Be Like Bob

Doesn’t this seem backwards?

While I clearly have not been the market for a paid ministerial position for quite some time, I still get emails from a list service that allows men seeking churches and churches seeking pastors to post their availability or openings for free to like-minded individuals and churches. I keep getting them because I find it fascinating to see the thought process.

Here is what I see regularly on these postings. There are two kinds of men posting their information. One kind is the man who is pretty staunchly Reformed and finds that his theology is not compatible with the local church he serves or his attempts to instill this theology in that church are unwelcome. The other is for men who are in associate, youth or part-time positions seeking a more senior pastoral position. Normally this is how it looks for the second type of guy. A man is serving or starting a small church. Because the church group is small, he ends up needing to work a secular job in addition to what the church pays him. His secular job brings him into contact with tons of people, many or most of whom are lost and in need of Christ. His desire though is to seek a “full-time” pastoral position so he can spend more time addressing the needs of people who are presumably already Christians instead of time out in the world among the lost. This typically means leaving the local church he is at and moving somewhere else where he feels “called”, i.e. they are willing to pay him a full-time salary. Many small local churches have the equivalent of a revolving door on their pastors office because the goal for many men, especially young men with families, is to move beyond a situation where they need to work a regular job and can draw all of their financial support from the church. The model looks an awful lot like the corporate model. Some churches are “entry level jobs” and the expectation is that as you gain experience, you should demand a bigger salary for ministry. Not many people stay at the same company in the same job they had when they first graduated from college, so that model has been imitated in the church.

That seems to me to be backwards. Shouldn’t a pastor, as he carries out his calling of equipping the entire body for the work of ministry, be able to delegate and let go of more and more of the ministry in the local church to other Christians? As he equips and releases more and more of the brethren to minister to one another, he should be freed up in his time and that seems like a great opportunity to cut the financial cord from the church and get a job. It seems counter-intuitive that the more mature a man gets in his ministry, the more removed he becomes from the lost. I think we need a new kind of thinking about this. Here is kind of how it would work:

A small, local church with maybe 60 people in Bob’s hometown has their current pastor retire and needs a new one. They contact Bob who is delighted for the opportunity to minister in the town he grew up in, so he accepts their calling and moves his family to that town. Of those 60 people who are members/regular attenders, about 15-18 of them are adults between 25-65. The rest are children or senior adults. It is hardly an affluent church, they are located in a small town in rural America where the population is pretty stagnant. The weekly offering is maybe $300. The adult believers in the church are a mixture in terms of maturity, some have been Christians for a long time and are somewhat mature, some are relatively new believers or at least fairly immature in the faith. Bob is initially paid a small monthly salary because the rest of the church frankly is not prepared to do the work of ministry in the local Body. They have never been equipped and don’t really expect that to be something they are expected or even permitted to do. Bob intends to change that mindset!

The local church provides Bob with a salary of $400 each month (a full 1/3 of the average monthly giving), which is obviously not enough to support a family. Bob takes a part-time job in his local community to make up his families financial needs above and beyond what the church is able to provide. Each week Bob focuses on equipping the other believers in the local church for the work of ministry in keeping with Ephesians 4: 11-13. Bob makes very clear that the ministry to one another in the local church is the responsibility and privilege of every believer, not just the pastor. Perhaps initially he goes on visits to homes, hospitals, etc. with a few of the brothers. Telling people about ministry is one thing, showing them by laboring along with them is how people are equipped and that is the sign of true Biblical servant-leadership (Phil 4:3).

After a year or two, perhaps 4 or 5 of the men of the church have advanced in maturity and are regularly ministering to the needs of the believers in this local church. The church recognizes these men as elders and they begin to shoulder an increasing load of the ministry in the church, again both to “members” and to the community in addition to their secular jobs. As the newly recognized elders help to minister and equip in the local congregation, Bob has more time freed up and is able to work his regular job on a full-time basis. Bob no longer accepts a regular salary from the church. The $400 the church had been paying Bob while he was laboring in ministering and equipping is now freed up so the local church decides to donate all of this to local and global ministries engaged in spreading the Gospel and works of mercy. Bob spends more time at his “regular” job and thus more time among unbelievers than in his office at the church. He still regularly leads the teaching ministry of the church and visits with members but so do the other elders. With more and more of the leaders of the church spending their time outside of the church building, the Gospel is spread and more people are saved. Those being saved are discipled and equipped by all of the elders and eventually come to a mature faith where they are also able to minister to others.

What about Bob? Well Bob is hardly the focal point of the local church although he is certainly respected and likely deferred to because his manner of life is praiseworthy and worthy of emulation (Hebrews 13:7). He sees the essence of Biblical leadership as serving and making much of Christ by making little of himself. Bob works for a living and the fruit of his labor is sufficient to provide for his needs as well as for others, like another church leader from the 1st century (Acts 20: 33-35). Rather than getting his bread from the donations of others, although he might have that right, he labors with his own hands so as not to be a burden on the church (2 Thess 3: 6-12). Because Bob chooses to emulate Paul, the work of the ministry is spread around among the brethren who grow dramatically in the faith and the funds that formerly would have been used to pay him now go to aid in spreading the Gospel, caring for widows and orphans and the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the least of these among us. Bob doesn’t resent that he has to work a regular job, he sees it as a blessing that more men are involved in the ministry and that more of the love offering of the church goes directly to ministry. Besides he gets to meet lots of people who need to hear about Jesus, people he wouldn’t meet if he spent more of his time in his office at church or in committee meetings. He makes a nice living to provide for his family and has excess left over to give to those in need.

Is that “pie in the sky” and unrealistic? It might seem so but I am pretty sure that what I am describing looks more like what happened in the early days of the church than what we typically see in the church today. We suffer from an epidemic of overly low and excessively high expectations in the church. We expect to much of the pastor and that he should shoulder far more of the load than is reasonable and we expect far less of the rest of the Body than we should and tacitly discourage them from ministering to others because they are not qualified or it is something the pastor should do. I know why this seems scary. When you include more and more of the church in ministry, often unsupervised, they are going to make mistakes. They might say the wrong thing. They might be horrible teachers. It is easier and, more importantly, safer to reserve ministry to just those who are the very best at it. That is again how the corporate world works. Those who are best at dealing with customers are in customer facing roles. The detail oriented people who are lacking in social graces work in the back office. The very best and most ambitious become the top leaders. The issue is that we have been called into the family of God, not into a multinational corporation and in a family we are all family members, even the people who are annoying or those who are socially awkward.

We need a shift in thinking among brothers in the church, a shift that doesn’t see getting called to a bigger church as the goal but seeing others equipped and taking hold of ministry right where they are. I have lived in a lot of places and I don’t know of a single places, big or small, urban or rural, that doesn’t have far more need for the Gospel than there are workers in that area. You don’t need to move to a bigger church to be able to minister more, you might just need to get out of the church more often. We need to replace the ladder climbing corporate model with a self-diminishing, self-denying model. I don’t blame most of the men who are pastors and following this model. It is the model they have been taught for their entire lives in a church culture that looks at bi-vocational ministers with pity and exalts the men with the biggest church and the most books and the greatest number of associate pastors underneath him on the church org chart.

This is not something that will happen overnight nor is it a popular idea. There is a whole industry that is devoted to the current pastoral paradigm, an industry that sells books, sponsors conferences and maintains educational institutions. I am treading carefully not to impugn the motives of the men in charge of this industry but anytime you have entrenched interests, change is going to be hard and is going to often attract strident opposition. I don’t really see this as optional shift though. First, I think it is a more faithful, more Biblical way to view ministry in the local church. Second, circumstances are going to force our hands. As America continues to shift toward a European view on religion, American Christians better be ready to adapt to a world where churches, clergy and Christians in general are not going to be as culturally acceptable and the way we have always done things is not going to work anymore (and I would say it never worked in the first place, no matter how commonplace it was). As difficult and jarring as this may be, it is something that is long overdue and something that will happen one small church, one faithful brother at a time. God sometimes works in the dramatic (ex. Sea, Red) and more often in the small, changing and transforming His people through the labor and love of plain and simple faithful brethren. It is my fervent and heartfelt prayer that God will continue to mold His church and His servants, all of them, into the image of His Son. Our epitome is not a CEO in an Armani suit but a suffering servant with dusty feet and dirty hands.