10 "Rules" for Pastors

 

              I’ve been thinking some about the two different descriptions of pastoral doings and beings I’ve compiled. I’ve consolidated those 15 pieces of advice down into 10 “rules” for Pastors. Again, I’m doing this for my benefit, but thought it might be helpful to others if I share it.

 

Be a Person of Faith

Remember you are a person of faith—You got into this gig because you love God and love your neighbor, or at least yearn to do both. You were whisked away by powerful story, with an order of service, which orders your life. Don’t lose that. Continue to read scripture outside of sermon prep. Attend worship services in which you aren’t presiding. Not only will this feed your soul, but it will also give you insights into the experience parishioners are having in worship. For example, it can be tough to make it to Saturday Night services at the church one town over… it can be tough for your folk to make it to Sunday Morning too.

In addition to staying true to the roots of your calling, this rootedness inoculates you from a real danger of ministry, becoming a “professional Christian” instead of someone called out of community to administer Word and Sacrament. This danger is two-fold: 1. the laity of the community can never measure up to your “expert Christian” doings and 2. you can become so professional that you cease to be Christian, the ordination rite supersedes the Baptismal sacrament—The road to hell is paved with the bones of bishops and the skulls of priests.

 

Know your Calling and be Grounded in It

              This job is weird; you are writing up a report for the council one minute, sitting with someone who is dying the next, choosing between two or three seemingly identical copiers, interpreting a 2000-year-old document in a way that is faithful to its original meaning and relevant to today, and then pushing carts full of food to people’s cars at the food pantry. I think of this experience as Ministerial Whiplash. On top of experiencing the variety of ministerial tasks, there is perception of these tasks. There are literally hundreds of people (both in the congregation and outside it) who have assumptions and definitions of what your job as pastor is and ideas about how you ought to do your job. Because this job can be so multifaceted, almost all of their definitions are at least a little true.

Even the standard definition of Ordained Ministry in my denomination—Word, Sacrament, and Other Duties as Assigned, falls apart when it comes to that third part. Duty is broad and the question of who is doing the assigning is awkward, to say the least.

              So, every 3 to 6 months, take stock of what you understand faithful ministry to be, and keep that definition close at hand, perhaps review it once a week. For example, the current iteration of what I understand ministry to be is: Receive God’s Grace, Share Agape, Spread the Gospel. That might sound too simple to be useful, but it is the lens I try to look at all the ministry tasks that come across my desk. It keeps me grounded when the weight of ministry starts to grind me down or blow me off course.

 

Have a System for Ordering Your Ministry

Once you have a sense of what you are doing, then comes the question of how to do it. Probably the most important thing to say is make sure you build in some slack time for emergencies, because they will pop up, often ever week. Don’t expend 100% of your energy and self 100% of the time, because that’s just asking for a surprise funeral.

Have a system in place to process all the things you need to get done in a week. I use an eclectic hybrid of Getting Things Done, How to Squeeze Blood from a Turnip, and Sunday Comes Every Week.

Additionally, I create a weekly chart with each day cut into thirds. I prioritize by day all my known tasks for the week and order the week for myself in a way that I have a third of a day that isn’t work, and one day off a week.

For example:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Morning	X	X		X	X		X
Afternoon	X		X	X	X		X
Evening		X	X

Additionally, I find it helpful to have a rough sense of major ministry tasks, initial directions of sermons, and bible studies plotted out about a year in advance, and update that list every couple of months, because ministry changes quickly.

If you don’t control the parts of ministry that are in your power, you have no chance of riding the unexpected parts of ministry to a faithful place.

 

You are the Most Responsible Person in your Ministry Context

              I don’t know exactly what it says about me that this, along with everyone in the community having an opinion about what my ministerial task was, was the most surprising part of becoming a Pastor. I naively thought there was someone who would swoop in and save me if things got really bad. It took me a frightening ER visit with chest pains that turned out to “just” be a panic attack to realize that, as a solo Pastor, no one else will take care of you. There are no training wheels; this is a live fire exercise.

This reality was again brought front and center during the COVID crisis where most pastors were thrust into the position of CDC official, mask police, political referee, and crowd control; we were making life and death decisions and if we got it wrong, or even right, God help us. The buck stops with you, especially when it comes to your own health and safety!

                  There is a saying attributed to Luther, “The Pastor is the Bishop of their congregation.” Now some folk cling to this quote because they think that makes them the answer person in their congregation, or it allows them to boss people around, or what have you. But this quote gets at the buck-stops-here-ness of being a Pastor. You are the most responsible person in your ministry context.

 

Care for God’s People

Currently the ELCA defined ordained ministry as coming from a threefold call, internal, external, and practical. I have a sense God has called me to ordained ministry, folk in the wider church observed me for half a decade and on three major occasions affirmed that calling, and then finally a group of people have discerned that I am called to be their pastor. The first four “rules” above are about being faithful to the personal sense of call. These next few focus on being faithful to the people and place you are called to.

Two quick observations before we get into it. 1. Despite sometimes managing ministry as if it is a series of tasks, the tasks aren’t the point. Those tasks are done in order to free yourself to be present to your people, and many of those tasks ought to be tasks that lead to deepening relationship. 2. There is a quote that “all good shepherds end up smelling like their folk.” While I would quibble that Jesus is the only shepherd, and that a healthier metaphor, or at least less hierarchical one, would be clergy as sheepdog, the point is good. After a few months among your people you’re going to start talking in their idioms, know their stories, and become a character in their story. So, when you consider a calling to a people, know that you will become one of those people—you will play a part in the congregation’s family system.

Be kind to your flock, forgive much—In a wide variety of ways you’ll be hurt by your folk. Modeling graciousness in the face of such hurts, pointing out bad behavior, but also paths to repentance and reconciliation, is part of your calling as a leader in the church. This may be the hardest part of being a pastor.

Be genuinely and personally interested in them—It is easy to let the role of Pastor dictate surface level conversations outside of ER visits and family crisis. That’s a mistake, establishing the trust that comes with deeper relationships earlier will make those pastoral visits easier. That is not to say you do those things they warn you about at boundaries workshops, or forget your pastoral role, just that you don’t forget that you’re a person while inhabiting that role.

Even be interested in the absent ones—Those who darken the church doors are only a fraction of the folk who consider themselves part of the congregation. Cold calls and home visits can be awkward, and the way people schedule their lives these days can frustrate even the best of intentions, but they let folk know you care. COVID blew most of these pastoral care patterns to hell, but that is just an opportunity to create new patterns that work for the current reality.

Celebrate with them—A fair bit of what you do is jump into people’s lives when they are bad and when an emergency happens, when the worst is upon them. Don’t forget to be with them in the good times too. 

 

Protect the vulnerable

              This is a hard one to write about. Without saying too much, there are abusers and predators out there, both ordained and lay, who see the Church as a place to misuse power and its ministries as existing for their personal gratification. You will encounter theft and graft, physical, mental, and sexual abuse, power plays and hurt people hurting people.

You are the fluffy sheepdog among the sheep that puts the wolves on notice. Your job is to be the “bad guy” who asks the right questions, notifies the right authorities, and stands between the predator and the victim.

I say that you’re the “bad guy,” because doing the right thing often means conflict and consequences, and most people really don’t like either of those things.

 

Be Present Throughout your Parish

Establish the bound of your parish. The model I use is the Sea of Galilee where Jesus did his ministry, a roughly 7 miles by 13 miles area around my congregation. In my case a major road is an easy stand in for the Sea.

Get to know the mayor, borough admin, local businesspeople, etc. Also, do church events in venues within your parish. Do faith formation at the local ice-cream shop or the bar. Do events outside the church walls equips and trains the saints to act faithfully as the body of Christ in the world as well as at church; there are many different types of people with different needs needing to be equipped. It also creates permeable barriers of entry into the community; inviting someone to meet up to talk about a particular subject once at an ice cream shop, is an easier sell than inviting someone to show up at church.

 

Play Well with Others

              You’ve established the bounds of your parish, now go, make friends, and play nice!

There has always been a Pentecost sort of ideal in the Christian faith, that diverse communities sharing their unique gifts with one another as partners is good and holy. Sadly, for most of Christian history denominations and congregations were too well off to live into that ideal—this period of self-sufficiency and relying on props other than the Gospel and the Spirit, is often called Christendom. Well, as Christendom is rightly humiliated for its sins, Christianity may now be in a place where we HAVE to live into that ideal.

As such, connecting with communities and organizations around you who do parallel good works is paramount. Be interested in what ecumenical partners are up to and consider how you can be faithful together. Consider too the ways secular organizations might be doing Gospel work unaware and see if you can join them in it!

That said, the humiliation of Christendom doesn’t always goad congregations to the Christian ideal of healthy partnership, and secular organizations don’t always get the church. Sometimes potential partners are unhealthy or even predatory. Secular organizations can see your membership roll as a donor list. Unhealthy congregations can see another congregation as a thing to be cannibalize for spare parts, offers of Christian partnership can be taken as a thing to be consumed in the hopes of returning to the ill-gotten riches of Christendom.

So, as with most things in ministry, be open, but also trust and verify. Discernment is key.

 

Think Globally and Act Locally

              It has to be acknowledged that one of the things Seminary does is widen your perspective, and uproot you. By the time you’re ordained you’ve likely moved four times and ministered in at least three different contexts. This is both a feature and a bug of seminary.

              It is a feature in so far as it allows you to help your congregation widen their perspective. There will be a temptation to be parochial, in fact when you go that route you might be lauded for it. Don’t yield, part of your vocation is to help your congregation see the forest from the trees and not get caught bellybutton gazing when panoramic astonishment is called for.

              The rootlessness of seminary is a bug when you become frustrated by your congregation’s local color or local concerns. That too is a temptation, often times it will manifest itself in that “expert Christian” affect I talked about earlier or thinking that the 7 mile by 13 mile boundary of your parish as too small for you—if it wasn’t too small for Jesus, it isn’t too small for you.

              As with most of these “rules” there is a balance to be struck that will be different in most every context, but recognizing the dynamic is key. Avoid parochialism and lofty arrogance; see the panorama but meet your people where they are.

 

Be involved with the Wider Church

Speaking of the temptation to be parochial, there will be strong pulls to be “for” your congregation to the exclusion of doing things with the larger church. Your ordination is to the church at large. There is a whole big world of interesting fellow workers out there who can help you with ministry and who you can partner with. For that matter, the simple fact is the wider church needs us too.

There are colleagues out there who will have your back and normalize the experience of Being the most responsible person in your context. Go to Synod things; be active in your cluster or district or whatever your Synod calls your more local colleagues. Do what you can to keep those connections fresh; relationships take practice. Ministry done alone is just asking for the devil to swoop in and poison all you’ve done.