Three imperatives for pastoral life that Jared Wilson observes are not generally part of a parish’s job description for the pastor.
The folk here at mgpc give me freedom and encouragement in all three.
To lead a healthy community in Christ, a pastor must:
1. Work hard to keep a congregation from becoming co-dependent.
How this plays out is a strategic withholding of oneself. Not a distancing, not a neglect of real duty and care. The pastor’s call is to feed the sheep. But it is also to equip the saints for ministry, and this can’t happen if he does all the ministry himself. It is good to regularly hold back enough that if you were to get hit by a bus today — or worse, have an affair with your secretary — your church can live (and grow!) without you. Very few churches advertise for a pastor who will lead a church in such a way that they don’t need him very much.2. Spend a lot of time with his family.
Good churches appreciate this and allow space for it. Certainly there are pastors who sacrifice ministry on the altar of family, just as there are pastors who do the opposite, but setting idolatry either way aside, a good pastor will realize his first calling is to his family and will carve out lots of time for them. Many churches will say “Please put your family first” to a pastor, but when it gets right down to it, many struggle with confusion when a pastor gets down to refusing to meet on his day off or compromise commitments made to his family for requests from the people who pay his bills. Certainly a pastor should not ignore a real crisis, but requests are more frequent than crises.3. Rebuke.
I’m a firm believer with Bonhoeffer’s dictum that a pastor does not exist to be his congregation’s accuser before God and man. Nevertheless, a pastoral “must” people rarely talk about is the appropriate biblical rebuke. Pastors often rebuke other people outside the church from the pulpit; very few are confident enough in the gospel to rebuke their own people (when it is warranted). Certainly some idiot souls make their living beating their people up from the pulpit and in the counseling room, but abuse is not what rebuke is. I’ve never seen a pastoral job description that said “Tell us when we’re disobedient, lazy, or stubborn.” With real love comes real correction; as the Lord disciplines those he loves — not as punishment, not as wrath, but as corrective training — a pastor who loves his people will rebuke them when necessary. (And they him. 🙂
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Yep. Really helpful. Thanks.
I’d add to no. 1 that you need to work hard to keep you and your congregation from developing a mutual co-dependency. Too many ministers can’t move on because they “need” their congregation.
Yeah.
I know what you mean.
When’s the changeover to wordpress?
I’m liking the dark version of the twenty eleven theme.
I noticed the change
It looks great.
Does it come in white? I’d like to keep the look of mine the same.
Yeah, the default is white.
I still think you’ll miss the widgets from blogger, but you seem to have adjusted to a more minimalist layout over the last couple of years.
Wordpress.com doesn’t like flash, I think. But there may be workarounds.
Here’s the page. http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/twentyeleven/
I think you can set the page background all white.
It’s the default for all new blogs at wordpress.com this year, following on from twenty ten. Apparently there’ll be a new default each year, but last year’s didn’t do black.
I like to update from time to time because I think the code for newer templates is more suited to newer releases of browsers and internet protocols.
makes a lot of sense Gary!