A Question of Service

I stood the doorway of the sanctuary as people filed past, greeting me and shaking hands after the service. Alfred, a tall, man with wire rim glasses looked down at me and filled my hand with his own. In his retirement he served as the custodian of the church. I knew him to be a man who spoke frankly and to the point.

“It’s about time someone figured it out,” was all he said with a smile before moving on to the let the next person greet me.

He was referring to my sermon when I reflected on the relationship between a pastor and the congregation. After six years of ordained ministry I had become frustrated with how difficult it was to motivate a congregation to participate in faith-based educational or service oriented programs. When the Senior Pastor took a new call I was left to work with the congregation and began to notice some interesting behaviors.

Of chief interest to me was the realization that the congregation put a minimal amount of energy into new programs. A program’s success depended completely on the amount of energy the pastor put into it. But when the Senior Pastor left, the programs that had seemed so successful when he was present came to a complete stop. And because I had to take on extra duties and could not put the time and energy into my pet programs, those also waned considerably.

In my sermon I surmised the reason for this behavior was due to the fact that every 4-5 years a pastor would leave and a new pastor would arrive bringing new programs and ideas. The congregation would go along with the person in office to please the pastor but wouldn’t get invested because they knew the programs were going to be short-lived. A new pastor meant new programs regardless of how successful the previous ones were. Committing wholeheartedly to a program would only bring confusion and grief down the road when a new pastor came with his or her own agenda.

According to a Fuller Institute / George Barna / Pastoral Care Inc. report (cited here) the #1 reason pastors leave the ministry - Church people are not willing to go the same direction and goal of the pastor. Pastor's believe God wants them to go in one direction but the people are not willing to follow or change.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that there was once a time when pastors and congregations shared a set of expectations about local ministry. That ministry basically consisted of providing worship opportunities, basic religious education for children, ritual support for life transitions (baptisms, weddings, confirmations, funerals) and a connection to the larger Church through missionary support and foreign aid. In this setting pastors primarily served a priestly function, presiding over rituals and serving as a local theological expert. Congregation members were understood to be faithful if they participated regularly in the activities and rituals and provided financial support.

Over the years our culture has become more and more individualized. In the church world this has morphed into the idea (or realization) that God gives each person a unique vision for personal ministry. While this may indeed be true the trouble begins with the expectation that the rest of the community is here to serve the vision for ministry that God has given to me. If the statement above is any indication, this is the basic assumption that most pastors are taking with them into ministry but it’s not what most congregations expect.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of pastors labor under this assumption, myself included. We like to go into a congregation with new programs that reflect our own strengths and passions for ministry.  We try to “fix” all the things that the previous pastor had wrong. (We are, of course, more subtle about it than this, fooling even ourselves into believing that we are doing it right where others have failed.) Meanwhile, congregations have been trained to sit back and wait for a pastor to “lead” them in the right programs and Bible studies. Finding a congregation that truly has a sense of its own ministry apart from a pastor is a rare thing.

The question really boils down to one of service. Who is here to serve who? Believing that I am called to a congregation that will serve my vision for ministry is backwards in my mind. I am called to serve the ministry of a congregation. Part of that service is to help a congregation discern the vision for ministry God has given them and provide support for that ministry. But when congregations are unsure of their own vision for ministry it leaves an open space for a pastor who wants to fill it with his or her own vision.

If God has given you a personal vision for ministry I encourage you to follow it. But we need to think twice about whether or not you require a whole congregation to go along with that vision. To do that we need to find new ways (or rediscover former ways) of discerning together what ministries God is calling the congregation/community towards.