What's my line?

One question that’s been wandering around my mind is this: Does our present focus on the minister as leader mean that we’ve devalued the minister as pastor?

Let me explain.

I wonder if we’ve reached a point where we recognise that the church needs strong, positive, enabling leadership and in order to have that we need to call people with leadership gifts to lead the church. But not everyone with leadership gifts has a pastoral gift too. Given that the vast majority of churches, certainly the vast majority in the UK, can only afford one full-time minister, what happens when you appoint a leader rather than a pastor?

I feel this acutely in my own ministry because I don’t see myself primarily as a pastor. I care about people but I’m not wired up as a pastor, or at least I’m not wired up to do what I perceive a pastorally wired person would do. I hear this same self-description from others at gatherings of ministers over the 17 years I’ve been in ministry. I can’t comment on how much this reflects our process for accepting and training people for ministry because I didn’t train specifically for ministry when I attended college.

So where does that leave us? Well I think it leaves us in a place where we know that we need high quality pastoral care in our churches, but I also think it leaves not knowing how to implement that care because we don’t know who should be doing the care. We still have a system of ministry that presumes it’s the primary responsibility of the minister as pastor to do the caring, but if the minister isn’t wired for It how effectively can, and will, they do it?

If our new leadership model is more focussed on being a team, then the role of the minister is to lead effectively, delegate appropriately, and enable widely. But that also implies that we need committed and gifted partners to make this happen. It is no use delegating a responsibility to someone who never does the job!

Perhaps we have got it right, perhaps we haven’t lost sight of the duty of care. Perhaps we just need to work smarter at developing a 21st century model for fulfilling our core call as God’s family, recognising the gifts and skills of those we call to leadership and building effective teams around them.

Building good pastoral care is one factor in closing the back door of the church, that’s why it’s so important that we do it well. As to the role of the minister, there’s still much to do.

I remember a long time ago now, as I was thinking about my role as a leader in church, I happened to be reading through Leviticus. It’s not the book I’d normally choose to read devotionally, but it was on my reading plan so I read away. In Leviticus 6 as I recall it describes the duties of the priests. One duty was simply to keep the fire burning on the sacrificial altar. That picture has stayed with me as I see part of my role as keeping the flame alight. 

I am privileged to be someone who knows that God has called them to this work of ministry and leadership. I am privileged to have a group of people around who recognise that too and who reach into their pockets weeks by week, month by month, to make it possible for me to not to have work in order to minister. Because I don’t have to go to the office I can go before God and tend to the flame.