When I picture the job of traditional pastors, they seem so busy with meetings, management and prepping for sermons that they end up with relatively no time left for day to day ministry to their own congregation. With this in mind, if pastors don’t even have time to spend time with their own members, how will they have time to be sent as well?
As a pastor how do you encompass the calling of mission for yourself? The traditional definition of a pastor is one who shepherds his church. But how do you fulfill that whole definition of pastor as well as being sent into the world of people who do not know Christ? So many pastors don’t even know non-Christians. They are so immersed in the work inside their church that they never step outside of it. With all the responsibilities that are put on pastors it’s hard for me to picture a pastor who fully pastors the already Christians within his church to maturity, as well as investing in the community around his church.
It seems to me that most Americans think a pastor’s job is to help mature the faith of his already Christian congregation. What should our definition of a pastor be? Many pastors have too much on their plate. What did the pastoring of churches in the New Testament look like? Were there head pastors or a group of leaders? Did weekly sermons take place? Were pastors in charge of all scriptural teaching? What did they allow others to lead in, and what was strictly their responsibility? How did they manage the care of their church without lacking being sent themselves?
-Emily L
Hi Emily,
Currently, none of us get paid by the church. We are a relatively young project with Christian Associates, so what funding we get for our church hours is made up in missionary support. I think at least two of us, even if church finance allowed would prefer to continue as bivocational workers, as it affords us unique opportunities to interact with other subsets of people.
I know that recently a lot of younger seminarians like myself have felt a shift toward bi-vocational roles. This shift has its pluses and minuses. The reality of my combination of jobs is really only sustainable because I am not married. (I put the most time per week towards the church of our triad).
For long term sustainability, I think we will end up pursuing a combination of bivocationality, and church salary. Although until we’ve reached that level of health, we will most likely continue with the support raising process. This is partially due to approaching our church plant in Portland as a missions project (we are focusing on trying to build a community that is primarily growing through conversion of skeptics and non-Christians).
I hope you’re enjoying the class. I wish Rob would have taught it when I was at Whitworth 🙂
B.D. thank you sooo much for taking time to respond to my post! I really appreciate your insights. Sounds like you’ve got a great thing going. I love that the missional shift encourages others and empowers them to do ministry. I’d never thought about that this can take care of a lot of the work that pastors do so that they can be free to pursue ministries outside of the church. I also really like that you rotate preaching. One question: How does your leadership triad get paid? Do you have a big enough church to support them or do they not get paid full time? Do you think this kind of model could work for small churches and if so what could they do financially? Thank you so much again!! God bless!
Hi Emily,
I’ll take a shot at this as someone who is a pastor in a missional plant. One of the beauties of the missional shift in my view is that not everything has to revolve around pastoral leadership. We actively seek to empower people to disciple others and not have this limited to the role of the pastor. Similarly when operating with a framework where we see all as sent, it no longer has to be the pastor who goes on every visitation ever (although I and our other leadership still do some).
I believe the idea of shepherding as pastor also means to teach those I’m around to care for each other, to make sure that people aren’t relying on the vocational leader for everything. Pastoring in this sense means equipping people to do the work of the Kingdom. So time is spent investing in others to also do the sorts of things we normally think of pastors as doing.
And as far as the week to week logistics of a gathering, we’ve chosen to use a handful of people in teaching roles instead of one consistent voice, our leadership triad all rotates, so that we teach once every three weeks. Now this isn’t easy, because we are all bivocational, but it’s also something we’ve chosen because we believe that all of us being sent ones in the world is important and so we have to have a leadership structure that supports that.
And I guess that’s the last thing, we chose a structure that makes sure that all of us are allowed room to pursue mission in our own ways. For me this means hanging out at coffee shops while I do my other job and chatting with baristas and customers. For another of our leaders this is in investing in her employees at the daycare she runs.
You are asking fantastic logistics type questions of how to actually do this, keep it up! These types of questions are important for asking how missional church can be possible.