How to Be a Pastor

(I spent several hours praying in this spot when I was in Eldoret, Kenya - gum trees, I was told.)

Are you a pastor? Do you feel called to be a pastor? What does "pastor" mean?

I love being a pastor.

I am still learning how to be a pastor.

I have looked to some pastors about how to be a pastor. One is Eugene Peterson. I never met him. I did talk with Eugene on the phone once, for less than five minutes. I was inviting him to speak at a pastors conference in Michigan. He was gracious as he told me he would like to to it, but could not. He said, "I'm out of gas." 

Peterson was out of gas, but his words start fires.

Peterson's book The Pastor has been important to me. He shares what kind of pastor he wants to be.

• "I want to be a pastor who prays. I want to be relaxed and reflective and responsive in the presence of God."
• “I want to be a pastor who reads and studies. This culture in which we live squeezes all the God sense out of us. I want to be observant and informed enough to help this congregation understand what we are up against."
• “I want to be a pastor who has the time to be with [people] in leisurely, unhurried conversations so that I can understand and be a companion with [them] as [they] grow in Christ—[their] doubts and [their] difficulties, [their] desires and [their] delights."
• "I want to be a pastor who leads in worship, a pastor who brings [people] before God in receptive obedience, a pastor who preaches sermons that make scripture accessible and present and alive, a pastor who is able to give [people] a language and imagination that restores in [them] a sense of dignity as a Christian in [their] homes and workplaces and gets rid of these debilitating images of being a ‘mere’ layperson."
• "I want to be an unbusy pastor." (P. 278)

I like this. I want to be a pastor like this. 

It requires a long obedience. In the same direction.

How to Help a Troubled Marriage

(Downy woodpecker in my backyard)

One of my "go-to" books for marriage counseling is Hope-Focused Marriage Counseling: A Guide to Brief Therapy, by Everett Worthington. 

Worthington says "troubled marriages usually show weaknesses in love. Love is being willing to value your partner and being unwilling to devalue your partner. Generally, troubled marriages are those in which each partner devalues the partner and fails to take opportunities to show and tell the other how much the partner is valued.

A troubled marriage is one in which partners devalue each other and fail to take every opportunity to value each other. Generally, also, as love has lessened people lose confidence that the marriage can ever improve, and their demoralization and loss of hope prevent them from working on changing the relationship. 

Marriage Solutions 

Do the following, as a beginning.

 
□ Regain a willingness to work on improving your relationship and sustain that willingness long enough so that the marriage can bounce back. The worse off your marriage is now, the longer you must be willing to work to change it before you give up. 

□ Focus on the good things that you do. If you focus on the successes and try to ignore the failures for a period, you’ll regain a sense of faith in the relationship and confidence that it can improve. 

□ Increase your efforts to value your partner in love at every opportunity, and increase your efforts to avoid devaluing your partner. To improve, love your partner more by valuing him or her."  (Worthington, p. 82)

What is "love?"

"Love as being willing to value the other person 

and being unwilling to devalue that person."

Worthington, p. xxix

Which Church Is Yours: Dragon, or Lamb?

 

(Monroe County)

Pastors - I recommend reading:

Letters to the Church, by Francis Chan (See also this recent interview with Chan)

The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus' Path of Power in a Church that has Abandoned It, by Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel

And one more - my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church. 

All three are about Spirit-led, Spirit-driven, Spirit-empowered churches. All three come out of deep concern for the American Consumer-Driven Church.

Goggin and Strobel, in their interview with Eugene Peterson, describe the American Church as following the "way of the dragon." Peterson writes:

"We choose: we follow the dragon and his beasts along their parade route, conspicuous with the worship of splendid images, elaborated in mysterious symbols, fond of statistics, taking on whatever role is necessary to make a good show and get the applause of the crowd in order to get access to power and become self-important." (In Goggin, p. 138)

Here is "the way of the lamb":

"Or we follow the Lamb along a farmyard route, worshiping the invisible, listening to the foolishness of preaching, practicing a holy life that involves heroically difficult acts that no one will ever notice, in order to become, simply, our eternal selves in an eternal city. It is the difference, politically, between wanting to use the people around us to become powerful (or, if unskilled, getting used by them), and entering into covenants with the people around us so that the power of salvation extends into every part of the neighborhood, the society, and the world that God loves." (Peterson, in Ib.)

Goggin and Strobel write:

"The way of the dragon is fixated on the spectacular, obsessed with recognition and validation, intoxicated by fame and power. The way of the Lamb is committed to worship, pursues God in the ordinary, and is faithful in hiddenness. The dragon devours and dominates, while the Lamb humbly and sacrificially serves." (Ib., p. 139)

They summarize the two ways as follows.

First, the way of the dragon . . .   

• The pastor uses the church as a platform for personal fame, fortune, and influence.   
• The pastor views ministry as an arena of performance, where some win and some lose.   
• The pastor uses the people of the church as tools to accomplish their big dreams.   
• The pastor relegates prayer and care, the heart of pastoral work, to “lower-level” staff because they don’t have time to waste.   
• The pastor views other pastors primarily as competition. 

Second, the way of the Lamb . . .   

• The pastor gives their life for the sake of the church, regardless of what they gain.   
• The pastor views ministry as an arena of love and service, not winning and losing.   
• The pastor embraces their congregation as people to know and love, not tools to use for other ends.   
• The pastor views prayer and care as the centerpiece of their work, rather than an interruption.   
• The pastor views other pastors not as competition, but as fellow shepherds on the journey whom they need for encouragement and wisdom, and who they are called to encourage and love.