How I serve as a pastor without strong ‘pastoral’ gifts (part 2)

…Continued from Part 1

So, I’ve admitted: I’m not the world’s most natural pastor. I love the Lord, I love to study and teach the Bible, I love to cast vision and create culture, and I love to lead and develop leaders. But a pastor (noun) still has to pastor (verb). So what do I do?

Jesus called himself the good shepherd. Then at the very end of His earthly ministry, he handed this call to Peter (not the worlds best candidate for shepherd either); “Feed my sheep, care for my lambs”. Peter then, in his epistle, transfers this same call to the elders. Paul, in Acts 20, does it too. I find very little room in scripture to support a ministry heart that strays from the sheep: This kind of ministry might look good or flashy up front but it leaves to others the work of walking in the sheep dung.

I think there is a good balance in the philosophy that explains the difference between a shepherd and a rancher. But a rancher who cannot identify with the sheep, and who forgets what it is like to be out in the trenches is about as good as an officer who never gets close the battle-lines or an executive who is totally detached from day-to-day organizational reality. I can become a rancher, if necessary, but I should never lose a shepherd’s heart.

The church where I learned ministry understood this. At the time I served it, this congregation had a full-time ministry staff of over 100. All of them started at the top…cleaning toilets. You didn’t gain any position of influence or ministry until you learned to serve. There wasn’t a pastor on staff who didn’t know where the cleaning supplies were kept or who didn’t understand the heart behind having to work hard to serve thousands of people every weekend by cleaning up after them. I often witnessed executive Pastors roll up their sleeves and dig into work doing things like moving tables to help us “grunts” transition the sanctuary between a service and a dinner.

So what does this all have to do with shepherding? A lot! Ministry is messy. Toilets get messy, carpet gets messy, and the people we serve and work with have messy lives. If we go into ministry thinking we are above working in people’s mess, we are unfit to lead. I’ve seen so many young people preparing for ministry who, after graduating with a degree, think they are prepared to do the “important” stuff like leading and preaching. These are people who think they have something coming to them. People who ‘deserve’ to earn a full-time salary with loads of benefits. They might even be competent to counsel, but they have no passion for people.

Shepherding has to start with a passion for sheep. It doesn’t matter how big our ministries might get. It doesn’t matter how much influence we might end up having. We don’t simply lead a crowd; we lead churches that are made up of individuals. These individuals deserve to be well taken care of and served. In fact, if we want to lead like Jesus did, He tells us we have to lay down our lives and ambitions so we can serve (Luke 9).

Case in point: I had a guy in my last congregation who had been saved for about 10 years. He was a drug-using carpenter who happened to be working on Ron Mehl’s house (who at the time was pastor of a church of over five thousand people). Ron saw him working, felt the Holy Spirit’s leading, and took time to find out his name, to come and talk to him every day, and then to lead him and his family to the Lord. I have no doubt that Ron was too busy to do that, but he still had a shepherd’s heart, and cared about the people that God cared about.

So, the question I ask myself is, “how do I keep that shepherds passion and effectively lead a growing church at the same time?”

Continued in part 3…