For those of you not familiar with my story, I began as a bivocational pastor in 1981. When I began I had no pastoral experience and no education beyond high school. After about 18 months in the church I decided I wanted some training. About an hour from my house was a Bible college with a good reputation. The only problem was that they only offered classes in the morning, and I worked day shift in a factory an hour from my house in the opposite direction of the school.
After much prayer and talking with my wife, I transferred to third shift at my job and enrolled at the school. I would leave home at 10:00 pm, work all night and then drive 100 miles to my classes. Around noon classes would end and I would make the 50 mile drive back to my home, go to bed and start the cycle again that night. This was a two-year program, but it took me four years to complete as I could not take more than 2-3 classes a semester.
A few months after graduation I began to have problems and was diagnosed as clinically depressed. Trying to work a full-time job, pastor a church and attend classes for that length of time had depleted the neurotransmitters in my brain. It took a year of medication and counseling before I recovered. Like many pastors, I had not taken care of myself.
Yesterday's post on managing the expectations a congregation has for their bivocational pastor generated more comments than any post I've written. Today I want to address the need for us to manage our own expectations of what we can do. I paid a high price because I did not, and I don't want you to make the mistake I made.
One of my favorite sayings over the past few years is "Self-care is not selfishness; it is stewardship of a very valuable gift God has given you." Ministers are often guilty of taking better care of others than they do themselves.
As a bivocational pastor you must accept that you cannot do it all. You have obligations to your family and to your other employment as well as to the church, to God, and to your own self-care. A life well-lived is a life that is lived with proper attention given to all five of those areas of your life.
This means that you cannot possibly go to the hospital every time someone is admitted. You cannot head up every committee in your church or even attend every meeting, especially if your church is over-structured like so many smaller churches are. You cannot preach 3-4 times a week, at least not if you are serious about message preparation. You cannot be in the pulpit 52 Sundays a year. The list goes on with things you cannot do. This means you must learn to delegate.
In yesterday's post I said that churches must transition from pastoral care to congregational care. This is a more biblical form of ministry (Eph. 4), and this chapter teaches us that the duty of the pastor is to train the saints how to do ministry. Too many pastors are wearing themselves out, and leaving the ministry, because they are trying to do everything themselves instead of fulfilling their biblical role of training others to minister to one another.
When I teach this in my seminars the question is always asked how to do this when so few people in the church want to do anything. My response is that we have to ride the horses that want to run. Yes, some people don't want to do anything, but others are just waiting to be taught how so they can minister to others. Love the ones who don't want to do anything, but invest your time and energy in those who want to serve and teach them how.
Identify people who have gifts of healing and mercy and teach them how to make hospital visits. Find the people in your church who have leadership gifts and put them in charge of leading the most important teams in your church. Maybe you don't have the authority to place people on your teams or committees, but you can make suggestions to those who do have that authority. It may take time, but eventually you can have very effective people leading these teams taking a great deal of pressure off of you.
I cannot stress this enough, but listen to your spouse, if married, if they begin to tell you that you are showing signs of stress or if they or the children are feeling ignored. When I pastored I made sure my calendar included a weekly date night with my wife. I attended activities my children were involved in and even coached our son's baseball team for about six years.
Finally, be sure you do not neglect your personal time with God. I know how easy that is to do when you're trying to do so many things. There would be times when I realized I wasn't spending any time with God for my own personal development. My time in the Word was to prepare messages, and my prayer life too often was inconsistent. God called us to be something before He called us to do something.
My book The Healthy Pastor: Easing the Pressures of Ministry includes more information on these topics, and much more about maintaining a healthy life as a pastor. I also have a seminar on this important topic that I can present to your judicatory or other group if you are interested. Be kind to yourself.
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