The Thing Your Preacher Can’t Tell You

Sometimes I get to be a guest preacher. I’ve learned that the role in that case is to go tell a congregation the things the pastor can’t say and then get out of town. So think of this column as being like a guest sermon. Here’s what your preacher can’t tell you.

            I guarantee that your preacher will disappoint you. This is not a guess or negative prediction. It is a fact that your pastor is only human and a certainty that he or she will disappoint you. 

Here is another reality check. You will expect your pastor to be a person of prayer, grounded in the scripture and in practices of personal piety like regular times of rest and reflection. And then you, unintentionally I am sure, do everything in your power to prevent your pastor from having the time he or she needs for prayer and the study of scripture. 

No matter how holy your pastor is or will become, he or she will go spiritually bankrupt right in your midst if there is no time to stay connected to God. Without time for prayer, scripture reading and other important spiritual practices, his or her own spiritual journey will take a detour in the desert even as your church thrives. For the church is a jealous mistress and a pastor can feel quite justified in denying his or her own spouse and children in the pursuit of ministry. 

Now y’all are smart folks and pretty well spiritually grounded and so I haven’t actually written anything new here. We know we are only human and we know that pastors need to take care of themselves even as they care for a congregation.

But it is worth holding up because there is another way that doesn’t even skirt the edges of burn out. The other way is the one found in the Bible. You see, the Bible knows nothing about a professional minister doing the work of God on behalf of a congregation of believers. The Bible only knows of and describes a life in which every single Christian is a minister no matter their age or ability.

You, gentle reader, are a minister of the Gospel by virtue of your baptism. Your pastor’s job is not to be the sole minister in a congregation of followers. The job for the leader of a congregation is that of pastor and teacher to a congregation of ministers who all follow Jesus.

            In Romans twelve, Paul describes the church as a group of “many members” saying “all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another.”

A well functioning body does not have the foot serving as a hand or an ear trying to pretend that it is an eye. In church terms this means that your congregations will thrive when people are doing the ministry God built him or her to do. Take someone built to work behind the scenes planning and coordinating and put that person out in front speaking and leading and you have your body parts out of order.

But when you get people with the right gifts in the right job, it is so much easier. Take your preacher, who God created to pastor a congregation. You give that person a chance to do just that and you will see him or her thrive. But if you burden the preacher with a lot of other junk better handled by someone else, you’ll make each other unhappy. It’s all about discovering the gifts in your congregations and unleashing those gifts in service both within the church and the community.

This is what your preacher can’t tell you without sounding self-serving. So I’ll say it. Not so much to help other preachers (though I’m glad if it does), but because it is true and deep down you know it as well as I do.

We have different gifts from God. Not everyone of us is called to preach or teach. But we have a variety of gifts within the church and we have those various gifts for a specific purpose.

The way to grow and build up the Body of Christ is to get each part of the body working properly. This is the real gift of a church that has grown up and has its act together is that people get to live into being the person God has made him or her to be.

You see if we get this wrong, we have to beg people to do things they don’t like to do. That’s how someone ends up teaching Sunday School and only feels used. The way the Body of Christ is supposed to work is that people do what they enjoy doing for the greater glory of the group.

This is how the Body of Christ functions with various people doing the things God leads them to do using the gifts God has given them. It is not about you getting forced into some role you don’t enjoy. It is about each of us finding the place God has for us to use our gifts. Much of that will take place out in the community as you use your gifts in other places. Some of it will happen in your own church as you use the gifts God has given you to build up that community.

So now that you’ve heard what your preacher wanted to tell you, try the question he or she wants you to ask yourself. The question is not whether God has given you any gifts to share with others. God has given you gifts. The thing to ask is, “What gifts has God given me and how am I to use them?”

            (The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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