Things I Wish I'd Known about Pastoring a Church When I Was Young

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I was twenty-eight years old when I started in full-time ministry in 1999 as associate pastor of a large Presbyterian church. I was thirty when I was called to pastor a small suburban church on my own. I made loads of mistakes and learned a lot of things the hard way. I can’t turn back the clock, but I can share these lessons. I hope they might help young men who are just starting out in pastoral ministry. Most of these thoughts should be read in the category of wisdom or common sense, to be weighed accordingly.

Don’t talk about church all the time with your wife. On Mondays I took my wife out for coffee so that I could treat her to an in-depth analysis of the day before: who was there and who wasn’t, how well we connected with visitors, who was struggling or doing well, problems with the music, problems with the building temperature, etc. I made my number-one supporter feel second-best to the church.

Don’t talk about church problems in front of the kids. They begin to sense that their church is the enemy of their family.

Find an elder to unload your problems on. Not your wife or kids.

Don’t go out many nights of the week. Keep it to two, three as a rare exception. And especially don’t go out when it’s meal and bedtime with the kids. While you are always wanted at home, you are most needed at home then.

You will impose far more pressure on yourself than you should. You know that Jesus is the Lord and Great Shepherd of your church, but you will act and feel as though the progress of the church all hangs upon you. This is arrogant, wrong, sinful. Jesus did not say to any man, “You will build my church.” Believe this and train yourself to live and feel the truth of it.

Don’t listen to yourself on Monday. On Monday you are the world’s worst preacher who has just preached the world’s worst sermon to a church that is about to collapse. On Monday you dream of making pizza for a living or driving a semi-trailer. You think dark thoughts, not because any of them are true but because of adrenalin letdown. You gear-up the whole week for the big event: the Sunday service and sermon. You preach with an atypical degree of focus, energy, and expectation. When all this is over your mind and body relax and adrenalin levels drop to below normal—to shield you from hypertension. This is experienced as mild depression. Hence “I am the worst preacher….” Don’t take yourself seriously at such times. Just say, “It’s Monday; these thoughts will pass. This is the Lord’s church, not mine.”

It takes buckets of time to prepare a sermon. The economics of a sermon are preposterous. You spend fifteen to thirty hours preparing for a half-hour delivery. Don’t be tempted to cut down on this, to “make better use of my time.” Preaching God’s Word is the most important thing you can do. “‘Is not my word like fire,’ declares the LORD, ‘and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?’” (Jer. 23:29). God uses our Scripture reading and preaching to bring new birth, redemption, justification, adoption, and sanctification; to build godly marriages, families, workers, citizens, communities, and servants. Not a minute of your prayerful prep time is wasted. Clear and effective teachers teach only ten percent from what they know, so know a lot. Every hour of prep builds and shapes you as a true student and teacher of the Word. Furthermore, so much of our preaching is intangible. Conviction—the most important intangible of all—arises not from exciting yourself in the pulpit but from extensive prayerful preparation.

Keep an attendance roll. I have a list of all of the people who claim attachment to our church and after every Sunday I mark them ✓ as having attended, a as being away for a known reason, and leave a blank if they weren’t there and I don’t know why. After two or three blanks I get on the phone. I want to know how my sheep are doing, and I want to think about every person every week. This simple tool also helps removes “the anxiety of the unknown.”

Get into people’s homes. Don’t rely on “catching up with people on Sunday.” When you sit with your people in their living room or garden, I guarantee that you will discover all kinds of important things about them that you would never have learned at Sunday morning tea. Plus, it shows that you care about them.

Go to funerals and other life events. I once spent a whole day catching buses and trains to attend the funeral of the mother of one of our older ladies. She talked about this for years. She knew I cared for her.

Do less and pray more. You cannot change people’s hearts. You cannot convert and grow people. Plead with God who can.

Expect the Lord to humble you. Expect him to lower and abase you. He does this for your good and the good of his church. His only tool for achieving this is, by definition, humiliation (from the Latin humus, dirt). Humiliation is innately unpleasant. The Lord ensures that many a pastor will be made to eat dirt. Don’t disintegrate into tears or anger. Our Savior was reviled, and we will never be humiliated as much as we deserve. He must increase; we must decrease.

Cultivate the highest view of the nature, value, and purpose of the local church. The local church is the center of the Lord’s work on this earth. The church’s greatest leaders and teachers were very often local church pastors: Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Baxter, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, Stott, Keller. They prayed and preached to their church and wrote books for their people, and their good teaching spread more widely. All Christian schools, universities, theological colleges, hospitals, all missionaries and chaplains, and all great Christian social movements originate from and are sustained by local churches. Under God, no ministry counts more than that of the local church pastor.

Never view other churches and pastors as threats. It’s a ludicrous error, but we are prone to making it. The church is not like a McDonald’s franchise where nearby stores threaten to diminish our takings. We are more like the city of Cambridge, with dozens of semi-autonomous colleges that work together and reinforce and build each other up to create a deep and wide culture of learning and one of the great educational cities of the world. When churches near me do well, that can only be good for my own church, the city, and the Kingdom.

All ministry is long term. We sow seeds. We build foundations. We look not to tomorrow but to the decades and generations to come.

Let people leave with good will. It stings when a family leaves, especially if it is to attend the better church down the road. By all means, ask whatever hard questions need to be asked—especially of yourself—and then send them off with love and prayer and goodwill. Show your church that the Kingdom means more than “your patch.” Perhaps you have invested hundreds of hours into a person only to see them leave and to minister somewhere else. Praise God for the privilege of preparing people for wider kingdom work. Remember that you have benefitted from many who were discipled by others.

Remember that your sheep live in harder places than you do. Never feel sorry for yourself, for your heavy burdens and challenges and disappointments. You get to spend most of your time studying the Bible and meeting God’s people. Your people have far less time in the Word and have to live and study and work in non- or anti-Christian classrooms, workplaces, social environments, and even families. Let your people know that you understand the privilege of your position and the difficulty of theirs.

Go slow with potential future leaders. There’s nothing lost by progressing steadily and carefully. Paul warns against giving people too much responsibility too soon: an elder “must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6).

Reliability trumps giftedness. Hold to this when you come to identify and invest in future leaders. An unreliable wunderkind is “vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes.”

Don’t check emails in the morning. Why waste those golden hours? Emails can and must wait. Don’t answer late-night texts, or any texts, too quickly. Your time and attention are not “on tap.” It’s best not to train people to think that it is.

Give your family at least one uninterrupted twenty-four-hour period a week. Where they know that you won’t answer the phone or sneak a look at your emails or next week’s sermon.

Lean heavily on your elders. This is especially pertinent for hard cases and decisions. Paul ordered that elders be appointed to local churches in part so that burdens would be shared (Titus 1:5; Acts 14:23; 2 Tim. 2:2).

Keep reading good books and pressing forward in your biblical learning. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said somewhere that this was vital for the development of young ministers, and for the stimulation and refreshment of older ministers.

Start a pre-church prayer meeting. We pray for thirty minutes and finish a quarter of an hour before the service starts.

Keep membership and baptism on the boil with regular classes and receptions. Show that you expect new and unbaptized Christians to be baptized, and all Christians to become members, to say in front of the church: “I am a Christian, and this is my church.”

Go back to paper bulletins. It is good to hand your regulars and visitors an attractive and informative paper bulletin as they enter church: something that they can read before the service starts, refer to during the week, and pass on to friends and family. Our four-page folded-A3 color bulletins include a precis of the sermon (including the word studies and other background parts that didn’t make it to the spoken version), attractive pictures, something for the kids, important contacts, and updates of all the regular and one-off meetings.

Don’t rush around on Sunday morning. Be Mary, not Martha. Let people see you sitting calmly, at least fifteen minutes before the service starts, reading over your text and praying. Your brothers and sisters will cover the rest, and your people will appreciate your meditative focus on what is most important.

Always ask people how they became a Christian. Christians love to answer this question, and unbelievers need to hear it. It will tell you a lot about where the person is at. And it is always best to ask newly attached Christians why they have left their old church. This sometimes leads to hard but important phone calls. 

Compartmentalize your time. I give a whole day to the sermon, another to preparation of classes, another to visiting, and another to admin. You get a lot more done when you are focused and in your furrow. Did I say don’t check emails in the morning?

Decide which problems and errors you need to address head on, and which are best addressed through the regular preaching. A denial of Jesus’ divinity must be challenged post-haste. Eschatological differences or differences about the work of the Spirit may be better addressed organically.

Go with the goers. Beware of those who do not really want to learn and grow.

Translate the Hebrew and Greek for every passage from which you preach. Or at least the key parts of very long passages. Your language skills are hard won, perishable, and irreplaceably important for your careful exegesis of the text. Don’t forget the preaching intangibles of depth of understanding, conviction, and text-confidence—all nourished by time in the original languages. Without prayerful and diligent preparation, we tend to the abomination of self-reliance.

Accept that not everyone will like you.

Learn the art of “not caring.”I was given this counsel by one of the godliest and most experienced ministers I ever knew. It shocked me at first. At the time my church was shrinking, and I was tormented by failure. He wanted me to know that I could only do what I could do, that I could not control everything, and that I probably cared more about “success” than Christ, my family, or my salvation. He was warning me off inordinate and useless worry. “Be still/stop fighting and know that I am God.” This wise counsel was truly liberating.