If you're standing on ice, it's very hard to push a car.  I've tried that before.  Sometimes the work of pastoring God's people can feel like that.  I'm not thinking here about managing the whole church or even a program.  I'm thinking here about my work with individuals.

The really public and visible part of a pastor's work is seen in those large-scale types of activities.  We certainly do have an important, even pivotal, role in leading a whole congregation -- casting a vision, motivating, organizing (God help me!), supervising, evaluating, re-organizing, etc.  We provide some of the key leadership for groups of various sorts within the life of a congregation, doing, again, on a smaller scale the same things we do when leading the congregation as a whole.  Certainly that can often feel like trying to push a truck while standing on a glare of ice.

But perhaps the most important, certainly the most eternal, work that a pastor does is to nurture the growth and maturity of individual Christians.  Most of that work takes place away from public view.  And except for the occasional spectacular transformation, much of what is accomplished in that work takes place slowly, incrementally, over the course of months and years.  Pastors who devote the hours of prayerful, purposeful, individualized work of nurturing disciples in their growth in Jesus Christ over the course of years will rarely get their picture on the cover of "Christianity Today."  That work is simply not public enough or quantifiable enough.

 And yet the nurturing of disciples toward maturity is what makes it possible for the church to engage in effectual, faithful, and lasting ministry and mission.  That kind of ministry and mission require selfless love, patience, humility, self-denial, a willingness to give up one's own interests for the sake of others.  These are all characteristics of a maturing disciple of Jesus.  Without this sort of discipleship at the heart of a ministry it will in time become self-serving instead of other-serving and ultimately God-serving.

Now, as I've sort of implied above, pastor's will most often get their "strokes," their affirmation and praise for the bigger, more public activities.  A pastor who devotes a lot of time to the quiet, low-key, and usually behind the scenes work of nurturing individuals in their faith can run the risk of being accused of lacking vision and leadership abilities and even of lacking ambition.  Americans are not notable for their patience and long-term mindset.  We tend to want quick, visible results.

Those sorts of attitudes discourage pastors from carefully, prayerfully, purposefully nurturing individual disciples of Jesus.  But there is also a more fundamental obstacle to this basic discipling work of pastors.  Becoming a disciple means changing, and most of us have very mixed feelings about change in our lives.  

A pastor who seeks to make disciples of his or her people is seeking to bring about change in their lives.  That is very often not something congregation members welcome.  Sometimes church members will not only not welcome a pastor who seeks to bring change into their lives, but they will also question whether a pastor has any business trying to bring change into a parishioner's life.

That question can be like ice under a pastor's feet.   I don't know whether I would say a pastor has a "right" to bring change into a congregation member's life, but I would say that he or she does have a responsibilty to do it.  Yet, unless parishioners open themselves to this work by the pastor in their lives, they will not derive the full benefit of having a pastor.

Well, this is one of the challenging tensions in the pastoral life.  It can be very tempting to simply stick to the public, large-scale, and quantifiable aspects of the pastoral work and to leave this work of nurturing individual disciples out of the schedule.  It is a rare church that will complain if their pastor does that.  But wherever a pastor does abdicate the disciple-making  heart of pastoral ministry, there will be a church that can never really be fully and faithfully atuned to the heart and will of God.