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.

Here's a joke . . . well, sort of a joke.  A certain potato farmer had been working his hired hand hard to get his harvest in.  But on one particular day, the weather was brutally hot and humid.  So, our of concern for his hired man, he decided to lighten the load that day.  He dumped an big pile of potatoes under a spreading shade tree, put three large bins near the pile of spuds, and called his hired hand over to him.

"Now, it's way too hot to be out there under the sun in the field.  So, I want you to take it easy today.  Stay under the shade of this tree, and drink plenty of water.  And all I want you to do is sort these potatoes into these three bins according to size.  Big ones in this bin, medium ones in this bin, and small ones in this bin.  Got it?"

"I thinks so, boss," was the reply.

"Good.  I'll be back in a couple of hours to see how things are going."

The farmer returned as planned and found his hired man leaning exhausted against the trunk of the tree, his clothes soaked through with sweat.

"What happened?" the farmer exclaimed.  "I told you to take it easy and just sort out this pile of potatoes.  What happened to you?"

"Oh, boss!  This is the hardest job you've ever given me to do."

"What do you mean?  This is the lightest work I've got on this farm."

"Boss, it's not the physical stuff.  It's the mental work.  It's all the decisions.  One decision after another.  Decisions, decisions, decisions.  I'm all played out with the decisions."

Well, I don't know if you're laughing.  My reaction is a sort of chagrined and embarrassed smile.  One of the hardest things about the pastoral work for me is all the decisions that I have to make.  A pastor is, among other things, the manager of a religious organization.  And one of the key roles of a manager of organizations and institutions is decision-making.

Delegating is an important skill and discipline.  (And it is both a skill to be learned and a discipline to be enforced on oneself.)  In a healthy church that emphasizes the ministry of all people, not just the "minister," delegation can be easier and more natural and even automatic.  In churches that see church members as "religious consumers" and the work of ministry as the responsibility of the staff, delegation can be an up-hill battle.

At North Church, where I am now, a lot of decisions automatically by-pass my desk.   For example, we are in the midst of a large project to replace the windows in one of the wings of our building and install air conditioning there.  I was involved in the decision as to whether we should do the project or not and how much we could afford to spend on it.  But after that the myriad decisions that have had to be made about that work have been made by others.  

Wise churches will spare their pastors from being overly involved in those decisions that do not really require his/her input.  This can be a lot trickier than it sounds.  To avoid unnecessarily drawing the pastor into decisions, a committee or working group has to be willing to take responsibility for its own decisions.  They also need to be willing to do the work of resolving their own internal disagreement in order to come to a decision.

Likewise, a pastor has to be willing to stay out of decisions that do not require his/her input.  That requires us to relinquish control over some of the details of church life.  That can run counter to our inclinations.  Being treated as indispensable can be a real ego stroking.  Sometimes we pastors have a hard time foregoing that.  Delegating also requires us pastors to be willing to live with decisions that may not be exactly the way we would have liked.  We need to do this for the welfare of our people and for the benefit of our own proper work.  Is it really better for me to give up a couple of hours of rest with my family or study for my sermon or visiting with a new family just so that I can make sure that the committee for the church kitchen buys the brand of refrigerator that I prefer?

Well, learning the skill and developing the discipline to delegate properly is always an ongoing challenge for pastors.  I think I know how to do it, but I know that I don't always do it well.

But even the pastor who delegates perfectly, if such a paragon actually existed, would still be faced daily with an enormous pile of decisions that simply can't be delegated.  For example, I have nothing scheduled for my afternoon today after a 1:00 P.M. appointment that should last about an hour.  So, what will I do with the three or four hours after that?

There are people in the hospital that I need to visit.  There are the two weekly bulletins that need to be finished.  I've done very little study on the passage that I'm going to preach on this Sunday.  I still haven't settled on my preaching plan for Advent Sundays, or Wednesday evenings for that matter.  The ushers guidelines and instructions need to be revised as of two weeks ago.  I haven't had a work out in over five months.  I've only visited with two of the five families in our current new members class.  I urgently need to be preparing resources for our elders and members to help them sort out the very serious denominational conflict that will be coming upon us in the next year.  For over two years I've been meaning to schedule an evangelism training program for our members.  The Nominating Committee needs my input.  The Budget Committee is hard at work without much help from me.  We have quite a few homebound members who haven't seen my face in a very long time.  I have a funeral scheduled for this coming Saturday, but I have nothing planned yet.

Should I slide some of this over into the evening?  That's when my kids will need some help with their homework.  My wife would like to have some conversation with her husband.  The downstairs shower is leaking.  Our bedroom door doesn't latch anymore.  And about 9:00 P.M. my brain will finally go on strike and make me fall asleep, because I've been forcing it to make some many decisions.

Ahh.  Poor, poor Gary!

Well, this is the stuff of life.  Mine probably isn't all that terribly different from yours.  Decisions are how we live our lives.  We can make them consciously and with a sense of purpose.  Or we can make them by default, by just responding to the matter that screams at us the loudest, whether it's the most important matter for us to address or not.

The one key truth, that I've been learning now for the past thirty-five years or so, is that the less I pray, the more overwhelming the decisions become.  And the more I pray, the more manageable and purposeful my decisions become.  I'm thinking there may be something in that.  What do you think?

I was on the church roof yesterday.  It all started out with my having gone out to chat with Bill and Brian who were preparing air conditioning units for placing on the roof.  I had my camera and took some pictures of the work.  I'll be putting them up on this site soon.  Then Bob arrived.  He and Brian hefted one of the air conditioning compressors on their shoulders and started to climb the two ladders up to the roof.  Not wanting anyone to fall from an unheld ladder, I stayed out with them to hold one of the ladders.  The first two units were "lighter" ones.  When the other guys got one of the heavy one's out, it seemed clear to all of us that they were too heavy to carry on shoulders up the ladders.  We puzzled it around for a while, then decided that the best plan was to back Bob's pick-up part way under the roof overhang above the church door.  We then could lift the air conditioning unit onto the bed of the truck.  That got us a three foot start toward the roof.  We tied ropes under the units, and the ropes were pass up to Bill and me on the roof.  Then with Brian and Bob lifting from the truck bed and Bill and me pulling the ropes from above, we managed to lift the three heavy units up onto the roof.

Thus, pastoral ministry in one of its many facets.  I even shed blood in the process.  The fins on the condensers are quite sharp.  My pastoral hands aren't quite hardened enough.  There are now seven fine, parallel slices across the tip of my left ring finger.  I wish all the scars from ministry were so minor.  Should I apply for workers' comp.?  Probably not.

Well, the North Star deadline is upon me, so I must adjourn this entry in order to contemplate and write about Christianity and sex.