Pastors Are Human Too

Last week my church had a meeting. It was your usual church AGM, they discussed a variety of things about the future of the church.

But the sermon that morning was anything but normal.

The pastor came up onto the stage and started off with “over the last year, I’ve taken the blame for a lot of things. It seems that anything that goes wrong is my fault. Even when it isn’t”.

Off the bat this made me tense. Being a pastor is not the easiest job in the world. They don’t just work on Sundays, they work everyday. During the week, they have to prepare their next sermon, usually they also counsel people, answer questions people have about their last sermon, and take care of the church. Most smaller churches like the one I attend don’t have many people working full time on site, so the pastor is also the janitor and maintenance guy. Often there are community organisations who will borrow the church gym or the church sanctuary; the pastor has to make sure that nothing goes wrong there. Churches are public buildings, which means they have to be inspected every now and then. Guess who has to arrange inspection, meet the inspector, and show the inspector around, then take the inspectors report and deal with it? The pastor. They have to do all this at the same time. Then when Saturday comes, they might not be in the office, but they’re still working. They have to preach tomorrow. You don’t really think that they’re not going to be going over their sermons to make sure that everything is A-OK? I don’t know about you, but I get cold sweats the day before I have to give an oral presentation in front of my class of thirty. How do you think the pastor feels about giving an hour or more long sermon in front of a congregation of over 100?

So don’t blame the pastor when something goes wrong, he has enough on his plate. Why don’t you fix it instead? I’m sure the pastor would appreciate it.

He went on to explain that a lot of the criticism has come to him from third or even fourth hand information. This means that people have been talking behind his back.

Again, this made me even more tense. I’ve had people talk behind my back before, it made me furious when I found out. If you have anything to say about me, say it to my face. I can handle it. The same goes for your pastor. If you have something against him, say it to his face. He can handle it. In fact, it might help him fix the problem or ensure it never happens again. And if your pastor thinks you’re misguided, he can explain it to you. The world advances only when dialogue and the sharing of ideas happens.

He then went on to list some of the things that people were saying against him; most of them were fairly run of the mill, too long, too short, boring, over-stimulating etc. There was one that stuck out to me: too much scripture. I know it’s not new, I’m sure many pastors have heard it before, but this was the first time I’ve heard it, and it made me mad…

“All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching” (2 Timothy 3:16). A sermon cannot be wishy washy jazz made up by the pastor using the facebook post of his 13 year old niece twice removed as an authoritative source. (Now I’m not saying that he can’t use the post to illustrate a point, but he can’t use her words to replace scripture.) Ultimately, he is preaching about God. He is trying to get the truth about God across to his audience. Who is the greatest authority on God? God. As I said above, scripture is God breathed, therefore it is the ultimate earthly authority on God. Pastors should use it as much as possible.

Ultimately, as my pastor said, God chooses weak vessels to give to the church. Your pastor is human. He is not God. Love him, care for him, and remember that he is doing his best.