Pastoring is both simpler and more complicated than you might think.
At its core, pastoring is simple.
First: love God. Of course, loving God is an all-encompassing pursuit. Delight in the Saviour. Know God’s Word. Pursue personal holiness. Refuse to compromise with sin. Repent quickly. Become a person of prayer. Minister out of the overflow of your relationship with God. Make the first great and primary business to which you attend every day was, as George Muller put it, to have your soul happy in the Lord. Grow in godliness.
Second: preach, pray, and love. Proclaim God’s Word faithfully. Trust God to do his work through the ministry of the Word. Pray for your people. Love them. Learn how to proclaim Scripture publicly, and then learn how to apply Scripture pastorally to their needs in more personal settings too.
These two things are what all good pastors do.
Of course, you can make ministry more complicated than that. But, at its core, every church needs godly pastors who are growing in their love for the Lord, who preach God’s Word, who pray, and who love the people.
The pastoral epistles are full of this simplicity. Train yourself for godliness, Paul says. Keep a close watch on yourself and your teaching. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Remind people of what’s true. Continue in what you’ve learned. Preach the Word. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. Declare, exhort, and rebuke with all authority.
But ministry is complicated for three reasons.
First, loving God and discharging the responsibilities of ministry is anything but easy. Our sin gets in the way, as do the pressures to focus on everything else. As Eugene Peterson pointed out, pastors can become “accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a problem to be adjudicated,” and thus “abdicate our most important work.” Everything — including your own sinful nature and the pressures of ministry — will pull you away from the simple tasks of pastoring.
Second, people are complicated. We don’t pastor ideal churches. We pastor churches who believe wrong things that need to be corrected, who are full of strugglers who need encouragement, and sinners who need to be reproved and exhorted. Read Paul’s letters to each church and you encounter a different set of problems. It’s possible for one church to have so many issues that it’s hard to find anything positive to commend. Even then, Paul worked hard at rejoicing in who they were in Christ.
It’s difficult to love God and discharge the responsibilities of ministry, especially in real-world conditions with difficult people and churches.
The hardest part about ministry, though, is that it involves suffering. As Ajith Fernando says, to serve is to suffer. Read 2 Corinthians and 2 Timothy and you see the cost of faithful ministry. It will cost you more than you think you can afford. It will humble you and cause you to rely on Christ’s strength, because you don’t have enough of your own.
The older I get, the more I realize that pastoring is both simple and complicated. Pastoring involves doing only a few things well, but these few things are beyond what any of us can do. We need God’s help.
If you find a faithful pastor, rejoice that God has blessed you. Support them and pray for them. If you are a pastor, pray that you will stay faithful to the few things God has called you to do. Devote yourselves to them. And don’t be surprised when pastoring, despite its simplicity, is difficult and costly. It’s always been that way. Keep paying the price. Keep at the few things that matter, because the world needs more good pastors who stay faithful to the simple job God has called us to do.