What does
the pastor do? Is there a job description? Is there a biblical job description?
When I graduated from the seminary and went to my first church, I asked several
seasoned pastors these questions. One answered, “Just go out there and make the
people happy.” Another encouraged me to visit, visit, and visit more. Another
one felt that the main role of the pastor is to bring new people to the church.
According
to the Scriptures, though, what should the pastor do? Do we have a model in the
Scriptures that might help us understand the role?
After many
years of observation and careful examination of the literature, I found two
distinctive pastoral roles: the traditional and the contemporary.
The traditional and contemporary roles of the
pastor
For many centuries,
people viewed the role of the pastor as a servant caregiver who does the
following:
1.
Teaching/preaching of traditional doctrine
2.
Caregiving, such as visitation, counseling, comforting, and taking care of the
needs of people
3.
Performing rites of passage, such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals
4.
Administration, such as taking care of meetings, putting together a bulletin,
and developing programs for the church and evangelism
5. And
finally, serving as ambassador of the church to the community
People
expect pastors to do this, and pastors also view their role in this way.
Actually, pastors did this for many centuries.
But around
the 1970s and 1980s, a new understanding started to emerge. Many book authors
and pastors of megachurches started to see the role of the pastor as a chief
executive officer (CEO/leader), who casts a vision and rallies and motivates
people to carry on the new vision in a changed and healthy environment.
Most books
on church growth and leadership today argue that if pastors continue to do what
pastors have done for so many years, they will fail. Greg Ogden, in Unfinished
Business,1 proposes that the pastor should be a visionary leader who constantly
builds other leaders, casts the vision, and changes the culture and structure
of the church, while doing all of this with an eye for mission, evangelism, and
growth.
However
fresh, insightful, and useful, both these ideas are weak theologically. The old
model of a servant caregiver does not lend itself to growth, but creates a
culture of people dependent upon the pastor, a role utterly inconsistent with
the biblical principles of the priesthood of all believers. It also encourages
people to focus on their needs and thus hinders the growth of the kingdom of
God.
The new
model of a CEO/leader combines a mixture of some biblical insights and
adaptation of business practices. Most of the church growth books are basically
books about leadership models adapted to the church.
But, many
dangers lurk behind this model. First, it might lead people to follow a
charismatic personality rather than biblical principles. Second, this new model
also focuses on the needs of the local church to the exclusion of the global
church. The emphasis of this model, and this should be noted, becomes the
building of a megachurch rather than building a healthy church. Finally, any
model we adapt needs biblical and theological development. The role of the
pastor should be based on a biblical model and have a strong theological
foundation.
So, then,
what are we to do as pastors?
The answer
can be found in the ministry of Jesus. The New Testament account reveals that
Jesus did five things: (1) Jesus built His relationship with His Father, (2) He
preached the gospel of the kingdom of God, (3) He met the needs of people, (4)
He made disciples through the power of the Spirit, and (5) He gave His life as
a sacrifice. These are the keys to true biblical ministry.
Relationship with the Father
Over and
over, the Scriptures show us that Jesus placed the highest priority of His life
on spending time alone with the Father. His life reveals an intense passion for
the presence of God. His heart longed and hungered to touch the heart of God.
Note the following
incidents:
• “One of
those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night
praying to God” (Luke 6:12).2
• “After he
had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When
evening came, he was there alone” (Matt. 14:23).
• “Very
early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and
went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35).
Jesus lived
a life of prayer. He started every day in communion with the heavenly Father.
He ended every day in close relationship with His Father. At times, He even
spent the whole night in communion with His Father. Jesus actually was in touch
with His heavenly Father all the time.
The first
thing that Jesus did each day was to fill the well of His being with the
presence of His Father; He then lived with heaven in mind all day long. He
managed His time by moving from being to behaving. His being was about being in
union with the Father and experiencing the joy of His Sonship. And His doing
was about doing the will of the Father. This made His doing so effective as He
received grace and power from the Father.
In Steps to
Christ, Ellen White said, “His humanity made prayer a necessity and a
privilege. He found comfort and joy in communion with His Father. And if the
Saviour of men, the Son of God, felt the need of prayer, how much more should
feeble, sinful mortals feel the necessity of fervent, constant prayer.”3 Ellen
White, in the same book, also admonishes us to start every day with prayer.
Consecrate
yourself to God in the morning; make this your very first work. Let your prayer
be, “Take me, O Lord, as wholly Thine. I lay all my plans at Thy feet. Use me
today in Thy service. Abide with me, and let all my work be wrought in Thee.”
This is a daily matter. Each morning consecrate yourself to God for that day.
Surrender all your plans to Him, to be carried out or given up as His
providence shall indicate. Thus day by day you may be giving your life into the
hands of God, and thus your life will be molded more and more after the life of
Christ.4
When the
pastor lives a life of prayer like Jesus and becomes intentional about
discipleship and spiritual formation, God will use them to transform the church
into a sanctuary for spiritually transformed lives. Jesus said, “ ‘ “My house
will be called a house of prayer” ’ ” (Matt. 21:13). He did not say that His
church should be a place of singing or preaching or doing ministry, however
important these things may be. The church is about leading people to the throne
of grace to experience the presence of God and receive power from Him.
Unfortunately, too many technicians have invaded the church with programs and
ideas and turned it into a human institution rather than the living body of
Christ. When we live a life of connectedness with the heavenly Father, the church
becomes a sanctuary of prayer, grace, and the dwelling of the presence of God.
Jesus’
hunger for the presence of God should be our motivation and inspiration to be
more and more like Him.
Preach the gospel
Jesus often
preached, proclaiming a message of God’s love. In describing His earthly
mission, Jesus said, in Luke 4:18, “ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, /
because he has anointed me / to preach good news to the poor.’ ” Also, Matthew
9:35 says, “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their
synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom.” Jesus taught the people
every day, giving guidance through the Word and calling them to confess their
sins and to experience a transformed life.
The
ministry of the Word always leads people to transformed lives. There is power
in the Word. The word of God brought this world into existence. The word
brought Jesus Christ from the grave. And the Word brings us back to spiritual
health and meaningful change.
From an
early age, Jesus developed passionate love for the Scriptures. He learned them
and taught them with power and authority (Luke 2:46–50). His love for the
Father motivated Him to read His Book and learn about His will.
The pastor
should always lead people to a better understanding of the Word of God. Notice
the following vital spiritual things that the Word does for us.
• God’s
Word gives us life (Phil. 2:16).
• God’s
Word can make us righteous (1 Cor. 15:1, 2).
• God’s
Word can produce growth (1 Pet. 2:2).
• God’s
Word sanctifies us (John 17:7).
• God’s
Word gives us wisdom (Ps. 119:98).
So often we
reduce Scripture to mere information. Paul reminds us that the Scriptures give
us a new life in Jesus. Paul’s command to Timothy urged him to give careful
attention to the public reading and preaching (expounding) of the Scriptures (1
Tim. 4:13). In his second epistle, he reminds Timothy that the whole of
Scripture is divinely inspired and therefore profitable for “teaching,
rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).
It is not
theoretical knowledge you need so much as spiritual regeneration. You need not
to have your curiosity satisfied, but to have a new heart. You must receive a
new life from above before you can appreciate heavenly things. Until this
change takes place, making all things new, it will result in no saving good for
you to discuss with Me My authority or My mission.5
It’s time
to stop rehearsing what we believe and start looking at what difference it
makes. We need spiritual renewal more than knowledge. We must study the Bible,
not for curiosity, but for a new heart. That encapsulates the essence of the
power of the Word. Jesus did not preach sociology, politics, or psychology; He
always preached the Word. For this reason, He had power and authority.
Meet the needs of the people
Often the
Bible says that Jesus, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them,
because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt.
9:36). Jesus loved people. He knew that lost people matter to God, therefore,
lost people mattered to Him.
Christ’s
method alone will give true success in reaching the people. The Saviour mingled
with men as one who desired their good. He showed His sympathy for them,
ministered to their needs, and won their confidence. Then He bade them, “Follow
Me.”6
Christ’s
method builds relationships and meets needs. The first thing Jesus did was to
mingle with people, desiring their good. By doing so, He touched their hearts.
The second thing Jesus did was to show sympathy for them. The way He did this
was that He met them at their daily vocations and manifested an interest in
their secular affairs. The third thing that He did was to win their confidence.
When we build a relationship, when the needs are met, and when the heart is
touched, then we bid people to follow Jesus.
Notice the
progressive steps that Christ took in witnessing: He started by mingling with
people and ended up calling them to be disciples.
Making disciples
As soon as
He began His public ministry, Jesus began to call disciples. He called and
empowered twelve men to be His disciples— twelve men who would champion His
evangelistic cause. As Robert Coleman says in The Master Plan of Evangelism,
“His concern was not with programs to reach the multitudes, but with men whom
the multitudes would follow. . . . Men were to be His method of winning the
world to God.”7
The wisdom
of His method centered in the fundamental principle of concentration upon those
men whom He intended to use to transform the world, not programs, and not the
masses. Theologically speaking, this has always been the methodology of Jesus.
Jesus challenged His disciples for this reason by saying, “ ‘The harvest is
plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to
send out workers into his harvest fi eld’ ” (Luke 10:2).
Jesus
basically says that we have a math problem. We need more workers, more
disciples, to gather the harvest, so go and make disciples. Our role is to pray
for the harvest and especially for harvesters.
God’s role
is to send us people who will be the new harvesters.
The need to
build disciples is so fundamental that Jesus spent three and a half years in
full-time discipleship formation. In fact, if Jesus had not built His
disciples, there would not be a church today.
A life of service and sacrifice
There are
two important truths about Christ. First, He was a Servant Leader. Any study of
Christian leadership is incomplete unless we study the servant sacrificial life
of Christ. “‘The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve’ ” (Mark
10:45, MLB). “ ‘I am among you as one who serves’ ” (Luke 22:27, MLB). The King
of the whole universe was not into self-glorification, self-satisfaction,
power, or control. He was into service and ministry.
The second
truth about Jesus is that He gave His life as a living sacrifice; to redeem us,
Jesus lived and suffered and died. In the agony of Gethsemane, the death at
Calvary, God paid the price of our redemption. In fact, the price paid for our
redemption, the infinite price paid by God the Father in sending His Son to die
on our behalf, should give us an idea of just how valuable we are to God. Jesus
declared, “ ‘The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost’ ” (Luke
19:10). Lost people matter to God. Thus, if I am to be a genuine pastor and
disciple of Jesus Christ, then lost people will matter to me as well. The
pastor’s role is to instill this value in the heart of their congregation.
This
sacrificial life manifests itself on at least two levels. The first level is to
live a life of giving—of time, of resources, and of life. The second level is
to give our lives in sacrificial giving, even to death.
God calls
us to live the life Jesus lived. Pastoral ministry is not about us, but about
Him—about knowing and serving Him.
Conclusion
So what
does the pastor do?
First and
foremost, we need to deepen our relationship with the Father through prayer
that results in an intimate relationship with Him. Then we will be able to
preach the gospel of the kingdom of God and build leaders to take care of the
needs of the people. Authentic leadership in the church is about servant
leadership. Jesus came to serve and not to be served. He came to offer His life
as sacrifice. He calls us to do the same.
S. Joseph
Kidder
