I have to tell you about a sub-theme, running through an otherwise excellent book, which dampened my own joy as I turned the pages.
The former pastor-author stated a few times that he worked so hard, with such passion, at loving and leading his people, because he believed that God was going to hold him responsible for the decisions made by the men and women who were under his care.
While this may have helped to make the author an outstanding and successful pastor, I’m a little surprised that it didn’t kill him.
It certainly didn’t make him joyful.
I believe that we can make a strong case for the conclusion that as pastors/teachers/leaders of God’s people, we are responsible for what we do – witness the passion for great ministry in the Apostle Paul’s speech in Acts 20:17-38 – but we are not responsible for the choices made by others.
We’ll call this suggestion #12 for meeting the pastor’s joy challenge. Stop taking responsibility for other people’s choices.
If you’re new to this blog, you need to know that over the past six weeks I’ve been seeking to help pastors with their joy challenge: their need to be joyful in a “job” (I hope you don’t mind my calling it that) that makes joy difficult to maintain over the long haul.
In these posts I’ve shared five reasons why the pastor’s joy is so important, fourteen reasons why it’s so challenging and, with the new material above, twelve suggestions for achieving “pastoral joy.”
- Work at getting good at rejoicing in the Lord.
- Take responsibility for your own joy.
- Dig deep into your position in Christ.
- Seek to get Jesus Christ obviously present and actively in charge of your church.
- Pursue the joy that comes from fruit bearing.
- Keep one foot on solid ground as you descend into the “hole” of another’s sorrow.
- You’re gracious to everybody else; maybe it’s time to be gracious to yourself.
- Cultivate hope.
- Expect that trouble will increase your capacity for joy.
- Share your story and His story.
- Don’t resort to looking for bosom friends in your church; find a good pastor fellowship instead.
- And just above, stop taking responsibility for other people’s choices.
The following are three more suggestions, in keeping with today’s theme of taking charge of your heart.
13. Develop godly assertiveness.
Assertiveness usually gets described like this: Aggressiveness means that I respect myself but I don’t respect you. Under-assertiveness (or “wimpiness”) means that I respect you but I don’t respect me. Healthy assertiveness – which is Biblical – means that I respect you and I respect me.
A few pastors are aggressive. Not good. But that’s another post for another day.
Quite a few pastors – and I was one of them for quite a while – are under-assertive. They think that being loving and Christ-like demands that they allow people to trample all over them. In truth, such shepherds typically have underlying problems with their own security, or call it self-esteem, or call it co-dependence (needing to be needed). Whatever you call it, it typically leads to passive-aggressiveness.
What we want and need to achieve – and we can do this with God’s help – is a reasonable and healthy assertiveness, built upon a firm grasp of our position in Christ as well as a good understanding of our giftedness, our calling, our natural and spiritual gifts.
With a reasonable degree of assertiveness, we can, as I share in a seminar, “get our lives focused and our act together.” It brings peace and joy and focus and order to our lives, it enables us to fulfill God’s mission for our lives and it immunizes us against the resentment that leads to frustration, angry outbursts and escapades into fleshly, ungodly attempts at compensation.
We see a healthy assertiveness in the Old Testament Joseph in Genesis 40. While he had accepted God’s strategic assignment (prison ministry!), he was not afraid to say to Pharaoh’s former chief cupbearer, “When you get your job back, get me out of here!”
If you’re an under-assertive pastor, I promise you, you can work at this and change for the better.
As you start making some progress, you may need to:
14. Work towards a reasonable, joy-producing job description.
Many pastors are suffering under the sentence of an unwieldy, ill-fitting, unreasonable ministry description. It’s pretty hard to experience joy when your job description fits you like Saul’s armor.
Some pastoral job descriptions are unreasonable in that they demand that the pastor be significantly gifted in too many areas.
Other job descriptions fail to allow the pastor to do the types of ministry for which he is best suited: forcing the people-person pastor to be a fanatically devoted scholar, or asking the introverted pastor to party it up like a raving extrovert.
Other job descriptions simply demand far too much work or leave the pastor working for far too many bosses. Either of these will kill your joy or just plain kill you.
In many of these situations, no one is particularly at fault. The search committee or church board didn’t exactly know what they were doing when the pastor was hired and neither did the pastor, and in far too many instances I’ve seen, the candidating pastor didn’t pay much attention to the job description until it was too late.
In any case, the pastor who is gaining some hard-fought assertiveness (as above) and has come to realize that his position is seriously ruining his disposition, can sit down with a reasonably understanding board and start explaining the changes he’s going to need in order to be a joyful pastor.
If you don’t have a “reasonably understanding board,” you may need to begin these discussions while simultaneously looking for a more suitable place to serve.
Does this take some courage? Yes! But you’re assertive now, right?
15. Go to a pastor’s retreat center, or create your own re-energizing retreats.
Back in the last millennium, my pastor friends and I used to make jokes about having a “Camp Burnout” to go to. For several decades now, we have actually been blessed with these wonderful places, which usually have classier names than the one we envisioned. They are all over the US, they are often funded by wonderful wealthy people and available at no cost to tired and troubled pastors and their wives.
If you are in tough shape emotionally – or even physically – you should seriously consider a trip to one of these great places. Some of them will dig around in your past, your psyche and your marriage. Others will just leave you alone for a few days and give you excellent meals.
If you need one, by all means take charge of your heart by checking these out and checking yourself in.
A related solution is to develop a rhythm of retreating to the cabin or cottage of a church member or a friend for a few days at a time where you can: (1) simply meet with God and sleep (2) work on a sermon series or leadership initiative with no interruptions (3) work on a big leadership or administrative project, again, with no interruptions.
In my long-term pastorate, God gave me two such cabins to retreat to. Writing a child protection policy wasn’t a lot of fun, but studying Isaiah for a week sent my heart soaring.
Pastor brothers: You can meet the joy challenge by taking charge of your own heart.
- Stop taking responsibility for other people’s choices
- Develop godly assertiveness.
- Work toward a reasonable, joy-producing job description.
- Go to a pastor’s retreat center, or create your own re-energizing retreats.
If you’d like somebody to talk to or pray with regarding any of this, send me an email at churchwhisperer@gmail.com. I don’t have all the answers, but I can listen and pray.
