Pastoral Success

I've been pastoring churches for a long time. I went to my first church in 1975 and have pastored continuously except for one brief period. I pastored my first church for nearly two years, the second one for about three years, the third one for three years, the next one for five years and I have been with my current church for 20 years. The churches have been as varied as urban, near downtown to very rural. The smallest town where I pastored had 117 people in it and the largest city had a population of about half a million with the entire area having 2 million people. The churches have been mainly small but about average with the average church in America. They have all grown dramatically while I pastored there. The church I now pastor has grown about five or six times its size when I first went there.

I have been through building programs, moving to two services, transitional communities, growing communities, declining communities, churches in poverty stricken areas and churches in middle America.

I have seen just about every thing a pastor can experience in my 30 years of pastoring churches. And, I would love to share some of the stories and some of the things I have learned through the years so as to help and encourage those of you that are pastors no matter where you are in your journey. We should all be learning all the time. If we ever stop learning we should move aside and let someone take our place.

When I went to my first church while still in college I had an idea of what it means to succeed as a pastor. To me success was pastoring a church with a lot of people in attendance and a large staff to shepherd them. I saw myself as the potential CEO of that organization and casting a vision of how to get there.

I had grown up in large churches. Actually I had never attended a church that had less than 500 in attendance. And, the last church where I was a member had an average attendance on Sunday morning of about 1500. So, my perspective was that of a large church.

Imagine my shock when we had 20 people and the entire population of the town where I lived and where the church was situation was only 117. I could have everyone in town and half of the population around us and still not have 500.

I had to either change my view of success or I had to learn to live with failure. Unfortunately at that point I didn't or maybe couldn't change my view of success. I worked hard and the church grew but in my zeal and youthful ignorance I alienated a portion of the membership of the church that was there when I arrived. I left there in less than two years with anger in my heart towards those that had been obstructionist in my attempts to build a great church. Too bad I missed the opportunity to build relationships and bring people along with me as I attempted to build a great church. Too bad I didn't take a look at reality and determine what the definition of a great church could be in that particular place.

You see success is different in every place that you serve. There are some constants but there are also variables to every situation. Success has to be evaluated in terms of opportunity, resources and skills. God has you where you are for a purpose. He wants a living, vibrant and ministering church no matter where you are. Some of the constants that should be in place for every church are; 1) A focus on evangelism. We are all given the great commission. The world as a whole is lost without Jesus. It's our purpose to share the Gospel with them and give them an opportunity to become followers of Jesus Christ. 2) There should be an emphasis on discipleship. In my opinion the greatest failure of most churches in the US is failure to disciple those people that we reach. The back door of the church is as big or bigger than the front door. 3) There should be an emphasis on ministering to the people in the community right around us. We should know who it is that is on our doorstep and we should develop tools, methods and programs designed to minister to them at their point of need. Those needs are going to be different with every community but they have to be one of our focuses.

For us to do the job God has called us to do we have to be focused. We have to know our calling, our responsibilities and our opportunities. When we know that we have to develop our mission statement and then stay on point in that mission. If we do that, we will absolutely be successful regardless of how that looks. It may be a large attendance with a lot of opportunities to learn and grow in Christ. Or it could be a smaller group of people who are growing in Christ and reaching out to the hurting in the community around them. And, it might be somewhere in between. Whatever it is that God wants for us is what we should work towards and be happy with.