There Are No Successful Pastors
This is an except from Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure by J.R. Briggs
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As pastors we don’t always know what it is we’re after. How is our church doing? Are we failing or succeeding? How am I doing – and how do I know? These questions can be maddening and unending. Whether evangelical church planters or pastors of established mainline congregations, few seem to know what we’re after. Pastors need a clear, robust and compelling compass for pastoral evaluation and focus. If success in ministry is clearly defined, unfortunately much of the time it’s metric is derived more from popular business books than the Scriptures. Few people have articulated the current inaccurate state of pastoral evaluate more than pastor and author Eugene Peterson. In the introduction of his book Working the Angles, he writes with a tone of prophetic reprimand:
“American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries. A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted.... It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not.They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills. The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns–how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money. Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists. The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.”
Peterson’s words are jolting, but such is the role of a prophet. If we ruminate on what he writes, there is much for us to learn. It is important to highlight Peterson’s opening line: the biblical fact is there are no successful churches. When I first read this as a young pastor, I bristled, but after years of contemplation, I concluded he’s right. If only we, as pastors in North America attempting to serve faithfully in a culture dominated by the message of success at all costs, could get that into our bloodstream, much of the the burden of performance could be lifted from us in order to free us up to actually shepherd, guide, serve, pray, love, listen and teach in ways more consistent with the kingdom.