Renovating Pastoring
Ancient pastoral practices are the key to the moment we're in
When you think of a pastor, what is their primary task? For most people here in the West, the image that comes to mind of a pastor is one who is in the pulpit preaching. We might picture of pastors teaching a class or, more recently, hosting podcasts, webinars, conferences, and more. For most, a pastor has been a source of religious knowledge and instruction throughout our lives, and for most of us pastors we’ve been trained to think of ourselves in precisely that way. Throughout my own years of ministry, I’ve even been referred to as “preacher.”
For most pastors, the work of teaching and preaching (two very different tasks, though often mistakenly conflated into one) is a holy thing. I started preaching at the age of 14, traveling to Pentecostal churches around eastern Michigan. Now, 27 years later, the honor to preach and teach people is something I don’t take for granted. But—and you may not like this, fellow pastor—our job is changing. Simply put, the days of being a sort of Spiritual PEZ dispenser as our primary vocational task are over.
Obligatory Mention of COVID-19
While it seems like everything I write nowadays makes at least a cursory mention of COVID, I once again can’t escape mention of it here. At the onset of the pandemic reaching North America, like many people around the country, I was trying to wrap my head around the gravity of what was taking place. For pastors, this necessarily included the impact of stay-at-home orders on church life.
I was on the staff of a larger church wrestling through these very questions in our executive meetings (which had been forebodingly titled “War Room” meetings), discerning together how to respond in this new norm. Simultaneously, I had friends who were leading churches of all sizes and ages around the country struggling to do the same. What I saw emerge were two very different trends, and I felt in my spirit (if you’ll allow me to wax Pentecostal for a moment) that which of these trends a church followed would impact how they weathered the pandemic’s storm. I turned out to be right.
One trend was embodied in pastors like my dear friend Brit Windel, who pastors DayBreak Church in Kenosha, WI. Windel responded to COVID by leaning into tending to the community life of his church and looking for ways to serve their community as was possible. He went as far as to record personal words of encouragement to the families in his church on the first Sunday their church meetings were shut down. Another friend, Preston Sharpe, who pastors Sacrament Church in Nashville, TN, delivered (COVID-protocol approved) communion to each of the families in his church. These two pastors are just examples of a broader trend that many churches embraced of tending to the church community.
There other trend I noticed was many churches who devoted large amounts of time, people power, and energy into replicating their high production “Sunday morning experiences” into digital space. The emphasis was placed on content production, whether in quantity or in quality.
Like most of you, there are ways I responded during that season that I would do over. But I was convinced of the fact—and communicated it frequently— that the churches who emphasized community—both within the church community itself and the broader community to which the church was called—would fare far better than those churches that focused on content and online worship experiences.
On the other end of the pandemic, this has proven to be true, both anecdotally, and in emerging data. Churches that put their time and energy stock into demonstrating value to their congregations and to their communities, saw less decline (and in some instances, even grew) in the wake of the pandemic’s official end. But why?
A Slow-Burning Shift in Pastoring
As I’ve said about other cultural phenomena, COVID was not a cause of the cultural shifts currently at foot around the world insomuch as it was an accelerant. The fires of cultural change were already lit and the pandemic was the gasoline that grew them.
I’m convinced that COVID did the same thing as it pertains to the role and vocation of the pastor. We’ve long been in a season where pastors are increasingly burdened with expectations of what they’re to be—motivational speaker, visionary strategist, thought leader, counselor, CEO, movement catalyzer, etc. We’re also well into the Information Age, brought about by the proliferation of digital technologies that have both democratized and decentralized knowledge.
By democratize, I mean that there is a decreased emphasis (and in some corners of our culture, an outright hostility) on expertise. Social media algorithms don’t care if you did your PhD dissertation on viral pathogens and don’t give any more priority to that expertise than they do the conspiracy theorist living in his mom’s basement asserting that COVID was spread by subliminal messages encoded within Taylor Swift music. Engagement, instead, drives everything—and to some extent that has a disadvantage toward experts because, well let’s face it…experts aren’t always the most engaging!
By decentralize, you probably already understand what I mean. We carry an access portal to the sum total of all human knowledge with us in our pocket. Whereas in the past, clergy were among the most educated in a community, often had access to the most books, and were the knowledge well from which people came to draw regularly, now any person can access nearly any sermon, book, paper, commentary, etc., with a few touches of one’s iPhone screen.
So in this cultural moment, we have both a decreased emphasis on the expertise of a pastor as well as a decreased need to seek out a pastor for knowledge. So let me repeat: pastor, your job is changing…in fact, it already has.
Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a teaching and preaching component to the role of pastor. I’m not saying that is going away, but its center-stage, mission critical nature is fading fast. Your congregation already has the capability to fact check you during a sermon (which I think is a good thing!), they can research additional insight on a point you make, and likely already listen to at least one or two other pastors online on the regular. You and I simply are not the grand “sage on the stage” that has been the hallmark of pastoral ministry for generations.
What is Pastoring Changing To?
So the inevitable question then is, if the role of pastors as dispensers of religious knowledge is fading away, what does pastoring look like? Is AI going to replace the vocation of pastor as so many others are fearing in their vocation? Do we even need pastors anymore?
Well, I don’t have such a grim outlook on the future and I have a high value on the role of pastors. But I do think that pastors who continue to place enormous energy and value in their capacity to produce content alone as a means of ministering to their congregation are going to struggle.
I’m convinced the answer lies in the ministry pattern of pastors like Brit and Preston, who of course teach and preach, but spend enormous time tending to the church community God has brought around them and the context to which he has called them. I tweeted this yesterday, and comments and messages asking for elaboration was the impetus for this piece:
The role of the pastor of the future (and the emerging present) will be less of a sage on the stage and more of a guide on the side. Pastors will need to be increasingly more cognizant of the sort of environments they are helping create and how those environments contribute to the flourishing of their congregation and the broader community.
This attentiveness to environments has less to do with creating a high production worship experience on Sundays, and more to do with a broader ecosystem of environments where people can encounter the living God together, shaping their formation in a holistic way. Flourishing community environments are deeply concerned not just with scriptural truth, but also people’s ability to deepen relationships with one another, engage in justice and mercy work, and is safeguarded against the corruption and abuse that has become all too common in ecclesial spaces. Flourishing communities steward people as image bearers, not simple as consumers of content and information.
I have much more to say on this subject, but I’d like to hear your feedback as to whether you’d be interested in best practices for stewarding church environments…
In all, I don’t think the vocation of the pastor is going away, but dramatic change to how pastor’s function in relation to their church and their community is already hard upon our heels. The good news is that the role of a shepherd as one who tends to cultivating life-giving community is actually a more biblically faithful vision of a shepherd than what we have lived at present and in the recent past.
Besides shepherds, the vocation of pastor is often compared with the image of a gardener or vintner—one who is entrusted with the care of a plant or vine, tending to the environment in which the plant grows so that the plant may do what it is created to do—bear healthy fruit.
What would the Church of the future look like for us to replace the modern images of pastors as CEOs and celebrity thought leaders with those of shepherds and gardeners stewarding the creation that has been entrusted to them? I say, let’s dispose of the former, live into the latter, and see what happens.