pastors

Talk about 'meeting together'!

Having underlined yesterday the importance of meeting together, I find today is a long succession of meeting with different people. It's a steady, seamless stream of people, all by arrangement, mainly here, but I'm 'off-site' and out and about as well.

Conferring with a range of different leaders across a very varied spectrum of the church's life: and working through with other folk I'm meeting with some painful pastoral issues.

It takes me from the morning through to meal-time at the end of the afternoon. And then there's also a meeting at night with the leaders here, addressing the next year's budget.

One of the folk I've been seeing today highlights the value of taking some time 'apart'. Simply getting away for a day from time to time. Pastors need that space, he says.

He gives me a leaflet along these lines. The leaflet has a number of intersting quotes -

"Pastoral ministry is deeply rewarding and an immense privilege. [I couldn't agree more. It is a huge privilege, sharing with so many people in spheres that are essentially such 'holy ground'. And yes, it's wonderfully rewarding, too - not least in seeing the Lord at work, effecting change, and bringing gneuine healing].

"But the role brings with it particular vulnerabilities and peculiar pressures. The Gospel may be unbreakable treasure but the messengers of the Good News are positively fragile."

They have to be. They have to be utterly sensitive. Sensitive to the Lord, to what he's saying and doing in a person's life. Sensitive to the person they're with, to the needs and the feelings that person has, and to what's being said in what is not being said.

That sensitivity, though, does make a pastor vulnerable. He feels the weight of others' cares as though they were his own. He feels the hurts that others know as if they were his own.

And because his skin is never thick (he can't afford such calluses to grow across his heart), he often struggles inwardly with an aching sense of failure and most times feels acutely any criticism made.

The leaflet quotes from C H Spurgeon, a preacher from a by-gone generation, whom I always have admired -

"It would be a dreadful thing to be a pastor without cares ... but some are overloaded with cares and overweighted with sorrows."

I remember my grandmother speaking about Spurgeon (their lives over-lapped). He was a remarkable man, an astonishingly eloquent preacher in the Baptist Church, occupying, with his sizeable frame, the Metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit in London for many long years, and drawing vast crowds of people every week.

The pastoral ministry consequent on that was huge. The Word of God, expounded by a man anointed by the Spirit of the Lord, simply ploughs the ground of human hearts and brings all sorts of things right up to the surface. Things which need to be addressed, worked through.

Pastoral ministry, properly understood, is the personal application of the Word that's being expounded. Given there were thousands every week attending that worship in London, Spurgeon had a lot of that to do.

Outwardly you'd have thought he had it all together. But the struggles he had in himself you'd hardly believe. Lifelong, massive struggles, in a number of different areas of his life.

Overloaded with cares and overweighted with sorrows.

The man spoke (or wrote, since the quote is from the book, 'An all round ministry') from very real personal experience.

But then, that's pretty much what the great apostle Paul was saying, too, when he spoke about the trials and afflictions he'd endured.

He wrote that "the God of all comfort .. comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation: if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurancec of the same sufferings we suffer." [2 Cor.1.4-6]

He's saying, in a sense, that pastoral ministry involves a great amount of empathy. There's a sense in which the pastor has had to have been there, known that, and got, not the T-shirt, but the scars and wounds to prove it.

Pray for your pastor! He's not some thick-skinned superman. He carries the cares and the burdens of those for whom he cares as though they were his own. He feels for his people. He aches for his people. He yearns for his people.

And the pain of that yearning is great and intense and ongoing.