Dear Pastor and Church Leader,
For the next several weeks we will review one of the chapters titled The Pastor’s Personal Life written by to David Wentz, author of Pastoring: The Nuts and Bolts [1]
Designed especially for pastors looking for help with day to day ministry issues, it stands out from similar books in its comprehensive scope and theological and cultural neutrality, including issues common to charismatic and pentecostal as well as mainline and evangelical churches around the world. It offers options and best practices rather than prescriptions.
If a pastor or church can have only one book besides the Bible, this is designed to be most helpful. Illustrated with real-life experiences, a conversational second-person style makes the book engaging to read. Each chapter ends with bulleted “Points to Remember.”
In this chapter David provides a comparative examination of your church life and personal family life.
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THE PASTOR’S PERSONAL LIFE – Part 1
By David Wentz
So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
– 1 Corinthians 10:31
Much to the surprise of some church folks, pastors are people, too. We have personal lives that are not necessarily all bound up in the church. You have personal time, personal money, a home, your health and your spirit to take care of. If you don’t, you and your church will both suffer.
Your Time
Your time belongs to God. That doesn’t necessarily mean it belongs to the church. Being a workaholic is no more laudable for a pastor than for any other profession.
In my experience, there is always more work than time. One of the most important things you can learn is how to prioritize your time. It’s not enough just to cut out the bad things you shouldn’t do, or even the useless things that just waste your time. The problem is all the good things you feel you should be doing – or the people in your church feel you should be doing.
The ideal schedule
I was told in seminary that to truly write a good sermon, you should spend one hour in preparation for every minute the sermon will last. If you preach one thirty-minute sermon every week, that’s thirty hours a week in sermon preparation.
Everyone knows the ideal pastor spends at least two hours a day in prayer, and two hours a day reading the Bible, and two hours a day reading theology and history and current events.
Since one of your main jobs is helping your people grow like Jesus, every pastor should meet with at least three people every day for an hour each. And of course, you should lead at least two or three Bible studies and classes each week – counting preparation time, that’s another two hours a day.
But how can your church grow if you aren’t out meeting and talking with people who don’t know Jesus? Certainly you should spend at least an hour every morning and afternoon on the streets talking to people as they go and come from work, as well as lunchtimes, and all day Saturday.
Then there are all the administrative details of running a church. To do that properly requires at least two or three hours a day.
Of course, one of the main duties of a pastor is to visit the sick, and those in prison, and those who are grieving. Add three hours a day for this, at least.
We haven’t even mentioned meetings, with your leaders, other pastors, community leaders or government officials, and so on. Let’s say three meetings a week, two hours each when you include preparation.
Add all that up and it comes to a minimum of 168 hours a week that you, as a good pastor, should be spending on your job. And there are 168 hours in a week. Perfect!
Of course, that leaves exactly zero hours for your family, for recreation, and for minor details like eating and sleeping. But who needs all that stuff? You’re Super-pastor!
The reality
If you try to keep that schedule you might last about three days before you completely fall apart. It’s impossible for any human being to do all the things many people believe a good pastor should do. And God doesn’t expect you to.
That means two things. First, learn to hear God’s priorities. If you are hearing God right, he won’t tell you to do more than he designed a normal human being to be able to do. Second, don’t allow yourself to feel guilty over the things you don’t get done. If you listen to God and obey his guidance, you’ll do the things God wants you to do, and that’s all that counts.
I love the story in John 11 of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, but probably not for the reason most people do. I love the first part.
Lazarus, good friend and financial supporter of Jesus, is deathly ill. His sisters send a messenger to Jesus. “Lazarus is dying, come quickly!”
As a good pastor, what is your immediate response? Drop everything, of course, and rush to his bedside. That’s what everyone expects you to do. You need to be there to pray. You need to be there to comfort the family. You need to be there to make sure Lazarus is ready to pass into eternity. How could a good pastor do anything else?
But what did Jesus do? He stayed where he was for two more days. Then he spent at least a couple more days on the road. By the time he finally got to Bethany, Lazarus had been dead and in the tomb four days.
Of course, we all know how the story ends. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. But what I find so freeing about it is that Jesus didn’t do what everyone expected him to do. Instead, he prayed and found out what God wanted him to do. Then he did that.
Please don’t misunderstand. This is an extreme example. The lesson is not to ignore your people’s needs. If you have an emergency in your church, your place is with your people unless God specifically tells you otherwise. What I do want you to learn is to stop and give God a chance to specifically tell you. Ask God what he wants you to do. Let God dictate your schedule, not the expectations of people, including yourself.
Time management
God won’t give you more than you can handle, but God does want you to handle things effectively. One important way of doing that is learning to properly manage your time. There are many systems, and many books that explain them, and different ones work best for different people. After more than thirty years in ministry, I’m still refining my time management and trying new things. It’s not important which system you use, as long as it works for you. What is important is that you develop a systematic way of keeping track of what you need to do, so you can efficiently and effectively get it done.
I have a tendency to underestimate how long it will take me to do things. That means it’s easy for me to over-commit myself. Before I realized this, it seemed I was always rushing, and always stressed out over things I hadn’t completed.
One day when I was feeling this the most, the Lord led me to a verse that at first seemed completely unrelated. In Ezekiel 44, God describes what the priests are to wear when they are ministering in the temple. Verse 18 says, they shall not bind themselves with anything that causes sweat.
What did a Hebrew priest’s wardrobe have to do with me? But as I prayed, I began to see something. God was saying he doesn’t want me to bind myself, to commit or obligate myself, to the point that I’m sweating over whether I can get everything done. In the Old Testament God didn’t want his priests coming into his presence all hot and sweaty. He doesn’t want it in the church either.[i]
Pray through the day
One last word on the subject of your time. Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation, reportedly said of his schedule one day, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.”
The busier you are, the more important is your prayer time. You can’t use prayer as an excuse for not doing other things, but you need to use it as a preparation for them. Make a habit of mentally walking through each appointment and task of the day, holding it up before God for favor and blessing, asking for wisdom about priorities and preparation. You’ll be amazed how much more smoothly your day will go. Time is like anything else: give the first fruits to God, and he will multiply it back to you.
Your day job
Not every church can afford to pay a pastor a full-time living wage. If you have an outside job, you owe your employer an honest day’s work. You may be the only Christian your co-workers know. Your example will either draw people toward Jesus or push them away. Remember, you’re not in the pulpit here. Your actions will speak louder than your words.
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Thirty-eight years as a pastor honed David’s passion for helping people connect with God and make a difference. Add a varied church background, a first career in engineering, and graduate degrees from three seminaries (mainstream, Wesleyan-evangelical and charismatic), and you can see why he expresses God’s truth in ways everyone can appreciate.
David earned a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia; two Masters of Divinity, from Melodyland School of Theology and Wesley Theological Seminary, and a Doctor of Ministry in Christian Leadership from Asbury Theological Seminary. He enjoys the outdoors, writing worship songs with his guitar, and playing sax and flute in jazz and blues jams. His heroes are John Wesley, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
David married his college sweetheart, Paula, in 1974. Their five children are actively serving God in the US and around the world.
Pastoring: The Nuts and Bolts can be found on Amazon in Kindle or paperback.
You can connect with David on his website, twitter, Facebook, and Doing Christianity Nonprofit.
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