In my first year as senior pastor of Faith Church, I showed a video clip from the R-rated movie The Matrix, attempting to illustrate a sermon. I could have shown a brief clip from the film that was relatively tame, but, no, I had the great idea of showing a ten-minute clip, including then scene where a totally naked (though you never see his private parts) Neo is awakened to see the real world in which robots have enslaved humans in pods, harvesting human energy to run the world. I was about to learn a tough lesson about pastoral ministry.
As I mentioned in the previous post, before becoming pastor, I knew that we humans, myself included, can sometimes be difficult. What I didn’t know is how it would feel being a pastor to 100+ people for 22 years. There is a messiness in being paid to pastor people, even when those people are lovely. It can get especially messy when you are being paid to pastor people whom you think are sometimes difficult.
It goes both ways. There is a messiness of being paid to pastor people who think you, the pastor, are difficult, because I am difficult sometimes. I have made mistakes, I have failed my congregation sometimes, I have my tendencies that are sometimes frustrating.
Needless to say, the clip I showed from The Matrix was not appropriate for worship.
At the time, though, while I knew it was edgy, I didn’t think deeply about how it would come across to the congregation as a whole. By the end of the clip, about 15-20 people had gotten up and walked out of the service. The next week of my life was awful, and I learned a lot. So many phone calls, emails, meetings because of my mistake. I started the very next worship service with an apology.
Since that sermon, which was in January 2009, I don’t believe I’ve had anyone walk out of a sermon again, except one time. A few years ago I was preaching a sermon in a series entitled “False Ideas Christians Believe,” (blog posts on the series starts here) and a first time visitor walked out of the sermon, after I made the suggestion that God is not obligated to bless us when we sacrificially give our lives and money to him (blog post with that specific sermon here).
My point in all this is to say that I had no idea before becoming pastor what it would feel like to be messy people together. I have been messy together with some of them for 22 years. Frankly, it is exhausting. You can’t get away from it. As pastor you are paid to do it, whether you like the mess or not.
So how do you make it 22 years? Many pastors don’t. Average pastoral tenure is 5-7 years. One way, among many, that pastors can increase longevity is the importance of learning nuance when it comes to people. No person is simply one way. No person is totally great, or totally difficult. We humans are filled with nuance. The person we typically characterize as difficult will do something gracious and loving and caring. The person we typically see as so much fun and interesting will say something hurtful and painful.
In my first few years of being senior pastor, I would stand up to preach, looking the congregation in front of me smiling, Bibles open, paying attention, not sleeping or dozing off at all ever (ha!), and I would think, “What could I possibly have to say to them? They already know all this. Look how godly and together they are.”
It’s been many years now since I thought that way. I know the church family better than I did in 2008, and we all have issues. We all need to hear God’s word on a regular basis. I don’t say that because I now know about all the issues of my congregation, and thus I feel more confident that they need to hear what God says.
Instead, I know we always all need to hear God’s word on a regular basis because all humans, me included, do not have life all figured out. We always need God to speak to us. We all need humble teachable hearts, so that we can learn to grow the Fruit of Spirit more in our lives.
Photo by Dan LeFebvre on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 