In high school I worked at Hess Bros Fruit Company, packing bags of apples into boxes. Bags come down the conveyor, and I would gently place the bags in boxes, close the box lid, and send it down the line to the box-taping machine. Then I would do it again. And again. And again. For hours. Endless boxes of apples. I love apples, and Hess Bros apples are delicious, but it got to a point where I grew to hate the nonstop deluge. If you’ve worked a conveyor line, maybe you know the feeling.
I did not expect the same feeling grow would inside me about preaching.
Preaching isn’t about me and what I have to say. It’s about God speaking through his word. My goal is to present the teaching of God’s inspired word week in, week out. A particular sermon might not speak to some people. That’s normal. But I hope many sermons do minister to most people.
When it comes to preaching, though, I didn’t realize how preaching and teaching can sometimes feel like a factory job. I love preaching, I love studying the Bible. But there are weeks it feels like a factory job, cranking out yet another sermon. I didn’t expect that. And it is why I am deeply grateful for my church’s Pastoral Relations Committee years ago giving me one Sunday per month off from preaching. I’m super thankful for the people, mostly from Faith Church, who fill in for me. It’s amazingly refreshing to have that monthly week off from preaching. I believe the week off has made my preaching better, and it has been wonderful for the church family to hear other voices on a regular basis.
Something else I knew growing up in Lancaster, but that I didn’t expect, was how it would feel that Lancaster County has so many churches. Some estimate we have 700 churches in our county. I never imagined how picky people can be about church.
But it’s not just all the churches in Lancaster. We also live in a connected world. Local churches are competing with television church, internet church, YouTube preachers. I didn’t realize how it would feel to be in competition with other churches and pastors, and especially one of the consequences of competition: losing.
I didn’t realize how it will feel when you invest in peoples’ lives, and they move on from the church. People will come and go. Again, that’s basic humanity. Before I became pastor I could have told you intellectually that, yes, of course people will leave the church. What I could not have told you is how it will feel. It can hurt. It happens so many times, you can get PTSD from it, which is what my counselor said I was experiencing in 2015. You can grow cold and callous. You can pretend it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t affect you. But it does.
Because our church family is a massive part of our lives, my wife, Michelle, and I have tried to invest ourselves in their lives. Some moreso, some less. But the result is that it hurts when someone leaves the church, especially for a reason we disagree with. That feels hard. When they leave without talking, without giving a reason, without conversing, it is particularly unsettling.
Before I became pastor I also didn’t realize that some people will look at you mostly as their pastor, and less so as a person. In other words, in some people’s eyes, you are fulfilling a role in their lives. You are their pastor. They can have all sorts of expectations for how you are to fulfill that role. Some expectations they never tell you, some you disagree with, some you cannot possibly fulfill. Sometimes we only learn what those expectations are when a person tells us we didn’t fulfill the expectation, and they are upset.
One way these expectations manifest themselves that I wasn’t prepared for is that people sometimes think they pay the pastor to perform a role. Those persons expect it to be a one-directional transactional relationship. They pay you to care for them. You are not paying them to care for you. Thus some people view their pastor as a role, not a relationship. I didn’t expect that.
From their point of view, then, it’s usually not personal when they leave the church. But from the perspective of the pastor, it can still really feel personal, hurtful.
Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 