Editor’s Note: This week we welcome guest blogger, Emily Marks. Emily is an adult & community educator. She and her husband Sean live in Lancaster, PA, with their dog Corvus. Emily grew up as a pastor’s kid, and therefore she brings a wealth of experience and a unique perspective to this week’s passage.
My father was a pastor and denominational leader for 30 years, from the time I was six months old until I was 30, so I grew up as a pastor’s kid, and it was such a formative part of my life and my identity that I still claim the title of “pastor’s kid.” I came home from the hospital to live in the seminary student housing. I don’t think it gets much more pastor’s kid than that.
Being a pastor’s kid is a very unique situation, and it’s not easy for some people. All the stereotypes about pastor’s kids and all the horror stories you’ve heard…they’re all true. But I want to be clear that having lived this life, I don’t judge anyone and their experience of being a pastor’s kid because it’s really complicated: you do live in a fishbowl. Everyone is watching you. And yes, everyone has opinions about you and your life. Even things that have nothing to do with the church.
Because of that experience, I’m excited to talk about what Paul has to say to the church about how the church treats its leaders.
In the New Testament the Apostle Paul wrote numerous letters, and they tend to follow a pattern:
- Greeting/Thanksgiving
- Praise
- Doctrine/Rebuke
- Exhortations & Closing Remarks
With that in mind, we have been studying 1st Thessalonians, and this week we are studying chapter 5, verses 12–13. We’re in the exhortations/closing remarks part of the letter. Paul writes in verse 12 “Now we ask you” which signals that he is speaking directly to the church in Thessaloniki.
Remember that we are overhearing this letter. This was not written to us. However, even though we are overhearing this letter and this exhortation is directly given to the Thessalonian readers of the letter, Paul goes on in this exhortation portion to list multiple characteristics and actions that are good practice, regardless of culture, lingual differences, or the years in between when the writer wrote them and when we read them.
In fact, in my opinion, this almost reads like a psalm, and some psalms are simply lists of good advice, some even taken from the secular culture, pieces of good advice that we should all heed. I believe this passage is similar in that way.
All that leads me to conclude that we can directly apply these practices and ideas to church families in 2025, even though we live in America and not Thessaloniki.
So let’s read the text, talk about its construction a bit, and then we’ll get into some practical lessons we can extract from these two verses.
1 Thessalonians 5:12-13a: “Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work.”
I’m an English teacher, so I would be doing a disservice if we didn’t have a bit of a grammar lesson here, but not English grammar: Greek grammar.
The Greek construction in this sentence is three participles all pointing to one article.
Basically, think of the three descriptors in this sentence as pointing back to one person or group of people: “those who work hard among you,” those “who care for you in the Lord,” and those “who admonish you” are not three distinct groups of people, but instead those three things all describe the one person or group of people Paul is referring to.
That might sound nitpicky, but it’s an important distinction.
I suspect that in your church, you know a thing or two about those who “work hard among us.” In my church we have so many folks who pull together to make sure that things happen around here and for the Kingdom. We have:
- Stewards
- Committees, that we call serve teams
- The Prison worship team
- People that bake and serve during Fellowship time
And so many more that I simply don’t have time to acknowledge.
These roles are all vital to the life of our church and should be recognized, and Scripture has plenty to say about sacrificial use of our time and service.
But that is not what Paul is talking about in verse 12.
That’s why the grammar is so important: we should not think of these descriptors as separate groups of people in this exhortation.
To fully understand what Paul is exhorting the readers to do, we must ask ourselves: who is the person or group of people who do all three of those descriptors? Who is the person or group of people who work hard among us, care for us in the Lord, and who admonish us?
Our pastors. Our leaders.
In the next post, I’m going to share one of my favorite stories about being a pastor’s kid. I hope my story can help churches think about how to treat their pastors and leaders in a healthy way.
Photo by Samuel Costa Melo on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 