It’s so easy to let secondary things divert us from the main thing, isn’t it?
In this guest article, Josh Taylor (who I interviewed in The Church Lobby, ep 059) writes from the standpoint of pastors about reclaiming our primary biblical call. We can spend so much of our time on urgent, but secondary tasks that we often neglect the primary and important ones. Namely, Prayer and Preaching.
— Karl Vaters
In one of my first pastoral ministries undergraduate classes, I had a professor ask the class to list the top ten things a pastor should do. Our classes’ collective list looked something like this, in no particular order:
- Administration
- Visitation
- Evangelism
- Discipleship
- Counseling
- Sermon Preparation
- Preaching
- Worship Services
- Contacting Visitors
- Meetings
I gave little thought to it. I guess I considered them all equally important, but the biblical reality is this: they are not. Notably absent was prayer—a sadly overlooked priority of pastors.
Good stewardship of a pastor’s time and energy should not be measured by what they do but rather by what they focus on.
Too many pastors overextend themselves and succumb to burnout because they can’t say no to good things. And, equally too often, a relentless schedule filled with good things distracts us and leaves little room for our biblical primary responsibility: preaching and praying.
Scripture commands that preaching and praying be the pastor’s priority. This is not just good advice—it is God’s commandment. Preaching and prayer are Christ’s priority for pastoral ministry. These responsibilities should be championed above any other task within a pastor’s role. If we’re going to burn out, let’s commit ourselves to burning out in the pulpit and on our knees.
The Pastoral Priority Solar System
Another way of looking at this is instead of trying to rank a pastor’s many duties into which are more important than the other, it’s more fitting to conceptualize them like a solar system with planets orbiting around a sun.
Preaching and praying are the sun. The importance of these two fundamental roles does not imply that all other responsibilities become insignificant or unnecessary. Instead, they become secondary in the sense that they orbit around and derive their place from preaching and praying.
Pastors will take on different roles at particular times, depending on each context, but pastors must build their ministries around this core calling: praying and preaching. Make no mistake: to sacrifice preaching and prayer with some other pastoral duty would represent an abdication of the biblical view of the pastorate. All other responsibilities circle around this.
The New Testament repeatedly teaches that a pastor is responsible for preaching the word.
As to the priority of preaching in the pastor’s ministry, the apostle Paul charges young pastor Timothy to preach the word with five preceding intensifiers. “I solemnly exhort you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and exhort, with great patience and instruction” (2 Tim 4:1–2).
John Piper writes, “There is nothing quite like it anywhere else in Scripture. . . . I am not aware of any other biblical command that has such an extended, exalted, intensifying introduction.” He continues, “I doubt that anyone has ever overstated the seriousness that Paul is seeking to awaken here.”
To be this kind of pastor, you must devote a significant amount of time and effort every week to faithfully complete the task, but once the realities of overseeing a church kick in, pastors scramble to devote time to preaching and prayer.
On top of that, many church members have been under-discipled as to preaching’s importance. While some church members won’t outright say it, many want their pastors to operate like successful CEOs or hospital chaplains rather than preachers of God’s Word. “Of course,” they say, “it goes without saying that preaching is important.” Still, that sentiment betrays that preaching has been overshadowed by something more important, and leading and instructing a church about the priority of preaching is not an easy endeavor.
To keep preaching the priority in the pastor’s ministry will mean significantly shifting the way things have always been done for most church members. It will be exceedingly difficult for the pastor who wants to impart this biblical vision and shepherd them in this old but new way of church life.
The Sweet Torture of Sunday Morning
The prince of preachers, Charles Spurgeon, stated in a sermon, “I do not know what you think about sermons; you imagine preaching is straightforward work. It is not so for me.”
The regular preaching of God’s word to God’s flock is a sacred trust that demands the utmost devotion. Even preaching can rapidly become a “burdensome joy,” as James Earl Massey dubbed it.
In an interview titled “The Sweet Torture of Sunday Morning,” Gardner C. Taylor said, “There is a sense, of course, in which preaching is an albatross on all of us. I go through a dreadful time on Sunday mornings getting ready to preach. Sometimes I pass laborers on my way to church and wish I were doing anything except having to come over here and get into that pulpit again.”
Massey also describes the burden of preaching as “an inward pressure—indeed, as a distress.” He says that this feeling can be caused by many things, like our fears or doubts about our abilities, not being able to accomplish what we want, failure, or our creative juices running dry. All of these fears can make pastors want to give up!
In an interview, when asked how preaching had affected him personally, Haddon Robinson responded, “There are all kinds of things happening in me that would shock the people in the pew if they knew. The trumpet doesn’t give an uncertain sound, but there are times when a trumpeter is uncertain.”
Inevitably, pastors come to the place when they think, “‘Who am I to preach this?’ That clouds your life.” Robinson related how his wife could easily ruin him on almost any given Sunday if she just asked him when he got home from preaching, “How committed are you? Is that really true about you?” Robinson answers, “Yes, it is true. But not totally true. I can easily be made to feel like a hypocrite.”
On the first page in the preface of his little book The Person in the Pulpit, Willard F. Jabusch writes:
“Sometimes preachers get discouraged, not so much because of worries concerning content or technique—as important as these are—but rather because of who we are. For preaching has a way of revealing our personal weaknesses. We tend to get weary, drained of physical and mental energy; we feel the weight of a weekly obligation. We feel guilty about our superficiality, glib and banal words, our lack of prayer and preparation. But most of all, in our most honest moments, we know we are really not worthy of such a role in the Christian community.”
Henry Baker Adams, professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School, explains that it is fitting for pastors to experience exceptional stress. It is audacious to speak on behalf of the Almighty.
He maintains that the pastor should spend much time meditating on what it entails to stand behind the sacred desk. Talk of sufficiency betrays one’s lack of appreciation for the high responsibility and heavy burden of preaching.
The prophets depended upon God to sustain them because, ultimately, preaching is supernatural. Only divinely-given capacities can accomplish the task.
(This article is excerpted from A Preach Well Church: How Churches Can Stop Burning Out Pastors, by Josh Taylor. It has been used with the author’s permission.)
(Photo by Stewart Black | Flickr)
