Brethren, we cannot all be large and megachurch pastors.
You believe that God has called you to the Christian ministry so you leave the job you have and make a considerable investment in a seminary education in terms of finances, time, and family disruption. You rightly and properly understand that your new occupation, “calling” is the term you prefer, is sanctioned by God Himself and is a good work, an important work representing the Lord Himself in a local community, sharing the eternal Gospel and being a leader in Kingdom work.
Then you take a church and struggle with congregational expectations, criticism, modest pay, and marital and family adjustments. What you envisioned for yourself isn’t quite what you find. The reality on the ground differs considerably from the grand vision you had for yourself.
I see no way, no program, no seminary class, no counsel that will ever remove the matter of unrealistic expectations in the Christian, especially the pastoral, ministry. Is one of those unrealistic expectations the one that visualizes for ourselves a large or megachurch in the future?
How many pastors will start work on their MDiv this semester with the aspiration to be the pastor of an average-sized Southern Baptist church?
I don’t know the answer to that but I was in the office of a pastor the other day. He had a photo of himself and a megachurch pastor on the wall – more than one photo, I think. Has someone done the research on this? Are many or most young guys who feel called to preach coming from churches that are considerably above the average in size and budget? I get the feeling that this is true but do not have the numbers to prove it. And, does this impact the goals and aspirations of the young men who enter the pastoral ministry? I suspect so.
If the model for a young seminarian is a large or megachurch pastor, if his church experience is in a very large congregation that had multiple clergy staff members, specified ministry roles, and a sizable budget, that person may consciously or unconsciously aspire to the same type of church. Nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with a goal of serving a large church but, save for a tiny fraction of pastors, it is a goal that will go unfulfilled.
About one half of one percent of SBC churches are megas, weekly attendance of 2000 or more. The last number I saw was under 200 and that out of about 50,000 SBC churches. Mid-megas, churches with weekly attendance of 1000 or more, make up less than one percent. Dip down to large churches and you’re still talking about maybe only 5% or so of all SBC churches. Chances are, the student who plops down in a seat in his New Testament survey course is never going to pastor a large, mid-mega or megachurch simply because there are so few of them.
The kinds of churches that are available are much smaller with 50, 75, 100, 150, maybe 200 in worship every Sunday. In these churches many of these things will be found:
- The pastor will be the only full-time clergy staff, but if your self-esteem demands it you can still count all the volunteer or part time staff and tell you buddies about your “staff .”
- The pastor will relate to all the members all the time, rather than having a staff to relate to most of the membership. Look at it this way. You would never learn some things God wants to teach you if you got to choose the select group that you would relate to individually. Look at some members as God’s challenge for you.
- The pastor will be called with what he might consider minor, even inappropriate, issues like the church sign has a misspelled word on it or routine building issues. Keeps you humble.
- Everyone in the church will know what the pastor is paid and will expect to see where all the church money goes. Deal with it. It’s their giving that puts food on your table. Why shouldn’t they know?
- Members will certainly want the pastor to take plenty of time to prepare sermons, just so long as he can get everything else done. You can probably do as well taking six or eight hours to prepare a sermon as twenty, especially of some of the twenty is in a boat on a lake thinking about the scripture passage.
- The pastor may have grand visions of that megachurch a few years in the future but folks who sit in the pews just want a pastor today and it’s tough to pastor the church you have and the church you want later all at the same time. Try just one at a time. Some of the brethren think they can do three at a time, their last pastorate, their present pastorate, and that future large or megapastorate. Self-delusion.
- You will not have a research assistant, unless your wife gets tired of hearing dumb things in your sermons and volunteers to fact check some of your stuff before you blurt it out publicly.
- You will probably not be given enough convention money to stay at the convention headquarters hotel next to the meeting venue, but a Best Western twenty miles distant that your church pays for is better than anything you pay for.
- There is an endless list of unwritten expectations for you…and you get to discover these one-by-one. An adventure every day.
But look at it positively,
- You and only you are the pastor of this group of people. They are your flock. God gave them to you. How great is that?
- You get to relate to all of them, all the time. Some will have fond thoughts of you as their pastor for decades hence.
- Your church actually pays you to do all this.
- You can make your own schedule, so long as you get everything done.
- As the pastor of a church, you have already gone as high as you can go in Southern Baptist life. How about that?
One day, while in my first year at seminary, the prof came in and said, “One of you guys might be the next pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church.” Now there’s a striking thought. God could so work that one of the young theologs, the untested ministerial students, would advance to the pulpit of what most of us considered to be the premier church in the SBC and be the successor to Adrian Rogers.
Well, one of us wasn’t but most of us went to just as high a position in the pastoral ministry. After all, I heard Adrian say many times that the pastor of the smallest SBC church has gone as high as he can in the ministry. It just took some time to adjust the daily expectations.
When I attended SWBTS in the mid 80s it was a known fact that the vast majority of students came from churches 250+ in attendance. The MegaChurch thing was not a thing at that time like it is now. But that is an issue for many, including me. I always lived in a big city (Denver, Tulsa, DFW) and attended a large church 500+. My first church was in Doniphan, MO which is a small rural community 4 hrs from civilization any way you cared to travel and almost 1 hr from Walmart. It was HUGE culture shock!
I have attended the annual RHMA conf in Morton, IL and they have a pgm that would have really helped me where they put attendees through a rural ministry boot camp introducing you to the issues, lifestyle and concerns of the rural mindset. I believe something like this would be very helpful for state conventions to offer to 1st time rural pastors coming into their convention. It would be much more helpful than what State Conventions do today for new pastors today!
Sadly many young preachers only last a church or two because the nature of the church is si different from their experience AND their training. Something should be done!
Lots of good points here. I don’t think the city/rural divide can be overstated.
I also went through Seminary, and while it was not explicitly taught that most of us would end up in larger churches, it seemed to be what most expected…especially those of us studying for “staff” positions (Youth, Music, etc…).
“It’s tough to pastor the church you have and the church you want later all at the same time.”
Solid Gold!
Yes! As much as I hate to quote William, I’ve already marked that one out as well.
Also, just for fun, some numbers to make us all feel better, just as an example:
A. I know of a church of about 4,000 attenders, in a nearby large metropolitan area of 1.2 million.
(1/3 of a % of their area)
B. I serve a church of 200, in a County of 30,000.
(2/3 of a % of our area)
So, our church has reached nearly double the percentage of our area that this mega church has reached!
🙂
Well, amen, mega-bro. Share those percentages with your church and inform them that you would like July and August off like the megapastors.
Number 4 on setting my own schedule as long as I get everything done made me LOL. So true!
William: “The pastor will be the only full-time clergy staff…” Don’t forget about about us bi-vocational pastors, in which case there is no full-time clergy staff.
Though I don’t think it was usually expressed in clear terms, the general way of thinking when I was a young preacher 30 something years ago was that you start out somewhere near the bottom and climb the ladder to “success”. Seldom did a preacher leave his church for a smaller church, but for one that was bigger and/or paid better. You might see an older minister “retire” to a small church but otherwise it was “moving on up”. I think that is an expectation — and the failure to meet that expectation often a disappointment that leads me out of the ministry.
Not “me”, but should read “leads MEN out of the ministry.”
This was a really great article, William. You combined realism with optimism, and that is very hard to balance, but you did it quite nicely. I am going to have my preacher boys read this.
I would just like to say, thank you, William for writing this. It helped me today.
Thanks William for the encouraging reminder! I usually gloss through these notes but stopped to read this one. God knew I needed this right now!
Jack Gresham
Pastor, FBC Macon, TN
Good job William! I came out of seminary with a MDiv degree and a leading to leave my rural roots to start a new church in a large city…..That was back in 2002. Fast forward to 2016 and a lot of water has flown under the bridge. As the only paid staff member for 13 years with the exception of a part time music person for a couple of years, you really grow to appreciate volunteer after you have done some of the physical labor for YEARS. Cleaning, drywall, plumbing, electrical, weed pulling, mowing, flooring, besides all the regular “pastoral” duties of visitation, outreach, youth, van driving for picking up kids for midweek, sermon prep,hospital visits etc. I went to school with brothers who are now in places of significantly greater attendance than our 75-100, but after reflecting upon the demands of their schedules versus my own, I don’t think that given a choice, I would want to swap with them. I have also been full-time bivocational since ’09, so my weeks are always full, but I have learned to be appreciative as I have seen so many pastors come and go, and many churches fold up. God has a different calling for each man, but I can truly say that I am thankful to be serving as an under-shepherd at a church that fits into the 90th+ percentile 🙂
Thanks all.
One of the first critical things a member shared with me about her former pastor, my predecessor, was that he refused to wash windows. Seems when there was a work day, typical sort of small church thing, he would not take part. Guess he missed the seminary window washing course.
I have great admiration for the solid, faithful brethren like the ones above. God bless you all.
I’m semi-retired, only do windows at home.
I think this represents an unrealistic expectation in the SBC in general driven by an otherwise actually realistic condition: Large churches built by gifted leaders need to replace them with similarly talented men when the time comes for that gifted pastor to retire. Where do the leadership of these large churches find them? They look for pastors of smaller churches that have grown in number by virtue of their leadership and preaching. That only makes sense. Sometimes they promote from within, but this can be risky if the new pastor is otherwise untested in the senior position. This gives people in general the sense that larger churches are promotions for pastors of smaller churches.
Pastors also drive this perception when they size each other up with the question, “How many are you running?” If you pastor the smaller church by a significant enough margin, you have the sense that the pastor of the larger church considers himself to be your superior. It can’t feel good. Add to that people like Rick Warren who claims his church is large because he trusted God enough to make it large. If that’s true, then obviously it means that your church isn’t large because you don’t have the same amount of faith that Rick Warren had. Don’t forget the Andy Stanley fiasco a few months ago. The one thing that can stop this is for pastors of large churches to stop smacking down pastors of small churches.
I can tell you how to grow a large church: Most large churches grow on momentum alone. Once the ball gets rolling, and that’s the hard part, all you have to do is keep a little energy added to it and it grows quickly. Many of the people come for no other reason than it’s the happening thing in town. Too many pastors of large churches are great speakers, but their content is mediocre. They put on a good show and hire staff to take care of the actual pastoring. Then they publish a book with a bunch of malarkey on how they think they did it. I’m not knocking big churches with this. I like big churches. I’m knocking pastors of big churches who think they are something special because they pastor a big church. The pastors that get my respect are the ones who are doing the faithful hard work year in and year out in a small church in an area where it’s simply not got the population to grow much. There’s not going to be a big ball with a lot of momentum. Be faithful to your calling to convey the message of Scripture and tend your flock, whatever the size.
Wow! Finally someone who understands what its like to be a bi-vocational pastor. Work all day at a secular job, THEN try and meet the expectations of the church you pastor. Yet this is what I’m called to do. I didn’t ask God to put me in a full time position, I asked Him if He would allow me a pulpit…somewhere. If someone is truly called, it won’t matter the size of the church they are called to. God does not call us into professions/jobs/careers, He calls us into selfless service for the people He places in out path, both inside and outside the church. Oh, William wasn’t joking about “trivial details” like the church sign, that really happens.
That’s why I’m extra, special careful about the sign especially in winter ’cause you only want to do it once.