The role of the pastor

With the role of the pastor varying so much from church to church it is important to continually rediscover the biblical job description. Simply put, he is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry (Eph 4:11-12). This can only be accomplished through a devotion to prayer and God's Word (2 Tim 3:16-17). There is always plenty of church work to do - good things that need to be done. The problem is that the pastor is only one man, and the important can easily trump the crucial. Acts 6 tells this story in concrete terms where the leaders, at that time Apostles, were busied with a good work to the neglect of their God-given duty. The solution was to choose out a group of godly men who could carry out those important tasks and allow the Apostles to devote themselves to prayer and the study and presentation of God's Word. If this focus was so important to men with the spiritual gift of apostleship, men who literally walked with Jesus, men who had heard him teach with their own ears, and with their own eyes saw him heal, raise the dead, cast out demons... how much more essential is this work for men like me?

In our culture the busy-work could look like office administration, financial planning, building programs, activities, and the like. These important things can easily crowd into the pastor's God given task of ministering through prayer and the Word. The solution? Godly men (deacons, elders, trustees, etc.) from within the congregation coming along side and shouldering the load.

The pastor's duty as overseer is often misunderstood, making him a CEO style administrator of the church's material assets. But, the term is used in Scripture in an exclusively spiritual sense (Philippians 1:1, 1 Timothy 3:2, Titus 1:7). The pastor's oversight is the spiritual direction he gives to the church through his teaching and leading. The pastor's task then is, by biblical definition, spiritual. This is not to say that the pastor does not pick up a hammer, or push a mower, or feed the poor, or lead a committee, or stay up all night with the teens on occasion. What it does mean is that the ministry filling the pastor's calendar must be those things declared by Scripture as non-negotiable - equping his flock through prayer and the Word of God.

Sure, this is rather broad and vague. But that is because Scripture is a field manual designed to be applicable to unlimited cultures and situations. Therefore, we can confidently say that with a commitment to the biblical design of first things first we can find a right way to get all the good stuff done too.