Ways You Can Help Your Pastor
The work of the pastor is both demanding and rewarding. No position in the church presents a heavier responsibility or greater opportunity. The pastor needs help to meet the challenge.
The Word of God offers many illustrations of people helping leaders through their spiritual gifts and ministries or material endowment. The Levites’ supporting ministries to priests and prophets of the Old Testament era are reflected in lay ministries to preachers and pastors in the New Testament era. Only the dispensation has changed.
Here are some practical ways you can help your pastor.
Pray for him:
It’s said that the family that prays together stays together. The same can be said for churches. Pray for God’s blessing and health. Pray that both the churches financial needs and the pastor’s personal financial needs are met. Pray that the unction and the anointing will rest upon him not only during service times but also as a confirming witness through out his work day. Failing to pray for your pastor may lead to his downfall and the death of your local congregation!
Give him spiritual support:
Prepare yourself to be a reliable asset for spiritual warfare. Be there as Aaron and Hur were to lift up and support your pastor’s hands during the battle.
Confirm his leadership:
Even pastors have doubts and fears concerning their calling and placement. There are times when you need to confirm your pastors call in your own heart and follow him as he follows Christ. Let him know that you accept him as being placed and called of God specifically for this time and place.
Submit to his leadership:
Trust your pastors decisions. Don’t second guess them. As a man under authority he must withstand the scrutiny of not only those of his own church, but also of those in authority over him in the denominational structure.
Help him develop his ministry:
Be willing to support your pastors desire to grow in educational, spiritual, and pastoral abilities. This may include supporting a desire to accept revival or camp meeting services at another church. Or, it may include attending correspondence courses and seminars.
Leave him time for his duties:
One of the most frustrating things for a pastor is that there is never enough time to get all the work of the ministry accomplished. Time is always short. Help your pastor by recognizing that some matters can be handled by other mature believers in the church. It’s not that the pastor doesn’t think you’re worth the time but good time management and setting godly priorities is essential to pastoral ministries. It’s very easy to have a half a day here and a half a day there eaten up by trivial matters that really don’t actually require the pastor’s full attention. Recognize that your pastor is one of the busiest men in town. Don’t monopolize his time or the time of his family.
Relieve him of details:
The pastor who is an errand boy almost never has time to pray, or prepare for service. Real pastoring can be subjugated to the mundane tasks of every day life. God has not called pastors to be janitors, maintenance men, bus drivers, floor scrubbers, and half a dozen other critical tasks in the church. No matter how needed and honorable they are you will do well to do them for your pastor and not let him get bogged down with them.
Appreciate his long range planning and vision:
The pastor of a growing church may spend vacations, days off, and even lunch breaks seeking God’s direction for an orderly expansion program that will provide exactly the environment God wants for his people. Building programs often require an attention to detail that require the pastor to go and be places other than where his people are.
And, quite probably, sometimes, where even he would rather not go. The need for expansion takes precedence over his desire to be at each and every social function.
Also, be willing to prepare yourself to be a part of your pastors Spiritual vision. Your pastor only wants God’s best for the people God has placed under his care. Your willingness to be taught and to grow in that knowledge will be a continual blessing and inspiration to your pastor.
Inform him:
Pastors are often criticized for not visiting someone they didn’t know was sick. Honestly, do you really expect the Holy Spirit to tell the pastor every detail, especially those you have knowledge of, and are quite capable of telling him yourself? Most pastors really want to know about things that happen that require prayer, or counsel. Let him know.
If you have been doing something, have a position, or do some little job you think no one noticed or appreciated, and are called away and can’t be in service let your pastor know!
If you need an appointment, ask for it. If you give him a brief idea of what the meeting is about he can meditate on God’s Word and be prayed up before you get there.
Be faithful in attendance:
Few things are more distressing than to see someone making spiritual progress and then start missing a service here or there. Your pastor really cares about you, and when you miss a service your absence is noted and a concern is raised for your well being. You bless the pastor with your faithful attendance. His sermon that day may have been prepared in heaven just for you!
Volunteer for some unique service:
There’s always something that needs to be done. Be available for those pick-ups at the airport, if you have the room keep a Prophets Room ready for the evangelist that comes through town, add your strength to those chaperoning the youth group. You name it, if it takes people, you can probably do it. From cutting the grass, to fixing a leaky faucet, the jobs needing to be done around the average church are mind-boggling.
Help in practical ways:
Your help is only as good as it is practical. If you are always under foot begging to be used, or you doing the job costs twice as much as another doing the same job, then perhaps that’s not very practical. But, even picking up that dropped gum wrapper can be practical. Look around, ask God for Wisdom and He will give it.
Respect his privacy:
A crank call society has made some pastors feel the need to get unlisted residential phone numbers. This is never to shut out the important matters. But, in some cases has become a matter of survival. Pastors are available, but callers should be considerate. Tying up the pastors phone for long periods of time not only disrupts the pastors very limited home life, but may cause him to miss other more important or even emergency calls.
Visits to the pastors residence no matter where it is located should only be made by invitation, appointment, or extreme emergency. How would you like it if half your work team decided to take turns, (one, two or three each night), making unannounced visits to your home? There’s only one pastor, but there’s a whole bunch of you.
Give your pastor space to nurture the family God has given him. Encourage him to take that time apart from “official duties” to be just dad, or grand-dad.
Evangelist Lowell Lundstrum once spoke of churches who complain that their pastor is not all that they desire. “Treat them well,” he admonished, tongue in cheek, “or God may give you a worse one!”
Pastors are humans, too. They are subject to the same limitations of time and space as the rest of us. And, while God can and does provide a rest and refreshing for them they still need human help to get the job done. The popular song says that WE are HIS hands. And, so it is. Help your pastor every way you can. God will be pleased, and you will lay up for yourself treasure in heaven.
And, don’t forget to lay aside each week as God has blessed you for the offering plate…
God isn’t a forger! If you don’t want to give you’re saying God isn’t blessing you….