A Pastor's Wisdom, Addendum 1

Today I am honored to have a piece I wrote on “the one thing I would focus on as a young pastor” posted on Scot McKnight’s blog, Jesus Creed.  One of the things I was thinking when I wrote this  was that as a pastor just starting out, I didn’t have any money,  and that one might think that putting together a support team like this sounds expensive.  And the truth is, it could well be—but it doesn’t have to be.   So here are some tips as to how put together a support team for ministry that won’t break the bank.

The two potentially high ticket items are a coach and a therapist.   Because of the two the coach can actually be the most expensive, let’s tackle this one first. 

And make no mistake:  a coach can be very, very expensive.   But you don’t have to formally hire an executive coach at a premium price.  There most likely will be an astute business person (or two!) in your congregation who would make a great coach.

I’d simply look for someone who is successful in business, ask them if they’ll have lunch with you once a month to talk about how the church is going, and tell them you’ll pick up the tab (most of the time they won’t let you, but I think it’s always good to offer and even better if you really can pick up the tab at least some of the time.  It goes a long way to not being seen as a mooch, which I think a fair number of people suspect pastors tend to be).

In my first church, for instance, there was a guy named Mickey Russell who was very successful in business (it helped that he was also deeply committed to the Lord).   We’d have our monthly lunch and talk about the business end of running a church—something for which I had absolutely zero training and zero experience.  Talk about being in over my head!

Because so many of our current church models are build on worldly models of success (though I do have hopes that the emerging church is moving us beyond that), I felt a lot of pressure to be “successful” myself.   That meant I only wanted to do things that seemed to guarantee at least some measure of success (i.e., more people, more dollars, more visibility, greater “market penetration”).

Mickey really took me to task on this.  “Let me share with you something one of my mentors shared with me,” he said.  “If you are successful 50% of the time, you are doing well.”  I needed to hear that, and I have never forgotten it.   Those words gave me the freedom to fail, and to take the kind of godly risks that I think are at the heart of a ministry pleasing in God’s sight.  They didn’t always result in a worldly success or a bigger church, but they did make a difference to somebody, taught us something in the process of failing, or drew us closer to God and deepened our trust in him.

That’s the value of having a good mentor.