In Search of the Perfect Pastor

Our congregation has been gearing up to enter the call process.  With the help of our intentional interim pastor, we have reflected on who/what we were in the past and tried our best to define who/what we are now. We are now beginning the phase of discovering who God is calling us to be.  With a new vision to guide us, we will be better prepared to discern who God is calling to lead us in that journey.

This collective visioning is perhaps the most important part in the process.  I’m hopeful that in doing so, we will avoid one of the big difficulties that could hamper the work of the Holy Spirit.  Because I’ve served on a call committee before, I know that all of us, whether we are willing to admit it or not, have a picture in our mind of the perfect pastor.  But the problem is no pastor we interview will meet that expectation because that pastor doesn’t exist.   

Although it’s meant to be humorous, there is still a ring of truth to this piece:

Picks only hymns WE like to sing.

The Perfect Pastor (author unknown)

The perfect pastor preaches exactly 10 minutes.He condemns sin roundly but never hurts anyone’s feelings.He works from 8am until midnight and is also the church janitor.

The perfect pastor makes $40 a week, wears good clothes, drives a good car,buys good books, and donates $30 a week to the church. He is 29 years old and has 40 years experience. Above all, he is handsome.

The perfect pastor has a burning desire to work with teenagers, and he spends most of his time with the senior citizens. He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his church. He makes 15 home visits a day and is always in his office to be handy when needed.

The perfect pastor always has time for church council and all of its committees. He never misses the meeting of any church organization and is always busy evangelizing the unchurched. The perfect pastor is always in the next church over!

If your pastor does not measure up,simply send this notice to six other churches that are tired of their pastor, too.Then bundle up your pastor and send him to the church at the top of the list. If everyone cooperates, in one week you will receive 1,643 pastors. One of them should be perfect. Have faith in this letter. One church broke the chain and got its old pastor back in less than three months.

The male pronouns used throughout this betray one preconception right away; that imaginary pastor is never a woman, which right away excludes a lot of very gifted candidates, who are no less Called by God, from the pool.  Intentionally or unintentionally, there’s an unspoken assumption among many that “pastor” = ”man.”   

It tempts me to try a visioning exercise with our congregation something like the one that attorney Jake Brigance ( Matthew McConaughey) uses so brilliantly in his summation in the movie, A Time to Kill. In his defense of a black man who killed two white men for raping his little girl, Brigance describes the men’s brutality in painful, graphic detail, then at the end, asks the all-white jury to imagine that the little girl in the story is white instead of black.  It obviously has the intended effect on the jury.

To what extent does our preconceived image of what is “church” limit our ability to envision new ways of being the church?  When, as a relative newcomer, I say I love the church, I recognize that I’m probably not talking about the same church as the families who have been coming there for generations.  As I noted in my last post, many of those components that used to make up a typical church experience in the past either aren’t there anymore or exist in a diminished state; like junior choirs, Luther League or Ladies Aid.

I pray that we all, women and men, young and old, new and established, contemporary and traditional, conservative and liberal, red, green or cranberry hymnal-lovers, can surrender our personal preconceptions of pastor and church to God so that we might be able to share together in the new vision God has for our congregation. 

Called together by your love, sustained by your love and sent forth to share that Love, Father help us to see where you are taking us and to trust you to show us the way, even when it may not look like we think it should. In Jesus’ name, Amen.