Great Expectations: The Gift of Clarity Around Pastoral Roles

As a church grows, the roles played by the staff, the council, the laity, the visioning team, and the pastor must shift appropriately. In a new series of newsletter articles beginning today, I’ll tackle each part of this system.

• What does a pastor do? That seems like a simple question. However, the day-to-day duties of the pastor of a 50-person church looks very different than the pastor of a 500-person church.

Pastors who do not shift their mindset as the church grows will be increasingly ineffective. But it’s not just pastors. Each part of the church will have to evolve their paradigm on ministry in sync. The staff may expect the pastor to operate one way, the council another, the laity another, and the pastor himself or herself yet another. This “role confusion” is a recipe for burnout.

• How does a pastor’s role shift as a church grows? In the book Inside the Large Congregation, Susan Beaumont offers helpful guidelines. The general shift she sees is from relational to managerial to strategic, which you can see in the categories below.

Key Skills For Pastors In Growing Churches

1. Decision-Making

• Growing churches need leaders who can define problems, articulate possible solutions, and evaluate the various options.

2. Organizational Ability and Process Management

• Decisions do not happen in a vacuum, so the pastor must know how to navigate increasingly complex systems (boards, committees, staff, etc.) to get things done. The wise pastor designs processes to manage these systems, measure progress, and identify growth areas.

3. Personal Resilience and Ego Strength

• The pressure of pastoring a large church can be crushing, so pastors need to create and maintain appropriate boundaries, engage with a robust support system, and exude a non-anxious presence. They must learn from adversity and cope with change well.

4. Preaching

• As churches grow in size, the expectation for carefully crafted and artfully delivered sermons increases. The effective preacher knows how to lead from the pulpit by making sermons relevant to people in very different stations of life.

5. Public Presence

• Larger churches tend to gain influence in the community and in their denomination. Pastors of these churches are eager to make time for visionary leadership to broader groups in order to help solve the broader problems churches face today.

6. Strategic Leadership

• The larger the church, the more common “vision drift” is. Pastors must work with others to discern the vision, articulate it clearly, and then work to keep all the systems in alignment toward accomplishing that mission.

7. Team Orientation and Supervision

• As a church grows, so does the size of its staff. Larger working teams exponentially complicate the tasks of alignment and good communication. Pastors play a role in recruiting good talent, setting expectations, distributing work appropriately, providing feedback, and navigating conflict between team members.

What do you think of this list? Does what is on it (and what is not) surprise you? Susan Beaumont writes this:

• “Notice that the list does not include many of the tasks typically associated with clergy leadership: pastoral care, visitation, social justice witness, and spiritual formation. In the small church the clergy leader tends to the ministry of the congregation by performing acts of pastoral care, visitation, social justice witness, and discipleship. In the large church, the senior clergy indirectly tends to these ministries by managing systems that carry out each ministry.”
• That may be the hardest shift of all for pastors to make. However, one person can only do so much. The pastor who refuses to change will burnout and/or become a bottleneck in the church’s renewal.

What can you do this week to give your pastor the gift of role clarity? How can you ensure everyone is “on the same page” with regard to your pastor’s role in the church? Do you need to think ahead and begin structuring for future growth?