In His Stead
Paul Gregory Alms on Being Paid to Act Like Jesus
What do pastors do all week? Being a pastor, I get this question every now and then. A few weeks ago, I was visiting a prospective family who had visited our congregation, and the husband, who was not much of a churchgoer, asked me, “So, what do you guys do all week?”
I am always a little nonplussed when someone asks me this. This fellow was a banker with a strong corporate mentality. I wanted to answer, “Well, I sit around a lot and read the Bible and pray and think about God and Jesus and people like you and me.” Which is literally true.
A Real Job
But I knew what he really wanted to hear. He wanted to know what, if I punched a clock, would fill up the eight hours a day. So I told him that I visit a lot of shut-ins, make a lot of hospital and evangelism calls, attend a lot of meetings, do sermon preparation, prepare Bible study classes, do administrative work. I tried to list as many concrete “tasks” as I could. I wanted him to think that, indeed, I had a real job just like him.
I could have taken the tack that I have heard some pastors take. I call it the “the ministry is the hardest working occupation in the world” sob story.
Around budget time in the congregation, or when a pastor is being attacked in the congregation, or when things are going south in the church financially or emotionally, some pastors will try out the sob story: “I work eighty hours week, I make calls all the time, I go to the hospital at all hours, I go to many, many, meetings, I am exhausted.” The sob story is effective at silencing critics for a while, but like my answer to my banker friend, it does not get at the heart of what pastors do.
Trying to describe what a minister does is tricky. Often, it isn’t a matter of time spent doing tasks. Sometimes the most important thing I do all week as a pastor is stand in the shower and realize that my sermon has no gospel in it and I’d better dump it in the trash and rewrite it. That insight, which takes a moment, might be the most valuable, cost-effective work I do all week.
Often, the most important things that happen are, to a corporate mind, the most mundane and routine: putting a bit of a wafer in the mouth of a sinner at the altar rail, or saying, “Your sins are forgiven in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
I can hear the thought-gears of that banker grinding at that one. “You mean they pay you a full-time salary with benefits so you can say words that any idiot could memorize and stand up and say?” Well, in a way, yes. They also pay me to preach and teach, and visit, and do some leadership and some administrative tasks.
But, in the end, what I really do is this: I am Jesus to them. I get paid to play-act. I get paid to do now what Jesus did: preach and forgive and bring the Kingdom to sinners. I say the words Jesus said and told us to say.
Paul Gregory Alms (paulgregoryalms.blogspot.com) is pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Catawba, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with both MDiv and STM degrees. He has written extensively for journals such as First Things, Concordia Theological Journal, Lutheran Witness, Lutheran Forum, The Cresset, and others. He is married and the father of four girls.
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