Analyzing Key Word Searches
“Small Congregation Overworked, Pastor Lazy”
One of the benefits of having a church blog is that you can find out what is on people’s mind. Blogs provide a list of the words people have plugged into their search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) in order to land on your site.
Today someone plugged in “small congregation overworked, pastor lazy.”
Redeemer is a small congregation and our people are overworked at least as measured by any normal volunteer church efforts.
For many years we had no pastor. If lay people didn’t step up, no one would.
Maybe pastors saw our little part of God’s kingdom as too much work. Those words spoken by a Synod representative ten years ago are hard to forget. “Ministry in East Falls is not good use of the Lord’s money.”
We suspect that the deprivation of leadership was by design. Our assets were targeted for 25 years. Our assets provided incentive to create conditions for failure in East Falls. Accepting a call with any anticipation of success meant defying the prejudices of leadership. Redeemer was not a church to be served by any pastor with upwardly mobile career ambitions. Calls issued by God rarely do!
But were the few pastors we encountered lazy? Some of them were. Some of them were focused on their own ambitions and sense of purpose. But their reluctance was not necessarily motivated by fear of hard work.
Some of them found themselves serving with inadequate training. They arrived with established ideas and packaged formulas for urban neighborhood ministry. They would provide these services after they did the normal pastoral duties. They would structure their work-week around sermon preparation, clergy gatherings, committees and visiting the sick.
All of this is care-taking, not church-building.
Many of the pastors sent our way were ill-prepared for the realities of urban ministry. Cities tend to be very diverse and fast-changing. Pastors are trained with goals of longevity and traditions. There was often a sense that they would do what was expected of them, whether or not their efforts advanced mission.
Evangelism, therefore, is often relegated to the laity. If pastors have little training in evangelism, lay people are likely to have none. The mission work of the church becomes fund-raising for someone else to implement mission. Easier to fund bricks and mortar than community-building.
Sadly, there are never enough funds for the work that needs to be done.
Lazy, no. Lost, yes.