Editorial: Pastor, your work will outlive you

When I was a pastor of a small, country church, I often wondered if what I was doing mattered. I wish I’d known then what I can see now.

A word of encouragement to discouraged pastors: Pastor, your work will outlive you.

I didn’t have those words until I was finishing a news story we published yesterday about Arabic Church of Dallas. Learning the history of the church and its pastors shined a new and encouraging light for me on faithful pastoral ministry. I’ll return to this at the end.

To know your faithful labor in service of God’s call will live beyond your ministry is great encouragement to a beleaguered pastor. It is joy, maybe even tears of joy. But first, the tears.

The call

Pastor, you sensed a call to ministry at some point. It may not have been entirely clear what shape your ministry was supposed to take, or God may have spoken to you as if to Moses, delineating your call in unmistakable terms. Whatever the case, you know God called you to ministry.

If you were called while young, you may have gone to college or seminary full time to be faithful to God’s call and to prepare for ministry. Meanwhile, your friends pursued more prudent—read: lucrative, marketable—degrees and careers.

If you were called later in life, you may have given up a good career—if not lucrative, then at least secure. Your friends and colleagues may have thought you lost your mind for walking away from a perfectly good job. But you did it anyway, because you wanted to be faithful to God’s call.

Or you may be one of the growing numbers of bivocational pastors who serve a church while maintaining other employment. Your church is small, and you don’t have much—if any—free time, and you often may feel invisible. But you are determined to be faithful to God’s call.

You may not always be fully aware how important God’s call is for you. You may not be cognizant in the grind of the moment how it gets you through tough times, but it does.

The doldrums

Sometimes, when the budget’s tight, when expenses are going up and receipts are going down, you may wonder if you’re doing the right thing.

When the attendance numbers fall far below the membership numbers, when your sermons or Bible studies don’t seem to make a difference, you may wonder what it’s all for.

When your church isn’t growing, when baptisms are few, you may start to think your friends were right and wonder if you’re doing any good.

Intellectually, you know you won’t always see the fruit of your labor, but it would be nice to see some more fruit than you are seeing. You preach and teach eternal rewards, but an earthly confirmation here or there wouldn’t hurt your feelings.

Intuitively, you may have known life would be different when you became a pastor, but you may not have known just how isolated and lonely it can be. You sacrificed a lot for ministry, and your family probably has, too.

You may find yourself contemplating the ledger of life and think the debits of ministry far outweigh the credits of your ministerial efforts. You may think God is telling you to do something else. Maybe you’re looking for that something else.

Pastor, your work will outlive you.

That may not be a comfort. That may be precisely what you’re afraid of, that ministry may be the death of you. For some, this is humorous. For others, this is serious, and it’s OK for you to seek and receive help.

However fruitless your ministry may appear to you, the fruit of your faithfulness to God’s call will live beyond your ministry. Arabic Church of Dallas’ founding pastor Imad Shehadeh’s description of the church he planted 40 years ago helped me see that.

The celebration

“The Arab Church of Dallas is a living testimony of God’s faithfulness and the faithfulness of the leadership that served in it,” Shehadeh said in reference to the church’s recent 40th anniversary celebration.

Given the struggles the church has faced during its 40 years—money and membership among them—it would be easy and even natural for the church’s pastors to be discouraged from time to time. Most pastors can relate.

Even so, a ministry started and carried out in the face of significant challenges has continued beyond the tenures of four previous pastors. What’s more, their ministries have lived and are living—to turn the phrase a little—outside their local congregation, spanning the world. Yes, pastor, your work for the gospel will outlive you.

You may not see it now, but your faithfulness to God’s call has led others to follow Jesus, to praise the Lord, to study the Bible and to proclaim the gospel themselves. Your work—however far in the past—is producing good fruit still.

Pastor, your faithful work will outlive you.

Pastor appreciation

Pastors, like most of us, want their work to matter, but in a qualitatively different way. They carry the weight of eternity in what they do. They know their preaching, teaching, relating, officiating, administrating, leading and living affects souls not only in this life, but also in eternity. So, yes, they want their work to matter.

If your pastor’s work has produced good in your life, it won’t hurt to let your pastor know. If you can remember what your pastor said or did that produced good in your life, you can honor your pastor in two ways: (1) tell your pastor, if it’s still possible, and/or (2) share it with someone else who may need good in their life.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at [email protected]. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.