Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.
—I Peter 5:2–4
4189 Number Of U.S. Ministers
There are nearly 400,000 American Protestant clergymen, 250,000 pastors, 35,000 seminarians, and 35,000 missionaries.
In contrast, there are 58,000 American Catholic clergymen, 18,000 pastors, 17,000 seminarians and 7,000 missionaries.
4190 Theology Students Increasing
The Association of Theological Schools, which includes 95 percent of theology programs in the U.S., reports that nearly 32,000 students were studying for the ministry.
Enrollment is up in most Protestant and Jewish seminaries. Even in Catholic institutions, which have seen a severe drop in student numbers, there are signs of a turnaround.
4191 How Many Hours Do Pastors Put In?
Just how do ministers work? To get an idea, the Ministers Life and Casualty Union picked 8 ministers—representing big, medium and small congregations, different denominations, urban and rural churches and various parts of the country. Each was given a diary and asked to record every activity round the clock for one month.
The result: most ministers worked 7 days a week most weeks. They averaged 9 hours per day, based on a seven-day week. They averaged 7.7 hours a day for such duties as visitation, conducting services, study, counselling and administration, which, incidentally, is the most demanding duty, averaging 26 hours a week for the ministers.
4192 What A Job!
“The pastor teaches, though he must solicit his own classes. He heals, though without pills or knife. He is sometimes a lawyer, often a social worker, something of an editor, a bit of a philosopher and entertainer; a salesman, a decorative piece for public functions, and he is supposed to be a scholar. He visits the sick, marries people, buries the dead, labors to console those who sorrow, and to admonish those who sin, and tries to stay sweet when chided for not doing his duty.
“He plans programs, appoints committees when he can get them; spends con siderable time in keeping people out of each other’s hair; between times he prepares a sermon and preaches it on Sunday to those who don’t happen to have any other engagement. Then on Monday he smiles when some jovial chap roars, “What a job—one day a week!””right>—Selected
4193 Frustrated Preachers
Dr. Samuel W. Blizzard during two years of research and investigation uncovered some interesting facts concerning ministers. Dr. Blizzard attempted to find the preacher’s image of himself. He asked 1300 ministers to arrange six roles or functions—preacher, pastor, priest, teacher, organizer, and administrator—in the order of importance according to what they believed to be an ideal pattern.
The more-than-700 who replied felt the minister is: first, a preacher; second, a pastor; third, a priest; fourth, a teacher; fifth, an organizer; sixth, and last, an administrator.
Blizzard also asked them to arrange the same six roles functionally, according to the amount of time they spent performing these roles. The results were: first, administrator; second, pastor; third, priest; fourth, organizer; fifth, preacher; sixth, teacher.
During an average ten-and-one-half workdays, these men spent an average of only thirty-eight-and-one-half minutes preparing to preach. The time spent on administration was seven times more than that spent on preaching. They declared that preaching ought to be their primary function, but they had reduced it to a very weak fifth-rate role by actual conduct and performance.
—Christianity Today
4194 Effectiveness Of Longer Pastorates
According to a study made by Allen Nauss at Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois, statistics show that ministers who remain in a pastorate for less than a four-year stay are less effective in virtually all areas: pastoral care, counselling, interpersonal relations, evangelism, religious education, preaching, conduct of worship, and administrative activity. Moreover, pastoral tours longer than twelve years apparently do not diminish effectiveness, contrary to what is often alleged.
—Christianity Today
4195 Wesley On Long Pastorates
John Wesley in his Journals and Letters admits that “I know that, were I myself to preach one whole year in one place, I should preach both myself and most of my congregation asleep.” Says Spurgeon, “He, who at the end of twenty years’ ministry among the same people is more alive than ever, is a great debtor to the quickening Spirit.”
4196 Pastors’ Sons In Successful Industries
Some years ago, Roger Babson, famed statistician, made a study of the heads of 100 leading industries.
He found that 5 percent of these outstanding men were the sons of bankers; 10 percent were the sons of merchants and manufacturers; 25 percent were sons of doctors and lawyers and over 35 percent were the sons of preachers whose salaries at the time of his investigation did not average more than $1500 a year.
—The Voice
4197 An Eye-Opening Comparison
At Ministers Life, we took an in-depth look at the work loads of eight ministers representing big, medium, and small congregations. They’re pastors in rural and urban parishes, from New York to California. Every minister surveyed worked seven days a week, often for nine hours a day.
The average work week was 53.7 hours. That’s just two hours less than the average week put in by the chief executives of the top 500 U. S. corporations. The average salaries of these executives is above $200,000 a year. The average pastoral stipend—about $10,000.
—Selected
4198 30,000 Pastors Thinking Of Quitting
Don’t be surprised if your pastor is thinking about resigning. According to sociologist John Koval of Notre Dame, one in four Catholic priests and one in eight Protestant clergymen are doing just that. Koval says that the major reasons are the need for more money and the seeming ineffectiveness of the church.
In a study by the National Council of Churches, 84 percent of the ministers responding to the questionnaire felt they were underpaid compared with other professionals of equal education.
Bob Dale, pastoral ministries consultant for the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board, sees the dropout problem as an inability to meet certain crises that occur at various periods of the pastor’s life. Dale says that the first crisis comes three to five years after seminary when a healthy dose of reality shatters many seminary-days ideals. The second occurs at age forty when the pastor realizes he has not reached the goals he set for himself. The third crisis comes when he looks ahead to the insecurity of retirement years.
If it’s true that one out of eight clergymen is thinking of resigning, that would mean over 30,000 out of the nation’s total of 250,000. If those 30,000 resigned all at once, maybe the churches would admit that they have a serious problem on their hands.
—Selected
4199 A Letter From Paul
A certain church found itself suddenly without a pastor, and a committee was formed to search for a new man. In due course, the committee received a letter from a clergyman applying for the position. The letter went like this:
“Gentlemen: Understanding that your pulpit is vacant, I should like to submit my application. I am generally considered to be a good preacher. I have been a leader in most of the places I have served. I have also found time to do some writing on the side.
“I am over 50 years of age, and while my health is not the best, I still manage to get enough work done so as to please my parish.
“As for references, I am somewhat handicapped. I have never preached in any place for more than 3 years. And the churches I have preached in have generally been pretty small, even though they were located in rather large cities. In some places I had to leave because my ministry caused riots and disturbances. Even where I stayed, I did not get along too well with other religious leaders in town, which may influence the kind of references these places will send you. I have also been threatened several times and even physically attacked. Three or four times I have gone to jail for witnessing to my convictions.
“Still, I feel sure I can bring vitality to your church even though I am not particularly good at keeping records. I have to admit I don’t even remember all those whom I’ve baptized. However, if you can use me, I should be pleased to be considered.”
Hearing the letter read aloud, the committee members were aghast. How could anyone think that a church like theirs could consider a man who was nothing but a trouble-making, absent-minded, ex-jailbird? What was his name?
“Well,” said the chairman of the committee, “the letter is simply signed … PAUL.”
—The Episcopalian
ACTION IN THE PASTORATE
4200 Pastor Moonlights As Boxer
Clergyman Charles S. Yoak, 29, leads three lives. Three days a week he is pastor of the Mendota Heights Congregational Church near Minneapolis. Three days a week he is a Minneapolis taxicab driver. At night he becomes Gentleman Curt Yancy, a tough, hard-punching professional boxer.
His win-lost record in the thirteen matches he’s had since climbing into the ring two years ago isn’t very good, but he won three of his last four bouts. He took home a purse of $350 from one of them.
He sees no conflict in slugging bodies and shepherding souls at the same time. Boxing is a sport, a molder of character especially applicable to youth ministry, he feels, and he wants to set up a boxing program for the church’s youth as soon as his small congregation can afford to install a ring. Also, he says, his presence in the training gym has opened up opportunities for informal counselling he wouldn’t have had otherwise. And finally, the ring is a perfect pressure valve for a preacher, he says. The tension that builds up because of the gentleness required in personal relations and the constant carrying of others’ burden, he explains, is blown out in punches at a bag—or an opponent.
—Christianity Today
4201 Pastor What?
According to a religious news report, God is the new pastor of Congaree Baptist Church in Gadsden, South Carolina. James R. God, that is. Another recent arrival in the area is the Reverend John Wesley, who has joined the staff of Trinity Episcopal Church in nearby Columbia (the famous eighteenth-century Methodist for whom he was named served for a time as pastor of an Anglican church 150 miles away in Savannah, Georgia). At about the same time, the Ridge Hill Baptist Church in Ridge Spring, South Carolina, was celebrating its 106th anniversary. In sermons, it’s a winner! Its pastor is J. E. Preacher, Jr.
4202 A Beloved Black Pastor
Charles A. Tindley was born into slavery. Although his slave mother taught him to love Christ, his master forbade him to attend church under threat of the whip.
After the Civil War when he became free, he took correspondence courses and entered the ministry. He began with a church of only 12 members where he had once served as a janitor. In time, his compassionate preaching attracted over a thousand people each Sunday, both black and white. For years he maintained a breadline which fed 500 to 600 people nightly. Derelicts received warm clothing and hot baths in the basement of his church. The mayor of Philadelphia visited his church and was so impressed that he gave the pastor a personal check for $2,000.
Charles Tindley died on July 31, 1933, when people were still receiving bread from his church. There were so many tributes at his funeral that the service lasted five hours. Downtown streets had to be roped off to hold back the crowds from the hearse that carried his body.
And today, more than thirty years later, parents in Philadelphia are telling their children about the black preacher who was a brother to everyone.
—Selected
4203 Spurgeon And Metropolitan Tabernacle
Spurgeon, in my opinion, was the greatest preacher in the English language who ever lived. The proof of this can be seen by what he accomplished.
For thirty-one years he preached to an average crowd of 5,000 in his own Metropolitan Tabernacle. And the only reason that there were not larger crowds is that the building could not contain them. This is demonstrated by the fact that once a quarter he asked his own people to stay away in order that he might have a congregation of new faces! And whenever he did so, he still had a full house.
In addition to this, Spurgeon did not fill the building through visitation programs, magnificent choirs, or a fleet of buses. He didn’t even have an organ. He merely stood and preached; and the people listened.
—Pastor Manual
4204 Dr. Parker Of London City Temple
Dr. Joseph Parker, writer of the famous The People’s Bible commentaries, was an absolute monarch on the throne! For 35 years at the London City Temple, he was minister, deacon, treasurer—everything. The stewards handed him the collection on Sunday, and he disbursed the funds—never giving any published accounting.
A rarity in preacherdom. Yet God used him mightily in that church.
4205 Dr. Peters On A Church Planter
Dr. George W. Peters, chairman of the missions department in Dallas Theological Seminary told, during chapel time, of a Southern Baptist man whose work was “planting churches.” In his lifetime, he planted 41 churches from scratch, and left them all prosperous.
4206 Largest Church In Argentina
This is the story of a church and her pastor. The church is Faith Tabernacle in Buenos Aires, one of the largest churches in Argentina. And the pastor is Rev. Juan Carolos Ortiz.
On a special programme during the Congress of World Evangelization in Switzerland, 1974, Rev. Ortiz shares his experience: “We were a very successful church, speaking in terms of numbers, but something was lacking and I noticed it. When I worked hard, the church attendance was up, but when I relaxed a bit the church went down, so it seemed to be depending upon my effort. We decided to stop all activities and I went to the mountain to pray and fast and ask the Lord about the problem.
“There, the Spirit told me 3 things:
“First, he told me that our church was not growing; it was just getting fat. While we used to have 200 members without love, the number has grown to 600 without love. That is not growing, just getting fat.
“Second, that we had a business company, not His church. We ran a sophisticated institution depending on human promotion.
“Third, I was not the pastor of a church, but the director of an orphanage. We were spraying the food over the congregation, rather than feeding each individual according to his own needs.”
This led to the church being completely reorganized according to the Biblical concept of members of a Body rather than members of a club. The idea was to regard each believer as a disciple who was under training by someone else. When he was trained, he in turn would disciple a few others.
“The first step was to call together the elders of my church. Before, I had been like the employee of the church, but after our meeting I became like a biblical teacher, and they became like biblical disciples.
“After six months, each one of the board members did the same with two or three other persons.
“It took us two years to change the whole church into disciples. We were 600 when we started. After the renewal began we were 400—we lost 200, for the demands of the Gospel are great. As soon as we had the whole church under discipleship, we multipled so that we are now 1,200!”
To put his new biblical concept to the test, this Latin American pastor shut down his church for a whole month without public announcement.
“The political situation was very uncertain in our country and we wanted to be prepared in the event that the church might be forced to close. So we started cell groups in the homes. We had more than 200 cells meeting all over the city—in houses, beaches, restaurants and so forth. We then closed down the church building completely. We passed the word to the disciples, and then people who were not disciples went to the building and wondered why it was closed.”
The church stood the test. The cells met regularly and that month they more than doubled the offering of the church.
—Selected
4207 Church Boom And Verse-By-Verse Preaching
Nine years ago Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, California, had some twenty-five members. By 1969 it had 150. Then it launched into an outreach program beamed at young people in the streets. Within two years, attendance reached 2,000. Hundreds at a time were being baptized in the oceans, building expansion programmes could not keep abreast, and Look, Time, and network television reporters were knocking at the doors. Pastor Chuck Smith claimed he was not doing anything differently from before. Yet the throngs of young people kept coming.
Calvary Chapel today has 15,000 members. About 10,000 attend the three Sunday morning services. The majority of those in the congregation are under 35. The Sunday school is so crowded out that high schoolers are encouraged to attend a church service instead. The Saturday night youth meetings attract between 4,000 and 5,000, and 2,500 show up for Thursday night Bible-study meetings. Nearly 800 were baptized on a recent Monday night.
Smith dedicates fifteen babies every Sunday (five per service), and the waiting list is months long. The nursery has 200 cribs. A Christian day school through eighth grade has an enrollment of 650, and plans are moving ahead to build a high school.
There are no unpaid bills except for a mortgage of $300,000 on a mountain conference center (it will be paid off within a year). In fact, the church has a cash reserve of $350,000 (there are 5,000 tithers on record), and it owns $250,000 worth of television equipment. Calvary has started branch churches in other cities and Bible-study groups across the country. It has built a $50,000 missionary radio station in Guatemala and is building another in El Salvador, and keeps a number of evangelistic music teams busy around the world.
The church has eight ministers (one is Smith’s son). Smith believes in Full Gospel doctrine, but Calvary’s church services are not charismatic-oriented. There are only a few standard hymns or choruses (usually without instruments), no upraised hands, no tongue messages or prophecies, no “singing in the Spirit,” no shouted Amens. There is no choir (Smith says too many church troubles originate among choir members, and he thinks the entire congregation should be a choir). Nearly everyone brings a Bible, and many people take notes.
Smith, 48, majors in verse-by-verse exposition, and his sermons last about 45 minutes. He rarely gives up his pulpit to speak elsewhere. Persons interviewed at random said they attend Calvary mainly because of Smith’s Bible teaching and partly because of the love they sense there.
—Christianity Today
4208 Through The Bible In 17 Years
Dr. W. A. Criswell has the largest Baptist congregation in the world at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas.
When he first came to Dallas as pastor, he announced that he would preach through the Bible. He made it in 17 years and 8 months. He said that at first the church members were fearful it would wreck the church, but the opposite happened. Hundreds and hundreds joined. Converts used to say, “I joined in Isaiah,” or “I joined in I Timothy.”
Dr. Criswell has now been in the ministry almost 50 years and about 34 years as pastor of the famous First Baptist Church of Dallas.
4209 Alexander Maclaren’s Pastoral Ways
In 1845 Alexander Maclaren was sent to preach at a run-down church in Southampton, where the people were so impressed they called him to be their pastor. The Portland Chapel had suffered greatly under an incompetent pastor who had plunged them into debt and given the church a bad reputation.
“If the worst comes to the worst,” Maclaren wrote home, “I shall at all events not have to reflect that at the funeral of a withered one.”
The work at Portland Chapel prospered.
Two years later, he was invited to preach at Union Chapel, Manchester. He accepted their call, and began an amazing forty-five-year term that gave him the name, “Maclaren of Manchester.”
History repeated itself: the church grew and had to move into a new edifice that seated nearly two thousand people. Maclaren had changed his location, but not his disciplines. He refused most invitations, and concentrated on studying the Word and feeding his people. He was not a visiting pastor and he repeatedly challenged the adage that “a home-going pastor makes a church-going people.” He reminded ministerial students that the adage was true only if, when the people came to church, they received something worth coming to hear.
—Warren W. Wiersbe
4210 How Not To Grow A Church
Consider the matter of the growth of Southern Baptists. Usually the subject is approached from the positive point of view. “How shall we grow?”
View the subject from the other direction—“How did Southern Baptists not grow?” What are some of the courses which may lead to mediocrity if not to oblivion? Several suggestions may be listed:
1. Practice open church membership—this will devaluate our Baptist position.
2. Disregard the Scriptural meaning of, and invitation to, the Lord’s Supper—this will cheapen communion.
3. Play down the importance of baptism—this will stifle our testimony.
4. Emphasize ecumenicity—this will erase our distinctives.
5. Be apologetic regarding the use of the name “Baptist”—this will weaken our prestige.
6. Deny direct kinship with the New Testament Christians—this will cut the root of Biblical and doctrinal strength.
7. Minimize the importance of training—this will close the churches on Sunday evenings.
8. Take the side track of fanatical conservatism or radical liberalism—this will produce a series of splinter groups.
9. Solicit financial support from non-Baptists—this will make beggars of the churches.
There are other roads which might open the way to denominational nothingness, but this combination would probably make others unnecessary.
—Robert G. Lee
4211 Pastor’s Parable Of “Submarine” Church
In warning the First Baptist Church, Pensacola, Florida, not to turn into “a submarine,” Pastor James L. Pleitz gave this submersible parable:
“Once upon a time in the twentieth century there was a church that became a submarine. It wasn’t as difficult as it might seem. One day it just shut the hatch on the outside world and submerged into its own sea. Occasionally it ran up the periscope to see where it was going.
“Once the captain got a real vision through his periscope and when he demanded that they get back to surface and fast, the crew quickly developed the bends and the sub stayed down.
“While submerged there was a lot for the crew to do. In fact they were kept on alert and asked to make maximum efforts. They tinkered with the machinery constantly. They overhauled their kitchen. They inventoried their ammunition at least once a week but they never used it. They paid salaries to the officers and went through endless drills occasionally interrupted by prayers that no depth charge would disturb their isolation.
“The air got stale too, so did the routine, but they put up with it because the alternatives were too demanding. Several committees even decided the stale air was good for them.
“One of the members who had sneaked a look through the periscope suggested a change in course and the giving away of their surplus supplies. He was immediately eliminated for mutiny.
“The last entry in the captain’s logbook read, “Have probably set a new record for being submerged and maintaining predetermined course. See no reason why we should change directions. Crew continues to give maximum effort. We did sight an enemy and appointed three committee members to study the situation.”
“The First Baptist Church of Pensacola is not a submarine. We are making an honest effort to do what Jesus would do if He were here. How about joining us in this quest, friend?”
—Selected
4212 Pastor Hit The Roof
• Pastor George Prentice of First Church of the Nazarene (Yoplin, Mo. ) preached from the roof of his church with a mike and congregation seated in chairs in the parking lot below.
He had promised months ago he would do so if Sunday school attendance ever reached 200. It finally reached 201.
THE PASTOR’S WIFE
4213 The Preacher’s Wife
There is one person in your church
Who knows your preacher’s life.
She’s wept and smiled and prayed with him,
And that’s your preacher’s wife!
She knows the prophet’s weakest point
And knows his greatest power.
She’s heard him speak in trumpet tone,
In his great triumphant hour.
She’s heard him groaning in his soul,
When bitter raged the strife,
As hand in his she knelt with him—
For she’s a preacher’s wife!
The crowd has seen him in his strength,
When gleamed his long drawn sword,
As underneath God’s banner folds
He faced the devil’s horde.
But she knows deep within her heart
That scarce an hour before,
She helped him pray the glory down
Behind a closet door!
You tell your tales of prophets brave,
Who walked across the world,
And changed the course of history,
By burning words they hurled.
And I will tell how back of them
Some women lived their lives,
Who wept with them and smiled with them—
They were the preacher’s wives!
4214 An Easy Job?
You may think it quite an easy task,
And just a pleasant life;
But really it takes a lot of grace
To be a preacher’s wife.
She’s supposed to be a paragon
Without a fault in view,
A saint when in the parsonage
As well as in the pew.
Her home must be a small hotel
For folks that chance to roam,
And yet have peace and harmony—
The perfect preacher’s home!
Whenever groups are called to meet,
Her presence must be there,
And yet the members all agree
She should live a life of prayer.
Though hearing people’s burdens,
Their grief both night and day,
She’s supposed to spread but sunshine
To those along the way.
She must lend a sympathetic ear
To every tale of woe,
And then forget about it.
Lest it to others go.
Her children must be models rare
Of quietness and poise,
But still stay on the level
With other girls and boys.
You may think it quite an easy task,
And just a pleasant life,
But really it takes a lot of grace
To be a preachers’s wife!
4215 Pastor Not Sitting Beside Her
A little five-year-old who with her grandmother regularly attended services, remarked one day, “When I grow up, I am going to marry a man just like Brother Gorsage. But I am not going to let him be a preacher.”
“But why not a preacher?” asked the grandmother. “You know you could not marry a better man than a preacher.”
“Well,” replied the little girl, “if he had to preach, he couldn’t ever sit by me in church.”
4216 How Spurgeon Got His Text
Another anecdote indicates the way Spurgeon concentrated on a text. His usual method was to study the passage without helps; and then search through a series of commentaries in order to learn what others had said. But when faced with the passage, “Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauty of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou has the dew of thy youth” (Psalm 110:3), he was stuck. “He sat up very late, and was utterly worn out and dispirited, for all his efforts to get at the heart of the text were unavailing.”
Susannah then suggested that he go to bed and try again in the morning when his mind would be refreshed. Since the next day was Sunday, Spurgeon agreed. But he insisted that she should awaken him early. With this admonition, he went to sleep. And then a most extraordinary thing happened.
During the first dawning hours … “I heard him talking in his sleep. Soon I realized that he was going over the subject of the verse … and was giving a clear and distinct exposition of its meaning.” Unfortunately, Susannah did not have anything at hand with which to record the exposition; but she prayed that the Lord would help her to remember. And He did.
The next morning Spurgeon chided her for allowing him to sleep late. She then repeated the exposition. “Why, that’s it—exactly!” he exclaimed. He then outlined the text and preached, and it was published. It is still available.
—Charles Ludwig
4217 Listening To His Sermons
It was at the close of a Lord’s Day, and Dr. Harry A. Ironside had been busy in the King’s business. Five times had he spoken. On the way home—how human it all was—a simple question of Mrs. Ironside was turned aside with irritation.
The Holy Spirit quickly convicted this man of God. Contritely, he asked his wife’s forgiveness with, “Forgive me. I am quite tired. Remember, I have preached five times today.” And then came the answer: “Yes, dear, I know; but remember, I have had to listen to you five times today!”
—Moody Monthly
See also: Church ; Dedication ; Preacher ; II Tim. 4:5; Rev. 7:4; 11:3.