by Gordon Cheng
What does it mean to do good, productive, effective work, when that work is the work of being a full-time paid minister of the word of God?
I vividly remember being required in one of my ministry jobs to keep time sheets for a two-month period. It was a dog of a task. Not simply because organisational ability is something I aim to be mediocre at, one day. Far more, it was because of the enormous difficulty in defining the nature of work. Yes, a conversation with the youth worker about the members of the youth group and their spiritual struggles would certainly count. But late at night, and accompanied by glasses of orange juice on the balcony as we wound down after evening church, the same discussion started to look suspiciously like fun. And if other friends were present, even the most generous hearted of observers might start to imagine that staff noses were not exactly being applied to ecclesiastical grindstones.
Conversely, many ministers find that what looks a lot like work may not actually have the importance it first seems to hold. An emergency board meeting to discuss repairs to leaks in the church hall feels a great deal like work for everybody affected"”including the long-suffering family of the minister. But in what sense does using the minister's time to chair such a meeting advance the spread of the gospel?
Simply because the question is hard to answer, however, doesn't mean we shouldn't ask. The book of Acts suggests that there are things that for "ministers of the word' ought not to be really classed as work at all. There the apostles assert "it is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables". They choose others to do this, while they devote themselves "to prayer and to the ministry of the word" (Acts 6:1-4).
This issue can be restated differently, and more biblically, by noting that pastors are the only members of the congregation who are not placed under the obligation to work.
There is precedent for this in the Old Testament. Priests and Levites were not workers in the way that other Israelites were; they were to serve the Lord while depending on the offerings of the Israelites to provide for their physical needs (e.g. Num 18:24). Then in the New Testament, Jesus does no work in his mission to Israel but is supported by donation (Luke 8:3). The apostle Paul does work, but insists that neither he nor any other person involved in ministering the word as an apostle or elder should have to work (1 Cor 9:5-6; 1 Tim 5:17-18). No other category of Christian servanthood receives such an exemption. Indeed, apart from involuntary unemployment, the rule for Christians is "if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat" (2 Thess 3:10).
We might even say that given the unique nature of gospel ministry, the gospel minister ought as far as possible to avoid doing any "work' at all. (Sound good so far?)
Ecclesiastes provides another perspective that also needs to be considered. It concludes that work is vanity (see Eccl 2, especially 2:23; also 3:22, 4:4). As important as work is"”it is an expression of love for family and community, pays money, and for some even gives satisfaction"”for all this, it fails to deliver meaning and purpose, because it fails to last into eternity. We toil and labour and struggle to produce, to build, to earn, but such is the frustrating nature of this fallen world that our efforts in the end are futile. Our plans and dreams often come to nothing, and even the monuments we do manage to build to our own greatness are rendered foolish by death.
The gloomy diagnosis of Ecclesiastes upon work is often taken as a cautionary word against careerism, and our secular society's desperate search for job satisfaction and fulfilment. And so it is. However, it also has something to say to gospel ministers about their labour in the gospel. Our work does not gain its value or its meaning by the number of hours we clock up, nor by the size of the congregation we grow, nor by the success of our building program we co-ordinate, nor by the amount of money we manage to raise. We can, like Solomon, build an empire, but that in itself does not make our work productive and truly effective; it does not make us "good ministers (or servants) of Jesus Christ'.
The real test of whether a pastor is working productively as a minister of the gospel will not be found by measuring the number of hours he can honestly ascribe to "work', nor by tracking other indicators like congregational size, number of complaints, or yearly growth in budget. True, a record of hourly activity might have value for a pastor, in that it may show how time is leaking away in unexpected or unhelpful directions. But the measure of whether good work is being done is not discovered by this means. It is found purely and simply by testing whether or not God's gracious word is being prayerfully spoken and taught, and if it is by God's work producing trust and obedience in those who receive it. That, we may remember, is the measure of productivity that Jesus applied to his own ministry in the parable of the four soils (Mark 4:1-20). The worthwhileness of sowing seed is found not in the rate of growth, nor in the efficiency with which the task of sowing was undertaken. It is found in whether on the day of harvest the seed, which is the word of God, has produced the fruit of faith, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.
When the gospel minister is engaged in that task"”prayerful proclamation to people"”then he is really doing his job. And the 1001 things that conspire to distract him from that task ought to be avoided where possible and minimised where they are necessary.
Two important points of qualification must be made. The first is to the pompous pastor who imagines himself above the menial tasks that are involved in the day-to-day running of the church. To be a minister is to be a slave, a servant. The minister has been freed from working in order to eat, but the minister has not been freed from serving others, and sometimes"”usually"” this will still involve plain old hack work. For some ministers, the glory of running a large church with a sizable staff team is that chair-stacking and building-locking may now be delegated to the youth worker, or to the ministry apprentice as an integral part of their "training'. Such a minister has forgotten that life and ministry go hand in hand.
At a student conference years ago an Anglican bishop offered to fetch me a glass of water as naturally as if he were the undergraduate, and I were the bishop. It was instinctive to his way of thinking and relating, it was unselfconsciously kind, and it was a model of Christlike leadership. Christ showed this attitude of humility when he gave his life on the cross, even though he might instead have insisted on all the privilege due to him as the second member of the Trinity (Phil 2:5-11). Similarly Paul forewent his rights, and worked at a secular job so as not to burden those being evangelized (1 Thess 2:9). Paul instructed Timothy that this connection between life and doctrine was an essential element in gospel growth. Without such a connection, the minister would be lost to God's kingdom and so, potentially, might the hearers (1 Tim 4:16).
The second qualification is this: to the extent that all Christians and not just pastors "speak the truth in love' to each other (whether in everyday conversation, or in a Sunday school class, or after church, or in a formal but unpaid leadership role), then all are called on to share in the ultimate heavenly productivity of being gospel ministers. It is not simply the pastor's sermon that has eternal value, as if no other ministry of the word were occurring among Christ's people. Every time someone opens their mouth to speak they have the potential to do something for Christ's children that will last into eternity. Our words as Christians can tear down with sarcasm, or waste time in triviality; or they can build up in gospel encouragement, and even, spoken in the right context, win people for the Lord Jesus Christ for all time. Every Christian has a part to play.
Back to the original question: can the pastor measure his or her own effectiveness? For the pastor ministering God's word faithfully, the number of hours spent on the job is almost entirely beside the point (not completely, mind you"”most Bible-believing pastors I know tend towards the sin of overwork). On the other hand, the pastor who fails to minister God's word accurately and faithfully is not going to escape the judgement of God by spending seventy hours a week hospital visiting, sermon writing, training others, committee chairing and generally being seen to do the right thing.
The easy practical solution to time management may be as simple as ensuring that the regular day off and evening off gets taken, and taken well (surely a subject for another Pastor's Brief!). In the meantime, let's just keep praying, and telling people the gospel.
