Planning and Priorities in Ministry Related Vocations
Any church-related work, from missions to church planting to pastoring an established church, brings with it more work than you can possibly handle. There’s simply so much to do, so much you want to do, so much the mission and ministry needs. Especially when you are young, the weight of the work can crush you or you can squander your time and energy with poor priorities and planning. Here are a few questions to guide your work.
WHAT AM I PAID TO DO?
Biblical Principles: Let your yes be yes (Matt. 5:37); Do your work as unto the Lord (Col. 3:23). The Apostle’s responsibility to the churches who funded his mission led to good practices:
Practices:
Get clear on your job description - make someone create one for you if one doesn’t exist; if you are planting a church, have your sending church create one that outlines their expectations.
Make sure that job description is clear and measurable - ministry doesn’t work like cutting grass (you often can’t see what you’ve mowed), so you will need some measurable goals to know if you are being faithful.
Watch out for things that you are being paid to do but don’t want to do because they are easy to neglect. Either you have to say no to the job description, or you need to do the work, even if you might one day hand off those responsibilities to someone better equipped.
Develop a clear structure of who will hold you accountable to those responsibilities. Meet with them regularly. Seek their feedback. Submit to where they press you.
Don’t take jobs that lack a clear job description and a clear structure of direct reports (if going into a church revitalization, work to establish this ahead of agreeing to the job; if a mission team, make sure you know who is boss and don’t settle for boss-by-committee). Caveat: some matters will not be on a job description, yet you will face whether they merit your attention or whether to delegate. This leads to developing leaders who serve. You will sometimes do things you had no plans on doing for the work of ministry to function well. But beware of jumping from one thing to another.
WHAT HAVE I SAID I WOULD DO?
Biblical Principles: Yes be yes; above reproach (1 Tim 3); man of integrity (1 Pet 2:12); trustworthy investment with little will set you up for more (Lk. 16:10):
Practices:
Get clear on what people are asking of you before you agree - timeline, final product, etc.
Notice how fear of man prompts you to give hasty yeses, and make sure you are avoiding the trap of being a slave to others’ expectations.
Learn to quantify the investment - all your yeses come with corresponding nos.
Look at your calendar before giving yes: Is what I’m being asked to do something that I can actually do and do well?
Recognize that ministry will bring with it some expectations that you can’t quantify, but to which you need to attend (for example, the 4 hours spent with a grieving family at the hospital).
Value and pursue hitting deadlines and doing more than the minimum viable product when you say yes. If you know that you are not going to be able to meet an objective, give your boss/elder team plenty of heads up as to why and what the new deadline will be.
For big yeses, bring in others who might be impacted (your wife) or the elders of your church.
WHAT DOES THE MINISTRY NEED MOST?
Biblical Principles: Paul’s sensitivity to the Spirit’s leading (Acts 16:6-10), telling Titus to appoint elders (Titus 1:5-9), leaving from one location to the next for Paul (Acts 20); preach the Word to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:2):
Practices:
Pray about your work before you start your work; don’t just jump in. Start each week and each day asking for the Spirit’s help to guide you to the best way to use your hours.
Set out time each week, each month, and each quarter to assess how things are going and where you need to press - create margin to work on your work and not just in your work.
Refine your job description with your elders or sending church or boss if what you are paid to do doesn’t match what the ministry most needs from you.
Learn to give yourself to what the work needs and not just what you want to do; while developing skills of building teams to do things that you might not be good at
Listen to others’ feedback about areas of strength that the ministry needs but that you feel ill-equipped to deliver. Strive to heed this feedback and get better at work that needs to be done.
Either create volunteer structures, hire staff, or develop a grid for the type of people you need to hire one day based on the tasks that the ministry most needs but that you aren’t that great at doing.
WHAT’S NO ONE ELSE DOING?
Biblical Principles: Only Timothy or Titus can do certain things; Paul as apostle to Gentiles; Paul’s ability to say hard things through Corinthian letters; learning to die to self (1 Cor 15:31):
Practices:
What can I uniquely contribute to this team? Meaning, spend time working on the things that you need to do that others can’t. Example - perhaps only you can prepare and preach a quality sermon, or only you can work to develop a clear membership pathway for your work, or only you can go out to that new village to seek to establish a relationship with a Christian among that community.
Notice the areas that get talked about as frustrations or fears but not acted on - this alerts you to conversations that need to be had, areas where the church or ministry needs to be stretched, or things that have been neglected in the past.
Look for the intersection of what the ministry most needs and what no one else is doing. Often this intersection is key to moving the church or ministry forward. Caveat: do you think you’re the only one who can preach or write policy or make decisions? Be realistic. Beware of holding an unrealistic view of yourself. Part of your pastoral responsibility will be to train others to do the things you’re doing.
Make sure these tasks are important to the overall health of the work at that time - perhaps no one is building a men’s ministry, but that ministry might not be the most important thing for your church plant to have in the first few years.
Ideally build teams in areas of consistent weakness.
WHAT AM I GOOD AT?
Biblical Principles: Gifts given to build up the body (Eph 4:11-16; 1 Pet. 4;10); diversity of gifts (Rom. 12:3-8):
Practices:
Don’t expect this to be a perfect fit early - the longer you work, the longer you stay in the same place, the more time you will be able to spend doing the things that you are uniquely gifted to do.
At best, early in ministry that’s going to be 50/50, with time split between things that you are good at and that bring you joy and things that are a grind - that’s normal at the start.
Early - more than seeing an exact match in your work between what you are good at and what you get to do, think about growing in self-awareness so that you begin to learn what you are good at and can better refine over time.
Green Light - Unconscious competence; I do this in my sleep; I can do this without thinking about it; doing this brings me joy and has proven fruitful over time.
Yellow Light - I can do this if I need to and I can do it well, but it’s not a natural gift for me and requires work and focus. To outsiders, yellow light gifts often look like green light gifts.
Red Light - I can’t do this, don’t want to do this, and make a mess of it when I try to do this.
Some pointers:
If your job description calls for you to spend a majority of your time in red light areas, then you are in the wrong job.
Too much time doing yellow light tasks will force you to learn to rest and re-create well because these tasks will be a grind.
You tend to admire people who spend 90% of their time in their green light areas, but that’s unrealistic for most of us in the early decades of ministry. Expect to spend energy in yellow light or red-light areas, while looking forward to later times in ministry when you may be able to specialize more.
In the first decade of ministry, you often don’t know what your red, yellow, and green lights are, so experiment.
You’ll tend to get easily frustrated with others whose red light is your green light and vice versa.
Don’t put this question before what you are paid to do – it doesn’t matter what you are good at or what you want to do, if you are paid to do other things; you might need to change jobs, but you can’t just not do things because you don’t want to or don’t think you are good at them.
AM I LOVING AND LEADING AT HOME?
Principles: Elder role in the home (1 Tim 3; Titus 1); marriage as picture of Christ love for the church (Eph 5:22-33); role and responsibility of parents (Eph. 6:1-4)
Practices:
Delicate tension here – we’ve moved from a world where ministers tended to neglect family for the sake of their jobs to a culture where many ministers neglect their work for the sake of their family.
You will need to dial this in over time, through frustrations that will come and just though ongoing conversation with your wife; All of us bring unreasonable expectations into marriage and ministry so use the first decade of work and marriage to get clear on what is appropriate in your home.
Work to love well, so that you move into work with clarity and freedom that all is good at home. Talk together about how a happy home with good communication empowers you through the day and, conversely, how anger or frustration hinders meaningful work.
Recognize the seasonal, and somewhat unpredictable nature of ministry. Don’t live with the expectation that time as a family will be the same week to week; learn to create healthy rhythms but know there will be peaks and valleys in terms of the quantity of time that’s required. My practice - anticipate the busy seasons and put things on the calendar to look forward to right after those busy times end.
Learn to live in tension - you want your family to know that they come first, but also your family needs to see that you keep your commitments and that there are times when you do leave them to go and serve someone else even when you are not on the clock.
Cultivate meaningful friendships for your wife - Give her outlets (this will vary depending on the relational needs of your wife).
WHAT’S SOMETHING I WANT TO LEARN HOW TO DO?
Biblical Principle: Diverse work of equipping saints (Eph 4:11-16):
Practices:
There are areas (often yellow lights) where we see some rudimentary gifts in ourselves and know that the ministry would be blessed if we were better in that area.
Some, like preaching, you need to give yourself to wholeheartedly to sharpen the ax.
Learn how to dabble without getting consumed - because some of these growth areas will not come naturally to us, it will be easy for you to experiment and work on developing gifts, while neglecting other tasks that you really need to do.
Have some mechanism for getting feedback on things you are just trying out–where elders can be a big asset. Hey, this is new for me and I know I’m a bit clunky. Would you mind giving me some feedback on how I can do it better (e.g., leading an elders’ meeting or having a hard conversation with a member).
Don’t try to grow in every area at once - Think about one area of growth and give yourself to it until you see the needle starting to move. It takes many reps doing one thing (especially something we aren’t great at) before we start to get better.
IS THIS A GOOD FIT?
Biblical Principles: He who aspires to office of elder (1 Tim 3); apostle pairings; unique gifts/history/personality make-up (Rom. 12:3-8):
Practices:
There is an inherent trial and error component to ministry work - things you don’t know about yourself and the work until you get in and do it.
Thorns and thistles infest churches and mission teams too, some more so than others, so it may be that the thorns and thistles of a particular church or mission team are a bad fit for your gifts and composition.
To say this isn’t a good fit isn’t always to be unfaithful to the Lord.
This is why the pressure to arrive by the time you are 28 is unreasonable. There’s a lot of refinement that needs to take place in your heart. You want to make sure you hit 40 somewhat self-aware, with a wife who still likes you, and with the wisdom to know how best to steward the rest of your life.
There are times when it’s not giving up to stop doing a thing - whether that be a side hustle or your role on a team
Don’t leave your boss, mission team, coworkers, church high and dry with this. Talk to people about the challenges you are facing, have people praying for you, and attempt (as much as you can control) to give people a long runway to adjust if you plan to go elsewhere.
AM I FULLY PRESENT?
Biblical Principles: Steward the days (Eph. 5:16); life like vapor (Jam. 4:14); one leader comes and goes (Ecclesiastes):
Practices:
Do what you’ve committed to do for the time you are paid to do that thing.
Doing work you don’t want to do but have committed to do is a catalyst for sanctification - it will make you a better husband, father, and person.
Don’t leave people high and dry on commitments you aren’t keeping while you look for something that would fit you better.
Keep a close watch on yourself and give yourself to some other authority (such as elders) to ensure that you aren’t cutting corners to dabble in secondary sandboxes when you are paid and expected to be doing a certain job).
If it’s not a good fit, make plans and shift rather than lingering too long.
AM I HEALTHY?
Biblical Principles: Rest (Mk. 6:30-32); Prayer (Luke 5:16); Sabbath (Gen. 2:1-3):
Practices:
Often our struggles with priorities revolve around the fact that we are tired. Many pastors and missionaries struggle to sleep, which is often an indication of stress and may indicate a lack of trust in the Lord.
Learn how you rest and give yourself to that habit on a regular basis.
Press against the notion that recreation is inherently selfish, but make sure these hobbies/recreations are actually re-creating you and not just diverting your energy.
Physical fitness matters - obese pastors hurt themselves and their churches. Ministry work isn’t inherently active (much time sitting, talking, typing) so you will have to find ways to move your body and eat well.
See ministry as a holistic work, much more so than other vocations. It takes a healthy mind, body, and soul to attend to the needs of your flock.
