What Is the Role of a Pastor?

Question 09078

Ask ten church members what pastoral ministry involves and you will get ten answers, most of them shaped by the last minister they had rather than by the New Testament. Some picture a chief executive. Some picture a chaplain who visits and comforts. Some, increasingly, picture a communicator with a platform. The text has something more specific in mind.

I write this as someone who has been doing the job for long enough to have made most of the available mistakes. What follows is not an ideal I have achieved but the standard I keep being called back to, which is a more useful thing to offer anyway.

The Shepherd Image Governs Pastoral Ministry

The word pastor simply means shepherd. The Greek is poimen, and the same root gives us the verb Peter uses when he tells the elders to shepherd the flock of God that is among you (1 Peter 5:2). Everything else in the job description flows from that picture, and the picture is agricultural rather than corporate.

Shepherds do four things. They feed, they guard, they lead, and they tend the individual animal that is hurt or wandering. Read the pastoral instructions of the New Testament and you will find those four activities everywhere, which suggests that pastoral ministry has not changed as much in two thousand years as our job advertisements imply.

Feeding the Flock

The first responsibility is teaching, and it is not one task among many. Paul’s charge to Timothy is blunt: preach the word, be ready in season and out of season (2 Timothy 4:2). An elder must be able to teach (1 Timothy 3:2), and it is the one competence in the qualification lists that is not purely about character.

That means study, and study takes time that looks unproductive to anybody watching from outside. A minister in his study with the Greek text open is working, though it does not photograph well. When the apostles refused to be drawn away from prayer and the ministry of the word in Acts 6:2-4, they were protecting exactly this, and they created the diaconate in order to do it.

I would add that feeding means the whole counsel of God rather than the parts a congregation enjoys. A pastor who preaches only his favourite themes produces a lopsided church, and the deficiency usually shows up years later in a crisis for which nobody was prepared.

Guarding the Flock

Paul’s warning at Miletus is one of the soberest passages on pastoral ministry in Scripture. Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, he says, for fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock (Acts 20:28-31). Guarding is not an optional temperament for the combative. It is part of the office.

In practice this means naming error, refusing platforms to teachers whose doctrine is unsound, and being willing to be thought narrow. It is the least popular part of the work and the one most likely to cost a minister friendships. It is also the part that protects a congregation from the drift that overtakes churches whose leaders wanted only to be liked.

Leading Without Lording

Peter draws the line with precision: shepherd the flock, exercising oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, not for shameful gain but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock (1 Peter 5:2-3). Leadership is real, and domination is forbidden, and holding both is the daily discipline of the work.

I do not believe in pastoral authority that places itself above the congregation. In my own church the membership holds the final say at church meetings. My deacons and I bring matters with our recommendations and our reasoning, and the members are entirely free to decide otherwise, and we are bound by what they decide. That is genuine accountability rather than a formality, and I would not want to serve without it.

The authority a pastor does carry is the authority of the word he preaches rather than of the office he holds. When I say something the text says, it binds the conscience. When I say something the text does not say, it is my opinion and should be weighed as such. Confusing those two is where most abuse begins.

Tending the Individual

Then there is the unglamorous majority of the work. Hospital visits. Sitting with a family after a death. The long conversation with a couple whose marriage is failing. The young man who cannot stop and is ashamed. None of this appears in any account of ministerial success and all of it is the job.

Paul reminds the Ephesian elders that he did not shrink from teaching in public and from house to house (Acts 20:20). Public and personal, both. A preacher who never enters a home does not know his people well enough to feed them, and the sermon suffers long before anybody can identify why.

What Pastoral Ministry Is Not

It is worth naming the distortions. The pastor is not the church’s employee in the sense of being managed by whoever complains loudest. He is not a chief executive whose task is organisational growth. He is not a celebrity whose personality carries the congregation, and any church built on one man’s charisma will discover its foundations the day he leaves.

He is also not a substitute for the ministry of the members. Ephesians 4 says the gifts were given to equip the saints for the work of ministry, which means the pastor’s job is to make himself less indispensable rather than more. A congregation where all the ministry is done by the minister has misunderstood the arrangement entirely.

Working With Others, Not Alone

One correction the New Testament repeatedly applies to our expectations is that pastoral ministry is a shared work. Every reference to church leadership in Acts and the letters is plural. Paul appointed elders, in the plural, in every church (Acts 14:23). Peter writes to elders as a body. The lone minister carrying a congregation on his own shoulders is a later development and not a healthy one.

That matters for the man and for the church. For the man, because isolation is where discouragement, pride and moral failure all breed most easily, and every minister I have known who fell had first become unaccountable. For the church, because a congregation whose entire spiritual life runs through one personality is fragile in a way it does not realise until he is ill.

In smaller congregations, and mine is not large, this is easier said than arranged. My deacons presently function in both an elder and a deacon capacity, which is a practical accommodation rather than an ideal. Even so, the principle can be honoured. Share the burden, invite genuine challenge, and let somebody know you well enough to ask you difficult questions.

There is a further implication for how we train men for pastoral ministry. A candidate formed entirely in a classroom and then dropped alone into a parish has been badly served. The apostolic pattern was apprenticeship, with Timothy travelling alongside Paul before he was left in Ephesus, and I would like to see far more of that among us.

The Man Himself

The qualification lists in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9 are almost entirely about character. Above reproach, self controlled, hospitable, not a drunkard, not violent, not a lover of money, managing his own household well, well thought of by outsiders. Only one item concerns competence. God evidently cares more about what a minister is than about what he can do.

Which means pastoral ministry begins with the pastor’s own walk with God. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching, Paul writes, in that order (1 Timothy 4:16). A man cannot lead people somewhere he is not going, and the flock always knows.

So, now what?

If you are a church member, pray for your minister specifically rather than generally, and protect his study time as jealously as he does. Ask yourself whether your expectations of him come from Scripture or from the last church you attended.

If you are in pastoral ministry, take the four shepherd tasks and audit your last month honestly against them. Most of us discover that one has quietly swallowed the others. And read the role of elders and how pastors should be trained and called alongside this, since the office is never meant to be carried alone.

When the Chief Shepherd appears, what will He say about the way you have handled the portion of His flock He entrusted to you?

Pastoral ministry is finally an act of trust. The flock belongs to Jesus, He bought it with His own blood, and He has not delegated the outcome to us. That is the only thought that makes the work bearable on the difficult Mondays, and it happens also to be true.

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.

1 Peter 5:2-3 (ESV)