Being a Pastor and a Father

This morning, my Father's Day began the way it pretty much always does.  I woke at a tick before seven am, the last few tweaks to the sermon humming and nudging in my brain.   My wife woke too, and gathered herself up to go rouse the boys.

Father's Day without breakfast in bed, you see, would be a disappointment.  Not so much for me, but for the guys.  So for the better part of a half-hour, I lay in bed, awake, waiting as the breakfast gradually assembled itself.

Then, in came the boys with the coffee and the cinnamon rolls and the vegetarian pseudo-sausage.  Mmm, pseudo-sausage.   I read the card pulled together by the little guy.  The big guy asked if he could hang out and eat cinnamon rolls with me...so of course I said yes.   My 13 year old wants to hang with his dad?   I'll take every moment of that I can get.

We hung and talked and ate for about 10 minutes, and then I scrambled to get ready and out the door and off to a 9:00 AM Contemplative Worship.

Father's Day is always a work day, if you're a pastor.

That, I think, is emblematic of one of the challenges facing any male with offspring who is called to serve a community of Jesus people.   The demands of community and call frequently stand in between you and your kids.   Almost all of the pastors I know are in a state of constant motion, leaping from a meeting to a visitation to a funeral to a counseling session.   We too often live the lives we tell our congregants not to live, out of balance and shimmering with the stress of being reactive to a thousand demands.

For kids of pastor-dads, this can often mean that dad is distant, disengaged, and distracted by the community that consumes them.   Given the male propensity to get completely focused on the task directly in front of them, the relationship between fathers and their Pii-Kay progeny can often be defined by distance, a distance magnified emotionally by the need for those younglings to perform and be Model Jesus Children in the display window of the pastor's smoke-and-mirrors-perfect family life.

It's an unworkable John Edwards-esque balance, being both "married to the church" and having kids with another woman.  But to be effectively a father and a Christian, it means having the courage to stand in the balance.  If you are going to serve the church, there are things that you just are gonna have to miss, just like I missed my sons' swim team time trials this Saturday because I was at a training retreat.   Or how I bowed out of an event to which I'd been invited by a church member, because I had a family gathering to which I had committed.  To be wise and in balance, things must give on both sides.  The most important thing that has to give is your pride, as you delude yourself into believing that 1) you can do it all and 2) you need to do it all.

Being a good father and a good pastor simultaneously means having the confidence to stand firm in both your calling to teach and proclaim and your calling to be present and aware of lives of your children.

Your Pastor is Not...

This last Sunday, after worship but before I trucked out for an afternoon meeting with our auditor, I gathered with a group of folks from my congregation and did an hour or more of Holy and Hopeful conversation about the future of my church.

The topic:  what are they looking for in the person who will replace me.

It's a peculiar situation to be in for any pastor.  But as I'm convinced that my time of call to this ministry has ended, it's necessary to be doing some of the thinking and prayer and discernment work prior to my departure at the end of October.  And, strangely enough, it feels right...in a way that church hasn't for a while.  Folks were getting it done, and having fun, and bonding together as a community looking hopefully towards their future.  People who don't usually speak up felt empowered to speak, and had their suggestions affirmed.  It was a good, high energy hour.

The framing question for the conversation was: "Our pastor is..." and then folks completed the sentence, and discussed what that meant.   It was useful, both in terms of framing the expectations of the church community as they look hopefully towards the future, but also in terms of surfacing some of the ways those expectations might pose a stumbling block. 

Expectations can stand in tension with one another.  Yearning for a leader who is calm and tolerant and accepting of the character of a community stands in potential tension with the desire for a pastor who is a change agent working to "unblock" a community where it's just spinning in increasingly frustrated circles.    Looking for a pastor who is a competent, experienced manager of people stands in potential tension with the desire for a creative, passionate outpourer of Jesus-enthusiasm.

And expectations that are too high...well.  We know where that leads us.  I reminded the group of this repeatedly, as the list of superlatives and hopes stacked up high. 

But after that conversation, I found myself thinking not about what my successor will be, but what my successor will not be.  And should not be, because if they are, then they're not going to be fulfilling their calling.

For the next few posts, I think I'll explore some of the things that a pastor is not.  What isn't a pastor?

Any thoughts?