On Pastoring: Four Easy Ways to Stay Connected and Accessible
I worked as a High School English teacher for a few years in the early 2000’s. It was one of the most effective training schools for life I could have ever experienced. It turned out that I loved the classroom. I enjoyed the challenge of facing 40 or so different teens every 45 minutes and trying to persuade them that Dickens and Shakespeare were worthy of their precious attention. I experienced moderate success too. I mean, it wasn’t like Dead Poet’s Society or something, but one or two kids leaned in and I still hear from some of them 20 years later and I take that as a bit of a win. I didn’t enjoy the other aspects of the educator’s job though. I hated the endless admin, the need to work with inept government departments, the many parent consults (as parents often have very little idea of what is really taking place in their kid’s daily lives), the staff room drama and lots of other little educationally adjacent responsibilities. The problem I faced though was that the natural progression of an educator within the system was to get promoted away from the thing that I enjoyed and towards the thing I loathed. As a young man, looking to get married and start a family, I needed to build my career and take any possible promotion and the pitiable raise that came with it, but with each new opportunity came less teaching and more admin.
Success in the classroom was rewarded with less time in the classroom. It is a bit of a busted system.
And pastoring can be the same.
I had no idea when I started pastoring that the better I got at preaching and pastoring, the more the church would grow, the more complex my leadership would become, the more I would get pulled into pastorally adjacent (and essential) tasks, and the less time I would get to spend on pastoring and preaching.
My response, when it started happening, (and I say this to my shame) was to buy in to the trend of the CEO pastor in the office who is very busy working on the church and very seldom available to do the unglamorous shepherding in the church. I ring-fenced my calendar (a necessity to be sure) and set a gatekeeper in place who protected my time and accessibility very closely. This felt necessary in order to survive the intense busyness that comes with a rapidly growing church. It felt like wisdom, but I soon found myself like a promoted school teacher spending all of their time outside of the classroom. I found myself leading a large team, managing a complex budget, co-ordinating the efforts of multiple ministries, which were all essential things to do, but I couldn’t help the feeling that I was doing them in a manner that was taking me away from the very people I was called to be among.
When I moved roles and churches I vowed it would be different. I wanted to embody Peter’s call to fellow elders when he exhorted them to shepherd the flock of God that was AMONG them (1 Pet 5:2). I wanted to be among a people, shepherding from the middle and not from the corner (office). But I soon found that unless I established firm guardrails of guaranteed connectivity and availability to and among the people I served then I would soon make all of the same mistakes.
Below then are four unbelievably easy things I do to maintain pastoral connectivity and availability even - and especially - in the midst of very busy, and very large, ministry environments. I am painfully aware that these sound small, obvious, and perhaps even pitiable, and that none of them would be necessary in a smaller church (a blog topic for another day) but they have all been really effective tools that have helped me and the people I serve as we seek to walk this life of Jesus following AMONG one another.
Weekly Pastoral Letters
When I moved to Austin, I took my place among an existing group of people. They didn’t know me and I didn’t know them and so I wanted a simple routine and discipline which could help them to know me better and could open the door for them to communicate with me regularly. And so, I launched a weekly email simply titled “Thursday Thoughts” which I started sending as my last order of business every Thursday (I sabbath on Friday.) It was, and still is, such a small and simple discipline, and I don’t want to overestimate its impact or efficacy, but it has really helped our people to know me more and it has opened weekly opportunities for our people for engagement, response, prayer, questions, and meeting requests (more on that in the next point.)
I have deliberately kept these emails away from the topics of the business of the church and have rather protected them as a space for pastoral observations and devotional musings. You can find examples of my weekly letters here.
An Accessible Calendar
Managing a calendar in a church of thousands of people is something that requires discipline and planning, but it can be done, and it can be done in a way that puts agency in the hands of your people, and makes you feel more accessible to them, rather than less.
I use a third party calendar management tool called calend.ly but there are many like it. I try plan a few weeks ahead by pre-blocking time off for prayer, reading, study, prep and known meetings. Then, I make different blocks of time available on my published calend.ly which I publish in my weekly email. The possible options for meetings include: a video or phone call, lunch or breakfast with me, lunch or breakfast with me and Sue (my wife), or a coffee with me. It is true that I really need to plan well to make this effective and it is also true that people might have to look quite far into the future to find an available slot, but I have found that our people really prefer this proactive approach, rather than me promising them to look in my calendar and seeing where we might both have an available slot.
You can view an example of my calend.ly here. Please don’t use it unless you are part of our local church though.
Hand-Written Notes
Every Monday I start my work day by writing small hand-written notes to any of our members who have a birthday in that upcoming week. We mail these off as small reminders that people are loved, celebrated, known and appreciated.
I love what G.K. Chesterton said about birthdays …
“The first fact about the celebration of birthdays is that it is a good way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.”
Getting a hand-written note with some prayers, blessing and a Scripture to consider is a simple reminder that your church celebrates that you are alive.
Spirit-Led Encouragement Texts
This one might feel a bit strange, but once a week I put an hour on my calendar that is reserved for what I call “Spirit-Led Encouragement Texts.” I simply scroll through our members list slowly, asking the Spirit who could use some encouragement, and when I sense that it is true of someone, I text them. Nothing fancy, usually just a verse, or a simple call to press on in faith. It is amazing how many times I get a message back saying how well-timed it was, and even if it wasn’t, who doesn’t need a little extra encouragement anyway?
I want to live a pastoral life AMONG a group of people. Every day I face temptations that seek to pull me away from that reality. These are the very simple ways that I fight that temptation, and by God’s grace, they have proved relatively fruitful so far.
How about you pastor friends? What is working well for you?
