October has been designated as national Clergy Appreciation Month. So I am dedicating this week’s column to all of the men and women who have sacrificially heeded the call to preach the Gospel. It has been said (by those who don’t know any better) that preachers have an easy life-- they preach a couple of sermons, play golf a couple of days, and get invited to a lot of neat functions every week. Well, I must say, I’ve been preaching for thirty-five years now and I have never had a week quite that easy.
The perfect pastor has been described (by those same people) as one who “preaches exactly twenty minutes and then sits down. One who condemns sin but never hurts anyone’s feelings. A perfect pastor labors from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. in every kind of work, from preaching to custodial service. He or she makes sixty dollars a week, wears good clothes, buys good books regularly, has a nice family, drives a good car, and gives thirty dollars a week to the church. A perfect pastor also stands ready to contribute to every good work that comes along.
“The ideal pastor is twenty-six years old and has been preaching for thirty years. He is at once tall and short, thin and heavyset, and handsome. He has one brown eye and one blue; his hair is parted in the middle with the left-side dark and straight and the right-side brown and wavy. He has a burning desire to work with teenagers and spends all his time with older folks. He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his work. He makes fifteen calls a day on church members, spends all his time evangelizing the unchurched, and is never out of his office!”
As extraordinary as that may sound, these are just a few of the expectations people place upon clergy. One could actually die trying to please everybody. No, there’s just one way a minister can obey God and still keep his/her sanity: be yourself. That’s the way God created you!
One day, a man handed me a piece of folded up notebook paper. On the top it read, “How To Get Rid of Your Pastor.” Honestly, I didn’t know whether to read it or not. I looked up at him-- hoping it was a joke. “Go ahead,” he said, with a sheepish grin. “I think you need to read this.” I opened it and what I read was not what I expected.
This is what was in the note: “Five Ways to Get Rid of Your Pastor: 1. Look him straight in the eye and say ‘Amen,’ and he’ll preach himself to death. 2. Give him a living wage. He’s been on a starvation salary for so long that he’ll eat himself to death. 3. Brag about all his good points to him, and he’ll work himself to death. 4. Go and tell him you want to help in the church, and he’ll have a heart attack and die. 5. Have the church unite together in prayer for him and really get behind him and help him, and then a bigger church will call him from you.”
Needless to say, I got a good laugh out of that. Oh, yeah, ministers do enjoy a good laugh every now and then. If you really want to bless your minister this month, remember that he or she is human and they need your encouragement and prayers!
Rev. Doug Johnson, Senior Pastor, Lexington First Assembly of God in Lexington, KY
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