Jason Daye 
Welcome to FrontStage BackStage. This week, we have a hand-picked highlight that we believe you will find valuable. If you do, we invite you to listen to the full conversation. You can find the link to the complete episode in the description. As always, please Like, Comment, Subscribe, and Share, so we can continue to bring you meaningful ministry content, helping you and pastors and ministry leaders, just like you, flourish in both life and leadership. Are you ready? Let's go. I think that's one of the things that can help sustain us, because, because, really, we're wrestling with an issue of sustainability in the pastor right now and I know a lot of the reason that that Barna has done the research, they've done a lot of the work that you have done, along with Barna, in producing the resilient pastor, you know, is addressing a lot of this, you know, I mean, and just taking a snapshot of where we are as the church. And then, you know, what is God longing to birth within us, and how, how is he longing to renew us? Talk to us a little bit, Glen, about how have the really expects, expectations and perceptions of the pastor has changed over years, especially, you know, last couple decades or so.

Glenn Packiam 
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Jason, you think about it. You know, seminaries were equipped, were designed to equip pastors for a particular set of expectations, and those expectations were initially that you would be well-versed in the scriptures, so you'd be able to handle the Bible and theology church history, and that's sort of what seminaries were designed to produce. Because that was the expectation of the people. You can go to your pastor for questions about God, about the Bible, and about a life with God. Well, then things began to change a little bit. And somewhere, maybe in the 70s or so, there was this expectation that actually, pastors need to learn about counseling techniques and about therapy and this. I'm not knocking this. There's a lot of good that's come from this. I do agree, pastors have had to learn so that we don't give sort of pat answers about how to solve a marriage or how to, you know, parenting issues, because there's wisdom in the Scripture, but we need to pair that wisdom with how God has revealed wisdom through the sciences. I you know, all truth is God's truth, and this is, this is the Lord's world. So, yeah, I do believe in that kind of robust interdisciplinary work. It's just that we kind of now expect pastors to be experts in trauma and in, you know, all of these things that we're not well equipped for and can't be well equipped for. And so that was maybe in the in the 70s or so. And then you see in the 80s and 90s, this, wait a minute, it's actually visionary leadership. And so all these books and conferences emerge. You know, you got to be an entrepreneur, you got to be a brilliant strategic thinker. Or, you know, pastors are reading articles from Harvard Business Review, and we're trying to do our best to figure this out, because, yeah, you know, we're there's an organizational side of this that seminaries didn't prepare us for. And then, and then maybe in the last, you know, 1015 years, there's been this sense of pastors ought to be political commentators, and then maybe even social activists, that we don't just comment on what's happening. We've got to lead a movement or a sort of resistance, or whatever it might be, and that looks different ways, depending on which political priorities someone is thinking about. And it's not that these expectations of a pastor are unfair in and of themselves. I think you could find biblical figures, and you could say, oh, I'm just asking my pastor to be like a prophet, like Moses, or I'm just asking my pastor to be like, you know, and all of those things you could probably find good justification for. It's just that these expectations have not been interchangeable. They have not replaced one another. They've just sort of stacked, and so now the weight of pressure of what we're supposed to be as a pastor it's untenable. There is no human being that can be all of those things.

Jason Daye 
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember at the last church where I was lead pastor, I shared with our, you know, our elders board, and I gave them all kind of low homework assignment and gave them a list of all these different, you know, tasks and roles that a pastor has. I just asked him, I said, Hey, can you guys just, or the next week go through this and just next to each one, you know, how many hours do you think I, you know, as the pastor, should contribute to each of these different tasks, right? So then I collected them all, and then, of course, as you know, in the next meeting I shared, I said, Hey, if I was to fulfill everyone just in this room's expectations, let alone the entire church just this room, you know, I'd be working whatever 128 hours, or whatever came out to be a week, you know. And I would have no time for Monica and the kids, you know, my family, or anything else like and so it's that idea that you just, like you said, the expectations just kind of stack, right?

Glenn Packiam 
Yeah,

Jason Daye 
And we feel this weight as pastors, and you know, most pastors that I know, we want to not necessarily fulfill the expectations of our people, but we want to be good and faithful pastors. We want to be responsible. People in the way that we minister to the people God has entrusted to us. You know that's, that's our heart. And so when these, when we feel these expectations, and we have a heart, you know, that we want to serve. I mean, that's why we're why we're in ministry, that can just be such a challenge for a pastor just trying to balance life, ministry, that sort of a thing.

Glenn Packiam 
It's so true. I mean, the vast majority of pastors, Jason, these are good-hearted women and men who are just trying to be faithful to Jesus, just trying, and they're putting themselves last. They're putting their family second to last, and then and they're putting everybody else first. And it's just untenable. And so I do think part of our role as pastors, and Eugene wrote about this too, is to actually educate our people like you did. I mean, what a brilliant example, Jason, of you saying, Okay, guys, fill out the sport and tell me which you know, because that's a form of discipling our people, even our elders, sometimes discipling them to recognize what actually is the heart of this role? And what am I? What do you want me to prioritize? And I do think, you know, Eugene had his own way of prioritizing for himself, prayer, study, and spiritual direction, and we can argue that maybe that is the heart of it. I think there's some freedom here for pastors to say, Well, what do I do best? What are the particular gifts that I have been given from the Lord, and maybe you, you fill the pastoral office in a way that resembles an evangelist a little bit more? Well, maybe that, maybe that's okay. How do we, how do we think about the right teams? So part of the answer is educating our church and our elder team, but the other part of the answer is being willing to rethink collaboration, you know, later in the book, you know. So the part one is these challenges later, the very end of the book, when I look towards sort of a hopeful future, one of the responses to this is the collaborative church. There's got to be some way of saying a healthy teams, even if it's even if there is a clear leader, and many churches will have a clear, sort of a singular leader that doesn't preclude or that doesn't eliminate the contribution of a strong, healthy team.

Jason Daye 
FrontStage Backstage is a ministry of PastorServe. Here at PastorServe, we love walking alongside of pastors and ministry leaders. If you'd like to learn details on how you might qualify for a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches. Please visit PastorServe.org/freesession. Now FrontStage BackStage is more than just another podcast. In fact, we create an entire toolkit that complements every single conversation. You can find this toolkit at PastorServe.org/network for this episode, and for every episode in the toolkit, you'll find a number of resources, including our ministry leaders' growth guide. In the growth guide, you'll find both questions and insights that are pulled from the conversation that you and the leaders at your local church or ministry can process together to consider how this content relates to your particular ministry context. Again, you can find the toolkit at PastorServe.org/network. Now we hope that you are finding this content valuable, and if so, we'd love for you to share, comment, like, follow, subscribe, that engagement is incredibly important. And also please take a moment to give us a review on your favorite podcast platform, your engagement and your reviews help other pastors and ministry leaders help find this valuable content. I'm Jason Daye, and I'm encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. Thank you, and God Bless.