When I look back, I probably did not know much of what to expect when I became a full-time minister. I knew about the job and my responsibilities, but I had not yet immersed myself in the world of ministry. Over the past few years, I have learned some very valuable lessons about ministry and what it means to be a minister.
1. You are always a minister, even when you are “off the clock.” If you are an accountant, you can basically stop being an accountant when you leave the office. If you want to have an unbalanced checkbook or want to overspend your bank account, it will not likely impact your career as an accountant. As a minister, you are always a minister. When people see you at Wal-Mart or at the movies, you are a minister. At night when a student needs to talk because of a mistake they have made or they have been thrown out of the house, you are a minister. When you are doing your morning prayers, you do so as a minister. It’s not something that you turn off. It is who you are.
2. Working at a church changes how you worship at your church. This is one of the big observations that many ministers make early on in their ministry. It may not be universal, but working at a church will likely affect how you approach your church’s worship. If you are like me, you wince each time you see a misspelled word on the worship slide or you get antsy when a transition seems to be taking too long. I find myself having to fight the urge to constantly be evaluating the worship service while it is happening. Some ministers also find that their current church has a very different style than they are used to. It takes work, but there is a great deal of comfort and encouragement in looking around the room and realizing that these people are here to seek after God and you are there to help them do it.
3. You minister out of the overflow of your relationship with God. If your relationship with God is struggling, you will struggle as a minister. So many of my great ministry moments have come from sharing what I am personally learning or what I have recently read rather than from the talk that I spent time preparing. If you are faithful in dwelling in the Scriptures, you will find yourself with a greater depth of ministry. When you shrink back from God and try to do ministry on autopilot, everything suffers. Ministry is too difficult for a foundation built on anything other than a desire to work for God’s glory and for His kingdom.
4. Ministry requires initiative. Some churches have highly structured schedules and tasks for their ministers. Most churches, however, simply expect you to take an incredible amount of initiative when it comes to accomplishing the work of your ministry. Truthfully, it can be quite easy to coast in a church position. There is a challenge in making sure you use your time wisely. This takes constant evaluation and self-assessment, but when it works, you find yourself achieving things you never thought possible.
5. There is always more to do than you can possibly accomplish. Your goal is not to make 60 cars in a month or bill 300 hours. Your job is to help people become true disciples of Christ. This takes time and does not work in some type of linear progression. Your people will have ups and downs. They will have mountain top moments and crises of faith. They will experience transformation in one area and ridiculous choices in another. And that is okay. The goal is to be on a journey with Christ, being ever transformed. Our goal is to do what we can in the time we have been given to help people along in that journey. At the end of the day, we cannot control other people or even convince them. We just do our best. There will always be more people we could meet with or more Bible studies to write, but when we know that we have honored God with our time and efforts, He will do the rest. A minister who works 80 hours a week will only be a minister for a few years. Pace yourself.
Journey of Faith 