Pastors: the Hidden Essential Workers
Pastor, I see you. You’re tired. You’re anxious. You’re annoyed. You’re—human.
Part of the difficulty of being a pastor is that the role is often seen as peripheral in society. How can you talk about pastors as essential workers when the term is applied to people literally saving people’s lives?
Simple. While we absolutely need medical practitioners and first responders to keep people alive, we need pastors to keep people living. In a society that has gone mad by pandemic and politic alike, pastors are essential in this season (indeed, every season), in order for society to remain, not just healthy, but holy—not only surviving, but flourishing. That’s why pastors are essential, though hidden from the limelight.
While the news (rightly) headlines heroic tales of doctors and nurses saving lives, the essential shepherds I know are personally and repeatedly checking in with those in their care. They are feeding those who are hungry. They are attempting to connect those who have lost jobs with new ones. They are praying over the fearful. They’re administering last rites for those at death’s door. Amidst their own anxiety over the future, they are courageously plowing forward to try to model what it looks like to trust God amidst very uncertain times.
The difficulty for the modern pastor is these deeds are often hidden. They are unrecognized—they are unsung. They don’t qualify for awards or recognitions. The essential shepherd carries a tremendous weight (Sam Chand’s book Leadership Pain highlights that many life insurance companies place the pastor in the same risk category as a munitions worker or logger) and are frequently tormented by their own feelings of inadequacy. For many, they are isolated because they believe their congregation to be unable to handle seeing their humanity without packing up and leaving to go to the church down the street. In the eyes of society they have been lumped in with charlatans fleecing the flock for personal gain, though many are sorely underpaid and often use their own resources to fund underfunded programs at their church.
For pastors to speak of their own difficulties, insecurities, frustrations, etc., is seen by many to be self-serving. From the outside the job looks like a Sunday morning grandstanding followed by a week’s worth of hanging out over coffee. Unless they themselves have been personally impacted, the essential work of the pastor largely goes unnoticed—The middle of the night prayer for a grieving parishioner in your living room or the 4:30am wakeup call to visit a parishioner ahead of a surgery—only to reach the office to find nasty note about how you’re not doing enough.
The essential shepherds I know recognize that the church in America is perilously close to throwing itself over the balcony into the arms of its two favorite lovers: Civil Religion and racism—and running off for good. Part of the crucial work of the pastor in modern society is to beckon people toward faithful allegiance to Jesus and away from the Siren’s call of those idolatrous forces that would co-opt the church for sinister purposes. These essential shepherds are tired—tired from fighting to disciple their people and warn them of the perils of the moment when many would not only rather be discipled by their favorite cable news station, but indeed attack the pastor for suggesting that things may not be as they seem to be.
The essential shepherds I know are bearing witness to how the Christian masses are being recruited to the front lines of a “Take America Back for God” movement and have left the Church vulnerable for the enemy to attack from within, eroding its faithful witness to the gospel and dismantling its bonds of unity. I’ve talked to these essential shepherds, I’ve read their social media, I’ve exchanged text messages—and I can hear the fatigue in their voices as they fight against a seemingly inevitable outcome of their people succumbing to the allures of empire––to pride over meekness—to taking up one’s rights instead of one’s cross.
These essential shepherds I know are scrambling to make sense of the vulnerabilities the pandemic has highlighted in their church life. They have seen the dramatic and urgent need for discipleship and many have felt remorse about not prioritizing it sooner. They have been dismayed at how people are swayed by consumer preferences, and they take the heat for all of it: “We’re meeting too soon!” “We should have resumed meeting sooner!” “You’re giving in to the media hype!” “You’re not taking this seriously enough!” And a failure to walk that tightrope inevitably has triggered the consumeristic worldview of the critics, causing them to pack up and move to the next church down the street that will better suit their preferences. The essential shepherds I know are navigating uncharted waters, many with crews ready to mutiny.
Pastor, I see you. You’re human. You’ve been beat up during this season. You’ve taken bad faith accusations, people misreading your motives, questioning your choice to publicly stand when they would rather you be quiet and sit. Several of you I know have even lost your positions due to the stands that you’ve taken. I see you. You’re essential. You’re appreciated. And there’s more like you—more in the same boat as you, than what you probably think there is.
Pastor, I see you. Keep your head up.
