The pastor is called to be a shepherd. Shepherding is quiet work involving feeding, caring, leading, and protecting. This isn’t sexy, big, glamorous work. It’s daily and mundane, often behind closed doors. It’s done in counseling sessions with weeping spouses and beside hospital beds. It happens on Saturday nights when preparing the sermon.

Four years ago, I left pastoral ministry. Without getting into any details, I needed to get out for my personal and spiritual health. I had just come out of a meat grinder of a year and was thoroughly confused, angry, and desperately needed to catch my breath.

And while leaving ministry has been tough, it’s been life-giving. I’ve learned things about myself, God, and pastoral ministry that are nearly impossible to learn when you’re in the midst of pastoral work.

What exactly have I learned? Here are 3 crucial lessons.

1) Ministry Can Put You In A Bubble

Before my departure, I was basically in or around ministry in one form or another for my entire life. I grew up in a pastor’s home, started leading worship at age 18, led our college ministry at 20, and became a vocational pastor at 25.

I was all in, all the time. Prick me and I bled ministry.

But ministry is a funny thing. The longer you’re in it, the more your forget what it’s like outside it. Every day, you can spend your time in commentaries and budget meetings and strategic planning sessions and Sunday reviews. You may immerse yourself in study and prayer, church wide initiatives and creating formal paths to membership.

You can become a ministry “bubble boy” of sorts – mentally cut off, isolated in a somewhat artificial world that most people never enter. Maybe not quite this extreme, but you get the point.

It’s easy to get so wrapped up in a ministry mindset that you forget what it’s like to be a “normal” Christian with normal problems working a 9-5 job. You forget that 99% of the congregation doesn’t think about what you think about. They are preoccupied with simply being faithful Christians – paying the bills, caring for family, navigating relational dysfunction, struggling with the grit and grind of marriage.

They don’t have a 5-year vision for the church. They’re just trying to make it on Sundays.

This has at least three implications for me in the future.

1. Be with people in non-ministry related ways. Not at community group or in formal counseling sessions. Not only on Sundays. More like over a slow cup of coffee or pint of beer, just spending time together like “normal” people do. No agenda. No specific purpose. Not for the purpose of dispensing pastoral wisdom. Just presence. To learn what their lives are like. Their struggles, battles, and joys.
2. To lead people slowly through any change. Though I may have been pondering a particular change for months, when I mention it to someone it’s probably the first time they’re hearing it. To expect them to be immediately on board is absurd. They probably need months to process as well.
3. Lay elders are really valuable. Vocational elders are hugely important, but so are lay elders. They live “regular” Christian lives while still be integrally involved in church leadership. They can help me see when an idea is unrealistic, unreasonable, or just plain idiotic. They can function as guardrails when ambition or stupidity threatens to take me over a cliff.

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