A faithful shepherd will pace himself for the long haul given the nature of the work. Pastors are not pounding out “products,” but doing heart work. And heart work can be messy, unpredictable, and slow to change.

The Tortoise wins.

I remember hearing Aesop’s famous fable The Hare & the Tortoise as a little boy and thinking, “I’d still like to be the hare. After all, the tortoise may win, but who wants to be a tortoise?”

Many years later I’ve reconsidered, especially when it comes to pastoral ministry. If there ever was a vocation wherein “the race is not to the swift,” it’s the pastorate. A faithful shepherd will pace himself for the long haul given the nature of the work. Pastors are not pounding out “products,” but doing heart work. And heart work can be messy, unpredictable, and slow to change.

When I was a child our family took annual trips from our Southern California home to the northwest corner of Iowa to visit my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins. I come from a family of German immigrants who came to Iowa for its rich farmland. I recall the first time my grandfather pointed out the living room window of their home (a converted school house overlooking farms as far as the eye could see) as he explained to me the way farmers rotated out the crops each year: corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans. This, I learned, was good for the soil. With other stories my grandfather would tell of how farmers needed great effort and patience as they waited for the crops to come in. To see the fruits of their labor farmers needed time: time to prepare the soil, time to plant, time to water and, finally, time to bring in the harvest. Being a farmer is not work for those wanting instant gratification. The parallels to the pastorate are many. Much like the farmer, pastoral ministry demands patient toil.

This, of course, is not the world we live in. We live in the age of instant. We want our WiFi to fly, our coffee ready, our music streaming, our shopping at the speed of Prime, and our social media and news feeds constantly refreshed. As Cal Newport helpfully observes, our age mitigates against “deep work.” ¹ And pastoral ministry is the ultimate deep work. In 2009 David Gordon concluded that Johnny Can’t Preachin large part because Johnny can’t read and write. ² The modern day preacher seems increasingly unable to do the deep work required given how media have shaped the messenger. Gordon was prophetic writing before smart phones, Twitter, and texting became ubiquitous in the culture making his thesis still more tenable. In the last decade there’s been a steady stream of scholarship focused on the impact of digital media on the mind. And not only on our minds, but our humanity itself may be at stake. The literature is ominous regarding the effects of our technological age. ³

At Some Pastors and Teachers we want to go counter to today’s frenetic pace. Our digital world feels frenzied because, well, it is. There is a hyperactivity to our time that works against pastoral ministry. What Nicholas Carr observes about the impact of the Internet on his life and thought can be applied to pastors today:

The boons [of the Internet] are real. But they come at a price. As McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ⁴

Pastoral work is not like riding a Jet Ski — zipping along the surface water of God’s Word and people’s hearts. Pastors are “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1) laboring for people’s “progress and joy in the faith” (Philippians 1:25). This is not work done in the shallows.

This is the vital lesson the apostles learned early on in the church. In Acts 6 we see the temptation for the church’s leadership to be pulled away from the deep work required of an under-shepherd. Rather than be deterred from matters of first importance, the leadership provided for another way to satisfy a very real need. After all, widows being neglected in the daily distribution of food is no small thing. But their need couldn’t be met at the expense of prayer and the ministry of Word:

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” ⁵

The word translated ‘devote’ means “to attend to, devote oneself to” with regularity and steadfastness. ⁶ Pastors must cultivate sustained, concentrated focus on the ministries of Word and prayer. And we need to be ruthless in keeping at bay distractions from this primary work. The apostle Paul trained his young apprentice Timothy in this understanding of the pastorate when he reminded him of what every pastor should be devoted to:

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers. ⁷

Note the verbs in this passage: devote, practice, immerse, keep a close watch, persist. To be sure, the current state of evangelicalism is not amenable to these disciplines. But this is no excuse for the pastor to not practice them.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]