Your new pastor is about to become the church’s pastor. Everybody wants this to be a healthy and productive beginning to what they hope will be a long pastorate. What can the pastoral nominating committee (PCN) do at the beginning that will help contribute to a good first year?
Any good pastor is going to work long hours, experience a continual roller coaster of emotional situations, feel stressed by the inability to do everything, and feel guilty that at times his or her profession cause the family to suffer as well. Frustrations as well as exhilaration, compassion as well as anger, hope as well as despair, energy as well as exhaustion are just part of being a pastor. In that situation, there are both good and bad ways that the pastor can practice self-care and there are ways that the congregation can exhibit support.
Let me make two suggestions that the PNC can take at the beginning. First, what if members of the PNC communicated to the congregations in several ways that they had a goal of designing ways to support the new pastor and be good stewards of his physical, emotional, spiritual, and family health. Remind the congregation that a healthy pastor can provide healthy ministry. Having described the challenge, invite the members of the congregation to submit suggestions about how the congregation can participate in creating this mutual support between pastor and congregation. What you are doing is engaging the members in being conscious of their ministry to the pastor even as the pastor has a ministry to them. Evaluate some of the ideas you receive and feed the best ideas back to the congregation.
Second, the PNC can commit to meeting at least quarterly with the pastor and focus at least part of that time on what the pastor is doing to take care of himself or herself even as s/he offers ministry to others. By making the pastor aware that this is part of the quarterly agenda, you are building both expectation and support for the pastor engaging in self-care.
Tomorrow we can develop this further.
