Times When Pastoral Leadership Begins to Unravel

Political Agendas

Some of the greatest challenges that pastors face right now aren’t in the areas where we’ve seen ministry tragedy happen. For instance, people lose their ministry over moral failure or people lose their ministry over doctrinal compromise. But most often, it’s not either one of those two obvious examples; it’s actually through more subtle leadership issues. And those things manifest in the pulpit and in our preaching. And so when we’re guarding our hearts and lives, what do we make sure we don’t want to drift into?

We have to avoid, for instance, drifting into political arguments. Now, we live in a culture that’s polarized. It’s charged with political combat and constant conversation. And so we have to avoid drifting into the culture wars. That doesn’t mean we don’t address cultural issues from a biblical perspective and worldview, especially as it comes from the passage that we’re preaching and teaching through. But it means that we’re not looking for an opportunity to walk through and tackle what we saw on the news or what we’re seeing on the internet.

So avoiding political agendas is important, but sometimes we limit that to cultural politics when also we need to include church politics. Sometimes as pastors, we actually find ourselves drifting into having an argument or a conversation in our sermon with people that we’ve envisioned.

We know where they stand as we’re trying to lead and navigate some things, from our church perspective, and we know the obstacles or the opponents to our perspective. And we’re hoping they’re listening. “I hope they’re hearing what I’m saying right now.” When we do that, all of a sudden, we have taken our eye off the ball. We’re not focused any longer, at that point, on the truth of God’s word and the spiritual formation of his people as much as we are the political agendas that are going on in our churches.

Personal Ambition

Sometimes we can also drift into areas of personal ambition. We live in a world where it’s all about influence, influencers, how many followers you have, and all these platforms. And when we do that, it’s easy—especially in preaching, which is a very prominent and public act—to gravitate towards the intoxication of affirmation, hearing our name mentioned, seeing someone’s post, or having those comments after the sermon.

We can gravitate towards that, and all of a sudden, we begin to develop our sermons and even preach in a way that’s asking for those or looking for those types of compliments or feedback. In reality, this takes our eyes off the primary responsibility we’ve been given, which is to be faithful to the truth of God’s word so that he can use it in the lives of his people.

Those are the areas where leadership often begins to unravel, because that creeps into our preaching, which is another reason why expositional leadership is so vital in keeping us grounded in leading and feeding God’s people well.

R. Scott Pace is coauthor with Jim Shaddix of Expositional Leadership: Shepherding God’s People from the Pulpit.

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