Begin With A Pastor’s Capacity

Hey. This is Jimmy Dodd with a pastor word of encouragement.

I want to guess that your pastor has a job description. And in that job description, it’ll say things like, “We expect you to teach and to preach, maybe be involved in a small group, maybe be involved in some type of mercy ministry, attend board meetings, do some pastoral counseling, be involved in our city, be involved with our denomination or a network.” Those types of things are there.

But I want to encourage you in this: don’t start with a job description. Start with their capacity because if you start with their job description, most people – if you put every expectation all together in one job description as churches often do, you will be asking your pastor to work over 100 hours per week, which absolutely is impossible.

Begin with their capacity. What are your expectations for the number of hours that you expect for them to work?

Most pastors that I know are not lazy. They work extremely hard.

But you need to understand this. Once you begin to go over the amount of time that you set for them, you’re going to start to create some difficulties for a pastor because there is limited capacity in their life. They have time outside of the church, outside of those things to eat, to sleep, to spend time with their spouse, to exercise, have time with their kids, to maybe actually enjoy some hobbies.

But when you begin to eat into extra hours, week by week, something has to go. Oftentimes, it’s sleep. Oftentimes, it’s exercise. Then oftentimes, it’s time with the spouse and children.

And you need to know that if you begin to ask more and more of your pastor that just creates these unrealistic expectations, something will ultimately crumble. Something has got to go.

Why? Because every pastor has limited capacity.

So, allow them to have time to sleep properly, to eat right, to have time to exercise, time with their spouse, time with their children, time for hobbies, time to just rest in the Lord.

So, don’t begin with a job description. Begin with what’s their capacity.

And then let’s find the jobs that they can do that fit in to what we really, realistically expect from our pastors and our leaders.