Growing Up Pastors

By Mike Glenn

The First Baptist Church of Edgefield, South Carolina is a county seat church in a small South Carolina town across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Despite being a small town church, the church had an outsized history. Basil Manly came from Charleston, South Carolina to be the first pastor of the church. (For those of you who aren’t Baptist, he’s the “man” part of Broadman publishing). R.G. Lee preached his famous sermon, “Payday Someday” when he was pastor of this church. 

Photo by Rebecca Campbell on Unsplash

And in 1981, I became the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Edgefield, South Carolina. My final meeting with the pulpit committee of the church was held in a Hardee’s in a nearby town. The chairman of the committee leaned forward and said, “Mike, I want you to know why we’re considering calling you as our pastor.  Our church has the calling to take good, young preachers and make them into good pastors. Check our history. We’ll call a new pastor and in about four years, another church will come and call them away from us. For most of our pastors, it takes about four years. We don’t know how long it will take with you.” 

He went on. “Mike, our little church isn’t going to change much, but we can help you a lot if you’ll let us.” 

And they did. A retired English teacher handed me notes after every sermon detailing mistakes in my grammar when I preached or spoke publicly. “Your grammar is awful,” she told me after one sermon. “It won’t hurt you here, but it will hurt you where you’re going.” By the time I left, I was down to a half page of notes. Not bad when you consider the first time she gave me notes on my sermon she handed me three pages filled with notes on front and back! Other members taught me about leading meetings and dealing with difficult people. During one conversation about a member who was giving me a hard time about one of my sermons, a leader in the church looked at me and said, “I know who she is. I know how she is. Everybody in town knows. Do you? How can you tell what she's trying to say if you don’t know her?”

These are lessons in leading a local church no seminary can teach you. The only way to learn these lessons is to live through them as the pastor of a local church. If you’re in a good church, a young pastor can learn these lessons without being fatally wounded. Once, when I was about to make a wrong decision I was trying to make my case and in doing so, I was digging the hole deeper and deeper. Finally, one of the committee members burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, fellas,” he said, “ I just couldn’t keep a straight face any longer.” Everyone in the meeting began to laugh until I realized they were laughing at me. I left the meeting with my ego severely bruised, but otherwise everything else was intact. 

More times than I can say, I have been grateful for the patient, godly teaching I received from this small town church. Just about everyday, I use something I learned there. I did become a better pastor. They did “do me some good.”

One of Satan’s best tricks is to make words smaller. Think about it. When we talk about love in our culture, we’re usually talking about sex. That is such a small interpretation of love. Stewardship is another word Satan has minimized. Now, the word only refers to how much we give to the church in tithes and offerings. Stewardship is so much more than that. Everything we have, everyone in our life, is there for us to steward for the Master and the glory of His kingdom. Parents are stewards of their children. Husbands and wives are stewards of each other. Teachers are stewards of their classrooms. Pastors are stewards of their churches. 

And churches are stewards of their pastors. Pastors are entrusted to their congregations so these pastors can be sharpened in their skills and deepened in their ministries. Sadly, few churches see themselves in this role. Far too many churches see pastors as hired employees who are held accountable through various committees. Pastors are given job descriptions (most with impossible, if not contradicting, expectations) and goals for the church to achieve during the coming year. Once more, the pastor will be given a lot of responsibility without any real authority to achieve the goals.

What if churches took their roles as stewards seriously? What if churches sat down with their pastors and worked together to develop the skills of the pastor? What if there were honest evaluations of sermons and leadership moments? What if the pastor understood the members were there to help, not injure or control the pastor? What if churches understood that one day they would stand before Jesus and give an account for how they stewarded their pastor? 

More churches should have the same understanding for their role in the kingdom as First Baptist Church, Edgefield. Someone needs to take young ministers and train them how to be pastors. If this happens, we won’t have such a hard time finding new pastors nor would  we have such a hard time holding on to the ones we have.