How to care for your Pastor

I was re-reading a book recently which contained this statistic: 44%of those in pastoral ministry for more than 15 years suffer from burn-out, mental breakdown or serious illness (and that doesn't include immorality or loss of faith). Whilst that alarming statistic is from Australia I don't imagine the UK is much different. I think in view of that we need to think about how we as churches and church leaders care for our pastors, how we facilitate their being in ministry long term. I’m going to suggest a number of things that I think are helpful:

1. Set Clear Expectations

• How many hours is he expected to work?
• How many hours he is actually working?
• How can we maintain a healthy balance here?

2. Help him avoid distraction from gospel work

• What are our expectations of him in his duties?
• What priorities do we want him to have?
• What other things might occupy his time?
• What distracts him from his primary tasks?
• How can we help him enjoy his work?

3. Help him keep on growing in his faith

• Is he reading and praying for himself?
• How can we encourage this even more if it is the case?
• Or facilitate it if it isn’t?
• Should we put in place a mentor system to ensure this is happening?
• If not how else do we pastor the pastor?

4. Resource him

• Are we encouraging him to continue being trained?
• Are we resourcing this with time and money and necessary changes to expectations?
• Is there a budget for conferences, books, etc... and if so is it sufficient?

5. Friendship

• Who is he spending time with outside of ministry?
• How will we encourage close friendships with those in the church?
• How will we facilitate time spent with other ministers?

6. Encourage him
It strikes me that we Brits never like to encourage someone in case it goes to his head and yet we are quick to challenge and even criticise, this can be incredibly damaging.  It is not that we must never criticise or question that would be equally wrong, but we also need to see the value of encouraging.

• How can we share with him what has helped or challenged us?
• How can we help him labour for the long term and not become disheartened by the often slow pace of change?

7. Provide for his family

• How generous can we be in providing financially?
• What will we provide by way of holiday/days-off?
• Will we check he takes it?
• How can we protect his day off with his family?
• How do we convey this to the church family?

8. Partner with him
Loneliness is one of the prime defeaters of ministry, it saps and sucks passion and energy.

• How can we share in vision setting and reaching that goal?
• How do we convey that an eldership is a team and we are partners together in this ministry?
• How do we build that team?