I wrote earlier that distraction is one way Satan has derailed the church from its mission. Here’s a version of distraction that also contributes, I believe, to mental health issues among pastors and pastor burnout. 

The problem is that pastors, along with the congregations that hired them, think the pastors are supposed to do everything. Is someone in the hospital, for example? Visiting them is the pastor’s job. Ditto the shut-ins. That’s what we hired the pastor for! 

But that attitude ignores all the “one anothers” in the Bible. We are to care for one another (1 Corinthians 12.21-26), encourage one another (1 Thessalonians 5.11, Hebrews 3.13), teach one another (Romans 15.14), and stand with one another in mission (Philippians 1.27). If the pastors do all that, they are depriving the members of their chance to serve, the pastors are wearing themselves out, and they are NOT doing their job of equipping the members to be on mission. 

A friend of mine, a Navigator-trained disciple-maker offered to help a pastor disciple the men of the church. The pastor told my friend, “If anyone in this church teaches the men, it will be me.” I heard a pastor say in a sermon, “My job is to feed the sheep; your job is to serve the sheep by, for example, keeping the nursery on Sunday morning.”

As a result of attitudes and practices like these, the mission effectiveness of churches goes way down.

I need to emphasize that pastors can’t change course by themselves. As Neil Hudson writes in Imagine Church, the pastors need to “renegotiate the contract” from pastor-shepherd to pastor-equipper. A young pastor I was working with came to that conclusion even before he read the book! But he had read the original directive:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ… (Ephesians 4.11, 12, ESV)