The Good Enough pastor Geoff Surat

Good Enough Pastors (Part 1)

The Excellent Pastor Myth

While reading a book called The Excellent Wife, my wife and her friends decided they didn't really aspire to be excellent wives, at least not as the author described. Instead, they jokingly formed the "Good Enough Wives Club". Between figuring out marriage, raising kids, and dealing with all the other challenges thrown at them, they decided good enough was good enough. Although tongue in cheek, they had a point; often good enough is good enough.

I propose we form a "Good Enough Pastors Club". Rather than beating ourselves up for all the ways we come up short of excellence as pastors, what if our standard became "good enough"? This idea occurred to me while during a strategy meeting with a church leadership team, wrestling with the appropriate standard of excellence for certain ministries. Finally the pastor declared, "I am a two talent pastor, and we are a two talent church. We are not going to wear ourselves out and beat ourselves up trying to be a five talent organization, we are going to be the best two talent church we can be."

He was, of course, referring to Jesus' parable of the talents, the story of an owner who entrusts three of his servants with one, two, and five talents (bags of gold), respectively. When the owner returns after a long time away, he finds that both the five talent and two talent servants have doubled his investment, while the one talent worker has simply buried his bag of gold. In the parable, the owner does not chastise the two talent servant for not being a five talent worker, nor does he criticize him for not producing five talent results. The owner gives the two talent servant the same praise he gives to Mr Five Talents, "Well done, good and faithful servant!" He did not describe the servants as amazing, outstanding, or excellent; he said they were good and faithful. Their effort was good enough.

In pastor world, however, good enough is never enough; we believe we should all be five talent leaders. If we take the right courses, attend the right conferences, and read the right books we will get there. Our reality, however, is that at the end of most Sundays, after dealing with technical glitches, complaining congregants, overwhelming prayer requests, and yet another mediocre sermon, we are thankful just to be done. When Monday morning roles around, our overwhelming sense of inadequacy reappears and we don't feel enough for our family, our leaders, our congregants, or our community. The only thing we feel excellent at is letting people down.

The myth of the Excellent Pastor is crushing us; we have implicitly bought into the lie that we should all aspire to be five talent pastors. I think this myth is one reason many of my friends are either leaving pastoral ministry, or dreaming about heading for the exit. Being a five talent, Excellent Pastor is not only exhausting, for most of us it's impossible. 

Here are some of the criteria to be a five talent, Excellent Pastor.

Excellent Communicator

All Excellent Pastors are amazing communicators. To achieve this status they excel at being

• Stand up comedians
  Pastors used to be able tojust grab a joke off the internet, but now they need to write their own knee slapping material. Anything short of Jim Gaffigan or Jerry Seinfeld just isn't good enough.

• Fascinating story-tellers
  A pastor's stories need to tug at the heart, bring a smile, and drive home a biblical principle in five minutes or less. Every sermon should end with a personal anecdote that drives everyone to a life altering commitment of faith.

• Relevant to culture
  No one under the age of 35 will listen if the pastor doesn't know the difference between Reels, TikTok and Snapchat. The reason the next generation is leaving the church is pastors who've never heard of BeReal.

• Biblical scholars
  Don't try to bluff on this one, everyone in the congregation has access to Blue Letter Bible and they'll be fact-checking the Greek references in real time. This extends to the lobby after service where the pastor needs to explain the theological significance of the Nephilim on demand. 

• Emotionally connected
  It is not enough to just present biblical truth, today's congregation needs to FEEL something; move our hearts or we'll move our membership.

• Authentic/Transparent/Relatable
  We want to hear about the pastor's fears and secrets in real time. If we even sniff that they're hiding that fight they had with their spouse on the way to church, we'll come after them like Draco on Harry. (I'm finally reading the Harry Potter books, so I had to sneak in a reference.)

Not only do Excellent Pastors have to be all these things as communicators, they have to do it every Sunday, and without notes. Memorize your sermon or polish your resume, you'll be moving on.

Empathetic Counselor

Excellent Pastors aren't just phenomenal speakers, they are also expected to be great counselors. Whether in the auditorium immediately after a service, in their office five nights a week, or in the checkout line at Walmart, the true five talent pastor can save a marriage, stop a suicide, or reform a teenager on demand through they're incredible insight into the lives of their parishioners. The truly Excellent Pastor never has the thought during a counseling session, "Wow, that sounds bad. I wonder what they're going to do now?"

Business Genius

Any pastor worth their salt is expected to understand complex business principles, interpret balance sheets, and raise millions of dollars to build new buildings. It is irrelevant that they didn't even take accounting in high school. "Whom God calls, God equips". The truly great pastors not only filled out the PPP applications for their churches in 2020, they still remember what PPP stands for.

Effective Evangelist

Between writing bestseller-level sermons, counseling the toughest cases back to health, and creating spreadsheets that would impress Bill Gates, the Excellent Pastor is winning entire planeloads of passengers to Jesus en route to their next speaking gig. They have converted their neighbors from Islam to Christianity and they personally baptized the local leader of Atheists Anonymous.

Organizational Guru

As the Excellent Pastor's congregation inevitably grows into a multisite behemoth, they are able to lead the change from a simple mom and pop operation to a complex matrix organization.  They lead the staff through bi-annual staff restructure retreats, maintaining a flat structure built entirely on hierarchal reporting relationships. They are the kind of creative leader Steve Jobs would have asked for advice.

Stellar Family

The Excellent Pastor has a smoking hot spouse and kids who excel in sports, school and discipleship. They lead their children through meaningful milestone rituals to mark their journey toward adulthood, which they document in professional level Instagram stories. Each of their children receives a full ride scholarship to the university of their choice, and their spouse leads an international ministry for business leaders, orphans, and/or puppies.

While the descriptions above are tongue in cheek, the expectations are real. Whether internal, external, or a little of both, many pastors feel pressure to excel in each of these categories. To fall short in any area feels like failure, and the stress to succeed is immense. This is why I am proposing the Good Enough Pastors Club, a place for the 98% of pastors who fall short in multiple disciplines, but still feel called by God to shepherd their people.

Are you good enough?

Before we formalize the Good Enough Pastors Club, let's see where we're at in each of the categories above. Be honest, no one is looking over your shoulder; you don't even have to show your results to the elders. If you rate yourself a five in all seven areas your fiery chariot should be by any minute to take you straight to heaven.

For each area rate yourself as a 

(1) One Talent leader (I'm not great)
(2) Two Talent leader (I'm ok)
(5) Five talent leader (I'm pretty good)
(We're sticking with Jesus' three categories for this exercise)

_____ Preaching

_____ Counseling

_____ Business

_____ Evangelism

_____ Organizational leadership

_____ Family

Now add up your scores and divide by six to get your average. Here's the grading scale:

0.00-0.99 Try again on a day not called "Monday"
1.00-4.99 Good enough
5.00 Nope

What do we do with these ratings?

Improve

Sometimes we need to put our shoulder to the wheel, our nose to the grindstone, and our ears to the podcasts and get better. There are hundreds of resources available to help us improve in each of these areas, and we all know that "leaders are learners". 

At the same time let's be honest about the odds. To go from being a One Talent leader to a Two Talent leader in a category means we have to improve by 100%; to go from a Two to Five Talent leader requires a 250% improvement. With focus and effort we might make that kind of change in one or two categories, but more than that is just adding to the frustration of ministry. In the Good Enough Pastor's Club we are realists. 

Outsource

While we can't outsource family leadership, every other category is a potential area to let someone else lead in that area. A great opportunity for outsourcing is preaching. 

I know pastors who knock themselves out week after week to write an adequate sermon, even though they are, at best, two talent communicators. Where is the law that says a pastor has to speak 50, 40, or even 30 times a year? I have a friend who leads a very large church in London but only preaches a few times a year. He long ago accepted that preaching isn't his best contribution, and has instead passed most of the Sunday communication off to others. 

It doesn't make sense to spend an inordinate amount of your one and only life trying to do something you're just not that great at. What can you outsource to others who are better equipped and will better serve the congregation? We'll look at some practical ways to outsource later in Part 2.

Accept

We often compare ourselves to leaders like Andy Stanley or Craig Groeschel, or we compare ourselves to New Testament leaders like Peter and Paul. I know Paul said, "Follow me as I follow Christ", but remember Paul is in the Pastor Hall of Fame. We can learn from Paul, but we can't be Paul. Or Andy. Or Craig. All we can be is all we can be, and for most of us that is Two Talent, good enough pastors.

It is freeing to declare myself as a solid Two Talent, Good Enough Pastor. There are many areas where I swing and miss, come short of others expectations, and even let myself down. I want to be a great preacher, but I'm not. I want to be an insightful counselor, but I'm not. I'm slightly above average at organizational leadership, and I'm really trying to be a great husband, dad and grandfather. I am willing to work hard in the areas I'm not naturally gifted, but I won't live in a constant state of stress and anxiety when I come up short as an Excellent Pastor. At the end of the day, my prayer is that God will someday say to me, "Well done, good and faithful servant. You were good enough, and that's enough."

That is my prayer for you as well. Will you join me in the Good Enough Pastor's Club? In Part 2 I'll share practical ways to be Good Enough.