1. They don’t complain about how hard the ministry is.
They understand that pastoral ministry is a call to self-denial, sacrifice, hard work, suffering, and patience in the face of slow, often immeasurable progress. They rejoice over the opportunity to suffer with Christ.
2. They don’t carry the anxiety of the congregation or of its individual members.
They recognize that one of their primary tasks is to create an environment that fosters spiritual growth and maturity in the members, and that said growth is usually accompanied by pain. So rather than rushing in to relieve the suffering and self-denial involved in spiritual growth, effective pastors show their parishioners the way through the pain to greater Christlikeness.
3. They don’t think that the Sunday sermon is the most important thing they do in ministry.
They see that the pastor’s primary task is to develop a church that produces self-sustaining growth in the disciples and self-sustaining production of new believers who eventually join in the ministry. Knowing this, they devote themselves to being the best preachers they can, but also understand that good preaching is insufficient to produce mature disciples.
4. They don’t see resistant or challenging church members as a hindrance to the ministry.
Instead, they recognize that the people they find the most challenging are the ministry. They realize that their job is to create an environment that will help those folks become like Jesus in their spiritual lives.
5. They don’t spend a lot of time managing programs that focus on members’ needs.
Instead, they are relentlessly uneasy that the church is not reaching unbelievers with the gospel and seeing people saved. Thus, they spend a great deal of time aligning programs with the mission of the church and finding new ways to connect unbelievers to the faith.
6. They don’t image that disciples are made in church programs or in small groups.
Effective pastors have learned the lesson. They know that church attendance, faithful participation in program offerings, and being in a small group do not make disciples. Having observed Jesus’s discipleship process carefully, they understand it is a lengthy, complex process that requires a lot of one-on-one face time with more mature disciples who will hold their protégés accountable, tell them the hard things, and walking alongside them.
7. They don’t avoid conflict or delay dealing with it.
They realize that conflict is like rotting fruit. The longer you ignore it, the worse it gets. Effective pastors run to the sound of gunfire. They deal with conflict as soon as they become aware that trouble is brewing.
8. They don’t dwell on the negatives or pay attention to the complaints.
Effective pastors realize that there will always be things to complain about and things that don’t go their way. Instead, they don’t dwell on the negative things; they make it a habit to meditate on the good things and to be thankful for the grace that shows up every day.
9. They do not shortchange their own spiritual and devotion lives.
The primary “qualification” for pastoral ministry is spiritual. Skill, intellect, education, and native ability don’t qualify one for ministry. Yet most of us spend time cultivating those secondary issues and neglect the more important issue: our spiritual lives. Effective pastors know that sermon prep and study are inadequate substitutes for personal spiritual disciplines and devotional time in the scriptures.
10. They don’t try to do too much at one time
Effective pastors focus their efforts on two or three major projects at once. They intuitively understand that we all tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in the short term and underestimate how much we can accomplish over the long haul. So, rather than spreading themselves too thin, they focus on just a few things in each year’s planning cycle.
11. They don’t try to mimic other pastors.
They don’t fall into the “conference” trap and go away thinking, “all I need to do to grow this church is do things the way that conference speaker or rock star pastor does them.” They know who they are in Christ, they understand their gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and the stay in their own lane. The only person they imitate is the apostle Paul.