Posts Tagged ‘ Ecclesiology

Crushing your Pastor’s morale

Richard Floyd assembled a list of 10 common practices that will likely cause your pastor grief.  Some of these include:

  • Make sure to have an annual customer satisfaction survey where every member of the congregation fills out an anonymous questionnaire about their views of the pastor’s performance during the previous year.
  • Tell the pastor that there are anonymous complaints that a. your sermons are too long; b. your voice is too soft to be heard (especially by the deaf); c. your spouse is not involved enough (or too involved) in the life of the congregation; d. your child shouldn’t have been given the lead in the Christmas pageant; e. your lawn needs mowing; and f. you were seen in shorts at the supermarket. This is just a sample list. Use your imagination.
  • Cut the mission budget to balance the budget. Better yet, ask your pastor to choose between a raise in salary or an increase in the mission budget.
  • Set up a pastoral oversight committee to regularly monitor the pastor’s performance.  Make sure to put into place measurable metrics and target goals for new members received and money raised. Hourly work logs are always effective as well.

You can read the entire list with further explanations here.

My question(s) for you: Do you see anything on this list that you or your church has done? Do you disagree as to whether this should be a morale crusher? (I don’t personally see the problem with having your pastor log the hours he works or what’s taking up the majority of his time).

The Early Church

Tim Prussic posted a helpful post examining the forms of government coming out of the synagogue system of Jewish worship during the time of Christ and the apostolic era. While Tim is specifically responding to a an argument attempting to support the government of the Papacy via the synagogue, I think it also has application for that group of Christians who deny that the the church today resembles the ecclesiastical structure of the early church. To paraphrase Tim, “The synagogue system looks a lot like the Presbyterian system.” The Presbyterian system doesn’t look like the home church movement much at all, though. Food for thought.