Well, this is my last day of reporting on what a pastor does all day. I bet today was the most like a day in the life of a regular pastor...
6:10am- alarm. First thought was to pray the Lord's prayer (master the depth and richness of this prayer, and you will understand what Jesus' spiritual life looked like). Grabbed a bite to eat
7:00 Prayer meeting with TSC (about 70 students) on campus. Rarely do I wake up on Mondays desiring to go and pray. Never do I regret it.
8:30 Cornerstone staff meeting. This is not your typical staff meeting. We laugh our heads off, share "God-stories", pray, cry, laugh (repeated for emphasis).... It's like a large family that loves being together. If someone is going on a vacation, they literally plan to leave after our Monday morning staff meeting. Our lead pastor Troy Nesbitt is the master at keeping things relational and fun.
9:45-11:15- Staff Director's meeting. Those of us that oversee our own staff teams are "directors." This is another fun meeting, but we address issues and talk about ministry related stuff. For example, today we talked about a church plant in West Des Moines, how to keep the church aware of what's going on in various ministries without adding too much "clutter" from the front, debriefed a recent couple's retreat...
11:15-11:50 emails
Noon-1:20- Basketball on campus, shower (Mon. & Tues. are my days to exercise by playing ball)
1:20-4:00 Studied for my message on prayer this week at TSC (to be honest, there was about a 5 minute nap in there. Who can stay awake reading for 3 hours right after lunch? Superman? Einstein? I'm neither.)
4:00-5:15- I met with a group of college men (TSC leaders) I'm discipling. That's the spiritual way of saying we hang out and talk about life, God, ministry, etc... I had them share about how they are planning to lead this semester, and I challenged them to read their Bibles and continue to set a pace for others to follow in that.
5:30- Ate, played Cranium with the kids (I made up questions, songs, etc), read to them, and put them to bed.
7:30- blogging and watching state of the union address
The hardest thing to avoid in ministry is hypocrisy. The great destroyer of hypocrisy is authenticity. So I try to be as authentic as possible, but it's hard. For example, I wanted you to think I was more productive in my 1-4 study time than I really was. I was distracted. I took a nap. I checked some email. I studied about prayer, but had a hard time praying.
Talk is cheap, and that's mostly what pastor's do.
Take a minute to pray for your pastor(s). Pray that they would live authentic lives before God and that they would have a genuine love for people.
1 comment:
I enjoyed your series on what pastors do during the week despite your sickness. Really makes me not want to have kids for quite a few years; man, that sounds hard. I am surprised you did not like Live Free or Die Hard; maybe it's cuz I saw it in theatres... I do like how you're a real person...
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