Podcast episode 087: Fight for your pastor with Peter Orr

Runtime: 29:21 min.

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Transcript

Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.

Introduction

Chase Kuhn: Today it’s very easy to be suspicious of people in places of authority. We’ve heard countless stories of how power has been abused. With our increased suspicion comes a level of distrust. This quickly leads us to criticise leaders, watching their every move and picking through their every word.

The trouble that we have as Christians is that this sort of behaviour is destructive to our church relationships. Rather than appreciating the leaders that God has given to us, we tear them down. Sadly, this does more than just compromise our relationship with our leaders; it actually demonstrates a pervasive thanklessness in our relationship with God.

In an effort to restore health to our churches and encourage those who God has placed over us, in this episode, we’re considering the need to fight for your pastor.

[Music]

CK: Hello, and welcome to the Centre for Christian Living podcast. My name is Chase Kuhn. I’m coming to you from Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia. Today on the podcast, I’m joined by my very good friend and colleague, Dr Peter Orr. Pete teaches New Testament here at Moore College, and is a constant encouragement to me in my life as a friend. Thanks, Peter, for joining us today!

Peter Orr: Thanks for having me, Chase! It’s always a joy to do these podcasts with you.

CK: Yeah, you’ve been on a few times now, and I’m grateful to have you back!

Why “Fight for Your Pastor”?

CK: Pete, you’ve just written a book that’s come out with Crossway this week: Fight for Your Pastor. I’m really excited about this book. I’ve read it this week and enjoyed reading it very much. In fact, I found it quite challenging. Talk to us about this project. First of all, what is this title, “Fight for your pastor”? It’s an interesting title.

PO: Yes, and a number of people have pointed out that the “for” is important; it’s not Fight with Your Pastor or Fight Your Pastor, which would be very different books. Fight for Your Pastor is really an encouragement to intentionally support your pastor—that is, fight for them. In essence, it’s drawing on the biblical imagery of spiritual warfare: pray earnestly for your pastor, and so on. But really the idea is to be intentional in your support and encouragement—and particularly your prayerful support—for your pastor.

CK: That’s great. I really like the way that you use that word in the first chapter. The first chapter is entitled “Fight”. You have all these one-word imperatives in the chapter titles, which are great. Basically you equate fighting with praying. But so much of the book goes beyond just prayer, and it’s really about contending for your pastor—supporting, strengthening, fighting for him spiritually, giving—all these kinds of positive reinforcements to the ministry that you’re benefitting from. What is it that brought this book about? Why did you think it was necessary?

PO: Working here at college, as you’ll know, we train lots of men and women who go into pastoral ministry, and we enjoy keeping in touch with people after college. The book really focuses on the senior minister, but it’s still relevant to lots of other people in ministry. My observation of a lot of my friends who are in pastoral ministry—particularly over the last few years and particularly with the challenges of COVID—was that there was just a heaviness in the work that they’re doing. The challenges of the pandemic, but also the challenges of a culture that’s becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity, and the challenges of churches where members can sometimes be a little bit thoughtless in the way that they relate to their pastors has combined to make the role of the pastor increasingly difficult. So talking to my friends, I thought, “Well, as someone working at a theological college with no direct skin in the game, I can write a book calling congregation members (of whom I am one) to intentionally be more supportive of our pastors.”

CK: Yeah. I want to come back to some of the challenges that have spawned this book. But I also want to say to you that I think you’ve done a great service to pastors, because it would be very hard for a pastor to write Fight for Your Pastor. But as another man in ministry who benefits from that ministry, I think you’ve done a service for all of us by helping us to recognise not just the significance of leaders over us and our responsibility to them, but also so many biblical commands that actually press in on us and are necessary for us to heed. I really do think you’ve done great work here, Pete.

Attitudes to leaders in the face of leadership failure

CK: You’ve mentioned a couple of cultural issues that I think really do press in now. First of all, there has been a lot about leadership failures that has come out. At one point, you write, “because of the failings of a few, even … godly men are now regarded with suspicion”.¹ I think that’s very, very pervasive in our culture. We get naturally suspicious of authority over us, and we expect that if somebody’s in a position of power, they must be abusing that power. Is there any more you want to say about that?

PO: Yes, that’s really insightful and I think that is something that’s happening. There is a degree of truth in that there have been very high-profile, terrible abuses of power in pastoral ministry. But the Bible does not assume that someone in leadership will automatically abuse their authority. In 1 Peter 5:3, Peter warns pastors not to be domineering. But I think that that natural suspicion is a slight distortion if that’s the way that we relate to our pastor—that we’re naturally suspicious.

Obviously if it happens, then it needs to be dealt with. But I think we should be more naturally confident in our leaders and submit to them, as Hebrews 13 tells us, rather than assuming that they’re going to abuse their power.

They almost have to prove themselves otherwise. I think we sometimes take the idea that the jury’s out until the pastor proves otherwise, whereas I think it should be the other way around.

CK: Yeah, that’s right. Rather than regarding with suspicion, we ought to begin with a place of trust in most instances.

Consumer church

CK: The other thing that has maybe fed into this that you recognise in the book is that we have become consumers in our church experience. One of the illustrations you use is that we look at our minister almost as if he’s our waiter at a restaurant. We think about whether or not we should be tipping him—whether or not he’s actually given me service that I’m grateful for—if he’s done a good job this week or whatever. ² You reframe that: you say, in fact, he’s a head waiter, we’re waiters underneath him, there’s mutual service from each of us, and we’re on the same team. Maybe you could fill out this picture of consumer approaches to churches a little bit more, and how that compromises our views of leadership.

PO: Yeah, this is not my idea; I read it somewhere—the idea that we think of church as a performance. We go along, and if the people up the front entertain us, we’re happy. I think most of the people listening to this podcast wouldn’t fall into that category; we’re more mature than that. But we may subtly think of church as a club that we’ve joined because it suits our interests. We may not articulate it that way, but we can think of it that way. Then if the leaders disappoint us or go in a different direction, we withdraw.

But obviously the New Testament uses much more organic imagery. I know it doesn’t actually use “church is family”, but it describes church as brothers and sisters who love each other deeply. We’re much more enmeshed organically with one another. So we’ve got to get away from thinking about church as a kind of entertainment or that they’re doing us a service while we’re consumers. We’ve got to get rid of that and shape ourselves by the much more organic family/relational images in the New Testament.

Sermon critique and active listening

CK: Some of the ways we do this every week, or we may be susceptible to doing it every week, is you get in the car after church and say, “How was the sermon?” and give it a rating on a scale of 1 to 10. How would you reframe that question so it’s more edifying in talking about the sermon?

PO: Yeah, I would say any sermon that goes through a passage faithfully, even if it’s not a great sermon, it’s drawn your attention to the passage: “Verse 27 is interesting. I hadn’t noticed that before,” and to try to be more empathetic. Your pastor wants to preach well. He wants to preach faithfully. But pastors do a lot of other things, so be understanding that across a year, you’re going to get, hopefully, some really great sermons. However, you’ll also get some sermons that aren’t that great, but they’ll still be going through the passage faithfully. Understand that your pastor has a lot on their plate.

Again, it’s the idea of partnership: we’re in this together. They’ve done the work in preparing this sermon; I need to be an active listener. Being an active listener means that I’m going to have to do some work. It’s not that he’s going to do all the work for me; I’m going to have to do some work too. I’m going to have to think about how it applies to my life. Maybe the application was a bit lighter this week, but then it’s up to me to do the work, and that’s not a detriment on him that he hasn’t done it all for me. It’s the idea of working together.

Encouraging your pastor

CK: Yeah, you’ve just worked across a couple of different chapters that you’ve written, and drawn together a couple of really helpful things. I’ll just give the listeners some context here. Your chapters are: “Fight!”, “Encourage!”, “Listen!”, “Give!”, “Forgive!”, “Submit!” and “Check!”. I think those are fantastic and, in some ways, they’re self-explanatory.

I want to just draw in on chapters 2 and 3 for a second—”Encourage!” and “Listen!”—because those are the ones we’ve just been talking about. You’ve just encouraged us that it is not the sole responsible of the pastor to engage us with the word of God. In fact, we are meant to actively engage. One of the things that you really encourage us to do is to encourage our ministers after we’ve listened—that actually we should be listening out for things and not just going to the pastor when we have complaints, but deliberately going with words of encouragement. It’s not just when they’ve tickled our fancy and given us just what we were hoping for and needed, but finding ways to deliberately encourage them, even when—just even when. Any time, right?

Some of the most scathing words of rebuke to me in your book were this: “We need to recognise that encouragement of others comes from a heart that is thankful to God.”³ I love that: how can I, first and foremost, say thanks to God for something? Even in this sermon that, I think, wasn’t the best sermon, what is something that I can appreciate and say thanks to God for? And then in parentheses, you go on with a real clear rebuke: “(The opposite is also true—a heart that defaults to complaint is one that is bitter towards God.)” ⁴ So the first step for us becoming an encourager is to be thankful to God. I think that is so helpful! If our normal disposition is to complain and critique all the time, we have to recognise that there’s a deeper spiritual problem—that is, that I’m not thankful to God. I’m actually, in one sense, complaining about things God has given to me as gifts. Really insightful, Pete!

Is there anything you’d like to add on what I’ve just been saying there? Have I misrepresented you?

PO: No, no, I think that’s … One of the overarching things of the book is to help us to be more thoughtful and more intentional, and I think that comes with our words. Proverbs warns us to guard our hearts. I think that the negative and the positive means, firstly, being careful with the negative things we say to our pastor. I’m not naïve enough to think that there’s never a place for a difficult conversation, although I think those are few and far between. But being more intentionally positive with the words we speak to our pastor: that’s probably an area where we—certainly in the general, wide circles that I move in—just assume if everything’s okay, we don’t need to say something.

I have a friend in a different context—not in Sydney; we don’t need to try to work out who it is. He’s a pastor, and someone said to him, “I only say something to you if things are going wrong, because if things are going well, you’re just doing your job.” I reckon, without articulating it, many of us probably operate with that assumption. Why do I need to say something to my pastor if he’s doing a good job? I just need to pick him up if he’s doing a bad job. Whereas actually, the Scriptures tell us to encourage and speak to one another: “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thess 5:11). That applies across congregations, but it applies from the congregation to the pastor. I don’t think we’re very good at doing that.

CK: Yeah. It’s a bit like reviews online: you only leave a review when it’s something bad!

PO: That’s right!

CK: I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast or even to you, Pete, but I worked in a restaurant for a long time. We used to ask for customer feedback regularly. Our manager said to us, “It takes ten positive reviews to outweigh one negative review.” So you get the one negative review and you will not feel different about that until you get ten positives.

I think the same will be true of your pastor: that one critique, however insignificant or small or major it may feel, could be a devastating blow in a week when they’ve been hearing nothing but critique. To overrule that and to have a positive spin is going to take a lot more encouragement than it will critique, because the critique’s going to weigh much heavier.

PO: Yeah, absolutely.

CK: I think your words of thoughtfulness—and by the way, just to listeners, I’ve said this before, Pete, but you do this in practice. One of the things I’m really grateful for in our friendship is that you’re deliberately messaging, praying, encouraging and challenging. I find that an immense help to me as a Christian man, and it’s actually been a great model to me of how to change in my own life.

[Music]

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CK: As we take a break from our program, I want to encourage you to check out Peter Orr’s new book that we’ve been discussing: Fight For Your Pastor. It’s an affordable and accessible read. The chapters are only a few pages each, and they’re filled with biblical wisdom, practical steps and helpful anecdotes that will benefit your life in the body of Christ. In fact, I read this book just this week, and was challenged to think and act differently in every chapter. Check out Peter Orr’s new book, Fight for Your Pastor, published by Crossway. I encourage you to read it with others in your church, to discuss it, and to hold each other to account to the challenges that are set forth.

I also want to encourage you to plan to join us for our live events in 2023. We’ll be looking at “Virtue in the Christian life”, considering love, humility, self-control and perseverance. For more details about speakers and topics, and to register for our events, check out our website at ccl.moore.edu.au.

Now let’s get back to our program.

Forgiveness and your pastor

CK: Getting onto some of these other chapters that you’ve written, forgiveness is one that you talk about here. One of the things you recognise is that we definitely will be hurt by people. We will bothered by people. We will be upset. Our expectations won’t be met, etcetera. You’re very clear to say, “Of course there are dramatic and significant circumstances that will really need to be addressed.” But in most instances, we’re going to be let down by people in small ways and maybe even medium-sized ways, and you encourage us to think differently about our responses. How do you help people think about these relationship dynamics and expectations—especially of leaders?

PO: Yeah. We can probably think of three types of negative actions. There’s the top-level, criminal actions, where the police and the denominational authorities need to be informed. At that point, we pray for those involved, but we don’t really have any involvement. Then there would be the major sin where the police wouldn’t be interested, but, say, the pastor falls into adultery or something like that, the denominational authorities will take over. Again, we as congregation members aren’t really involved. We pray and whatever.

But it’s the third level that affects us most, where it’s not major (though it might be if it’s a pattern). It’s the careless word or it’s the disorganisation that means that email that isn’t responded to. It’s the sort of things that happen in every relationship, and there are strong words in Scripture about stuff like this. Proverbs 19:11 says, “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.” I think sometimes we have such a strong view of sin, we think sin always needs to be called out. Well, no: Scripture says in some instances, it just needs to be overlooked. “Turn the other cheek,” Jesus said in Matthew 5:38. “Why not rather suffer wrong?” Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:7.

Again, to stress, those are not major issues. With spiritual abuse, I would say that’s a pattern, and obviously that’s a significant issue that needs to be dealt with. Whereas, I’m talking about times when your pastor has had a bad week, he’s a bit snippy with you on a Sunday, and that’s a little bit out of character. But you don’t need to call him to account on all of those things. Scripture tells you that sometimes you need to overlook an offence. You need to forgive it.

That’s costly to you, because you need to bear it. You were hurt. That email that you were expecting a response to doesn’t come, or that comment out of tiredness wounds. But part of the Christian life in all our relationships is that in some of those cases, we need to overlook and we need to forgive.

The pastor’s humanity

CK: Yeah. It’s really helpful to remember (which might be a surprise to many) that your pastor is a human. Which is what you say in the book: he is a man, he is susceptible to tiredness, he has limitations like we all do, he has a finite memory, he has all kinds of things that are going to mean that he will stumble. Sometimes it won’t even be sin; it will just be a mistake or not meeting expectations. You challenge us in the book about the kinds of expectations we—the word you use is “saddle”—that is, the things we put on our pastor and things that may not be met.

You give a great illustration in your book. I don’t want steal the thunder of your book, but I found it really helpful. You talk about a particular minister having a poor memory. Would you like to share that story?

PO: My minister at my university town was an amazing godly man. I’m so thankful to God for his ministry in my life. But he had a terrible, terrible memory. I’ve told this story in different contexts, so maybe some of your listeners have heard it before. But he once realised that he needed fuel for his car. He got to the petrol station and realised that he walked. He’s been so scatty and was probably thinking about the sermon he was writing [Laughter] that he’d walked. But that kind of bad memory—

CK: Wait, sorry. You have to tell the next bit, because you said another time he needed petrol—

PO: Oh yeah, okay. Another time, he remembered to drive. He drove to the petrol station, filled up the car, and then when he got home, he realised that he’d walked home and he’d left the car at the petrol station with his kids in the car.⁵ [Laughter]

CK: I just cannot believe this! [Laughter] I have a hard time believing it’s true. But that kind of memory obviously impacted his ministry.

PO: In the sense. One of his other traits was he was the most welcoming person and would always be bounding up to newcomers. But the problem is, when you combine those two traits, he would sometimes bound up to the same person for four weeks in a row, and welcome them as a newcomer, because he’d forgotten that he’d had a conversation with them the week before. After this happened to one of my friends three weeks in a row, I remember my friend just turned to him and said, “Well, actually, no, I’m not a newcomer. This is the third time we’ve had this conversation. I’m not going to come to the church again.” My friend didn’t have any sense of proportion and just reacted very badly because he felt he was being mistreated. But if he’d understood the big picture, he would have laughed.

CK: Yeah. And again, that feeds back into our perception of church as something we are consumers of. This is something that I should be welcomed into. Somebody needs to take care to remember me. So you feel a certain level of entitlement of a certain kind of service, rather than a gracious approach and saying, “Oh man, maybe that guy’s just got a lot on his plate. Maybe he doesn’t have a very good memory. Maybe he’s had a hard time lately. How can I encourage him? How can I make a joke about this? Maybe I could wear a huge name badge the next week so he remembers he met me last week.” [Laughter] There are ways that we can actually service graciously, rather than expect something in an entitled way that would compromise gospel fellowship.

PO: I think the other thing that relates to this and relates to a lot of the things is a sense of proportion. I’m not down on social media, but I think it just amps everything up to 100, and every slight or relational problem is just this massive thing. Whereas, again, the Scriptures overlook an offence. You don’t have to call it out. You don’t have to name it.

Sometimes you do. Obviously don’t hear me saying that we should sweep everything under the carpet. Not at all. But I feel like there are some things where we have to say, “Yeah, that was not a helpful interaction. But you know what? In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that major. I’m just going to move on.”

CK: Yeah. And you’ve mentioned in the book, if you take it out of even the pastor/congregation member relationship dynamic and you put it into other relational contexts, we have to do this in so many other spheres.

PO: Absolutely!

CK: There are other relationships that are seemingly deeper bonds that are less contractual, if you will. We often make church this kind of contractual relationship that can be violated, where, in a marriage, for example, we think, “I have to overlook things or else we will never make it, right?” And you expect and hope that your spouse would overlook the same things for you too. So to just nit-pick everything or to keep a tally and constantly say, “Well, you did this ten years ago and you said that word to me then,” it’s not to excuse the offence, but in our frailty as human beings, we’re going to make these mistakes. The gospel actually calls us to a certain level of forgiveness and graciousness.

PO: Absolutely! Yes, that’s right.

Submitting to your pastor

CK: One of the things that comes with this, then, is the difficulty of submission. You talk about the language of submission. What do you think makes it hard for us to hear language about that today? And what in Scripture needs to correct us in our present moment?

PO: I think “submission” is one of those words that is a curse word in our culture. Our culture almost defines “submission” as “letting someone do whatever they want to you”. It’s seen as an entirely negative thing.

Submission in Scripture is just a right recognition of someone’s authority, order, position or place. It can be abused; Scripture is not so naïve to think that it can’t be abused. Of course. But the default in loving relationships is that submission is a good thing. We submit to our leaders. Hebrews 13:17 says we should do that in a way that’s joyful for them as they lead us, and not a burden, because that would be of no benefit to us.

So submission is a Scriptural thing. It’s a good thing. We need to have our thinking framed by Scripture and not by the world. I realise by saying that in such a stark way, we live in the world and we have to think about how we relate in the world. But I think so often we allow the world’s understanding of relationships and ideas to colour our interpretation of Scripture, rather than the other way around.

CK: That’s helpful. And the same goes without saying: the kind of leadership that we expect as well is a Scriptural leadership that we’d be glad to submit to, not a worldly leadership. So in one sense, the kind of leaders we’re expecting to be over us are godly men who are committed to gospel truth and to our wellbeing as God’s people. Therefore there’s a glad submission in that.

PO: Yep, and leaders who obey Peter’s command not to be domineering. That’s the command that they’re under. We’re under the command of we need to submit.

Sometimes it goes wrong, and we need to think carefully about what happens when it goes wrong. But we can’t let those times when it goes wrong throw the whole thing out. I think sometimes we’re in danger of doing that.

Mutual benefit

CK: Yeah. Now, the overarching concern of your book is for godliness. It’s what the Lord has called us to because of the good gifts he’s given to us. It is not a rant to defend your friends. [Laughter] That’s not what it is. In fact, the motivation is not this, but it does actually work this way out—that the more that we encourage, pray for, give to, submit to our leaders, the healthier experience we’re going to have as Christians as part of the body of Christ.

PO: That’s right.

CK: So there’s mutual benefit. We support those whom God has appointed over us to do the work of the Lord that God has called them to. As we do that in godliness and in faithfulness, we actually benefit and reap the benefits of a healthier body life together.

Is there anything more you’d like to say about that kind of mutual interaction? Again, it’s not a motivation of, “Well, I’ll support you so that I can be supported better.” But this is the way that God has made it to work.

PO: Yeah, absolutely. The image of a body is of a body working well. Again, we’ve touched on it earlier: if you’re thankful—intentionally thankful—for your pastor—if you thank God for him, that’s going to make you much more well-disposed towards him, which means you’re going to be more joyful and more likely to pray for him, encourage him. He’s then going to be doing a better job, and as you say, you’ll benefit from it. That’s not to say that there won’t be bumps and difficulties and complexities along the way. But walking by the Spirit, dependence on God, praying—these are things we think about in our Christian lives, but we need to apply them also to our lives together.

CK: Yeah. That’s really helpful, Pete. Thank you.

One action point for this week

CK: Just as we conclude our conversation, you have so many practical gems throughout the book. My encouragement is that people get this book. It’s a very short book—a quick and edifying read, with lots of Scripture and some really interesting anecdotes from pastors all over who you consulted while writing the book.

But if you could just give listeners today an encouragement, what would you encourage them to do just even this weekend as they go to church, or this week as they’re thinking about relating to their pastor and how they might encourage him? What are one or two steps they could take practically?

PO: Before God, think about what you’re thankful for your pastor and then tell him. Tell him in person. Send him an email. Send him a text message. “I’m thanking God for you for x, y, z.” Pastors hear a lot of criticism. I think we would be surprised at the amount of criticism that pastors get, and we would be surprised at the lack of intentional encouragement that they get. That would be my big thing: intentionally encourage your pastor.

CK: That’s great. As they pray for their pastor as well, you present a couple of tips on how to move beyond the “Bless this person” prayer. What would you tell people as they pray for their pastor this week? Of course, one: pray for your pastor.

PO: Pray for your pastor. Just to step back very briefly, while working on the book, I was struck by how often Paul asks people to pray for him. Paul’s the person we think, “He’s the super Christian. He’s the Christian in church history who’s got it together. Yet he constantly asks people to pray for him.” If that’s Paul, how much more your pastor. So pray for him all the sorts of things that you pray for yourself. Pray for his health. Pray that he would grow in his love for the Lord Jesus. Pray for his family if he’s got a family. Pray for that he would not give into bitterness when he faces criticism. Pray for refreshment when he’s on his holiday. Pray for his health—physical, mental and spiritual. Pray that he’d be wise in his use of technology. Whatever it is—the breadth of prayer. So be thoughtful in your prayers for your pastor.

CK: That’s great.

Conclusion

CK: Pete, thank you for writing this book. Thank you for coming on the podcast again. I’m grateful for you.

PO: Thanks for having me, Chase!

[Music]

CK: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.

On our website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre.

We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.

As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.

[Music]

Endnotes

¹ Peter Orr, Fight for Your Pastor (Wheaton: Crossway, 2022), 17.

² Ibid, 32.

³ Ibid, 34.

⁴ Ibid, 34.

⁵ Ibid, 63-64.

Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.