The ‘American Idol’ Pastor- Being Voted off the Show! Pt. 1

Pastor Mike Cavanaugh had some interesting quotes in a recent class I attended:

Pastoral Significance:

“It’s hard to feel significant as a pastor. We are constantly compared to amazing speakers, incredible entrepreneurs and holy, monkish people who pray more than we can. Our churches are compared to huge churches with massive budgets and incredible bands, and staffs as large as our whole congregations.”

Pastoral Criticism:

“Criticism is one of the things that really hurts. Amazingly, people will criticize their pastor in ways they would not speak of their worst enemy, and feel they have a right to hold an opinion on everything the pastor does. His professional life, his emotional life, the way he dresses, his choice of words, his kids, his personality, the car he drives, the friends he chooses- and the list goes on. It’s easy to feel like you’re a constant disappointment to people, that you are letting people down all the time.”

Pastoral Rejection and Betrayal:

“It’s painful to realize that people leave the church because they don’t like you. That you can invest deeply in a person but that they can still come to the conclusion that they should leave the church because of something they don’t like about you and often they don’t feel the need to even explain. They just stop coming.”

Pastoral Statistics:

-Fifteen to seventeen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout or contention in their churches.
-Ninety percent said the hardest thing about ministry is dealing with uncooperative people.
-The majority of pastor’s wives surveyed said that the most destructive event that has occurred in their marriage and family was the day they entered the ministry.
-Only one in ten ministers will actually retire in the ministry.

Is it any wonder some pastors walk off the ‘show’ rather than wait to be ‘voted off the show?’