There are a lot of things pulling for a lead pastor’s time, but not everything that comes across your desk or email is something you should do. One of the hardest and most important aspects of leadership is determining what will get your time, energy and effort. And no, the answer is not everything.
While you as a lead pastor could do lots of things, there things that only you can do and things you should make sure you do every week.
Here are 4 things every lead pastor must do:
- Work “on” the church. Working on the church is not working in the church. Working on the church involves planning, strategy, learning about new ministry paradigms, evaluating ministries, leaders, budgets and asking questions like: where are we? Where are we headed? I try to spend 3-4 hours on Monday morning in this mode. The larger your church gets, the more important this becomes. This is the time where you pull your head out of the weeds and the day to day of ministry to check how things are going. In case you are curious, lead pastor, no one else at your church is going to do this or should do this. This is the job of the lead pastor to see the whole field, not your student pastor or worship pastor. They are in charge of their ministry and can help speak into this, but only the lead pastor is supposed to think about the whole field on a church staff.
- Care for your soul and health. Your elders probably care about your health and so does your staff, but only you can actually take care of your soul and health. This means, each week you are taking your day off. You are taking a monthly retreat day. No one else can make sure you are getting good sleep, reading your bible (not just for sermon prep), praying, confessing sin. Only you can make yourself do that. And, you can lie to people about that and for the most part, no one will know. You have to make caring for your soul a higher priority than it is.
- Develop other leaders. You should be spending time each week pouring into other leaders. Leaders who will one day plant churches, business leaders in your church, your staff. And not just in a staff meeting, spewing information at them or calendar issues, but training them to be leaders. You should be giving them authority, responsibility, etc.
- Plan ahead. You should always be looking ahead. Looking ahead in sermons, looking ahead for the church. Thinking about what the church will be a like year from now, 3 years from now. No one else is doing this for the whole church. Other leaders can speak into this, but the lead pastor is paid to think about this for the whole church.
As I said, there are a lot of things you can spend your time on as a lead pastor and some of the things above other leaders are doing and want to be involved in and that’s a good thing. These are 4 things though that you cannot delegate away and that you are being paid to do.
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