six steps ✙

A Single-roled “Pastor”? Preacher Pastor vs. Shepherd Pastor

Warren Bird (Leadership Network) writes about A.W. Tozer:

Tozer’s official title for many years was that of “pastor,” but in actuality he focused his pastoral work very narrowly on preaching and teaching. He didn’t enjoy – and wasn’t particularly good – at pastoral acts like visiting the sick or training his elders. In fact, when he candidated at one church he said, “I’ll go anywhere to preach, but it needs to be clear that I am not interested in being pastor.” Indeed the church employed him at that very level: his sole responsibility was to speak at the Sunday morning and evening services. The church hired a second person to do everything else. That young man “will handle everything. You won’t have to attend board meetings, visit the sick, lay any cornerstones, attend any picnics, cut any ribbons or anything else. Just preach twice a Sunday, that’s it,” the church’s leaders had promised.

Bird goes on to ask,

“How is that dual-person role any different from today’s multisite approach of one person as teaching pastor and the other as campus pastor? I think Tozer (and many others like him) set quite a precedent that led in some ways to the splitting of roles in many multisite churches today.”

Personally, I think every “pastor” needs to have a public proclamation of God’s Word (preaching, teaching, equipping) and a private proclamation of God’s Word (counseling, visitation, congregational care). He ought to live amongst and care for his people, in order to have credibility and authenticity for applying the preached Word into his congregation’s lives. Living in community is a prerequisite to preaching expositionally: we must exegete God’s people, alongside of exegeting God’s Word.

Caring for our sheep, knowing their needs and struggles, is the means by which we discover the areas of life that should be addressed in our sermons, and the life contexts to which we apply God’s all-sufficient Word.