When pastoral care dies

New Warhorn Media post by Tim Bayly:

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I have been in a number of church situations where the church got to the size it could hire a second full-timer. In each case, it involved a senior pastor hiring someone to do the pastoring as he (the senior pastor) intended to get on with teaching & administration. Now, the 2-i-c appointed to do the pastoring was hardly a “hireling” - but the fact that it isn’t the guy in charge who’s clearly doing the pastoring, could send quite a message!

Richard Baxter recommended hiring additional pastors to help, so it’s no new thing to get men to help you as a pastor. What they do and what you do is a separate matter.

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Yes, I do get your point about hiring additional men to help; how these additional men are used is, of course, the key question, and what I wanted to tease out.

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Another thought here. “Nature abhors a vacuum”, and if the flock cannot get the shepherding they are meant to from their pastors, they will often look for it elsewhere. I’ve been in situations where the best on offer was actually a lot of informal pastoring from others in the rank & file of a particular church. It didn’t always work. Sometimes people went outside the particular church they belonged to, if the need was perceived to be great enough.

And what is true of pastoring will be just as true of teaching & preaching …

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