Pastoring, Productivity, and Priorities

Learning to prioritize your most important tasks, and then tailoring your best energy to complete those tasks for God’s glory, is the essence of pastoral productivity.

“I choose to fail at email,” my seminary professor said, as he gently hinted to the class not to take offense if you didn’t receive a reply from him. He explained his busy life as a husband, father, and professor, and he wanted the class to know his lack of responsiveness is not rooted in a lack of sympathy, but because he already made a vocational decision to fail at email. It’s not one of his priorities. 

Although you may not choose to fail at email, my seminary professor illustrates the need to prioritize your most important tasks.

Time management is not about trying to fit everything into your schedule. Effective time management, instead, is about rightly acknowledging your priorities, and then saying “no” to or delegating everything else. Pastoral ministry is open-ended. There’s always something you could be doing. Activity and productivity, however, are not identical. Learning to prioritize your most important tasks, and then tailoring your best energy to complete those tasks for God’s glory, is the essence of pastoral productivity. 

Efficiency vs Effectiveness

The only thing worse than getting nothing done is getting things done that don’t matter. It’s a mistake to think working for eight hours a day and checking things off your to-do list is automatically an effective day, for you could have spent that day doing unimportant things. 

The productivity literature distinguishes between efficiency and effectiveness:

• Efficiency: Completing tasks in the best manner. 

• Effectiveness: Completing the right tasks. 

Ideally, you’d do both. But what’s the point of being efficient if you’re not effective? It’s unproductive to accomplish things efficiently if you’re working on the wrong things in the first place.

Ministry evaluation is difficult. It’s hard to define “success” in ministry. The results of our work are not always seen. Ministry, to put it another way, has a way of making some pastors feel like they are failing when they are bearing fruit, and it has a way of making other pastors feel successful when they are succeeding at the wrong things, and evaluating the wrong metrics. 

Pastoring, Productivity, and Priorities

To ensure you succeed at the right things in ministry, you should identify your ministry priorities. The word “priority” comes from the Latin prior, meaning “first.” The narrowest description of pastoral priorities in Scripture is Acts 6:4: “But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”

To make this more concrete, however, as I write with adult teaching pastors in mind, I offer a suggestive list of pastoral priorities. This following list doesn’t mean these tasks are the only things to be done in ministry, but the most important ones. The point is not to get you to agree with the list, per se, but to challenge you to shape your schedule around biblical priorities.

1. Pursuing Holiness and Staying Qualified.

As a pastor, it’s easy to roll your eyes at something obvious, but too many pastors don’t have regular quiet time. Whereas before paid vocational ministry you often enjoyed an unhurried time of private Bible reading and prayer, now it seems your time with God in private is ignored or rushed. One of the biggest disciplines you must cultivate despite a brutal work schedule is the ability to linger in God’s presence. 

Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843), an influential Scottish pastor of his time, offers these well-known words: “My people’s greatest need is my personal holiness.” M’Cheyne’s words are hard to believe — at least at first. We tend to think our people’s greatest needs are our leadership, our preaching, or our intelligence. But if your holiness is what your congregation needs the most from you, then pursuing holiness should be your top priority. 

Or consider this quote. “Don’t let the pulpit drive you to the Word, let the Word drive you to the pulpit.” 

Do you regularly enjoy unhurried Bible reading and prayer? Do you feel spiritually vibrant? Are you letting the Word drive you to the pulpit or does the pulpit drive you to the Word? 

2. Preaching and Teaching the Bible. 

Sunday sermons, Wednesday night teaching, or Christian Education class: preparing to preach and teach the Bible should receive your best energy.

In his helpful and often humorous book on church planting, Mike McKinley tells the story of leaving to plant/revitalize a church, only to ask Mark Dever for advice one last time: “Do everything you can do to preach excellent sermons. Everything else will fall into place.”

McKinley admits he wondered if Dever’s advice would work. But as the story goes, McKinley prioritized preaching the Word, and God did great work in his church. The point isn’t that your church will automatically grow if you preach well. The point is biblical preaching is an irreplaceable component of a healthy church — so you should prioritize it.

Let your elders know your conviction about the need to set time aside for sermon prep. Let them know before you get hired. And guard your sermon preparation time with your life. Words truly are inadequate to describe the utter necessity of biblical preaching for the health of a church. 

If you find yourself unmotivated to preach or if you find yourself wandering off to Instagram during your preparation and don’t even know how you landed on the site, something is off in you and requires adjustment. 

3. Preparing the Order of Service. 

Presbyterians love to quip they live by 1 Corinthians 14:40: “But all things should be done decently and in order.” But it shouldn’t just be Presbyterians. Every church leader should strive to lead and facilitate biblical, orderly, and edifying services. 

This will vary, of course, depending on liturgical convictions, denominational background, cultural climate, and church size. But every pastor must view the Order of Service as a sacred stewardship. You’re deciding what words will be on people’s lips as they sing and what verses will be in their ears as you preach. Take it seriously. 

Putting together the Order of Service requires a lot of mental energy. It might look like: 

• Having a worship service planning meeting. 

• Having a worship service review meeting. 

• Having the music team rehearse during the week. 

• Going over the order of service with everyone involved on Sunday morning. 

• Intentionally picking verses and songs that have a singular theme.

This shouldn’t be a quick email or text that you send off. You might use a tool like Planning Center, and ensure everyone involved in the service gets a copy early in the week. You may even consider planning an entire month of worship services — in one meeting. 

I like to keep The Pastor’s Book by my side as I prepare the service. Keep resources you regularly use to organize the order of service close by.

4. Leadership. 

Leadership is influence. It’s taking people from point A to point B. It’s leading people somewhere, preferably forward. It’s the ability to articulate a vision and execute the vision. It’s rooted in character. And it should always be done out of love.

Leadership is also hard. It’s difficult to paint a picture of a vision, of something that doesn’t exist, and then try to take people there. It’s especially hard to lead volunteers or people who’ve been at the church for 20 years before you showed up. In business, you can fire a paid employee. But with volunteers, it doesn’t work that way. So you have to communicate all-the-more effectively with volunteers, and that’s not easy.

Although church leadership is hard, it is an absolute necessity. Because if you don’t lead, your church will slowly die. There’s no such thing as stabilization in ministry. You’re either growing or dying and the quality of leadership in your church often determines if you grow or die. Someone in the church has to lead and take initiative. Let it be you.

A retired pastor told me if he could go back into his ministry, he would have spent more time meeting with guys. So you also want to spend considerable energy not just leading the church, but doing leadership development and raising up other leaders.

5. General Shepherding. 

A shepherd spends time with sheep. There is no substitute for time in the presence of your congregation to gain trust. Build relationship capital with your elders, deacons, staff, and leaders. And you need to exercise oversight over each member (and delegate some of this work to other elders) — ensuring all sheep are fed, nourished and cared for.

Also, the priestly work: praying for the sick, hospital visitations, and counseling. Productivity-minded pastors tend to neglect this work or dread it. But if we are truly going to be shepherds and not just leaders, we must prioritize the priestly work of pastoral ministry. 

Prioritizing Your Most Important Tasks

Some of you may say, What about discipleship? What about administration? What about evangelism? Are you saying those things are not important? Perish the thought. 

My list above is not exhaustive but is provided to encourage you to think about time management in the pastorate as prioritizing your most important tasks. 

You don’t have to choose to fail at email like my seminary professor, but you must choose to prioritize what you will accomplish — and say “no” to or delegate everything else.