I've had the opportunity to share this small vignette from my life a couple of times recently, so I'll also share it here in-case anyone else might find it amusing.

Before I was in the church, back when I lived in England, I was a bit of a metal-head. I listened to rock and heavy metal music and outside of work lived in jeans and black t-shirts. I had lots of black t-shirts, mostly band tour shirts. Henry Ford would have been proud of my t-shirt selection technique: any colour as long as it was black. How many black t-shirts did I own? Well, enough that they comprised a full load in the washing machine.

At some point, and I don't even remember the reason, I had purchased a bright red t-shirt and was worried about it bleeding all over my work shirts. This was back when as a programmer, I had to wear a suit and tie to the office. And then it dawned on me, just throw it in with my black t-shirt load. I will never know if that red t-shirt bled any colour in the wash, but I do know that all of my black t-shirts looked just fine afterwards.

A pastor is a saint before they are a pastor. I say this because there is tendency to regard pastors (all licensed ministers really) as above the regular folks in the church and I believe that this is unhealthy for church culture. Respecting your pastor and following their spiritual leadership is healthy, but considering them above you just because of their title is bad.

For the record, when I use the term saint, I'm using the biblical meaning of an individual saved believer within the church, not some alleged super Christian as taught by a certain large church organization who shall not be named here. Do a word search in your favorite bible study software or bible website and you’ll see what I mean.

Perhaps the root of the issue is that we have done a poor job separating people and roles (or offices if you prefer that term). This seems to be a general problem with humans as it happens even in the most secular of large corporations. For example, people get a job position with the word manager in the title and suddenly they are a MANAGER and don’t you forget that! The good ones rise above this, but many do not, providing backstory to the modern parable that "people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers". The good managers are those who are still whatever they were before their promotion, only they now use their skills to help and provide for their team. My background before pastoring was IT and the good managers were still good programmers at heart. When I arrived at the role of Technical Lead, I had enough responsibilities on the project that my available programming time was limited, but I was still the one that my team came to when they got stuck because I was the best programmer. I considered that my role was to enable them to do their work, whatever that meant that I needed to do. I would run interference and keep them out of meetings whenever possible, I would help them when they got stuck, answer their questions or deal with organizational blockages.

Back in the mists of time, when I started as a pastor, I had this dream that the role would be amazingly spiritual all the time. Don't get me wrong, there certainly were spiritual activities. Preparing sermons and teachings for the Sunday and Wednesday services and teaching bible studies at other times counts as spiritual. The rest of the activities, while generally needful and important, were undoubtedly less spiritual. On a good week, I would be about 20% spiritual activities, with the significant balance being the business of running a church and keeping the congregation out of jail. (Mostly kidding about the jail thing.)

Perhaps most people don't give this much thought, but a church is a business. Most are classified non-profit and tax-exempt, but even so, they are a business and must be run as such. Annual business meetings, board meetings, filings with appropriate state and federal departments, maintaining proper accounts and following non-profit organisation accounting practices. And don't forget the fundraising! We used bake sales, rummage sales and peanut brittle sales. Let me tell you, we made lots of peanut brittle! And it was good. We had people contacting us as soon as the weather started getting cold, asking when we were going to be selling our peanut brittle.

And then there’s the care and feeding of the congregation. This is the most challenging and variable part of the whole pastoring thing. You just never know what they’re going to ask or do. I've been asked advice on many topics, some of which I knew about and others I had to do some serious Internet searching to find answers for them. I have helped people put together budgets, obtain cars, organise weddings and funerals and so many other things. From early in my time as a pastor, I was often asked to assist with slaughtering animals. This was something that I had never done before, so with help from a good friend (Thanks Bill! You know which one you are. Goodness, I know so many Bill's and William's!) I learned, very much on the job, how to slaughter a variety of animals and then process them. Now, this is a useful life skill, but not one that I thought would accompany being a pastor.

The Lord sets the gold standard for power of all sorts.

Destructive power. It seems uncontentious to say that Hollywood, and the media industry in general, does not like Christianity or anything to do with God. Freewill and all that. Of course, they are welcome to dislike whatever they wish. That being said, they do seem to spend a good amount of their time referencing it in various ways. The ten plagues that God brought upon Egypt when he was freeing his chosen people, the Hebrews, are often referenced by the media. Whether by making movies about the event or using it as a reference to describe the enormity of some disaster, they treat it as the gold standard upon which any devastation is to be judged. Weather commentators use terms like "Biblical proportions" when describing things like hurricane damage and movie producers seem to enjoy making and remaking movies about the ten plagues so that they can incorporate the maximum amount of special effects.

Constructive power. While the world seems to like concentrating on the destructive power of God, he also sets the gold standard for creative power, specifically the creation of the universe and everything in it, including us. Gotta admit that speaking the universe into existence is impressive. I love the creation account and when you read it carefully, it always strikes me as the most briefly and humbly described use of power by the Lord. There was no intent to impress, just a willingness to provide a wonderful universe for the new life he was about to create.

"Pastor, I just feel that I'm not being fed." This is always a fun thing to be told by a member of your congregation. All that studying and sermon preparation wasted. The first time I had someone tell me this, I was distraught and blamed myself until I realised, looking back, that the issue was that I wasn't preaching what they wanted me to preach. Not going to name any names, but one family were preppers and were offended that I wasn't using the pulpit to warn the congregation that martial law was going to be declared imminently, and certainly in less than two years and that everyone should start preparing by stockpiling food and ammunition. They even had YouTube videos of other people saying the same things, so how could I not believe them? I was such a bad person, how could they in good conscience stay under my ministry any longer?

Well, that was about ten years ago as I write this, so we are overdue for martial law and the government taking away our rights using extreme force by at least eight years. While I am aware that these days the average lifespan of a conspiracy theory is somewhere in the region of six months before it's proven true, not every conspiracy theory is automatically true.

What is true, is that no matter who is or isn't the president of the United States (or is or isn't the leader of any other country) the Lord is still on his throne and in charge of the universe. The Lord's will and his plans are unable to be thwarted by any enemy. Satan may steal away individuals from the Kingdom of God, but the Church is going to be triumphant and every plan and minion of the devil is going to be defeated. Therefore, we are better served receiving the teaching of the scriptures regardless of whether we like them rather than listening to teachers of conspiracy theories. If your pastor is preaching straight out of the scriptures, clearly teaching that Jesus is good and sin is bad, then your obligation is to receive that spiritual food and not put yourself on a spiritual hunger strike.