Hired Hands and Platforms

From The Pastor’s Justification:

I want to think of the flock God has loaned out to me not as items on a task list but as people made in the image of God, precious and broken and beautiful and sinful, like me. I want to see them as people, not problems. I want to see them not as obstacles in the way of some vague missional purpose but as the missional purpose themselves. The minute I begin seeing God’s people as problems to be solved (or avoided) is the minute I’ve denied the heart of Christ.

Carl Trueman quotes an email he received:

I worshipped this Sunday with my in-laws at their home church which is pastored by a man featured at this year’s [conference name supplied] with 6000 of my closest friends. My father-in-law has been dying for five years (renal failure) and is very likely within months of his death. I can’t get a pastor or elder from this congregation to come and visit him once, let alone make it a weekly priority to help him die well—in the full confidence of the Lord Jesus. But there’s time, mind you, for (yet another) conference.

Trusting that this fellow really had tried to get an elder from his father-in-law’s church to visit him before he dies, this is unconscionable. I know a pastor of a church who once said to someone asking about hospital visitation that he didn’t do it. Ever. Somebody would visit, but not him. He wasn’t saying it in terms of disdain, just matter-of-factly that that’s not in his particular job description.

I understand an individual pastor not making every (or even most) hospital/deathbed visits. But for the life of me I cannot understand an individual pastor making none.

(Pastors, with a public ministry: Your platform is not your grounds for pastoral legitimacy. It’s the other way around. And you might be able to fool your readers or wider audience, but you won’t be able to fool your local church for long. And you will never be able to fool God. There will be a reckoning for “hired hands” who don’t feed his sheep.)