How Can I Best Support My Pastor?

I love it when Christians ask me how support their pastor because you just you have no idea how much your pastor needs your support.

The first way that any good pastor will tell you that you can support him is praying. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities and spiritual forces of darkness in high places. Without prayer, we’re done for.

Supporting your pastor by attending church is a huge thing. It is amazing. I’ve been watching over the last 20 years, faithful, committed Christians eroding in their regularity in church attendance. What that does is it discourages your pastor. Your pastor thinks, “Well, I mean, why am I not serving you well?”

Part of it is in our day and age people have options. They can be off with a traveling league with their kids. They can be at the beach. They can be in the mountains. They can be doing this, that, and the other, and your pastor is left wondering how important God is, how important Christianity is, and whether he’s a failure as a minister because half the pews are full and his best people are not there.

One of the ways you can support your pastor—and, by the way, you need this for your own souls—is just to be in the Lord’s house, on the Lord’s day, with the Lord’s people, under the Lord’s word week after week after week.

The best pastoral ministry, I think, that probably exists in the world today goes unnoticed. You know your pastor lives in the day and age of celebrity pastors. There are guys that are out there building their platform. They’re coming out with smoke machines and emerging to fireworks, and I know your faithful pastors don’t want to do that and they don’t want to be that. But I can tell you this, they’re discouraged by that because those people have 20, 30, 40, 50, 60,000 people coming to their churches on Sunday. And your pastor is in your 140-member congregation, and nobody out there ever notices him.

That’s kind of how ministry is supposed to be. We’re supposed to be in there slogging it out, living life with you, and knowing your cares, your heart breaks, your trials. If you can just express, “Pastor, thank you that you’re not out there building your brand. You’re not out there building your platform. You’re not out there working on your next book deal. You’re here loving me, serving me, serving all of us. You’re feeding us the word, ministering to our souls.”

Befriend your pastor. Pastoring in a local church, even in a wonderful, warm, welcoming, friendly local church, can be a bit of a lonely thing. And then here’s the last thing: it’s just support your pastors family. It’s a hard thing to be a pastor’s wife. It’s a really, really hard thing to be a pastor’s wife. And it’s a hard thing to be pastor’s kids and so just be tenaciously protective of, supportive of, defensive of your pastor’s family because you want your pastor’s family to be happy in the Lord and happy together. So those are some ways that you can support your pastor.