Michael Aitcheson: Pastor, What’s Your Plan?

Mike Aitcheson

This is serious. This is serious business. People really do believe this, and you’ve given us a great stewardship here. But it’s also incredible when the king says, See, these are, these are my sheep, that you’re that I’m that I’m handing over to you to care for. Um, it’s a there’s a deep satisfaction today. Lot of joy there you.

Mike Aitcheson

On difficult days of ministry, there are several things right? It depends on whether I’m feeling down about the work that I’m doing all right, or whether I feel like something failed. So when I feel like the work that I’ve sowed into it, what I’ve the seeds I planted, aren’t bearing fruit, then I have to stand back and say, Okay, your identity does not consist in the abundance of your possessions. Your identity is not consistent. How well you are, how well this project went, Okay, Rejoice not that the demons are subject to you, but that your name is written in the Lamb’s book of life. Okay, so I have to get the identity piece, get my priorities right, that it’s about God’s glory, not my glory. And then I have to remember to not despise the day of small beginnings. Okay? I have, I have to remember that one man plants another waters. God yields the increase. So it is it, the church belongs to God. God is going to do with the church what he wants and the way in which he wants to do it. And so I’m freed up by the sovereignty of God. I think of, you know, John Packer’s encouraging work, evangelism and the sovereignty of God. I do all that I can, and I trust I do the right thing the best I can, and trust that God is going to do what only God can do. And then another thing I do with difficult days, and this is actually fresh, because God’s been dealing with me on this is okay. I try to hit rewind, and I try to consider God’s faithfulness. Alright, look what God has done. My tendency is to think about what isn’t done and what needs to be done. And so I’ve just this week, as I was reading story of getting I was thinking, Gosh, Lord, you’re going to get the glory. You’re going to do it the way that you want, maybe with less people. May not be with this person doing this, or that person doing that, but you’re going to get the glory. And I just thought, man, sometimes I have to remind myself that God has brought us a mighty long way. We have an anthem in our church. We’ve come this far by faith. It’s a famous gospel song, and I have to stop and and sing that, and have to think about it. And this week, it hit me afresh that, Mike, you’ve been spending too much time thinking about well, you’re not you need to just pause and reflect on how far God has actually brought you all, and he has brought us very far. There’s a lot of joy in pastoral ministry. The first thing I would say is that it’s a privilege. I know very often, the first thing you hear out of people’s mouths about the difficulty of the pastoral ministry is about pastoral ministry, excuse me, is how difficult it is. And that is true. Make no mistake about it. A friend of mine told me, because we we planted a church. He said, church planting is not for the faint of heart. He’s also involved in ministry. But before we accepted the call to plant a church, I looked in the mirror and I said, What are you doing? The mirror did not answer back, thankfully. But then I got in the car and drove away 10 minutes down the road, and I said, But Lord, this is amazing. We get the privilege of starting a kingdom outpost for you. So this is a privilege, because God went to great lengths to secure eternity for His church. The Bible says that Jesus shed his blood for the church, and so it’s a privilege to shepherd and care for God’s people that He purchased with His own blood. It’s a joy when God gives you these. Small glimpses of how meaningful your labor is. I think of Hebrews 610, God is not someone just to overlook your love on behalf of the saints. Well, let’s see nine Easters in now, a young man that I baptized when he was an infant, and his parents came up to me and said, Steven wants to take a picture with you, Mike, his parents and I are close friends, so he’s ready for his picture with Pastor, Mike. And so I scroll back to that first picture, that first Easter, where Steven and I took a picture together in my plaid jacket that the staff called a tablecloth. And I said, Stephen, you remember this? And he looked up and he smiled. I said, Do you remember when I baptized? He said, Yes, as an infant, if you remember when I baptized you? We all need to be scared right now, but there are sweet moments like that when Steven, who is now eight, okay, comes up to me seven, seven or eight comes up to me and wants to continue the tradition of taking a picture with Pastor Mike, wants to talk about what it means to participate at the Lord’s table with Pastor Mike. You can’t it’s sometimes difficult to explain how meaningful it is. It’s almost just an intangible sort of quality to it. It’s actually eternal, if you will. And I think that’s it. It’s eternal when you see your children’s ministry director stand up and cast vision, and we are talking about child safety. And she shares a story in front of 3040 people about safety and duty to warn. And she shares that I asked my oldest, who are the people you trust in the church? Who can you tell if something bad happens? And she goes down the list of people, and in the top three or top four are you and your wife as she has tears running down her face, those are just joys that you get along the way that you just hold with you for a long time and you say, alright, God, this is serious. This is serious business. People really do believe this, and you’ve given us a great stewardship here. But it’s also incredible when the king says, See, these are, these are my sheep, that you’re that I’m that I’m handing over to you to care for. Um, it’s a there’s a deep satisfaction today, a lot of joy there. The most important thing about being a pastor that I did not learn in seminary is somewhere in the space of organizational leadership, we talked about ecclesiastical structures polity, but there’s this sort of space That is endemic to kind of like the corporate world, if you will. Not that the church is corporate America, but there’s a corporate reality to it. There’s an organizational reality. And I would say that that I learned that real time. I learned that by meeting with businessmen, I learned that by seeing their frustrations with pastors. I learned that

Mike Aitcheson

how upset they can get with how inefficient pastors can be, all those things and so administrative, probably in the administrative realm, I would say, Find do, do not, do not. Be afraid to find leaders in the business community, because that’s their life. Business Administration, alright, so you’re going to learn what it means to be organized. You’re going to learn what it means to follow up. You’re going to learn what it means to communicate well, with email, with organizational structures, with legal documentation, all these things. And you don’t have to have a mastery of them, but you need to be at least familiar with these things enough to know that I’ve gotta sharpen my sword or find someone who can do it and be able to interact. And then, you know, depending on the quality of your church, we have a session. So it’s like a mini board, and as a pastor, you’re the moderator of that board. So what comes with that? There’s not only hard skills that you need to learn, but there are also soft skills. There are certain political realities. Aristotle said, humans are political animals, and politics sounds bad, but we’re always negotiating interests. As Bob Burns would say, there’s always a. Interaction going on. You’re trying to communicate something. People are trying to communicate something to you. How do you work together? How do you build consensus? How do you move people along? How do you make a decision? Make the right decision, even when you have multiple voices speaking into something that might agree with each other, but with whom you disagree. Consensus is not always the right answer is not always found in the consensus. You have to make the right decision with the information that’s given. So these are all leadership skills, all right, strategic plans, all right. Where I remember when I met with this city official, he was a believer and well respected in the community. He said, Where are you taking the church? I said, to glory, hopefully. And he was like, Haha. And I he said, No, but where are you taking the church? And I realized, okay, he’s asking me a different question. He wants to know what’s my plan, right? He wants to know Have I sat down and thought about, you know, finances? Have I sat down and thought about growth? Have I thought about hiring practices? Have I thought about all those things that are necessary for the organization to thrive? So I would commend you to books like institutional intelligence by Gordon T Smith leadership, online, by Heifetz and Lenski. Any of Lencioni things, Pete scazzero and and finding you know a local businessman or woman.