Tag Archives: Pastors

From "Out of Ur"

This is a blog by a single pastor...looking for a position.

I am single.  I don't want to be a single pastor.  I don't want to stay single.

I DO want to see churches embrace single people with the same dignity and importance as the do married people.

Three important paragraphs

These churches explicitly were not looking to hire someone single--like Jesus or Paul. I then was surprised to discover that even though the majority of adult Americans are single (52 percent), that only 2 percent of senior pastors in my denomination are single! Something was clearly amiss.

We need to move from a church culture that says “Many of my best friends are single” to one that can say “Many of our best pastors are single.” I don’t want to lose heart; I want to believe that it’s possible for 650 million Evangelicals to finally embrace the equal dignity the Scriptures bestow upon both singleness and marriage.

The bottom line is that it is not about being single or married. It’s about being called and gifted by the Spirit to minister to people both like and unlike us (race, gender, marital status, etc). I plead with search committees everywhere to reflect on the implications of 1 Corinthians 7 before overlooking your next single pastoral candidate. They deserve to be evaluated on their excellence, not their marital status.

From a "Christ the Center" podcast - a rough quote:

Our expectations of a pastor stems from our ecclesiology - our thoughts about what a church is.

If our understanding about church is that our priority is social justice, our pastor will be our chief social worker.

If we believe our goal is to affect political change, our pastor will be our community organizer.

If "church" is about our friends and family - a neighborhood clique, there will be little outreach.

If we know that our church exists to proclaim the person of Jesus Christ and His work on the cross - and to equip the saints to do that - we will expect that the Gospel be preached from the pulpit each and every week.