Ask your pastor: "What encourages you?"

Got this email today from a pastor who was happy for me to repost it anonymously.  This was in reply to my post of yesterday.  So, are you one of these discouraged pastors? Or are you already encouraged?  What drives you.  For some church members the reply of this man may surprise you, but it doesn’t surprise me:

Thanks for that blog post, apologies for the antiquated email reply but I’m still resisting twitter & facebook for now, plus I wouldn’t want my reply displayed publically since I identify with a fair few of those stats.

I wonder if it’s worth capturing some feedback about what it is that really encourages a Pastor. For me, what really fires me up is people under my care getting serious about God and growing, responding in a ‘good soil’ type of way to what’s being preached etc. When people are doing that, it spills over into everything – evangelism, serving in the church (and taking some of the none core stuff we carry off us), participation in Sundays, how they respond to the Pastor’s lead, and more. It’s not that you don’t want people to show appreciation sometimes, and the whole ‘Pastor care’ thing does need addressing, but someone really walking the walk tops a ‘that was good’ comment every time.