Fire Prevention

Pastor’s blog

Acts 20:28 Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.

I have recently been looking into getting new fire extinguishers in the church building which is, of course, a necessity in any public building. I sincerely hope that they never have to be used.

We have also recently had our whole church building rewired.

The reason for this was that some of the electrical wiring in the church was very old and was prone to faults, and it also constituted a fire risk. The fire extinguishers are there to put out a fire, should one break out. The wiring was to help minimise the risk of a fire happening in the first place.

I have been in pastoral ministry for twenty years this year and I’m now in a position as a Network Coordinator for the South Coast network of Elim, and as a Placement Supervisor for our local bible college, to help other Pastors maximise their own ministries and to help those coming into ministry to get equipped for the road ahead, and what I  see here, with our fire extinguishers and our wiring, is a big parallel for pastoral ministry.

Sometimes, Pastors and church leaders seem to spend their entire ministries putting out fires in people’s lives instead of preventing them. They hop around from tragedy to tragedy, only visiting people when they are sick, or when something terrible has happened, and they rarely have any input in the lives of the people they minister to, outside of looking at them from a platform on a Sunday morning!

Personally, I count it an honour to be called by God to be a Pastor. I’m not an Apostle, and I’m OK with that. I’m not a Prophet, though I will and do prophecy from time to time, and I’m OK with that. I’m not an Evangelist, though I will and do evangelise. And I’m OK with that. I’m a Pastor – and to me, it is the best calling in the world!

A Pastor is a teacher, when the ministries are listed in Ephesians 4:11 it says, “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers…”  Pastor and teachers are listed together here, showing that they are one and the same ministry. Imagine a list of tradespeople – “plumbers, mechanics, painters and decorators.”

A Pastor teaches, not just by preaching on a Sunday, or by leading the bible study, but by being a life-example to others and by ‘doing life’ with them. And a Pastor is a Shepherd. We are called to care for the flock that God has entrusted us with and that means feeding them and caring for them. Didn’t Jesus say of himself that the Shepherd knows the sheep by name (John 10)? What better example of shepherding than that of Jesus!

I spend at least one working day of every week visiting or meeting with people from church and I see the benefits of that in the relationships that are built.

I want to encourage you, today, Pastor.

Feed your sheep, get to know them, visit them or take them out for coffee.

Walk through life with them, be there for the tragedies and the joys of life.

Celebrate with them, laugh with them, cry with them.

Get to know their struggles and their triumphs. In this way, we begin a rewire in the lives of those entrusted to us, confidence is built, and we have a wonderful opportunity to live as examples to the people we journey with and hopefully, though it may not look as dramatic from the outside (but is far more beneficial) we prevent fires rather than having to fight them later.

God bless.