I was re-reading Steve Bierly’s book How to Thrive as a Small-Church Pastor. It’s a very good book and in a number of places he made me laugh. One of this humorous comments is was this:

Someone came up to him one day and said, “Pastor, I envy you. You must see evidence in people’s lives all the time that God is real!” He replied, “Well, yes, I do, but I also see things that could lead me to believe that God is really absent, or really not as active as we think he is, or really weird.”

In the small church, pastors do get to know a great deal about people’s lives. Often when God is evident in a parishioner’s life, it is very public. Times like: a re-commitment of their faith lives, baptism, marriage, more involvement in the plans of God both personally and corporately.

What pastors also see though, is the sad, the weird and the absent times. There are times when a parishioner shares his or her favorite racist joke, or when someone’s big plans to serve God ends up taking a back seat to a softball team, or when the “strong” person of faith has something go wrong in their lives and they blame God.

Yes, the small church allows pastors to get to know more about the person and this I have come to find out is both blessing and bane. For in all honesty sometimes I don’t want to know all that I do. Sometimes I want to be an ostrich and stick my head in the sand and believe everything in a person’s life is peachy-keen. Unlike Paul Harvey, sometimes I don’t want to know “the rest of the story.”

But the rest of the story is important. For example, a while back I noticed a parishioner’s truck parked at the local bar on an every day basis. I was able to ask someone in confidence about this person. I came to find that he and his wife were having some marriage problems. That allowed me to just happen to stop by one day. The visit got things going and their marriage is being rebuilt.

Yes, sometimes the “rest of the story” is not always wanted, but I have come to find out that it is needed, and because of it, I am a better pastor to my people.

God bless, Dan

P.S. But I still don’t know why God felt it was important for Esther to share her life story as it related to her bowels. God, that’s just weird!