Solo Pastor: Understanding and Overcoming the Challenges of Leading a Church Alone

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You stay in by lowering your expectations to the level of “nothing’s happening here, but nothing’s happening anywhere else either. It's best to delay starting a new ministry unless you have a minimum of five people committed to getting it started and keeping it running. He can and will take you through a development process and make you – by His mighty power – the leader whom you need to be.

Lincoln City Church

A solo-pastor church can adequately add only one new ministry a year, and perhaps retool two other ministries. Most small churches don’t have enough people to effectively run nursery, children’s ministry, youth ministry, small groups, adult studies, men’s groups, women’s groups, and a dynamic worship service. It’s striking to me that the apostles, as the first leaders of the first church, after their unique and matchless training at the hands of Christ himself, viewed prayer as a major part of their ministries – “…we will give ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word…” (Acts 6:1-4).Joseph Lalonde is an award-winning leadership blogger and hosted the Answers From Leadership podcast. I’m fine with seeing pastors “leave the ministry” if they weren’t the right men to be serving in this way in the first place.

The Solo Pastor: Understanding and Overcoming the Challenges

Our communication is clearer, our structure is stronger, our leadership development process is better, our facility stewardship is more proactive, and our cultural mindset is now set on eagerly advancing the kingdom of God. Doing too much too fast in a solo-pastor church brings overextension, disillusionment, and collapse. A God-given vision requires a church to step forward in practical ways to connect with real people in ministry situations. Learn to hate the twin pastor-killing sins of bitterness (because of what you did to me that you shouldn’t have done) and resentment (because of what you should have done for me and didn’t do).In my opinion, in most cases, one of the three responsibilities which the full-time pastor should give himself to is that of training/equipping the saints (Ephesians 4:12) so that the saints can do the work of the ministry.