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Book Review: “The Flourishing Pastor”
This book by Tom Nelson offers soul nourishment for weary, challenged and even energized pastors. From counsel to cautions, you'll learn how you can thrive spiritually while you seek to bless your church.
The Flourishing Pastor: Recovering the Lost Art of Shepherd Leadership, by Tom Nelson
In eleven chapters, 1 Tom Nelson speaks to weary, challenged and even energized pastors. He successfully calls them deeper – away from weariness, away from mustering up their strength or courage, and away from craving accomplishment or ministry success. He reminds pastors that Who called them is more significant than What they’re called to.
Nelson shared 2019 survey results (pre-pandemic) that “almost 40% of all clergy report low satisfaction with their overall life… And slightly more than 40% report high levels of daily stress.” The rest of the book seeks to serve pastors by offering scriptural and practical lifelines to not only keep them afloat but to help them confidently and joyfully swim, even against the current when called to do so.
In one of what I deemed his favorite words (he overuses it throughout the book), the author shares “three perilous paths” that pastors can walk on:
- The Celebrity Pastor
“Instead of living before an audience of One, the celebrity pastor lives before an audience of many… Jesus does not offer shepherds a green room to pridefully bask in; instead He offers a cross to carry and a basin and towel to serve with.”
- The Visionary Pastor
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “God hates visionary dreaming, it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself… When his ideal picture is destroyed… he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”
I especially appreciated the author’s challenge to us pastors who may pursue being visionary at the expense of simple, daily disciple-making.
“[When] I am asked about the vision of our church… though nuanced, my response is basically that there are no visionary leaders in our church, no grand guiding vision of a desired future. Instead, our vision as a faith community is the gospel vision Jesus gives us in Holy Scripture of the abundant life of intimacy, integrity, influence, and joy he invites us to experience as his apprentices… Rather than pursuing the perilous path of visionary leadership, a wiser path is to become the lead servant in a faith community. … The vision pastors desperately need is not one of a humanized grand future, but a growing vision of the glory of our triune God. A grave peril for pastors is the seduction of accomplishment at the expense of intimacy.”
- The Lone Ranger Pastor
“Pastoral isolation is a toxic seedbed for burnout and scandalous behavior… in the dark shadows of pastoral isolation, prideful self-sufficiency [is born].”
Overall: Restore trust in the church by becoming a trustworthy, flourishing pastor.
The book overall is a truly nourishing book. I wouldn’t say it’s a timeless book on soul care for pastors. However, it was a truly timely book for me. His chapter on Cultivating a Flourishing Culture, in particular, was an important message to spiritual leaders.
In a day when distrust of institutions is rampant, we must realize that the church itself is an institution. We must be trustworthy spiritual leaders as we work diligently to restore and create trust in the institutional life that we guide and develop in our local churches. We can do this by developing healthy, biblically-rooted culture in our churches.
“…an enduring institution—thrives when leadership places continual, disciplined attention on cultivating and preserving organizational culture… It has often been observed that organizational culture eats organizational strategy for lunch.”
Ultimately, the institution of your local church must be protected and strengthened by a pastor who is flourishing. Nelson’s book will remind pastors of some basics and encourage them to tend to their own souls diligently in order to lead flourishing churches.
- The Flourishing Pastor: Recovering the Lost Art of Shepherd Leadership, by Tom Nelson (Intervarsity Press: 2021). By clicking the link and purchasing the book, I’ll get a little credit from Amazon.[↩]
So glad you were encouraged and enriched by the book. The phrase that always comes to my mind when thinking about Pastors is “servant leader” – one who first and foremost glorifies God and serves others. You are a picture to me of a “servant leader.” – one who serves and ministers tirelessly.