How Megachurches and the Body of Christ Will Benefit Using Personal Pastors

Personal Pastors- All About People

To many, the term megachurch is a pejorative. It summons an image of huge buildings, multiple campuses, and large impersonal programs, all run by an autocratic pastoral staff just as interested in building their own kingdom as the Kingdom. Against this background, a very large church must be focused and intentional to elevate its people above its programs and property.

One of the frequent criticisms of megachurches is that they fail to obey Hebrews 13:17:

“Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no benefit to you.”

Specifically, that megachurches do not keep watch over their members. The predominant megachurch models feature very large congregational gatherings, comprehensive ministry programs, and small cell groups. The “church consumer” utilizes these resources on an a la carte basis, on a self guided spiritual journey.

This personal pastor idea proposes the addition of a new division within large churces that is as big a priority as worship and preaching. The scriptural basis is found in Jeremiah 3:15:

“Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding.”

This model involves employing a team of personal pastors whose job is to interact with members and contactable visitors in a way that gets them off the self guided spiritual journey and on to God guided spiritual growth. A walk that converts visitors to members and members from church consumers to church creators.

A shepherd works with nothing more than his staff. Similarly, personal pastors work with only a laptop and cell phone. They are the front line infantry for a megachurch that already has artillery and fighter jets that reach people from a distance, while personal pastors reach people one on one. They also are the intelligence division of the church, constantly collecting information about members needs, hopes, and dreams. A stint as a personal pastor is a strong training ground for future senior leaders. And because members will have a closer connection to the church through personal pastors, they will likely pay their own way in the budget.

Using personal pastors, a megachurch can arguably become the most Biblical of churches. In a typical smaller church a pastor’s time is split being the shepherd and being the church administrator. Presently in a megachurch, each pastor’s time is also split, between running a ministry program and shepherding. In both, the pastor’s time tends to go more toward long term members who are already known than the newest, who typically need the most guidance. Because personal pastors are true full time shepherds and their attention is focused solely on the sheep, they can combine their knowledge and understanding of the people with their knowledge and understanding of God and His Word, and their personal heart for God in a way that will get people saved, healed, set free, discipled, equipped, empowered and serving.

People Care is the Mission

God’s church exists to take care of His people, both the already saved and the yet to be saved, as per 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.”

Everything else that goes on in a church is a support function for caring for people. Cared for people in turn, serve God by serving others, and worship God as living sacrifices.

Given this mission, evaluating this personal pastor proposal or any other major change to the structure of a church must answer the question, “Does this provide more care for the people and is it an appropriate church function?”

People care is deliberately used here rather than pastoral care. Pastoral care is a preexisting ministry/department in most large churches. People care goes well beyond the bounds of existing pastoral care programs. It involves not only passively responding to member needs but proactively engaging members, contactable visitors, and the community at large.

Jesus is a Personal Pastor

In a typical megachurch, almost all pastors work behind a “program wall”. They are responsible first for the program they oversee, and then for the people who use the program. From a narrow economic perspective, this can make sense. Even small changes to improve the program are multiplied as the program is used by many people.

Personal pastors have no program to look after. Their sole responsibility is to care for the people. Jesus ran no program and Phillipians 2:5 directs us:

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus”

We are called, particularly iin Romans 8:29, to be conformed to the image of his Son:

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.”

Personal pastors will provide us with a boots on the ground image of Jesus’ own ministry. Their condensed job description is to love people.

People Will Pay for Personal Pastors

A very famous scripture passage is Luke 10:6-7:

“If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”

The point of these verses is that church members should receive the services of a local/personal pastor and provide for their sustenance. As the relationship between the member and the church is strengthened through the personal pastor, giving should increase.

This is a testable proposition. A church could assign a personal pastor to half of their new members over a certain period. After a set time, comparisons could be made between the personal pastor cohort and the other group in terms of not only giving, but things like small group participation, volunteerism, and service project participation.

Personal pastors are not new bureaucracies or even necessarily new people on the payroll. They are front line workers who have no paid staff and can work from home with a cell phone and a laptop. This paper presents the reasons why using the personal pastor approach to reallocate scarce resources will result in more people care and ultimately more resources.

Personal Pastors Scale and Specialize

Each personal pastor should be able to serve up to 300 families. This may seem like a large number, and it is probably an upper limit. The key to serving that many is that personal pastors are not performing all of the duties of a traditional pastor. The majority of the most time consuming activities will be referred out by the personal pastors to existing church program ministries. Technology and volunteers will also be used extensively to assist in many tasks.

As the church grows, the personal of personal pastors is not diminished as long as the personal pastor/member ratio is maintained. In Exodus 18:21 God tells Moses to use proportional scalable leadership:

“But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.”

In 1 Timothy 4:15, church leaders are directed:

“Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress.”

Indicating that shepherding is to be a specialized occupation and that the occupation itself should progress over time. Throughout human history, material progress has been the result of increased specialization by individual producers. In the megachurch, many roles have become increasingly specialized and that has contributed greatly to the excellence in ministry.

Just as senior pastors and head worship leaders specialize in preaching and worship respectively, personal pastors will specialize in people care, without the burden of simultaneously running a church program.


Personal Pastors Command Armies

Deuteronomy 1:15:

“So I took the leading men of your tribes, wise and respected men, and appointed them to have authority over you—as commanders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens and as tribal officials.”

Personal pastors are the basis for communities to exist within the larger church. People may be assigned or choose personal pastors based on numerous criteria. Geography and life stage are obvious starting points but many other factors can also be used. A very large church might have a personal pastor that focuses on serving professional athletes, Spanish speakers, single mothers, the deaf, etc.

When it comes time to take spiritual ground, the personal pastors can lead their respective communities in a coordinated way that takes advantage of the unique gifts present within each community. Free market small groups are great, but they are bands of rebels in the forest compared to the strength of an army of coordinated communities when it comes to reaching people to embrace Jesus and His church.

Personal pastors should be simpler to lead for the senior pastors. A church that has many large programs has many different job descriptions. The team of personal pastors has essentially one job description with easily measured metrics like tithing and small group participation that can be applied to determine effectiveness.

Having Personal Pastors Allows Better Stewardship

In 1 Peter 4:10, God calls for each of us to steward our gifts:

“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”

A church that has both program pastors and personal pastors on staff allows for better stewardship of both. Many pastors are drawn to a church calling by their desire to serve people face to face. They often end up running large programs with small bureaucracies. The people who get the advantage of their one on one gifts are usually staff members and the pastor himself gets frustrated and burned out because he is not operating in the center of his gifting.

At the same time there may be men who currently hold positions very similar to that of a personal pastor- like maybe a young youth pastor. This pastor may have a gift for administration but be in a job with much interpersonal contact. Separating the staff into those whose primary responsibility is programs and those whose primary responsibility is direct people contact allows both gifts to be used faithfully.

A church can switch to personal pastors without adding to payroll. Presently most large churches have pastoral staffs that split their time between program work and people work. Using personal pastors to do the people work and program pastors to do the program work enhances specialization and economies of scale. If it is necessary to add to the payroll to implement personal pastors ( and some program pastors may be reluctant to give up their office, staff, and sense of importance to become personal pastors) that may mean a church is inadequately serving its current people needs and beginning to serve them should increase relational ties and ultimately giving.

Personal pastors steward program and even small group resources by steering their community members towards those programs and groups that are well matched with each individual’s spiritual circumstances, avoiding much free range program shopping.

Having Personal Pastors is Equitable

It is natural that church members today generally get pastoral staff time in proportion to their length of membership. Many members and pastors have known each other since the days when the megachurch was merely a church. 1 Corinithians 12:25 instructs otherwise:

“so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”

Arguably, pastoral time should be used almost inversely to length of membership. The lost, new believers, and new members require more guidance than mature Christians.

Special groups have special needs. In a church where everyone has a personal pastor, there should be little grumbling that certain groups also have a personal pastor due to their special needs- such as blind members, the disabled, and even the CEO’s.

Personal Pastors are Accessible

Church members are constantly making decisions. Some of those decisions are life changing and often death inducing. For instance, a man may find it a lot easier to get a divorce attorney on the phone than a pastor. A personal pastor system gives members a way to act on Proverbs 19:20:

“Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise.”

This does not mean personal pastors are personally available 24/7. In fact, almost all of their time should be scheduled using asynchronous methods such as email and voice mail. A personal pastor should have enough knowledge of his people to readily filter which requests are true emergencies that require his immediate involvement and which will only require a later referral to appropriate church programs.

Personal pastor divisions and personal pastors individually can develop FAQ’s to post on their respective websites. A lot of member needs are repetitious and the best course of action can be outlined where it is accessible all the time.

Personal Pastors Generate and Maintain Records

Throughout the Bible and by the Bible itself it is clear that God endorses record keeping. 2 Chronicle 33:19 recounts the records of Manasseh, who found favor with the Lord after repenting:

“His prayer and how God was moved by his entreaty, as well as all his sins and unfaithfulness, and the sites where he built high places and set up Asherah poles and idols before he humbled himself—all these are written in the records of the seers.”

Very large churches today generally do not have detailed records of interactions with members. Sadly, Amazon and Netflix, two impersonal Internet enterprises, probably know more about their customers/members than the typical megachurch.

Personal pastors will be responsible for logging every significant interaction with a member or visitor in a secure on line database. This will both help themselves during later interactions and help program pastors and senior leaders to review member information prior to various classes, meetings, and functions.

Personal pastors can provide valuable feedback from their communities to senior leaders when the church takes or contemplates a different course like a new campus.

Small Groups will Thrive with Personal Pastors

Megachurches generally us a free market small group system, any qualified member can form a small group focused on just about anything. This has proven to be a pretty good system for getting people to try a small group, but it is a little less successful in getting people to stay with a small group. The Bible clearly encourages house churches and other small groups, Hebrews 10:24 states:

“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”

Many small groups have taken up this challenge of love and good deeds very well. A personal pastor can supplement this success by getting to know the small groups that may appeal to his particular community and steering members into small groups that are a particularly good fit. This should help reduce the group shopping that typically goes on.

Personal Pastors are Role Models

Paul and Timothy wrote to the Phillipians (3:17):

“Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters, and just as you have us as a model, keep your eyes on those who live as we do.”

This type of role modeling is difficult with the modern megachurch. Only top executives of good sized companies have a schedule and demands that are similar. Personal pastors, on the other hand, work one on one with members every day and can be expected to work side by side with them in order to enhance relationships during church programs and services.

Personal pastors should be attending small groups, volunteering to usher, work children’s church, and direct traffic in the parking lot. Not to gain extra labor, but to gain extra relationships. A personal pastor should not only be in the altar ministry to pray with people, he should be at the altar to receive prayer when his needs arise.

Being a personal pastor is as close to the membership as any pastor gets. It is important that they experience as much of church life next to the members as practical.

Personal Pastors are Hands On

Jesus’ ministry was hands on, in Mark 10:16 we read:

“And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.”

A major component of a personal pastor’s schedule will be to meet with individual families in his community about once a year. Take their picture for the database, catch up with where they are, and gain understanding as to where they are going.

Some of the largest enterprises that people deal with every day are as impersonal as imaginable. No one has ever spoken to customer service at Google. A church, being not of this world, can be intentionally the opposite, providing the human touch that we all desire.

Personal Pastors Lead Communities

A prophesy of Zechariah (80:20-21):

“This is what the LORD Almighty says: “Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come, and the inhabitants of one city will go to another and say, ‘Let us go at once to entreat the LORD and seek the LORD Almighty. I myself am going.”

This is the great success of the modern megachurch. Drawing people from an entire region (many cities) to worship and proclaim the greatness of our Lord Jesus. A megachurch may have many cities represented now, but there is generally little city by city leadership.

Many feel that this success has come at the price of forsaking community. Megachurches clearly work on a very large scale, corporate worship, and on a small scale, a wide variety of small groups. There are many instances where medium scale is most appropriate and personal pastors can facilitate that. Traditional church activities like pot luck picnics and trips to a ball game may work well within a pastor’s community.

Non-traditional methods will allow communities to become cohesive. The personal pastor’s weekly text and video email can be used to introduce new members, announce births and marriages, and relay information about sick or passed members. Members may decide to show up at weekend services wearing a community emblem of some sort so they can readily identify each other. And a personal pastor may decide to occupy the traditional pastor’s spot near the back door of the sanctuary in order to individually greet his community members as they exit.

Personal Pastors Find the Lost and Lost Sheep

Our great purpose as Christians is stated by Jesus in Luke 19:10:

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

For a personal pastor and his community, there are the lost and the lost sheep. Lost sheep have wandered away from the church while the lost have probably never been near the church.

Due to his relationships with his community members, a personal pastor should be able to get a very high response rate to his weekly email- especially after they realize they are going to get another email or even phone call if they don’t respond. For this kind of routine and repetitive ministry work, a personal pastor will recruit volunteers from within his community. A typical response to a weekly email will be for a member to click a few radio buttons indicating what service was attended, small group attended, or other church related activity. Using this information the personal pastor and his volunteers can get about tracking down lost sheep.

As far as saving the lost, each personal pastor and his community have an assigned field to harvest- people just like themselves. So if the community consists of empty nesters in a wealthy suburb- that is exactly who they will target. This focused effort to seek, and yes even numerical comparisons with other pastor’s communities, should result in more saving of the lost.

Personal Pastors are Sentinels

Unfortunately, as in David’s time, our world is full of predators, Psalm 56:6:

“They conspire, they lurk, they watch my steps, hoping to take my life.”

Many a megachurch has been gravely wounded by a financial or sexual scandal. Whether a huge Ponzi scheme or a small multi-level scam, these shenanigans can rip through the heart of an otherwise Christ centered church.

In the ideal church world where every member and contactable visitor is on record and acquainted with a personal pastor, there should be adequate advance warning before these squalls are allowed to grow into large damaging storms

Personal Pastors are Entrepreneurial and Competitive

Men are naturally competitive. Paul described his ministry as a competition in 1 Corinthians 9:26:

“Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air.”

A team of personal pastors can be expected to act like a team of free agents whose contracts are up for renewal. They will devise new innovative ways to serve their communities continuously as they compete among themselves for excellence. These innovations will then be cross-pollinated both to the local church and the worldwide church.

Much of what personal pastors do can be tracked easily and almost effortlessly as the pastors themselves collect data daily. While some pastor’s communities will be specialized, most will be fairly uniform and allow fair comparisons across pastors. All of the personal pastors will need suitable technology skills in order to efficiently interact with their flocks.

A roster of competent personal pastors will be the engine that drives church growth, both by their direct efforts and the constant feedback supplied to the senior leadership and program pastors. Much improved people care will result in much improved people, who will attract even more people by their witness.

Weddings and Funerals

A frequent criticism of megachurches is that some of them do not provide adequate provisions for weddings and funerals. With system of personal pastors members will know and be known by a pastor who can officiate at these solemn occasions.

Implementing Personal Pastors

In 1 Timothy 3:10, Paul prescribes a way of bringing along new church leaders:

“They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons.”

Similarly, it is reasonable to apply the same reasoning to new church strategies. Fortunately, personal pastors can be tested on a small scale before being implemented on a large scale.

Earlier in this paper, one such possible test was mentioned- assigning some new members to a personal pastor while leaving the rest without. After 6 months or so, comparisons can be made of the tithing, small group participation, and volunteer rates among the two groups. Surveys may also be used to get a subjective evaluation from the participants.

Many other test scenarios can also be imagined. Maybe using personal pastors on a newer satellite campus instead of installing another set of program pastors, limiting the program pastors to only those programs that are essential on the satellite campus.

Another test might be using a personal pastor for a group that is underrepresented in the church body, such as Spanish speakers. The test could be to compare how well that demographic grew before and after the installation of the personal pastor(s).

In a very large church it makes sense to run several tests simultaneously so there is a small cohort of personal pastors who can work with each other to refine the nuts and bolts of how to do this new job. More tests should mean sooner widespread implementation with the commensurate benefits for the entire church body.

Many churches may find they already have personal pastor candidates on staff that can be redeployed in the new positions. Some programs may be a little overstaffed and have strong candidates assisting the program leadership and ready to be more independent, independence they would have as personal pastor leading a community.

Other personal pastor candidates may come from unconventional places. Retired senior members of the church may be well suited to the position if they have the requisite Bible knowledge and a great love for people. Member of disabled communities may best be able to serve those communities within the church in this position.