Congratulations, You Are an EM Pastor!
Three Dispositions to Help You Understand the
Landscape of Your First Ministry Call
By Daniel Jung
I graduated from seminary in 2013 and took my first call to full-time vocational ministry in 2015. It was at a small Korean immigrant church in California’s Central Valley, where I was to serve as their fourth English Ministry pastor in the last six years.
We moved into our rental home and while my wife and kids settled into our new surroundings, I packed my minivan with boxes filled with books and trinkets and drove to church for my first day “at the office.”
It was the first time I was given an office so I was eager to move into the space, particularly looking forward to putting my books on the shelves and my schedules on the wall. After bringing in the last box from my car, I sat down at my desk for the first time and took a deep breath. The rumbles and rattles from the small air conditioning unit was a clear sign that it was struggling to keep up with the sweltering August heat of Central California. The sweat that dripped down my ankles and pooled into the heels of my flip-flops was a sign of my struggle to battle the heat as well.
Catching my breath, I peered through the tower of boxes and caught a glimpse of a decorative piece hanging from the wall. It was one of those Hobby Lobby signs found in the clearance aisle in the vein of Live-Love-Laugh, most likely a remnant from one of the previous EM pastors.
The sign read, “The will of God will never take you where the grace of God will not protect you.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but for a variety of reasons, I repeated this phrase—a sort of motivational slogan—saying it to myself and continually believing it over the course of the next four years. More than this discount-store proverb, however, a clear-minded, candidly unromanticized guide/roadmap to my first ministry calling would have been more helpful.
Enter KALI.
For you, the first-time EM pastor, you may be figuratively (or literally) sweating through your shirt, trying to keep up or stay afloat. The pressures to succeed may be rumbling and rattling within you. You are doing your best to present yourself as a competent leader on the outside, but crumbling under the sweltering heat of ministry demands and congregational expectations. So beyond a pithy decorative sign, it is our hope that this manual gives it to you straight, without mushy sentiments, serving as a useful roadmap for your first ministry call.
………………….
1. Accept the Limitations of Your Role - Financial, Operational, Ministerial
If you are a new EM Pastor, you will undoubtedly bring your seminary-trained visions of grandeur into your new ministry environment; eager to preach from the catechisms, hopeful for the prospect of leading session meetings and presiding over the Lord’s Supper table. You offer lip-service to an unassumingly faithful ministry, but you’re inwardly daydreaming for a revival that you the Holy Spirit ignites.
But the reality of your position, as an assistant pastor or unordained jundosanim, is that your ministry will only grow in proportion to the KM pastor’s vision for the EM and his session’s willingness to provide funds for it. Coming to grips with this reality will not only save you some unnecessary disappointment, it will also help you gauge the role in your specific EM landscape.
From what I’ve experienced—and from what I’ve confirmed from the experiences of other EM pastors—the church can either adequately support the operational budget of the EM or it can support your salary. One or the other, sometimes neither, but never both.
Here’s where you should resist the temptation of greener grass without prudently evaluating your current situation. Chances are your salary will never be enough, but you will receive three fringe benefits in spades:
work experience - the sheer volume of work will force you to learn all aspects of church ministry on the fly. Preaching, teaching, vision casting, organizing, galvanizing, mobilizing, strategizing. You will learn it all and you will sink or swim.
a legacy of love for the church - since you will likely be working with youth, 20-somethings, and a few young families thrown into the mix, you will have a direct hand in shaping their ecclesiology for the rest of their lives. This is a privilege and an honor.
an opportunity to explore church planting - the EM pastorate will undoubtedly confront you with questions regarding your desire to plant a church. Whether you decide to take the time to answer them is up to you.
Accepting the limitations of your role—being aware of the boundaries of your ministry landscape—will safeguard your heart from disillusionment and will provide structured space for you to operate with liberty and whole-hearted service.
Practical Advice: if you consider church planting, you should start by answering the question, “What is my vision for a new church?” rather than “What will I do differently than my current EM?” It’s a small shift in your mindset that will provide pinpoint clarity to your future church planting aspirations.
2. Assess your Relationship with the KM Pastor/Session with a Sober Mind
It is likely that your KM pastor has been serving at his church for so long that a job description is unnecessary. Preach, morning prayer, staff meetings, bible studies, church activities, home visitations, church cleanups…it’s been built into his schedule for years. Your job description should be similar but you’d be hard-pressed to see it in writing. Therefore, you must be okay with ambiguity and undefined roles. On the flip side, you must also be okay with rigidity that you deem unnecessary along with obeying previously uncommunicated unilateral decisions. Be like water, my friend.
Expecting your senior pastor to change is unfair. He will not change, nor should he. When asked why he never passed to his teammates, Kobe Bryant said (paraphrasing), “I see them in practice. I see what time they come to the gym and what time they leave. I see the work they are putting in. Nah, I’m going to keep the ball and shoot it myself.”
No matter how many times your KM pastor affirms your partnership in ministry, it’s his church. He is the one waking up at 5am everyday for morning prayer, he is the one who has a cot in his office so he can sleep, and he will be there long after you say your goodbyes to the congregation. While you may bemoan your 50-60 hour work weeks, he is nearly doubling that on a slow-week. He sees you as ministry-middle-management at best, or a spiritual babysitter at worst, depending on your relationship with him. He is Kobe. You are Metta World Peace, maybe Ron Artest. Your most significant avenue of autonomy is that you get to choose which it’s going to be through how willing you are to cooperate. That’s the plain truth. The sooner you can accept it, the more fruitful your ministry will be.
Practical Advice: unless explicitly stated otherwise, you must maintain regular office hours. NO EXCEPTIONS. If you have a problem with this, you shouldn’t be serving at a Korean immigrant church.
Practical Advice: accept that your tenure is limited and plan accordingly. Paul planted and Apollos watered. You cannot do it all, so pick what you want to do, do it faithfully, and leave the rest up to God (and the next EM pastor).
3. Know When to Say Goodbye - Recognize and acknowledge your burnout.
Many of us assume a narrow definition of burnout. We think it’s correlated to physical exhaustion—when you are overworked, your schedule is filled to the max, and you have no bandwidth for any more tasks. This is burnout, yes, but equally damaging (and harder to self-diagnose) is another kind of burnout.
It’s a kind of burnout that is the result of uninspired work. A work culture with conflicting visions, or without clear direction. It’s exasperated by a relationship without communication, collaboration, or feedback. Work for the sake of work. There are a number of different contributing factors for this kind of burnout (an inconsistent enforcement of guidelines, fluctuating metrics of evaluation, erratic or nonsensical examples of accountability, undermined efforts), but in the end, this kind of burnout is not a shortage of bandwidth, it's a shortage of inspiration.
As pastors and leaders, when our desires/efforts don’t align with the vision of the group, when there is little overlap between the two, we attempt to bridge that gap by saying, “I’ll do it for God.” But that dissonance is taxing. That kind of dissonance will be alleviated eventually, either through burnout, moral failure, chronic health conditions, depression, apathy, or…you can leave. When the divide becomes too great, when you can no longer say, “I’ll do it for God”, then it’s time to leave.
Practical Advice: prioritize mentoring/fellowship opportunities with other Korean American pastors who understand your situation because they’ve experienced it themselves. They can help you, support you, advise you, and give it to you straight. You will have to seek these opportunities because your church and congregation will not prioritize this for you. Other than your time with your family, these opportunities must be safeguarded and you must be your own champion for it.
BONUS: Leaving Well - Don’t Upheave. Just Grieve and Leave.
When it’s time to leave, resist the temptation to “tell the story” or worse yet, tell your side of the story. No good will come of this. Your congregation will not understand and you will appear selfish, perhaps unraveling the years of work you had invested in your EM. You cannot control the narrative. You can only trust that God will shape the narrative as you give it to him as an offering. In other words, keep it short and sweet, make it about God, and be their shepherd to the very end and beyond.
Practical Advice: When announcing your resignation to the general congregation, it will be natural to get emotional. It’s okay to cry, but keep in mind that it’s still a Lord’s Day worship service. Incorporate we-language instead of I-language and remember to direct the congregation towards God’s unfailing love.
EXAMPLE - “Let’s remember all that God has done during our time together. The ministry initiatives, the formal and informal gatherings, the corporate times of deep prayer and worship. These are all things to not only be celebrated, but continued, knowing the faithfulness of God has endured and will endure long after our time together is over…..”
………………….
Just as I was starting to get used to my new office chair, and just as the sweat from my polo-shirt was starting to dry, I heard the voice of my senior pastor. “Daniel jundosanim, can you come in here?”
I walked to his office and we exchanged pleasantries. He asked how I liked my office and I told him I was grateful. It was my first office. Our conversation was polite, spoken through his broken English and my very broken Korean. A nuts-and-bolts ministry conversation that lasted no more than five minutes. As the meeting ended and as I got up to return to my office, he said one more thing.
“Jundosanim.”
“Yes, moksanim?”
“As a pastor, you should not be wearing shorts and flip-flops at church.”
“Ok…I mean, 네.”
I walked back into my office and read the sign once more.
The will of God will never take you where the grace of God will not protect you.
Daniel Jung is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary and a teaching elder in the Korean Northwest Presbytery. He lives in Northern California, where he serves as an associate pastor at Home of Christ in Cupertino. In his spare time, Daniel loves the 49ers, good coffee, and writing about the intersection between faith and pop-culture. You can find more of his work here.
If you found value in this content and believe in the ministry of KALI, we ask that you prayerfully consider participating with us through your financial support. You can make a tax-deductible contribution to this ministry online. Clicking on this link will direct you to KALI’s MNA (Mission to North America) giving page. Please follow the website’s instructions from there.
