The Average Pastor

In this episode of the DoorWays Ministry Network podcast, host Ric Shields interviews Dr. Daniel Isgrigg, a Pentecostal historian and associate professor at Oral Roberts University. They discuss Isgrigg's book, "The Average Pastor", which encourages pastors of smaller churches. Isgrigg shares his journey from being a children's pastor to leading a church, and the challenges he faced in managing a smaller congregation with limited resources. He emphasizes that the average church size in America is under 100 people, and that these congregations are just as valuable and deserving of dedicated pastoral care as larger ones. Isgrigg encourages pastors to embrace their congregations as they are, rather than focusing on growth or comparing themselves to larger churches.

Transcript

Ric Shields (00:00):

Imagine if you will, your kids coming home from Children's Church reciting the creed from the fourth ecumenical council held in Caldon in 451 AD or the Athanasian Creed from 500 AD. Well, that's what happens when your children's pastor has a degree in theological and historical studies. Now, actually, I think that's probably a good thing, even if it goes against conventional wisdom in children's ministry.

(00:27):

But this episode is not about children's ministry. It's about being average. It's about an average pastor in an average church and how Daniel Isgrigg realized his options. He could operate with ongoing disappointment or come to realize he was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

(00:46):

Trust me, average is not an enemy. And my guest will explain why on this episode of the DoorWays Ministry Network podcast.

(01:03):

Thank you for joining us on this podcast. I'm Ric Shields, your host, and I'm the director of the DoorWays Ministry Network.

(01:09):

Today I'm talking with my friend Dr. Daniel Isgrigg, an associate professor and Pentecostal historian at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Daniel has been as Assemblies of God minister for over 20 years. His research interests are early Pentecostalism, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the well-known evangelist Oral Roberts. Dr. Isgrigg is the author of six books, a couple of dozen published articles and scores of blog posts and other communications. He's a husband to Amanda and the father of Will and Britian, and not to mention the human caretaker of a Bassett hound named Deacon. I'm proud to have him as a friend. Daniel, thank you for joining me on this episode.

Daniel Isgrigg (01:51):

Thank you, Rick. You are my friend and I love your family and appreciate the work you're doing on this podcast. It's been a real joy to listen in and hear all these great conversations. So to be on it, it's pretty cool. Thanks.

Ric Shields (02:04):

Well, thank you. I'm really happy you're with me. We're going to talk about one of your books in a moment, but I can't help but ask first why it was you became a Pentecostal historian?

Daniel Isgrigg (02:15):

Oh, gosh, that's a good question. A historian tells stories, obviously. And being a minister in the Pentecostal tradition and enjoying my academic education, I had the opportunity while I was in seminary to do my thesis on Howard Irvin, who was a scholar and professor here at ORU. He was a Baptist who was filled with the Spirit and really became a person who was articulating from an academic standpoint the Pentecostal beliefs in spirit baptism. And so, I got to tell his story and I fell in love with it. And just that process of doing research and telling a story that no one has told yet. And so that's how I became a historian. I decided to do my PhD in Pentecostal history and studied the history of Assemblies of God views on the end times or eschatology.

(03:09):

I finished my PhD in 2019 and I just keep telling stories. I keep doing research and keep finding cool things to let people know about. So that's why I blog, too, because I find things that I think are interesting and I write about them, and hopefully other people find them interesting, too.

Ric Shields (03:27):

And you find some pretty obscure things.

Daniel Isgrigg (03:30):

Yeah, I mean, most people aren't looking for stuff like that. And so, I served for five years as an archivist at ORU’s library in the Holy Spirit Research Center. So, my hands were always touching cool things when you read history or you know, see something in history, you think, oh my goodness, I didn't even know this existed. And so, then I tell other people this exists. Hopefully, they think it's cool, too.

Ric Shields (03:55):

Yeah, we always hope.

Daniel Isgrigg (03:57):

I don't know, sometimes I think things are interesting and there's crickets.

Ric Shields (04:01):

Daniel, you were not raised in a Pentecostal tradition, so how did you come to embrace that theology? That's a different theology than how you were raised?

Daniel Isgrigg (04:12):

Yeah, so I was a Methodist growing up. My family took me to Methodist Church, but I didn't necessarily have a relationship with God till right after high school is when I got saved and my sister happened to be going to an Assemblies of God church. When I gave my life to the Lord, I just called her and asked her where she was going. And so, I went there. So it wasn't really a conscious choice, it just was a matter of circumstance.

(04:39):

But what I found in that particular tradition was very life giving This church, an Assemblies of God church, Christian Chapel, discipled me and helped me to come understand my faith and things like that. And the idea that God was real and that I could experience him personally, and that he can do things today that he did in the Bible resonated with me. So, I fully embraced that and felt like, you know, that represented what I read in the Bible. And I was, I didn't intend to be a Pentecostal, but I became one then I was eventually involved in ministry and got my credentials.

Ric Shields (05:21):

Let's turn our focus to your book, “The Average Pastor.” You published it in 2016. I think it would be good for us to have a little background first. You started attending what I would call a medium sized church around what, 300 people or so, maybe a little more, while in high school after receiving Christ as your Savior began working at that church as a janitor, even before you enrolled as a student at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. After graduating ORU with a degree in theological and historical studies, in the year 2000, you became the children's pastor at the church for the next six years. A children's pastor with a degree in theological and historical studies. That I'm trying to put those together.

Daniel Isgrigg (06:04):

Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

Ric Shields (06:05):

Yeah, it really does. And then you be, you became the associate pastor for...

Daniel Isgrigg (06:10):

They were learning the Apostles Creed!

Ric Shields (06:12):

Yes. They were definitely learning it. Apostles Creed, every creed there was.

Daniel Isgrigg (06:18):

They knew who the Council of Caldon was.

Ric Shields (06:22):

Well, you became the associate pastor for the next four years while you completed your master's degree at ORU and after 10 years, you made a big change and became the pastor of a church. So, what led up to that change from serving on a church staff to becoming the pastor of a church?

Daniel Isgrigg (06:40):

I have always kind of had the approach in life. I don't know that I've heard God speaking to me like audibly about things, but I've tended to walk through open doors, that's fitting right with this podcast.

Ric Shields (06:56):

That's right. That's what we used to be called, but we're not anymore, so that's okay.

Daniel Isgrigg (07:00):

So, I tend to walk through DoorWays and they're open. But no so I was kind of a reluctant adopter of children's ministry and ended up just really enjoying it. Then with my education doing more teaching for adults and things like that. And so, sort of transitioned that into adult ministry and associate pastor.

(07:26):

But after you do that for a while, you know, the church kind of breeds you to think that the next step is senior pastor. Plus, I was in a really healthy situation, felt like I was mentored very, very well, and felt like, well, you know, maybe it's time for me to go lead a church myself. It just happened that there was a church open at the time that I was feeling this, and it was one that some of people in my family had some roots in. And so, it was interesting to me. So, I applied at this church, New Life Center.

(08:02):

On the one hand, you know, really excited about going there. On the other hand, didn't necessarily want to leave a church family that I was already ingrained in, but, you know, a new challenge, a new opportunity. So, behind the scenes when you have a lot of success, as I did at the church I was in, and people appreciated my ministry, it was this sort of sense that I deserved an opportunity to be the leader. And I got that opportunity, and it wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. That was a humbling experience, but it was actually the best thing I could have ever done.

Ric Shields (08:42):

So, tell me a bit about the church. Why was it not exactly what you hoped it would be?

Daniel Isgrigg (08:46):

Well, so as you mentioned, I was at a church with about 300 that had a staff of four or five pastors support staff, large pool of volunteers, plenty of money. And I took over a church that on my first Sunday was 55 people and had some volunteer staff who had been there a very long time. And the church had a fairly new building. They had relocated and, but they'd invested a lot in the building. And so, it had a, it had a large expense to it, but didn't have very many people to support that. So, it had a financial deficit. And these are all things I never had to deal with before, right?

(09:28):

So being an associate pastor, you have all the best parts of ministry and none of the worst parts. And so now I'm in charge of all of it. I remember my first Sunday coming into the office after the first Sunday it had snowed, and we closed the church.

(09:46):

Obviously, I'm starting on the Monday afterwards, and we had not had an offering. So, the secretary asked me, “Which bills do I want to pay?” And I told her, “All of them.” And she said, “It doesn't work like that here.” And so, suddenly I'm just thrust into a situation where I have to manage a lot of things I'd never managed before and realize I wasn't as good at what I thought I was in ministry. And so, I had to really kind of dig, start to dig deep into the resources of God and his calling on my life and figure out how to navigate these things well.

Ric Shields (10:26):

In your book, you mentioned that one of the first books you read about leadership was titled “An Enemy called Average.” Now I've read that book. It was filled with snippets of conventional wisdom and personal stories. Personally, I thought the book itself was just about average, but the title leads us to believe that average is not only less than desirable, but it's actually an enemy that works against us.

(10:47):

But then you write this book and the title you give it is, “The Average Pastor - Reflections of an Average Pastor of an Average Church.” So, the first part of the title of “The Average Pastor” could lead one to believe that you're going to use your book to chastise pastors of smaller churches. But it's that byline that's really critical to note “Reflections of an Average Pastor of an Average Church.” You actually spend your time encouraging pastors of smaller churches. So how was it that you decided upon that approach?

Daniel Isgrigg (11:15):

Yeah, so coming from a fairly successful church, my paradigm was that my job is to replicate that in a different church. This church needed help. I'm the person to help them. And if we just do things right, we will grow like everybody else says. But at the same time, I'm experiencing the pains and frustrations of what it is to be a, you know, a lead pastor of a church with no support staff, very limited finances, a very different type of congregation and all of that.

(11:48):

Through that process, I started to think, okay, this is not normal. This experience of 55 is not normal. The normal experience is what I had at 300 in a larger church. But the more I tried to connect with other pastors for support and help, I realized they were more like me than they were like my previous church.

(12:10):

That process of just sort of, instead of I, at first, I blamed myself. What's wrong with me? Why can't you know, why can't I be a church like I came from? You know, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with our congregation? What's wrong with us?

(12:27):

And but the, the more I talked with other pastors, you just realize that actually the church of under a hundred is normal. There's not actually anything wrong with the church of under, under a hundred. There's 82% of churches in America are under a hundred. The church that I was pastoring was not abnormal. It was normal. The size of the church that I was at was average. This is the normal, this is average. The average church. When I finally made that realization, I stopped trying to make my church be the large church. I embraced it for what it was, which was a normal church.

(13:05):

This is what normal churches look like. And the normal church doesn't have a staff of five full-time pastors. The average church doesn't have more than one person who the church can support for their living. They don't have a full staff of people. They don't have all of the, the extra things. They tend to have a small number of children and youth ministries and things like that. So, the youth ministry of a hundred that I came from is abnormal. The youth ministry of a handful with a dedicated volunteer to be there with them is normal.

(13:46):

And so that's why I started, I had to change my own thinking of there's not something wrong with me. I'm actually, this is normal. This is average, this is the average pastor. I'm just an average pastor in an average church in the U.S.

Ric Shields (14:00):

You're listening to the DoorWays® Ministry Network podcast. My name is Ric Shields and I'm joined on this episode with Dr. Daniel Isgrigg, an associate professor and Pentecostal historian at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(14:13):

We're talking today about a book Daniel wrote a few years ago called “The Average Pastor.” I found it to be an interesting book full of reflections and encouragement for those who serve as the pastor of a church of 50 to 200 people. So, if you would give us some insight, Daniel, what constitutes an average church?

Daniel Isgrigg (14:32):

Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, the church landscape is changing in the present world of COVID has had some impact on that. But when I was pastoring, I started looking at, statistically, (there's a lot of pastoral statistics out there) but I found 66% of churches are 100 people or less, 87% are 250 or less. So, your normal 100-person church was fairly normal for most of the churches in the area.

(15:08):

In my particular denomination, I found that the average church in Oklahoma for the Assemblies of God was 60. Here I was, you know, running 60 to 75. I was actually above average. Even at that, only 2% of churches are over a thousand. When we generally associate that the 2% is really abnormal. I mean, that's a very, very small percent are the ones that are actually, you know, the large churches. And yet that's sort of our picture of that.

(15:41):

At the time, the average salary for a full-time pastor was $31,000. And that's actually pretty high for a church of un under 100. Most pastors of a church of under 100 are bi-vocational because the church can't support them. And 72% of churches of under 100 have an annual income of less than $100,000. And so, you're talking about $10,000 a month. And if you're paying a full-time, pastor, $31,000, that's, that's a pretty, you know, that's you, you're just barely getting by in any suburban context.

(16:18):

Yeah. You know, sometimes rural context, it's a little bit easier and those numbers are probably way lower than even that. There's a lot of frustration that comes with that, too, as a leader, because even when we did sort of capture or collect people who felt called to ministry, you didn't have a lot of opportunities to provide them with the type of opportunity that even I had to serve full time on a staff.

(16:43):

And so, I had several people that served with me over the years, and they had a desire to dedicate themselves full-time to ministry. They didn't want to work during the week as an electrician, they wanted to serve the church. But the church couldn't really provide that for them. And so, we always had lots of talented people around who wanted to be in ministry, but the church couldn't support that. And so that reality not only affects the lead pastor, but affects everybody else who wants to be involved and would love to love to be on staff full-time and to serve.

Ric Shields (17:20):

I'd like for you to join me next week, Daniel. Maybe we can drill down to some specifics of what the average pastor of an average church needs to do to be an effective minister to their people. But today, as we draw our time to a close, I wonder if you have any special words of encouragement you'd like to share with our listeners as it relates to their calling and their place of ministry.

Daniel Isgrigg (17:41):

I had a couple of thoughts that really helped me as I was transitioning from one paradigm to another. And the first one is that everybody deserves a pastor. There's not an ideal ministry context. There's some large churches. There are some small churches, but the people in small churches or rural communities or difficult parts of town, those people deserve somebody. They deserve a pastor to, to shepherd them, mentor them, and disciple them. And so, it's always valuable being in those contexts.

(18:19):

And so, when we, when we look at small churches as something less than, we're actually negating the people there, too. And so, embracing the idea that this is a valuable place, that these are valuable people, no matter how many shows up on a Sunday morning, was a real big paradigm shift for me.

(18:40):

And it's not about the crowd or the size, but about the value of the people who are there. And that was the second thing was, I started pastoring the people who were there and not the people who are not there. And that's an important paradigm as well. So, when you embrace an average church, you embrace the mentality that this is not a problem to be fixed. This is a place to embrace and enjoy and feel called to. And I did enjoy, I had a great experience as a pastor. I just didn't have a great experience being a pastor. <Laugh>

Ric Shields (19:17):

<Laugh>. Big difference. Big difference. Thanks Daniel.

(19:22):

Thanks again for listening. I hope you found this podcast to be helpful. Please feel free to share it with others you think may benefit from it.

(19:30):

Would you like someone to pray for you? I'll pray for you. And if you'd like, I'll share your note with others who will pray and believe for God to work on your behalf. Drop me a note at info@DoorWays dot cc.

(19:43):

Until next time, may you sense God's presence, the love of Jesus, and the grace of the Holy Spirit in your heart, your home, and in your spheres of relationship in the days ahead. God bless you.