One Eye On The Crowd
On the joys and weight of pastoring, and where a pastor’s eyes belong
Some of the best advice I ever got about preaching wasn’t about preaching. It was about where to look.
You cannot preach with one eye on the crowd.Your eyes have to be on the cross.
I didn’t understand that when I started. I understand it a little better now, mostly because I’ve tried the other way.
The glance
It happens in a split second. You’re mid-sentence, and you see a face. Arms crossed, maybe. Or someone checking a phone, or someone who nodded at your last point and is now staring at nothing. In that moment a quiet question rises up in you: Is this landing? Do they like this? Am I about to lose them?
That glance is the whole temptation of the pulpit in miniature. Once you start preaching to the reaction instead of to the Word, you start trimming. A hard truth gets softened. A needed word goes unspoken. A simple faithfulness turns into a performance.
And it isn’t only Sunday. It’s every email, every meeting, every decision you make in the week. Everyone has an opinion about how a pastor ought to pastor, and most of those opinions come from people who love the church. Some of them are even right. But a pastor who steers by opinion will be blown around by it, because opinions pull in every direction at once.
What nobody sees
I don’t want to oversell this. I’m not writing to be pitied, and I wouldn’t trade the calling. But it would be dishonest to pretend there’s no weight.
Pastoring is one of the few jobs where you can sit with a family on the worst day of their lives, hold their grief, stand beside the casket, and then watch them walk out the door and never say a word.
They move on. That’s their right. But you don’t get to move on the same way. You’re still carrying what they handed you.
And more often than I’d like to admit, the same grief you held for them gets turned around and used against you. A criticism. A complaint. A reason for leaving. You were trusted with the most tender part of their lives, and later it gets used as a weapon.
Add to that the strange math of being thanked and misunderstood in the same month, sometimes by the same person, and the Sunday nights when you replay every sentence and wonder what you missed.
That’s the cost. It’s real, but it isn’t the whole story, and it isn’t even the main one.
What I wouldn’t trade
I get to stand in rooms most people never see. I get to open the Word with people who are hungry for it. I get to watch someone who wasn’t sure God had any use for them discover that he’d been after them all along. I get to see a marriage that looked finished start breathing again. I get to sit beside a grieving person and say, with a straight face and a full heart, that death does not get the last word.
Nothing else I could do for a living would put me near that much grace.
Why the cross changes the math
Here’s what I’ve learned: the weight gets lighter when I look in the right direction.
When my eyes are on the crowd, every reaction is a verdict. Praise puffs me up and criticism flattens me, and either way I’m driving by someone else’s steering wheel. But when my eyes are on the cross, I remember whose church this is. I remember that I wasn’t called to be liked, or even to be successful by any measure I could put in a report. I was called to be faithful, to say what God has said, to love the people in front of me, and to leave the results with the One who actually gives them.
That’s freeing. The cross tells me what I am (forgiven, same as everyone in the pews) and who I’m not (the Savior, the Holy Spirit, or the final judge of how it’s all going). It’s also the one place I can set down the grief I’ve been carrying for other people, because it’s the one place that can actually hold it.
You cannot preach with one eye on the crowd.Your eyes have to be on the cross.
A word for everyone else
If you sit in the pew
You can help your pastor keep his eyes where they belong. Pray for him specifically. Tell him when God used something in his sermon. Be kind in your disagreement and curious before you’re critical. And if your pastor is a faithful man, give him room to say what’s true even when it isn’t easy to hear.
If you stand in the pulpit
Look up. The crowd is made of people God loves, and you should love them too, but they are not your audience. Preach to the One who called you, and let the rest fall where it falls.
It’s heavy. It’s also holy.
And on the days when it’s both at once, which is most of them,
keep your eyes on the cross.
— Derrick Hurst · derrickhurst.org · living for eternity today