On May 26, 2020, Pastor Victor conducted an interview with Pastor Rocky via Zoom about his first year as Senior Pastor of Evergreen SGV. This is Part 2 of a 4-part blog series based on that interview.

What have been some of the challenges from this past year?

I remember when I was coaching, some people would come up to me at church and say, “Hey, it’s great that you get to play your games on Sunday. What do you do the rest of the week?’” What? The games are the rewards! It’s the grind, it’s about 80 or 90 hours just to get to this point at work. 

Pastoral ministry is similar.

First of all, even to get to the pulpit for me, it’s 15-20 hours of work to have some kind of organized thought to preach the Word. It hasn’t necessarily been the tasks that have been challenging to me, although they’ve been humbling because I’m learning something new. 

The challenges have been more relational.

At the end of the day, I still have to make the choice on some of these [decisions for the church] and some of these emphases have been hard on some and relationally, that’s been hard for me. I don’t like to disappoint people. Naturally, I like to please people and make them happy. 

I have to make decisions that I feel like is best for the church family and what the Bible says in essence guides me. [Some of those decisions made from applying the Bible are] not popular for some people.

I’ve been involved with certain situations where I have to confront sin, where I have to confront error for the good of the sheep and also for the flock. That's hard. That’s a challenging thing.

You know [correction in the context of family is] never a fun thing, but it's what we’re called to do because you love them.

And the same thing [is] for me as a pastor. These are the things that I do because I love Christ and also, I love the people. Relational things are incredibly hard for me and God’s humbling me through it.

In pastoral ministry, I don't have the eye in the sky [game film] or the one loss record column to determine if I'm doing a good job or not. [The key question is]: “Am I being content and just being faithful to what a pastor is called to do?” A pastor’s primary role is to preach and teach the word of God [and] feed the sheep (John 21, 2 Timothy 4). The second thing is to pray for the people, to care for the people [and] to protect the people. That's really what it is — to provide spiritual oversight.

I have no idea how things are going on results-wise in the hearts of people. That's humbling. I'm used to results.

Size of the church isn't even the metric [of success for a church]. The metric is how holy are the people that God has given us to take care of. That's it. Only God knows that.

I’d say those are two challenges — relational challenges and just being content and being faithful to our Lord.

Check in next week for Part 3 of the series —What are you looking forward to?