The Custodian?

"Are you the custodian?"

That was the question recently when someone saw my keychain. "I'm not the custodian, but sometimes it seems like it" was my reply. I'm the pastor of a small church, and in addition to my main responsibilities the fact that it is a small church, and that I live next door, makes it only "natural" that I do some other things. These other things include occasional custodial work, some building repairs, minor work on the church car, unlocking/locking up the building for other users, and some other things that don’t come to mind at present.

I need keys to the various doors of the church, the parsonage, the gym/education building, a storage shed, as many as four vehicles, and two post office boxes. Over time I have assembled a collection of keys that, to this point, give me access to everything I need. A few keys unlock multiple doors, and several fit only one single door. Once we had a doorknob break. I couldn't repair the door knob but I could replace it with an old one sitting in our storage shed. An old one that happened to have a single key with it.

Lots of keys, virtually all of them having a necessary purpose, kind of like you'd expect the custodian to have, except I'm not the custodian. Well, not exactly the custodian. Because as I thought a bit more about the key/custodian thing it occurred to me that a pastor and custodian have a lot in common in the nature of their work. 

The custodian needs to know their way around the building, and how to take care of things. They need to keep an eye out for what needs to be done, and use the right tools and supplies to do the job well. Cleaning might be the greater part of the job, but it isn’t the only thing that gets done in the course of a day.

Similarly, there is a lot of care, over peoples souls, that goes into being a pastor. After five years in Dulce I would say that the biggest parts of a pastor's job are preaching and praying. As the book of Acts tells the story of the early church grew it notes that the apostles were feeling overwhelmed with all the things to attend to. And so they gathered all the disciples together and then set some aside for the various tasks of service, saying in Acts 6:4:

"But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word."

The apostles weren't necessarily better than anyone else, but they understood that there were only so many things each person could do, and that some of those tasks were the ones that Jesus specifically prepared them to do. And so that’s where they focused their energy.

For me, it works out to spending time studying, praying and preparing to proclaim God's word, Sunday by Sunday; sharing the Bible and praying with the people I get out to visit with in their homes, the hospital and care facilities; and praying over the many things that come as prayer requests when we worship on Sunday morning. And there are all the seemingly random bit of contact I have with people during the week. At the store, or post office, or just about anywhere, where a few brief words become an opportunity to point a person in the direction of the Lord. 

Many things come up as "non-pastoral" duties over the course of the week. They come my way, they need to get done, and I work on them. But it is the various forms of "prayer and the ministry of the word" that I think are the most important. The diverse way those things present themselves make me think the pastor/custodian comparison holds a lot of truth. And that’s just fine with me.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.