I do many things as a Pastor. In my mind, on most days, it is the best job in the world.

What other job has a healthy rhythm yet allows for tremendous flexibility within that rhythm. My normal week has some fixed stuff, like the obvious, constructing a liturgy for worship, including preparing a sermon.

But I also get to do a ton of other stuff like:

• Have coffee with fascinating people.
• Communicate to people the wonderful story of the Gospel.
• Sit with people in their most complex, challenging, and sacred moments.
• Encourage people, young and old, to live faithfully into their life callings.
• Try my best to inspire young people…
• And even dream and strategize about how a community of people can impact the world for love.

And much more. I get to write during working hours. I get to invest in other leaders, teach grad school, and manage a Lilly Grant. I do some stuff I wouldn’t say I like to do, but generally speaking, I love being a pastor.

As I have gotten older, though, one of the most important things I get to do is be a curator. Not the ordinary word found in most pastors’ job descriptions, but it has found its place near the center of what I do.

This new element of my job has emerged from a growing conviction (that might not be a strong enough word) that it is not my job to speak or preach every week. It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time in my career that I would speak (preach) almost every Sunday of the year. Probably somewhere between 48 and 50 times. Heck, I rarely took two weeks off a year. BTW – I’m not proud of that. At this point, I think overworking and never breaking is plain sin. It was built on a faulty belief that the church would lose momentum if I let up. Confession: I was massively arrogant or just plain dumb – most of the time, both at the same time.

At this point in my career, I limit myself to preaching about 30 times a year. Enough times to appropriately influence the church with the life experience and gifts that reside in me but also enough times to activate many other voices. I am not feigning some sort of false humility that my voice is unimportant. It is! To act like it isn’t is to, in a way, show contempt for what God has placed in me. That said, it is simply not adequate. It does not represent the whole voice of the church. Do you want to know what is needed for that to happen? Other people to leverage their life experiences and gifts. Let me state the obvious. I am a late-middle-aged white male. Here is what that means. Regardless of how much I try or how sensitive I am, I can never be the voice of a young person or the feminine or a BIPOC person (or someone with a full head of hair, though that doesn’t seem to be quite as much of a deal-breaker). I have an apostolic calling, which means I bring something unique and needed to the church, yet I can never adequately provide the evangelist’s voice, the voice of the pastor/teacher, or the prophetic (think APEST). I am significantly left brain in the way I communicate and interact with the world, which means I can never sufficiently speak to the right brain people in our community. Let me summarize this. If I am the sole voice in our community, we simply cannot be whole. The church needs the whole voice of the church empowered by the Holy Spirit for it to be a whole community.

That means I must recruit uniquely gifted people inside our church to speak. There is such a well-spring of these folks if we will simply pay attention to who is in our community. There are at least five women in our community that if they were the only ones speaking, our church would grow like crazy. I am persuaded of that. Again, my voice is needed, but in some ways, it hinders growth. We have Haley, who is a world-class theologian. There is Lenore, who carries an indigenous voice and is one of a true and gentle prophet. Judy speaks to the right-brain people in our midst. Melissa who is an evangelist draws forth that desperately needed element, and our Pastor Leslie, an African American is one of the most profound exhorters I have ever experienced. They all contribute to filling out the whole picture of who we can be. There are also men who are amazing: Scotty – Prophetic/teacher, Phil – Pastor/Exhorter, Rodney – Pastor/prophet. These are just those who reside in our community. The curating calling also includes inviting uniquely gifted people from outside our community to share their voices to complement what we sense God is doing in our midst.

It is the calling of a curator!

• Who is God calling you to invite to activate their voice?
• Who can you invest in to develop their calling as a communicator?
• Who might you invite into your church to supplement what you dream would be born in the community’s midst?

Can I challenge you to set fear aside? Take a risk. Absolutely value and exercise the voice God has gifted you, but at the same time, be committed to activate the diversity of voices available and needed so that the church can be whole in this crucial and liminal moment.