Many theological brains have gotten together over the decades and come up with all sorts of answers to one of life’s great mysteries. How do we know whether we are a pastor or a planter?
1. Pastors use language like: ‘If the music group would like to come up to their stations now please’. Planters just ask the music group to come up and play.
2. Pastors sit in meetings with their hands clasped together and smile at you as you share with them. Planters can’t sit in meetings, have got one eye on you, half listening to what you’re saying whilst scrabbling about in their pockets for a pen to try to remember that great idea they just had.
3. Pastors encourage the church members to join one another for a time of ‘sweet fellowship during church lunch’. Planters encourage people to ‘get stuck in to the food before everybody scrans it’.
4. Pastors describe baptism and communion as ‘the sacraments’. Planters describe them as baptism and communion. For the pastor communion has a further clarification insomuch as he refers to it as ‘the elements’. Planters refer to the sun, sea, wind, rain and snow as the elements.
5. Pastors are great at ‘mmmming’ and love to smile and pat you on the shoulder when you share an ‘encouraging word’ with them. Pastors use the phrase ‘encouraging word’ a lot. Planters say ‘good for you’ and ‘OK, who’s next?’ before moving rapidly on.
6. Pastors refer to their members as ‘brothers and sisters’. Planters refer to them as their peeps. Pastors get offended by this terminology and will gently, but firmly remind planters that the ‘sheep actually belong to the shepherd.’
7. Pastors use illustrations from stories they have read about other people. Planters use illustrations from experiences they have had.
8. Pastors get tickled by the Hebraic word play of textual variants and antithetical parallelism. Planters stopped reading this sentence at Hebraic.
9. Pastors love ‘to shepherd’, ‘equip’ and ‘teach‘. Planters love to ‘challenge’, ‘evangelise‘ and ‘mobilise’.
Both love Jesus and live to share the wonderful gospel of grace that we have. If not they need to get out of ministry now. Some, very few, are both. They tend to be very tired and need a lot of prayer.