Why is being a pastor ‘a noble task’? Could you be one?

In December 1926, a 27-year-old doctor, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, left a London medical career in which he was making stellar progress to become pastor of a small church in a steelmaking town in South Wales. His move provoked public astonishment, even reaching the papers. Headlines included this: “Leading Doctor Turns Pastor: Large Income Given Up for £300 a year.”

One result of his move was that he was sometimes asked to give his testimony about the sacrifice he had made. He always refused. On one such occasion, he said: “I gave up nothing. I received everything. I count it the highest honour that God can confer on any man to call him to be a herald of the gospel.”1

Or, as the apostle Paul put it, the office of overseer is indeed a noble task.

These are words we badly need to recover. Falling numbers of candidates for ministry, across the denominations, suggest that we’re in danger of losing a sense of the vital importance of this role.

So, Bible in hand, can I persuade you why this task is a noble one?

Jesus’ resurrection encounter with Peter

On the shores of Galilee, in a beautiful act of restoration mirroring Peter’s threefold denial, the risen Lord Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved Him, and each time gave him a similar instruction: “Feed my lambs … Take care of my sheep … Feed my sheep” (John 21v15-17).

Jesus’ concern for His people to be shepherded could not be clearer. If Peter loved Jesus, then he was to care for Jesus’ people. To be more specific, Peter was to feed them. It is very hard not to see an implication of the profound importance of the pastor’s specific role of nourishing the flock by teaching them.

An astonishing apostolic decision

Acts 13–14 tell us the gripping story of Paul and Barnabas’ first missionary journey. From their sending church in Syrian Antioch they sail to Cyprus, and then north to the mainland cities of Perga, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. They preach the gospel to great effect, but also endure huge opposition: expulsion, plots and stoning. They will have arrived at their final destination, Derbe, with emotional and physical injuries.

Bruised and battered, they now took an astonishing decision. It was time to head back to their sending church in Syrian Antioch. By the direct route, that’s not far. But instead, they took a far longer pathway, retracing their steps through the very cities where they’d been beaten and opposed – giving themselves not only weeks longer on the road, but putting themselves back in harm’s way. And why? To encourage the new disciples they’d left in each of these towns, and to appoint elders for each church (Acts 14v21-24). Nothing could indicate more clearly how concerned Paul and Barnabas were that these new little churches had leadership than the risks they took to secure it. Churches need pastors!

The very existence of the Pastoral Epistles

The fact that three whole letters of the New Testament (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus) are specifically addressed to gospel ministers, and whose subject is gospel ministry, should alert us to the importance of this work in God’s eyes. As Paul writes to Timothy in Ephesus and Titus on Crete, it’s clear throughout that the spiritual health of these churches rides on their leadership. Their work is to include the vital business of appointing other men as local church leaders. Pastors are at the heart of God’s plans for His people.

We need to recover this emphasis. Since, perhaps, the 1960s there has been a right reaction against over-clericalism and a stress on every-member ministry; there has also been a recovery of the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and the value of all work as a vocation. Rightly, we’ve been reminded that we can be Christians in law, in politics, in teaching, in business and so on. But the danger is that on its own this thinking can make us too settled in these professions – which are normally better paid! The existence of three whole books of the Bible, specifically devoted to the pastoral ministry, helps re-set the balance by showing that the minister’s work really matters in God’s eyes – and for the health of the churches.

The Lord Jesus’ call to prayer in Matthew 9

Jesus says: ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field’ (Matt. 9v38).

Jesus’ analysis is so instructive. Some would have us believe that the apparent decline of Christianity in the UK is because Christianity has been proved wrong or out of date. But have we considered the Lord’s view – that a critical need could be lack of gospel workers? Lift your eyes to see the need!

From time to time in our church, when a student from elsewhere in the country comes to trust Christ, we try to find a reliable Bible-preaching church in their home town. Sometimes, despite searching widely, we draw a blank. This may reflect our ignorance, but the startling truth seems to be emerging that there are whole towns across the UK with no reliable Bible-teaching church. No wonder, then, that the public profile of Christianity is declining!

A member of our church who’s training for pastoral ministry has his own story of this. He and his parents came to a personal faith in Christ as a direct result of a new pastor being appointed to their village church who began to open the Bible with them. With this wonderful mercy of God fresh in his mind, now he wants to go and do the same!

History also bears out the huge difference local pastors can make to the whole cause of the Lord Jesus. The great revival of the 18th century is well-known and rightly associated with the names of the great itinerant evangelists George Whitefield and John Wesley. Less well-known is that a crucial component of the revival was the work of ordinary pastors preaching Christ in their local churches and districts: Romaine, Venn and many others in London; Grimshaw in Haworth in Yorkshire; Fletcher at Madeley in Shropshire; Rowlands in Llangeitho, Wales; Walker in Truro, Cornwall – the list goes on and on.

Jesus Himself

Finally, consider this: Jesus Himself is a pastor! He’s the Chief Shepherd, Peter tells us – that is, the Chief Pastor (1 Peter 5v4). Could anything give more dignity to this work than that our Lord Jesus Himself is a pastor?

Should this not persuade us all – as individuals and as churches – that the work of the pastor is indeed a noble task?

This is an edited extract from Alasdair Paine’s book A Noble Task: Why Pastoring a Church is a Great Role, And How to Know Whether it May Be For You, published in September 2025 by Christian Focus.

1. Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years 1899-1939 (Banner of Truth, 1982), p. 121, 150.

See also the article from Lydia Houghton here.