Quotes About Pastors

#1. If churches are to be healthy, then pastors and teachers must be committed to discovering the meaning of Scripture and allowing that meaning to drive the agenda with their congregations.

Thabiti M. Anyabwile

#2. The church is not a campus but a community. Pastors are not CEOs; they are shepherds.

Dillon Burroughs

#3. The morality of clean blood ought to be one of the first lessons taught us by our pastors and teachers. The physical is the substratum of the spiritual; and this fact ought to give to the food we eat, and the air we breathe, a transcendent significance.

William Tyndale

#4. The problem with most pastors and theologians was that the way they went about their business did not require the existence of God.

Stanley Hauerwas

#5. The earlier practice of the Church had been more or less to employ in worship under the presidency of the pastor or pastors, the gifts of the congregation.

Robert Rainy

#6. Supremely, spiritual directors/mentors/pastors are persons who have a sense of being 'established' in God. Otherwise they are too dangerous to be allowed into the soul space of others.

Richard Foster

#7. My whole family is spiritual. My grandmother, grand aunt, cousins, they're all preachers and pastors. Spirituality is a part of my family, from generations ago.

Ziggy Marley

#8. I meant no disrespect. It's just that I had always felt that rabbis, priests, pastors, any cleric, really, lived on a plane between mortal ground and heavenly sky. God up there. Us down here. Them in between.

Mitch Albom

#9. When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.

Dallas Willard

#10. The Church is or should go back to being a community of God's people, and priests, pastors and bishops, who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God.

Pope Francis

#11. All of my sermons become books. I've been accused of having no unpublished thought. I encourage pastors to do that. I think there are so many great sermons that never really get circulation.

Max Lucado

#12. We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.

Matthew Desmond

#13. It is a maxim of ours to work in the service of the people, with the good pleasure of the pastors, and never to act contrary to their wishes. And, at the opening and closing of each mission, we get their blessing in a spirit of dependence.

Vincent De Paul

#14. I don't find pastors and professors, for the most part, very interested in matters of formation in holiness. They have higher profile things to tend to.

Eugene H. Peterson

#15. Pastors are over-extended taking care of a few hundred sheep in their church

Sunday Adelaja

#16. My parents are both pastors. In the '80s and '90s in the mainstream Christian world, it was not really common for a woman - especially a married woman and a mother - to be a pastor.

Mallory Ortberg

#17. pastors throughout the countryside around Rome had reminded their parishioners that Jesus was a Jew in order to coax them into opening their doors. Catholic guilt was a powerful tool,

Amy Harmon

#18. I am convinced that in all history there has never been a greater need to Pray for our Pastors than exists right now! Pastors are experiencing an unprecedented wave of attacks, stresses, challenges. obstacles. pressures.

Saint Augustine

#19. At the time I perceived most religious men, particularly the pastors with all their talk about love, faith and relationship, as effeminate.

Luke Ford

#20. Adoration outside Holy Mass prolongs and intensifies what has taken place in the liturgical celebration and makes a true and profound reception of Christ possible. I ... warmly recommend, to Pastors and to all the faithful, the practice of Eucharistic adoration

Pope Benedict XVI

#21. Pastors, elders, and members often misinterpret the church through business and organizational lenses.

Jeramie Rinne

#22. Can you imagine churches actually working together within a city to win the lost? Can you picture pastors unselfishly praying with other pastors, sharing resources among themselves without worrying about who gets the credit? Can you see your city becoming a place where outsiders

Stephen Kendrick

#23. Too many congregations look to their pastors for simple answers to problems that their pastors see as anything but simple. And too many pastors don't trust their congregations enough to say, "It's not that simple from my point of view and here's why.

Ken Wilson

#24. When Jesus Christ comes back, it is not the liberal politicians who ought to be trembling, it's the pastors ... because so many men have built their 'ministries' on the dry dead bones of
unconverted church members.

Paul Washer

#25. Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors.

Henry Ward Beecher

#26. The Bible equips us for ministry. And ministry is not limited to pastors, priests, nuns, speakers, authors, and Bible teachers. Ministry is doing God's work wherever He has placed us ... in our home, in our school, in our workplace, in our neighborhood, in our community, and in our world.

Wendy Blight

#27. Pastors and Bible teachers go about their work in communal settings, where they listen to as well as deliver sermons, hear as well as speak, and gain biblical insights from their parishioners as much as they pass them on.

Peter J. Leithart

#28. Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.

Eugene H. Peterson

#29. Pastors can lead the way in motivating the faithful to wise stewardship of their citizenship responsibilities. Without a healthy culture and civil society, limited government and ordered liberty will be impossible.

Edwin Meese

#30. We as preachers/teachers/pastors have to figure out things to do in order to garner the attention of individuals and also keep them at our churches by making sure that we reinvent ourselves on a consistent basis.

Marvin Sapp

#31. Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own read.

William Shakespeare

#32. Contrary to popular belief, we (millennials) can't be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans.

Rachel Held Evans

#33. Mark this down if you can. Silences, not just sentences, form the work of pastoral ministry. Wise pastors are listening preachers.

Zack Eswine

#34. Too often, our concept of pastors and church leaders reinforces rather than obliterates the sad state of family life in our current context.

Russell D. Moore

#35. I'm not an expert in the sociological realities of all the pastors in the world, but I would say that there are some very, very positive things about the state of integrity in church leaders.

Henry Cloud

#36. I think pastors are the worst listeners. We're so used to speaking, teaching, giving answers. We must learn to be quiet, quit being so verbal, learn to pay attention to what's going on, and listen.

Eugene H. Peterson

#37. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness,

Mark Driscoll

#38. You need to be in a church where the pastors are urging you, not so much to listen to what they say as to turn to the Bible from which they teach.

Alistair Begg

#39. The pastors and ministry leaders came away energized to have voter registration drives at their churches and motivated to encourage their congregations to "vote their values."

Paul Smith

#40. But what is the theological cost of viewing ministry as management and pastors as professional organizers, albeit in charge of spiritual organizations? What is lost in the switch is the biblical vision of the pastor as a shepherd of a flock of souls. Such

Iain M. Duguid

#41. Pastors must practice a two-fold program of cultural engagement: deconstruction and demystification of cultural idols, and reconstruction and re-enchantment of a gospel-shaped worldview.

Timothy Keller

#42. Pastors are starting to get wily. When people tell my friend, 'I'm not being fed,' he replies, 'I'm prefectly happy to spoon feed my one-year-old. But if I'm still spoon-feeding him when he's five, we've got a problem. Here's a fork. Feed yourself.

Jon Acuff

#43. Pastors started killing their church members and church members killed pastors. Husbands killed wives. It's a situation no one can describe.

Paul Rusesabagina

#44. There are pastors who won't go to people's sick beds. How can people of God turn their back on the sick, poor and hungry?

James Harvey Robinson

#45. Pastors must welcome the lost sheep. Actually, I made a mistake. I said welcome, rather, go out and find them.

Pope Francis

#46. Preachers, however eloquent they are, are rarely heard as readily as pastors. After all, shepherds are sheep lovers, and the sheep are dependent upon their shepherds, who love them even before they listen.

Calvin Miller

#47. Many churches have their eyes on the culture instead of on Christ. Many pastors preach on common unity instead of calling the community to repent.

Billy Graham

#48. Thousands of pastors, Sunday school teachers, and Christian workers are powerless because they do not make the Word the source of their preaching or teaching.

Billy Graham

#49. Today, more pastors than ever need profound encouragement and rejuvenation.

Will Graham

#50. But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,
cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

Anthony Trollope

#51. Inconsistency on the part of pastors and the faithful between what they say and what they do, between word and manner of life, is undermining the Church's credibility.

Pope Francis

#52. Just because the pastors have preached hundreds of sermons in one place does not give them the liberty of skipping the work of audience analysis for even one single Sunday.

Calvin Miller

#53. Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren't bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.

Eugene H. Peterson

#54. This is really an opportunity to mobilize a new generation of scholars and pastors not just to equip the saints but also to engage the culture and reclaim it for Christ. That's really what is driving me.

William A. Dembski

#55. If we were to boil down Christianity to its core, we'd be left with simply this: relationship with God. The living, loving God of the universe has spoken throughout history, and still speaks today - not just to pastors or priests, but to anyone who will listen. God will speak to you.

Bill Hybels

#56. Pastors and ministry leaders need continuing education because the basics of their occupational challenges were not taught in their educational institutions.

Jimmy Dodd

#57. It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

H.L. Mencken

#58. men have never seemed to object to women going off to difficult missionary assignments in the far corners of the earth. The matter of women preachers became a problem only when women wanted to be pastors back home, in the sometimes affluent neighborhoods that typically had churches pastored by men.

Alan F. Johnson

#59. I think it is wrong for the federal government to force Christian individuals, businesses, pastors, churches to participate in wedding ceremonies that violate our sincerely held religious beliefs. We have to stand up and fight for religious liberty. That's where this fight is going.

Bobby Jindal

#60. Many pastors would rather preach God's Word and keep their distance than invest in a personal one-on-one counseling ministry. Most pastors counsel because they have to, not because they want to.

James MacDonald

#61. Just very practically, pastors need to be careful that while they have a right to call people to absolute allegiance to the Word of God, we don't have the right to call people to absolute allegiance to our programs or every ministry we have at the church.

Kevin DeYoung

#62. Whereas the public means of grace (such as church services) will do a lot of good to other Christians, those of us who are pastors have to rely a lot more on the private means of grace.

Thomas K. Ascol

#63. Charismatics have seen pictures of Pope Francis when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires praying and asking Protestant pastors to pray for him. His friendship towards the charismatic renewal is there.

Ralph Martin

#64. Do what you do because Jesus is watching, not so you'll end up on some top 100 church list or be the envy of the next pastors gathering. That stuff doesn't matter. Be innovative because you believe people matter and you want to please Jesus.

Tim Stevens

#65. I go farther, and say, that it is plainly our duty to desire pastors and teachers to take the care of such congregations, and that God did raise up such in the church as we see it in the word.

John Nelson Darby

#66. Sadly, when pastors choose to neglect controversial issues, they do great damage to the spiritual growth of their congregates. We have generations of young people in our churches who simply believe what the world believes on social and moral issues, and they don't think biblically on these matters.

Ken Ham

#67. It is the responsibility of Pastors to encourage, also by their personal witness, the practice of Eucharistic adoration, and exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in particular, as well as prayer of adoration before Christ present under the Eucharistic species.

Pope John Paul II

#68. Many pastors have been reduced to secular "mentors" and "coaches" in exchange for authentic disciplers of men.

John Paul Warren

#69. We must stop seeing our Pastors, Reverends, Men of God, as infallible.

Sunday Adelaja

#70. Pastors uses peoples ignorance to spread their deception.

Sunday Adelaja

#71. If people think honoring pastors means doing everything they say, why don't they honor Jesus the same way?

D.R. Silva

#72. It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs ... The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in work, in action and in law.

Pope Benedict XVI

#73. Instead of applauding sex addict pastors, we need to tell them to either preach the Gospel with their lives or get out from behind that pulpit!

Eric Ludy

#74. It's interesting to note that all revolutionary literature was written by pastors. These guys were involved in a revolution against the mightiest power that the world had ever seen.

Randall Terry

#75. People didn't realize that pastors, preachers, teachers, worship leaders, poured out so much of themselves, they needed the opportunity to be filled back up, too.

Candice Y. Johnson

#76. Dr. Boice's commentary series is a treasure for the church and for her pastors. No expository preacher can afford to be without it.

R.C. Sproul

#77. It certainly was unusual growing up with two fairly well-known pastors as my parents.

Mallory Ortberg

#78. Whenever pastors assume people in their congregation know certain things, they miss opportunities to teach. If a pastor makes assumptions year after year, then a whole generation has never heard [that truth] for the first time. If we assume too much, we communicate too little.

Andy Stanley

#79. Jesus did not die for pastors to have a well paid job. Neither was He raised on the cross just to raise our standard of living. He died to seek and to save those who are lost.

Reinhard Bonnke

#80. We need priests who are men of the interior life, "God's watchmen" and pastors passionately committed to the evangelization of the world, and not social workers or politicians.

Robert Sarah

#81. Pastors are sent to utter the deep things of God for the conviction of sin, and for edification and comfort.

T. B. Joshua

#82. A high view of God's sovereignty fuels death-defying devotion to global missions. Maybe another way to put it, people, and more specifically pastors, who believe that God's sovereign over all things will lead Christians to die for the sake of all peoples.

David Platt

#83. More often than not it's this fear of losing people and this attempt to keep people in the church that causes pastors to neglect seeking the presence of God

Sunday Adelaja

#84. Payment or financial support provided to ministers, pastors, church conferences, and religious organizations should be considered gifts.

Terrence Jameson

#85. Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.

Eugene H. Peterson

#86. Many forget that most of the greatest theologians God has given to the church were also pastors and teachers in the local church.

Joel R. Beeke

#87. Pastors are appointed by God to help their people see that the church walks in the light and all others in darkness. We, the "in Christ" people, are the true culture (John 14:6). We say this without arrogance, but with a sense of surprise.

Owen Strachan

#88. All my books come out of sermons, and I'm really a pastor who writes rather than a writer who pastors.

Max Lucado

#89. There will always be bosses, pastors and government officials over us - and this structure is actually a good thing. It is not our job to derail it or work around it.

David Pritchard

#90. The most common self-inflicted put-down is 'I am not a pastor-I am just a layperson.' This is all part of a clever satanic scheme to neutralize apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers along with the entire army of disciples, already positioned in the marketplace.

Ed Silvoso

#91. EPH4.11 And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;

Anonymous

#92. We look to our pastors and priests and rabbis and counselors of all kinds to testify of the enduring principles upon which our society is built: honesty, charity, integrity and family.

Mitt Romney

#93. If people don't know their pastor, it's easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It's also easy for pastors, who don't know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers.

Eugene H. Peterson

#94. Sometimes it takes a lowly, title-less man to humble the world. Kings, rulers, CEOs, judges, doctors, pastors, they are already expected to be greater and wiser.

Criss Jami

#95. The church tastes true delight, and the world only samples a counterfeit. Pastors cannot help but pull off the mask of worldly thinking and harmful societal developments as they preach and teach and disciple.

Owen Strachan

#96. Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin.

John Ortberg

#97. We as pastors, as God's ministers, must have right priorities. Only then we will become successful in ministry.

Sunday Adelaja

#98. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.

Pope Francis

#99. Gay marriage within mainline denominations is gaining traction. Skewed pastors and even the government can't trump the Bible on this issue. Pastors: stand!

Steve Camp

#100. Church is not for pretenders and performers. Church is a place for pastors to preach principles of the faith in order to prepare believers to face the storms of life on the stage of an unbelieving world.

Billy Graham