Appreciating Your Pastor Pt.1: Cultivating Unseen Care
October is Pastor Appreciation Month, an opportunity for churches and individual church members to actively encourage and express gratitude to those who serve Christ Jesus faithfully in the local church. While there is always an inherent danger in designating a specific month for appreciating anything (mutual appreciation and care should be the daily pattern of our lives), there can be no doubt that October’s focus can help us to be vocal and visible in expressing Christian love to those who serve. In forthcoming articles, our editorial team will share some ways in which churches can appreciate their pastor, during this month and every month of the year.
Appreciation Beyond Virtue Signalling
Ours is an age of constant chatter and passing causes, with outrage and joy blooming and withering with dizzying speed. No sooner has a news story broken about a tragedy or a political issue than social media is flooded with compassion, concern or calls to action. When the news cycle refreshes within hours or days, all of the outpourings seems to carry as much substance as steam, and moral nutrition equivalent to candy floss.
In a world which signals virtue, where social media serves as a bus stop for the public to board every passing bandwagon, it is important that our appreciation for pastors goes beyond this superficial level. A great way to secure our motives and to build longevity into pastoral appreciation is to work on things that our pastor may never know we have done, but whose effect he will most certainly feel.
Our pastors and elders serve at the sharp end of spiritual work and often feel the blast of spiritual opposition at its hottest. Making them, their families, and their work the focus of our concerted prayers is a silent, humanly unseen way of truly supporting them. For those elders who have given themselves to ministry full time (whom we commonly describe as pastors) we can pray for their encouragement in the work they have devoted their lives to, for the moral, spiritual, physical and emotional protection, and for them to thrive in their own souls as they minister to the needs of others.
Modelling Authentic Appreciation
We can model this kind of authentic care and appreciation of our pastors for our children by incorporating such prayers into family worship or when we give thanks for food at the table. We don’t need to sound a trumpet before our pastor that we are praying in this way, but we can be certain that he will know the benefits in his own soul.
Another unseen means of appreciation is to determine that we will seek to speak well of our pastors to our family, friends, and fellow church members wherever possible. This kind of counsel must be followed carefully, however, as a ‘touch not the Lord’s anointed’ mantra has served as a means of silencing credible critics or survivors of abuse at the hands of their spiritual leaders.
Where such things are not part of the picture, where our pastors are serving faithfully, to the best of their abilities, we should seek to share words about them that are not nitpicking, bitter or critical. Every pastor struggles to fulfil every commitment assigned to them in their ministry, but where they are serving in good conscience, it is good for us to be commendatory in our conversation and rejectors of pernickety attitudes.
Imaginative and Unseen Appreciation
We are imaginative creatures by nature, and it is a fascinating exercise to think of individual and context-specific ways in which we can show appreciation for our Pastor without ever directly telling him about what we are doing. What behind-the-scenes, off-grid, pure-of-motive means can you exercise to truly appreciate the ministry and labours of your pastor? Getting together with fellow church members to think through how to do this might produce some unexpected and refreshing ways in which those who serve in your midst might find their hearts lifted, their ministry load lightened and the labour that falls to their hands refreshed with new joy.
Church health and ministry life are at the heart of the mission and ministry of Grace Publications, with many of our resources specifically written and shaped to enrich the life of local churches and to encourage the hearts of local church pastors. During 2026 we pioneered our first Pastor Appreciation Packs scheme and it has been our privilege to bless ministers throughout this year with books, messages and little treats. If you would like to find out about the Pastor Appreciation Pack scheme for 2027 please follow the link below.
