Relating to Conference Administration > Advocating for Pastors

Much of your committee work and work before your conference officers will be as an advocate for your pastors. Sometimes this will be for a specific pastor for a specific purpose, or it may be a general advocacy that is needed. In either case, you are there to represent pastors and pastoral ministry. Yours may be the only voice they have in any given situation, so please take this privilege and responsibility seriously.

To be an effective advocate, you need to be aware of what's happening in your conference. You need to know your pastors and their needs and the issues they face. You also need to know about impending or considered moves that administration has in mind for your pastors.

Here's an example that can happen often: you are aware of some personal issues a pastor is dealing with, and you have heard that the conference might be considering him or her for a move. Because the issue is not resolved yet, it may well be that the move will create an opportunity for the issue to be exposed before it's truly resolved, thereby damaging a pastor and his/her ministry. If you have the privilege of speaking with your administration ahead of time about moves that are being contemplated, you might well be in a position to say something like, "I think a move for this pastor would be really beneficial, but my counsel would be to hold off for a bit."

If you are then pressed by conference administration as to why you feel that way, let them know that you will get back to them on that. Then you can quickly make contact with the pastor involved and let them (in very vague terms, of course), that the conference might sometime soon consider him/her for a move. You can then talk openly with the pastor about the impact such a move might have on their personal issue. This might be one of those times where you counsel the pastor to get out in front of the issue by talking directly to administration themselves before it goes to a committee for approval of the move. If the issue's been resolved and you feel confident that it will not be an issue in the future, then you can go back to administration and say that you no longer counsel them to hold off.

Sometimes you might find yourself in a position where you cannot advocate for a pastor. Here are two scenarios from one of our Sage Pages that talk about such times.