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This is an important question. Your pastors will need to know how to relate to you.

 

Some conferences give their Ministerial Director(s) vice-president-level positions, and with that position comes the responsibility to decide on the recommendations to hire/fire/placements.

 

Other conferences will have you involved with hire/fire/placement issues but not make you responsible for them.

 

Still others will keep you at arm's length from anything having to do with hire/fire/placement issues.

 

Those who have direct hire/fire/replacement responsibilities will have to work harder to manage that side of their job description so that they can still function as pastor's pastor.

 

If your pastors see you as an administrator or as the arm of conference administration, be prepared for them to be reluctant to fully open up to you. If they are struggling and reveal that to you, they may worry about the security of their job.

 

As long as a pastor can feel that they can tell you most anything (aside from the usual mandated reporting type things) and that it will be kept between just the two of you, then they will see you as their pastor. If you are not given the freedom by conference administration to keep these confidences, then it would be only fair to disclose that to the pastor.

 

If, however, you are given that freedom of separation from administrative oversight, you will need to reassure your pastors of this often, both privately and publicly, in order for them to begin to feel secure in talking to you about areas of challenge in their lives.

 

If you feel that your current roles are compromising your pastors' ability to see you as their pastor, have a frank conversation with your conference administration to see if some adjustments in your roles can be made to remove the concern. If an adjustment is made, ask your president to announce it to the field, either at a workers meeting or in a regular means of communicating with pastors. It might well be that word must come from administration that they want to protect that layer of pastoral confidentiality for you and the pastor before those in the field will be able to believe it.