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What does it mean to shepherd a young pastor? In this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman, Phil Newton, and Rich Shadden introduce Shadden and Newton’s book Shepherding the Pastor and their heart behind writing it. They flesh out why it is important to mentor younger pastors as well as how to be a good shepherd to them. They finish by discussing how even the oldest of pastors could use a mentor and should have a teachable spirit.

• The Heart Behind Shepherding the Pastor
  
• The Importance of Mentoring Young Pastors
  
• How to Shepherd Well
  
• Can You Be Too Old For a Mentor?

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Related Resources:

Book: Shepherding the Pastor

Journal: Young Pastors

Articles: Aspiring Pastors Need Encouragement, Too: 5 Ways Paul Encouraged Timothy

Podcast: On How Quickly a Pastor Should Make Changes

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Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Mark Dever:

Hello everybody. Jonathan Leeman is here for another episode of Pastors Talk.

Jonathan Leeman:

And so is Mark.  Pastors Talk exists for the glory of God to build better churches and help pastors think Bible things.

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s what we aspire to. Learn more at 9Marks.org.

Mark Dever:

That’s it, man. You are on it today.

Mark Dever:

You know, jet lag helps sometimes.

Jonathan Leeman:

Indeed. Oh, we’re here with a couple of special guests. We have Phil A. Newton and Rich C. Shadden. They are the authors of Shepherding the Pastor: Help for the Early Years of Ministry. We want to talk to them about that briefly.

Mark Dever:

Now, I think Phil is well-known probably to most of our listeners. Phil pastored for many years in Memphis and since then has a ministry of just blessing other people. But Phil, who is this Rich you have with you?

Phil Newton:

Yeah, Rich is a pastor in our area. I had the joy of mentoring him when he was… He was doing some of his seminary work and then we sent him out in the church that I was pastoring at the time.

We sent him out to do a church revitalization in Memphis. And that was over 12 years ago now, I think, Rich.

Jonathan Leeman:

Rich, which church is that?

Rich Shadden:

Audubon Park Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jonathan Leeman:

And what are you preaching through right now?

Rich Shadden:

So right now, we are going through Romans. Waited 11 years to start the book. And we have just started chapter seven.

Jonathan Leeman:

How long were you guys in the same church before being sent out?

Rich Shadden:

About two and a half years.

The Heart Behind Shepherding the Pastor

Jonathan Leeman:

Okay, so you knew each other quite well. This book, Shepherding the Pastor, is about the mentoring relationship in some ways that you two had, but then also how to tackle the early years of ministry. Am I capturing it succinctly?

Phil Newton:

Yes, that’s right.

Jonathan Leeman:

Is it a sequel?

Phil Newton:

I think it’s an application of The Mentoring Church or some of the whole concept of what I tried to write on in The Mentoring Church, because the whole thought of it is how do you maintain ongoing pastoral training, even when you’re a pastor, especially in those young years, and especially as Rich was going through a church revitalization.

Jonathan Leeman:

In the introduction, you say this book is not about mentoring strategy, nor is it about the history of mentoring, nor does it provide a template for mentoring, nor do we give a theological foundation for mentoring. All that can be found in a previous volume that Phil has written. That’s The Mentoring Church, if listeners don’t know that.

Mark Dever:

That’s a very helpful book.

Jonathan Leeman:

Whereas this one, it’s kind of just you two doing it in a way through different areas of the church’s life.

Mark Dever:

And Rich, you wrote this also. It wasn’t just Phil. I mean, you wrote alternative chapters?

Rich Shadden:

In a way, we wrote back and forth to try and convey what our conversations were like in that mentoring process.

Phil Newton:

Rich actually came up with the idea. So, I had nothing to do with it other than writing on it. So this is Rich’s idea. And he said we ought to write a book that might help other guys like me who are trying to revitalize and going through difficulties in the early years of ministry and to help them see how we plotted through this together.

And so he sets up an issue that was going on in his church. Then I respond to it on how I may have counseled him or how I would counsel any pastor in that setting. Then he gives an application of how he worked that out in his ministry.

Then I do some next steps for the readers, and then we give some book recommendations, which there are a number of 9Marks that end up on those recommendations.

Mark Dever:

So guys, friends, this is your second chapter, “Trust God’s Sovereignty”. You begin, “Young Pastor Rich faces a challenge,” which is essential, Rich, I take it, you write. You say, “Eventually, Audubon Park Baptist Church in Memphis showed interest in me almost immediately.

Questions popped up. How do I handle the interview process? Are there certain questions I need to prepare for?

How do I handle difficult or misunderstood theological questions? Calvinism was a controversial topic during this time. Do I lay all my theological cards on the table? What questions do I need to ask?”

Anyway, then you have “Mentor Phil offers counsel,” and then you have “Healthy incubators, candidating for the church,” and you have some bold numbered principles. And then you have “Young Pastor Rich applies the counsel,” and then “Mentor Phil lists some next steps with”, as Phil just told us, “recommended reading.” So that seems to be the sort of pattern you have in the chapters.

The Importance of Mentoring Young Pastors

Jonathan Leeman:

To be really clear, the mentoring relationship here that they describe and model for us isn’t within a church pastor to somebody in this church, but across churches. One older pastor to a younger pastor in a church, how many miles apart? Just curious.

Phil Newton:

I think it is about six and a half to seven miles.

Jonathan Leeman:

Okay, so you’re close. So you can have lunch.

Phil Newton:

Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It’s a, I mean, it’s a less than a 15-minute drive typically.

Jonathan Leeman:

Mark, do you mentor pastors in other churches?

Mark Dever:

I assume I do it less formally maybe than Phil. So I’m, I am frequently giving counsel and meeting up with younger pastors. I mean, these days almost every pastor is a younger pastor.

Phil Newton:

I would also say you’re correct about that, Mark.

Phil Newton:

Yeah. Even if you are a younger pastor.

Mark Dever:

Well, to you, but I mean, to most people, they’re younger pastors than me.

Phil Newton:

Yeah. We didn’t sit up and say, okay, we’re going to meet x amount of times and do this and that. It was, it’s that “witness” as Gunter Krallmann terms, mentoring. We’re just with each other. We’re pastoring in the same community.

We’ve got a good friendship. We respect each other. And so, Rich felt free to contact me with stuff and he could confide to me the things going on. And I could talk very candidly with him about some of the stuff going on and even some of my experiences that maybe I could not publicly talk about.

Mark Dever:

And those things you don’t put in this book.

Phil Newton:

Right. Well, I try to be judicious of that. I may have crossed the line a couple of times, but I tried to be pretty judicious about that.

Jonathan Leeman:

Every once in a while, my wife will be reading something that I wrote and she’ll be like, “You put this in there?” I’m sure it’s fine, honey, I swear.

Mark Dever:

Rich, you seem pretty candid in your chapter on “Aim for Longevity and Biblical Reform”. You talk about the church as a leaking ship, and you say, “As I navigated the waters of those early years, you can imagine how overwhelmed I felt. It was like we were trying to keep a leaky ship from sinking.

We could see water coming in through the holes. We knew that simply throwing it back out wasn’t going to work. We had to plug the gaping holes. I felt the weight of all this. It seemed like the church would fail if I failed to maintain its multiplying structures.”

Rich Shadden:

Yes. And I think this book took 10 years to write in the sense that this is the story of how Phil really served as a mentor in my life through those first 10 years.

So, one thought behind the book is that it can be relatable. Most pastors are probably experiencing something similar. So that’s the purpose of some of those anecdotal stories.

Mark Dever:

What I appreciate about it is very much like a two birds, one stone book. So on the one hand, you’re modeling mentoring. On the other hand, you’re helping a pastor think through those early years, right, of the ministry and the various challenges you experience.

I assume there’s a number of guys out there listening to this who think to themselves, man, I would seriously benefit from a mentor, some other pastor who could tell me what to do. I just feel alone here. Vice versa, I assume there are a lot of guys listening who might have something to give to a younger pastor, but maybe don’t have the relationships.

It worked out for you guys because you had that knowledge of one another from being in the same church and then being sent out. What do we say to anybody listening who feels like, I’m alone, I would seriously, I don’t know what to do in this next elders meeting. These guys are older, I’m confused. What does that guy do?

Mark Dever:

Well, looking through the book, it looks like Phil is going to tell them to read some books.

Phil Newton:

And that might happen.

Rich Shadden:

And he did. And that was very helpful. I think as a younger pastor, it’s important to be very willing to reach out to more seasoned pastors. You don’t know what you may get if you don’t know the individual.

But in my context, I was able to get to know Phil first, and then he had an open, generous, willing heart to help me. But I think you at least have to be willing to say, I’m going to take initiative and I’m going to reach out and begin to try and form relationships with more seasoned pastors and see what God does with it.

Mark Dever:

And Rich, how did you know about Phil in order to do that?

Rich Shadden:

Well, I was training at seminary and a friend recommended Southwood Baptist Church to my wife and me. And so we began visiting and that’s how the relationship began.

Jonathan Leeman:

Mark, surely you’ve had young pastors in the area, contact you, ask for lunch, and then show up with a list of questions.

Mark Dever:

Yeah.

Jonathan Leeman:

Typical? Common?

Mark Dever:

It’s happened repeatedly. I don’t know if I’d call it common, but yeah, it’s happened repeatedly.

Jonathan Leeman:

You remember Mike Christ, of course.

Mark Dever:

Sure, of course.

Jonathan Leeman:

When he became pastor of Greenbelt Baptist Church, he contacted me, this must have been a decade ago. We got together at TGI Fridays and he had this whole yellow notepad paper of questions because he was all by himself. He had never pastored before.

He’d been a missionary. He was working on his PhD. And we must have done that a dozen times when he would show up with us. Because he had no other elders. And he was in this extremely unhealthy church at the time.

But there was a guy who initiated and reached out. I’m not sure I was the best guy to reach out to, but he reached out to somebody. And I really appreciated that example. And I would commend that to others.

Mark Dever:

I was just with a pastor at a church in Jakarta, Indonesia. And he was saying that he had reached out to a pastor here in America with a lot of questions. And this pastor had given him a ton of time to answer his questions repeatedly. And he was really helped by that.

Phil Newton:

I would say by observation, I’ve been around both of you brothers for a long time. And I think you both have been very generous with helping pastors and that. And I’m grateful for you because I’ve seen the fruit of that in a lot of guys’ lives along the way.

Mark Dever:

Well, back at you, Phil.

How To Address Pastors Concerned About Time

Jonathan Leeman:

Thank you. What do you say to the pastor who says either A, I don’t have time to be mentored or B, I don’t have time to mentor other pastors?

Phil Newton:

I would say the first one, you are going to get yourself in a lot of trouble. You’re going to make some unnecessary mistakes. You’re putting yourself in a position of maybe being burned out and you don’t even know you’re getting burned out.

You will probably do some things you will look back on and think, that really was stupid. Why did I do it? And so that’s one hand. On the other hand, I think for a guy who’s pastored and has gone through the challenges of pastoring, he has stewardship with younger pastors.

He needs to do as Paul did with Timothy and Titus and Tychicus and Archippus and so many others. He needs to invest because I feel my mortality far more now than I did 10 or 15 years ago.

And I realized the day’s going to come when I’m not going to be able to speak to guys. And I don’t want to hoard the things that I’ve learned. And some of them I’ve learned the hard way and I have mistakes that I’ve made and I want other guys to profit from it. So I think it helps pastors to be generous with their time with other pastors.

Mark Dever:

I read a secular book this summer by Arthur Brooks called From Strength to Strength, I think. And he says basically the same thing. In the first part of your life, you’re acquiring a lot of skills. Almost all the Nobel prizes have gone to people in their twenties or early thirties.

Jonathan Leeman:

For work dated in their twenties or thirties.

Mark Dever:

Yeah, that’s right. Then later in life, you have a kind of different sorts of skills, and those skills are often best used by passing along to the next generation, the knowledge you’ve learned by experience, which is exactly what you’re talking about doing.

And Rich, I’m curious if a pastor is listening to this and they’re feeling kind of down and despairing and they don’t have a mentor, is that a good thing to do to go find another pastor to talk to them when they’re in an unusually downstate?

Rich Shadden:

I think that is a good thing to do. I think you need to be judicious in that process. You could pick a bad mentor. And so you have to be wise in how you approach that process, but you don’t really know until you get to know an individual.

And all of us probably have folks in our lives that we can reach out to and connect with. But if you’re in a particular area serving in a church, you may not know that many people. And so I would just say, take initiative, see what God does with it.

Mark Dever:

Amen.

How to Shepherd Well

Jonathan Leeman:

I want to give you guys four or five practical areas. And you tell me how, whether or how, one can mentor in that particular area. So one of the most prominent areas of a pastor’s work is his preaching.

But it’s a bit tough to mentor somebody from one church to another church when you’re not sitting under them preaching it. So how would you do that? And this is for any three of you.

Phil Newton:

Well, I think one of the things I would visit with Rich, if I had an off Sunday, I would try to go by and visit with Rich or another one of the guys that I’d mentored in the area. And that way I’d at least see where they are.

I’d heard the guys preach. That was part of our mentoring. We had them preach a number of times and so I was able to give feedback. And then on Rich’s part, he would talk to me about a series that he was doing or theological issues in a text.

How do I work through this particular sticky matter? And we had an open relationship. And I’ve had times where I’ve listened to guy sermons online because they wanted some kind of feedback and I, you know, trying to encourage them.

Rich Shadden:

And I would say a practical thing you can do as a young pastor is you can post your sermons on your website or you can send them to a mentor and he may have an opportunity to listen and then help you think through how you could preach better.

Jonathan Leeman:

Mark, anything on…

Mark Dever:

Well, to me, that seems expensive. It’s not that I would never do it, but I have rarely done that. But I do it all the time in my work as a pastor of this church with our staff because we have a fairly large number of going-to-be senior pastors around. And so I kind of pour my time into mentoring the young men that we have brought on our staff.

How To Mentor On Difficult Decision-Making

Jonathan Leeman:

How do you mentor a guy through areas like difficult decision-making?

Phil Newton:

I think some of that depends on what is the area of decision that you’re making. What is God teaching you through it? What is the costliness of whatever the decision might be? You know, is this a battle that you’ve got to fight now, or is this something that you need to get a little more time under your belt in that church in making the decision?

If there’s something pressing, sometimes you make the decision and you rumble your way through it, you feel the bumps and the bruises, and sometimes you get kicked out. But I think you judge the nature of it. What level of or how critical is that decision at the moment?

 Mark Dever:

I ask a lot of questions and I generally assume if I keep asking questions and then am patient to let them give me the answers, like let them talk about it for a while, then I learn more and then I’m able to ask more precise questions and I feel I’m able to get a lot of work done that helps the other person by asking questions, sincere questions, careful questions, open-ended questions and then listening, sometimes for an uncomfortably long period of time for the other person.

Jonathan Leeman:

You left one category of questions out, leading questions. Do you do those?

Mark Dever:

I don’t think, I don’t think I tend to do the leading questions.

Jonathan Leeman:

You don’t, whereas Phil, you do.

Phil Newton:

I will do some. I will do a leading question because I’m trying to do the same thing Mark is describing. I’m trying to find out where they are. And so I was with a pastor not too long ago.

And he was describing some critical issues going on. So I’m asking some questions because I want to draw out of him. Are there some underlying issues in his life and in his thinking that he’s not talked about?

Are there or are there some underlying issues in the church? Is there some trouble going on that I’m not aware of that he hasn’t quite leveled with me on to be able to give advice on?

Jonathan Leeman:

Conflict resolution, dealing with conflict, and fear of man.

Phil Newton:

Rich might want to speak on that one because that was a fair bit of our conversation along the way, wouldn’t you say?

Rich Shadden:

It was, and I think chapter 2, the title you read earlier, that chapter…

Mark Dever:

“Trust God, His Sovereignty”

Rich Shadden:

Yeah, that’s a theme that has to be, that has to carry you through the ministry. I can’t tell you how many, I think this is normal for pastors, how many thresholds you come to and you wonder. Will we cross this threshold?

And you trust the Lord and God in his goodness takes you through? Again, you might be fired, you might be removed, but you trust the Lord, you seek to be faithful and you leave the results up to him. But it’s really helpful to have a pastoral mentor who’s encouraging you in those things.

Mark Dever:

And Rich, one of the things you talk about very particularly is leading Audubon Park to change their polity.

Rich Shadden:

That’s correct. So it took…

Mark Dever:

So do you mean leading them to become a Presbyterian church?

Rich Shadden:

No, I mean leading them to our historical, Baptist roots. I think leading them toward elder plurality that leads a congregation, the office of the deacon that serves the congregation, and the congregation rules. And so that was the idea was to get more in line with the biblical model where the focus is not on one senior pastor, but on a plurality of godly qualified men who could better shepherd the flock together than I could alone.

Jonathan Leeman:

And Phil helped you through that, presumably.

Rich Shadden:

Absolutely, he did.

Phil Newton:

He was in a very traditional Southern SBC church that had the typical hierarchy with pastor, deacon board, and he had… When Rich got there, he had several men that were really good men.

They were really good deacons, but he didn’t have… he really didn’t have elder sort of guys in the church. Is that a fair statement?

Rich Shadden:

That’s a fair statement. Yes, some very godly deacons and then some men who came after I was there who eventually became elders and the church recognized them as elders. And that was a long process and I think you’re putting it into year seven before you…

Rich Shadden:

It was seven total years before we transitioned to that polity.

Phil Newton:

Yeah, there were a lot of hills to get over to get to that point.

Mark Dever:

So if you’re a pastor listening to this and your church is not where you think it should be in terms of polity, there are some basic things they’ve not done with membership or discipline or having deacons or having elders, you might want to grab a copy of this new book by Phil Newton and Rich Shadden, Shepherding the Pastor: Help for the Early Years of Ministry, because that’s one of the examples they give.

Can You Be Too Old For a Mentor?

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, those kinds of changes take so much patience. You know, you talked about seven years, and young men aren’t going to be quick to do that, and having an older man saying, you said a lot of hills to get over.

That’s not a hill to die on. That’s not a hill to die on. That one, keep cresting it as long as you can. It’s just the sort of counsel I’m sure you provided him, Phil, through all of those conversations and so forth must have been invaluable.

My last question is this, you mentioned a few minutes ago pastoral longevity. How does this kind of relationship aid pastoral longevity? In this case, I guess, it reaches longevity.

Rich Shadden:

Well, and I’ll just speak to one particular moment. We were around year five, year six, and I remember it was the first point in my time there where I really truly began to seriously ask the question, is it time to leave?

My wife and I had talked a lot about this, and prayed much about it. And so I finally had the conversation with Phil. He pointed me to John 10, Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd, and the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. And of course, that’s about Christ, but he’s the example for all of his under-shepherds.

In a little context, Phil knew me, and my family. He knew our situation. He knew we were in a good spot as a family. And so he encouraged me to follow the example of Christ and to stay put and continue faithfully shepherding for the good of the church.

I bring that example up because that was a pivotal moment where Phil as a mentor spoke into my life and God used that to help us stay put. And in God’s kindness, we’ve been able to see the fruit of that.

Jonathan Leeman:

Amen.

Mark Dever:

So Rich, you stayed put and in God’s kindness, the church has become more conformed to what we see in the New Testament in terms of its polity. Do you still need a mentor or was that really just as you say here for the early years?

Rich Shadden:

I would say that Phil has continued to be a mentor and there are other mentors who speak into my life as well. I think we always have to have a teachable spirit. We need to always be willing to learn.

Phil Newton:

I think the teachable heart and the patience that Rich has shown as a pastor made continuing to mentor him something that was reasonable to do. And you know, if a guy’s not very teachable if he’s impatient in ministry, it’s pretty hard to mentor guys like that.

Jonathan Leeman:

Mark, I think of another brother we both know in a very large church, mega-church in Indianapolis, and he has just a posture, a hard attitude of continually reaching out. He’ll call me and ask for advice.  And I’ll be like, I’ve never pastored a multi-thousand-member church, but the brother just is hungry for wisdom and is constantly seeking out members.

And I think your example, brothers, is great for all of us, whether we have a formal relationship the way the two of you have, or we’re just continually hungry both to receive wisdom and also when younger brothers come along and ask, and sometimes older brothers, to share what wisdom we have. So thank you for your example. Thank you for the book and the time.

Mark Dever:

Amen.

Phil Newton:

Glad to do it.

Rich Shadden:

Glad to do it. Thank you so much.

Mark Dever:

Thank you, brothers.