Many churches and believers have come to realize the need to provide pastors with good material supplies but have paid little attention to their spiritual needs.
As a young and middle-aged pastor working full-time in an urban church in eastern China, Brother Wang Zhong spends most of his time preparing for preaching, visiting and caring for the faithful, reading the scriptures and praying, and taking care of his family. But rather than being busy, Brother Wang Zhong has long faced a bigger problem: "While I feed the believers, but who will be my pastor?"
"I feed the believers, but who will be my pastor? Who will pastor the pastors, especially young pastors? As pastors, we pastor others, and we really want to be pastored, but the reality is that there is no one who ministers to us."
Wang said their temporary solution now is that churches often organize fellowships for pastors, which also involves forming pastoral groups to encourage, rebuke, and urge each other through communication. In this way, pastors get some pastoral and spiritual supplies.
"To be honest, frontline pastors seem pretty miserable to me. Because in the process of ministry, every pastor will accumulate a lot of spiritual trauma. But they cannot tell others. They could only bear them alone. Because it's inconvenient and impossible for church workers to tell believers about many things because they are in the privacy of others. They have no one to talk to about these things, and they could only bear these things alone. They can only face Jesus Christ alone," he said.
He added that there was once a case where a great leader of a church served well. He had a wife who also worked in the church and children,. But then all of a sudden, he was caught cheating on his wife, and because of that, he left the church.
"It is fair to say that none of us thought that anything would happen to this brother. None of us could have imagined it. But Satan may appear when people ignore that possibility. Because as long as there are weaknesses in people, Satan is sure to try to catch the chance. By using such weaknesses, he is able to accomplish his work of destroying the Church."
Believers also have a responsibility to protect their pastors, including praying for them and establishing healthy channels of communication between believers and pastors.
-Translated by Nicolas Cao
