Surviving the Workday

I’ve been pondering criticism recently, and 8 Ways to Encourage Your Pastor prompted some more thinking.

Some of the difficulty of being a writer (and also a minister) has to do with the regularity of feedback. As a working writer, I receive a lot of feedback, and most of it negative. If I were truly a bad writer, I’m convinced I simply wouldn’t get work (or not repeat work and not repeat clients). So, in my mind, it’s not so much that my writing is bad, but that the feedback is negative because that’s how people are used to operating in the world. They don’t tell you what works; they tell you didn’t work for them.

In 8 Ways to Encourage Your Pastor, the number one way to encourage your minister is to cut the criticism:

Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers, creator and host of television’s “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” recently gave an address describing the time he was a student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and attended a different church each Sunday in order to hear a variety of preachers.

One Sunday he was treated to “the most poorly crafted sermon (he) had ever heard.” But when he turned to the friend who had accompanied him, he found her in tears.

“It was exactly what I needed to hear,” she told Rogers.

“That’s when I realized,” he told his audience, “that the space between someone doing the best he or she can and someone in need is holy ground. The Holy Spirit had transformed that feeble sermon for her and as it turned out, for me too.”