Someone – probably the church growth people back in the 1980’s – sold pastors the notion that cultural relevance requires familiarity with popular culture. In other words, being “relevant” requires illustrating your sermons with material from Lady Gaga and Modern Family and American Idol. But this stab at relevance has exactly the opposite effect: a year or two from now, when Lady Gaga is MC Hammer and Modern Family is Cheers, your sermon podcasts will be painfully irrelevant.

If you want to become a better pastor, you need to rigorously protect your schedule to allow for regular times of solitude. Don’t tell me you don’t have time. You DO. You just have to plan for it. Either you control your calendar, or it controls you. Stop living in the tyranny of the urgent and use your calendar to set boundaries.

The wise pastor/mentor Tommy Nelson used to challenge young leaders by saying: “You’re either a prophet or a parrot.” Prophets speak fire and life. Parrots repeat what someone else has said. In our day of celebrity pastors, it’s easy to be a parrot. Good sound bites abound. But when the people of Judah are acting like Sodom and Gomorrah, they don’t just need truth. They need Isaiah. And if Isaiah parrots Elijah, he’ll be preaching to the wrong country.

If you hang out a shingle and say, “I’m open for counseling,” you’ll immediately get all the needy, self-absorbed people who want to use you as their substitute Messiah and Mediator and who can’t afford to pay a professional counselor. Bad idea. Don’t react; be proactive. I’m talking about doing gospel work. Evangelism. Discipleship. What the Porterbrook Network calls “missional visitation.” It’s being a missionary-pastor. One whose goal is not to be a cheap alternative counselor for Christian consumers, but a gospel pacesetter who takes forward the work of the gospel in the lives and hearts of people you’re called to reach.

Can a pastor spend 30 hours a week on sermon prep out of a deep, unadulterated, pure-hearted love for God and his word? Certainly. I have no doubt that some men do. I also have no doubt that many men lie to themselves about this. Chances are, you are devoting so much time to your sermon because you crave the approval of your people. Or because you want to live up to your own standard of “hard work.” Or because hours spent in study are quantifiable and give you a feeling of achievement.

There’s a reason why Will Rogers is funny. There’s a reason why people still listen to MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech. There’s a reason why the works of Lewis and Chesterton are classics while Left Behind is just a book. It has to do with the power of words: words fitly chosen, rightly framed, and provocatively delivered. You will probably never be Lewis or Chesterton or MLK. But you should be a keeper of their tradition.

In the final analysis, listening and reading widely isn’t just about doing what you do, better. It’s about cultivating wisdom. You are a pastor. People expect you to to be conversant in pastoral things – to have wisdom in matters of the soul. Which surgeon would you rather have: one who can explain exactly what he’s going to do and why he believes it’s better than the new experimental procedure they’re testing at Johns Hopkins, or one who says, “Heck with all that newfangled research - this is how we learned to do it in Fresno?”