Here is a fascinating snippet of an interview between Cathy Newman and David Baddiel. I was struck by one particular observation that I will say more about shortly. Take a look, further comment follows:

Speaking about political leadership in Britain, this is what David Baddiel said:

We live in a time where a perfectly adequate, not knock-it-out-the-park amazing and not that charismatic, but an adequate man – who in the 70s would be Jim Callaghan, and no one would be hating him and they might not be thinking he was great but no one would think he was the worst thing that ever happened to politics – is [now] considered that, and there are calls for him to go, and I don’t know if we can carry on with this. It’s a bit like what’s happening in football whereby a manager has to go, and everyone hates them if they haven’t had immense success within five games or whatever. Culture has got speeded up, and extreme, so that a normal bloke who’s okay, or a normal woman who’s okay, who often is the person who is going to lead the country, is not good enough anymore.

I think there is something this observation. We are no longer content with people who are just fine. People who might not be the best thing since sliced bread, people who we might wish did a whole bunch of things better, people who inevitably make mistakes and aren’t especially brilliant, but nevertheless do some good things and are essentially okay, as political leaders, such people get castigated and treated as though they are the worst thing ever to happen to this country.

I can already hear some of you readying to type and (probably) prove the point. Ready to insist that Keir Starmer (or any other leader over the last 25 years, for that matter) really is totally incompetent and utterly awful. But I think David Baddiel is essentially right. At least some of those leaders, despite not liking various bits of what they may or may not have stood for, are probably at least fine. But fine, uncharismatic and unimpressive, just okay, does not compute anymore. We have such divisive politics now that it is virtually impossible to get cross party agreement on even the most mundane and obviously good measures because it won’t do for clicks, soundbites and votes. Measures that then get brought back around by the opposition-now-government and passed off as something new. That isn’t to say these things were never an issue in the past, it is just to say they now seem considerably worse.

But I was particularly set to thinking about David Baddiel’s observation as it pertains to pastoral ministry. I wonder whether we, in the church, haven’t also found ourselves in a situation where a bloke who is essentially just fine – not brilliant, not that charismatic, fairly pedestrian – but basically okay is no longer deemed good enough as a pastor. Certainly, to look at the average pastor’s advert, we seem to demand criteria that would lock Jesus and his Apostles out of leadership.

Here is a section from an old blog post from Thom Rainer:

When I was a pastor in St. Petersburg, Florida, I surveyed the twelve deacons in my church (I often joked that we had eleven good deacons and one Judas!). The survey listed several pastoral responsibilities, and I asked them to share the minimum amount of time they believed I should devote to each area every week. The list included about twenty predefined responsibilities, with space for them to add others if they wished.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I expected from the survey, but the results were startling. After tallying the responses, I discovered that to meet the deacons’ minimum expectations, I would need to dedicate the following hours each week:

* Prayer at the church: 14 hours

* Sermon preparation: 18 hours

* Outreach and evangelism: 10 hours

* Counseling: 10 hours

* Hospital and home visits: 15 hours

* Administrative functions: 18 hours

* Community involvement: 5 hours

* Denominational involvement: 5 hours

* Church meetings: 5 hours

* Worship services/preaching: 4 hours

* Other: 10 hours

Total: 114 hours per week

To put this in perspective, meeting the minimum expectations of twelve deacons would have required me to work over 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Alternatively, if I took one day off, I’d need to work 19 hours a day for six days a week. And keep in mind, these expectations came from just twelve people—not the entire congregation.

This is just the time expectations and is to say nothing of the qualifications and abilities that often accompany these things. These are not seeking a man; they are asking for superman!

The truth is, most pastors are just going to be okay. They are going to be men who love the Lord and love God’s people and are just doing their best. They may do it well in some areas, they may do it poorly in others. They will do some stuff helpfully and mess other bits up. But in essence, they are fine.

I do sometimes wonder if fine is no longer good enough.