Page 5267 – Christianity Today (2024)

Without a doubt, my all-time favorite animal is the duck-billed platypus. It appeals to my nonconformist instincts because it breaks so many rules of biology. Consider: The platypus has a flat, rubbery bill, no teeth, and webbed feet, like a duck. Yet it has a furry body and beaverlike tail, and nurses its young like a mammal.

But wait-it walks with a lizard gait and lays leathery eggs like a reptile! And the male can use venomous hind-leg spurs to strike like a snake.

The strange animal stymied scientists for years, and in fact the first platypuses shipped back to England in 1800 were judged frauds. Europeans were still reeling from an expensive and popular fad item: imported "genuine mermaids," which turned out to consist of monkeys' heads stitched to the bodies of fish from the China Sea. They were not about to fall for a bizarre concoction of duck's bill, webbed feet, and beaver's body.

The platypus holds a certain charm precisely because it does break all the rules. Somehow or other, it still works as an animal. I like to believe that, in designing the platypus, God had fun stretching the limits of natural law (or "pushing the edge of the envelope," to borrow a phrase from test-pilot Chuck Yeager).

I like the platypus for another reason: its combination of so many incompatible features in one humble animal gives me hope that we humans, too, can break some of the rules that govern the "organisms" in which we are involved. I am thinking particularly of the local church.

The New Testament's favorite metaphor for the church, "the body of Christ," describes an organism, and pastors use organism-type words in speaking of their congregation: the flock, the body, the family of God. But churches also function as organizations; most have a formal governing structure and involve themselves in personnel management and supervision. Even churches with single-person staffs must supervise volunteer programs. Like it or not, every church becomes a Christian organization. Those two words thrown together set up an immediate tension.

Christian connotes community and family feelings and spirituality.

Organization conveys hierarchy and institutionalism and the pragmatic pursuit of goals.

Read a management textbook and Jesus' parables back to back, and you'll notice a clear difference in the way they view the world.

Organism vs. Organization

I have spent most of my adult life in Christian organizations of one kind or another. For sixteen years I have worked in Christian publishing. Besides the direct employee experience, in my writing career I have often covered stories that occurred in a local church setting or in such Christian ministries as Wycliffe Bible Translators and World Concern. In addition, I have served my own local church in various volunteer capacities, and my wife currently works on a church staff. All this exposure to Christian organizations has convinced me that the church, like the platypus, is a whole made up of contradictory parts.

Organizations, such as the army, government, and big business, follow one set of rules. Organisms, such as living things, families, and closely knit small groups, follow another. The church falls somewhere between the two and attracts criticism from both sides. Organization people accuse it of poor management, sloppy personnel procedures, and general inefficiency. Organism people complain when the church begins to function as just another institution and thus loses its personal, "family" feel.

I have concluded the tension between organism and organization is unavoidable and even healthy. I would feel uncomfortable within a church that tilted too far toward either model. A healthy church combines forces normally found in polar opposition. We must strive to be efficient and yet compassionate, unified and yet diverse, structured and yet flexible. We must live like a platypus in a world of mammals, reptiles, and fowl.

Recognizing the value of healthy tension is one thing. Living with it is quite another. Too easily, even the healthiest tensions lead to open conflict.

For the church to work effectively, we must become aware of the underlying forces of organism and organization and then learn how to harness them.

I will outline four areas-goals, status, structure, and failure-in which the tension commonly occurs and give some opinions on how the church can respond.

Goals

A pure organization has the advantage of clear and measurable goals. Take the military, for example. In wartime, the army has one ultimate objective agreed on by everyone: win the war. Such measurements as body counts and control of territory indicate how well the objective is being met.

Groups of people that function as organisms, however, find the task slipperier. What is the "goal" of a family? One could reduce the goal of parenthood, say, to "creating adults." But any parent could tell you that goal is as difficult to measure as it is to accomplish. Churches sometimes go through the exercise of defining their goals. I have participated in three-day retreats where such goals were spelled out in dazzling detail: evangelize the city, balance the budget, develop Christian leaders. But, again, these goals are much easier to state than to fulfill. I have watched highly paid consultants come into Christian organizations with a certain co*ckiness. "What this organization needs," they conclude, "is a Management By Objective plan. Let's define our objectives, then manage a way to meet them." I have watched those same consultants leave a year later, shaking their heads and mumbling. Christian ministry is not easily reduced to neat MBO formulas.

If MBO principles were rigidly applied, we would have abandoned missionary efforts to the Muslims long ago, and we would give up most of our current relief work in despair. True, Christian ministries have much to learn about efficient management of their resources, and goal setting may help that process. Yet we dare not become so goal oriented that we shut our ears to God's direction.

I would love to see someone try to interpret God's activity in the Old Testament from an MBO point of view. Goal: to create a godly nation of many people. Modus operandi: start with three barren women (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel) and factor in four hundred wasted years in Egypt and a forty-year detour in the wilderness. Or, move to the New Testament and try to explain Jesus' parables of the ninety and nine or the Prodigal Son from an MBO perspective.

With respect to goals, churches tend to fail in two ways: they become obsessed with them or they ignore them completely.

Either response makes me equally nervous. I feel utterly frustrated in churches that care nothing for the goal-setting process. Often they merely squander resources and stunt the growth of their people. The saying "He who sets no goal will reach it" applies directly to such organizations.

On the other hand, I have noticed that goal-oriented churches usually choose goals that are relatively easy to accomplish: a new building, an increase in size. But Jesus said very little about those goals; he talked instead of unity and love and justice. How well are we accomplishing them?

As a general principle, a church should deliberately stock its leadership with some people who are goal-oriented and some who are people-oriented. Very often, especially in smaller churches, the pastor will come from a people-oriented perspective. He or she chose the ministry, after all, because of a concern for the needs of people. Yet the pastor's job includes many tasks-supervising, running programs, juggling the demands of a crowded calendar-that can be planned and measured for effectiveness.

For several years I attended a suburban church with a small congregation (around seventy-five regular attenders). We had a loving, concerned pastor-so loving and concerned, in fact, that he never got around to much of the business of the church. A scheduled counseling session with a needy person would expand to consume an entire morning. The person being counseled would thrive under all the personal attention, but the rest of the church grumbled on Sunday morning when the pastor delivered an ill-prepared sermon and the bulletin never made it into print.

The church leaders concluded they needed more than a resident counselor; they needed a full-fledged pastor who could minister to the entire congregation. But the pastor, having no staff to share his work, never could get to all the important tasks. For two years the church lurched on in unpleasant tension.

Finally, a quiet but successful businessman asked if he could try an experiment for a few months. He volunteered to meet with the pastor every Monday morning for a two-hour breakfast. Together the two would plan the pastor's use of time for the coming week. The next week, they would begin breakfast by reviewing exactly how well the pastor had met the previous week's goals, then move on to more planning.

The pastor had enough openness and security to welcome a reporting structure that might seem demeaning to other pastors (but is actually quite common in a business setting). And the businessman showed sensitivity when the pastor had to change his priorities midweek in response to other needs. After such meetings had been going on for a year, I never heard further grumbling about the pastor's use of time. Together the two men had found a successful balance between the demands of organism and organization.

Status

Organizations rely heavily on status. Soldiers know exactly where they stand, and everyone else knows, too; uniforms announce rank. Competitive ranking begins with the A's, B's, C's, and F's of first grade. In the business world, title, salary, and other perks signify status. You can climb floor by floor up the Sears Tower in Chicago and, just by observing the office furniture, see the status of Sears executives rise with the height of the building.

In an organization, status depends on performance. Prove yourself worthy, and you'll get status. It's easy to haughtily look down on such rewards as appeals to "lower instincts." But the business world has learned that human beings respond well to marks of status; they can be incredibly good motivators.

In organisms, however, status works a little differently. How does one earn status in a family? Every family has divisions based on status and privilege. Parents reserve certain privileges they do not allow their children and they dispense privileges according to age and behavior. A seventeen-year-old daughter may date; a fourteen-year-old may not. A ten-year old can stay up till midnight to watch a movie; his five-year-old brother cannot. Status and privilege are assumed.

Yet the rules within a family do not operate like those within a corporation or army. Careless parents may show favoritism to one son or daughter, but at the risk of alienating the others. How many older siblings resent the privileges granted the "baby" of the family, who gets to date at fifteen when they had to wait until sixteen. In a family, and other organisms, something inside us instinctively calls out for fairness and equitable treatment, not privilege.

At an even deeper level a child "earns" the family's rights just by virtue of birth. A backward child is not kicked out of the family. In fact, a sickly child, who "produces" very little, may actually receive more attention than her healthy siblings.

In God's family, we are plainly told, "There is no Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free." All such artificial distinctions have melted under the sun of God's grace. As adopted children of God, we gain the same rights, albeit undeserved, as those granted the first-born, Jesus Christ himself. Paul dealt with the topic directly, using his analogy of the body of Christ to warn against valuing one member more highly than another.

Tensions surface, however, when a church tries to work out the principles of grace and equality in an organizational setting. Why else do youth pastors chafe so at being "just" a youth pastor?

In a large Christian organization, the reward system almost always expresses underlying belief about status. Government and industry make no apology about offering higher rewards for more "valuable" employees. But some Christian ministries flinch at such practices. A few, such as Campus Crusade and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, attempt to pay all employees the same amount, regardless of status. And some, such as Mennonite Voluntary Services and certain Catholic orders, pay their employees almost nothing: room-and-board expenses plus maybe thirty-five dollars per month for spending money. More typically, churches and Christian ministries have a sliding pay scale but tend to downplay what it signifies. They appeal to employees on the basis of loyalty, sacrifice, and shared commitment to the common goal, and then apply rewards on the basis of status.

How does status affect the local church? Even if a pastor tries to avoid the issue of status, it will inevitably come up because of the very nature of organizations. In most church settings, the pastor has status simply because our society has invested most leadership roles with higher status than follower roles. It is up to the pastor to keep status from being a barrier.

I have known a few pastors successful in using their status in effective ways. They do not ignore the status barrier, but rather, make specific efforts to have regular, sustained contact with people of "lower" status. One pastor visits each church committee at least once every six months on a rotating schedule. She recognizes that her very presence at an obscure committee meeting can raise the value of the committee's function in its members' eyes.

Another pastor expresses his gratitude in thank-you notes. His obsessive, endless stream of thank-you notes causes the church secretary much consternation, but it conveys a spirit of appreciation to every volunteer in the church.

A third pastor chips away at the status barrier this way: Once a year, he cooks a lumberjack-type breakfast for all Sunday school teachers. Seeing their pastor in an apron, flipping pancakes, frying bacon, and buttering biscuits does more to motivate teachers in that church than anything else all year.

American business unashamedly allows barriers to grow up between levels of employees. High-status employees earn more rights and privileges. But what works in an organization may not work in an organism-or in a church that combines qualities of both.

Structure

Although organizational structure often relates to status, the two are not the same. Structure, particularly the reporting relationship, makes formal an organization's lines of power. And any military or civil service veteran knows that a person can have high status with no real power.

Once again, business excels at structure. Nearly every major company has a corporate organizational chart, some as labyrinthine as a Tibetan map of the universe. Management experts, recently influenced by the Japanese, have added exotic new appendages to the old-fashioned pyramid, but all organizational charts confirm a formal hierarchy. Structure serves the same function in an organization that a skeleton serves in a biological body. And, predictably, organisms with no structure become soft and squishy, and sag in the middle.

In contrast to the corporate world, churches often have no organizational chart. I asked one employee of my church, "To whom do you report?" and received a blank stare in response-something that would never happen in the corporate world. (When he did think of the person he theoretically reported to, it was the staff member least gifted in supervisory skills.)

Over the years I have become acquainted with some of the leaders of large Christian ministries. I sense among them, with very few exceptions, an extreme discomfort with their power. The very word power seems to embarrass them. If they deal with corporate structure at all, they do so with a feeling of suspicion, as if dabbling in heresy.

Yet just as nature abhors a vacuum, organizations abhor a vacuum of power. In the absence of a formal structure, an informal power structure will grow up. By defaulting on power, those leaders simply open the door to someone else's power. How many churches in America are held hostage by one power-greedy deacon or elder or a maverick music director?

David Hubbard says that when he was asked to head Fuller Theological Seminary, he had one major question for the search committee that interviewed him: "What is your philosophy of power?" He knew that a school as large as Fuller could not squander power or spiritualize around it by pretending it did not exist. And he did not want to step into a role without the appropriate power to match his abilities and the structure's needs.

True power in Christian ministries often gravitates toward people who have good skills but not the skills necessary to handle power. Commonly, in an evangelical subculture that prizes verbal skills, the smoothest talker rises to the top. Verbal skills work well in a figurehead function. But when the need for hardheaded decision making arises, those verbal skills may actually turn into a disadvantage.

The Bible gives little advice on organizational structure. Jesus left no corporate chart for his disciples; the only one known to hold an office turned traitor. And when Paul outlined qualifications for church office, he focused exclusively on spiritual character qualities: temperance, integrity, honesty. We ought to reflect on that very carefully.

But does godliness in itself qualify a leader to manage a staff and a multi-million-dollar budget? Giving full responsibility for budget and personnel management to an individual who can teach, preach, and pray but who may not be gifted in administration will usually frustrate both pastor and congregation and make the church ineffective. A solid structure must somehow account for the varied abilities of its leaders.

I have no room in this article to propose a philosophy of power for Christian organizations. (In previous issues of LEADERSHIP, individuals such as Gordon MacDonald and Arthur DeKruyter have detailed structural possibilities. And World Vision's management seminars attempt to deal with the question.) I would simply raise a caution, because most Christian ministries and churches I have observed seem to stumble here.

Failure

Several million people in the United States could testify how the corporate world handles failure: If the economic climate is cloudy, you get laid off. And if your performance consistently fails to measure up, you get fired.

Organisms, however, view failure differently. A family may have black sheep, but does it ever "fire" a son or daughter? Such a drastic step as disowning a child is, in most families, inconceivable.

Christians hold up a single word as the ideal response to failure: forgiveness. The Prodigal Son's father welcomed him with open arms. Even the incestuous Corinthian was permitted back into the fellowship after his repentance. David the murderer, Saul the Christian-hunter, Peter the denier-they all found a new place in God's family. But what happens when this same gospel of grace gets applied in the Christian organization?

Good management requires a balance between responsibility, authority, and accountability. Churches and Christian ministries must be accountable to a board concerned about efficient management and to the people funding the ministry.

In turn, those ministries demand accountability from their employees. And yet, I sense great confusion on this issue. Too often management and theology get muddled. Christian ministries begin ministering to, rather than administering, employees. Employee mistakes get overlooked, and bad habits form.

Ignoring an employee's failures produces three very undesirable results.

First, it makes a statement to the rest of the organization: There's no need to be conscientious about excellence and promptness-the church secretary (or custodian or children's worker) abuses those standards constantly and no one cares.

Second, it makes a statement to the community at large: You could probably get a job as a youth pastor-they're desperate for any kind of help.

Perhaps most important, it makes a statement to the employee, a subtle message that the work has little value.

In my early years at Campus Life magazine, I had the great fortune of working under a wise Christian manager who viewed his role as helping the employees under him grow and develop. Many times in those early days I yearned for a more "understanding" boss. Why wouldn't he accept the fifth draft of my article? Why insist on a sixth?

Now, looking back, I see his professional attention was a form of loving concern. He knew I could become a better writer, and he committed himself to push me toward that goal. I even watched that same man fire employees in a loving way. The sentence may sound self-contradictory, but it is not, for separation was the best thing both for the company and the employee. In most cases, he worked hard to find another, more suitable job for the fired employee.

Working toward Balance

These four areas represent many others in which churches will feel tension between two different forces: a pull toward organization and a pull toward organism. The tension, I have concluded, is a healthy one, and each church must grope for solutions that combine the best elements of organization and organism.

Like a platypus, the church pieces together different parts. It combines some features from business and some from family. But what features, and how? Should the platypus have a duck bill or a rooster's beak? A beaver or muskrat tail? You will have to work out the specific details within the environment of your own church. But my experience has taught me some general principles that may help. I admit they are highly subjective and may not apply in every circ*mstance. But they illustrate an attempt to deal with the conflicting realities of a "Christian organization."

1. Separate the person from the function. A truly Christian leader will seek to recognize the inherent value and worth in every worker. Each person's intrinsic worth comes from being created in the image of God, and has nothing to do with skill or performance. But an employer does have the right, even the obligation, to judge a person's function. A pastor who loves an assistant pastor or church treasurer can express that love even through correction.

For a model of how, read through the gospel accounts of Jesus and his disciples. Among the scenes of intimacy and fellowship, you will find some rather harsh incidents of corrective management. When Jesus' disciples failed in their roles, he never let it slide.

Jesus singled out two disciples especially for correction. One was hot-tempered, self-centered, and inconsiderate, earning the appropriate nickname, "Son of Thunder." Another was blustery, pretentious, and ultimately treacherous. Yet under Jesus' careful management, these two flawed individuals became the apostles John and Peter. What would those two have accomplished had not Jesus attended to their failures?

2. Take risks with undesirables. Theologians in Latin America use the phrase "God's preferential option for the poor" to describe the biblical emphasis on justice. The bias is unmistakable: when God constructed a just society, he gave preferential treatment to the weak, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the alien.

I know of two organizations that apply this principle in radically different ways. One, Servicemaster Industries, is managed by dedicated Christians but operates in the fiercely competitive business world. In the free market, the government sometimes has to rely on a quota system to force hiring of minorities and handicapped persons. The managers of Servicemaster, however, try to reach beyond any quotas and intentionally seek out employees with true human need.

New employees at Servicemaster all start at the lowest level, cleaning floors.

Everyone gets an equal chance, but Servicemaster has little tolerance for failure. The company excels at defining "performance objectives" and then monitoring an employee's progress. They take risks in hiring but not in gauging performance. If employees do not measure up, they are released. As a result of their efficient management and strict adherence to performance, Servicemaster consistently performs with one of the highest profit margins of any company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Another company I know operates on a much smaller scale on the far north side of Chicago. There, a Presbyterian minister runs a nonprofit construction crew staffed mainly by alcoholics and recovering drug addicts-the poorest of the poor. Not a single one of his employees would make it at Servicemaster. They miss days, do sloppy work, relapse into chemical dependency. "With each job, we try to figure out how much money we can lose, and then go raise that amount to cover it," says their foreman. And, over time, a few good employees emerge, skilled and responsible enough to make it on their own.

Both companies take risks, and both seek to stretch their employees. I, for one, am glad the kingdom includes both.

Local churches do not have so many employee opportunities, of course. But when some low-skilled functions do arise-janitorial services, building maintenance, occasional typing-whom do we think of first? Are we willing to take risks with people who may fail? And if we don't, who will?

3. Make Christian virtues the style of your "corporate culture." The best-selling book on management, In Search of Excellence, gives great emphasis to "corporate culture," the combination of unified behavior, commitment, attitude, even dress, as practiced by companies like IBM. Local churches and Christian ministries ought to have a corporate culture also, one that has been defined for them already in the New Testament.

Sadly, many local church offices are full of strife and bitterness and favoritism. How can a leader bring to a group such qualities as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? The only way is for leaders, and those around them, to commit themselves to those qualities as enthusiastically as they commit themselves to such goals as fiscal soundness and productivity. It means a commitment to employees that extends beyond the last day of work, a depth of commitment that could never be expressed by a "one-minute manager." In Search of Excellence says nothing about a manager's prayer life, but that factor alone may do more to determine the success of a leader than all the management textbooks put together.

4. Encourage relationships. The corporate world has ambivalent feelings about how much to encourage relationships among staff. One rule is clear: People from different status levels must maintain a certain distance. Some companies even set rules forbidding car-pooling and social lunches between employees on different levels.

I realize that managers have wide disagreement on this issue, but a church offers a unique environment for nurturing personal relationships. Pastors sometimes encounter certain cultural barriers to intimacy: they feel set apart from other people. But I believe the rewards are well worth the energy it takes to dismantle those barriers. I believe that because I experienced it myself.

In ten years of employment by a Christian organization, I encountered all the common pitfalls of mismanagement. Yet now I look back on that time with a feeling much like longing. A group of people on a magazine staff became for me a kind of family. Those people prayed for me, saw me through hard times, encouraged my professional growth, corrected me, and, in short, loved me.

Love was not in anyone's job description at Campus Life. But it happened-there was an atmosphere of true community.

I now recognize that this nurturing environment, coming at a critical period of my life, was the most positive force toward growth I have ever experienced. I doubt it would have happened in a nonChristian environment. And for that reason, I don't believe a "Christian organization" has to be a contradiction in terms.

There I was, settling into my first full-time pastorate, and wondering, What have I gotten myself into? With a consistent attendance of less than fifteen and a total church budget of under $14,000, you might say there was nowhere to go but up. But how do you begin the ascent?

The people looked to me for leadership, but I wasn’t sure I knew where to start, let alone where to lead.

Although my situation was probably extreme, in principle it illustrates what all small-church pastors face at one time or another. With limited resources, a handful of people, and not infrequently a hint of discouragement or desperation, what can a pastor do to make a difference, especially when the budget restrains experimentation? From my ten years in a small church, I have learned three principles that helped set our ministry on a steady, upward course. The principles are not earth-shattering, but they set the stage for growth.

A Positive Perspective

In smaller churches, I have observed what I call the “attitudes vs. abilities” factor. Organizations that work with churches often offer resources to sharpen leaders’ skill levels. Such resources, of course, are both good and needed. Rarely, however, do they address the self-image of the church. It is often that deficient attitude, not just the lack of skills, that hinders a church’s development.

The small church knows full well what it can’t do, how much money it doesn’t have, and all the needs it isn’t meeting. (Interestingly, it is a revelation to many small-church leaders that bigger churches often feel exactly the same way but on a larger scale.) Such attitudes often lead to an unhealthy introspection and an apologetic demeanor: “Well, I know it’s not much, but we’re giving it our best shot.” The pastor then complicates the situation by directing sermons at the weak areas, urging greater commitment, greater efforts in evangelism, greater giving.

I’ve found it better to continually hold before my people the good things the church is accomplishing. Even small things, when lumped together, give a sense of real accomplishment to the people.

For example, as I looked at my church early in my tenure, I realized we were not accomplishing much that I thought we needed to do. But rather than constantly emphasize what we couldn’t do, I decided to help the people rejoice in the ministry we were able to accomplish.

The local Youth for Christ group was led largely by people in our church; per capita, we were near the top in giving to our district ministries; our participation in conference camping and church-planting programs contributed to our district’s outreach; and in many other ways we were making our mark. Individually, none of these accomplishments appeared all that significant, but taken together, they formed a positive backdrop for ministry and for change. When one of our people accomplished something, we made sure our whole church heard about it and rejoiced!

Pastors are often advised to perform a “strengths vs. weaknesses” study of their church. When the results are tabulated, frequently there is only a weak nod in the direction of the strengths while the major effort is expended on improving the weaknesses. Perhaps a better starting point would be targeting one or two strengths and working to improve them even more-making them the central thrust of the church’s ministry.

In most churches one or two strengths will naturally bubble to the surface. A strength may be fellowship or a good Bible study program or the worship on Sunday or an effective children’s program. I encourage smaller churches to take charge of the process rather than just letting strengths develop haphazardly. Churches can identify and improve on their strengths until they become expert in these areas.

Developing a strength accomplishes two things. First, it gives the church an area of expertise. Very likely this strength will establish the church’s reputation in the community and become a natural springboard for outreach. “You know, there’s just something about First Baptist; you really feel loved when you go there, and it makes you want to go back” or “Bible Fellowship definitely understands the problems of young marrieds. I like it there.”

Second, it gives the church a reason for genuine and healthy pride. Nothing helps a small church’s esteem so much as to know “We do this well!”

When I got to Faith Baptist, I found a group of people who definitely cared about others, member and visitor alike. So I capitalized on it, underscoring at every possible occasion: “We care about people.” Lately I’ve found it rebounding. I had one counselee tell me, “I’m not a churchgoer, but this is a church I’d like to be a part of because you people really care.” He’d been to only one service, but he had picked up on a natural strength of our congregation.

Of course, work still remains to round out the total ministry of the church and strengthen its weaknesses. But now it can be done in a positive and progressive atmosphere of growth, not a negative one of desperation and despair. Even in the worst of situations, such strengths become an anchor point for the rest of the ministry.

Pulling is more effective than pushing, and if the people perceive their role as “rounding out” instead of “desperately hanging on,” more is accomplished.

A Clear Purpose

Purpose comes second for a definite reason. Often the smaller church has no clear purpose, and the idea of developing a church purpose can strike fear in the hearts of church leaders. Where do we start? How do we proceed? And how can we convince the church it’s even necessary?

Sitting down cold and trying to state on paper their reason for being is often just too big a step for church leaders. To be “spiritual,” the church will try to do a little bit of everything. A large church may pull it off, but it becomes difficult, if not impossible, with a small church’s limited staff and budget.

If, however, the church has already specialized in one or two areas, grasping the concept of purpose and direction is much simpler. The process then becomes one of understanding the scriptural mandates for churches, seeing where the church is going, and developing a purpose that combines the two by saying: (1) “As we understand the Bible, the church is to do . . . (2) We can fulfill that mandate by . . .” This way, rather than forcing a purpose on the church, purpose emerges out of the gifts and natural aptitude of the church.

For example, at Faith Baptist our general purpose statement reflects our desire to keep people, not programs, a central focus of our ministry and yet to grow at the same time. As we analyzed our ministry, this purpose statement became an indication of both our present direction and our future hopes: “The purpose of our church is to maintain a personal ministry that equips individual believers to successfully live a Christlike life. We are committed to excellence in (1) preparing the individual, (2) exhibiting a personal touch in ministry, and (3) proclaiming Christ to our world.”

I realize that’s a pretty broad statement, and we’re taught that purposes should be specific But this was the first time our church had been able to put down in writing our reason for existing. We can now begin to measure all we do against this standard. “Does this activity help us accomplish either number 1, 2, or 3? Are we doing this with excellence? If not, perhaps we should rethink it.”

After this first step is taken, further refinement of more specific goals comes more easily. For instance, we can take a three-year approach, emphasizing one point each year. Once the original hurdle is overcome, the possibilities are endless.

I admit my entire congregation may not completely understand the purpose and goals of the church-that’s the ideal to work toward-but in the interim, I consider it crucial that the leaders do. For a small church like mine to be effective, the leaders must be “owners” of the ministry, not simply administrators. Here I, as pastor, am important: I must encourage, lift, build, help, and show that I value my leaders. They must feel they are co-laborers in Christ. And though at this time they may not be able to spell out exactly the goals and direction of the church, they must at least sense a target on the horizon. Remember, the definition of a fanatic is “one who redoubles his efforts when he loses sight of his goal.”

All this presupposes that I as pastor have a clear understanding of that target; if I cannot decide what I want the church to become, there will be no dynamic to the church’s ministry. I need to be able to say: “In one year, five years, ten years, twenty years I want my church to be . . .” Vision is more caught than taught, and woe unto the pastor who has no vision to spread.

When I arrived at this church, I decided to first dream dreams without worrying about how to make them happen. For the initial year my goal was simple survival. Within five years I wanted to help the church iron out its problems, stabilize the budget, and move toward an attendance of forty. By ten years I wanted to see a self-supporting congregation on firm footings, one I could leave without it falling apart. After getting the dreams in place, we have worked hard to make them happen, and we are about two years ahead of the game.

Now I’m beginning to revise the picture. We’re looking toward adding a second pastor in a year, buying property and erecting a building in the next three years, and reaching 250 in attendance by five years. Then we’ll start a daughter church. This may have seemed impossible when I began with fifteen people and practically no resources, but by now it isn’t just my vision; others share the dreams with me.

A Professional Presentation

I’m an amateur radio operator, and two stores in my area cater to ham radio needs. One, about fifty miles away, has a prominently displayed sign that reads: THIS IS NOT A RADIO CLUB-NO LOITERING. The other, almost twice the distance, greets you with a pot of coffee and donuts. I drive the extra distance because I feel welcome there.

Similarly, visitors gauge how friendly a church is by the way it presents itself. Smaller churches may unknowingly project a negative image. Buildings are sometimes old, and there’s not always money for proper upkeep. Bulletins and church literature may look decidedly amateuristic. The people of the church don’t often see these things because the church is so familiar. Perhaps they have never known any other standard. However, these clues do not escape the notice of the first-time visitor. The physical plant and public image communicate the personality of the church.

Beyond the material considerations stand the people themselves: how they react to visitors and how they treat each other. No matter how much the church wants to reach out, growth will not happen if the building and the people fail to say “Welcome!”

One technique I have found helpful in building this awareness is to walk church members through their building as if they were first-time visitors. I take a small group a block or so away from the church, give them pencils and note cards, and try to create a “first-time visitor” mindset for them. Then we “visit” our church. What does the general appearance of the building and grounds communicate about the congregation? How at home do they feel? For example, can they find the rest rooms without having to ask the embarrassing question? Is the foyer cluttered and messy? Are minor repairs left undone? Do the walls and posters tell them anything? If one is not a Christian and has seldom been to church, what would this building say? Would they have any idea where to go or what they were supposed to do? The unwritten “signs” around the building may say a lot more than any welcoming committee ever does.

When the group “visited” our building, they found the exterior in sad shape. It looked like we were telling the community we weren’t a viable church; if the building were any indication, we might not be around much longer. However, on the interior we scored better. Our friendly bulletin boards and displays and the inviting coffee pot in the foyer made up for the undumped trash and the woeful lack of signs indicating rest rooms.

Since then we’ve spruced up our exterior, made sure the trash is dumped regularly, and posted clear signs to the lavatories. These simple efforts may not win any souls, but they tell people we are committed to our church and care about them. And that, combined with our strength of friendliness, may bring them back to hear the gospel.

I apply the same technique to the Sunday activities. Is any effort made to create a good impression? Or is too much taken for granted? How many people talk to visitors? How much time elapses before someone greets newcomers? Does the church give any impression that it even expects someone new to come? For one new church I know, meeting in a community center, it took twenty minutes of deliberate search inside the building for a visitor to find the meeting location! The church had no signs posted, no ushers at the outside doors-and no visitors.

I try to extend image-oriented thinking to all the public images our church projects. What does the Sunday bulletin look like? Although it did cost our church a bit of money (at a time when we had little to spare), we custom designed our bulletins. Since bulletins generally go home with people, we wanted them to carry away a good impression, so we bore the expense. We’ve had T-shirts professionally designed with our church logo. We use them for sports, youth activities, vacation Bible school, and other occasions, and it’s exciting to see them dot the town.

I’ve found that whatever we decide to do-even as a small church-we need to maintain a sharp image before the community, one that says, “We know what we are doing and we intend to do it well.” People are, after all, bombarded by TV and print media of the highest quality, and it hits a responsive chord if the church is professional in its presentation. Would people feel comfortable visiting a doctor whose office is kept with the carelessness that many churches keep their foyer?

This, of course, is not to negate the church’s spiritual ministry role. But with a little attention to detail and, yes, just a little money, much “pre-evangelism” can be accomplished with first-time visitors before any words are spoken or any visits made. And the members themselves begin to take pride in their church as well.

The determination of salmon swimming upstream to spawn impresses me. I feel tired just watching them. However, there is no spiritual blessing to be received by churches fighting their way upstream against feelings of insignificance and defeat. Effective ministry is difficult enough even in the best of situations.

I’ve discovered these three principles are neither costly nor difficult to implement, yet they can help churches overcome self-image deficits.

My father used to tell me, “Work smart, not just hard.” I believe our Father honors the same concept. By taking a good look at our churches and making sure some basic principles are at work, we can set the stage for growth and service in the smaller church that could make even big churches envious.

Gary Harrison is pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Delavan, Wisconsin.

Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Randy, a fellow minister and friend, caught my eye and motioned toward a private corner. I could see a heavy question coming.

“How do you know when it is time to move?” he almost begged.

His searching eyes suggested the question was more painfully complex than its simple phrasing. Randy is not alone. Most ministers find themselves in his quandary periodically, if not persistently.

For fifteen years I have served one church, but I have frequently faced the question of moving. I am not suggesting ministers should never move or that I never will. A move is sometimes imperative. So far, however, I have chosen to stay because of some guidelines hammered out along the way. These principles at least brush against the question Randy and you and I often ask: Is it time to move?

No doubt you sense my bias. I am unabashedly in favor of long tenures in ministry. Ministry, like marriage, finds its fulfillment in faithfulness. Marriage vows are intended to last until death brings separation; a ministerial covenant does not imply such sacred permanence. Nevertheless, when a shepherd is called to a covenant with a flock, that union is not to be terminated lightly.

The Long-playing Record

Longevity in ministry is an enormous plus. After nearly fifteen years with the same church, I have observed something like this:

The first two years you can do nothing wrong.

The second two years you can do nothing right.

The fifth and sixth years of a ministry, either you leave, or the people who think you can do nothing right leave. Or you change, or they change, or you both change.

Productive ministry emerges somewhere in the seventh year or beyond.

Why does increasing tenure generally enrich the quality of ministry? For one thing, time gives the sensitive minister intimate rapport with the community. Its needs become more clear. The minister also becomes more familiar with the local communication networks. Thus, in most cases, time helps a minister connect more precisely with the needs of the people.

Effective ministry often demands that a church make costly and radical shifts. Even the most loyal Christians will not willingly retool major patterns of living in response to temporary pastoral leadership. But when godly people gain confidence in the permanence of the leader and accept the direction he or she is going, they will more readily make the significant changes necessary.

Example: The ink is still wet on a document generated by our long-range-planning task force. We are facing a major building project. Even before the findings were complete, the elders wanted to know if they could reasonably expect me to be in the Highland pulpit for at least the next five years. Am I indispensable to the growth of this church? Definitely not! But the people will be asked to pay the high price of expansion in dollars, work, and inconvenience. Before they can be expected to make this commitment, they deserve some assurance there will be no switch of signals from the pulpit.

Long tenure in ministry also enhances credibility. People respect and trust a person who loves them. Only over time can love be authenticated. I’ve believed this a long time, but I believe it even more since M. J.’s wedding.

M. J. grew up in our congregation. She started first grade the year I arrived. She was part of our youth ministry, mission trips, and singing groups. M. J.’s parents are divorced. I often listened and prayed as she processed the pain of family problems. Once M. J. went as our “daughter” on a churchwide family canoe run down the Guadalupe River.

During the hours of premarital counseling with M. J. and Mark, they invaded my heart even deeper. Then came the wedding, a garden affair under the oaks and amid the flowers. While the wedding was informal, it had a touch of elegance. The bridal attendants were Libby, Carra, Marla, and Holly-friends M. J. had grown up with. As little girls they had skipped into Sunday school together with their bashful gap-toothed grins and white stockings that sometimes bagged at the knees.

At one point during the ceremony, all the girls sang the words from Jeremiah 31:

They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion;

They will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord. . .

Then maidens will dance and be glad, young men and old as well.

I will turn their mourning into gladness;

I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow.

For a few seconds, my ears heard the voices of children singing as they had so many times as little girls. The rush of emotion was nearly frightening. I was scarcely able to gather my scattered wits to continue the ceremony. Oh yes! There are powerful feelings between church and minister that only time can create.

A healthy family in the parsonage also enhances the minister’s credibility. As a minister’s family moves successfully through several developmental stages before the watching eyes of the community, the leaders of that family gather respect as parents who manage relationships well and whose faith is authentic and contagious.

The access to people’s lives during a long tenure of ministry is awesome. A teacher sees a child in a handful of classes at best. A coach will relate to athletes for one or two seasons. A counselor or social worker or policeman will see a few people, and then only when they are in trouble. But God’s minister enjoys interaction with a staggering number of people of all ages and through a collage of experiences and changes. Life-changing impact continues as long as both parson and person remain in the same congregation, and even beyond.

The Sunday morning prior to high school graduation is traditionally a roller coaster of emotions at our church. The seniors sit in a special section. I usually step over to where they’re seated and reminisce a bit with each one, then give some personal words of blessing and farewell. The elders present each senior with a signed New Testament and give each student a warm, often tearful hug and a heartfelt prayer.

In my twelfth year here, Senior Sunday hit me with hurricane strength. As I looked into the faces of more than thirty young men and women, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that their lives and mine had been entwined since they were in first grade.

I had screamed at their ball games, grieved with some through death or divorce in their families, talked one or two down from drug and alcohol binges, heard whispered confessions of fear of pregnancy. We had been canoeing, backpacking, and swimming together. I had spoken at school events, hugged track stars and homecoming queens and their friends. I had heard most of them confess Jesus as Lord and had baptized most of them. And now they were leaving! What those kids and I were feeling-what the whole church was feeling-is just a small slice of the ministry possible only through long tenure.

Many factors enter the minister-church relationship as time passes. I can enumerate only a few. But one thing is sure: eventually, these elements combine in a powerful synergism not attainable in a few years. The ministry with the most impact is usually the one that has survived the longest. All too often, hasty moves cut short what could have been an increasingly rewarding ministry.

The Solid Foundation

Before I discuss specific reasons to go or to stay, I need to lay a foundation.

My assumptions about minister-church relationships distill into three words: calling, shepherd, and covenant.

First, what is a calling? Do you not yearn for a task of God’s choosing rather than your own, something bearing a divine aura? I know I do.

A sense of calling, while indispensable, is also vulnerable to self-deception. Calling is claimed through a wide variety of experiences-from the traditional to the bizarre.

The story is told that deep in the jungle, at a fork in the road, sat a witch doctor, his weathered face locked in concentration on a stick he repeatedly tossed into the air. A traveler who chanced upon the scene watched in curiosity as the shaman repeated the process over and over.

“What are you doing?” interrupted the traveler.

“I am asking the medicine stick which way I am to go,” replied the witch doctor. “As it falls to the ground it points the way.”

“And why do you throw it so many times?” the traveler asked.

“Because I don’t want to go where the stick is pointing!”

Most of us want to be more submissive and less subjective than the witch doctor, yet an explicit definition of our calling eludes many of us. Some of us consider our own experience too intensely personal and subjective to reveal or rely on. Yet unless I am drawn to my place of ministry by a sense of God’s leading, there will be paralyzing ambivalence when I consider my motives. The word call must be at the heart of ministerial motives.

The next metaphor-shepherd-depicts relationships. In ancient Palestine a shepherd was not hired through a downtown employment office. The shepherding task demanded more than a hireling- someone so desperate for work he could be persuaded to camp in a pasture for pay. For an authentic shepherd, the hills were a permanent home. His life centered on his sheep. When lambs were born, the first hands to caress them were those of the shepherd, and the first voice to greet their ears was the shepherd’s voice. The growing lambs came to associate the resonance of that voice and the stroking of those hands with green pastures and still waters. By the time the lambs were fully grown, an intimate, trusting relationship was bonded between sheep and shepherd.

Something resembling this sheep-shepherd relationship is surely not too much to expect between a minister and a church. God’s servant enters a serious commitment when taking responsibility for a congregation. So does the church. Minister and congregation will be trekking the hills together, crossing treacherous chasms, braving icy storms, and facing hungry wolves. Together they will also graze in green pastures and rest by still waters, where their relationships with each other and with God will flourish. Effective ministry comes from authentic relationships, and these relationships take time.

When a relationship is viewed as a covenant, its strength grows dramatically. Broken covenants result in broken hearts, whether in marriages or churches. When covenants are superficial, a minister may become more hireling than shepherd and a spouse more halfhearted roommate than lover.

A Time to Stay

Frequently, the urge to move strikes on blue Monday mornings, tempting us to move for all the wrong reasons. When is it seldom a good idea to move?

When I’m frustrated that church growth has plateaued. Most churches experience periodic plateaus. A plateau may end in a drop off or form the footstool of a mountain! Using numbers as the lone criterion for effectiveness may need reevaluation, as well.

Of course our wart-ridden old parish doesn’t match our ideal. No church does. It’s easy to forget that often the attractiveness of a prospective church exists only in the eye of the frustrated beholder.

In my own case I am haunted by this question: If I have failed to lead this church into growth, what makes me think I will do it with another?

When a problem person is making me miserable. Most of us have endured those agonizing weeks when anywhere else looked appealing-anywhere to get away from that intolerable but unavoidable someone in the church.

In such a week I remind myself, “This impossible character could actually be an opportunity for personal growth. Be careful! You could be running from something God is trying to teach you. Besides, every church-even the next one-harbors at least one pain in the neck.”

When more money is offered elsewhere. Remember the assumptions underlying minister-church relationships: call, shepherd, and covenant? To answer a call only because it promises a generous boost to salary and prestige may not honor covenant or reflect the shepherd’s heart. Upward mobility is no sin in itself, but the desire for well-situated positions is spiritually perilous. Seldom, if ever, is a larger salary to be taken in itself as a call of God.

When I am hurt. No one likes to hang around abusive people, and God does not require a vow of masochism. Pain, however, is not always symptomatic of a ministry gone wrong. More often, pain can be the very means God uses to accomplish necessary growth as well as fruitful ministry.

I once believed it possible that a church might bring suffering to a minister. I now believe it is inevitable. There is no long-term, life-changing ministry without pain. We cannot confront evil and live with our fellow sin-victims without living at the edge of agony. I try to remember that God’s most awesome deed was accomplished in his deepest suffering. We are called to “share his suffering.”

Of course, pain can also be self-inflicted. If I have been hurt too many times by too many people, I need to evaluate. Problems and disappointments can’t always be someone else’s fault. Painful though it may be, reviewing the history of my own embattled relationships can be an ideal growth opportunity. During the early stages of my relationship with Highland Church, I wondered why such good people often became hostile with me, “a nice young man just trying to serve God.” In the rearview mirror, I see a miracle that these people tolerated some of my attitudes.

A Time to Go

As surely as grievances real or imagined can seduce us to move for inappropriate reasons, healthy factors sometimes compel us to go. Leaving too soon can be tragic. Staying too long can be equally disastrous. Here are four scenarios that might call for a move.

When staying with the present church violates my integrity. For example, sometimes pulpit and pew honestly part company theologically. Other times the convictions of minister and members fall completely at odds over the direction a church should take. To remain in a church in violation of one’s conscience breaks a higher covenant than the relationship between minister and congregation. One’s sacred personal covenant with almighty God obviously has first priority.

When family needs would be ignored by staying. Marriages have been damaged, emotional health impaired, even faith destroyed out of misguided loyalty to a ministry. Covenant commitment to family must take precedence over one’s commitment to a church.

Some dear friends, “Joe and Carol,” confronted the crunch between ministerial possibilities and family needs. “I’ve found myself in the most fruitful ministry of my life. I feel I ought to stay. But Carol is miserable here,” Joe confessed. “She has always been outgoing and had stacks of friends wherever we have been. Somehow, she just can’t connect here at Oakhaven. She’s given it a good shot, over two years, but things are not getting any better. Is Satan luring me away from a good work through my own wife? Or is Carol my first priority?”

Joe decided to move. After more than two years, God is blessing Joe’s ministry at Hope Valley far beyond what Joe could have imagined at Oakhaven. Even better news: Carol is blossoming again. She enjoys a sense of belonging, and God is using her tremendously.

Did Joe and Carol make a good decision? Didn’t Jesus say, “If you love family more than me, you are not worthy of me?” My response is that commitment to Jesus must not be confused with our obligations to a given congregation. God made families long before he made churches.

When the relationship between minister and congregation no longer exists. In a marriage, when trust has been destroyed through infidelity, or when one partner no longer wants anything to do with the other, some would contend the relationship has already, in a sense, ended.

When are things over between a minister and a church? Who knows for sure? But is there any point in staying when my credibility has been irreparably damaged?

When the church no longer wants me, for whatever reason, a relationship no longer exists. Conversely, when leaders of a church have consistently betrayed me, my trust in them will be shattered. When either of these conditions exists, covenant has been broken, and I am, in fact, no longer a shepherd of that flock.

When it is clearly the will of God that I go to a specific new ministry.

While our first three scenarios indicate a move for somewhat negative reasons, the fourth describes a positive indicator-being led to new fields, not being driven from an old one.

How can I determine whether I am being driven or led? I must gather the hard information indispensable to sound planning. I need a no-nonsense understanding of the prospective church. But even after the spadework has been done, I also need some certainty that God is beckoning in a new direction.

Discerning God’s Will

Discerning the will of God is not always simple. Sometimes in our intent search for God’s guidance, we wind up inside a subjective and confusing house of mirrors. Passion for divine guidance must be tempered by godly caution.

Discernment begins on our knees. A healthy decision is bathed in prayer from beginning to end. Since God reveals his purposes through Scripture, people of prayer will turn also to the Word.

But eventually, the seeker must confront specifics not addressed in Scripture, and God often leads through the counsel of wise and godly people. In the final analysis, crossroads decisions are usually very lonely. But the journey to the point of decision is best traveled in the company of several trusted confidants.

The Lord may also lead through convicting circ*mstances, troubled conscience, and my own spiritual gifts. I must resist the deadly inclination to silence my nagging questions: Toward what are the events of life pointing me? Could God be shaping me into an instrument better suited to another setting? Why do special kinds of people and needs in other places chronically tug at my conscience? What about my gifts? Am I neglecting them in the demands of the present church?

At times the Lord may back us into a decision. My friend Jay learned this. “Jay,” I probed, “why did you move to Hope Rock?”

After a reflective moment, Jay responded, “When the call came from Hope Rock, everything looked right, but I sat down and generated a list of seventeen reasons why I shouldn’t go. One by one, all those reasons evaporated. I knew it was God at work. When the reasons were all gone, I knew I had to move.”

To attempt an exhaustive analysis of the ways and means God leads, however, would border on sacrilege. Who understands all of God’s mysterious leading? Many factors, I am sure, are involved in the guidance process, yet any one of them taken by itself could be disastrously misleading. Yet all the available components, taken together, can produce a helpful grid for discerning the will of God.

Places of the Heart

Randy, my friend mentioned at the beginning of this article, stayed where he was, declining several calls from large churches offering higher salaries and more prestige. Joe, also mentioned earlier, moved in response to a call that had all the perks involved in Randy’s offers. Both are at peace with God and immersed in richly anointed ministries. Each listened to counsel from the secret places of his heart. So must each of us.

In the final analysis, I must examine the purity of my own heart. God’s will can never be clear to me if my desire to obey him is not genuine. Jesus probes this nerve when he says: “If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matt. 6:23). T. S. Eliot wrote, “The greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” Any attempt to know God’s leading will be futile if my heart is not genuine.

If my heart rests in God, I can be at the center of his will in any number of churches. Where I go and how long I stay are really beside the point.

The secret places of our hearts cannot be entered hurriedly. Silencing internal noises long enough to hear the still, small voice is not for the impatient. But across the ages those who have listened declare the results worthwhile. As M. L. Haskins wrote,

I said to the man who stood

at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light

that I may tread safely

into the unknown!”

and he replied:

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand

into the hand of God.

That shall be to you

better than light

and safer than a known way.”

-Lynn Anderson is minister at Highland Church of Christ Abilene, Texas.

* * *

THE OTHER SPURGEON

One day I was jogging in the forest near my house when a question popped into my mind: What about John Spurgeon?

I admit, not many people are losing sleep over that question, but I had been reading the autobiography of the famous British preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. I was asking the Lord to bless my ministry like his. And then that question hit me, and I began thinking about John Spurgeon.

Ever heard of him? Until my recent reading, I never had. He was the father of Charles. He was himself a pastor and the son of a pastor. Yet if his son had not achieved such fame as a preacher, John Spurgeon would have served the Lord faithfully, gone to his grave, and we never would have heard of him.

Hundreds of pastors like him have walked with God, shepherded his flock for a lifetime, and gone to their reward without any notice in the sight of the world. As I jogged, I thought, Would I be willing to serve God faithfully and raise up my children to serve him, even if I never achieved any recognition? Even if no one but my own small congregation knew my name?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized, Yes! That’s really what I want: to be faithful to the Lord in my personal walk, in my family, and in my shepherding of God’s flock.

The Lord never says, “Well done, good and famous servant,” but he does say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

If God makes me as famous as Charles Spurgeon, that’s his business. My business is to be as faithful as John Spurgeon.

-Steven J. Cole

Cedarpines Community Church

Crestline, California

Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Arch Hart, professor of psychology and dean of the graduate school of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, has focused much of his research and writing on the hazards of being a minister. Among his own books are Coping with Depression in the Ministry and Helping Professions and The Hidden Link Between Adrenalin and Stress, both published by Word. He recommends the following books:

Pastor as Person: Maintaining Personal Integrity in the Choices and Challenges of Ministry by Gary L. Harbaugh (Augsburg).

Many of the problems pastors experience arise when they forget they are persons. Forgetting this, they easily neglect themselves and start down the road to stress and burnout.

I appreciate this book’s emphasis on becoming a whole person-in Christ. Not being taught in seminary to maintain themselves, pastors tend to down-play their legitimate human needs. They need to take care of their physical well-being. Many years of clinical experience with pastors and their families has convinced me this book is right on target.

Harbaugh illustrates from the lives of pastors, touching on significant issues-stress, dependency, relating, feeling, and thinking.

Make Anger Your Ally: Harnessing Our Most Baffling Emotion by Neil Clark Warren (Doubleday).

Of all the emotions that erode strength, anger must top the list. I have met few ministers who are not hurting deeply from interpersonal conflicts and tensions. Knowing how to constructively cope with anger is essential for healthy ministry.

A psychotherapist experienced with ministers, Warren has written a comprehensive and sensitive book that provides suggestions for channeling anger constructively. He describes the various unhealthy ways of handling anger and then points to principles of anger management, such as organizing your anger-aggression values, keeping an anger diary, and learning how to forgive.

Beyond Assertiveness by David Augsburger and John Faul (Calibre Books) and Speak Up! Christian Assertiveness by Randolph K. Sanders and H. Newton Malony (Westminster).

Much secular teaching on assertiveness creates a selfish and self-seeking mindset. Yet pastors need godly assertiveness to survive in a secular world.

Both of these books emphasize the role of Christian love in relationships. Churches need assertive leadership.

Not to be assertive in a Christian way is to be dishonest and hurtful. Pastors must be able to set limits on the many demands made on them, to say no more often, and to openly deal with expectations and conflicts.

They can avoid being overly assertive (which offends people) and aggressively assertive (which hurts people) by applying basic Christian principles from these books.

Clergywomen: Problems and Satisfactions by Harry Hale, Jr., Morton King, and Doris Moreland Jones (CSS of Ohio).

Women in ministry face unique stresses and need special help in maintaining their energy and endurance. I’ve found this book helpful in my seminars with such women. It identifies the key persons who can help or hinder them in their career and points out the problems and satisfactions that can be expected.

Women ministers will see that their ambivalence and conflicts are shared by many other women. Male clergy working with women staff members may find the book helpful in understanding their female colleagues.

Developing Spiritually and Professionally by William M. Moreman (Westminster).

This book explores the interplay, tension, and integration of the professional and spiritual aspects of the minister’s life and work.

The chapters set up the two dimensions in interesting ways: Upgrading skills is set alongside deepening awareness; studying alongside meditation; planning alongside praying; and our bodies alongside the temple of the Holy Spirit. These contrasts can help pastors find a balance that is energy preserving and restoring.

32 Summer LEADERSHIP/86

Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

A Church of Christ minister in Texas wrote recently, "My toughest counseling problems are those where the changing needs to be done by someone other than the one I'm counseling. For instance, the wife has come for help, but the husband is the alcoholic. Or the mother-in-law is a hypochondriac, but the daughter-in-law has come to me. How do you help in those situations? Should the problem person be confronted?"

Almost every pastor knows the dilemma. What do you do about the man, for instance, who takes his wife for granted and puts his marriage on autopilot, unaware or unconcerned that his wife is starving emotionally? Or the woman who bounces from one job (or relationship) to the next, never satisfied, always looking for something else? Or the couples in premarital counseling who are blind to serious areas of incompatibility?

Leadership Journal managing editor Marshall Shelley, whose book Well-Intentioned Dragons dealt with handling antagonists in the church, began researching the flip side of the dragon question-not the people who attack, but those who stay away, those who need help but aren't asking for any.

A pastor encountered one of life's little dramas playing itself out as he entered the YMCA: A toddler wearing a wet bathing suit was coming out the door from the swimming pool area, and her mother was saying, "You are such a coward!"

The child was shivering, and her cheeks were wet-from tears or the pool? The pastor couldn't tell. She simply stood there shaking as her mother continued, "It's the same every week. You always make your daddy and me ashamed. Sometimes I can't believe you're my daughter."

The pastor found himself thinking, I wonder what the penalty is for hitting a woman?

"What she was doing was more hurtful, more brutal than a beating," he reflected. "It was emotional child abuse, and if it continues, that toddler will grow up feeling worthless, which will lead to all kinds of destructive behavior."

If that woman had been a member of your congregation, what would you have done? Most pastors feel the urge to do something, either immediately or eventually, to help the mother realize what's at stake, to help her be a better parent. Even if she isn't asking for help.

When is intervention appropriate? How do you enter a situation uninvited? It's not an easy decision.

Recognizing the Risk

Sometimes pastors step in-and later regret it. Despite pure motives and a deep desire to help, their well-intentioned intervention can at times do more harm than good.

Earl and Edna Waring were in their forties, and they were childless. David Lindquist, their pastor, also noticed-with everyone else-their penchant for public bickering.

In the adult Sunday school class, Earl would joke about looking forward to the church potluck "so I can finally get a decent meal." Edna would counter, "I'm just glad the church has a full-time janitor to clean the floor after you've eaten." The rest of the class would laugh nervously. The humor did not quite cover the barbed intent.

David wondered how he could help Earl and Edna relate to one another without continual put-downs. One day he stopped by their house and asked pointblank, "Sometimes you two seem unhappy with each other. Why is that?"

"We're not unhappy," Earl said.

"Around the church, people perceive you that way, and so do I," said David. "You bicker about money in Sunday school. You publicly ridicule each other's appearance. Last Sunday, Earl, in front of your wife, you told me, 'Edna can't cook worth a lick, which wouldn't be so bad if she'd only make the beds, but she never does.' It's wearying. But even worse, I worry about what it's doing to your relationship."

Earl and Edna didn't seem to take it seriously. David left, but he was determined to try again. He knew that often people needed time to get used to the idea of dealing with a problem. Over the next few weeks, he visited Earl and Edna two more times and each time he'd ask, "How are you two getting along?" Each time, they'd reply "Fine."

But David didn't give up. On the next visit, he pressed harder.

"There must be something underneath that's rankling you two. Earl, tell me, what attracted you to Edna in the first place?"

As Earl retold the story of their meeting, Edna remained strangely quiet, seemingly preoccupied. When he was done, David pressed her to open up, to describe her relationship with Earl.

After a long pause, she said, "Earl, I need to ask your forgiveness." She seemed to stumble for words. She began to talk about her past, revealing several rather sordid sexual experiences with various men before she had met Earl.

"I was quite a floozy," she said. "Maybe that's why I'm the way I am now. I've never been too domestic a lady. Of course, I'm saved now, and that puts everything away, but sometimes I still feel guilty."

Earl listened wide-eyed. "I never knew that before!"

"I appreciate you sharing that," said David, feeling that at last he'd made a breakthrough. "Earl, how about you? What experiences in the past may be continuing to influence the way you relate to your wife?"

Earl hung his head and admitted that he, too, had been rather promiscuous in his young adult years. He admitted he still was attracted to other women, although he had not actually been physically unfaithful.

David talked about forgiveness and accepting one another. Before he left, he prayed with them that they would be able to support one another rather than tear each other down.

Unfortunately, the approach was a mistake-at least in that particular encounter. Now, ten years later, David wishes he had handled things differently.

"I got them to confess all this dirt to each other," he says. "But all it really did was create suspicion and distrust. 'Will she do it again?' 'Can he ever really put his past behind him?' They had been married about eight years at that point, and though they bickered, they had stayed together. But within another year, they were divorced."

Of course, they might have divorced anyway, but David feels his unwise, or perhaps untimely, intervention contributed to the failure of the marriage.

"Given their patterns of communication, I had simply added to the ammunition they could use against one another," he says. "They had learned to live with the bickering about cooking and unmade beds. That was a comfortable-and safe-way of fighting. But suddenly I'd introduced the heavy artillery, and even when it wasn't used overtly, it was always in mind, and that proved too weighty for the relationship to bear.

"For me," he reflects, "it raises the question of whether we really need to know everything in the past or not. Isn't the forgiveness of God sufficient not to raise those questions again?"

Seeking disclosure for disclosure's sake, he now feels, is a mistake.

David Lindquist's experience also raises another issue: At times, trying to help only hinders. If even well-intentioned intervention can prove destructive, when should a pastor intervene, and when should a bad situation be left alone?

Obviously, even in small churches, there are going to be more fires flaring up, more problems in people's lives, than any pastor can personally stamp out. How do you decide which ones to take on?

When Not to Intervene

There are occasions when it is probably best not to try to help those who don't want help.

When you don't know the person. Without some kind of personal relationship, intervention is difficult and risky. In these cases, the better strategy is an indirect approach.

"At the shopping center, I often see harried mothers ready to strike their toddlers or scream at them for simply being young and dropping their ice cream or whatever," said one woman, a co-minister with her husband. "Since I don't know them, I don't feel I have the right to directly intervene, but one time I walked by and said, 'They're a handful, aren't they? I'd forgotten how much patience it takes to be a parent. Even so, I wish my children were that age again. Yours are so cute.' It knocked the props out from under the mother. Suddenly she said, 'Yeah, they are kind of cute.' I was simply trying to be a little salt of the earth. We never exchanged names, and we may never meet again, but that compliment kept her from throttling her kids."

When you're beyond your depth. When a situation demands more skill or time than you have available, the best thing you can do for yourself and for the person is to bring in someone else.

One pastor found himself facing an impossibly complicated marriage triangle. Initially the wife came to the pastor complaining about poor communication patterns. When the pastor met with the husband, he discovered the man had been having an affair for over a year.

The problem was that the wife was pregnant, and so was the mistress! The husband didn't want to lose his family; he wanted to keep his wife. But he was not only emotionally attached to the mistress, he felt a moral responsibility to help her through the pregnancy and delivery of their child.

The pastor was stumped. "Normally, I'd tell a man to stop seeing his mistress as a prerequisite to rebuilding his marriage. But what could I do in this situation?"

When the husband started bringing the mistress to the pastor for counseling, the pastor knew it was time to call for reinforcements.

"I was in over my head," he said. "I think I know how to help couples repair their marriages, but I can't do that and help the husband and his lover at the same time."

Since the husband and wife were members of his church, he continued to see them, but he referred the mistress to another Christian counselor.

When is it time to refer? Another pastor offers a helpful image: "I give it my best shot in two or three meetings to see if there are any indications of healing. I'm a counselor, not a psychotherapist. The difference: Counselors put bandages on the wounded so natural processes can help them heal. But when a person is continually ripping the bandages off the wound so it will never heal, it's time for the psychotherapist."

Perhaps the best most pastors can do is clean out the dirt to prevent infection, apply bandages, and set up the situation where normal healing processes can work. When the person persistently sabotages that treatment, it's time to refer.

When your motivation isn't right. Motives are always mixed; elements of fear/love/worry/altruism/reputation all get tangled together when confronting a volatile situation. And yet, pastors have found that some of their most counterproductive confrontations take place when they've gone in with the wrong motivation. So they identify warning lights that occasionally tell them their motives are not right for intervention.

"I was once tempted to confront a husband about his misbehavior, but I realized the only reason was because I liked his wife. Instead of being an ambassador for Christ, I would have been the woman's advocate, her mouthpiece. I realized I was not the right one to counsel that family."

Other pastors admit the temptation to make an appointment with a woman to discuss a problem her husband had mentioned, motivated largely by the pleasure of being with her. In that case, too, the motive is probably sufficient to rule out personal involvement.

Another dangerous and ineffective motivation is self-righteousness. "I've found being dogmatic and legalistic does not lead a person to want help. It turns him against it," said a pastoral counselor. "But if he feels he'll get a fair hearing, he's much more apt to let someone step in. It's crucial to sincerely want to understand that person's point of view. Even if I wind up disagreeing with the decisions he makes, I want to know the factors that went into making those decisions."

Anger is yet another motivation that must be brought under control before attempting intervention. As Laurence J. Peter once said, "Speak when you're angry-and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret."

Even when the individual has acted so badly as to deserve punishment, "you need to deal with your own feelings before you can deal effectively with the situation," says psychiatrist Louis McBurney. "It's natural to see a child abuser or workaholic as a real villain. But simply being judgmental will not help anyone. The only way I've found to get feelings under control so you can work with the person is to start asking What's caused this person to act this way? Everyone is part victim as well as part villain; every story has two sides. Obviously, we've got to get the individual to stop the destructive behavior, but to do that, we must understand what factors led him or her to act that way."

By checking emotions of anger and judgment, we can begin to truly listen and ask the right questions. McBurney observes, "At this point, you can form an alliance with that person, so he doesn't see you as being against him but with him, and often the person can say, 'I hate this about myself, too. I really do need help.' "

A final motivation pastors find they must guard against is seeing themselves as saviors.

"I have a standard speech for my staff I call 'Messiah Complex 101,' " says a pastor in the Southwest. "Everybody gets it several times because all of us in the helping professions have a little touch of the Messiah complex. We tend to believe that given enough time and money, we can love people enough and pray hard enough and work hard enough to help anybody. Not so. There are some people you cannot help no matter how hard you try. Everybody has to learn that, and if you don't, you can create more problems than you solve. Part of learning to be a minister is recognizing there are some people for whom you have nothing to offer-at least at this point in time."

How can you identify the people you can help? Do you have to try and see if you get rebuffed? Or can indications tip you off right from the beginning?

When to Intervene

How do you discern the leading of the Spirit from a human compulsion to correct someone? Here are some of the factors pastors point to when deciding whether to help a person who doesn't want help.

God's persistent call. Opportunity does not equal a mandate to act. Just because you become aware of a need does not mean God is calling you to meet that need.

"I do not think God has called me to straighten out everyone," says one long-time pastor. "Unless it's an obvious emergency, I consider a concern God-given only if it stays with me over time. If it's a passing thing, I doubt if it's the call of God. But when the Lord lays it on your heart to help someone, he'll make sure you don't miss it. The story of young Samuel comes to mind. God will call you more than once if it really is of him."

Another pastor said, "In some cases, I've waited three weeks to six months before I knew God wanted me to act. He used that time to show me other facts I needed to know. I became more observant. I gained wisdom and necessary evidence."

When, before God, motives are right. If we are tempted to "straighten someone out," it is doubly important to check our motivations. What should the motivation be? Because I love God. It sounds simple, and it is. But in essence, that has to be the primary motive: loving God and wanting to help others love God, too.

"One motivation I have to guard against is feeling pious and smug before God," said one pastor. "It's easy for me to point out misbehavior or sin because it makes me feel righteous. It's even sweeter when something bad happens to the person and I can say, 'Don't you remember when we talked about that? I warned you.' But that doesn't do the person any good, and it certainly doesn't help my spiritual life. It's pride, which leads to the Elijah syndrome-'It's just you and me, Lord, and sometimes I wonder about you.' "

A check on that motivation is to ask, Do I care deeply for that person, and not simply for the other people in the situation? The guidance in Galatians 6, the passage that commands those who are spiritual to restore those who are "overtaken in a trespass," is all couched in language emphasizing the importance of eliminating any self-righteous tendencies. We are to "bear one another's burdens" (v. 2) and "watch yourself, or you also may be tempted" (v. 1) and not think too highly of ourselves (v. 3) and test our own actions (v. 4).

As counselor Everett Worthington, Jr., writes in his book How to Help the Hurting, "Only after careful self-examination-more than a cursory overview-praying in the presence of the Holy Spirit, can we see well enough to even attempt to remove the painful splinter from the eye of a friend. It is never hasty."

Before attempting to correct anyone, he asks himself these questions to check his motivation:

Do I really care for that person?

Am I a close enough friend that I am willing to bear his or her burdens?

Is the timing right for a confrontation?

Is the Holy Spirit directing?

If the answer to all these is yes, then intervention may be appropriate, and the questions then become how and when.

Sorting Out the Options

Most pastors, as they mature, begin to seek counsel before riding off on any rescue missions. As one pastor described it: "Early in my ministry, I took a solve-them-as-they-come approach. My assumption was we shouldn't have problems in this church, so anything I became aware of I tried to solve. Even though my motive was good, my assumption was not well thought out. I never asked, 'How does this problem compare to this other problem, and which of the two should I be spending time on?' I didn't have any plan of action. As the bullets were fired, I tried to bite them. I about lost my sanity.

"In my second church, I began to trust the advice of my two part-time staff members. Before I acted, I'd sit down with them and discuss the situation. We would decide whether any action was necessary. If not, we'd pray about it and leave it. If we decided action was necessary, then we'd decide who and how, or if anyone else (such as the board) should be in on it."

Before taking the initiative in a ticklish ministry situation, this pastor and his associates asked themselves these questions:

1. Do we have all the facts? Do we have something more than hearsay? What can we do to get a fuller picture?

2. Once we have a better understanding of the situation, is it as bad as we thought? Whom does it really impact? Is it a churchwide problem? Is it going to affect one family, four families, or forty families?

3. Can we afford to wait? If we don't respond, what's the worst thing that could happen in a week? In a month? In a year?

"That's not passing the buck," said the pastor. "That's gaining the wisdom of time. You don't ignore it forever, but instead of rushing to the fire immediately, take some time to gain perspective. If we felt the problem could wait a month, we would let it go. My tendency was to exaggerate the urgency. I was surprised how many 'emergencies' took care of themselves in a month."

Other times, however, the pastor must step in, and a sense of timing is crucial.

Recognizing the Right Moment

Farmers know crops go through three stages: green, ripe, rotten. Harvest is effective only at one of the three stages. Pastors, too, have learned that intervention is not always the appropriate action, but at the right time, it can produce a rich spiritual harvest.

When people finally become willing to work on an area of their life, pastors must know when the moment comes, and not jump the gun. What are some of the signs to look for?

Perhaps the most apparent is a time of personal crisis. With resistant people, often the breakthrough arrives as a result of tragedy or failure.

Ike, for instance, was a farmer and a father of the old school-strict with his children and never showing emotion. He would make his children line up when he entered the house, and he expected them to sit without speaking at the dinner table.

His pastor, Eb O'Malley, claimed he could never talk to Ike about anything personal. Ike was always polite but reserved; conversations were kept on a surface level . . . until Eb was called to perform the funeral of Ike's brother.

A few days later, Ike told Eb, "You know, my brother and I were very close. One reason was because we endured a lot together as kids. My father was a harsh man. When I was twelve, my mother died, and the day of her funeral my dad got us up early and forced us all to work in the field from 6:30 to 10:15. Then he called us in, and we had fifteen minutes to get dressed for the funeral. We went to the funeral home, and immediately after the service, he loaded us back in the car, brought us home, and sent us back out to the field. We couldn't even go to the dinner for everyone else after the funeral. I remember thinking, Aren't you supposed to cry when your mom dies? But Dad never gave us a chance. He wanted to keep us busy."

Ike looked at his pastor. "Now, after my brother's funeral, I got to thinking. Maybe I'm more like my father than I'd like to admit."

Eb said later, "From then on, he was much more willing to talk with me about his relationship with God, his wife, and his children. His brother's funeral seemed to be the turning point."

What about situations where there is no personal crisis? What are the signs that intervention might be effective?

One is increased nervousness, as evidenced by blushing or inability to sit still. Body language reveals much about a person's internal condition.

A second sign is a lapse in the defensive posture. Before a person is ready to deal with an issue, he usually will be defensive about it. "Initially, if some one is defensive, I'll overlook it and show acceptance," says Louis McBurney. "But after I've worked with him a while and feel we have more of a relationship, if he's still defensive, I might challenge him a bit-'It sounds like you feel a little defensive about that subject.' I may still have to wait, but before long he'll usually say something like, 'You asked me about that before. What do you think about that issue?' Or something will indicate he's not reacting with the same degree of defensiveness, that he's feeling more secure. At that point, I can raise the issue directly."

Both of these principles were put into play by Pastor Daniel Frantz.

Daniel had been approached by Eddie Wiebe, a young man in the congregation. "Pastor, Sherry and I have been married only a year and a half, but we've got problems. She's still seeing an old boyfriend who works with her. They eat lunch together-just the two of them-twice a week."

"Have you talked with her about the problem?"

"Yes, but she says she's not doing anything wrong. I say it may not be wrong, but it sure tears me up inside. When she won't end the contacts for me- for us-I wonder if she loves him more than me. Would you talk to her?"

"Does she know you're talking to me about this?"

"I told her we should consider counseling, but she says we shouldn't need counseling after only a year of marriage."

Daniel agreed to talk to Sherry, and as was his custom, he asked Eddie to perform a "familyectomy"-to take himself and their son out of the house so Daniel and his wife, Ruth, could talk to Sherry alone. He didn't want her to feel humiliated or emotionally pressured by any other family members. Eddie agreed that the next Tuesday night he would tell Sherry about 7 P.M. that he needed to pick up something at the hardware store. "Come back around eight," Daniel suggested.

The next Tuesday evening, with his wife along, Pastor Frantz rang the doorbell about 7:10. Sherry answered.

"Hello, Sherry. How are you?"

"Fine, Pastor. Hi, Ruth. Come in."

"First, let me tell you why we came," he said, planted on the porch. "We don't want to come in unless you really want us. Eddie told me you two have been struggling with some things. I'd like to talk about them, but I am not going to push myself in. I realize you didn't invite us to come here. I've come because as your friend and pastor, I felt I should. But we won't come in unless you invite us. If you say no we'll still be friends. We won't say anything more."

He paused and watched Sherry swallow hard. (He calls this his "Revelation 3:20 approach" because it makes sure the person knows her freedom is not being violated. But it also forces a decision.)

As is the case in most of Daniel's experiences, Sherry said, "Come in." They sat at the kitchen table.

"Eddie tells me he feels he's got some competition for you. I wanted to hear your side of things."

Sherry reassured Daniel that she wasn't doing anything wrong, that she and Roger were "just friends," that she had no guilt feelings, and that she was unafraid to be seen with Roger. As she continued to talk, however, Daniel noticed that while her mouth was saying one thing, her hands were telling a different story.

A box of Kleenex sat on the table, and Sherry unconsciously took one after another out of the box and shredded it. Before long the pile resembled a sizable bird's nest.

Finally Daniel remarked, "You keep saying you don't feel guilty about this relationship, but I'm not sure I dare believe it. You know why? Because your hands betray you." He pointed to the nest of shredded Kleenex. "I wonder if your sense of guilt isn't about as high as that pile of Kleenex."

She was speechless. "You know," he continued, "when Jesus came into Jerusalem and people were cheering, the Pharisees said, 'Hey! Make them shut up!' And Jesus said, 'If I make them shut up, the stones will cry out.' Sometimes I talk to people who shut up part of themselves, but their gallstones-or ulcers or blood pressure-cry out. Sherry, I think you are crying out through this pile of Kleenex."

Sherry lowered her head and admitted there were things about herself that she hated. "She never admitted guilt, but she did talk about her loss of self-respect," Daniel recalled. "Her bravado was really a cover-up for her self-hate. We talked honestly, and she and Eddie have begun to make progress on their relationship."

Not every case of pastoral intervention ends with such positive results. There are times to intervene and times not to intervene. In this case, the key to effective ministry was timing-noticing the subtle clues that God was already at work in her life, and then moving gently but firmly when the defenses began to come down.

Marshall Shelley is a contributing editor of CTPastors.com.

I have a friend suffering from discontent.

He doesn’t feel good about his life. He wants more than he has. No success in his ministry is ever enough.

Like many afflicted by this malady, my friend admits he has no objective reason to feel as he does: “I have a fine family, three grown sons, a healthy wife. I’m not rich, but I’ve planned well for retirement.”

He is successful, having achieved the top rank in his ministry/profession. Nobody does it better. And he is one of those rare individuals who has been able to advance without creating enemies. In fact, he has more genuine friends than anyone I know.

So why the discontent?

That’s what he asked me over lunch several weeks ago. I didn’t have very good answers.

I stumbled and mumbled, talking about normal highs and lows of the spiritual life, reminding him that King David and Job were all-time sufferers who eventually worked through their problems. I reminded him of Paul’s comments about contentment.

But we both led the lunch dissatisfied; his discontent probably grew, and I had some created by my inability to help.

I thought about my friend for many days after that. I wanted to help him and realized I hadn’t. The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that he was suffering a special kind of discontent that afflicts well-meaning, perfectionistic Christians-the ones who do most of the work in the body of Christ. They are the ones who have taken the teachings of the Beatitudes to heart, have chosen to live with humility, meekness, and mercy. Righteousness is the primary thirst they have tried to slake, and they have rejoiced in the scorn of the world, especially when aimed at their dedication to ministry.

These leaders operate behind the scenes, choosing to promote others ahead of themselves. Among their favorite books are Thomas … Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest. They eschew opportunities to grab the brass ring of fame and popularity because they would have to compromise some small, shadowed corner of their value system.

Their susceptibility to this special kind of discontent arises from an inability to appreciate the real law of the harvest. Although they have taken seriously the biblical teachings about how to live, they have not fully understood the teachings about the rewards of such a life. The Bible teaches that exemplary deeds are not necessarily rewarded here and now. Not only will the world scorn such dedication, but members of our own Christian community are liable to scorn it as well. Only in the next life are our accounts fully settled.

The very personalities that enable some to live so selflessly seem unusually vulnerable to a mental block about the crazy reward system of modern culture-the system that pays athletes millions and puts mushy thinkers on talk show pedestals.

The true law of the harvest-that earthly limelight may be weak and the rewards empty-is one of the hardest lessons of a fruitful Christian life. And it has been the stumbling block of many Christian leaders. In extreme cases we see them succumb to the temptations of fame and wealth. They throw over the vision and principles that put them in power. The rationalizations are easy. The leader, looking back at years of self-denial, tells himself he has “paid his dues.”

More often, however, the law of the harvest teaches its lesson in the form of discontent, dissatisfaction, and doubt.

I sketched out some questions to ask my friend, to help him understand the implications of this law of the harvest. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Why did you choose to forgo the “great educational degree hunt”? Did you realize the consequences would be prejudice and suspicion about your qualifications?

2. Why did you choose not to write books? Did you realize the consequences of people thinking (wrongly) that you had nothing to say?

3. Why did you choose not to play the power politics that would make you well known? Did you realize the consequences of being passed over for major leadership jobs?

4. Aren’t you just now reaping the fruit of those decisions? Some of it is very good fruit: integrity, productivity, love of friends, the power of having lived the truth. But some of it is very bitter fruit: misunderstanding, anonymity, lack of respect.

I looked at my list of questions. I thought how prepared I would be the next time my friend brought up the subject.

Then I realized I didn’t understand the law of the harvest any better than he did. I realized I still hold out hopes for wealth, fame, and popularity-all thrust on me by acclamation, of course. I realized that I needed to make up a list of questions for myself.

Knowing my own weakness, perhaps I could now give my friend some help. At least we could stumble forward together, remembering Wilberforce’s comment in Real Christianity:

“The Scriptures instruct us that mankind is liable to error, and therefore that the world makes mistakes with its commendations. … They also remind us that its judgment is darkened and its heart depraved: thus its applauses and contempt will, for the most part, be systematically misdirected.

[“The follower of Christ] should encourage a holy jealousy and a suspicion of himself when the world lavishly and generously bestows praise on him. Since we should set our affections on heavenly things and converse about heavenly objects, then it follows that the love of human applause must be unhealthy. … Since it is impure, we should view it with suspicion.”

Terry C. Muck is editor of LEADERSHIP.

Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

SUSTENANCE

Imagine you are on holiday and you have an apartment overlooking the sand and surf. Sitting on the table in your room is a fishbowl, and inside the bowl is a small goldfish. Each day you swim and sun-bake and enjoy soaking up the delights of vacationing. Before long, however, you begin to feel sorry for little Goldie who is all alone in his bowl while you go out having fun in the sun. To make up for this injustice, you promise Goldie a little of the action. “Tomorrow,” you tell the goldfish, “you will begin to enjoy life, too.”

The next day you take a washcloth, lift the fish from the bowl, place it in the cloth, wrap it up, and put the living bundle into your pocket before leaving for the beach.

As you reach the spot where you are accustomed to spending your day, you can feel the sun’s heat beating down upon your back. Excitedly you take your gilled companion from your pocket, lay out the washcloth on the sand, place the fish on the cloth, stand back, and say, “Now this is the life, Goldie; live it up!”

Can anything be more ridiculous or more foolish? Being in the sun on the hot beach is no environment for a goldfish—or any fish! It will die there, not live. It was never intended to be in that environment. For people, a relationship with God as Father is the only correct environment for life.

—Peter W. Law

in A Portrait of My Father

ABUNDANT LIFE

During World War II, economist E. F. Schumacher, then a young statistician, worked on a farm. Each day he would count the 32 head of cattle, then turn his attention elsewhere. One day an old farmer told him that if he counted the cattle, they wouldn’t flourish. Sure enough, one day he counted only 31; one was dead in the bushes. Now Schumacher understood the farmer: you must watch the quality of each beast. “Look him in the eye. Study the sheen on his coat.” You may not know how many cattle you have, but you might save the life of one that is sick.

This is wise counsel for composition students as well. The one who asks, “How many words do you want?” invariably strings together a poor piece of writing. But the one who focuses on the assignment—a childhood fear, a person I admire—writes something worth reading.

Evaluating my everyday use of time and resources, I noticed how often I tended to count and measure—abstracting from a situation rather than living it. Take the routine of soft-boiling an egg. After the water came to a boil—a goal for which I would wait impatiently—I would slowly count to 100 while the egg cooked to the desired firmness. In this numerical mode, I would keep an eye on the clock and sometimes snap at my husband, absorbed in the newspaper.

After reflecting, I tried a new way of measuring the cooking time for eggs—one I would have scorned as a young wife and mother interested in “saving” time. Experimentation showed that the eggs are cooked to perfection after three Hail Marys [or three verses of a hymn]. I watch the water with interest until it boils, then I use the boiling time to place myself in touch with earlier generations of cooks who measured their recipes with litanies, using time to get beyond it.

—Sally Cunneen

in The Christian Century

SOVEREIGNTY/FREE WILL

During his days as guest lecturer at Calvin Seminary, R. B. Kuiper once used the following illustration of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility:

“I liken them to two ropes going through two holes in the ceiling and over a pulley above. If I wish to support myself by them, I must cling to them both. If I cling only to one and not the other, I go down.

“I read the many teachings of the Bible regarding God’s election, predestination, his chosen, and so on. I read also the many teachings regarding ‘whosoever will may come’ and urging people to exercise their responsibility as human beings. These seeming contradictions cannot be reconciled by the puny human mind. With childlike faith, I cling to both ropes, fully confident that in eternity I will see that both strands of truth are, after all, of one piece.”

—John Morren

Lake City, Michigan

ENDURANCE

I was talking with a farmer about his soybean and corn crops. Rain had been abundant, and the results were evident. So his comment surprised me: “My crops are especially vulnerable. Even a short drought could have a devastating effect.”

“Why?” I asked.

He explained that while we see the frequent rains as a benefit, during that time the plants are not required to push roots deeper in search of water. The roots remain near the surface. A drought would find the plants unprepared and quickly kill them.

Some Christians receive abundant “rains” of worship, fellowship, and teaching. Yet when stress enters their lives, many suddenly abandon God or think him unfaithful. Their roots have never pushed much below the surface. Only roots grown deep into God (Col. 2:6-7) help us endure times of drought in our lives.

—Neil G. Orchard

North Olmsted, Ohio

GOD’S RULE

While serving as a missionary in Laos, I discovered an illustration of the kingdom of God.

Before the colonialists imposed national boundaries, the kings of Laos and Vietnam reached an agreement on taxation in the border areas. Those who ate short-grain rice, built their houses on stilts, and decorated them with Indian-style serpents were considered Laotians. On the other hand, those who ate long-grain rice, built their houses on the ground, and decorated them with Chinese-style dragons were considered Vietnamese.

The exact location of a person’s home was not what determined his or her nationality. Instead, each person belonged to the kingdom whose cultural values he or she exhibited.

So it is with us: we live in the world, but as part of God’s kingdom, we are to live according to his kingdom’s standards and values.

—John Hess-Yoder

Portland, Oregon

STAMINA

A recent television documentary pointed out that the cheetah survives on the African plains by running down its prey. The big cat can sprint seventy miles per hour. But the cheetah cannot sustain that pace for long. Within its long, sleek body is a disproportionately small heart, which causes the cheetah to tire quickly. Unless the cheetah catches its prey in the first flurry, it must abandon the chase.

Sometimes Christians seem to have the cheetah’s approach to ministry. We speed into projects with great energy. But lacking the heart for sustained effort, we fizzle before we finish. We vow to start faster and run harder, when what we need may be not more speed but more staying power—stamina that comes only from a bigger heart. Motion and busyness, no matter how great, yield nothing unless we allow God to give us the heart.

—Grant Lovejoy

Lake Dallas, Texas

GOD’S PURSUIT

Several years ago an eastern paper reported this story:

One evening a woman was driving home when she noticed a huge truck behind her that was driving uncomfortably close. She stepped on the gas to gain some distance from the truck, but when she sped up, the truck did too. The faster she drove, the faster the truck did.

Now scared, she exited the freeway. But the truck stayed with her. The woman then turned up a main street, hoping to lose her pursuer in traffic. But the truck ran a red light and continued the chase.

Reaching the point of panic, the woman whipped her car into a service station and bolted out of her auto screaming for help. The truck driver sprang from his truck and ran toward her car. Yanking the back door open, the driver pulled out a man hidden in the back seat.

The woman was running from the wrong person. From his high vantage point, the truck driver had spotted a would-be rapist in the woman’s car. The chase was not his effort to harm her but to save her even at the cost of his own safety.

Likewise, many people run from God, fearing what he might do to them. But his plans are for good not evil—to rescue us from the hidden sins that endanger our lives.

—Michael J. Petri

McIntosh, Minnesota

SELF-ABSORPTION

Clifton Fadiman, in The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, tells a story about Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born novelist who achieved popular success with his novels Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969).

One summer in the 1940s, Nabokov and his family stayed with James Laughlin at Alta, Utah, where Nabokov took the opportunity to enlarge his collection of butterflies and moths. Fadiman relates:

“Nabokov’s fiction has never been praised for its compassion; he was single-minded if nothing else. One evening at dusk he returned from his day’s excursion saying that during hot pursuit near Bear Gulch he had heard someone groaning most piteously down by the stream.

” ‘Did you stop?’ Laughlin asked him.

” ‘No, I had to get the butterfly.’

“The next day the corpse of an aged prospector was discovered in what has been renamed, in Nabokov’s honor, Dead Man’s Gulch.”

While people around us are dying, how often we chase butterflies!

—Vernon Grounds

Denver, Colorado

HOLY SPIRIT

Gordon Brownville’s Symbols of the Holy Spirit tells about the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first to discover the magnetic meridian of the North Pole and to discover the South Pole. On one of his trips, Amundsen took a homing pigeon with him. When he had finally reached the top of the world, he opened the bird’s cage and set it free.

Imagine the delight of Amundsen’s wife, back in Norway, when she looked up from the doorway of her home and saw the pigeon circling in the sky above. No doubt she exclaimed, “He’s alive! My husband is still alive!”

So it was when Jesus ascended. He was gone, but the disciples clung to his promise to send them the Holy Spirit. What joy, then, when the dovelike Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost. The disciples had with them the continual reminder that Jesus was alive and victorious at the right hand of the Father. This continues to be the Spirit’s message.

—Thomas Lindberg

Stevens Point, Wisconsin

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LEADERSHIP

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38 Summer LEADERSHIP/86

Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Recently I wrote my one thousandth missionary-candidate evaluation for the Lutheran Church in America. The majority of the candidates were clergy and spouses. Based on the psychiatric and psychological evaluations I prepared, I am able to say the large majority of these clergy are well-adjusted, happy individuals who find satisfaction in their profession and have a positive outlook on life.

So much for the good news. The bad news is that not everything is copacetic in the ranks of what the Wall Street Journal calls “the Balm Squad.” If I were to generalize on the basis of the pastors and priests I counsel, I’d be tempted to say most or all clergy experience professional dissatisfaction or have emotional problems. But that, fortunately, isn’t so.

A little over a decade ago, Herbert Freudenberger coined the term burnout to describe a condition that occurs in members of the helping professions, including the clergy. In simplest terms, burnout was thought to occur when a professional works too hard for too long in a pressured environment. The burnout victim is drained on all levels-physical, emotional, attitudinal, and spiritual. The condition knows no age limits. It can strike a struggling young intern or vicar as easily as the veteran pastor.

Cary Cherniss in his book, Staff Burnout, describes three stages in the burnout process:

1. The honeymoon stage, in which enthusiasm, commitment, and job satisfaction eventually give way; energy reserves begin to drain off.

2. The “fuel shortage” stage, characterized by exhaustion, detachment, physical illness, anger, sleep disturbances, depression, possible escapist drinking or irresponsible behavior.

3, Then crisis-pessimism, self-doubt, apathy, obsession with one’s own problems, disillusionment with one’s career.

Job stress, however, does not invariably lead to burnout. Working in a slaughterhouse removing hair and fat from hog carcasses is as physically draining and mentally numbing a job as one can find, as I personally can attest. Yet one worker I knew took pride and pleasure in his ability to clean a hog carcass in forty-five seconds.

Burnout as a concept has its limitations. It is like a declaration of bankruptcy-necessary at times, but not always responsible. It may be, as Freudenberger suggests, “a demon born of the society and times we live in,” but it may also be a sign we are trying harder, though not always successfully, to meet the needs of the people to whom we minister.

But why do some pastors and lay professional leaders seem to thrive in stressful situations, find satisfaction in their work, and weather the ups and downs of personal and professional life with equanimity, while ones in the next parish burn out? There must be other factors-within each individual-that account for the difference. These factors include the attitudes, wisdom, and faith the individual uses to handle the stresses in his or her ministry.

Three candidates for burnout

Burnout candidates are often, but not always, Type A personalities: hard workers who set high goals for themselves but suffer from “hurry disease.” A Type A person, for example, honks the horn when the car ahead doesn’t move when the light turns green, interrupts the speech of others or finishes sentences others have started, makes a fetish of being on time, has the sermon for the next Sunday done on the preceding Monday, places great emphasis on making the budget and increasing the membership, plays nearly every game to win, some times even when playing with children.

Let me give an example. A fine pastor who had been in a New York parish for fourteen years came to the office with a number of physical complaints: shortness of breath, panic reactions, feelings of faintness, diarrhea. A physician he consulted could find nothing wrong. The family doctor thought his problems might stem from some emotional base.

When we first talked together, there seemed nothing to support the doctor’s hypothesis. The pastor got along well with his wife, had lovely children, and served a congregation that was going well. He was conscientious, capable, and concerned. When we began to review his daily activities, however, he listed a schedule a yard long: an active parish, Rotary, several synodical committees, part-time VA chaplaincy, community preservation committee, many outside speaking engagements, plus an active counseling program.

As he finished listing these, he put his hand to his forehead and complained of a headache and not feeling well.

I asked, “Do you think there may be a relationship between what you’ve just been describing and the headaches?” He hadn’t really thought of it.

“Do you think you might be overloading yourself?” Not really, there was so much that needed to be done, and this was his calling.

I commented that he seemed very busy looking after the needs of others, but who took care of him? His wife, for the most part, but then she had a fulltime job looking after the kids, running the house, and being involved herself in the parish and community. Did he have a hard time saying no? That he admitted.

I am happy to report it didn’t take too long for him to see the tail was wagging the dog, that his life had gotten out of control. He didn’t have enough sense to cut back, so his body had cried out in protest and forced him to slow down. I am not suggesting that hard work hurts a pastor or anyone else. What causes problems is allowing work to become a compulsion.

A second type of burnout-prone person is the one who bases personal worth on the results obtained in ministry. She plays the numbers game and is exhilarated by the throngs on Easter and depressed by the drop-off on Low Sunday. He feels good about himself if the budget is raised and bad if the goals are not met. Now it’s normal to feel good if things go well and disappointed if hard times fall on the parish, but it is extremely risky to feel good about yourself if the numbers are up and bad about yourself if the numbers go down. We need to remember that God has not called pastors to be promoters; he has called them to be witnesses. The increase is God’s responsibility.

A pastor in the office not long ago told me he was feeling miserable about himself. “How come?” He felt the sermon the Sunday before had bombed. “What happened?” The time he had set aside for preparation had been usurped by a crisis-a member’s husband had committed suicide, requiring the pastor to spend the day with her and the children. He knew this was the right thing to do, but felt torn. I reminded him that any professional had to set priorities, and the needs of the traumatized family were of top order even if the sermon suffered. His error was in feeling guilty and letting the lukewarm response to the sermon affect his self-esteem.

Alvin Rogness points out that faith allows us freedom from the judgments of others. We are judged by God in Jesus Christ and found righteous. Such faith is a powerful antidote to burnout.

A third candidate for burnout is the twenty-four-hour-a-day pastor. This personality can be found in every profession.

In the doctors’ dining room at the hospital there are usually two clusters of physicians. On one side of the room are the full-time diagnosticians. Even during lunch hour, they discuss the morning’s surgery or the probable significance of the laboratory findings for the baffling medical problem on their floor. They talk with intensity, their brows furrowed, often leaving food on their plates. They seldom have dessert.

On the opposite side of the room, their colleagues are discussing the New York Knickerbockers or telling about a play or movie they have seen. They laugh a lot, scrape their plates clean, and are more prone to indulge in goodies. I prefer to eat lunch with them. Their medical skills are every bit as good as those of the first group, but they have learned the art of compartmentalizing. They are not physicians twenty-four hours a day. They don’t wear their stethoscopes in bed. Their lives are in balance.

Some clergy overidentify with their profession. A number of years ago, a pastor’s wife said she admired her husband’s dedication but protested the endless amount of time he spent in parish duties. She felt neglected; they seldom went out, and she was being left to rear the children virtually alone. I don’t know what happened to this couple, but I suspect that unless the husband got his life in balance, his round-the-clock involvement in his parish eventually led to fuel exhaustion and put his engine and marriage in real trouble.

Stress or distress?

I have described these cases of burnout in some detail for a reason: If we have a problem, we need to know it; if we are doing things correctly, it is good to know that, too. Many authorities claim stress is the reason for burnout. I do not believe that. Most work-in the church and elsewhere-is done by people under stress. Stress is not the issue. The problem is rather distress. Distress is the product of frustration and repeated disappointment. In order that the clerical collar not become the hangman’s noose, we must address the conditions that produce distress in the ministry.

Distress can result from a wrong chemistry between pastor and congregation. There are many examples of fine congregations and fine pastors who just don’t work well together. If this is the cause of the distress, then the solution may be another call for the pastor.

Sometimes the source of distress may be bad internal chemistry: unrealistic expectations, poor stewardship of one’s resources, relating one’s worth to results in the congregation, and the like. If we can identify the correct causes of distress, the first step in preventing or correcting burnout has been taken.

To avoid the distress that leads to burnout, maintain control over your life and work. Determining your agenda are both your assets (and limitations) and the needs of your congregation. If the congregation unilaterally determines your activities, burnout is the likely consequence. There is no way you can do everything that needs to be done in your parish. Only you can determine the order of priorities.

Professional church leaders should strive to keep their lives in balance. Get away from parish responsibilities at regular intervals. Become good at something else-it doesn’t matter what-music, butterfly catching, automotive repair, carpentry, golf, you name it.

If you can’t get away from the parish physically, you can always do so in your imagination. Many times during the week, I travel mentally to our little place in the country where I fish, or build stone walls, or finish the inside of the cabin.

A voluntary change of activity is as good as, or even better than, rest when completing a particular task becomes impossible. For example, if the ideas for Sunday’s sermon won’t gel because of fatigue or enforced interruptions, it is better to go for a walk or sweep the basem*nt than to sit around stewing. Hans Selye says, “Stress on one system helps to relax another.”

Learn how to regress. Countless phenomena run in cycles, such as the recurring needs for food, water, and sleep. There is no way we can function at peak efficiency all the time. Damage is done if the cycles are not allowed to run their course.

One way to handle the emotional cycles is to regress, to stop acting your age temporarily, to let your hair down. You married folk, court your spouse the way you did when you were first going together. It will do wonders for your psyche and your marriage. A seventy-five-year-old priest I know plays basketball a couple afternoons a week with grade-school children. He is one of the youngest seventy-five-year-olds I know. Dipping in and out of the regressed state from time to time is a good antidote for burnout.

Develop a support system. Roy Oswald, in an article distributed by the Alban Institute of Washington, D.C., notes that pastors engaged in difficult work over a long period of time need a small group of people telling them they are on the right track and are loved and cared for. Oswald feels fellow clergy are potentially an excellent source of support, but his experience is that peer groups of clergy usually don’t work too well. He favors a group composed of individuals within and without the congregation.

Finally, I refer to the missionary candidates mentioned at the beginning of this article. One of the things we try to evaluate, although it is sometimes difficult to do so, is commitment to Christian service. Missionaries, like most pastors, experience periods of discouragement. They wonder what they are doing overseas. During these difficult periods they often find themselves sustained by their faith and gain strength to go on. In Acts 1:8, Christ promised the apostles power from the Spirit as they became his witnesses. The Greek word for power is dunamis, from which we derive our words dynamite and dynamo. Kehl observes that the former goes off with a big explosion and then is all burned out, but the dynamo continues to produce day in and day out. For the pastor, as for every Christian, the daily walk in faith is made possible by Word and sacrament; through them we receive spiritual renewal. If, by his grace, we learn to look on ourselves as God’s instruments, a lot of the distress that brings burnout will be avoided.

-Paul A. Qualben

director of psychiatry

Lutheran Medical Center

Brooklyn, New York

Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Anne Tyler, in her novel Morgan's Passing, told the story of a middle-aged Baltimore man who passed through people's lives with astonishing aplomb and expertise in assuming roles and gratifying expectations.

The novel opens with Morgan watching a puppet show on a church lawn on a Sunday afternoon. A few minutes into the show, a young man comes from behind the puppet stage and asks, "Is there a doctor here?" After thirty or forty seconds with no response from the audience, Morgan stands up, slowly and deliberately approaches the young man, and asks, "What is the trouble?" The puppeteer's pregnant wife is in labor; a birth seems imminent. Morgan puts the young couple in the back of his station wagon and sets off for Johns Hopkins Hospital. Halfway there the husband says, "The baby is coming!"

Morgan, calm and self-assured, pulls to the curb, sends the about-to-be father to the corner to buy a Sunday paper as a substitute for towels and bed sheets, and delivers the baby. He then drives to the emergency room of the hospital, sees the mother and baby safely to a stretcher, and disappears. After the excitement dies down, the couple asks for Dr. Morgan to thank him. But no one has ever heard of a Dr. Morgan. They are puzzled-and frustrated that they can't express their gratitude.

Several months later they are pushing their baby in a stroller and see Morgan walking on the other side of the street. They run over and greet him, showing him the healthy baby that he brought into the world. They tell him how hard they had looked for him, and of the hospital's bureaucratic incompetence in tracking him down. In an unaccustomed gush of honesty, he admits to them that he is not really a doctor. In fact, he runs a hardware store. But they needed a doctor, and being a doctor in those circ*mstances was not all that difficult. It is an image thing, he tells them: You discern what people expect and fit into it. You can get by with it in all the honored professions. He has been doing this all his life, impersonating doctors, lawyers, pastors, counselors as occasions present themselves.

Then he confides, "You know, I would never pretend to be a plumber or impersonate a butcher-they would find me out in twenty seconds."

Morgan knew something that most pastors catch on to early in their work: the image aspects of pastoring, the parts that have to do with meeting people's expectations, can be faked. We can impersonate a pastor without being a pastor. The problem, though, is that while we can get by with it in our communities, often with applause, we can't get by with it within ourselves.

At least, not all of us can. Some of us get restive. We feel awful. No level of success seems to be insurance against an eruption of angst in the middle of our applauded performance.

The restiveness does not come from puritanical guilt; we are doing what we're paid to do. The people who pay our salaries are getting their money's worth. We are "giving good weight"-the sermons are inspiring, the committees are efficient, the morale is good. The restiveness comes from another dimension-from a vocational memory, a spiritual hunger, a professional commitment.

The Danger of Doing the Job

Being a pastor that satisfies a congregation is one of the easiest jobs on the face of the earth-if we are satisfied with satisfying congregations. The hours are good, the pay is adequate, the prestige considerable. Why don't we find it easy? Why aren't we content with it?

Because we set out to do something quite different. We set out to risk our lives in a venture of faith. We committed ourselves to a life of holiness. At some point we realized the immensity of God and of the great invisibles that socket into our arms and legs, into bread and wine, into our brains and our tools, into mountains and rivers, giving them meaning, destiny, value, joy, beauty, salvation. We responded to a call to convey these realities in Word and sacrament. We offered ourselves to give leadership that connects and coordinates what the people in this community of faith are doing in their work and play, with what God is doing in mercy and grace.

In the process, we learned the difference between a profession, a craft, and a job.

A job is what we do to complete an assignment. Its primary requirement is that we give satisfaction to whomever makes the assignment and pays our wage. We learn what is expected and we do it. There is nothing wrong with doing jobs. To a lesser or greater extent, we all have them; somebody has to wash the dishes and take out the garbage.

But professions and crafts are different. In these we have an obligation beyond pleasing somebody; we are pursuing or shaping the very nature of reality, convinced that when we carry out our commitments, we benefit people at a far deeper level than if we simply did what they asked of us.

In crafts we are dealing with visible realities, in professions with invisible. The craft of woodworking, for instance, has an obligation to the wood itself, its grain and texture. A good woodworker knows his woods and treats them with respect. Far more is involved than pleasing customers; something like integrity of material is involved.

With professions the integrity has to do with the invisibles: for physicians it is health (not merely making people feel good); with lawyers, justice (not helping people get their own way); with professors, learning (not cramming cranial cavities with information on tap for examinations). And with pastors, it is God (not relieving anxiety, or giving comfort, or running a religious establishment).

We all start out knowing this, or at least having a pretty good intimation of it. But when we entered our first parish we were given a job.

Most of the people we deal with are dominated by a sense of self, not a sense of God. Insofar as we deal with their primary concern-the counseling, instructing, encouraging-they give us good marks in our jobs as pastors. Whether we deal with God or not, they don't care overmuch. Flannery O'Connor describes one pastor in such circ*mstances as one part minister and three parts masseur.

It is very difficult to do one thing when most of the people around us are asking us to do something quite different, especially when these people are nice, intelligent, treat us with respect, and pay our salaries. We get up each morning and the telephone rings, people meet us, letters are addressed to us-often at a tempo of bewildering urgency. All of these calls and people and letters are from people who are asking us to do something for them, quite apart from any belief in God. That is, they come to us not because they are looking for God but because they are looking for a recommendation, or good advice, or an opportunity, and they vaguely suppose we might be qualified to give it to them.

A number of years ago, I injured my knee. According to my self-diagnosis, I knew all it needed was some whirlpool treatments. In my college years we had a whirlpool in the training room, and I had considerable experience with its effectiveness in treating my running injuries as well as making me feel good. In my present community, the only whirlpool was at the physical therapist's office. I called to make an appointment. He refused; I had to have a doctor's prescription.

I called an orthopedic physician, went in for an examination (this was getting more complicated and expensive than I had planned), and found he wouldn't give me the prescription for the whirlpool. He said it wasn't the proper treatment for my injury. He recommended surgery. I protested: a whirlpool certainly can't do any harm, and it might do some good. His refusal was adamantine. He was a professional. His primary commitment was to some invisible abstraction called health, healing. He was not commited to satisfying my requests. His integrity, in fact, forbade him to satisfy my requests if they encroached on his primary commitment.

I have since learned that with a little shopping around, I could have found a doctor who would have given me the prescription I wanted.

I reflect on that incident occasionally. Am I keeping the line clear between what I am committed to and what people are asking of me? Is my primary orientation God's grace, his mercy, his action in Creation and covenant? And am I committed to it enough that when people ask me to do something that will not lead them into a more mature participation in these realities, I refuse? I don't like to think of all my visits made, counseling given, marriages performed, meetings attended, prayers offered-one friend calls it sprinkling holy water on Cabbage Patch dolls-solely because people asked me to do it and it didn't seem at the time that it would do any harm and, who knows, it might do some good. Besides, I knew there was a pastor down the street who would do anything asked of him. But his theology was so wretched he would probably do active harm in the process. My theology, at least, was orthodox.

How do I keep the line sharp? How do I maintain a sense of pastoral vocation in a community of people who hire me to do religious jobs? How do I keep professional integrity in the midst of a people long practiced in comparative shopping, who don't get overly exercised on the fine points of pastoral integrity?

Entering the Wreckage

An illusion-bashing orientation helps. Take a long look at the sheer quantity of wreckage around us-wrecked bodies, wrecked marriages, wrecked careers, wrecked plans, wrecked families, wrecked alliances, wrecked friendships, wrecked prosperity. We avert our eyes. We try not to dwell on it. We whistle in the dark. We wake up in the morning hoping for health and love, justice and success; build quick mental and emotional defenses against the inrush of bad news; and try to keep our hopes up.

And then another kind of crash puts us or someone we care about in a pile of wreckage. Newspapers document the ruins with photographs and headlines. Our own hearts and journals fill in the details. Are there any promises, any hopes exempt from the general carnage? It doesn't seem so.

Pastors walk into these ruins every day. Why do we do it? What do we hope to accomplish? After all these centuries, things don't seem to have gotten much better; do we think another day's effort is going to stay the avalanche to doomsday? Why do we not all become cynics? Is it sheer naivet‚ that keeps some pastors investing themselves in acts of compassion, inviting people to a life of sacrifice, suffering abuse in order to witness to the truth, stubbornly repeating an old, hard-to-believe, and much-denied story of good news in the midst of bad news?

Is our talk of citizenship in a kingdom of God anything that can be construed as the "real world"? Or are we passing on a spiritual fiction analogous to the science fictions that fantasize a better world than we will ever live in? Is pastoral work mostly a matter of putting plastic flowers in people's drab lives-well-intentioned attempts to brighten a bad scene, not totally without use, but not real in any substantive or living sense?

Many people think so, and most pastors have moments when they think so. If we think so often enough, we slowly but inexorably begin to adopt the majority opinion and shape our work to the expectations of a people for whom God is not so much a person as a legend, who suppose that the kingdom will be wonderful once we get past Armageddon, but we had best work right now on the terms that this world gives us, and who think that the Good News is nice-the way greeting card verse is nice-but in no way necessary to everyday life in the way that a computer manual or a job description is.

Two facts: the general environment of wreckage provides daily and powerful stimuli to make us want to repair and fix what is wrong; the secular mindset, in which God/kingdom/gospel are not counted as primary, living realities, is constantly seeping into our imaginations. The combination-ruined world, secular mind-makes for a steady, unrelenting pressure to readjust our conviction of what pastoral work is. We're tempted to respond to the appalling conditions around us in terms that make sense to those who are appalled.

Ministering as People Set Apart

The definition that pastors start out with, given to us in our ordination, is that pastoral work is a ministry of Word and sacrament.

Word. But in the wreckage, all words sound like "mere words."

Sacrament. But in the wreckage, what difference can water, a piece of bread, a sip of wine make?

Yet century after century, Christians continue to take certain persons in their communities, set them apart, and say, "You are our shepherd. Lead us to Christlikeness."

Yes, their actions will often speak different expectations, but in the deeper regions of the soul, the unspoken desire is for more than someone doing a religious job. If the unspoken were uttered, it would sound like this:

"We want you to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and kingdom and gospel. We believe that the Holy Spirit is among us and within us. We believe that God's Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world's evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures. We believe that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history, but a participant.

"We believe that the invisible is more important than the visible at any one single moment and in any single event that we choose to examine. We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material God is using to make a praising life.

"We believe all this, but we don't see it. We see, like Ezekiel, dismembered skeletons whitened under a pitiless Babylonian sun. We see a lot of bones that once were laughing and dancing children, adults who once aired their doubts and sang their praises in church-and sinned. We don't see the dancers or the lovers or the singers-or at best catch only fleeting glimpses of them. What we see are bones. Dry bones. We see sin and judgment on the sin. That is what it looks like. It looked that way to Ezekiel; it looks that way to anyone with eyes to see and brain to think; and it looks that way to us.

"But we believe something else. We believe in the coming together of these bones into connected, sinewed, muscled human beings who speak and sing and laugh and work and believe and bless their God. We believe it happened the way Ezekiel preached it, and we believe it still happens. We believe it happened in Israel and that it happens in church. We believe we are a part of the happening as we sing our praises, listen believingly to God's Word, receive the new life of Christ in the sacraments. We believe the most significant thing that happens or can happen is that we are no longer dismembered but are remembered into the resurrection body of Christ.

"We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don't trust ourselves; our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to give us help. Be our pastor, a minister of Word and sacrament in the middle of this world's life. Minister with Word and sacrament in all the different parts and stages of our lives-in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: Word and sacrament.

"One more thing: We are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know your emotions are as fickle as ours, and your mind is as tricky as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when we won't feel like believing anything and won't want to hear it from you. And we know there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won't feel like saying it. It doesn't matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.

"There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won't give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of Word and sacrament so you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.

"There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don't know the foundational realities with which we are dealing-God, kingdom, gospel-we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation."

That, or something very much like that, is what I understand the church to say-even when the people cannot articulate it-to the people whom it ordains to be its pastors.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland.

Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

We wanted to have something special for the children in our services, so one of our ladies volunteered to deliver a children’s sermon. These sermons, however, quickly became discourses aimed at the congregation. (After all, what do three-year-olds care about the various theories of inspiration or eschatology?) I needed to correct the situation. But the best I could manage was to drop little hints.

I was a pastoral doormat. I knew what was right, but I was far too unsure of myself to speak it out. Perhaps I was afraid of the conflict that might occur if I really told it like it was. Or maybe I just didn’t think that my opinions, feelings, or rights had much validity. Anyway, regardless of the reason, I rarely spoke my true feelings. And I was frustrated.

Occasionally my frustrations would increase to the point of explosion. Then I would take my stand. Unfortunately, I usually took a stand over something that had little meaning, or I would do it in a rather angry or aggressive way. Or I spoke about it from the pulpit, where I didn’t have to worry about someone talking back. Usually, though, I just kept it to myself and stewed.

I still remember a time we proposed several elders for ordination in our church. As the names were read from the pulpit, one woman’s face darkened. She was upset, she told me later, because her husband had not been nominated. There was a reason for this “oversight” (he lacked the spiritual maturity), but rather than tell her, I muttered something about checking into it at the next board meeting. To make a long story short, the woman’s lobbying succeeded in getting her husband’s name added to the list and he was presented to the church. But he was voted down. It was a public embarrassment for him and his wife, all because I didn’t bring myself to speak the truth, privately and face to face, in love.

The Bible is full of examples of spiritual jellyfish. Eli, for example, refused to correct his sons until it was too late. Ahab continually gave in to Jezebel’s wicked suggestions. And Peter, not usually considered a milquetoast, feared conflict with the Jewish Christians so much that he shied away from eating with the Gentile believers.

While some pastors are more than assertive enough, others, like me, tend toward the opposite extreme. I am not proud of my wimpish past. I have seen the error, the ineffectiveness it produces. So I have begun to change. I am working on speaking the truth in love.

Let me share some of the causes, consequences, and cures for this malady.

Causes

Most of us justify our lack of assertiveness by saying we are trying to “keep the peace” or “maintain the unity of the Spirit.” In reality, however, we are often simply trying to protect ourselves. The truth hurts, and it can hurt the speaker more than the hearer. Naturally, we shy away from speaking it. Yet when we know the truth but cannot bring ourselves to speak it, usually it’s for one of these reasons.

1. We have a low view of ourselves. It may seem strange to lay people that those who speak with such authority on Sunday morning struggle with self-doubt. It would shock them to realize that we who proclaim the promises of God have as hard a time believing them as anyone else. But it’s true. We struggle with our identities; we wrestle with self-esteem; we fight unhealthy self-images-just like every other Christian.

The fruit of low self-esteem is a low view of our thoughts and opinions. After all, we may think, who are we that others should be mindful of us? We may lack the healthy self-confidence that says our ideas are just as good as the next person’s and deserve to be heard.

2. We feel we have no rights. I remember feeling it would be unchristian to refuse a request from a church member, or to protest when my needs were ignored or my ego trampled upon. After all, wasn’t I supposed to be at that meeting? The family can wait.

“It’s OK. I’ll meet with you on Monday” (even though it’s my day off).

Why do we live this way? Because we have accepted a false spirituality that says the more of our human needs we violate, the more we are like our Lord. To speak of our needs and rights would be selfish, we feel; therefore, we let them slide.

For several years during my early ministry, I lived virtually at poverty level. Our church gave far more to foreign missionaries than it provided for our support. My wife, endowed with the gift of common sense, urged me to ask for a raise. Never! I thought. That would be selfish. However, her persistence won out, and I mentioned to the church board that it would be nice if they would consider . . . uh . . . you know . . . maybe increasing . . . uh . . . our support . . . just a little . . . maybe. And they did; in fact they doubled it on the spot. We never had that trouble again.

Thinking that when we enter the ministry we give up all personal rights makes us pastoral wimps, or worse, poisons us with bitterness.

3. We fear the reaction of those we confront. They crucified Jesus for speaking the truth. They beheaded Paul. They fired Pastor So-and-So. What will happen if I say what I really think? We are so afraid of the conflict that comes (and it often does) when we dare to speak out that we would rather endure the consequences of silence (which can be far worse).

On our board was a dear man who had served so long and hard that he desperately needed a rest. However, I was afraid to tell him so. I knew he would be hurt and angry. So I let him keep serving and watched him struggle to keep his emotions from falling apart.

Why do we fear people’s reactions? Because we want them to like us. We sincerely want to be pleasing to others, and we will let them harm themselves rather than displease them.

There are certainly other causes of nonassertiveness. Some people will point to their personality type. Others will say it runs in the family. Others will deny it is even wrong. Yet one thing remains constant: it is ultimately harmful to us, others, and the church.

Consequences

If we examine the biblical examples of nonassertiveness, we find a number of negative results. It cost Eli his ministry and the lives of his sons. It cost Ahab his kingdom. In Peter’s case, it damaged the Christians’ view of grace. Keeping silent seems the easy way for the moment, but it comes with a price.

1. Bad situations go uncorrected. In the case of our children’s sermon dilemma, nothing ever was resolved. Every week the misdirected sermon would go on, people would squirm, and worship would be interrupted. Yet the woman involved had a great heart for children. A gentle but firm word could have turned a disaster into a delight.

This is a mild case; many are more serious. There are board members who are destroying their families because no one will confront them about their overbearing style. There are ministries that are bearing no fruit because no one dares do the necessary pruning.

2. Our low self-esteem is confirmed. The more we choose to believe that our opinions are worthless, the stronger that belief becomes. Eventually we cripple ourselves emotionally and find we have lost even the ability to think for ourselves, much less speak what we think.

3. We hurt the people we are trying not to hurt. This is the rub. We go forever not confronting because we don’t want to make people angry. So we let them get hurt . . . and then they really get angry. Like the man whose wife wanted him to be an elder. Afterward, he was terrifically angry. He had been allowed to be humiliated because we didn’t want him to be mad at us.

Cure

There is hope. I’ll never forget the first time I took my steak back to a restaurant manager and said, “This isn’t done enough.” What a day! I had actually spoken what I thought.

Then I exercised the courage to tell someone not to come over because I was spending time with my family. And then I even confronted-discreetly, of course-a young man on his lack of readiness for seminary. I began to see the positive effects of a ministry that takes the initiative. An assertive person was born.

How can we learn to speak the truth in love?

1. Look honestly at the results of our passive behavior. When we take inventory of our wimpish actions, it will shock us to see they haven’t accomplished anything except what we originally wanted to avoid-anger, hurt, rejection, and increased problems.

2. Reconsider our self-worth. It is possible to change the way we think about ourselves. We can begin to believe that God has indeed given us the wisdom we need for our jobs. We can remind ourselves that we do matter and so do our opinions.

3. Aim for respect, not popularity. A successful Christian school administrator told me that he was not liked by everyone but that everyone respected him. That is the key to being an effective manager. It is also key to being an effective pastor. We cannot please everyone. But we can be respected for being honest.

4. Develop an “assertion message.” I have found the familiar formula Robert Bolton suggests in People Skills simple, brief, and helpful. It provides a framework for expressing what we really want to say while respecting the other person. It has three parts:

“When you (insert the other person’s behavior), I feel (explain how it makes you feel) because (give a specific negative effect of the behavior).”

First, there is a concrete, unemotional description of the behavior we want to see changed. The key is to keep it specific and avoid exaggerations. Second, we state the feelings we experience because of the behavior. The purpose is to let the other person know we really care about this matter, and it is no joke. Third, we let the person know the negative effect of his or her behavior. For example, “When you come late to board meetings, I feel angry because it causes all of us to get home late.”

This is not a magic formula, but it is a place to start. As we become more confident in mature assertion, we can develop our own methods.

But having made the case for assertiveness, I also need to warn against the other extreme. Being a doormat is not an effective way to minister. But neither is being a bulldozer. There are still times to be quiet and let things slide. While the doormat has no respect for himself, the bulldozer has no respect for others. In ministry, we aim for mature assertion in which we respect ourselves, respect others, and encourage growth in Christ.

We have a choice. We can be wimps. We can be bulldozers. Or we can lovingly speak the truth. In the balance hangs a more fruitful ministry and a more satisfying experience of leadership.

-Michael R. Baer

Garland, Texas

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