In that long ago, far away book The Peter Principle lies the doctrine of my insecurity. The book states that climbers on the ladder of life are promoted rung by rung until they eventually reach a level they’re not equipped to handle. Thus, by doing well, a person arrives at a plateau beyond his real capabilities and successfully “out succeeds” himself. I have often been haunted by the fear that my church will one day outgrow my ability.
Only one word can prohibit this imagined debacle: adjustment. Not my adjustment to the crisis moments of ministry. Such moments belong to every pastor. Not my adjustment to wrenching business meetings or to those lonely nights that follow the hectic days when it seems that, for all my acquaintances, I haven’t got a friend in the world.
No, the adjustment required is the ability to relate in different ways to the congregation as the membership expands. This difficult adjustment, I believe, is the reason many church planters cannot grow a church from inception to super congregation. How does one relate to church members at the difficult plateaus of growth?
One church growth expert said that because of personal inclinations, there are some “fifty-member pastors,” some “two-hundred-member pastors,” some “five-hundred-member pastors,” and some “two-thousand-member pastors.” I’m not sure his statement is altogether true. But if it is, I find myself wondering which is my own magic number of competency. I only know that congregational vitality is somehow related to my ability to lead, and I don’t want my church to lose its vitality as it grows.
The whole subject makes me paranoid. Year after year, I cannot escape the dread feeling that I’m not growing as fast as the church. How do I keep adjusting-to keep from stifling my church’s growth and yet keep my church from outgrowing me?
I find certain questions accompany my fears:
Why do I react when someone accuses me of not knowing what’s going on in church administration?
Do I sometimes lash out when anyone implies I have taken too much time for myself?
Was the anger on my face obvious to the committee when I confessed to forgetting one appointment on a day I had fifteen scheduled?
Why do I sometimes feel I have created a busy church that’s all legs and no heart?
Why do I feel bad when there are sixteen people in hospitals and I’ve visited only fourteen of them?
Why do I spend the first six days of every ten-day vacation feeling guilty that I’m living in caprice while hundreds of problems remain unsolved back home?
Was I always plagued by such self-recrimination? Yes. For years I have lived in the double bind of wanting my church to grow, but fearing my competency would not suffice if it did.
I want to avoid statistical arrogance, but the truth is our church has grown in the past two decades. Twenty-one years ago, I arrived in Omaha and, with five other families, began the work. My wife and I became members eleven and twelve of what was little more than a Bible study. Now the church has a weekly attendance that would have seemed impossible back then. We aren’t one of the top ten great churches of America, but we’ve added an average of three new members a week for the past ten years. We have just finished what seems to us a huge sanctuary, and the church, at least to me, seems to be exploding in size.
At each stage of growth, I’ve had to change, and change is as hard for preachers as it is for parishioners. Yet change is the central task of pastors who commit themselves to growing churches. Failure to adjust to the church’s new stage of development is a sure way to prevent any further growth.
Let me walk you through the stages as I’ve seen them.
You Get the Pizza; I’ll Bring the Guitar
The first is what I call the “Joe, You Pick Up the Pizza and I’ll Bring the Guitar” stage of church life. Those who plant churches often begin with this pizza clique kind of fellowship. At this stage, things depend purely on the pastor’s ability to be colloquial.
I confess I graduated from seminary a little too Brunner-esque. I began a small church with the false assumption that everyone who walked into our clique was just dying to find out whatever happened to the Socinians. Like most seminarians, I hadn’t been prepared to build relationships in ordinary ways. But nobody learns what down-to-earth means any faster than a pastor who wants to plant a church.
Churches begin as colloquiums where it’s important that we can talk about little things. At this stage, there will be no talk of the Sistine Chapel or Reformation theology. Instead, the conversation will bounce from Jesus to the latest wave of public school chicken pox. Working out the exact date of the Second Coming isn’t as important as the next “all-church” picnic.
For our church, this stage was warm and clinging, delightful and close. All six families left our Sunday evening study group and reassembled for fellowship at someone’s home for pizza. We were all reluctant to break off our Sunday togetherness.
But we were little only in size, not in vision. The near global idealism of our six families produced a zealous togetherness. We knew at the outset that God was about to use his clique of conquistadors to raise the gospel flag, citadel-fashion, over Omaha. Our group rarely voiced this dream, for, spoken out loud, it seemed a delusion of grandeur. Plus, there’s always the superstitious feeling that saying anything out loud breaks the magic. Dreams should hatch silently, incubated by workers who don’t talk away the glory.
So our ministry lived in prayer, pizza, and partisan enterprise. We laughed and sang, never talking in grandiose ways about our conquest. But touching each other and being together, we nevertheless kept the dream alive.
My wife and I quite often fed the whole church five loaves and an unmultiplied fish or two. We didn’t talk much about saving the world (though we never doubted it could be done). Our themes were generally too intimate to apply the shepherd metaphor, which doesn’t seem to fit when the flock is small. We were all shepherds or all sheep or all neither. We were just a clique with a large conscience.
The information flow in our fledgling church was universal, and guilt was the one tool we used to keep each other in line. If Joe wanted to go to Kansas City for a weekend, we wanted to know it well ahead of time. He wouldn’t dare just wander off without scheduling it with us. If he did, we all called right after he missed church to chirp, “We missed you!” But Joe knew it wasn’t so much a condolence as a threat dipped in guilt and fired at close range by all of us who didn’t go to Kansas City.
All in all, we sought unanimity. We were few, and it was important that we felt alike. Each of us would regularly lick an index finger and hold it up to the group, and in such unsophisticated theological tests we measured which way the wind blew:
“Yes, we believe in eternal security.”
“No, divorced men can’t be deacons.”
“What, Joe, you let your kids play Dungeons and Dragons?”
“Dobson was great today, wasn’t he?”
“David C. Cook material is optimum.”
“The Living Bible is slangy and giddy and not to be given place alongside the NASB.”
A politburo of concord we were, yet we didn’t do it to be coercive, but to protect the dream we didn’t talk about but never forgot.
Best of all, this closeness hatched fifty-two weeks of Christmas every year. My sermons weren’t glorious, but I was somehow key, at the hub of most relationships, so I was rewarded-if not for being brilliant, at least for being central.
But Are They Members?
The next stage I’ll call the “Should We Let People Sing in Our Choir If They’re Not Members?” plateau. Little groups are protective of their togetherness. The congregation, like me, wanted the church to grow, but we wanted it to grow without widening the “we feeling” we so enjoyed.
As an artist, I have noticed I can freehand a pretty good circle-as long as the circumference is small. But if the circle is large, I cannot hold the radius equal around the more and more remote center. The effort grows eccentric.
Further, simple geometry ordains that it’s harder to see the center of the circle from a wider circumference. So the real tension of this second stage is hidden in this desire: “Let’s keep this circle perfect.” The corollary is that the circle must therefore remain small.
I began to discover as pastor that it was next to impossible to have over all the “old members” and, at the same time, to have over all the “new potential members.” While the number of either wasn’t large, it was still too large to allow my wife and me to fit them all into our small home. As soon as we began to limit “attendance” at the parsonage get-togethers, we began to hear rumblings from those not included.
We also noticed for the first time that we had inadvertently become the sole “entertainers” of our small fellowship. We hadn’t meant to be virtually the only family showing hospitality on a group scale, but we had become just that. People seemed to see this as our responsibility. They clung ever more tightly to the small circle, despite their philosophical commitment to widening the scope of our fellowship.
I began to hear the “first circle” criticizing the newcomers: “These (new) people don’t love this church like we do.” A protective exclusivism was born: “Should we let people sing in our choir if they’re not members of the church?” It was an institutional question that sought to protect their own place in the church without being really honest. I remember that the first time I heard the question, I was struck that our choir was so small-we had one man and three women.
At this stage, the number of members and adherents began to grow so numerous that lines of communication, which once had intersected with me at the hub of the circle, now began to bypass me. My self-importance suffered as I often felt I was in the dark about what was going on.
My worst adjustments came in trying to reach out to charter members who seemed to grow intentionally aloof. Were they psychologically retaliating because they weren’t the “in crowd” they once had been? Even though I tried to tell them that I, too, was experiencing these feelings, they were unconvinced. In most cases, the pain I felt was sponsored by the spiritualized criticism of those who left.
None of them quit the church for the real reason of “psychological insecurity.” But some of them found other reasons for leaving, like: “Your sermons don’t feed us anymore!” (though I hadn’t consciously changed my preaching from when it had been feeding them). Others wanted a “truly compassionate” pastor; others wanted one who would “preach the whole counsel of God.” Still others left because we weren’t being true to the “historic traditions” of our denomination. Many of these people moved about six miles away and started a church that would offer the customary programs of our denomination.
All this was traumatic for me. I learned at great emotional expense that it’s okay to lose members. Indeed, I later learned that not every potential member of the church has needs that our congregation can best meet. Still, I have never lost a family without guilt and pain.
Oops, I Didn’t Know We Had a Softball Team
Shortly after we had gathered three hundred resident members and had hired our first full-time staff person, we reached a stage where the lines of communication became sketchy. That summer, I discovered we not only had formed a church softball team, but we were doing very well in the city league.
It was the first time I could recall something that “major” being done without my having some role in the decision. My ego was bruised. But the men said that I had been “away” when the crucial decision was made, and they knew I wasn’t too “athletic” anyway, so “a group of us got a team together, and we didn’t take any church funds to pay the league fees [which is, of course, the acid test in a new church], so we knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t mind (too much),” I said. “It’s just the principle of the thing!” They could tell I was steamed, so they invited me over for pizza after one of the games. There we kissed and made up . . . except that sometimes, late at night, I would pray that they’d lose the championship game.
They didn’t, and my administrative grief was compounded by the emergence of huge trophies all over the vestibule-blue and gold plastic icons of the decision I never made. Like Zwingli (whose name, I’ll admit, isn’t cited at many softball banquets) in Reformation Zurich, I had the awfulest urge to sweep through the church smashing softball trophies. But I knew it was simply administrative sour grapes.
In the ensuing years, there would be many decisions made without my counsel. Recently, a square dance group formed right out in the open “behind my back.” Truthfully, square dancing has always looked like fun, but that doesn’t change the fact that Baptists have firmly stood against dancing of every sort ever since Herodias did her thing. The group assured me this case was different from John the Baptist’s: nobody’s head was at stake.
“What about mine when the deacons find out?” I shouted. “Deacons can make Herod look compassionate.” They succumbed, and for the most part there’s no square dancing and we’re still free from the “obvious sins.”
The point is that as churches grow, pastors must be prepared for the fact that they gradually lose some touch with all that’s going on. Yet while I may be removed from the planning of these events, fireworks often explode because of such uncharted acts. The congregational explosion may be the first time I realize I’ve been unaware. I often find myself having to patch over the bruised feelings associated with these events.
But You Married Us, Remember?
One element usually associated with growth is long tenure. When a church is small, the pastor knows every member by name. In a small church, the pastor is “in the know,” and knowing is a kind of job security, a feeling of control. This relationship is vastly different for the pastor who has such a big congregation he or she can’t possibly know each member.
I was the keynote speaker at an Arizona gathering, and when the meeting was concluded, a rather striking man came up to me with two towering, six-foot boys whom he introduced as his sons.
“I’m Roberto Blair,” he said.
“Roberto!” I replied. “Nice to meet you.”
There was an awkward silence. He waited, apparently to see how long it would take me to remember him. I realized I was in the vise. It was important to him to have me remember his name. I fished desperately. With a name like Roberto, his wife was probably named Rosita or Carlotta, but then, I had once known a Consuela . . . no, she ran the missionary lunch room in Monterey, didn’t she? It was no use. Finally I blurted out, “Have we met before?”
“Aw, come on . . . you baptized me and my boys. You even led us to Christ.”
“Of course,” I said. “Uh, how long has it been?”
He said the late fifties. I didn’t ask if he meant the 1850s or 1950s. I asked his forgiveness for forgetting and blamed it all on a clogged carotid artery. He seemed at peace, but inwardly I felt bad. I have baptized almost two thousand people in my ministry, and I find it hard to remember all their names.
Recently a middle-aged couple visited our church. When I introduced myself, the man asked, “Don’t you remember us? You married us seven years ago!” I confessed I didn’t remember.
My problem lies in the number of people I meet every week-usually between six and fifteen new families. At Easter and special occasions, we have had as many as two hundred new families visit us. Still, I can’t help feeling guilty because I feel I should remember everybody I meet and be able to recall their names. Much of my guilt comes because I was sociologically in control at earlier levels of the church’s development.
Now I must adjust to a growing remoteness. I am simply learning that the pastor of a growing church must somewhere quit memorizing saints and start equipping them. I must challenge the congregation with compassion. Unless members minister to each other, real ministry will die in the growing congregation.
The only answer is that I must stop insisting on the official singularity of the word minister. Carlyle Marney says we (laos and cleros alike) must all be “priests to each other.” As pastors, we must equip every Christian to minister, and we must quit wallpapering our offices with degrees that insist that we alone are certified ministers.
George Bernard Shaw once said that every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. God help us if that should be true of pastors. We are on the side of the laity, one with the laity. We are calling them to be ministers so that the number of members on a church roll exactly equals the number of ministers. Canadian pastor Paul Stevens is both sensible and theologically correct when he writes: “I keep the official record of it, my ordinational certificate, over my desk partly to remind me of what I am not. I am not the only commissioned minister of my church. I am not the only called person. I am not the only person who should be called a minister. If the institution of ordination perpetuates a practical heresy in the church by slighting the nonprofessional minister and favoring the professional, then it should be abolished.”
Hear, hear! This is the wisdom and the accountability of a growing church. There’s no room in the authentic, growing church for pastors insisting on their right to stardom in the ministry. My role is one of equippage and not empire.
Sheldon and Davy Van Auken called it “creeping separateness” and spoke of it as a danger in their marriage. A growing church also has a sense of creeping separateness. The task of trying to be intimate friends with everyone in the church drives me crazy. There are always new names and faces. At the same time, loneliness stalks the madness. On any given Saturday night, when the various bowling leagues or bridge cliques are flying, my wife will feel alone. Are we driving ourselves neurotic trying to be friends with the whole congregation?
We’re not complaining, mind you. We are so often tired that an evening alone is the rare gift that sometimes comes to refresh us and gives us the feeling that life can be managed. Yet in the fishbowl of a large church, our thoughts are ever on the newcomers.
The danger is that one of the “newcomers” will surprise you with a bit of history. “Mr. New, I presume? Not new? Really? I married you and what’s-her-name a brisk five years and six thousand handshakes ago?”
If the Flag Is Flying . . .
Finally, our church has arrived at what Lyle Schaller calls the “mini-denominational stage.”
I will never forget seeing Windsor Castle for the first time. As we walked about the spacious gardens and walkways, I asked if the queen were at home. The answer I received in crisp British was, “If the flag is flying, the Queen is in residence.”
I remember a long breathing spell in the middle of a racquetball game, when one of my very finest friends told me he had been a member of the church long enough to see my role changing.
When I told him his words were cryptic, he simply said, “I have seen you pass from a doer to a symbol in our congregation.” He went on to say that pastors in larger churches cannot possibly touch individual lives as frequently as they might in smaller churches.
“You’re my pastor,” he said, “but many others now provide me spiritual counsel and insight. While you’re central in my understanding of how the Word of God is ministered, you’re more the model than the mode of my counsel.”
His words both blessed and rebuked. As a church grows, the pastor’s role does become one of focus and symbol.
I still make about twenty visits a week, as do the other pastors on the staff, but at this snail’s pace, I could never visit all the families in the church in a year. The church’s need is now wider than my stamina and time. Still, visitation is important so that my ministry can have relevance to me, if not to them. If I were to cease making calls, something in my own evangelistic impetus would die, something I need to keep Aristotle’s pathos (sensitivity and feeling) in my sermons. Without a strong sense of pathos, I might never find the verve I need to convince others (as well as myself) of the priority of seeking the kingdom of God in life.
Still, I must fit all my personal ministry into a schedule laden with student rallies, staff meetings, family life, church growth, and Bible conferences. For me, the big-church syndrome means I must work harder than ever to maintain the necessary home-base feeling. I cannot feel authentically pastoral otherwise.
My resolve is bound up in my desire to be a pastor and to be thought of that way. This is an important symbol in our congregation. They must see me as someone who is always available. So when they say to me, “If the flag is flying, the king is in residence,” I want them to say it with a smile. Made in a good-natured way, the comment says, “I understand the church has grown, and growth is our calling as a church.” I hope they also see that it means they’re obligated to minister to each other.
Social Growth: A Painful Necessity
Growing can be painful. Who needs it? Wouldn’t it be better to settle down in warm, containable settings?
No, because we have met Christ, who told us to win the whole world, or as much of it as we can. Hence, as I see it, not every great church is a big church, but every great church is a growing, changing church. I realize the statement has some limitations in dying rural situations or hard-locked urban districts. Still, great churches are busy increasing either their numbers or their vision.
Whichever is the case, relationships must also widen to create room for such visions. Joseph Aldrich said we should visualize the Spirit of God hovering over our neighborhood. It is this vision that calls the church to integrate the new. Ours cannot be the greatest problem; remember how twice early in Acts thousands of people were swept into the church on single occasions. There was little question that the Holy Spirit was hovering over their urgency. As he hovers over Omaha, my own adjustment must continue.
If, as the shepherd, I am not continually growing, changing, and developing my own relationship skills, there is little hope for greatness in this flock.
The number one response to all change is anger. I have known the resentment of seeing close friends push me perimeter-wards in their growing circle of relationships. I have sometimes been angry because I wasn’t invited to some soiree where I knew laughter and good times were going to swell. I have felt hurt because the very family that I prayed with through thirty hospital visits had a prayer retreat in their home a year later and invited an Episcopal rector to direct it. I have been angry because my best friend’s daughter didn’t ask me to do her wedding ceremony, picking one of my associates. But my anger lives only till I kneel in prayer and ask God to bring to my remembrance the right of everyone to be free in the fellowship. Then I see that they’re only doing what I must do so often in my own complex world of relationships. They are picking and choosing, and they can’t all choose me all the time.
Then, too, it’s really all for Christ. And yet, when I’m honest, I wonder how much of the spotlight I would shine on Christ if some of the “edge-light” wasn’t always spilling on me. It keeps my best spiritual moments smudged with doubt about my dedication.
As for the people in our congregation, I don’t know how many more God will bring to us. All I know is that I love them. As Paul said, they are my “joy and my crown” (Phil. 4:1). I am blessed to be their shepherd, however heavy the task.
As shepherd and flock, we all have to allow for some diminishing of closeness. In a sense, this is born of self-denial. We are creating space so that all those not yet born again may also come to know Christ.
In lessening our grip on relationships, we not only set others free, but we also free ourselves. It takes courage to stand without clinging, but only as we release our grip are we free to stand straight and self-sufficient before our world. Is it not heresy to know Christ and call ourselves self-sufficient? Yes, of course, but the self-sufficient Christian finds sufficiency in Christ and not in clinging to another. At the heart of all relationships in a growing church is the strength of Christ.
Church growth always demands social growth. Especially for the pastor.
Calvin Miller is pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska.
Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
