“Pastor, it’s getting a little cold in the children’s choir room. Do you suppose we could meet in one of those downstairs classrooms during the winter months?” Sandi Fawkes inquired.
Mere administrative detail, I mused. I knew half of the forty-five youngsters in her choir represented nonchurch families. It was a good outreach, and Sandi was an enthusiastic worker. I made a quick executive decision. “Why don’t you move into the big room in the corner? You’ll like the carpeting, padded chairs, and good piano. We don’t use that room on Thursday nights.”
“Oh, wow! Thanks, Pastor Steve,” Sandi beamed. “I knew you’d figure it out for us.”
Why, my dear, I thought to myself, that’s what a pastor is for.
Sunday, just before the morning service, a subdued Sandi came up and whispered, “I guess we’ve got trouble.”
“What?”
“I mentioned to Margaret Greenly that we planned to use the big downstairs room for choir, and she hit the ceiling.”
“Why?” I stammered.
“Something about that being a preschool room, and she didn’t want it messed up on Thursday nights. Margaret was, er, quite emphatic about the room being strictly unavailable for use on Thursday nights. I’ll talk to you later.” Sandi headed for the choir loft and I entered the pulpit.
Why do these things happen to me thirty seconds before a worship service? I moaned.
After the service I learned that the big room in the corner was used every Friday morning by the entire student body of The Master’s Munchkins Preschool. They get everything arranged Thursday afternoons.
On Monday I had a long, but amiable talk with Margaret Greenly. “You know, Pastor, we just can’t let something like this chip away at the efficiency of the preschool. The Master’s Munchkins is rated as the best preschool in the whole city.
“Every Thursday we have to change bulletin boards, arrange the chairs, and form displays on the book shelves.”
“Well,” I suggested, “the choir doesn’t need the bulletin board space, and we can have them stay away from the north side of the room where the book displays are. I’ll ask one of the parents to set up the chairs exactly like you had them. I think the room will be all right by Friday morning. Let’s try it a few weeks and see how it works.”
Margaret shrugged. “Well, you’re the pastor.”
That evening at the board of deacons meeting, I was surprised when Tom Cotton, head of our Christian education department, announced, “Margaret Greenly called me tonight, demanding the board get this trouble with the preschool and the kids’ choir resolved. She hinted that it was getting nearly impossible to run a quality program with such interference.”
“We don’t want to hurt the preschool,” another board member chimed in. “Margaret’s been running that program for fourteen years.”
From across the table Chet Moreno exploded, “The preschool! They’ve been telling us what we can and can’t do for years! They gripe if we use a bulletin board. They gripe if we don’t decorate the rooms. They don’t like the way we leave the chairs on Sunday morning. Who’s in charge here, anyway?”
Tail or dog?
Every church faces similar dilemmas. The traveling teen choir drains people and money from other ministries in order to buy new buses and go on tour. The Wednesday night kids’ program begins to dictate what lessons should be taught in Sunday school.
Usually such conflicts are the price of success. It is because a program is working well that it begins to overshadow other ministries.
Often what appears to be a routine schedule conflict or misunderstanding may be, at a deeper level, an issue of control. In our case, we could have held a facilities scheduling meeting, but another, similar problem would likely have surfaced later. There was a larger issue underneath: Who’s in charge here, anyway? The preschool-perhaps our church’s most visible ministry-or the broader congregation? The tail or the dog?
As we learned from this experience, an issue of control usually calls for three fundamental actions.
Refocus
Our board realized that before we would really have things operating smoothly, we would need to clarify our goals as a church and define where each program fit in achieving those goals.
In the meantime, we purchased a couple of space heaters for the upstairs room and had the kids’ choir continue to meet there. That suited no one.
From time to time in most every church, a pastor or inspired layman gets the idea the church should have some long-range goals. Committee meetings are held, research is done, reports are accepted, and a nicely printed pamphlet “Who We Are . . . and Where We Are Going” is distributed. But in our church, the pattern had been that by June, the pamphlets were gathering dust in the custodian’s closet. So this time we forced ourselves to be more specific and accountable.
First, the board of deacons set five measurable goals for the church to achieve in the next five years. Our list: (1) expand the parking lot to hold fifty more cars; (2) double our missions budget; (3) add 125 families to our church rolls; (4) establish a continuing fund of $500 a month for the poor and needy in our community; and (5) build our youth group to the point that 10 percent of local high school students were attending regularly, and 50 percent of those were involved in personal Bible study.
We made the board responsible for reporting to the congregation twice a year the progress on each of these goals. And each group in the church was asked to decide on projects in the coming year that would help the church reach the goals. The women’s fellowship, for example, pledged that during the first year they would aim to: (1) bring five new families into the church through the women’s meetings, (2) support the high school program by guaranteeing twelve dozen homemade cookies every Sunday evening, and (3) match the dollar amount we were giving the Andersons in New Guinea, thereby doubling our giving to one missionary.
How did all this help the problem between Margaret Greenly and Sandi? They were reminded that the ministry of Christ is not separate programs whose only connection is shared building space, and that each program was designed to be a complementary method in achieving the same goal.
The Master’s Munchkins Preschool surveyed their families and discovered two cases where the cost of preschool severely strained the family budget. The school decided to up tuition by one dollar a month, per child. This excess fund, $100 per month, became available as scholarships for the needy parents. By doing this, we were one-fifth of the way in reaching our five-year goal of helping the needy.
Margaret and Sandi also decided on a joint venture: the kids’ choir would sing for Parents’ Night programs at the preschool. This would provide an opportunity for the parents of preschoolers to sign up their older kids for the choir. If nonchurch parents had kids involved in more than one church program, they would more easily come into the church. Margaret and Sandi set a goal of bringing in ten new families.
Recentralize
Second, we needed to clarify, once again, the lines of authority within the church organization. The framework had been established years earlier, but it had not been updated to meet current needs and was largely forgotten or ignored.
The board of directors for the preschool had originally included one member from the board of deacons. But over the years there were times when the deacons weren’t too interested in what was going on, so nonboard members were appointed.
The preschool was supposed to be responsible to the Christian education department, but C.E. was occupied with other matters, Margaret Greenly was too busy to go to another meeting, and “everything was going fine anyway.”
So we established a policy that the vice-chairman of the C.E. department (always a deacon) would be chairman of the preschool board. This insured both the C.E. department and the deacon board of continual input from the preschool. We actually drew up an organization chart that illustrated the equal importance of the preschool and kids’ choir, and the line of command to the Christian Education department.
Finally, we decided if there were an unsolvable conflict over building usage, whichever program that would help us best achieve our five-year goals would have first priority.
Reconvene the central parties
Since clarifying our goals and authority, though, we have not had to make that decision. Diplomacy works better now that some rules have been established.
“It’s still pretty cold up in that rehearsal room,” Sandi reminded me one Sunday morning.
“Well, let’s get everyone together and see what we can come up with,” I suggested.
The deacon who headed up C.E., the deacon who was chairman of the preschool, Margaret Greenly, Sandi Fawkes, and I gathered to figure out our schedule for the big corner room.
Margaret gave a thorough description of why she needed that room: It was the only carpeted room, it held all the students in chairs, it had a small kitchen adjoining, and it was on the ground floor for little ones’ safety.
Likewise, Sandi was clear how the junior choir had to meet on Thursday nights. Wednesday night was our youth program, Saturday mornings conflicted with soccer and baseball, and other nights were impossible for Sandi to commit herself to.
After discussing a bit, I asked Margaret to describe the Friday preschool program. It turned out to be a time for a Bible story, singing, birthday celebrations, announcements, and refreshments.
“Could you still do all those things on Thursday?” I suggested.
Margaret wrinkled her nose and sighed. “Do you mean our whole Friday program?”
“Yeah. That way it wouldn’t matter what Sandi did in here on Thursday nights, and the custodian could clean it on Fridays.”
“Actually,” she said, “it would free up Fridays to do some other things.”
“And there would be no chance of us accidentally messing up one of your displays,” Sandi added.
“Well,” Margaret said, “let’s give it a try for a few weeks and see what happens.”
“Great,” Sandi said. “Listen Margaret, do you have the address of Lisa Ferguson’s parents? They were asking about having their oldest daughter join the choir, and I wanted to call them back. I think they might be one of our ten new families this year.”
Tom Cotton turned and muttered, “If those two would have been that friendly two months ago, it would have saved us a lot of work.”
Tom was right. But until we had clearer direction, stronger lines of authority, and more regular communication between key people, the tail would have continued to wag the dog.
-Stephen A. Bly
Winchester, Idaho
Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
