March 1988. Arlington Heights, Illinois. After eight and a half years in a home-missions church in Chicago, I am three months into a new ministry with a church of forty. It is night, and my wife is asleep. As my bare feet pace the bedroom floor, worries wear a path in my mind: With $600 of monthly support from another church, we’re still going in the hole. In three months that support drops to $200. At the end of the year, zip. We hit the wall in four months unless we grow!
I am not praying. This is hard-core anxiety. I dread the thought of packing and moving again. Although, we could stop renting in the school, maybe move the office to my basement; and if Nancy found a job, or if we sold equipment . . .
Survival. For half of my thirteen years in the ministry, that has been the issue. Occasionally I have felt desperate, at times doomed, up to my ears in quicksand. Talking to other pastors, I often find them concerned not with lofty goals and expansion, but with outliving a vote of confidence, paying next month’s mortgage, holding family together, overcoming crippling depression.
Ministry presents a Pilgrim’s Progress landscape of menacing crises. How do we survive? How can we sidestep the bog of despair? What attitudes and strengths will enable us to overcome, and then move on to progress and fruitfulness?
Lately, I find myself again relying on survival tactics learned at my first church. Like a recruit dropped into the desert for survival training, I had to learn new skills and attitudes there. Here are the tactics that have helped me-so far anyway.
Lean into the Pain
Survival situations arc racked with pain: emotional trauma over conflict, stress from unpaid bills, even anxiety over one’s reputation. The natural reaction is to run, yet the survivalist learns to handle pain, much as a distance runner must accommodate burning lungs. As Otis Davis, who pastors in Chicago, told me, “You pace yourself for the long haul, for agony.”
Like most in our society, I have grown up with aspirin, expecting that pain can and should be eased quickly. During our mission-church troubles, my tendency was to interpret prolonged pain as a symptom that we were missing God’s will. And that prompted a search for relief.
However, in Scripture I realized I didn’t observe such an analgesic reflex in Jesus or Paul. Instead, I found statements about glory in suffering: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10) and “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24).
Ministers are not masochists, but ordained afflictions are credentials as honorable as ordination papers. From then on I didn’t exactly invite pain, but I accepted it as part of my job description, a decision that somehow deepened my reservoirs of endurance.
My concept of the nature of ministry controls my expectations and performance. Occasionally I have backslidden into a business mindset, thinking about career, professional advancement, salary, success, bottom line. In a battle for survival, such fallen values lead to despair.
The apostle Paul, by contrast, spoke about victory and defeat, soldiers and weapons, duty and devotion, pain and suffering and sacrifice, fighting the good fight, and dying the good death. Perhaps a military mindset helps toughen us for inevitable pain. I’ve noticed it promotes in me more courage and tenacity.
I’ve concluded that ministry is a battle wherever I go. Certainly the challenges differ-a power struggle here, a financial war there, resistant people to my left, the daunting bulwarks of tradition on the right. But in the midst of these challenges, Paul’s word to Timothy helps me face the reality of ministry wars: “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Tim. 2:3). Instead of resenting hardship as a vexing quirk, I try (repeat, try) to shoulder it as my charge in ministry-something to be expected of a good soldier.
I have abandoned the notion of a wonderful, nearly millennial, pastorate in greener pastures.
Gary Allen, who pastors in Elgin, Illinois, illustrates the spiritual battle pastors face. His church sold their building in 1979, purchased property, and began construction-before securing additional financing-because interest rates were low and building costs escalating. However, before they could get a bank’s letter of commitment for money to complete the building, interest rates skyrocketed from 8 percent to anywhere between 17 and 23 percent.
“We were out of the ball game,” says Allen. With the cement shell of the building completed, they had to suspend construction and spend the next two years looking for finances.
“I would walk daily through the empty shell of the building,” Allen remembers, “and I would cry and pray. By this time the pigeons had taken over, hundreds of them. With tears dripping off my chin, I would throw rocks to drive away the pigeons, which to me represented the enemy-they were here and I wasn’t. In my despair I thought we would never see the building finished. But eventually it was.”
Survival often exacts sacrifice. Ask the veterans; they’ve learned to make do without. No foot soldier gets rich.
If the church’s war budget bleeds red ink, the viability of the ministry depends on the wisdom to discern the essentials, the forcefulness to jettison the frills, and the self-control to live on less. One pastor whose church skirted dangerously near a financial landmine said, “During those heavy years of inflation, we didn’t take a salary increase for three or four years. We also gave everything out of our savings to keep things afloat.”
I likewise have found over and over again that I can do without things considered essential, such as air conditioning, pocket money, new clothes, lunch in restaurants, or a comfortable office. Yes, I like these perks, but I’d prefer to survive in ministry. And so I’ve conditioned myself to accept a sometimes-spartan existence in order to finish my stint as a soldier of Christ.
Be Willing to Experiment
Necessity can be a fertile, creative womb. One famous pastor says we do not lack for resources, only ideas. Forsaking the ease of conventionalism and prayerfully testing the possibilities can bring life to our ministry.
After nearly a year at my first church, attendance was dwindling (from twenty-five into the teens), and morale was plummeting, taking the offerings with it. Woodenly I persisted to preach and pray without the enterprise of any momentum-turning special meetings. Eventually a friend suggested, “Why don’t you invite that ministry from Texas for an evangelistic crusade? They did a fantastic job for us.”
I balked. They practiced radical, high-profile evangelism, and I was skeptical over how that would play in our neighborhood. Still, at that point I would reach for anything. “Let’s do it.”
They were radical, all right. Made up of converted prisoners, they were outright reckless. We drew up posters and marched through the streets playing guitars, testifying and preaching with a megaphone, and dispensing tracts. Our evening rallies pulsated with high energy. I loosened up and joined the spectacle.
It was huge fun and great ministry, with several saved. It also marked a turning point. From there the church gradually ascended.
For my first several years as a pastor, principle so concerned me that my methods were hidebound. I said things like, “The ministry should just be preaching and prayer. All this other stuff-promotion, fund raising, programs, buildings-is humanistic striving.” And, “They shouldn’t lure kids into Sunday school with candy.” Too often I baptized approved methods as orthodoxy itself.
However, for our church to survive, I had to become savvy in method while remaining rock-ribbed in principle. My principles served as a skeleton, but not as a thick skin to shed whatever innovations sought to pierce it.
I grew more concerned about saving the lost than pleasing the pundits. For example, when Star Wars was hot, we used it as the theme for a Sunday school campaign. In the church basement we built a spaceship in which we taught Bible lessons on an overhead projector. In skits Luke Skywalker and company became parables of spiritual truth. Yes, we even dished out confectionery reinforcement. Sunday school was packed, and I felt great about it because we weren’t entertaining kids just to pad numbers. We hadn’t baptized Star Wars ideology, but we had converted its popularity to serve the church’s purposes.
When considering a new method, I ask several questions:
-Is this deceitful in any way?
-Is it manipulative?
-Are my motives pure?
-Am I depending on flesh or on God?
-And after trying it, are the fruits good or bad?
My goal is to be both savvy and Spirit led. Sheer human gumption may get results, but the church is built not by might, nor power, nor savvy, but by the Spirit of the Lord.
Where godly savvy ends and humanistic striving begins is not always clear. Several weeks ago in a phone conversation, one of our men expressed concern over my leadership. “It seems you are trying to build the church through programs and special events.” He believed people should reach out, not the church institution, so we shouldn’t have programs. We never did reach full agreement; I haven’t seen him since.
That’s one of the dangers of experimentation, but if we are to survive, we’ll have to bear the risk. After all, experimentation gave Paul the methods he used successfully across the Roman world. His approach at Mars Hill was different from that at the Philippian jail, which was different than his ministry from captivity in Rome.
Scramble when Necessary
A survivalist cannot afford to be choosy. I don’t particularly like asking for money, but to my chagrin, fund raising was forced upon me in our scramble for survival. After six months of hardscrabble existence in Chicago, we discovered winter, and with it, our need of a new boiler. Even while shivering, I considered the needed $5,000 unimaginable with our $250 weekly offerings and members on welfare. I reluctantly called the district office for permission to seek help and then began the humbling task of contacting other pastors.
They were kind and generous, even though they probably suspected the church would close eventually and their money would be wasted, and the boiler was bankrolled. An added benefit of such dependency: I felt an even deeper responsibility to see that their money paid dividends. I also learned the wisdom of calling established pastors for advice. Such help formed a bond that endured even after our church stood on its own two feet.
Such resourcefulness isn’t natural for me. I had to learn this frontier virtue. With affluence, we tend to overlook resources. Want, with its searching eyes, carves buttons out of buffalo bones.
Our IBM typewriter was thwacking words on paper with electronic ease, but not fast enough for me, the typist. When will I quit being the church secretary? I wondered. The time I spend typing this newsletter detracts from my essential ministry. Later at home, as my wife and I collated the letters into Zip Codes for bulk mailing, I reviewed the roadblocks to hiring a secretary: “We simply don’t have enough money to hire anyone, and volunteers can’t be relied on for long.”
Unable to solve the puzzle, I would resign myself to office tedium.
One day at a seminar, a friend bubbled about the clerical help he had found. With similar financial strictures, he had hired a competent secretary for two days a week. Envy mounting, I said, “If I could find someone like that, I’d hire her in a second.”
I drove home ruing my fate and again rehearsing our clerical options. Then it hit me: Ask Debbie if she would be willing to work on Saturday afternoons. We can afford that. She was a full-time, professional secretary, previously ruled out because I wanted someone for two days a week, on the cheap. Cautiously optimistic, I prayed and decided to talk to her on Wednesday.
With the hubbub of fellowship in the background, I outlined my proposal. “I’ll pray about it,” she said, “and get back to you in a week or so.”
I prayed as well-fervently. On Sunday she approached me after the service, with a smile on her face. “Sounds like a great idea,” she said. She worked on Saturdays for several years, an arrangement we could have had months, perhaps years, earlier, had I known better how to scramble for solutions.
Adjust Goals and Values
One of the most upsetting things about our desperate straits in Chicago was the gap between my dreams and my current status. I felt like an abject failure. In order to cope, I had to modify my short-term goals. Without forsaking my dreams, I realistically faced the fact that for now, survival was success.
I took satisfaction in simply not folding my tent. In my eyes that was a prodigious feat. Endurance, faithfulness, and church viability became my objectives. Later, I would hoist my sights.
Adjusting goals and values can mean the difference between confidence and quitting. One pastor who edged along the brink says, “Focus was important to me-clarifying goals, clarifying the call of God, clarifying my motivations. With my focus clear on the inside, no matter what happened on the outside, I could keep chipping away and know that Hey, this is right! No matter how difficult the process, there is an end, and one of these days I’ll see that end.”
This same pastor put his finger on another critical issue: “I saw that some of my goals were more ego centered than Christ centered. What I had considered ‘successful ministry’ may have been so by the world’s standards, but it wasn’t by God’s.”
Perhaps ego had something to do with a problem I regularly faced. The most difficult time was when I was around other pastors. My goal of mere survival seemed lilliputian alongside the burgeoning attendance figures, magnificent building programs, and broad influence of others. Comparisons devastated my confidence.
But humbling experiences can also exalt us. When I was alone in prayer, faithfulness would again become what it always should have been: my primary objective. Doing God’s will-faithfully, zealously, despite the absence of tangible rewards-is a worthy goal and a colossal success in itself.
Build Vital Dependencies
In the early years in Chicago, I would, on occasion, doubt my effectiveness as God’s instrument. Having given my all, only to discover my all was insufficient, I would yearn for outside help. With the thwop on the floor of the daily mail, I would hurry to search for a bolstering note or a miracle check, but only find bills, junk mail, and requests for money. The ring of the phone would raise anticipation: perhaps someone looking for a church? In our ethnic neighborhood, such calls came annually at best.
Repeated disappointment taught me to rely primarily on what God would do through me and the people. Outside circumstances might graciously assist us at times, but I had to quit waiting for the cavalry to gallop over the hill.
Depending on God usually does not mean passivity. God wants to use me. I learned to understand human agency.
Shouldering responsibility is one thing; quite another is rugged individualism-impressively macho but mistaken. One pastor who went through a building crunch said, “I had to face the fact that I couldn’t do all I wanted-or needed-to do. So I did the basics, putting my heart into Sunday morning preaching and teaching. Other things I compensated for with help from others. The people rallied around, and it made for a strong church.”
Another pastor said, “I attached myself to my peers, those around me and those over me in the Lord. I felt more respect and affection for them than before. That helped me understand I’m part of something bigger.”
God has designed the body-and the vocational ministry-in such a way that we are required to depend on each other. Even Paul the apostle spent time in his epistles requesting housing and raising funds. We need one another and can depend on our fellow Christians.
But the greatest joy and opportunity in a survival situation is this: we ultimately have no resource but God. As much as I dislike being needy, I relish the childlike purity of desperately needing the Lord.
Being on the cutting edge of faith has invigorated my spiritual fundamentals. Frequently I have bowed on my knees and cried out, “Lord, you alone can save us. You alone can establish this church. You are my Deliverer. Help us, O Lord.”
Meanwhile certain Scriptures have come alive: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time” (1 Pet. 5:6). And “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord” (Ps. 27:14).
One pastor who suffered a heart attack followed by a pastoral transition says, “I saw things differently. I saw the grace of God at a deeper level, and the blessed hope in a new hue. I probably was more spiritually stable at that point than ever before in my life, even though physically I was rocking.”
Yes, it’s okay to be dependent. We who want to take the world by storm learn that slowly. God, who made us, knew it all along.
Is it worth holding out in a desperate situation? During my final year in Chicago, the church held an outreach-more accurately, an extravaganza. In the narrow yard of the church, we gave away food, clothes, and literature, punctuating the afternoon with songs, drama, and preaching. While strolling through the crowd, I was prompted by the black grit underfoot (remaining from our recent sandblasting) to take stock of our progress over eight years. I watched our workers haul boxes and remembered with great satisfaction how far they had come with the Lord.
At one table, a woman, who years earlier had committed her life to Christ in a Sunday morning service and whose husband and family later followed, was helping people find clothes. Her smiling face put a seal on the testimony of my heart: It’s been worth it.
October 1989. Back at Arlington Heights. Next month will mark two years here. After a barren 1988, we turned the corner last December, and 1989 has been fruitful. Our forty have turned to seventy, and although our weekly financial shortfall remains, God has supplied our needs through extraordinary gifts two or three times a year.
Yes, a tough summer burned all the fat in the checkbook, and attendance dipped disappointingly. I cut my salary and hung on. But eventually the people rallied. Fall attendance has returned, and our offerings approach that elusive break-even point. And more, I have an unpaid assistant pastor now, and even a volunteer secretary a few hours a week.
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
