The Reverend Doctor R. Thomas Martin knew he was out of place as soon as he arrived as pastor of California’s Corona Del Sol Community Church.
The large cross crafted from the shattered surfboards of hapless former pastors gave him his first clue. The liturgical break-dance group practicing in the sanctuary confirmed his dark suspicion. The pastor nominating committee had not told him the whole truth.
Corona Del Sol and R. Thomas Martin are mythical, but pastors out of their element are very real. The life of a square peg in a round hole can be painful-for the peg as well as the hole. I’ve been in that situation to a degree, and over the years I’ve talked with other pastors who find their distinctive corners jammed against the church’s contours.
The Square-peg Experience
“Square pegness” can take a variety of forms. One of the most common is a difference in life experience.
Susan Baker, a Presbyterian pastor, grew up in a large church in suburban California. She attended college in California and then seminary. Then she accepted a call to serve a circuit of three small churches in the rural Midwest.
For Susan, square pegness is almost total. She is a woman, pastoring in churches and a region accustomed to male pastors. She entered this conservative habitat fresh out of a seminary noted for theological diversity and controversial positions on social issues. She is single in a world of married couples. Her background and education effectively set her apart from the people she serves.
Square pegness also can mean a difference in orientation. Growth-oriented pastors may introduce their sharp angles into contentedly static round holes. They come to lead a charge only to find the congregation wants a chaplain for the wounded. Plans for growth and change aren’t always welcome.
“In a farming community,” explains one pastor, “relatives are those buried in the graveyard. You can’t waltz into town thinking you’ll be part of the family.” Some churches aren’t particularly open to newcomers. Yet if the church is to grow, it will have to open up. Pastors committed to that outward-directed orientation may find it harder to fit in.
Square pegness often results when the pastor comes from a church of a different size than the congregation he or she joins. Lyle Schaller writes in Looking in the Mirror, “One of the most subtle changes in the dynamics of small-membership churches can be traced back to the changing source of pastors. During the first half of this century, thousands of young men who went into the pastoral ministry were drawn from among the children who had grown up in rural America and were nurtured in small-membership churches. The new minister carried many years of first-hand recollection of the dynamics and congregational lifestyle of that size church.
“During the past three or four decades, however, an increasing proportion of those going into the ministry have come from much larger congregations. Many have no firsthand contact with a congregation of fewer than six or seven hundred members. Frequently, their first ministerial responsibility, following graduation from seminary, is to serve as the pastor of a small congregation. This can be a difficult experience for both the new pastor and the parishioners. Occasionally the minister feels rejected. The pattern is the same as when the body of a heart transplant recipient tends to reject that new organ. There is a natural tendency for a body to reject that which it perceives as a foreign or alien object.”
The pastor’s educational and economic background can be a square peg. As one pastor sees it, “They don’t think my work is work. Reading a book is not work to one who gets up at 5 A.M. to feed the cows.” It’s hard for a laborer to imagine how one can be tired from a day of exegesis.
Calvin Thomsen served as pastor of a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Claremont, California, a community dotted by private colleges. He describes that church as “wanting to be the Adventist Church of the future.” A young, progressive, and highly educated congregation with a positive self-image, it boasted an attractive physical plant, showed an appreciation of music and art, and easily appealed to people disillusioned with “traditional churchiness.”
After seven good years there, he left Claremont for a church in Simi Valley, California, which, in many ways, is at the other end of the cultural spectrum. “I was ready for a challenge,” Thomsen says, “and I certainly found one.”
Before Thomsen went to Simi Valley, he did his research. He knew the church had been trouble for previous pastors. Deep divisions within the church, and between the church and the local Adventist hospital, troubled him. This hole, he knew, might be lined with spikes. But he didn’t expect it to be so round.
Thomsen discovered the congregation didn’t value what he values in church life. “I love a great pipe organ, and they are perfectly content with a badly tuned Hammond. Even the doctors from our congregation do their rounds in cowboy boots. I forever will be unable to make the church what I prefer. These people don’t want to be upscale.”
Since the church won’t switch to ecclesiastical Perrier, what is his goal for them? “A highly participatory, evangelical, contemporary congregation that fits this community,” Thomsen says. “That vision is equally revolutionary for the congregation but has a better chance of success.”
The growth of the church offers yet another way to become a misfitting peg. And even growing a church doesn’t guarantee a fit. John Blackburn comes across like a good old boy. He is a relaxed, folksy man with an amazing ability to grow churches.
When John began as pastor of the Almond Grove Church, Almond Grove was an agricultural town. John fit right in. Then the freeway was completed, and Almond Grove began to grow rapidly. Under John’s leadership, the church welcomed newcomers and expanded its ministry. The little Almond Grove Church exploded faster than the community. John just grinned, kicked the dirt, and kept making things happen.
One day the people of Almond Grove looked around and discovered they were an influential, 2,500-member congregation filled with sophisticated people-and their good-old-boy, dirt-kicking pastor was an embarrassment. Eventually John resigned. “They got so fancy, I wasn’t allowed to spit anymore” is how he put it. He left Almond Grove and took a small church up in the hills, right in the path of the next freeway. The BMWs in his parking lot are beginning to worry him again.
I’ve served three churches since leaving seminary, and the present fit is by far the most comfortable. I attribute this to the fact that I’m the organizing pastor. A square hole has grown up around my square peg, so the fit is nearly perfect. However, it will be hard for the pastor who follows me if he or she happens to be round, or even-horrors!- oblong. The ways not to fit abound.
When Holes Won’t Accommodate Corners
I asked several successful square pegs how important a good fit is. The answers ranged from “moderately important” to “not that important.”
So I tried a different tack. I asked Calvin Thomsen, “When is the fit so bad that the pastor really does need to make a change?” He offered four signs of an irredeemable situation:
-First, when the pastor has major gifts and abilities being frustrated. “Of course,” he cautioned, “we may decide this is the case prematurely. Many pastors feel the church doesn’t fit because it isn’t meeting certain needs for status, companionship, intellectual stimulation, or a host of other desires. All are legitimate needs, and some pastors may have to find ways to meet these needs outside their congregations to relieve the stress of a poor fit.”
Then again, a person gifted in visitation and pastoral care spending years trying to be a pulpiteer, or a true scholar devising banana games as a junior high minister, may find they truly are misplaced. A pastor may grow out of a job description.
-Second, when the larger context of the community or region doesn’t provide needed resources.
Several pastors expressed the need for a release valve. One reason Susan Baker accepted a call to the rural Midwest was other women in ministry nearby with whom she could share. Proximity to a metropolitan area where she could attend the symphony, go to a play, or take advantage of educational opportunities also attracted her.
A person may adapt temporarily by downplaying the importance of certain interests and aspirations. But a bleak situation, in which the subdued self cannot find an outlet from time to time, will increasingly oppress and frustrate a pastor. Periodically, we need to allow our sharp angles an opportunity to protrude.
-Third, when the accommodations the pastor makes to build bridges begin to erode the pastor’s core identity. Cal Thomsen increasingly sees himself in Simi Valley as a cross-cultural missionary. He adapts to the culture around him in order to build bridges for the gospel.
“But wise missionaries,” he says, “also have an identity firmly planted back in their own world. Skillful missionaries may appear to go native and adopt the dress and language of the host culture, but they retain a clear identity. They know who they are. It is when you compromise your core identity that you start resenting the accommodations you are making.
“I’m willing to expand myself, but I’m not prepared to deny myself completely. For example, if people started pressuring me to water down my basic Christian convictions, I’m afraid that would be farther than I could bend. I wouldn’t then be drawing from the real me.”
-Fourth, when the situation is harming the pastor’s family. “I’m not willing to offer my family as a sacrifice on the altar of any congregation,” Thomsen explains.
“My wife works outside the home. If a sizable number of church members were putting pressure on her not to work, and if the tension started getting to her, I’d take that as a signal to leave.”
Improving the Fit
How good must the fit be? How much do you have to be like your congregation?
The answer seems to be that pastor and people need to inhabit the same universe and speak, at least roughly, the same language Susan Baker commented, “There is a small-town feel to me. I’m not slick. I’m not a coastal person. But even if I were, I could minister here. It isn’t that important that the pastor be like the people. What is important is that the pastor like the people and that they know it.”
Calvin Thomsen agrees, and adds, “It’s also important to be yourself and to model that you’re comfortable with and affirm diversity. If you try to pretend, the people smell the pretense. If you can embrace who they are, you can bridge some wide gulfs.”
One gulf Thomsen faces is disagreement over the place of psychology in the church. “I teach psychology at the university,” he explains, “and there are people in the church who think psychology is anti-Christian. I tried to soft-pedal my involvement at first, but it didn’t work. It just made everyone more insecure. Now I freely affirm the value of psychology. But also I’m willing to use language that communicates to them my orthodoxy. It’s not pretense. It is very deliberate. I don’t say anything I don’t believe, but I am careful to say things in the way people need to hear.”
The key issue: building bridges between pastor and people. These successful square pegs indicated a willingness to adapt as long as they don’t compromise their Christian walk. “I can be all things to all men,” one commented, “but I cannot turn my back on the gospel. It is not so important that I be true to myself as it is to be true to my Lord. For example, I could join Rotary, even though I might find the meetings boring. But I could not join the Klan.”
Even when differences between pastor and people are evident, they don’t have to divide. They might even be a source of humor and growing camaraderie. They help humanize the pastor by giving the congregation a “flaw” on which to focus.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area with the conviction that nothing good comes from Los Angeles, especially in the world of sports. During football season I am a vocal 49ers fan. Until last season I was a subdued Giants fan in the land of Dodgers. Last fall, however, I was insufferable, but the men’s breakfast troops would have been disappointed with anything else. In basketball season I shut up.
My refusal to see anything good in a Southern California team hasn’t alienated me from my decidedly Southern Californian congregation; they enjoy ribbing me about it and taking my flak. After the last Super Bowl, they even presented me with a 49ers T-shirt. And I, in a spirit of compromise, have allowed my son to keep a picture of Orel Hershiser on his bulletin board.
After graduating from seminary, my thoroughly Colorado friend Dave Freehling told the Lord he was willing to serve him anywhere-as long as it was a university town in Colorado. The Lord obligingly sent him to Fort Collins. But life evens out, for the Lord spoke to Dave and said, “Leave Colorado, that land flowing with Rocky Mountain spring water and downhill skiers, and go to Texas.”
Dave journeyed from Colorado to flatland, downstream Texas, feeling like Jonah on the road to Nineveh. But, to his surprise, he found the Ninevites to be enjoyable people. He still misses Colorado, but the Ninevites think that’s fine. They allow him, within reason, to brag on Colorado. He just has to provide equal time for some Longhorns. Being able to laugh at the differences-even to play off of them-can help pegs and holes gain perspective on their incompatibility.
Pastors cannot expect congregations to adapt themselves to their background and style. But as the people come to value the pastor, they will tend to adapt themselves to the pastor’s quirks-like my objection to painting the church Dodger Blue.
The successful square pegs I spoke to all stress the importance of pastoral flexibility. Susan Baker commented, “One night l spent an evening with friends in the city listening to the symphony. When I drove back to the country the next morning, I saw livestock in rustic barnyards. I can find beauty in both.” In fact, Susan recently was invited to blend her considerable classical music skills with the local country band.
Both during and after seminary, John Stanford served in large and prestigious churches. His Phi Beta Kappa IQ and broad world-view helped him fit right in. Then he went to serve a church in a rural community. When I asked him how he was able to shift gears and fit in so well in each of his diverse ministries, he said, “I have a broad set of interests. So I just bring out different parts of my personality. When I’m talking to a farmer about the type of cultivator he’s using, I don’t only act interested; I am interested.”
The overall key appears to be that the people need to value the pastor for who he or she is, and they need to know that the pastor values them for who they are. This is why the square pegness that is brushed aside or even enjoyed in one pastor can become a crisis for another.
In Step to Whose Beat?
A guy I knew in high school was the lead drummer in a bagpipe band. After one parade his father commented that he had been out of step. “No I wasn’t,” he insisted. “Everyone else was out of step.” Technically, he was right. Since he was the lead drummer, it was his responsibility to set the beat and everyone else’s duty to conform to that beat.
Every now and then, pastors likewise find themselves doing what’s right in a congregation that isn’t, and their well-honed edges rub against an ill-formed hole. When that’s the case, being a square peg is commendable. The hole needs to get squared, because the peg conforms to God’s specifications. In those rare instances, fitting in is the last thing the pastor ought to do. Adapting becomes the church’s responsibility.
But, excepting such circumstances, most square pegs need to make the greater effort to fit. The friendly and flexible square-peg pastor can find even the roundest of holes a good place for ministry. As Susan Baker states, “We are different. But a shared commitment and willingness to submit ourselves to God’s Word brings us together.”
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