MR. JONES’S HUNCHED-OVER, ox-yoke shoulders framed a body once six-feet-three inches tall, but after ninety years gravity was winning. You couldn’t have rendered a teaspoon of fat from his trim physique. His bull pine arms clung tightly to their shoulder sockets; years of bucking bales left them permanently angled at the elbows. His powerful hands could slam-dunk the earth.
His strength was intact, but his joints didn’t cooperate. His hearing was shot; and he saw only shapes, no details. I never heard him sing, but when he spoke, his bass voice sounded like it originated from the center of the earth. A nurse cared for him full-time, including bringing him to church. The piety was hers alone.
In personality, Mr. Jones was as subtle as his frame.
The pretty white country church held about 120, but we felt blessed to gather forty-five on a Sunday. We hoped for new families. Some visited, few stayed. To remain, you had to like Mr. Jones as much as we did because at any point in the service he might say just about anything—loudly. Ostensibly, he was speaking only to his nurse. But when he leaned over to whisper in her long-suffering ear, his God-given basso allowed everyone to hear every word. None of us will ever know if Mr. Jones couldn’t manage discretion, or if he was just an old coot who figured he’d earned the right to be a public nuisance. I suspect the latter. But since he never upset us too much with his outbursts, he probably never accomplished his goal.
Once during my pastoral prayer he supplicated his nurse, “Who is that up there, anyway?” (Quoting him verbatim violates reasonable norms of language for Christian publishing!)
Commonly, about ten minutes into the sermon, he’d turn to his nurse and say, “Isn’t he done yet?”
Mr. Jones was a church-growth nightmare. We loved him, but we never thought visitors did. Then again, when his bones aged past coming to church, our numbers didn’t increase. It saddened me to see him go. It made preaching a little less tense, but it forced me to work harder at keeping people awake. When he died, his nurse returned to her home church.
I will always consider it an irony that an old man cussing during the Lord’s Prayer didn’t perturb people, but a couple of kids wearing ball caps blew the place to pieces.
Can I like this kind of a situation? Do I need to like it? Do pastors need to like the church they serve? I didn’t think I needed to like my church when I began pastoral ministry.
Philos: the gutsy love
The word like is like nice, and nice is a wimpy word. There are a lot of things about most churches that aren’t nice. An old man bleating expletives during worship isn’t nice.
In every one of the four rural churches I have served, certain people have enjoyed visiting with their friends in the pews before worship. For them it was an opportune time to fellowship with other Christians. I called them the Informalites. Each church also had certain people who liked quiet before worship. They didn’t think talking to their friends before worship was the thing to do. I called them the Formalites. The Formalites thought the Informalites were rude. And the Informalites thought the Formalites were stuffy. Both groups liked accosting me with their definition of “nice” in opposition to the other group’s definition. The Formalites and the Informalites each expected me to enforce their idea of niceness with pastoral police action. The Formalites wanted fifteen minutes of marshal law before service, and the Informalites wanted fifteen minutes of anarchy.
What I didn’t like was being asked to be everyone’s cop of niceness. (These debates resembled a Jackie Chan movie. And yes, I did all my own stunts.)
But I have become convinced that we must like our churches and its parishioners. I take this from the New Testament words phileo and philos, which can mean “to love,” “to befriend,” “to hug,” and “to kiss.”
Taken together, they imply “to like.” We often give the philos words a short sheet in our New Testament studies because agape is exalted as divine love, and philos is relegated to human love. There is plenty of truth to this; after all, Jesus’ sacrifice was an act of agape. We cannot pastor our congregations without agape. But historically speaking they crucified Jesus not because of who he loved but because of who he liked. The powers of his day might have endured a mission by Jesus of agape love to tax collectors and sinners. Christ’s ministry was a mission of agape, but for him, agape meant befriending sinners. Liking sinners could not be tolerated. The Pharisees did not accuse Jesus of loving sinners; they accused him of befriending (philos) sinners.
For instance, when Jesus called Levi away from the tax collector’s table, some of the Pharisees may have been impressed. But for Jesus to attend the party at Levi’s house to celebrate the man’s new life with his old friends was unacceptable.
If Jesus had preached the message of John the Baptist at the party, the Pharisees might have been impressed. But “eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners” isn’t preaching to them. Rather, Jesus shared fellowship with sinners. He must have even appeared to be enjoying the company of the people around him. “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend (philos) of tax collectors and sinners!’ ” (Luke 7:34). To a Pharisee, this kind of thing is definitely not nice.
Jesus didn’t preach the message of John the Baptist; instead, he lived out John’s baptism by identifying himself with sinners. He could not have ministered to them if he had not liked them, for to like someone is to reflect to them that they are made in the image of God. To like someone is to affirm in particular what it says in general in Genesis about all creation: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). We stew over how to improve someone’s self-image; Jesus simply befriended people, and in so doing affirmed they were made in God’s image.
Most people have a hard time believing that God is with them if not a single human being who claims to know Jesus wants to spend time with them. We need someone to reflect our self-worth to us in person through positive, life-affirming friendship.
This is true for churches as well, especially the small churches that get passed from pastor to pastor. They eventually learn that it is easier to dump a pastor than it is to be dumped by one, and they become extremely difficult to like in the process. A pastor can preach to these churches that they are the body of Christ, but they will do everything in their power to convince him or her that they are not the body of Christ.
These churches need a pastor who will stick with them (bond with them), have sympathy for their dysfunctional existence (have true compassion for them), and even like them. Otherwise, they will never believe deep down in their fractured, complex, corporate soul that they truly are the body of the living Christ—so they can start acting that way.
Of course, all of this requires sacrifice (agape), which I will discuss in the next chapter. But merely making a sacrifice for a person or a church does not necessarily improve his or her self-image. Liking a person does. Liking a person or a church, finding the individuals pleasant, beautiful, and good, is the genesis of genuine, positive self-image.
Proverbs 8 is the song of Wisdom, in which she sings her song of love and warning. She tells of her role in Creation and in preserving creation. Christian theology has traditionally recognized the song of Wisdom as the song of Christ. This poignant poem speaks to the joy of God in creation.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the
beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I
was brought forth,
when there were no springs
abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been
shaped,
before the hills, I was brought
forth—
when he had not yet made earth
and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the
heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the
face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies
above,
when he established the
fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its
limit,
so that the waters might not
transgress his command,
when he marked out the
foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a
master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
(Prov. 8:23-31)
If I cannot delight in the human race, I cannot be a pastor. If I do not have a sense of humor, I will be crippled in ministry. A pastor whose sense of delight and humor and joy has been taken away can never lead the people of God.
The issue of liking is the issue of leadership. Jesus’ anointing became his friendship with sinners. He was Messiah in loving the unlovable; not just putting up with them but delighting in them; not for their sin but for God’s image; for God’s work of grace. If Jesus hadn’t liked the people he served, he would have been a different god than the true God that saw all things good, that delighted in the human race in creation.
Not liking people is the personal guts of Gnosticism. Misanthropy is often a sign of its loathsome presence. Often, when a pastor begins to dislike the church, he or she will begin to spiritualize his or her call to that place. The more a pastor loathes the church and its people, the more he or she will retreat into spiritual isolation, away from the everyday concerns of parish life.
We may be able to theologize correctly about God’s good will for a people we do not like, but we cannot lead real people toward God’s good will unless we like them. They do not need to like us. That is the painful paradox of pastoral work.
Many times our people will not like us precisely in the area where we are doing our job correctly. But we must see and affirm the image of God in them; we must delight in what God delights in them; we must take pleasure in their presence.
People will follow us into God’s good future if they see his love for them in our eyes.
The power of pastoral leadership is deliberately, stubbornly, and consistently liking people who do not necessarily like us. That means liking people who are not nice and who are not nice to us. Liking people who hate our guts is one of the great agape sacrifices of pastoral ministry. It is one of the hardest things any of us is called to do.
Liking the unlikables
The first step toward liking the people we serve is learning to like the church we serve. If we start by trying to like individuals, we get caught up in who we like more and who we like less, and that eventually turns into whose friendship we crave and whose we despise. It isn’t hard to see where that could lead.
If we learn to like the church we serve, we can learn to like the people of the church for the sake of the church. Our personal friendships within the church must be kept in plumb with our friendship with the church. This keeps us working on the difficult relationships that we would not pursue except for the sake of the church. Focusing on the church first keeps our integrity intact in relationships with people we are tempted to like too much, particularly within the opposite sex.
But how do you to learn to like prickly, difficult churches?
I can only speak from experience. But I can positively say that I have learned to love, respect, and enjoy the small rural churches I have served (even the church that knew skunk were breeding under my office and didn’t do anything about it) by seeking to understand the particular genius of each church. The four churches I have pastored have all been about 100 years old with dismal histories. Two of them remembered only one great pastor in their whole history. The others had no memory of a pastor whom they could say they loved and who stayed long enough to change much. The corporate self-image of each church mirrored fights and failures and timidity. They didn’t know how to care for a pastor, and they weren’t sure they wanted to know how. But the churches survived. They were the oldest private enterprises in each town by forty years; one of them may have been older than the local school.
Why did these churches survive? Setting aside for a moment the fact that one hundred years of struggle left the churches as cranky as Mr. Jones, how did they make it for as long as they did?
I became convinced that each of these churches possessed a particular genius, likened to the angels of the seven churches in the book of Revelation. I never called their genius the “church’s angel.” I understood theologically that God’s Spirit preserved each church and that maybe angels were part of that. But I called it the church’s “genius” because I wanted to know how God’s providence worked its way through the corporate life of the people. I loved God for his work in preserving each church, but I wanted to know where God’s preserving hand struck human gold.
It was a matter of finding the image of God in the church. Finding the image of God in Mr. Jones allowed us to love him, even to like him. Finding the image of God in the church allowed me to love my churches, and even like them, for what God had done through particular people with particular strengths.
This allowed me to affirm the strengths of each church, and it guided me in my pastoral leadership. The foolishness of attempting to pastor a church apart from its God-given genius should be obvious. Yet that is what many pastors, armed with briefcases filled with marked-up, underlined church-growth manuals, attempt to do to these little churches. Every old church is a book. It is an affront to the church and an embarrassment to the ministry when pastors read books about their church before they read the book that is their church. The problem is that when we read books about churches, we generally will compare that picture with the church we actually serve, and we will probably not like the church we serve. Obstacles to growth are all we will see.
The genius of a church is the secret to its growth. If you lead in the direction of the church’s best self, the people will follow—most of the time. I must qualify this because a church’s genius also contains its weaknesses and temptations.
Mr. Jones provides a perfect example of the genius of the church he attended. That church was the oldest private institution in the town. The town’s bank probably took second place. It survived the Great Depression—one of the few that did in Montana. The reason was its tough, tight-fisted monetary policies that led to large cash reserves. The church had survived for 100 years because of kind, generous gospel policies, which led to large reserves of patience and understanding. The bank would have failed without its money policies. The times the church came closest to failing were the times it violated its gospel policies.
When the church loved Mr. Jones, it was doing what it did best. The ability to love that old coot was its genius. Its biggest battles took place when it violated what it did best. The church endured two bitter, church-splitting fights. One occurred in the late ’70s when it refused to continue to allow the community senior citizens’ lunch to use its fellowship hall and one in the early ’90s when it refused to budge on the ball-cap issue. Besides the fact that there were legitimate sides to each issue, somehow, in each case, the church found a way to violate its own best self, and it paid a big price for doing so. That’s why the fights were so huge. They were going contrary to what the church did so well. And, ironically, some of those who fought the hardest to remove the senior citizens’ lunch from the church premises were the very ones who felt abandoned when the church would not accept boys in ball caps.
Churches rarely split over what they do poorly; they split over what they do well. Doctrine-oriented churches split over doctrine; fellowship-oriented churches split over fellowship; and mission-oriented churches split over mission. In its infancy, the fellowship-oriented, early church described in Acts 2 almost split over the distribution of food to Christian widows. Later it almost split over its Gentile mission in Antioch, and later, over doctrine.
When Mr. Jones’s church was at its best, it was an accepting gospel lighthouse in the community. When it was at its worst, it fought over how to serve its own particular genius. How do you lead such a church? A pastor must know, understand, appreciate, and like its genius. If a pastor does not like the church, that pastor can forget leading it.
Do you voluntarily submit to someone who you know doesn’t like you?
Pastors must discipline the church precisely on what it does best, not over the myriad things it does poorly and may never be able to accomplish. Unless, of course, he or she thinks that every church ought to be able to do everything well—and that invites the church to criticize the pastor’s ministry for everything he or she does not do well—something we consider to be unfair and unkind.
The love of discipline
It may seem strange to discuss church discipline under the category of “liking the church.” In ordinary life the people we like, our friends, are the people we find most difficult to rebuke. And yet, precisely with a friend, difficult advice goes deepest. The book of Proverbs talks about the invaluable function of our friends’ disciplining us with correction:
- “Well meant are the wounds a friend inflicts, but profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Prov. 27:6).
- “Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart, and the pleasantness of one’s friend springs from his earnest counsel” (Prov. 27:9, niv).
- “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend” (Prov. 27:17, kjv).
Most of us don’t pay much attention to the critique of people we know don’t like us. However, we listen to our friends because we know they have our best interests in mind. But even deeper, we listen to our friends—even though doing so may hurt—because they know us at our best, they love us at our best, and they know when we are violating our own best self. No one but a friend knows when we are really hurting and when we need compassion, or when we are whining and need someone to kick us off the dead self-centeredness of self-pity.
Only a pastor who really likes a church can lead it in discipline. Only if we like a church are we able to see, appreciate, and affirm its strengths as well as truly understand its weaknesses.
This can be seen in the book of Revelation. Jesus tells the church in Laodicea, “I reprove and discipline those whom I love (philo). Be earnest, therefore, and repent” (Rev. 3:19).
Often the particular weaknesses of each of the churches in the seven letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation are related to that church’s strengths. To the church in Ephesus, John is told to write: “I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Rev. 2:3-4).
But what about the prophetic role? Does a prophet need to like the people he or she prophesies to? Probably not. Jonah hated the Assyrians. But Jonah was not a pastor. Jeremiah cried buckets of tears over the objects of his bitter prophesies. He probably didn’t like the Jews a whole lot. But again, Jeremiah was not a pastor. Isaiah, on the other hand, pastored and prophesied to kings. Still, “befriending and liking” Israel seems like an irrelevant category to apply to Isaiah. But there is a big difference between the word of prophetic judgment and the act of pastoral discipline. Jesus reserved the sharpest rebuke recorded in the Gospels for his dear friend Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mark 8:33). That was pastoral discipline. Jesus called the scribes and the Pharisees “broods of vipers and whitewashed tombs.” That was prophetic judgment.
Pastoral discipline is more difficult to deliver than prophetic judgment. Pastoral discipline takes more guts, if only because it hurts so much more to be strung up by a friend than by an enemy. We can live without enemies. We cannot live without friends.
Most difficult of all is choosing to live in loyal bond with friends whom the Word, Spirit, and conscience force us to discipline. That is the sign of being a pastor. It doesn’t feel nice. It requires the kind of pastoral love discussed in the next chapter: agape. The reader is forewarned: agape cannot be qualified by the word nice; agape is the least likable of all the pastoral loves. The model for agape is a prophet, Jeremiah’s successor, the craziest man ever to wear the prophetic mantle: Ezekiel.
Copyright © 1998 David Hansen
