A Controlled Burn

Some people thrive on danger: Navy Seals, secret service agents, storm chasers. Add Steve Goodwin to the list. Like a firefighter who runs into a burning building while everyone else is fleeing, this is a pastor who seeks out failing congregations. He has led two Lutheran churches to major reform and now assists aspiring turnaround pastors through his ministry, www.reforminghope.com. He is author of Catching the Next Wave: Leadership Strategies for Turnaround Congregations (Augsburg Fortress, 1996).

Why do you focus on struggling churches?

Surveys show that 85 percent of our churches have stagnated in attendance or are in active decline. My passion is to help congregations get past that.

A lot of pastors are not making progress because they just don’t have the skills to reform their churches. So they experience conflict, burn out, frustration, and deep anguish.

I see it all over.

Why do so many pastors lack the skills to reform their churches?

It requires a whole different set of skills than we learned in seminary. Denominations spend so much time and energy preparing church planters, but we need to spend equal time preparing church reformers.

Our counterparts in business are way ahead of us here. I see so many pastors making the mistakes John Kotter wrote about 20 years ago in his book Leading Change: they don’t build a coalition; they don’t anchor the change in the culture; they declare victory too soon.

So many well-meaning pastors get wounded because they don’t have the right skills to lead through change.

So the things that we normally associate with pastoral ministry—preaching and pastoral care—are not what’s needed to reform a church?

You have to preach, teach, and do pastoral care. That’s essential. But on top of that, a reformer needs a separate skill set. They must be thinking, How am I going to make this culture change? How can I inject a new mindset for ministry among these people? How can I get them to think about the church as a mission that’s sent out instead of just people coming in?

What skills do we need that don’t seem especially pastoral?

Ministry is a spiritual enterprise, but it has a social component. Pastors need to understand the social structures of a congregation. They need to be cultural anthropologists diagnosing the factors that prevent growth.

For example, in my last church there was a lady who used to criticize me for every tiny thing. And she did it to everyone else, too. It was just nasty. I couldn’t figure out why the congregation tolerated her for so long, until I realized there was a payoff for them: she chased off any new people who didn’t look exactly like the current membership. She protected the rest of the congregation from having to change.

When I confronted her and she left the church, the congregation started to grow.

I highly recommend the book Church Conflict (Abingdon, 1994) by Cosgrove and Hatfield. It teaches pastors to do congregational mapping to reveal how the factions and coalitions in a church work and interact with one another. I ask my students to do this. It’s always enlightening to watch a student finally understand why conflict always arises from one group in the church. And it gives them new ways to solve the problem.

What indicates that a pastor might be suited for leading a struggling church to a turnaround?

Strong psychological health. Pastors who come with narcissistic tendencies or grandiosity make terrible reformers. We need really healthy pastors who understand themselves.

Edwin Friedman is a rabbi who has done great work on family systems and applies it to congregations. He says that we take our own family of origin issues and superimpose them on the life of the parish. Friedman makes the case that we live out these unhealthy patterns over and over. And I see this all the time with pastors. To be a healthy leader of reform requires a pastor to make deep changes in himself, as Friedman says, to go back to our families of origin and resolve those issues.

As we become healthier, we are better able to lead the congregation to greater health.

Do pastors who lead turnarounds need certain personality traits?

Reformers are made, not born. They don’t have to be a charismatic, extroverted, John Maxwell personality type, but they do have to be visionary. They have to see the big picture and be able to take people from here to there. They also have to be intuitive people who can sense what’s wrong in a system and be curious enough to search for answers.

Most important, they really need to be a theologian of the cross. That is my way of saying they need to understand they’re going to suffer. In Acts the Lord says regarding Paul, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” A reformer is going to suffer.

Being a reformer sounds like being a prophet.

Yes, it really is. A prophet is called to speak the words of God and call people to repentance, to change. But we shouldn’t be too excited about taking the prophet’s role. They had to suffer a lot. It hurts when people say terrible things about you.

As Stuart Briscoe says: “The pastor has to have the head of a scholar, the heart of a child, and the hide of a rhinoceros.” That’s very true. We need the hide of a rhinoceros.

How can a pastor prepare for the hardships reforming will bring?

Adjust your expectations. I ask my students: Was John the Baptist a failure because he got beheaded? John didn’t end up on the cover of Time. He got beheaded, but he did what God needed him to do.

At my last church I was their 15th senior pastor. Doing research, I discovered the church had mistreated every one of its pastors, including me. I hung in there for eight years and reformed the system. I saw myself as, to use a baseball analogy, a middle reliever. My family and I suffered through some tough innings. We have painful memories of our eight years there. But the system changed. Old factions were disempowered, and new ways of doing things were put in place.

Now the new pastors are succeeding—the first ones ever in that church.

Praise be to God.

But no one goes into baseball hoping to be a middle reliever.

Exactly, because a middle reliever doesn’t get the glory. The glory goes to the starting pitcher or the closer. But a baseball team has to have good middle relievers. That’s why being a theologian of the cross is so critical. You’ve got to take your dreams of glory out of the equation.

Pastors who dream of being the next Rick Warren are deluding themselves, and they don’t make good reformers. You’ve got to be able to say, “Whatever God wants of me, God gets.”

You may never be praised for what you do, but that’s not the point. God will know what you did, and that’s enough.

When searching for a new pastor, churches will often say they want to change. How can a pastor know if they are serious?

Most congregations will say they want a reformer without being clear about what that means. And as soon as that leader starts making changes, the congregation says, “That’s not what we meant by reform.”

I advise pastors to negotiate with the church from the beginning, before you accept the call, and haggle it out. Ask, “What does change mean? What does leadership mean?”

That’s what I did with my present church. I insisted we have a town hall forum—not just an interview with a search committee and staff. I explained what I meant by reform and gave them concrete examples of what could change at the church. Then I asked: “Are you willing to take this risk with me? If not, let’s just part company and thank each other. You got a free consultation from me, and we won’t beat each other up.”

As a result my letter of call actually states I’ve been called here to reform the congregation.

So many churches say they want change, but they really want someone to bring back 1959. And that won’t work.

Once the pastor accepts the call to reform a church, what should he or she do first?

The old adage is “Don’t move the furniture for the first few years. Just get to know the people and don’t make any major changes.” I think it’s exactly the opposite for reformers. We have to find a couple of easy wins right at the start and make some sweeping moves. This announces to everyone that something’s finally going to change.

Before arriving at my church, I asked them, “What’s your vision for the future?”

They told me they’d wanted restrooms on the main sanctuary level for over 25 years. That was the entirety of their vision for the church. So the first thing I did was spend $8,000 converting an old closet into restrooms.

I think that may be the only time in church history the Holy Spirit had to remodel restrooms to get a church moving, but that’s what it took.

You should always look for a couple of immediate wins. Then people start to believe the pastor knows a thing or two, and they start to trust you with bigger things. Those early wins are really crucial.

You use the term reformer a lot. How did you land on that word?

Well, I’m Lutheran. Reformation is our word; it’s rooted in our history. Reformation Day is an important day to us for good reason. I wanted to use it because all organizations die when they lose track of where they began. That’s one of my fundamental beliefs. I remind them of Martin Luther. Also, the word reformer applies well because we must re-form, re-imagine, re-cast the gospel. So I think it’s an excellent word.

Is being a reformer your calling?

I don’t see myself in history books like Luther or John Wesley, but even reforming the little corner of God’s kingdom that I’m called to serve is important to God and it’s important to God’s people. And, yes, I really do encourage other people to think of themselves as reformers, too.

Steve Goodwin is pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Rowland Heights, California, and an adjunct professor at Fuller Theological Seminary.

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