Pastors

THE COFFER CRUNCH

Jim Smith, Lloyd Sturtz, Art Gay, Bob Rhoden

What happens to ministry when money is in short supply?

October 19, 1987, will forever be remembered as Black Monday in the financial world. The Dow plunged, like an out-of-control airplane, a record-scorching 508 points. In seven hours, investors lost some $500 billion in equity values. Smaller brokerages were forced out of business. Traders were let go. And now, more than a year later, according to reports, smaller investors still have not regained confidence in Wall Street.

What happens when a local church experiences a similar financial downturn? What exactly does ministry mean when a church faces a fiscal crisis, whether moderate or severe, and what’s the pastor’s responsibility?

LEADERSHIP posed those questions to four pastors who have experienced money crunches of varying kinds. As an introduction to their discussion of the underlying issues, here is each pastor’s account of how his church found itself in a hole.

Aborted Bequest

Jim Smith

Elim Baptist Church

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Late in 1983, a former parishioner at Elim approached my predecessor to say: “My family has deep roots in this church. And now that I’m beginning to think about retirement, I’d like to build the church a new building-whatever it costs-provided you furnish it.”

Plans began, I came to the church, and by July of 1987, the building’s roof and walls were completed. The inside, though, had a long way to go.

Then the donor suffered a major financial reversal and informed me, “I have to cap the gift.”

That left our urban-neighborhood congregation, attendance around 300, with signed contracts and debts totaling almost $700,000. Without any clue it was going to happen, we inherited a debt three times our annual budget. If the work stopped, we could be sued for breach of contract. We weren’t sure there would be enough money for any staff. We came within days of the project being shut down.

The One Two Punch

Lloyd Sturtz

Chippewa United Methodist Church

Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania

My former church, Grace United Methodist in Franklin, Pennsylvania, had grown to an attendance of 450 on Sunday morning, which was more than our sanctuary could handle, and we began thinking about building. At that time, a member told me, “I’m expecting a major legal settlement shortly, and I’d like to give half a million dollars toward a new building,”

We had some money set aside, and with that gift promised, we bought property and began site preparations. When the foundations were laid and walls were going up, the major donor called me at home. “I’m about to receive the check,” the person said, “but I’ve made a decision. I’m not going to give you the money up front. I’m going to put it in my will, and you’ll get it when I die.” This donor was only 35 years old.

That left us with roughly $600,000 indebtedness, which would have created a cash-flow problem but still have been manageable.

However, six months later we learned that Joy Manufacturing-the largest employer in Franklin- was laying off half its management staff. In the next nine months, community unemployment hit 25 percent. We lost three hundred of our eight hundred members as they moved to find work. And most of these people were active leaders and liberal givers.

The church hadn’t experienced financial difficulty before, but now we had to decide each month which bills we’d pay. We wrestled with which ministries would go, and eventually we had to drop our Christian day school.

Changing Demographics

Slump

Art Gay

South Park Church

Park Ridge, Illinois

Our situation isn’t as dramatic as some of the others’, but it’s current. South Park Church is about 50 years old, and without faith promises or pledges, it has always paid its bills and been able to expand its ministries.

But the game has changed. Many of the church’s long-time “angels” are now being called home or retiring to Arizona. In our urban/suburban Chicago area, many of the younger families can’t afford to live here unless they have two incomes. And the younger people we do keep aren’t accustomed to tithing. They like to give to projects-like co-sponsoring an Indian church in Chicago-but they don’t get as excited about ongoing operations..

As a consequence, we’re currently in a cash flow crisis and $100,000 behind budget. We can’t afford to replace one pastor who left, so we’ve had to cut back ministry to young singles, which is a growing area for us. As we build our budgets for next year, we’re looking at no raises-and probably cutbacks-in staff salaries and ministry programs.

Though we’re a church with no debts, we have few resources. The county just approved our plan to put up a two-story educational building, which we need because we have many young families with children. But the people causing the expansion can’t pay for it. We have one year to start building, but we’re several months into the year and have no fund drives going because of our current situation. So the building may not happen.

Botched Building

Bob Rhoden

West End Assembly of God

Richmond, Virginia

In the late seventies, when attendance at two morning services reached about five hundred, we decided we needed more space. We designed a simple, multipurpose building. Our philosophy was that you don’t borrow, and we thought we’d spend $250,000 on a payas-you-go basis.

Meanwhile, three problems developed in the congregation. One was theological; we had to deal with the “name it, claim it” issue. A second problem was governmental; we were changing from a congregational to a more presybyterian polity, and that created a power struggle. And the third problem was economic. We discovered we had a crowd but not a church. There was no common vision, and people were not excited about giving.

We decided to proceed with the building anyway. As we got into it, though, costs soared to $400,000, and so in midstream we had to switch from pay-as-you-go to borrowing. Before, we had taught “It’s God’s principle that we not borrow,” and now we were asking people to take a loan. That created a loss of confidence in me and the other leaders.

Meanwhile, the county charged us $150,000 for drainage work we hadn’t anticipated, and the building ended up costing $980,000.

When the building was completed, there wasn’t enough parking, and the air-conditioning didn’t work on opening day, a hot September Sunday, so we had the doors open. Plus, the building flooded on one side, so sometimes members had to mop.

Soon, we didn’t want to answer the telephone because of contractors. We borrowed $500,000 on the first mortgage and tried, unsuccessfully, to raise the rest of the money. We had to take bonds for an additional $205,000.

People stopped coming to church to find out what God was doing in people’s lives; they came to find out how much we owed. At one meeting, three people demanded we put the church into receivership. Another night, a church meeting to discuss the problem nearly turned into a brawl. One man challenged another, “You want to step outside and settle it?”

Leadership: Whew! You and your churches have been through the wringer. Yet you’re here talking about it, alive and well. What happened?

Bob Rhoden: First, we held a “Day of Victory” on Easter of 1980, in which we tried to raise $50,000. We received $17,000, which represents a lot of sacrificial giving, but all we could think was, We came in $33,000 short of our goal.

We learned something through that: never look to a onetime event as a way to restore the damage from a long process. It took time to get into the mess, and it will take time to get back out. You have to say, “God, we trust the process that’s going on here.”

After a lot of thought, I stood with the other leaders one Sunday morning and said, “We have made a lot of mistakes. We have blown it royally.” We didn’t try to blame anybody else. We said, “We ask you as a congregation to forgive us for what we’ve done wrong. We don’t have all the answers to this, but if together we can find an answer, we’ll go on.”

It was gut wrenching to stand before five or six hundred people and say, “I’ve blown it.” But the people recognized it was sincere, not a manipulative move, and they came forward, wept with us, and told us they forgave us. That didn’t solve all our problems, but it changed some attitudes.

Jim Smith: Keeping relationships strong is critical. I had to ask, “How can we keep from fighting ourselves, from attacking segments of the church, from scapegoating?” It’s natural for people to wonder whether someone could have seen this coming.

But as we talked and prayed through our feelings, we were able to do the practical things we needed to do. We began a faith promise program and obtained a line of credit from the bank, and the people responded generously. The budget jumped 30 percent in one year, but we’ve gradually moved from a full-blown crisis into a cash-flow crunch. We aren’t able to support a full-time associate, and there’s austerity, but we’re making it now.

Lloyd Sturtz: We had to make some tough decisions through agony and prayer. It wasn’t easy closing down our Christian school, and we lost a family over it. But from those decisions and courageous giving by the members-tithing of their severance pay!-the church has gradually climbed into the black.

Art Gay: The only solution to our situation has been to redefine ministry success. It isn’t based on noses or nickels; it’s based on being faithful with what we have. Whether or not we build a building or have as much staff as we need, ministry will continue.

If I don’t get a raise, I remind myself that raises are not a given; they’re a privilege. Joanne and I are ready to take the lead in this. Going backward in compensation is not failure. What hurts, though, is when people move to other churches with great numbers and finances and then view us as unsuccessful. We have to keep saying, There’s another standard by which we want to be measured: faithfulness.

Smith: When a crisis hits, the minister has to take the lead. We made some cuts, and so in three years my salary has gone backward. But that doesn’t bother me; I’m not a martyr. It’s just that if you’re going to ask people to sacrifice, you have to cinch down, too. Some of our dear people mortgaged their homes to make sure we didn’t lose the ranch. Together we made the decisions and paid the price. And as a result, we had a deeper sense of ownership and of God’s desires to use the building in ministry.

Rhoden: What helped turn us around happened after that time of repentance before the congregation. My associate and I were brainstorming one day, and we concluded: “We’re in such a mess, we’ll never solve all of it. We ought to go help somebody else.” We recommended the church send twenty people to the Dominican Republic to build a church. The twenty paid their own airfare, and the church raised $12,000 to help with the project. The group built not one but two churches, and suddenly we began to develop an identity.

Our attendance dropped to about 350, but internally we rounded the corner. From that point on, five different people gave us large gifts. They said, “We want to give this out of conviction, not because we feel any pressure.” When we gave up worrying about ourselves and started helping others, the whole situation changed.

Leadership: Looking back, do you think you could have forecast your various crises? If so, what would you have done differently?

Smith: In our case, no. Who would have guessed a multi-millionaire would struggle with finances?

Complicating the situation is that when I came as pastor, in July of ’35, the oars already were in the water, the boat was wet, and the rowers were sweating. I tried discreetly to ask some questions: “Do I have any latitude in this building project? Is there any elbow room to talk about the nature of the gift or how it’s applied?”

The response: “Realistically, not at this point.”

Leadership: If you had been able to influence the initial stages, what would you have done?

Smith: Set a dear definition of the size of the gift. The gift was open-ended, which was the way the donor preferred it, and the donor and building committee acted in good faith. But without a set amount, all we could do was say, “Here’s what we would like to see in the building. Do you think this is okay?” And the response would be, “That seems reasonable.” But when the crisis hit, we didn’t even know the exact extent of our indebtedness.

Sturtz: We could have been more realistic if we had watched the economic downturn everywhere else in the country. It didn’t hit the Franklin area until two years after other areas. We had a two-year reprieve, but we just didn’t pay attention.

We Christians tend to say, “We live by faith; God’s going to take care of us.” That’s true, but we’d better look closely at what the business community is doing if we’re planning new construction.

Rhoden: If I could go back, I’d gather people in the real estate, development, and construction businesses. As a pastor, I haven’t been trained as a contractor or real estate agent. In a recent building program we just completed, we did gather such a group, and that team kept us on track.

A second thing I’d do is make sure the congregation owned the vision. In our first building program, we talked about “We’re gonna pay for this as we go,” and they all stood and applauded. But they just didn’t give.

Leadership: The applause meant, “They are going to pay for it, not I.”

Rhoden: Exactly. There has to be some criteria by which you can determine whether people are ready to take the next step. For instance, in this current project, we said, “Before we take step one, we’re going to pay for the land, which will cost half a million dollars.” The money came in for that, and then we knew the people were behind the project.

Third, I’d set a realistic goal for the cost of the building and stick to it.

Leadership: What happens in a congregation when money is tight? What symptoms do you notice?

Gay: Embarrassment, surprise, self-doubt, anger, acrimony at meetings. In the past, our congregation felt there was nothing we couldn’t do. To find out we can’t do some things we’d really like to do is earth shaking. People want to distance themselves from that.

One of the roles of pastoral leadership is to identify the mood of the congregation and describe their feelings. That’s part of shepherding, of helping people through the grief process.

Leadership: So your counsel would be to talk about the crisis directly?

Gay: Yes, from the pulpit. In my case, I was given the assignment; “Now, Pastor, we’re in trouble Get out there and preach those stewardship sermons.” (Laughter) Seriously, the leaders said, “It’s your responsibility to articulate the vision of the church, and we’re in a critical situation.” So I talked about our position clearly and directly. The bottom line was, “Realistically, when we begin a new fiscal year, the church will be at this financial position, and the congregation will determine the level of ministry. And that’s okay. God hasn’t left us, and I have no intention of leaving unless you know something I don’t.” (Laughter)

I went on to say, “My sense of success isn’t attached to money; it’s attached to faithfulness.” That was important for people to hear, because people expect that when giving goes down, pastors yearn to leave. And the fear of desertion is a strong emotion. So I want to articulate the church’s vision, communicate the people’s feelings about the crisis, but then say, “However this comes out, we’ll still be here ministering together.”

Smith: Something I’d add about communicating publicly during a crisis is to wait until you have the facts. The Sunday in July after I found out we had a problem, I didn’t say anything. By the end of the summer, I had an idea of our debt. By early September our leadership was working on a strategy. Not until October could I write a newsletter article for the congregation with full details.

Leadership: What did you say in that article?

Smith: I affirmed the generosity of the benefactor and the diligence of the building committee. Then I said we’d received word that the generous gift would have to be capped, and this meant it would cost over $600,000 to complete the project. I admitted I’d felt anger, fear, and the temptation to blame others. But now, I said, I’m ready to move to the next stage: finding the Lord’s solution. Finally, I strongly urged people to attend a Sunday meeting where the financial realities would be explained in detail.

Rhoden: To me, the timing of when you say something publicly is important. If I stand up and speak during the announcements, it’s heard on one level. But if what I say is part of the sermon, it has a higher value. So I spoke about the crisis right before I preached. I’d say, “I’m going to talk to you for just a few moments as family.” Why take the lowest part of the service to say what is important?

Leadership: Your approach also places whatever you say in a spiritual context.

Rhoden: Right. It says, “We’re not talking about mere business, folks. We’re talking about the kingdom.” We elevate what we say by when and how we say it.

But I also think it’s important to resist the temptation to let the crisis enter all your preaching. I really felt a tension: Am I going to preach out of this pressure I’m feeling, or am I going to preach out of God’s anointing?

Sturtz: In retrospect, I would change the way I described the problem. I said repeatedly from the pulpit, “We don’t have a financial problem; we have a spiritual problem. If our people were as spiritually committed as they ought to be, we could easily do this.” I’d never say that again. That was a disaster.

Leadership: Because you accused people of lack of commitment?

Sturtz: Because it wasn’t altogether honest; we did have a financial problem. The leaders kept coming to me and saying, “You’ve got to tell them we need more money to pay our bills.”

I’d say, “That’s not what we need. We need more commitment. If our members would tithe, we could pay our bills.”

And they’d say to me, “Lloyd, you’re an idealist. The reality is we’re facing $10,000 in bills this month that we haven’t been able to pay.”

Leadership: So if the situation presented itself now, how would you talk about it?

Sturtz: I would be honest enough now, I think, to say, “Unless we come up with this amount of money, we’re not going to be able to meet the budget.” Then I would say, “I believe we will be able to pay this bill if the spiritual issue of commitment to give is taken care of.” I’d put the spiritual and financial together.

Rhoden: I made the mistake of talking about our financial problem every week. It would have been better to pick the first Sunday of the month and say, “I want to give you a report on how we did last month.” That way, people get a feeling there’s some relief. But if you talk about a corporate problem every week, you fatigue people, and soon the corporate problem overshadows personal needs, and ministry deteriorates.

Leadership: Besides the public presentations, what other aspects of ministry do you need to emphasize during a crisis?

Smith: I tried to anticipate people’s reactions and questions. “How did this happen? Is it anybody’s fault? Could there be some mistake?” The congregation seemed to experience denial and all the other stages of grief. In addition, people began to ask broader questions: “Where do we go from here? Does this building really represent us, or is it just one guy’s dream?”

As a result, I invested an enormous amount of time in answering phone calls, initiating conversations, and saying, “No, the way you heard it isn’t exactly the way it was.” There were so many stories going around, and I had to make sure the straight story was being heard.

Gay: I haven’t changed my time allocation. Crises of church discipline consume many days or weeks or months, but during a financial crisis, if I’m going to carry on the rest of ministry, I can’t focus just on that. Probably if you’d ask my financial chairman or board chairman, they might say “Art should be more concerned.” But deep down they have the attitude, and it’s been articulated to me, “You spend the time in the Word and head the ministry team. Share with us the other concerns, but we don’t want you bleeding off your energies toward this. Ministry has to go on. Otherwise we’ll have nothing here.”

Sturtz: I had to spend extra time deciding what kind of ministry we could afford. I looked at the bottom line and knew we were going to have to divest ourselves of some programs. I had to go to the church and say, “If the church is going to survive, we have to continue our youth program and our children’s program. Sunday school, worship, prayer, and Bible study have to continue. But we can do away with the concert series and the special speakers. And the school will have to go.”

It takes time and discussion and prayer to make that kind of decision, to honestly interpret the congregation’s willingness to support a program.

Smith: I had to monitor where my people were. Some lay people gave an immense amount of time and expertise to handle the problem, and I got concerned they might burn out. Other people seemed not even in touch with what was going on, and so I’d say, “Wouldn’t you like to get involved, in prayer and in offering constructive alternatives So I spent time either calming people down or waking them up.

Rhoden: I found myself doing a lot of damage control, trying to deal with people’s feelings. Someone would call and say, “I’m upset about the way this has been handled,” and I’d get drawn into that.

Some ugly things were said about “supporting his vision,” and I had to work through those.

Sturtz: You hear some amazing stories. For example, “Lloyd’s building a monument to himself.”

Leadership: How do you deal with a charge like that?

Sturtz: Smile and say, “Boy, if you ever get the chance to build a monument for yourself, I hope you get to go through what I’m going through.” (Laughter)

Leadership: What are the temptations for a pastor in the midst of a financial crisis?

Gay: To cut and run, to sell used cars.

Rhoden: Oh, yes. I saw what the situation was doing to my family, and I thought, I don’t need this. Let somebody else deal with it. But that would have been reacting rather than responding.

Sturtz: Another temptation is to let anger build. When that member decided to put the gift in a will, I felt angry and frustrated. I thought we had been shafted.

Rhoden: It’s a temptation during crisis to become a fixer rather than a builder. As a pastor, you’re the builder; you’re responsible for the long haul. But when a money crunch comes, you want to put a Band-Aid on the situation.

Looking back at our “Day of Victory,” I realize I was trying to fix the problem in a hurry. If I could do it over, I would say, “Folks, we owe a lot of money. We’re not going to fix this in one Sunday. It’s going to take a process, and we’re going to build over time until we come out of this.”

Another example of “fixing” things is that we stopped putting out a weekly bulletin. People came one Sunday, and there was no bulletin. I had to explain, “There wasn’t enough money for it.” I would never do that again. That creates such a strong negative statement, and we were saving something like $13. But in a crisis, all you can think of is solving a problem rather than making the best decision for the long haul.

Smith: I know what you’re saying, but at times you’re forced to apply some Band-Aids. With only a few days’ warning, we had to draft a lean budget for the bank to examine before it would extend a line of credit. It had zeros for certain staff people. We had warned them that might happen, but we didn’t have time to give them official notice. Later, one associate resigned and then de-resigned in the midst of this. When you have situations like that, you have to do a lot of extra mustard plastering. I had to major in seventeen-minute conversations, which usually began, “Pastor, I’ve got a concern.”

Is that putting on Band-Aids? It’s not just damage control; it’s ministry.

Sturtz: I faced another temptation because I felt guilty. If I had not been interested in reaching the community, in helping the church grow, we would never have needed the building. I wondered, Are you sure you heard the Lord correctly when he said to build? I felt so guilty about it that finally I went to a psychologist friend and said, “I’m dying inside. Something’s wrong with me. Talk to me.” We talked for hours, and I finally realized I wouldn’t do anything differently were I doing it over again. I’d want the money in the bank before I turned a spade of dirt, but I believe in people. I believe they want the church to grow and to do the ministry of the Lord.

But it took me a while to get there. There were times when I considered buying a $2 million keyman insurance policy and doing away with myself to get the church out of its crisis. I know I could never have gone through with my intentions. But there were times I contemplated that, because I hurt so much for the congregation and felt so guilty.

Leadership: Now that you have some distance from that situation, do you think accepting blame was a realistic assessment? Did the congregation hold you responsible?

Sturtz: No the congregation never blamed me.

Leadership: Even if a pastor has no responsibility for the crisis, how much is the pastor responsible for getting the church out of it?

Gay: You want an honest answer? Inside the gut of every pastor is the feeling that if he’s good at what he does, there will be enough resources to carry on the work of the church. It’s based on the old saying, “If you do God’s work in God’s way, you’ll never lack God’s supply.” But what happens is that when you don’t see God’s supply, you think you must not be doing God’s work in God’s way. Yet I see people ministering in the middle of Chicago and in South India who do God’s business in God’s way and yet have no resources, financially speaking.

My responsibility as a pastor is to nurture a climate in which people can free their resources to support God’s work. I do that primarily through teaching the Word of God so that conviction- internal motivation by the Holy Spirit-takes place, rather than external motivation.

Sturtz: In the United Methodist Church we’re ordained to “Word, Order, and Sacrament.” We stress the Word and the sacraments, but the responsibility for order, administration, also comes to the pastor. So when something goes wrong, for whatever reason, it’s the old Harry Truman statement: “The buck stops here.”

Leadership: During the money crunch, what gave you hope?

Sturtz: In the midst of the crisis, friends and colleagues would come by. Some would drive a couple of hundred miles just to say, “We want to take you to lunch; we want to pray with you.” And that made it possible for me to put my arm around people in the congregation and pray with them.

Rhoden: Adversity has a way of bringing out optimism in some people. Both of my parents were killed when I was two; a drunk ran over them. I don’t have any brothers and sisters, and my grandmother brought me up in below-poverty-line conditions. But she always told me, “God loves you and will be with you. Don’t measure who you are as a person by your outward circumstances.” I’ve never forgotten that. During the worst of our situation, something inside didn’t have time to give them of ficial notice. Later, one associate resigned and then de-resigned in the midst of this. When you have situations like that, you have to do a lot of extra mustard plastering. I had to major in seventeen-minute conversations, which usually began, “Pastor, I’ve got a concern.”

Is that putting on Band-Aids? It’s not just damage control; it’s ministry.

Sturtz: I faced another temptation because I felt guilty. If I had not been interested in reaching the community, in helping the church grow, we would never have needed the building. I wondered, Are you sure you heard the Lord correctly when he said to build? I felt so guilty about it that finally I went to a psychologist friend and said, “I’m dying inside. Something’s wrong with me. Talk to me.” We talked for hours, and I finally realized I wouldn’t do anything differently were I doing it over again. I’d want the money in the bank before I turned a spade of dirt, but I believe in people. I believe they want the church to grow and to do the ministry of the Lord.

But it took me a while to get there. There were times when I considered buying a $2 million keyman insurance policy and doing away with myself to get the church out of its crisis. I know I could never have gone through with my intentions. But there were times I contemplated that, because I hurt so much for the congregation and felt so guilty.

Leadership: Now that you have some distance from that situation, do you think accepting blame was a realistic assessment? Did the congregation hold you responsible?

Sturtz: No the congregation never blamed me.

Leadership: Even if a pastor has no responsibility for the crisis, how much is the pastor responsible for getting the church out of it?

Gay: You want an honest answer? Inside the gut of every pastor is the feeling that if he’s good at what he does, there will be enough resources to carry on the work of the church. It’s based on the old saying, “If you do God’s work in God’s way, you’ll never lack God’s supply.” But what happens is that when you don’t see God’s supply, you think you must not be doing God’s work in God’s way. Yet I see people ministering in the middle of Chicago and in South India who do God’s business in God’s way and yet have no resources, financially speaking.

My responsibility as a pastor is to nurture a climate in which people can free their resources to support God’s work. I do that primarily through teaching the Word of God so that conviction- internal motivation by the Holy Spirit-takes place, rather than external motivation.

Sturtz: In the United Methodist Church we’re ordained to “Word, Order, and Sacrament.” We stress the Word and the sacraments, but the responsibility for order, administration, also comes to the pastor. So when something goes wrong, for whatever reason, it’s the old Harry Truman statement: “The buck stops here.”

Leadership: During the money crunch, what gave you hope?

Sturtz: In the midst of the crisis, friends and colleagues would come by. Some would drive a couple of hundred miles just to say, “We want to take you to lunch; we want to pray with you.” And that made it possible for me to put my arm around people in the congregation and pray with them.

Rhoden: Adversity has a way of bringing out optimism in some people. Both of my parents were killed when I was two; a drunk ran over them. I don’t have any brothers and sisters, and my grandmother brought me up in below-poverty-line conditions. But she always told me, “God loves you and will be with you. Don’t measure who you are as a person by your outward circumstances.” I’ve never forgotten that. During the worst of our situation, something inside said, God is sovereign. It’s bad, and I don’t know if it’ll ever get better, but I think it will, and I’m gonna keep on going.

Gay: I ask myself, What is this self-pity that says I have to have funding at a certain level or feedback that I’m successful? Maybe good theology does result in good psychology after all.

Leadership: What do you wish you’d known going into the crisis that you know now?

Smith: I would like to have known it was going to happen, to have a few months’ lead time to soften the impact. But when I look back, I realize the Lord was preparing us spiritually for some of this, tuning us to be responsive to him.

Gay: That crisis is part of life. If I presume to be an undershepherd, why should my experience be different than the Chief Shepherd’s, whose life was a series of crises? I expect the current crisis to pass at some point if God so wills. And I expect another period of crisis to occur entirely beyond my ability to imagine it. Life is like that.

Sturtz: I would like to have grasped going in what my colleagues reaffirmed for me: You are not in control, Lloyd, but God is, and you can trust him.

Maybe I also needed to know the faithfulness of the congregation. Had I looked at what they had done previously, I could have seen they weren’t going to desert me.

Rhoden: It’s important to keep in mind that crisis is not all there is. That’s hard to do when you’re in the middle of one.

Gay: Right; crisis is not where we dwell. It’s a great privilege to be part of the fellowship I serve.

In preparation for our discussion today, I tried to recall past difficulties, and though we’ve had some, I had trouble remembering the details. The painful situations are overshadowed by recollections of ministry. Maybe I have the spiritual gift of amnesia. (Laughter)

Leadership: Are there any benefits from a time of shortage?

Gay: After the acrimony of the business meeting a few weeks ago, people began to come to prayer time. Our prayer meetings have been better than they’ve been in the last ten years, because people realize prayer’s the only answer. I’ve been praying to the Lord for years, “Do whatever you need to do to get people to pray.” If it’s taken this situation to bring it about, then I accept what’s happening. Crisis causes people to be the most spiritual they’ve ever been.

In my own life, each of the crises through which our church has gone has made me dig deeply into the only thing I have, and that’s my call from the Holy Spirit. When I was a kid, 7 or 8 years old in LaSalle Street Church in Chicago, I committed myself to serve in the pastorate. In every crisis I’ve dug deeply on that, and I’ve found that call to lead a church to be substantial and secure.

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

When We Don’t Get No Respect

Doug Jackson

What an appropriate response to those who belittle the work of the ministry?

The question caught me off guard. "Do you work?"

I studied my next-door neighbor's features carefully. No, he wasn't joking. He just wanted to know.

I had been in my church for about six weeks when my neighbor threw that uppercut to my ego. I'd told him about my pastorate. I'd even talked about my faith in Jesus Christ and invited him to church. And yet just a few weeks later, he flung that insulting question at me without the hint of a smile.

With what dignity I could manage, I reminded him I was the pastor of the First Baptist Church. Oh, he remembered that, he said. But he sold real estate, and he was just looking for a few good men to consolidate his network "I'm sure your weekly message must take a lot of work," he offered, "but surely not so much that you couldn't move a little property on the side."

I never again tried to talk with him about spiritual things; in fact, I could barely find the self-respect to talk to him about the weather.

A few months later, a troubled church member sat in my office talking about his frustration at being in his mid-thirties and still scratching out a living as a day laborer. "What do you think you will do if you ever leave the ministry?" he suddenly asked. "Will you get a regular job, or what?" I didn't reply to his unintended insult, but inside I was angry.

Why does it seem that respect is so hard to come by in the ministry? With the general disrespect of our secular society for professional "holy men" compounded by the sexual vagaries of some famous evangelists, all of us feel, from time to time, like Moses, the tame raven who represents religion in George Orwell's Animal Farm:

Moses, who was Mr. Jones's special pet, was a spy and a tale bearer, but he was also a clever talker. He claimed to know of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. It was situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, Moses said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges. The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but many of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain.

There may be some very secure pastors who never worry about respect-gospel gladiators who clank around in armor-plated psyches and dare the world to turn thumbs down. I lack that hard shell. My self-respect is vulnerable to a disrespectful society. In the face of society's scorn, I sometimes nurse my wounded pride and ponder a career selling timeshare condos.

After seven years in ministry I'm still seeking a final answer to the problem of respect. But a few changes of attitude and action have helped me learn to respect my work and to begin to teach others to respect it as well.

Respecting Yourself

The first thing I've learned is that ultimately respect must come from within, from my own understanding of the importance of the work God has called me to do. No esteem anyone else can give me can take the place of self-respect.

I find it easy to make the mistake of seeking self-respect from others rather than from within.

A few years back, a commercial for laundry soap proposed an interesting solution to an especially nasty stain: Shout it out! I notice pastors sometimes attempting to find security in a similar way: we try to drown out our inward insecurity with outward noise. Psychologist Wayne Oates calls it "overshouting the doubt."

Perhaps our most common method of overshouting the inward doubt is by collecting testimonials to our greatness. Of course, everyone needs reassurance now and then. I've learned not to reject sincere expressions of appreciation; a simple "thank you" when someone compliments a sermon seems more sincere to me than falsely modest protests. But it is important not to become addicted to praise. If I'm not careful, I can find myself baiting the hooks of praise and trading my calling as a fisher of men for one as a fisher of compliments.

It's a pitfall I try to, but don't always, avoid. Like the wicked queen of "Snow White," I'm tempted to linger before sycophantic mirrors who chant, "You are the fairest of them all." But I've discovered the respect that comes only from others' praise doesn't last. In fact, it promotes only more insecurity: like the wicked queen, those who become too dependent upon it often end up spreading poison apples around to ruin the reputations of others who threaten them.

My response to critics gives me another clue when I'm not working at self-respect from within. For a time, I felt compelled to talk back to anyone who besmirched the dignity of the ministry. I wrote angry letters to the local religion editor after she slandered "raving fundamentalist preachers." I shouted at the television set when I saw unflattering portrayals of pastors. I rehearsed my grievances against religion's critics to my bewildered wife.

But the more I talked, the angrier I became. The doubt was too loud to overshout. In the end, I discovered I was really working to convince myself, not my detractors.

Ministry, and not debate, is the key to self-respect. The best way to respect the ministry is to minister. Every time I hear another fallen-preacher joke or see a sit-com parson portrayed as an inept hypocrite, I seek an opportunity to meet needs in the name of Christ. I sit awhile in the hospital beside someone who is a mass of pain and surgical tubing; I hold a blue-veined hand in a dreary nursing home; I get out of bed at 2:00 A.M. to settle a dish-cracking battle between troubled newlyweds. I minister for a while and learn to respect my ministry.

For me, the ultimate source for self-respect is offering the gospel to those who've never received it. That's become my cure-all for professional anxiety. I don't win all of those to whom I witness; indeed, I win only a fraction of them. But I always return from outreach with renewed respect for the way I spend my life.

I have learned that the search for respect will end in failure as long as it remains a matter of "overshouting the doubt." The real answer lies in developing an inner respect for the work to which God has called me.

Genuine Respectability

A second thing I've learned about respect is that you can't expect it unless you deserve it.

I got a speeding ticket not long ago. My wife encouraged me to fight it. After all, she pointed out, I had the right to be heard in court, and having the violation on my record could increase our insurance premiums. So why not take on the system?

"Because," I replied, "I'm guilty."

A similar dynamic operates in our search for respect. At times, I haven't deserved respect. It's no wonder I couldn't command it.

When I first became a pastor, I soon realized my schedule was largely at my discretion. In a small church with no other staff, not even a secretary, no one really knew how early I came or left, or what I did while I was there. Frustration over conflicts I was having with church members added further incentive to avoid my responsibilities. I found the snooze button on my alarm an incredibly easy target on a cold morning.

John W. Drakeford, in his book Psychology in Search of a Soul, cites the results of a survey of pastors who'd left the ministry. One of the chief factors turned out to be what Drakeford calls the "temptation to indolence." A pastor is self-employed, punches no time clock, and isn't paid by the piece. Consequently, some pastors find themselves falling into the habit of looking busy while accomplishing very little. That frustration, Drakeford found, eventually drove them from the ministry.

I can sometimes fool my church members about my activity-or lack of it. But I cannot fool myself. If I know that despite the number of meetings I attended or charts I produced I have actually put in a week of short, empty hours, I don't have the nerve to demand respect from those around me.

My answer has been to develop a workman-like attitude toward my calling. I try to keep regular hours. I get out of bed in the morning and go to the office, just like those people with "regular jobs." Of course, my schedule is not so easy to control as some people's; what begins at 9:00 A.M. may finally fade out somewhere in the weary blur of midnight, and I have to make up the rest some other time. Still, the effort to be stable in my work habits earns greater regard from those around me.

I also insist on good sermon preparation. I've sworn off the "Saturday Night Special," a snub-nosed homily cheaply manufactured from an old volume of Spurgeon. I try to study hard and according to a regular pattern. I try not to prevent the Spirit from overriding my plan, but I never expect him to override my lack of one.

Most important, I take my product seriously. When I entered the full-time ministry, I had no regular, daily time of prayer and Bible reading. But, like a vegetarian butcher or a pacifist Marine, that's an awkward position. I can't recommend to my parishioners what I'm not practicing myself. I now attempt to discipline myself to a regular regimen of Bible reading, prayer, and Scripture memory.

In short, I can't get respect for my ministry unless I've put forth effort that deserves respect.

Expect Respect

Not long ago, I attended a conference for pastors and youth workers. As our car pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a lot of people were sitting in their cars, wondering what to do. One of the men with us was a retired Marine major. He jumped right out of the car and began looking for the room where the session would be held. That caused an interesting response: all the rest of us got out and followed him. He acted like he expected to be followed, and we trailed along.

This is a third lesson I've learned about respect: you get respect when you act like you expect it. Of course, if it were that easy, we'd all be respected. It isn't. Misconceptions hinder us from expecting respect.

One that has troubled me is a false concept of humility. Somewhere along the line, some well-meaning soul had convinced me that Christian humility removed any expectation of respect. The humble Christian, I believed, knows he has nothing of his own of which to be proud. So how can he insist on respect?

That misconception troubled me for years. My first step in learning to expect respect was to tear false humility from my mind and replace it with true humility. I came to see that real humility is not so much a denial of gifts as it is a recognition of them. And recognizing that they've come from Someone other than myself.

This definition places the emphasis on the word gift. "What do you have," asks Paul, "that you did not receive?"

A preacher who acknowledges his gifts is like the person who operates a bulldozer. The bulldozer jockey sits atop a clanking mass of machinery capable of altering entire landscapes. The operator does not confuse the machine's abilities with his own; he would never attempt, by himself, to move the hulking mounds of earth that lie before him. But just because the machine's strength isn't his own doesn't mean he neglects or abuses the machine. Instead, he carefully protects it and would never allow anyone to vandalize it.

Similarly, ministers employ gifts God has invested in them. They know the gifts aren't their own, yet they also realize that, if they are to do the job God has given them, those gifts must be developed and cared for.

And they insist that others don't vandalize those gifts. People vandalize the ministry subtly. They usually don't spray-paint obscenities across our sides but punch small holes into our working parts-minute damage that can eventually destroy us. When I see vandals at work, I try to stop them.

For example, I take a dim view of jokes about my ministry-jokes like, "What do you do the other six days of the week?" I suppose it would demonstrate a certain amount of security to brush off such remarks. But I care too much for the ministry to ignore them.

Early in my ministry I discovered a way to stop that kind of joke: don't laugh. No punishment known to humanity can compare with the embarrassment of having a joke fail. If this seems rude, pause to consider how rude it is to make fun of someone else's work.

Another way I show I expect respect is to let God define my calling, and then stick to that definition. Many times we feel that we must minister in every way other people tell us to, that our vocation has no definite shape other than to respond to that which others ask of us. Our congregations, taking their cues from our uncertainty, may assume the reason our ministries have no central focus is that they have no relevance to the age in which we live. The church becomes in their minds a quaint social throwback on the order of the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park, surviving only to adorn the real activities of society. No wonder we find our schedules burdened with trivia, and our worship services more concerned with advertisements for the Girl Scout cookie sale and the scrap-paper drive than with preaching the gospel!

I try to keep a narrow focus to my ministry: the eternal work of curing souls. True, I pay a price for this. Some people have left our church to find one that would support the community blood drive or announce the Lions Club car wash. Still, people eventually get the idea that our church is an independent entity with goals and purposes of its own. If popularity is the goal, my method may be a failure; judged, however, in terms of respect, it's a success.

The Semantics of Respect

A fourth lesson I've learned is that we can teach people to respect the ministry by the words we use when we talk to them about it.

In Victorian England, tables and chairs did not have legs; they had limbs. Women had neither, since no one dared refer to any part of their anatomy south of the Adam's apple. Such word games seem silly to us now. Parts of a chair by any other names don't tempt us to break commandments. And clearly the Victorians, to judge by the lives of their writers and artists, were quite familiar with the female of the species, whether or not they had names for all her body parts.

Christians can play similar word games. A woman once berated me for saying I was "hired" to do the work of ministry. She gave me a 20-minute lecture on the evils of trying to serve God and mammon.

I'm well aware of the dangers of a hireling ministry. But I'm also aware of the dangers of a professional religious elite who refuse to soil their hands with anything so mundane as common toil. If we make workplace words too dirty for the ministry, we run the risk of making productive labor an obscenity in the ministry as well.

I have added a few terms to my vocabulary. I practice saying them daily, not in front of a mirror but in front of church members. All of them are short and fit easily into common conversation. I begin with the word work, as in "No, I cannot go fishing tomorrow. I have to work." How about job? "I'm glad you liked the sermon. I tried to do a good job on it." Add to the list words like hard and tired, as in "I've worked hard today, and I'm tired."

My congregation consists primarily of blue-collar laborers. Because I describe my ministry using the words they use to describe their own work, they've gained a new appreciation for what I do when I'm out of the pulpit. Not all of them understand work that has primarily to do with study and mental exertion, but they all know that their pastor "works" and seem to regard his activities as his "job," and it seems to help all of us. I don't defend my work to them; I don't think I need to. I simply describe it to them in terms they recognize.

And it helps them to respect the work God has asked me to do.

When in Doubt, Minister

All of these ideas have proven to have some value for me. But they contain not even the slightest amount of magic. Even with these principles in practice, I haven't seen a change in everyone's regard for my calling, nor have I always felt self-respect.

For me, the best answer to disrespect for the ministry remains: when in doubt, minister. Whether or not people give us the appreciation we think we deserve, ultimately our calling comes down to a choice to give ourselves in service for God no matter what the cost.

In a letter to his brother, Mark Twain once described his work as "a 'call' to literature of a low order-i.e., humorous." Said Twain, "It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit."

Whatever the world thinks of what I'm called to do, whether people regard it as a high calling or low, it remains my calling. I have invested my life in it for God's sake.

Even in the midst of my deepest doubts, when the noise of a disrespectful world drowns out the reassurances of others, I know the Father has called me.

He respects me. It is for him that I minister.

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

AFTER A SUICIDE

Randy Christian

What is the best way to serve those left behind?

Cottonbro Studio / Pexels

Perhaps this hasn't happened to you, but it has certainly happened to others.

The secretary hands you a note. Emergency, it says. Call home.

Your throat is dry as you punch the buttons on the phone in your office. When your spouse answers after a single ring, the hello seems scared, forlorn, raw from crying.

Two minutes later you hang up the phone. Your hand is trembling. Your throat feels swollen. All you can do is stare at the wall. You've just learned that your son, age 17, has been killed in a car accident.

A mistake, you think at first. I saw him just a few hours ago. He can't be dead.

You feel dizzy as you tell the others that you have to leave. You offer no explanations, and quizzical looks follow you as you hurry out. It is all you can do to get into your car, turn the key, and drive home.

Somewhere in your numbness, guilt and anger flash. I shouldn't have let him drive. His friends shouldn't have asked him to come. He shouldn't have gone. God shouldn't have let it happen!

By the time you reach the hospital, you have felt more emotions than you ever thought possible, from guilt to helplessness to rage to grief. And there is the numbness, a feeling that makes you feel dead yourself-but does not stop the pain.

In the hospital chapel, you ask questions of a doctor and a policeman: "Was … was it quick? How did it happen?"

Though you didn't think it possible, you're thrown into deeper darkness by their answers. The police officer says quietly, "Your son drove his car into a concrete abutment. He left a note with a friend. It was suicide."

You sit, disbelieving, as it slowly sinks in. Your son didn't just die; he decided to die. It is the ultimate rejection: For some reason he felt it was better not to live than to live with you.

Finally the tears come. You sob with guilt for allowing your son's death to happen, even though you don't know how you could have prevented it. You feel guilty on his behalf, somehow, for this self-murder.

During the sleepless night that follows, your sense of rejection sours into bitterness. How could he have done this to me? Your grief turns to shame as you think of explaining this to relatives, friends, the congregation. As this shame takes hold, you begin to feel a loneliness so intense you doubt anyone could penetrate it.

This exercise in imagination only hints at the emotional whirlpool that swirls around those bereaved by suicide. The grief felt by someone who has lost a loved one to suicide is usually more terrible than most of us can imagine.

When suicide strikes, the survivors often find that few friends are able or willing to help. Often a pastor is called to the suicide scene, home, or hospital to comfort the survivors.

When I first faced suicide bereavement, I was a police chaplain, called to assist a family whose son had shot himself in the head with a shotgun. I had no idea what to do, what to say, or what in the long run would be healthy for the family.

Since then I've had opportunities to serve many families who were bereaved by suicide. Those experiences, along with the insights of others I've worked with in this ministry, have helped me train pastors, police officers, police chaplains, and counselors. I've found that we can have a tremendous ministry to those left behind by suicide, even in the midst of their shock and sorrow.

Being honest with painful facts

The first and perhaps most important insight I've gained is the need to be honest. This starts with speaking plainly to the survivors, saying "suicide" instead of euphemisms like "the unfortunate incident."

This isn't easy. The awkwardness of grief tempts us to hide from the truth. Those bereaved by suicide are tempted to avoid the painful fact that a loved one took his or her life. But hiding from that fact only makes it harder to recover from the grief.

Clara tried to hide. When she was a young woman, her husband died in a tragic "accident." She lived in a small town where everyone knew she and Jim had been having marital problems and that Jim had been deeply depressed.

Clara suspected Jim's death was suicide when the police explained the circumstances. She heard the cruel gossip of those who picked up rumors concerning the coroner's findings. She knew that many in town were saying Jim had killed himself-and that the coroner, an old family friend, was trying to ease Clara's pain by ruling it an accidental death. In fact, the rumors were true.

Years later, when her son was old enough to question his father's death, Clara was forced to face the reality: Jim had committed suicide. The shock and shame were too much for her; admitting the years of deception and accepting the suicide of her husband nearly crippled her emotionally. Clara's friends had done her no favor by helping her hide from the truth.

No one is comfortable with the reality of suicide. No one should expect to be comfortable talking about it or even thinking about it. But I've found that grieving can't be completed, and healing can't come, if dishonesty takes over.

Honesty, of course, doesn't mean emotional brutality or insensitivity. The facts can be faced gently and lovingly. We don't have to pretend we aren't afraid, awkward, or hurting. In fact, when we show these feelings, we assure the bereaved that it's all right for them to feel and express these emotions.

Accepting "outrageous" feelings

We must not short-circuit survivors' feelings, no matter how objectionable. Hearing and accepting feelings is an important part of this ministry, but it can be tough-as it was when I went to see Mark's family.

Mark had shot himself. Now his family was so intensely angry at him that some members actually wished he were alive again just so they could kill him!

My first reaction was to try to calm them down. "You don't really mean that, do you?" I asked.

The answer from Mark's sister was cold and clear: "You bet I do!" As I looked into the eyes of that suffering woman, I knew she was serious.

But somehow when she voiced these feelings, she was released from their power. Eventually she was able to let go of her hate and to deal with the loss she felt. Had I successfully stifled her comment, this might not have happened.

I learned a valuable lesson: Everyone has a right-even a need-to feel and express such feelings. Mark's sister could no more stop her rage than I could stop a cloud from passing over my head. She needed to face that rage, and when she did, she eventually was able to control it.

We need to be ready to hear and accept a wide range of emotions. Some survivors feel intense anger and hatred; others experience remorse or guilt. Still others may feel a sense of relief or even peace and happiness.

The question is not whether people should have these feelings. The feelings are there. The question is this: What feelings are there, and what is the healthiest way to express them?

When I feel survivors' emotions are too extreme or not deep enough, I force myself to listen, to hear out people without cutting them short. This frees people to experience grief in their own way and sets an example for other family members. It says, "I'm open to listening to any feelings you might have, and you need to do the same for each other."

Leaving judgment to a higher court

I remember John, who seemed to be handling his mother's suicide as well as could be expected. But every night he would wake up, tormented by the thought his mother was in hell because of what she had done.

Had God condemned her for killing herself? Theologians have long debated the question of a suicide's eternal destination, but I could find no justification for John's fear in Scripture. I encouraged him to trust God, the only one who could judge his mother. John began to do so. As he did, his focus changed from what his mother had done to what God had done for both of them.

Leaving judgment to God is especially important for church leaders, who are often seen by the bereaved as God's bodily representatives. By refusing to pass judgment on the one who committed suicide-even when the bereaved want such a judgment-we encourage the survivors to leave judgment in God's hands.

This does not mean offering false hope. Many grieving relatives have approached me, asking of a loved one, "Is she with God?"

Hard as it is, the only right answer for me is, "I don't know."

Judgment is no more my right when I want to pardon than when I want to condemn. My role is to remind the bereaved that God is the only rightful Judge, and that the basis of his judgment is our relationship with Christ.

Replacing rejection with acceptance

Life may be filled with rejections-an unkind word, failure to listen, walking out in the middle of a conversation-but none compares with the rejection felt by many survivors. To them the person who committed suicide has said, "I don't want to be around you-ever."

A friend, a police chaplain, was able to help in such a case. He met with a young woman whose husband had killed himself while arguing with her. Just before the husband pulled the trigger of his revolver, he shouted, "I'll show you!"

The young wife was devastated. She felt that her husband, who a few years earlier had committed himself to spending his life with her, had chosen to end his life to get out of that commitment. She had been rejected in such a final and horrible way that she believed she was the most worthless person alive.

My friend sat with her for hours. He called her the next day. He stopped in to see her occasionally after that. By his words and actions he was saying, "God accepts you." Had he not been there, she might not have believed this message.

Offering this type of acceptance can be time-consuming, and the bereaved can become too dependent on the helping person's presence. To avoid these problems, the primary helper can, without breaking contact with the person, introduce others who also will care. This shows the bereaved that others also accept her.

Remembering the power of presence

The temptation is to think we must have exactly the right words for the bereaved. It helps to realize the value of simply being there.

On one of the first suicide calls I received, I was asked to sit with the family members in their dining room while the police and coroner worked on the other side of the house to examine the scene and remove the body. It was a small house; we could hear virtually every word, every sound.

I asked family members whether they would prefer to leave the house while the coroner finished his work. They declined and sat silently. For ten minutes I tried to start conversations that might have some meaning to the survivors, but in vain. So I asked whether it would be all right if I just sat with them. They agreed.

For more than an hour and a half, we sat. Occasionally someone would shift his or her weight, and our eyes would meet as if we were all having some kind of visual conference. I have never been more uncomfortable than I was in that dining room, but I felt the family needed someone.

When the coroner and police had gone, I stayed for another hour. By the time I left, I doubt if we had spoken for even fifteen minutes.

The next day I was asked to conduct the funeral because the family had no church home. During the months that followed, I had sporadic contact with them. All that time I felt defeated. I don't have what they need, I thought. If only someone else had been available to them.

Nearly a year after the suicide, a friend mentioned seeing one of the family members. "I don't know what you did," he told me, "but they sure are grateful to you."

All I had done was commit myself to being with them. Had I continued my drive toward conversation that day, I don't believe the result would have been so positive. Those family members needed someone who would simply be with them and hurt with them. Now I purposely allow a period of silence at such times; survivors usually comment on that when they talk to me later.

The amount of time spent "being there" depends on the helper's schedule, of course. I've found that one to three hours in the beginning is usually sufficient-and needed-to show the family I care. During that time I don't leave family members alone unless they ask me to. I know they don't want me there forever, but they want to sense I'm committed to them.

Pointing to forgiveness

When I spend time with survivors, I find that two kinds of forgiveness may be needed. The first involves the survivor who hungers to be forgiven, who feels somehow responsible for the suicide. "If only I had watched him more closely," this person mourns. "If only I had been more loving, or let her see her boyfriend, or … "

Sometimes the "if onlys" have enough legitimacy to cause great pain. For example, Janet's family knew she was considering suicide. They kept watch, driving past her home every fifteen minutes or so to check on her. On one of those drive-bys, they saw her car running in the driveway and investigated. There was Janet, sitting in the car with the windows rolled up-except where a vacuum hose from the exhaust pipe was pouring fumes through a back window.

They had arrived early enough; Janet was not injured. Removing the hose, they moved the young woman into her house and discussed what to do. Should they call the police or take Janet to the emergency room? Janet assured them she would not try anything else that night; she only wanted to get some sleep. Finally the family took Janet's car keys and the vacuum hose and left.

But Janet had a duplicate set of keys and another hose. The next morning, neighbors found her in the car. Dead.

The members of Janet's family knew they had made a bad decision. They kept bringing this up when I met with them, and it would have been dishonest of me to deny it. But I could show them that they could be forgiven for their error.

My first step was to show that I could forgive them. They needed to see in my actions that Christ was willing to forgive them, too. Then they needed to understand how to forgive themselves. Over the next several months I kept reassuring them that forgiveness was available; in time they accepted it.

Theological discourses are not the cure for people like those in Janet's family. But a simple sharing of Christ's love for us and his willingness to forgive our sins is always appropriate. I try to explain the concrete, practical side of forgiveness. "I know you don't feel forgiven right now," I might say, "and you probably shouldn't expect to. Forgiveness is more of an action than a feeling. It's deciding not to make a person pay for what he or she has done. That's what God does for us in Christ-not making us pay for our sin. If God forgives you, then you can forgive yourself, too."

When a survivor feels unforgiven, it may help to explain that he feels angry with himself for not preventing the suicide. The anger is rooted in hurt, and he will probably feel angry with himself as long as he feels the hurt. But he doesn't have to act on the anger by refusing to accept forgiveness.

"Think about what you're doing to yourself," I might say. "You don't have to keep punishing yourself, constantly reminding yourself of what you did, depriving yourself of the help you could be getting from others. You can decide, step by step, to accept God's forgiveness, forgive yourself, learn from your mistake, and maybe help someone else." Once this is accomplished, the survivor is free to move ahead in the grieving process.

A second kind of forgiveness is the ability to forgive the person who committed suicide.

This was the case with a boy named Jack. Only 13 years old, he had experienced the ultimate rejection from his father, who had killed himself. He needed help to forgive the father who had left him.

No matter how many explanations Jack heard about his father's mental state, no matter how many times he was told about the pressures his father had felt, it didn't help. Jack couldn't change his anger and resentment.

The first step in helping Jack was to let him see others forgiving his father-not condoning the man's action, but showing a willingness to forgive. Then it was important to help Jack see that refusing to forgive was not hurting his father, it was hurting himself.

It took a long time for Jack to accept his father's imperfection, but eventually the boy was able to forgive and proceed with his grief.

When the next call comes

There are no sure-fire formulas for helping those left behind by suicide. There may be times when we feel out of our league and need to refer. But that need not keep us from answering the next call from a stunned survivor.

Standing with those who have experienced the pain of suicide is a special opportunity to serve. As helpers, we become special to the survivors because we are there. To them we represent God, and they usually take seriously our ambassadorship. That does not require perfect performance on our part. It does give us a chance to model the compassion and forgiveness offered by the One who sent us.

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

Grinnin’ Down Bears

Robert K. Oglesby

According to legend, Davy Crockett, without a weapon, subdued a bear. Asked how he did it, he replied that he just “grinned the bear down.”

Ask ministers what their biggest dilemma is, and they’ll likely say it’s problem people in the church, our equivalent of hungry bears. I’ve made two big mistakes with the bears in my ministry.

My first inclination has been to fight it out with my critics. I’ve stood foursquare for truth, defended my ground, proved my case-and lost the fight. I won the war of words, but with things never again the same in the relationship, it wasn’t much of a victory.

I’ve also tried a second tactic: apologizing when I didn’t think I was wrong. That made for peace, but I felt ravaged inside afterward. I wanted to fight and felt like a wimp for giving in.

Fortunately, my years in the ministry have helped me discover a more satisfying third option. In this approach I neither fight aggressively nor passively submit to a clawing; instead, I grin the bear down.

A time for grinnin’

Here’s an example of how I stand my ground and disarm the grizzly. One such encounter started with that common preachers’ hazard-the after-worship attack in the hallway. One of my listeners stepped up (while I was shaking hands and extracting all the compliments possible) and said to me, “That’s the worst sermon you ever preached.”

Instead of attacking or retreating, I decided to grin him down. I used what’s been my most effective response: “You’re probably right.”

The word probably introduces the subtle possibility that the bear also could be wrong. We can rest assured, however, that the critic will hear “You’re right” and miss the word probably. But this sets the stage for a truth search, in which I may find he’s telling the truth-if I understand what he means, and if he understands what he means.

Then I used some diplomatic questions to get at the issues. “Would it be all right if I asked why you thought that was the worst sermon I ever preached?”

What could he say? He wasn’t about to admit, “No, I’m afraid to look deeply into anything I say.” Instead of attacking his case, I was asking him to explain it. I’ve been amazed at how much more agreeable bears are if I first accept their feelings rather than argue with their conclusions. There will be plenty of time later for arguing if I must, but in the beginning, I try to understand what is really being said. I’ve learned that once I understand my critic, I rarely disagree totally.

“Well, you never used to preach so hard,” my critic responded.

I listened carefully and replied, “That may be true, but I thought I had always preached that way. Perhaps I’ve not been aware of how I sound.” Note the tentative words may and perhaps. Trying to understand him promoted a sense of fair play, which compelled him to offer me the same courtesy.

I remembered that my critic had been away for some time, so I asked him, “Is it possible you might have changed some during the months you were away? For instance, what kind of preacher did you listen to while you were gone?” He admitted the preaching he had been hearing in another city had little bite to it.

“Do you suppose,” I probed, “that would make me sound harsher than normal?”

“It’s possible.”

We had a bit of privacy to talk further, so I continued: “Tell me, has anything else been different in your life over these past few months while you’ve been gone?”

After some thought, he admitted he’d been associating with different kinds of people than was his usual custom. “It’s possible my preaching has deteriorated,” I admitted, “but could it also be possible that the changes in your life might make my preaching seem harder than you remember it?”

My question was designed not so much to argue with him but to understand him, and I worked to communicate that feeling with my voice and posture. Eventually, he admitted his recent lifestyle was probably counter to what I’d always preached.

At that point I said, “Then I think you’re probably correct. From your standpoint, this was likely the worst sermon you ever heard me preach.” In saying that, I let him know I understood where he was coming from and was receiving his comment not from my background but from his.

I kidded him that from my standpoint, if we were going to have a “Robert’s Worst Sermon” contest, some of my other sermons ought to be given a fair chance in the competition. In twenty years of preaching at that church, surely some of my really bad sermons deserved honorable mention. Even the bear cracked a smile.

We worked through our encounter on a win-win basis. My bear got to growl, but I also clarified that on an objective basis this was likely not my worst sermon ever. My critic also recognized that perhaps he had changed at least as much as my preaching.

Disarming and fair

There are right ways and wrong ways to stand your ground. I try to be both disarming and fair.

For instance, I ask myself, Is this a form of manipulation? Obviously, it can be. If I’m clever enough, I can use it as a deceitful psychological club. Unless I am on a truth search, it can become nothing more than gamesmanship.

What do I mean by a truth search? Simply being willing to find the truth. For example, saying “You’re probably right” must not be a gimmick. I’m not deceitful when I say it, because I’ve found few of us (me included) say exactly what we mean the first time. I give people the credit for possibly being right.

Then, however, I need to ferret out what’s behind their perception of the situation. A truth seeker enters the encounter willing to accept whatever is real. After all, it’s entirely possible that it might have been my worst sermon ever! Manipulators, on the other hand, keep maneuvering until they get the answer they want. Manipulators eventually get caught, though. Insincerity riles bears, and things can get nasty when they smell a phony.

What are my motives? Many motives are possible, but these are my conscious ones:

First, I want to defuse an explosive situation. James says, “The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God” (1:20). Anything I can do to control anger (his and mine) will help the cause of truth.

Second, I need to understand my critic. I may not admire his attitude or his choice of words, but if I can hang in there for a while, I may receive a blessing. After all, something stirred him up. Even if he has no constructive suggestions, perhaps I can discover something helpful in his clarified criticism.

Third, I also need to make my point about what I believe to be truth. But I can say it best in a nondefensive posture. By the use of questions, Jesus corrected his opponents effectively when they strayed from the truth. I may need to do the same.

What if I can’t complete the process? The confrontation I mentioned took place in the hallway on Sunday morning. Fortunately, most of the congregation had already gone. Had the time not been available, I would have invited the bear to lunch. Time for leisurely discussion is always my preference. Since some problems cannot be delayed, however, I try to be prepared mentally to handle some confrontations immediately.

What if I successfully grin down the bear but the bear still wants my picnic basket? What if my critic and I manage to stay calm and objective but still disagree? Grinnin’ bears is designed to cool emotional heat, slow arguments, and dispel clouds of misunderstanding. If it does that, it has worked well. And if the issue remains, it will still have to be faced.

After all, right and wrong can never agree, and truth and error forever remain enemies. The big difference is that now the real issue can be handled instead of a bogus one. Likewise, truth will be better served if we both coolly continue on the truth search.

I hope I haven’t given the impression that this is an easy process. I’ve been working on this concept for twenty years. In the words of Scripture, I learned it “line upon line, precept upon precept; here a little, there a little.” Although the process is clear, it must be learned and practiced. Not many of us do this sort of thing naturally; it takes patience.

Just keep in mind the claw marks you won’t have to nurse-or the dead bears you won’t have to bury.

-Robert K. Oglesby

Waterview Church of Christ

Richardson, Texas

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

To Verify…

With this issue, LEADERSHIP introduces this new column, a companion to “To Illustrate . . .” For seven years, readers have turned to “To Illustrate . . .” for stories and illustrations that communicate with impact, and they’ve given it high marks for its usefulness in their preaching.

However, increasingly, church leaders recognize the need for an additional persuasive tool: accurate, forceful statistics. Statistics that take the pulse of society, that support or dispel assumptions, that clarify what’s happening around us.

For each “To Verify . . .” column, the editors will select current statistics of greatest value to pastors, teachers, and other Christian communicators.

Fast Facts

Percentage of Americans earning less than $15,000 a year who say they have achieved the American Dream: 5

Percentage earning more than $50,000 a year who say this: 6

Percentage of American children living with just one parent, in 1960: 10

Percentage now: 24

Current total of U.S. AIDS patients: 63,726

Estimated number by the end of 1993: 450,000

Average cost of a religious hardcover book in 1977: $12.26

In 1987: $24.22

Percentage of college freshmen who said the goal of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” is important, in 1967: 83

Percentage today: 39

Percentage of college freshmen who say “being well-off financially” is one of their top goals, today: 76

Percentage of Americans who do not believe in God: 1

Percentage of adults who attend church in a typical week, in Ireland: 87

Percentage in the U.S.: 41; in France: 12

Number of hours of leisure time each week for an American adult, in 1973: 26.2

Number of hours in 1987: 16.6

Percentage of married young adults without children who attend religious services almost every week: 27

Percentage of married young adults with children who attend religious services almost every week: 43

Percentage of unchurched teenagers who performed volunteer service last year: 16

Percentage of churched teenagers who did: 31

Rewards of Success

What do American high-achievers say is their most important reward? What drives them to accomplish?

Is it money? No, according to George Gallup, Jr., and Alee M. Gallup, authors of The Great American Success Story (Dow Jones-Irwin, 1986). Expensive possessions came in a distant tenth on a list of important rewards ranked by high-achievers.

Is it fame? Close; peer recognition was second.

But the key motivator for people who get things done is a sense of personal worth and self-respect.

The Unchurched

About 44 percent of U.S. adults are unchurched, neither belonging to a church nor visiting one in the last six months, except for holidays, weddings, or funerals. This finding came from a Gallup study, “The Unchurched American, 1988,” which also reported:

72 percent of these unchurched believe Jesus is the Son of God

63 percent believe the Bible is God’s Word

77 percent pray to God (41 percent daily)

Surprisingly, 58 percent of unchurched adults said they’re open to joining a church if they found the right one. Yet in the past year, only 38 percent were invited to one.

SOURCES – American Dream: Roper Organization, reported in Harper’s, 8/88. Single-parent families: New York Times, 1/28/88, reported in Youthworker Update, 3/88. AIDS: Government statistics, reported in the Washington Post and New York Times, 6/5/88. Book costs: Publisher’s Weekly, reported in Context, 5/15/88. College freshmen: American Council on Education survey of 290,000 college freshmen, reported in Group, 5/88. Belief in God: 100% American by Daniel Weiss (Poseidon Press, forthcoming), reported in Good Housekeeping, 10/88. Church attendance: Gallup Report by Norman Webb and Robert Wybrow (Sphere Books, Ltd., 1982). Leisure time: Survey by Louis Harris and Associates, Inc., commissioned by Philip Morris Companies, Inc. Reported in the Chicago Tribune, 3/16/88. Young marrieds’ church attendance: Princeton Religion Research Center’s PRRC Emerging Trends, 4/88. Teenagers’ service: PRRC Emerging Trends, 5/88.

Leadership Winter 1989 p. 81

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

Well-Focused Preaching

Bill Hybels

Taking a clear picture of your preaching activities requires both wide-angle and zoom lenses.

When I first began teaching publicly, as a youth minister in the early seventies, I taught in a conversational, dialogue style. After all, there were just twenty-five kids. When my material wasn’t all that useful, one of the students would raise a hand and say, “Can we move on?” Then I’d realize I was missing the mark, or I had overstayed my welcome in the Book of Leviticus, and we would move on.

I stayed with that style for more than a year, but then we started outreach programs, and all of a sudden the group jumped from 25 to 150. My teaching style soon became inappropriate for the larger group; I actually had to start putting together formal messages. In a panic, I went to a senior pastor friend and said, “I have to start giving full-blown messages to 150 high school students. What do you suggest?”

He said, “Well, if I were you, I would get a copy of Berkhof’s Manual of Christian Doctrine and just start at chapter 1 and teach these kids.” Sounded fine to me. So I read the first chapter of Berkhof, did some underlining and preparation, and that night began delivering it to a roomful of students.

Five minutes into that talk, I started to see glazed expressions. Students were looking around the room to see who was there. Others were looking at their watches, passing notes to each other, drawing on the backs of the chairs in front of them.

Right then, I knew this teaching was not useful. I was so disheartened by what was happening that I stopped about a third of the way into the message.

“I have to apologize,” I said, “for the fact that I am missing the mark tonight. What I prepared to say is obviously not on target. And I want to make a commitment to you students. If you’ll come back next week, I’m going to talk about something straight out of the Bible that is going to make a difference in your understanding of God, in your appreciation of the Christian faith, and in how you live your daily life. And if you’ll give me another opportunity, I’d like to prove that to you.”

The next week most of them returned, graciously, maybe just to humor me. But from that day on, I have lived with a sanctified terror of boring people or making the relevant Scriptures irrelevant. That experience helped me die to pride on the issue of having my teaching evaluated.

Every preacher is evaluated, one way or another, by every listener. I want to get evaluation that will help me be most effective in reaching people with God’s truth. I consider getting accurate evaluation part of my job.

The Right Questions

Constructive evaluation won’t happen, though, no matter how willing I am to receive it, unless I’m asking the right people the right questions at the right time.

By right people, I mean people with great discernment whom I have learned to trust. It will only distract, confuse, or harm me to get input from everyone. Instead, I want to go to wise counselors.

By right questions, I mean that I want to find out how I’m communicating at a variety of levels:

Each illustration-did it communicate what I intended?

Each message-did it serve its function in the series?

A year’s worth of messages-are they covering the topics and passages this congregation wants and needs to hear?

My preaching as a whole-is it helping to accomplish the goal of my ministry?

Finally, by right time, I mean I want to receive evaluation when it’s most effective. Obviously, that’s when I can do the most about it. Finding out after I deliver a message that it was slightly off track is somewhat useful. But how much more productive it is to find out before I put twenty hours into something that wasn’t well aimed. So increasingly, I ask “evaluation” questions during the planning stages before I preach. Each weekend, for example, I preach the same message three times-once on Saturday night and twice on Sunday morning. I try to get evaluation immediately following the Saturday night service, so I can make adjustments before I preach the same message two more times. As a result, some Sunday mornings have found me in my office at 5:30. But getting evaluation early keeps me from making one mistake multiple times.

Asking someone to evaluate your preaching is a delicate operation, and the people, questions, and timing are going to vary with each pastor and church. But let me share how I have tried to gain the information that would make my preaching better.

Evaluating One Sermon

The elders at Willow Creek would always respond truthfully when I asked them about the accuracy or relevancy of my preaching. But unless I asked, they wouldn’t say anything.

So over the course of time, we have formalized the process. Now the elders evaluate every message that I preach, and they give me a written response to it within minutes after I complete the message. One elder-our most discerning when it comes to preaching evaluation-collects responses from the other elders, summarizes them, and writes them on the front of a bulletin and gives it to me before I leave.

For example, on a recent Wednesday night I gave a strong call to honoring the lordship of Christ. One elder called me (though usually his comments would just be written on the bulletin) and said, “I really do appreciate all of what you said and the style and the tone of what you communicated Wednesday night. Now that you’ve made that emphasis, I feel it’s important for you to remind the people regularly in ensuing messages of the assisting work of the Holy Spirit. We need his power to submit consistently to that kind of lordship.”

I said, “Good word.” That’s the kind of correction I need, because sometimes I will feel so strongly about a subject that the sheer force of my personality causes complications I didn’t intend. People think I was angry about something. And so hearing how my tone and demeanor came across is very important to me.

This past Wednesday night, I again spoke on the lordship of Christ, and several elders remarked that they appreciated the spirit and tone with which I spoke. In this message, they said, I was not strident, but gave a loving call to discipleship. That meant a lot to me.

I realize the thought of having elders evaluate every message-or any message-is a frightening thought for many pastors. I confess that the primary reason this system of accountability and evaluation works in our setting is because of the enormous trust and love that has been built between my elders and me. When I work sometimes twenty-five or thirty hours on a sermon, and pour my life into it, and pray over it, and write out three drafts-if the evaluation is not done with great sensitivity and with no ulterior motives from the evaluators, the system would be imperiled. If I ever, even once, sensed a private agenda or hobby horse one particular elder wanted to ride, this form of evaluation we enjoy might unravel.

Having said that, however, we have taken several steps to ensure effective evaluation.

First, I freely admit to them I’m sensitive about having my preaching evaluated. I have told the elders probably a hundred times, “I am extremely vulnerable about these evaluations in the first four minutes after I get down from the pulpit. I would appreciate very much if whoever’s doing the evaluating would put a lot of time into thinking about how to present constructive criticisms to me.” The elders have understood that and worked hard on it.

Second, we filter all the evaluations through one person. It used to be that if I had said something a little off the mark in an illustration, by the time I got to my office, I’d heard about it seven or eight times. After the third elder would say something, I would say, “Enough already; I got the point.” But each one felt responsible to say something. So finally I went to the elders and said, “Time out. The seven pats on the back when I preach well are nice, but the seven slaps when I blow it are excruciating. Let’s filter all the comments through one elder so I’ll hear things only once.”

We chose as the person to collect responses a man who has a rare ability to affirm that which should be affirmed. The agreement is this: If an elder senses a message was right on the mark, then there’s no need to find this elder appointee and say anything. If the message was incredibly insightful-I think it’s happened once or twice-then make a point of telling the appointed elder. And if there’s a problem in the message, naturally, the elder appointee should hear about that. But there isn’t a formal caucus after each message, because over the years this particular elder’s evaluation has been recognized as almost always illustrative of the feelings of the group. And usually he will talk to two or three elders before he talks to me.

A third principle that makes the system work for us is that there’s give and take on the evaluations. A lot of times, the elder appointee will say something like this: “You might reconsider the use of such-and-such word, given the fact we have so many former Catholics.” I’ll ponder that and say, “I didn’t realize that would set them off. It’s no big deal to replace a word there. I can use another word, and everybody’s happy.”

But other times he’ll say, “Might you consider not making reference to the football player?” And I’ll say, “If this is one of those ‘might you reconsider,’ I think no, it’s very important for the nonchurched men I’m trying to reach.” As many times as not, the elder will say, “I can understand that.”

Of course, periodically, there are the comments such as, “Please change this; please delete the use of that word; please delete that illustration. We can talk about it later, or call me at home, but we have strong reservations about that concept.” And in those cases, I change it. The elders (and board members and staff people, whom I occasionally ask for evaluation) are discerning people who know when I hit the mark and when I forgot to load the gun.

I used an illustration one time about sitting next to a black attorney on a plane returning from Washington, D.C., and went on to talk about our conversation. One of the board members stopped me on the way out after the service, smiled, and said, “Was it necessary to say that attorney on the plane was black? Were you proving that you’re impartial? What were you saying there?”

“It never crossed my mind,” I said. “I was just reporting the facts. He was black.”

He said, “I would guess that as many people wondered why you noted that he was black as benefited from the point of your illustration.”

I said, “Now that’s a good insight.” To me, I was just reporting the facts, but reporting that fact clouded my illustration in many people’s minds; that one word made them miss the whole point of the illustration.

I know I’ve heard other speakers mention off-handedly in an illustration, “I saw this obese woman,” and I’m painfully aware that if I said that, many people in my church would have their self-esteem destroyed. They would be out of commission the rest of the sermon and not hear anything else I said. And the offhanded comment had nothing to do with the point of the illustration!

In fact, I got so tired of having ancillary issues become the dominant issues in my preaching, simply because of carelessness, that I now write my sermons in three drafts and include every word of every illustration. Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that other preachers inflict themselves with a discipline that I have chosen willfully and joyfully to submit to. I just got sick of reading, “Did you realize who might have been hurt by your reference to that? Your off-the-cuff remark about this may have meant this . . .”

Writing out sermons does offer many fringe benefits. I’ve found it helps me structure a sermon, because I can see the main points emerge. And writing helps expand my vocabulary. When someone talks, he tends to use repetitive word forms. When he writes, he realizes that two pages ago he used that particular word so it would be inappropriate to use it again. But the primary reason I write out a message is so that when I reread it before I deliver it, I can ponder, Who is that going to trip? What ancillary issue will that make dominant? It helps me say exactly what I want to say and not raise other issues that block the main point.

If, after reading the sermon I’m preparing, I still have a question about the appropriateness of a certain point, I may talk it over with an elder. This is especially true of messages for Wednesday night, when there’s no second chance to fix them. The elders and I meet to pray before services, and if there’s a troubling issue I’m going to get into, I’ll say then, “I feel I have to mention this certain topic, and I was planning to handle it this way. Are you all going to feel comfortable with that?”

Having elders or other trusted people evaluate each sermon sounds like work. It is. But this evaluation has saved me so many times from saying something I would regret later, that I have reached the point where I wouldn’t want to preach without it.

Evaluating a Year’s Worth of Sermons

Sometimes, though, I need to step back and look at more than one message or series. The zoom lens is fine, but sometimes you need to use a wide-angle lens to get everything in. I’ve found it natural to look at a year’s worth of messages at one time.

The only way I can do this, though, is to get away from the church for an extended period in which I can pray, read, and look back over my previous year’s sermons. I have started taking a summer study break each year, and I’m convinced it has improved my teaching. Only when I’m away from the crush of the daily routines can I see patterns of strengths or neglected areas. Suddenly I notice topics or themes that have gotten lots of attention and others that have been overlooked.

But when a year’s worth of preaching is at stake, I don’t want to wait until it’s over to listen to people in the congregation. After 100 messages, evaluation comes almost too late. What I need more is to hear people’s interests and concerns before I start the year.

As a result, I have developed a three-step approach to planning a coming year’s sermons, and I get input from people at every step.

In April, I select eight or nine people from the congregation. I choose people who are members of our main target audience (suburban business people who wouldn’t feel comfortable in many traditional church settings). Sometimes I’ll add someone who is highly creative, or who represents a large segment of the congregation in terms of his or her age, career, family situation, or whatever. I give these people an assignment: “Circulate in your social circles and find out on what issues people would like clear teaching from the Word of God. Then, based on that, put together what you feel would be an ideal sermon series addressing those needs. Come up with a series title, how you would break down the topic, and what your emphasis would be. You can work with anybody you want, and you have thirty days to do it.”

People think, Hey, this might change what I have to listen to! and they get motivated. They talk to their friends and people they work with. Some of them invite groups of people to their homes for input.

Then this group and I go away together for two and a half days. We meet from 8 a.m. till midnight, with a few hours off to eat and let the jets cool. The main thing I do is listen and take notes. I ask the first person, “Read me one of your series titles and the sermon titles that would be a part of that,” and we discuss it. Usually one idea will trip another idea, and we’ll end up with thirty or forty viable sermon series.

For example, I just finished a series entitled “Seasons of a Spiritual Life” that included four messages: “The Season of Spiritual Seeking,” “The Season of Spiritual Infancy,” “The Season of Spiritual Adolescence,” and “The Season of Spiritual Adulthood.” That title and breakdown of messages came straight from this group.

This spring I’ll be preaching a series about Jesus entitled “Someone You Should Know.” What a great title! Later I’ll work on still another idea from this group: “Families in the Fast Lane.”

During the month following this meeting, I go over all the ideas the group came up with. I rule out any topics I just covered in the past few months, as well as any that are extraneous to the scope of Willow Creek’s ministry. From the remaining proposed sermon series, I choose twenty I feel I could really work with or that stimulate some interest in me.

Then I convene a second group made up of elders and senior staff members. We go away for three days and make the final selections for the coming year-which of the twenty contenders we will preach, and in what order.

It’s amazing to me the wealth of wisdom that comes out of a plurality of godly people who look at life differently than I do. Last year, in the first planning session, someone had proposed a series of sermons on fear: a message on the fear of failure, another on the fear of living alone, another on the fear of dying, and so on. When the person proposed it, I thought, That series will never make it. Those fears were simply not things that kept me awake at night. But I did leave it in as one of the twenty contenders for the second planning group to consider. When the elders and senior staff began to discuss it, I told them frankly I just couldn’t see it working. But these highly discerning people looked at me and said, “Bill, just because you don’t wrestle with these fears doesn’t mean other people don’t. People have these fears-normal people. Take our word for it that this subject is pleading to be spoken to.”

So I agreed to preach the series, even though it wasn’t one I would have chosen. But as they suspected, it was tremendously beneficial for our church. In fact, “The Fear of Dying” was one of the most highly requested tapes in recent years!

How Well We Meet Our Overall Goal

So far I haven’t mentioned the usual barometers we use to measure our preaching: informal comments from people after services, letters they send, the number of tapes ordered, or comments from our spouse at home. Not that I don’t think these measures are important. The problem is that I (and other preachers, I suspect) tend to put too much importance on them. And if we’re not careful, that can lead to a subtle imbalance in our preaching.

It happened to me. Here’s how.

Over the last thirteen years, the period in which Willow Creek has developed, society has fragmented at a frightening pace. When we started the church, maybe 5 percent of our congregation was made up of people who were so badly wounded they were dysfunctional. They grew up in homes with alcoholics, or were sexually abused or verbally abused, or were abandoned, divorced, or victimized in one form or another. Now, as a result of trends in society, that percentage has grown to probably 15 percent.

During this time, I have been careful to use the normal ways of listening to people and getting feedback about my preaching. I have a commitment to stay after a service as long as anybody wants to talk. After a typical service, I’ll have serious conversations with probably thirty people. In addition, people write to me; I’m contacted by between 100 and 150 people a week.

But what I have not been sharp enough to pick upon, until recently, is that this sample of conversations and letters doesn’t reflect the total congregation. It’s skewed. Why? Because the people who will take the time to stay after a service in order to talk, or who will take the time to write a letter, are from the segment of the congregation that tends to be dysfunctional. They are so wounded that they write impassioned letters, and they are so hurting they are willing to stand for forty-five minutes in order to talk to me.

What I didn’t notice, because it happened so subtly over time, was that I was not being contacted by the 85 percent of the congregation who are fairly functional, normal people who want to get on with their lives and grow. The preponderance of my interaction was with the 15 percent: wounded, needy people who were screaming out for me to be helpful. They did not want me to talk about picking up a cross and carrying it to serve Jesus Christ. They did not want me to talk about denying themselves. They did not want me to talk about making a difference with their lives. They wanted to be helped and loved and encouraged and nurtured.

So when I would give a message on “God will be with you even in your pain,” or something like that, all the normal indicators of preaching effectiveness would go sky-high. Letters and phone calls would start coming that said, “Thank you for that tremendously helpful message.” People would stand in long lines to tell me that message was just what they needed. I looked at all that and thought, If I really love the flock, if I’m here to serve the flock, that’s the kind of preaching I’m going to do.

Then I went on my summer study break. As I evaluated the past five years of sermons, I began noticing subtle shifts. Five years ago, I realized, 70 percent of my messages were what I would call firm discipleship or gospel-oriented messages. Only 30 percent were more general, helpful messages. But over the years, those numbers have almost flipped. I was floored.

I reread Loving God, and when I finished, it dawned on me, Chuck Colson thinks we ought to be producing fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ in our churches. All I’m trying to do is patch up people’s lives. All I’m trying to do is lift burdens off sagging shoulders.

I began to ask myself, What about the 85 percent? Who is challenging these people to full discipleship? And who is asking these people to become kingdom men and women? Who’s asking these people to lay down their lives for the cause of Christ? I’m not. And I’m the only preacher they have.

I could say very honestly I had not done anything consciously to preach a cheap gospel. I was trying to proclaim a compassionate gospel. Let any sensitive pastor talk with 125 people a week, the preponderance of whom are wounded, victimized, and crying out for help, and it takes a toll. You begin to think, How can I add the burden of kingdom responsibility onto the shoulders of people who are bent over already? I don’t have the heart for it. My authentic motivation for that subtle shift was to be more responsive to a broken people. But as I spent days earnestly seeking the mind of God, it became clear to me that even though the motivation for the subtle shift was admirable, continuing down that path would be disaster.

When all this crashed in on me, it was both exhilarating and devastating. For weeks, I wrestled with what had happened. I came back and talked to the elders about it, and the minute I alerted them to this, everybody could see it. They said, “We knew something was happening, too.” But no one had the luxury that I had of spending several weeks trying to hear what God was saying. The elders are godly people; I only had to mention the change in a cursory fashion and they said, “That’s it. It’s got to change.”

Our solution has been to offer regular seminar and workshop teaching and therapy on all of these areas of victimization and pain. We are able to say to the 15 percent, “There is a place for you; there’s hope for you; there’s a context for you to receive the nurturing and expertise that are going to really solve your problem.” But it’s primarily in our counseling center, not in our Sunday service. And that makes sense. Allan McKechnie, the head of our counseling center, has pointed out to me that lasting change rarely comes out of large-group therapy, which is what I was attempting. It comes in the context of small groups or one-on-one discussions.

That frees me to be able to do the kind of teaching that exhilarates me and fulfills me and that is a true representation of who God made me to be. It’s with the 85 percent.

Take, for example, a recent Wednesday night message. A theme of this whole ministry, coming out of Luke 15, is “You Matter to God.” During that recent message, the first or second after my study break, I said, “We talk a lot around here about the fact that you matter to God. That’s right, and that’s true. But let me ask you this: Does God matter to you?”

It’s interesting what has happened as a result of our sharpened focus. I used to drive home on a Sunday feeling as though I had been run over by a truck. I would talk after the service with dozens of people who were struggling to make it through another day, and I would feel totally defeated. I would come in the house, and Lynne would say, “That was a great message this morning.” And I’d say, “What message? I don’t even remember preaching.”

But since this whole understanding has come, I talk to just as many people, but because of the subject matter I’m preaching these days, the conversations invigorate me. People are wrestling with what it means to be a man or woman of God. Even the wounded people see their need in a spiritual way. I’m not doing therapy; I’m doing discipleship. And that kind of talking doesn’t exhaust me; it infuses me with energy.

From this experience, I have learned some important lessons. First, for my preaching to be effective, it’s imperative I know-and stay riveted to-the overall goal of my ministry. At Willow Creek, we ask ourselves, “What do we want the end product to be? There’s this enormous machinery-buildings and staff. But after the people finally come through our ministry, what are they supposed to look like?”

We have answered that, “We want to develop fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. They should think Christianly, act Christianly, relate Christianly.”

I know I haven’t drawn that target on the wall often enough. Too often I’ve been caught preaching as if the goal of my ministry were to help people lead happy, well-adjusted lives and be more helpful to each other. Baloney! We have to shoot much higher than that. I want to preach in such a way that I help produce people who can rise above petty scrapes and get on with following Jesus Christ.

Second, I rigorously and regularly have to measure my preaching against this bull’s-eye. Are the messages I’m preaching contributing to that? Are they really leading people to become more devoted to Christ? It’s so easy to drift, incrementally and unconsciously, from that goal. But when that happens, my preaching, no matter how clever or prayed over or prepared, is undermined.

Why Fool with Evaluation?

Sometimes I’m tempted to think, It really would be so much nicer if I didn’t have the elders reproving me every time I slip up, and if I could just preach the way I want to preach and forget about anybody’s evaluation.

But then I realize why I have to take evaluation seriously. It’s because I preach, as every pastor does, before a righteous and holy God, and I know he evaluates my work. Every time I take out a new pad and write a new sermon title with a passage under it, I pray, “Lord, I would like this to be an unblemished lamb, a worship sacrifice that you would really be proud of. I’m not going to be happy, and you’re not going to be happy, with a sick, dying, blind, diseased, ravaged lamb. I will not offer it; you will not receive it.” So to me it’s a holy thing to start a new message. If God has given you speaking gifts and called you into the ministry, he expects unblemished lambs.

But that’s also a good, freeing realization for me. I give a lot of messages that I don’t think meet the standard I would have liked. But then I can go back and say, Did I really do my preparation effectively? Did I pray on my knees as I should have? Was it biblical? Did the elders say that it was approved? If I can say yes to those questions, then I’m done with the message, and I can walk away from it, no matter what anyone thinks. If those who came through the line said they didn’t appreciate it, and if I got ripped apart by an extremist on either side of the message, it doesn’t affect me. I did the best I knew how in trying to offer an unblemished lamb. That’s the extent of my responsibility.

The rest is God’s. I never have the final word on any passage or on any topic. When I get to the end of myself, that’s where the real message starts. My prayer, when I’m driving home from church, is “Now, Holy Spirit, that I’m done and out of the way, do your real work. I tried to give you enough truth and opportunity to work with. But the result in these people’s lives is up to you.”

Leadership Winter 1989 p. 88-94

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

Preaching Through Personal Pain

Daniel T. Hans

What can you say when the tragedy is yours?

“Two days ago my daughter Laura died.”

So opened the most difficult sermon I have ever had to preach. In that message, titled “God on the Witness Stand,” I put myself in the place of Job, who, when assaulted by horrible personal tragedy, declared, “But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God.”

That morning I preached a dialogue between myself as the prosecutor and God as the defendant. For nine months I had helplessly watched my 3-year-old lose her physical and mental abilities to a malignant brain tumor, and I had a strong case against God.

Friends questioned the wisdom of my decision to preach so soon after my daughter’s death. Could I withstand it? Could the congregation handle the emotional impact?

But if I did not use my personal life as the basis for preaching during this time of crisis, would I have either an audience or a message for someone else’s time of pain?

Exegeting Our Experience

Those who caution against becoming too personal in preaching raise necessary questions. Does a preacher have the right to carry his or her own confusion and pain into the pulpit? Doesn’t such transparency focus more upon the preacher than the Lord? Does not personal exposure in preaching turn the pulpit into a soap opera and denigrate the ministry of proclamation into self-aggrandizement?

Certainly discretion must be employed in what the preacher says about personal matters from the pulpit. However, in response to these cautions, a counter question must be asked: Shouldn’t a human preacher be human in preaching?

That sermon preached two days after my daughter’s death was one of many messages composed at my daughter’s bedside in the hospital and her deathbed in our home. Those sermons constituted a collection of feelings and convictions as intimate as private prayers. I must confess that little biblical exegesis went into them. My own life became my primary source. My prayers and reflections became my commentaries.

As I preached in the midst of my pain, I was unaware of particular features of my sermons that later proved healing and directive for my congregation. Looking back, however, I can identify four characteristics of preaching that should be present whenever I attempt to preach through pain.

Vulnerability: Admitting the Pain

Vulnerability heads the list. While this has become an overworked word in the jargon of pastoral ministry, it has no suitable substitute.

Openly expressing sorrow in the pulpit does not constitute professional sin for preachers. On several occasions, I couldn’t keep back the tears. Controlling my pained emotions proved no problem when I stared at myself in the mirror. But somehow my control dissipated as I stood in the pulpit looking out at faces visibly suffering with me. It was painful for my congregation to see me cry, yet it was tremendously healing for them and for me. One member whose earlier years had been clouded by drug abuse confided in me, “Your tears helped free me to face some painful things in my life that I’ve tried to hide behind a fake wall of strength.”

The greatest resource in preaching through my own pain was the Old Testament Prophets and Wisdom Literature. I mined those writings thoroughly, for I found therein faith’s best reflections upon the injustices of life, placed beside the reality of God and the futility of attempting to categorize and control him.

Arthur Gossip, a Scottish preacher from the early 1900s, lost his wife suddenly. Upon his return to the pulpit following her death, he preached “When Life Tumbles In, What Then?” In that message, Gossip announced that he did not understand this life of ours. But still less could he understand how people facing loss could abandon the Christian faith. “Abandon it for what!” he exclaimed. Speaking from the darkest storm of his life, he concluded, “You people in the sunshine may believe the faith, but we in the shadow must believe it. We have nothing else.”

Honesty: Equal Access for Anger

A second necessary characteristic of preaching in the midst of personal pain is honesty. Honesty holds vulnerability accountable, adding the following caution: We must not talk about our struggles from the pulpit unless the thoughts and feelings expressed truly belong to us. If hope and strength characterize our emotions, let that be known. However, if hope and strength have abandoned us, then in the pulpit we must not pretend to possess them. People will see through our veneer and therefore doubt our integrity.

As grief must be given access to the pulpit, so also must anger and doubt. Here I balked. I had often used the sovereignty of God as an excuse for allowing life’s loose ends to remain untied. Now, when I spoke of hope, I found I was ignoring my own strongly felt doubts. Unwilling to face honestly my inner anger toward God, I bailed out when opportunities arose to address my indignation in the pulpit.

In the year following my daughter’s death, I put together a book that was my “pulpit journal” during those nine months surrounding my family’s travail. A counselor friend offered this comment after reading it: “While I appreciated the insights you shared, I think you let God off the witness stand too soon. Your anger was not allowed to present fully its case against God.”

In retrospect, I believe I was too polite with God. I’ve become convinced of two things in this regard. First, God can handle anger, even a preacher’s. Second, a congregation needs to hear how the preacher deals with those angry feelings we all have toward God in times of tragedy. When crisis strikes, anger toward God is one of the truly honest emotions we feel. Describing how we as pastors feel in such situations validates the emotion for others and also provides a model of how to deal with it.

Though the expression of my anger was masked in my preaching, a few people discerned it. They told me that the inflamed questions I fired at God in the sermon immediately following Laura’s death provided them some emotional liberation.

One mother, who read that sermon nearly two years after I preached it, wrote expressing her gratitude. She said I had given her an invitation to face the anger she still carried over the loss of her son three years earlier. The gist of her discovery was that if a minister could get mad at God, it must be all right for her to do the same. That helped her begin to work through her anger.

Hope: Looking at the Moment and Beyond

A third element in preaching through personal pain is hope. Hope stands as the supreme gift a preacher can offer a congregation while speaking from the shadowy valleys. In its simplest form, God’s redemptive hope means that good can come out of bad.

In another sermon following my daughter’s death, I looked at the lives of Joseph and Paul. Joseph told his brothers, “What you meant for evil. God meant for good.” Despite the pain of his thorn in the flesh, Paul heard God say, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

At Laura’s birth I witnessed the serenity of her being placed in her mother’s warm arms. At her burial I witnessed the severity of her being placed in the cold arms of the grave. In reflecting on my experience and that of Joseph and Paul, I concluded a message about holding onto hope by saying, “Our faith is built upon a severe mercy-an innocent man being executed on a cross. What person, at the time, thought the death of Jesus was anything but a senseless and severe tragedy? Who now would see it as anything but the mercy of God at work on our behalf? When so many strugglers would seek God’s mercy only to deliver them from the severe events, we would do well to seek God’s mercy to teach us through the severe events. These latter works of God, the severe mercies, become the lasting ones.”

Near the time of Laura’s death, a friend showed me some verse from Emily Dickinson that helped me and my congregation look at the moment and beyond:

I shall know why-when Time is over-

And I have ceased to wonder why-

Christ will explain each separate anguish

In the fair schoolroom of the sky.

Patience: The Grace of Unanswered Questions

The fourth trait needed is patience. Impatience enticed me to seek a quick and easy explanation for the suffering that befell my family. My greatest temptation in the pulpit is to view my call to preach as a command to offer definitive explanations. I feel far more comfortable concluding a sermon with an inspired call to arms than with an unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question. Personal tragedy has taught me the answer to human suffering is not to be found immediately-if it is to be found at all.

When a parent is confronted with the diagnosis of cancer in his child, the inevitable question “Why?” demands a hearing. How could I reconcile my 3-year-old’s cancer with an all-powerful, all-loving God who, I believed, ruled this world? In one sermon I addressed the why of evil and the goodness of God by setting forth the classic and contemporary attempts to resolve the conflict. People of faith who encounter a tragic injustice gravitate to one of the following options:

dualism, with its universe governed by co-equal good gods and bad gods;

demotion, in which only one God exists but is seen as limited, mighty but not almighty, and doing the best he can in the face of evil;

denial, as in religions like Christian Science that deny the harsh realities of illness, death, and evil;

despair, which gives up on God when he fails to live up to naive and magical expectations of him; or

self-damnation, with its guilt-laden question, “Is God punishing me?”

A final option exists, however, which I believe is the only choice consistent with revelation and reality. The simultaneous existence of God and evil is an unsolvable dilemma. Job, Habakkuk, and countless others immersed in personal pain and confusion have attempted to use theology to control the situation, but in the end, our human explanations all come up empty-handed. However, there is a grace in the unanswerable why, for it leads us to the very heart of faith, which is patient trust in God.

I recall a conversation I had with a man several weeks after the sermon in which I “prosecuted” God. This was a compassionate person whose heart had been deeply pierced by Laura’s death, and he also wanted answers to the why of her suffering. He reviewed a portion of that sermon in which I accused God of willfully refusing to heal my daughter. Then he confessed, “I have struggled with faith all my life. My conflict with God intensified with Laura’s illness. But now I keep thinking back on what you said about us wanting God’s absolute control and life’s absolute freedom. I never thought of it that way before. We want two things from God that by their nature cannot exist together. I’m beginning to see that to have faith does not mean to have all the answers. Faith is holding on to God in spite of the confusion.”

What greater gift can a preacher give a congregation than the picture of trust in the Lord even though grief and confusion remain?

Knowing Our Limitations-and Theirs

Having explained some qualities needed when preaching through pain, I must offer a word of caution about when not to bring crises into the pulpit. During the three months prior to Laura’s death, as her condition rapidly deteriorated, I was unable to make reference to her from the pulpit. At other stages of her illness, tears were somewhat under my control. At this stage, however, my emotions were so strained I feared I might not be able to regain composure if tears began to flow. I knew my congregation would have welcomed my reflections on Laura’s status, but when the pain is too fresh or intense, wisdom advises avoiding references to our personal plight.

Another occasion when not to preach occurs after the crisis has passed. I failed to realize that my congregation’s grief over my daughter’s death did not linger as long as mine. Having conducted countless funerals and having been involved with the grief of many families, I was quite aware of the degrees of grief different people experience. However, when the deceased was my daughter, I somehow thought the rules would change. Surely others would have the same intensity and duration of feeling I carried! Such was not the case.

Following a sermon I preached long after my loss, one church member politely said to my wife, “I think Dan has talked about Laura from the pulpit too long after her death.”

When I first heard this, I felt the person was being unfair to my feelings. However, I now realize my prolonged airing of my grief was unfair to my congregation’s feelings. Had the Preacher in Ecclesiastes envisioned the theme of this article, he would have added this line to his description of life’s cycles: There is a time to preach through our pain, and a time to preach beyond it.

I preached in such a manner on Memorial Day weekend nearly two years after Laura’s death. Addressing the necessity of the grieving process after any major loss, I read a note I had received from a young mother. She had lost one child at birth and had a second child who had the same kind of tumor that took Laura. This mother enclosed the following prayer, which serves as a good reminder when we have to preach through our own pain: “Dear God, teach us to laugh again, but never let us forget that we have cried.”

Leadership Winter 1989 p. 35-9

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

PASTOR DAVID OR PASTOR SOLOMON?

Robert L. Moeller

Sometimes we are called to fight worthy battles, sometimes to build God’s house.

My two pastorates differed greatly. Two Sunday afternoons, less than three years apart, typify the contrasts.

The first afternoon began with an awkward lunch. The atmosphere reminded me of the meal following a funeral-people smile and comment on the food, but inwardly their hearts are broken. I knew mine was.

Joining us at the table was our district superintendent and an elder from a sister church in town. They had come at the request of our elder board to spend the afternoon listening privately to the complaints and accusations of individuals in our congregation.

What had begun sixteen months earlier as minor skirmishes was now full-blown conflict with several individuals. The surface tension was over issues as petty as my decision to rearrange the office furniture. We also struggled with an undercurrent of controversy over the practice of certain spiritual gifts. But as I saw it, the real conflict was the issue of control-a small group in the church had served notice that they were in charge, not the board or the pastor.

I hoped that with the help of these experienced men from outside, we could confront the issues directly and resolve the conflict. But despite the encouraging words from the D.S., a long-time friend, I knew the truth: regardless of who emerged victorious from the confrontation, the long conflict had taken its toll. There had been too many hurts, too many rumors, too many innuendoes and feelings of mistrust.

As in most church battles, the combatants were relatively few in number. I was reminded of a tactical lesson from military history: guerrilla forces need be only one-tenth the size of a conventional army to keep it hopelessly enmeshed in a no-win situation.

My wife and I were exhausted from the hit-and-run warfare. We had nothing left to give. As I sat at the lunch table, waiting for the day’s uncertain events to unfold, I recalled another, much different, Sunday afternoon.

This other afternoon was farewell day at my previous pastorate. We were finishing five years of difficult but fulfilling ministry in the inner city. A group of people who once had been ready to disband and give their building to a parachurch organization were now alive and aggressive in their purpose and mission.

The church had grown. It was feeding local street people and attracting Native Americans to worship services. It distributed hundreds of pounds of clothes to the destitute. At times, so much food was donated from supporting churches to be given to the poor that we had to stack it in the front pews of the sanctuary. The shewbread was once again in the temple feeding the hungry.

My wife and I were overwhelmed with the love we received in that small, urban church. One cold, winter day, a 94-year-old woman from the congregation walked to our home with her Norwegian stew because she’d heard I was ill.

The Sunday afternoon we left, I held back tears as the church chairman and his wife cried while saying good-by. It had been a sweet experience, working together to build God’s house in that place.

Two Different Roles

As I look back over these experiences, a metaphor from the Old Testament helps me make sense of the two polar-opposite pastorates: the life and destiny of David compared with that of his son Solomon.

David dreamed of building a temple for the Lord in Jerusalem. But he was prevented from doing so. God explained that it was not for him to be the architect and builder. David had been a warrior; he had shed too much blood. It would be his son Solomon who would construct the sanctuary and witness the glory of the Lord descending upon it.

Solomon reigned during a time of nearly unbroken peace in the land. He watched as his land blossomed with prosperity undreamed of by his ancestors. He watched as the temple grew and took form, and led in the exhilarating experience of dedicating the building as God himself appeared in a theophany to enter the Holy of Holies. His string of successes were untarnished for years on end.

Reflecting on my experiences and those of other pastors, I’ve noticed that each of us may find ourselves following the path of a David or a Solomon or both during our ministries. That is, we may play the role of a warrior in one setting and that of a temple builder in another. Perhaps both are in the will of God. Certainly both have inherent in them certain advantages and risks.

What Happens to a David

Some pastors find themselves, however reluctantly, in the role of a David; they’re perceived as warriors who challenge well-established and powerful forces. Such an individual endures conflict and confrontation in order to address moral and spiritual issues vital to the well-being of the body, hoping to clear the way for the church’s future growth and ministry.

Few if any Davids remain in such a setting long enough to witness the joy of completing the temple. The cost of battle often is so high that they become casualties themselves, even if their cause prevails.

These are not contentious, controlling personalities who thrive on conflict and see their lives as a martyr’s lot. Such are not the traits of a David. A true David finds such conflict in the church sad, painful, and regrettable, but at times necessary.

What happens to a David? Let me suggest some advantages, dubious as they might seem at first, that result from serving as a David.

You lay the groundwork for future church growth and spiritual prosperity. The maxim of church history is that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. In less dramatic terms, that means the sacrifice and pain borne in guiding a church to spiritual health will someday be evident.

I once asked a friend why he was leaving a Christian organization. His reply: “Once you tell the truth, it’s often impossible to stay.” To a certain extent that can be true in a pastorate.

I recall a situation that existed in a women’s Bible study early in my ministry. Under the guise of prayer requests, some women were telling stories about the failings of their husbands (or husbands of their friends) that were potentially embarrassing, if not damaging. Though several women felt uncomfortable as a result and vowed never to return to such a study, the practice went on.

When I asked some of the leaders to exercise more discretion, they felt I was intruding on “their ministry.” It proved for me an unpardonable sin. From that day on, I was in trouble with them.

Yet, the conflict that ensued eventually led to new leadership that improved the group’s atmosphere and even opened the way for new women, particularly non-Christians, to be welcome in the group.

You learn that God is more concerned with what happens in you rather than to you. In short, you attend the graduate school of character. As Chuck Swindoll says of suffering, “The tuition is free. It only costs you your life.”

As I became more bewildered over why I was in such hard circumstances, I began to believe God was in all this in some way I couldn’t fully understand.

Interestingly, the Psalms became more practical and essential to my life than ever before. And I learned to some extent what David learned: God is in control, regardless of what people may do. I came not to loathe criticism, but to see it as an opportunity for God to examine my life and test my character: Was I able to respond gently, in an honorable way?

Though it pained me, I sensed a foundation being laid in my life of faith as I looked at what needed changing.

You develop close and meaningful relationships with key church leaders. There is rarely racism in foxholes. Likewise, the barrier between pastor and laity diminishes as you weather intense storms together. I came to love as brothers those who stood with me on the elder board. At great personal cost, they took action to discipline certain members of the congregation. Having been through some difficult hours together, we were friends who had become not a group but a caring team.

Such commitment is not found among “sunshine soldiers,” as Thomas Payne called them. Neither is such deep camaraderie.

But besides the advantages, there are also some definite risks to serving as a David.

You are misunderstood by those who have an inadequate theology of conflict. Basically these are the people who see all conflict as sin. Their conclusion: you must be in sin (or at least an incompetent pastor) for there to be this trouble. In their minds, the only spiritual church is one that’s free of conflict. While a conflict-free environment is everyone’s goal, it is often only arrived at by working through significant and difficult issues.

One individual in the heat of the moment in a congregational meeting pointed at me and said, “The trouble started with you!” While that may or may not have been true, it didn’t mean the trouble was unnecessary or unredemptive. I thought about the history of the patriarchs, the prophets, and Jesus, and the conflict characterizing their ministries. As they challenged wrongful behavior or attitudes, they were perceived as the real problem instead. Some were sawn in two. There were times when I had a good idea how that must feel.

Once you’re cast as a warrior, it’s almost impossible to change people’s perception. It seems like a version of the Leonard Nimoy Syndrome. Nimoy, as you recall, is the actor who played Mr. Spock in the television series “Star Trek.” His distinctive character became so well-known that no matter what other roles Nimoy played in later years, no one could forget he was really Mr. Spock.

Once a pastor is identified as a warrior, that reputation is extremely hard to shake. During the conflict, I spent hours with individuals in counseling or in visitation after a death in the family or in personal ministry. I worked to keep a balanced pastoral stance. Yet, to those who wanted to believe it, I was simply a tough guy, the one who “can’t get along with so-and-so.”

A few of my critics were so outspoken in this regard that one Sunday morning I met a real estate company president who was visiting our church. Thanking me for the morning message, he confessed he had come just to meet the man about whom his employees could say nothing nice. They were so one-sided, he had to find out for himself.

After prolonged conflict, you tend to lose perspective on people and issues. While you try to focus on issues and not personalities, the longer the battle, the more they change places.

I once read that after decades of bloody feuding, the Hatfields and the McCoys couldn’t remember what the initial argument was about. But it didn’t matter any longer. The real issue was whether you were a Hatfield or a McCoy. So it goes in churches. A warrior can easily forget he is battling issues and not people.

In such moments the words of Jesus to love your enemy and to be kind to those who spitefully abuse you take on new significance. I knew I was making progress when I honestly could tell the husband of a woman who had caused me great suffering that I loved both of them. I knew I meant it, and it gave me the freedom to go on.

But many are the temptations to cover your buried anger with more acceptable rationalizations, such as righteous indignation.

What Happens to a Solomon

Now let’s consider what’s involved in being a Solomon. Obviously, there are some advantages.

You receive great affirmation and support from the congregation during your tenure. Unlike a David, often controversial and misunderstood, a Solomon is liked by nearly everyone. After all, the visible signs of growth and prosperity are evident, and it’s easy to attribute at least some of that success to the pastor.

You don’t leave such a church with many enemies, and even those who disagreed with you begrudgingly admit you helped the church. Given a little time, your accomplishments tend to grow in the retelling.

I’ve never enjoyed a larger-than-life reputation, but I did find people remembered fewer of my mistakes and more of my successes in that small urban church. During the height of the crisis in our second church, I took a summer vacation that included a stop at my previous parish. After my brief one-minute update on my family and thank-you for their ministry to us while we were there, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. I was stunned. Such affirmation seemed almost schizophrenic, given my current dilemma at the time, but it was deeply appreciated.

You observe the glory of God descend upon your church. One of the great rewards of life in ministry is to see the hand of God touch your efforts. Quite apart from your own merit, God chooses to do something beautiful if not miraculous in your church. Solomon’s life wasn’t the reason the glory of God descended on the temple at the day of dedication, yet he was privileged to observe it and participate in that supernatural event as worship leader.

In a similar way, I witnessed God at work in our little church. The first night we ever opened our church to the community was Thanksgiving. I’d been there about three months, and though we had only seventy-five regular attenders, we ran an ad in the large city newspaper inviting anyone who wished to come for a free turkey dinner. The board members were nervous: What if we have problems? What if no one comes? What if everyone comes?

That night as we opened up at sunset, I watched a stream of humanity pass through our doors and down to the basement-white, black, Hispanic, and Native American. Several of our ushers stood grimly with their arms crossed, ready for trouble. By the end of the evening, the spirit of joy and celebration was so evident from feeding 250 men, women, and children from the community that our 63-year-old church chairman was seen skipping across the empty room.

While I didn’t see the glory of God descend just as Solomon had, I knew I was in the presence of the Almighty that evening. It was the beginning of good things to come.

Your church is attractive to visitors as they sense the unity that prevails. I believe the atmosphere of a church can be read by visitors within five minutes of arriving. Warmth, acceptance, and joy seem to exude even from the narthex of some buildings. On other occasions as a visitor, I’ve entered churches to a stale, deathlike pall that seems to linger in the air. Tension, routine, and isolation seem the order of the day.

I’ve also noticed that churches that can state their reason for existence in one sentence or less are the ones that are growing and unified. In our urban church we knew what we were about: we were there to offer food, clothing, friendship, and the gospel. People seemed to enjoy knowing where we were going, and they seemed to experience a certain security in that knowledge. That atmosphere was picked up by visitors.

With all these heady benefits, it’s easy to become oblivious to the disadvantages and risks of being a Solomon. But, as many of us have learned, success can be far more treacherous to our spiritual well-being than failure. Consider some of the following not-so-obvious pitfalls of leading a united and prosperous parish.

You’re tempted to believe your leadership alone is responsible for the great things that happen. Watching programs expand and your budget rise is fun. It’s also dangerous, particularly if, like me, you’re young and in your first pastorate.

It takes a more seasoned and less presumptuous pastor to realize that if you’re experiencing a time of relative peace and prosperity, others probably have paid an anonymous but enormous price to help pull that off. Somewhere on your property there ought to be a monument to the Unknown Pastor, that brave and selfless soul who gave some of his best years to lay the groundwork for the good things now happening.

The notion that the church’s growth was triggered by our arrival is as deceptive as the lie that says all the trouble began when we arrived. Let’s be honest; we inherit more than we create as pastors, whether for good or ill.

Looking back at my inner-city experience, I can think of a long line of pastors who invested their lives in that place, and the one who served immediately before me perhaps deserves more praise than all the rest. He stayed only two years. But in that time he argued that “business as usual” was no longer possible. By the time I came, the people were ready to listen. I owe that young pastor and his wife credit for most of our subsequent success, though few would know it.

You are tempted to embrace a neo-prosperity theology. In short, you’re led to believe that God’s will for every pastor is to experience unbroken success and growth. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, “All the programs are good looking, and all the attendance figures above average.” How wrong. Perhaps even diabolical.

The Book of Hebrews tells us God used many individuals in the past to accomplish feats of wonder. They conquered kingdoms, administered justice, gave the dead back to the living. Yet, that is not where that chapter ends. It ends by talking about a second group, a group too good for this world. They were persecuted. They went about in animal skins. They even lived in holes in the ground. But from God’s perspective, they are even greater heroes than the first group.

How many of us think the true heroes of the church are the men and women who remain faithful while struggling in some lonely and forgotten setting with carnal and angry critics constantly sniping at them? How can such sorrow and hurt be part of God’s will? Doesn’t he want all of us to live on an ecclesiastical roll? We’d all answer no, but at times, especially when the church was doing well, I tended to forget that.

During my second pastorate, it hurt to go to denominational get-togethers where others could boast of building programs and staff additions, while I thought of people abandoning our church because of the conflict. I realized how smug I must have appeared the years the figures were in my favor, and how it hurt other pastors to be asked by their parishioners why they weren’t doing things like we were. I wonder if I don’t owe some of them an apology.

Finally, you are tempted to become shallow, unable to identify with others in pain. According to the Arab proverb, “All sunshine makes a desert.” That is also true in living the life of a Solomon. It’s easy to become, little by little, a one-dimensional person, less and less sensitive to people in pain.

In the midst of my better times, I enjoyed being around people I considered winners. I had little time for someone who seemed headed nowhere. If colleagues were in trouble, it was their fault, or so I reckoned.

Granted, my success was limited, but at the time it appeared significant to me and to those struggling to hang on. And as they reached out, I didn’t listen. I’m afraid I walked past many a wounded pastor on the road to Jericho.

When the tables were turned, I saw how shallow I’d become. I gained a moment of self-awareness when I was sharing my hurts with a fellow pastor. He listened with something of an obligatory attitude and then replied, “You know, I’ve never experienced anything like that. Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve had a wonderful experience. I can’t remember anyone leaving my churches in anger.”

At first I felt hurt, then anger, and finally pity. He couldn’t help me at that moment because he was handicapped. His own relative ease had disabled him. From that time onward I no longer cursed my problems but began to ask what God wanted to do in my life through my pain. If possible, I wanted him to use me and what I had experienced.

Farewell to Arms

The day we drove away from our second church, a difficult but precious chapter in our lives came to a close. So many people had been so kind to us. For example, during the worst of the controversy and while my wife was quite ill expecting our last child, women came on a daily basis and cooked, did housework, and encouraged her. We couldn’t have made it without them.

In the face of such love and support, it was difficult to leave. When we submitted our resignation, the congregation voted overwhelmingly to reject it. We were deeply touched by their confidence in us. They insisted instead that we take a leave of absence to reconsider our decision, which coincided with the birth of our child.

During this leave, the board dealt aggressively with the remaining church problems. It was soon evident that the conflict had ceased. A David was no longer needed. Ironic as it may sound, the fact that the church’s problems had subsided gave us the reassurance that we could leave. It was for someone else to build the temple.

Ecclesiastes teaches that there are seasons to God’s will as it relates to the events of our lives. Our season of service was ending, not with bitterness or rancor, but with the joy that comes from having completed a task. I was genuinely grateful for the experience, and I continue to hear good things about the church’s concern for the unchurched and desire for service.

Years earlier when we left our first church-more as a Solomon than a David-we clung to our friends as we said good-by. Little did we know the temple doors were closing behind us and the time of relative peace in our lives was ending.

So which experience do I value more, that of being a temple builder or a warrior? My answer might surprise you.

Sigmund Freud once said something to the effect that someday, given enough time, those life experiences that have been the most difficult will become to us the most precious of all. He was unwittingly borrowing truth from the Psalmist, who said God makes everything beautiful in his time.

I would gladly serve a thousand churches like the first, but I wouldn’t trade all of them for my years in the church that struggled so deeply.

Should a pastor be a warrior or a temple builder?

Probably both.

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

WHEN A CHILD DIES

Cinda Gorman

Ministering to grieving family and friends presents special needs and unique opportunities.

I was pushing my two elementary-school-aged boys through their bedtime routine. “Hurry up! Shar is coming over to discuss a retreat we need to plan. There won’t be time for a story tonight, but let’s say prayers together and do back rubs.”

Then the phone rang-and changed not only the course of the evening but the events of several weeks to follow.

“Cinda, this is Dr. Steele. I’m in the emergency room at Grossmont Hospital with Keith and Judy Meeker. Their son, Jarrett, hanged himself on a back-yard rope swing this afternoon. He’s been pronounced dead. They asked that you or your husband be here.”

My husband, Steve, another pastor at our church, had already left for an evening meeting. I was searching my memory for a picture of the Meeker family. I came up blank. Then I remembered that last weekend Jarrett and his dad had been with the males in my family on a fishing trip with the boys’ choir.

After clarifying where to meet the parents, I told the doctor I would be there as soon as I could find care for my boys. I shared the news with my children as gently as possible and greeted my friend Shar as the “angel” God had provided to care for them that evening.

At the hospital, I got the story: Jarrett had come home from choir practice and was playing in the back yard while his sister napped. His mom had asked him to stop throwing rocks, and he began to swing on a nylon rope suspended from a eucalyptus tree. The rope was knotted at the bottom for a foothold, but a section above the knot was unwoven and created a loop. Judy went into the house to answer the phone and then returned outside to continue her yardwork. It was then that she felt the silence.

Jarrett’s lifeless body was hanging from the loop in the rope. She pulled him out, ran into the house, and phoned for help. She continued her efforts to revive him, carrying her son to the front yard so the paramedics could quickly find them. But it was too late. Despite lengthy procedures in the ambulance and at the trauma ward, there was nothing to be done.

Jarrett’s death was accidental, though no one knew exactly how his slender body had slipped through the rope swing.

Much has been written about helping people through the loss of an infant, but little about the loss of an older child. This raises unique dynamics and requires careful responses, as I learned by experience in those next few turbulent days. Here are the lessons I learned along the way.

Helping the Parents

The first task is ministering to the parents. This means several things.

Encouraging them to talk about the child. The hospital’s “scream room” or “cry room” was ours alone that night. The stunned parents sat together on a couch, their 8-year-old son’s body on a gurney in another room. We talked about the recent fishing trip, about Jarrett’s gregarious, friendly style with other children, his learning disabilities that were improving, his love for God’s creation, and his relationship with his 5-year-old sister, Jennifer.

I didn’t press for details of the accident, because I knew the deputy coroner would soon come for a complete report. I would be able to listen in on that.

Encouraging them to spend time with the body. We went into the trauma room where Jarrett’s still, blanket-covered body now lay. He looked like a sleeping child. I encouraged the parents to stroke his face and hair. Like any caring parent, his mother commented on his dirty socks.

The grandparents and an aunt and uncle arrived. Soon I was in a corner with my arms around Jarrett’s father, a usually cool lawyer who now found himself sobbing about his lost son. At this point, ministry entailed providing tissues and a shoulder to cry on, and saying quietly, “It is good to cry,” while we shed tears together.

Taking time to discuss burial arrangements. After a while, we discussed the decisions they now faced. Should Jarrett’s body be cremated or buried? This was a crucial decision, calling for mutual agreement. When they decided on burial, I encouraged them to find appropriate ways to involve their daughter in the decisions so she would not feel left out or abandoned during the next few days. They decided to include her in the trip to the cemetery to choose a plot.

Discussing memorial funds and gifts. I brought up the topic of memorial gifts during that first evening at the hospital. To some people this might have seemed premature, but it was fortunate that we talked about it that night. Media attention the next day provided a healthy opportunity for these parents to make a positive response in the midst of a tragedy.

Because we had discussed some available options, they had established a special fund by then, using the Deacon’s Fund in the church as a collection point. The donations would be used to finance a week of “zoo school” at the San Diego Zoo for needy children. They had chosen an experience Jarrett had enjoyed, and opened it up to other children.

Pastoral ministry in this crisis also included accompanying the family through the next painful stage-returning to the scene of the accident, their home.

By now my husband had arrived at the hospital to finish the evening with them. We exchanged a few words of information in the hall and went back into the conference room for prayer together. I left the Meekers after offering to return in the morning to help share the news with Jennifer, who was staying with friends that evening. They were visibly relieved and indicated this was one of the biggest and most troubling tasks on their minds.

Discussing available support groups. Later on, parents will need to know about support groups for families who have experienced the death of a child. Some in our area include Empty Cradle (for families who have lost a child under 2 years of age) and Compassionate Friends (for any parent whose child has died). In addition, local hospitals often offer seminars on grief, which could also prove helpful to families in the months following a child’s death. Groups of this type broaden the number of people with whom they can feel a kinship.

The Meekers found the support they needed within the congregation. Judy’s statement, “People in the church praying for me has been the only thing that keeps me going,” is a testament to the love and care of the whole people of God in the face of crisis.

Helping Siblings and Friends

We also have a role in helping brothers, sisters, and young friends deal with their loss.

Avoid misleading terms. I learned to be factual and honest. While in the hospital’s conference room that first terrible night, we touched on how and when to tell Jarrett’s sister and cousin. We discussed language and how using metaphors about “sleep” and “God needing Jarrett” can be destructive and frightening to children. Since children are literal thinkers, these terms could cause them to become afraid of going to sleep or resenting God for “taking” someone they love.

In the morning I notified Jarrett’s school principal. We discussed the exact details of the accident so she could share the news factually with the school counselor, teachers, and students. I suggested she avoid using the words hanging or hanged himself since my older son’s question had been, “Did he do it on purpose?”

By using “accidentally strangled,” the counselor could rule out suicide in the minds of Jarrett’s classmates. A visit to the school later in the day reassured us about the sensitivity with which the staff dealt with Jarrett’s friends. I assured the principal that the memorial service would be appropriate for children and that any parents who inquired should know their children were welcome to attend.

Choose the discussion site carefully. As promised, I called on the Meekers that first morning to be there when they told Jenny their sad news. Cradled in her parents’ laps, she alternated between tears and amazingly perceptive observations. She said, “I wish I could just wake up and this would all be a bad dream.” When we talked about it being an accident and that accidents sometimes happen even to children, she remarked, “Jarrett never got to grow old and be a grandpa.”

Again we shared tears, tissues, and prayers. While we chose Jenny’s bedroom for this conversation for the sake of privacy, I now consider that a mistake. Her subsequent unpleasant dreams about things on the walls and dressers might have been because we shared such traumatic news in a place she called her own.

Many books help explain the concept of death to children. (A section from Mister Rogers Talks with Parents by Fred Rogers, which I brought for the Meekers, proved to be very helpful.) Most agree that a 5-year-old has a limited concept of the finality of death. This was not a problem with Jenny, as evidenced in her statements about her brother. We talked about Jarrett’s body still being at the hospital, but that it would be buried in the coming days. (While not the case in this situation, some children take discussion of “bodies” to mean that the head is not included. Again, it helps to remember how literal children are in their understanding.)

Assure children that a full range of emotions is normal. It’s okay to cry-or to laugh. Children in a grieving family need to be assured that they can still express a full range of feelings even though many sad people surround them.

I told Jenny that in the next few days she would want to cry sometimes, and other times to laugh and play even when grownups were very sad. Jenny later told her mother that “Pastor Gorman said I could laugh and play or be quiet and show sadness and tears, and it was all okay.”

Include children in the funeral and memorial service. The death of a child also involves ministering to friends and their families. I found myself spending a great deal of time on the phone with other mothers who were suddenly facing the mortality of their own children.

One way of reaching out to them was scheduling a specific time to be available at the mortuary. The funeral home provided a filmstrip on questions that naturally curious children will ask, such as, “How do they dig a grave?” After viewing the filmstrip with several children, my husband and I added thoughts about what we as Christians believe about resurrection. Parents seemed relieved to have assistance explaining the difficult topic of death.

Many adults are uncomfortable with exposing their children to death except the fictional (and often violent) forms of death on TV. Our experiences of involving children in such settings, however, have been positive.

Jenny’s parents and I planned the memorial service the morning after the accident. We scheduled it for a time that could include classmates and teachers. We decided to use taped music of the boys’ choir Jarrett had been in. I would give a children’s sermon, and friends would be invited to share some good memories of Jarrett. In addition, Jarrett’s baseball team would take up a collection toward the memorial fund.

For the children’s sermon, I used toy caterpillars that unzipped into butterflies. I made up a story of two caterpillars discussing what it would be like to fly. One then spun a cocoon (a paper bag) and came out a butterfly. He couldn’t come back and tell his friend what flying was like. It was beyond any description a crawling caterpillar would understand.

“Just so,” I pointed out, “Jarrett can’t come back to tell us what it’s like where he is now. But we know it’s a wonderful, happy place.”

Keith and Judy prepared a display of Jarrett’s models and baseball cards for the reception following the memorial service. This gave them some tangible way to share their son with their friends and to remember his many interests.

Schedule follow-up time. Pastoral follow-up after the service included a stop-by visit over coffee in the back yard. The eucalyptus tree in the back yard had already been removed, and they commented on the wonderful view they didn’t know they had been missing. (Some experts would have suggested this was a premature action of denial, but it was a decision the family could make and take action on.)

When a child dies we grieve over not only the loss of that child, but also the loss of the future we had anticipated for the child. Our dreams are shattered, and the memory bank is more limited. Most of the memories center around holidays and particular sports, friends, and sites. For this reason I found it important to make follow-up contact with these parents around the holidays we associate with children-Halloween, Christmas, and Jarrett’s birthday. I noted these dates and the anniversary of his death on my calendar.

Christmas was the most difficult holiday, and the Meekers chose to change the site to a mountain cabin and to keep the holiday rather low-key.

Looking back, I would be more assertive about follow-up than I was. Distance made dropping by difficult, but I wish I’d have done it on a regular basis and with more pointed questions. Not until six months later was I able to encourage more formal counseling.

The divorce rate for parents who experience the death of a child is high, so being aware of family dynamics is very important. While Jarrett’s death didn’t threaten this couple’s marriage, it did raise other issues from their extended family.

Judy has said repeatedly that she had too little time alone with Jarrett at the funeral home. Now I would suggest that visitation by family and friends be scheduled at a time other than when the parents go to the funeral home. That way there would be no scheduled end to the time they have to grieve with the body. Our institutions dealing with death, such as hospitals and funeral homes, have robbed families of the chores that used to be theirs in preparing bodies and graves. The least we can do is provide appropriate time for parents to be with their dead child.

Helping Yourself

Pastors in this kind of crisis initially will devote a great deal of time to the family in need. But we must be aware of our own personal and family needs. By the third day, I was exhausted from my own lack of sleep and took my first ever sleeping pill. I also needed to be attuned to the feelings of my two sons, so I sent notes to their schoolteachers about their friend’s death.

I depended on the prayers of our congregation. While I have never felt it inappropriate to cry at a memorial service, I feared that if I cried at this one I’d be unable to regain control. So I asked people to pray for my husband and me to get through the service. This wasn’t from a sense of steely pride, but because I had cried enough by then and it wouldn’t be helpful to those attending. I’m sure that our ability to remain composed was due to God’s help.

I was blessed to have a partner in the ministry during this crisis. I would encourage any pastor facing a tragedy that impacts not only a family but a community to find a partner to share the load. A spouse, a colleague, or a small-group member can be an essential support in a journey the pastor should not have to walk alone.

The Meekers were not members of our congregation, though Judy attended regularly. No vows of loyalty “qualify” a family for the intensity of pastoral presence they need in those difficult days. The Meekers have been carried along by the prayers and fellowship of a concerned congregation and plan to join during the next class. Their presence among us has been a deeply moving testimony to their faith since Jarrett’s death.

I wouldn’t want to rerun those wrenching days, but they focused my perspective on ministry and sharpened my skills in grief counseling. And they showed me how God and his people can be faithful to those who mourn.

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

The God Who Delegates

Philip Yancey

From Moses to most of us, God works through an unlikely set of characters.

Your mission: a documentary film series about religion for PBS. Great. One more yawner of an assignment. “Explore images of God through the ages,” or some such abstraction, they say. Just fine. Who comes up with these schemes? For starters, the central character is invisible. Well, until someone thinks of a way to arrange an interview with God himself, they’ll have to settle for vignettes about God.

Fourteenth century B.C. Begin with helicopter shot of the Sinai peaks. Uninhabited area, so no TV antennas to dismantle, etc. Zoom to a clump of Bedouin extras impersonating ancient Hebrews. Voice-over on how they eat, what they wear. Camera settles on a Jewish boy about 12 years old. Interrupt him from play and call him over.

“Tell me about your God. What’s he like?” narrator asks.

Boy’s eyes widen. “You mean . . . you mean . . .” Can’t bring himself to say the word.

“That’s right, Yahweh, the God you worship.”

“What’s he like? Him? See that mountain over there? [Cut to volcano. Lots of steam, smoke. Close-up of magma.] That’s where he lives. Don’t go near it or you’ll die! He’s . . . he’s . . . well, most of all he’s scary. Real scary.”

A.D. First century. Pan across the broad, flat horizons of Palestine. Same Bedouins, now milling around the desert in a group. Oasis in the background. Tighten in on a clump of bystanders, then on a woman along the edge, sitting down, leaning against a desert shrub. Prompt her with a question about the nature of God.

“God? I’m still trying to figure him out for myself. I thought I knew, but when I started following this teacher around, I got confused. He claims he’s the Messiah. My friends laugh. But I was there when he fed five thousand people-who else could do that? I ate a piece of the fish. And with my own eyes I saw him heal a blind man. Somehow God is like that man named Jesus, over there.”

A.D. Twentieth century. Move film crew to picturesque church in Smalltown, U.S.A. Pan across the faces of people in the pews.

Voiceover from narrator, “And what is God like now?”

The New Testament asks us to believe that the answer lies in that ordinary church, in those ordinary people in the pews. God in Christ is one thing, but in us? The only way to sense the shock of it is to read the Bible straight through, from Genesis to Revelation, as I did not long ago during several snowy days in Colorado.

The mighty, awesome Lord of the universe, full of passion and fire and holiness, dominates the first 900 pages. Four Gospels follow, about 100 pages long, recounting Jesus’ life on earth. But after Acts, the Bible shifts to a series of personal letters. Grecians, Romans, Jews, slaves, slaveowners, women, men, children-the letters address all these diverse groups, and yet each letter assumes its readers belong to an overarching new identity. They are all “in Christ.”

“The Church is nothing but a section of humanity in which Christ has really taken form,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The apostle Paul expressed much the same thought with his phrase “the body of Christ.” The way he saw it, a new species of humanity was emerging on earth, in whom God himself-the Holy Spirit-was living. They formed the arms and legs and eyes of God himself on earth. What’s more, Paul acted as if that had been God’s goal all along.

“Don’t you know that you yourself are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” Paul wrote to the ornery bunch at Corinth. To the Jews, of course, the temple was an actual building, the central place on earth where the Presence of God dwelt. Was Paul claiming, to put it plainly, that God had “moved”? Three temples appear in the Bible, and, taken together, they illustrate a progression: God revealed himself first as Father, then as Son, and finally as Holy Spirit. The first temple was a magnificent structure built first by Solomon and rebuilt by Herod. The second was the “temple” of Jesus’ body (“Destroy it,” he said, “and I will raise it again in three days”). And now a third temple has taken shape, fashioned out of individual human beings.

God, the Giver, Delegates

He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye.

Creation seems to be delegation through and through. I suppose this is because He is a giver.

-C. S. Lewis

The progression-Father, Son, Spirit-represents a profound advance in intimacy. At Sinai the people shrank from God and begged Moses to approach him on their behalf. But in Jesus’ day, people could hold a conversation with the Son of God, and touch him, and even hurt him. And after Pentecost the same flawed disciples who had fled from Jesus’ trial became carriers of the Living God. In an act of delegation beyond fathom, Jesus turned over the kingdom of God to the likes of his disciples-and to us.

But enough. All these misty ideas about the Spirit must somehow be reconciled with the sobering reality of the actual church. Look around at those who call themselves Christians. Look at the faces of the people in the pews of any church. Is this what God had in mind?

Delegation always involves risk, as any employer soon learns. When you turn over a job, you let go. And when God “makes his appeal through us” (Paul’s phrase), he takes an awful risk, the risk that we will badly misrepresent him. Slavery, the Crusades, pogroms against the Jews, colonialism, wars, the Ku Klux Klan-all these movements have claimed the sanction of Christ for their cause. The world God wants to love, the world God is appealing to, may never see him; our own faces may get in the way.

Yet God took that risk, and because he did, the world will know him primarily through Christians. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine of the church: God living in us. Such a plan is the “foolishness of God,” as Paul says in one place, and writer Frederick Buechner marvels at the folly: “to choose for his holy work in the world . . . lamebrains and misfits and nitpickers and holier-than-thous and stuffed shirts and odd ducks and egomaniacs and milquetoasts and closet sensualists.”

“And yet,” Paul continues, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”

We who live among the flawed, ordinary people of the church, we who are the lamebrains and misfits and odd ducks of the church, may want to water down the Bible’s extravagant statements about the body of Christ. We know how poorly we embody him. But the Bible is unequivocal. Consider just two examples.

1. We represent God’s holiness on earth. Holiness, above all else, is the reason for the great distance between God and human beings. It’s what made the Most Holy Place forbidden ground. But the New Testament insists that a seismic change has taken place. A perfect God now lives inside very imperfect human beings. And because he respects our freedom, the Spirit in effect “subjects himself” to our behavior. The New Testament tells of a Spirit we can lie to, or grieve, or quench. And when we choose wrongly, we quite literally subject God to that wrong choice.

No passage illustrates this strange truth more forcefully than 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul is scolding the randy members of the church at Corinth for hiring prostitutes. One by one, he knocks down all their rationalizations. Then, finally, he settles on the most sobering warning of all: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?” Paul seems to mean this in the most literal sense, and he does not shrink from the next, astounding conclusion: “Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!”

You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to see the contrast. In the Old Testament, adulterers were stoned to death for disobeying God’s law. But in the age of the Spirit, God delegates his reputation, even his essence, to us. We incarnate God in the world; what happens to us happens to him.

2. Human beings do the work of God on earth. Or, to be strictly accurate, God does his work through us-the tension comes into play as soon as you try to phrase it. “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not,” said Augustine. In a similar vein, Paul wrote, “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” in one clause, and “for it is God who works in you” in the next. Whatever else they mean, such conundrums surely contradict a “leave it up to God” attitude.

God provided food for the Israelites wandering through the Sinai Desert, and even made sure their shoes would not wear out. Jesus, too, fed hungry people and ministered directly to their needs. Many Christians who read those thrilling stories look back with a sense of nostalgia, or even disappointment. Why doesn’t God act like that now? they wonder. Why doesn’t he miraculously provide for my needs?

But the New Testament letters seem to show a different pattern at work. In a cold dungeon, Paul turned to his long-time friend Timothy to meet his physical needs. “Bring my cloak,” he wrote, “and also bring Mark, who has always been so helpful.” Another time Paul received “God’s comfort” in the form of a visit from Titus. And when a famine broke out in Jerusalem, Paul himself led the response: he collected money from all the churches he had founded. God was meeting the needs of the young church, but he was doing so indirectly, through fellow members of his body. Paul made no such distinction as “the church did this, but God did that.” Such a division would miss the point he had made so often. The church is Christ’s body; therefore if the church did it, God did it.

Paul’s strong emphasis on this truth may trace back to his first, dramatic personal encounter with God. At the time, he was a fierce persecutor of Christians, a notorious bounty hunter. But on the road to Damascus he saw a light bright enough to blind him for three days, and heard a voice from heaven: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Persecute you? Persecute who? I’m only after those heretics, the Christians.

“Who are you, Lord?” asked Saul at last, knocked flat on the ground.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” came the reply.

That sentence summarizes as well as anything the change brought about by the Holy Spirit. Jesus had been executed months before. It was the Christians Saul was after, not Jesus. But Jesus, alive again, informed Saul that those people were in fact his own body. What hurt them, hurt him. It was a lesson the apostle Paul would never forget.

The Uncomfortable Application

I dare not leave this thought without applying its meaning in a most personal way. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has great significance for us. A friend of mine, Richard, refuses to believe in God because he can’t see him. He once asked me, “Where is God? Show me. I want to see him.” Surely at least part of the answer to his question is this: If you want to see God, then look at the people who belong to him-they are his “bodies.” They are the body of Christ.

“His disciples will have to look more saved if I am to believe in their Savior,” said Nietzsche to such a challenge. But maybe if Richard could find a saint, someone like Mother Teresa, to embody the qualities of love and grace, maybe then he would believe. There-see her? That is what God is like. She is doing the work of God.

Richard does not know Mother Teresa, but he does know me. And that is the most humbling aspect of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Richard probably will not hear a voice from a whirlwind that drowns out all questions. He will likely never get a personal glimpse of God in this life. He will only see me.

The Head of an Imperfect Body

Jesus Christ, said Paul, now serves as the Head of the body. We know how a human head accomplishes its will: by translating orders downward in a code that the hands and eyes and mouth can understand. A healthy body is one that follows the will of the head. In that same way, the risen Christ accomplishes his will on earth, through us, the members of his body. We are his mouthpiece, his designated vocal chords on earth.

A plan of such awesome delegation guarantees that God’s message will sometimes seem garbled or incoherent, and guarantees that God will sometimes seem silent. But embodiment was his goal, and in that light the Day of Pentecost becomes a perfect metaphor: God’s voice on earth, speaking through human beings in ways even they could not comprehend.

I have a bright, talented, and very funny friend in Seattle named Carolyn Martin. But Carolyn has cerebral palsy, and it is the peculiar tragedy of her condition that its outward signs-floppy arm movements, drooling, inarticulate speech, a bobbing head-cause people who meet her to wonder if she is retarded. Actually, her mind is the one part of her that works perfectly; it is muscular control that she lacks.

Carolyn lived for fifteen years in a home for the mentally retarded, because the state had no other place for her. Her closest friends were people like Larry, who tore all his clothes off and ate the institution’s house plants, and Arelene, who knew only three sentences and called everyone “Mama.” Carolyn determined to escape from that home and to find a meaningful place for herself in the outside world.

Eventually, she did manage to move out and establish a home of her own. There, the simplest chores posed an overwhelming challenge for Carolyn. It took her three months to learn to brew a pot of tea and pour it into cups without scalding herself. But she mastered that feat, and many others. She enrolled in high school, graduated, and then signed up for community college.

Everyone on campus knew Carolyn as “the disabled person.” They would see her sitting in a wheelchair, hunched over, painstakingly typing out notes on a device called a Canon Communicator. Few felt comfortable talking with her; they could not follow her jumbled sounds. But Carolyn persevered, stretching out a two-year Associate of Arts degree program over seven years. Next, she enrolled in a Lutheran college to study the Bible. After two years there, she was asked to speak to her fellow students in chapel.

Carolyn worked many hours on her address. She typed out the final draft-at her average speed of forty-five minutes a page-and asked her friend Josee to read it for her. Josee had a strong, clear voice.

On the day of the chapel service, Carolyn sat slumped in her wheelchair on the left side of the platform. At times her arms jerked uncontrollably, her head lolled to one side so that it almost touched her shoulder, and a stream of saliva sometimes ran down her blouse. Beside her stood Josee, who read the mature and graceful prose Carolyn had composed, centered around this Bible text: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God but not from us.”

For the first time, some students saw Carolyn as a complete human being, like themselves. Before then her mind, a very good mind, had always been inhibited by a “disobedient” body, and difficulties with speech had masked her intelligence. But hearing her address read aloud as they looked at her onstage, the students could see past the body in a wheelchair and imagine a whole person.

Carolyn told me about that day in her halting speech, and I could understand only about half the words. But the scene she described became for me a kind of parable of the church: a perfect mind locked inside a spastic body, and vocal chords that failed at every second syllable. The New Testament image of Christ as Head of the body took on new meaning for me. I gained a sense of both the humiliation that Christ undergoes in his role as head, and also the exaltation that he allows us, the members of his body.

Sadly, like Carolyn’s body, we in the church sometimes obscure rather than convey God’s love and glory. But the church is the reason behind the entire human experiment, the reason there are human beings in the first place: to somehow let creatures other than God bear the image of God. He deemed it well worth the risk and the humiliation.

But Carolyn also illustrates what even an imperfect body can do.

At one point, she worked at Crestview Developmental Center, a workshop for the disabled. Only Carolyn and one other were physically disabled; the others had either mental or severe emotional problems.

Several airlines had granted the center a contract to clean and repackage stereo headphones. Some of the older men would just stand and stare at their work all day, insulated in a hopeless daze. Carolyn told me later, “I would watch them and shudder, wondering if I too was heading that direction. Those old men sometimes showed up in my dreams at night, with me among them.”

At first Carolyn could not communicate with her fellow workers. Her loud voice made most of them uneasy, especially when they couldn’t understand her words.

“I could write notes,” said Carolyn, “but none of them could read. So I learned to reach out and touch them, and this shattered the wall of ice. The more I touched, the more they responded.”

She reflects: “The workers at Crestview were the most lovable and yet the most volatile people I have ever known. In reading class, often the young men became so utterly frustrated trying to remember words that they would pound their fists on the tables and run off into the forest behind Crestview.

“Yet despite the emotional scars, they received affection openly and gladly. I was surrounded during breaks and lunch hour by people wanting hugs.”

Likewise, even an imperfect body is able to express something of the love and purposes of Christ, the Head.

He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe. It was he who gave some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Then we will no longer be infants. Instead, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

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