The Man Who Heard Voices, Part 1

By Alan Jacobs

“There is neither a first nor a last word,” wrote Mikhail Bakhtin. “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.” Suppressed for decades under Stalinism, long inaccessible to Western readers, the work of this powerful Christian thinker invites us to a carnival where the pretensions of all grand system-builders are deconstructed.

On the first page of Dostoevsky’s great novel “Crime and Punishment” we find ourselves thrown into the mental world of an unnamed young man. Though the narration is in the third person, it seems at times to slip without comment into the young man’s own voice:

It was not landladies he feared, no matter what this one happened to be plotting against him.

To find himself stuck on the stairs, though, and forced to listen to the whole range of her nonsense and offensive rubbish for which he had absolutely no concern; forced to listen to her pesterings for payment, her threats, her appeals; and he himself all the while prevaricating, making excuses, lying. … No. Better somehow to slink down the stairs like a cat and slip away unseen.

Is the landlady plotting against this young man? Does she speak mere nonsense? The narrator does not say. And likewise, when we hear the young man asking himself, “Can I really do that?” the narrator refrains from informing us what that is. We soon learn that the young man’s name is Raskolnikov. We learn it, not because the narrator tells us, but because the young man identifies himself to a pawnbroker (a pawnbroker he will soon murder); now the narrator can pick up the name and use it himself. Raskolnikov wanders into a saloon, where he meets a strange, agitated man who introduces himself as Titular Councilor Marmeladov. And off goes this Marmeladov on a long, drunken monologue filled with references to people we don’t (yet) know, culminating in a disorderly but blissful eschatalogical vision in which Marmeladov comes before the great Judge at the end of the world, admitting that he is but a drunkard and a swine, and he is received all the same. “O Lord!” he cries out in the saloon. “Thy kingdom come!”

Why are we asked to listen to such rambling for so long? What are we supposed to think about Marmeladov, about Raskolnikov? Later on we will hear, at equal or greater length, from others: from a prostitute named Sonia, from a strangely and hideously depraved man named Svidrigailov, from a mysterious official associated with the police and known to us only by his first name and patronymic, Porfiry Petrovich. Why won’t the narrator explain any of these people to us, or tell us what we should think of them? And above all, where is Dostoevsky in all this cacophony? He is the author of this book; why does he hide himself behind these faces, these voices?

The man who could answer these questions more fully than anyone else–and who understood that their import went far beyond mere literary criticism; that, properly understood, such questions come near to being the first questions of philosophy and theology–that man was born 100 years ago in the Russian city of Orel (on Nov. 16, 1895, to be exact).

Three-quarters of a century later, in a retirement home near Moscow, he could have paused for reflection on his long and eventful life: on the years in internal exile; on surviving the Stalinist purges; on how the only manuscript of one great book had been destroyed, during World War II, by a bomb, and another, written just afterward, had been rejected as a doctoral thesis; on the young scholars who, during the Khrushchev thaw, had found that he was still alive and working in an obscure provincial college and began to celebrate his greatness; on being rediscovered and becoming a sage to whom people made pilgrimages. But instead, he kept working and in one of his last notebooks explained with exemplary brevity the key to his long life of careful and brilliant thought, the essential lesson he had learned from reading Dostoevsky:

“I hear voices everywhere, and dialogic relations among them.”

1. This man’s name was Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, and he is, I believe beyond question, the greatest scholar and theorist of literature this century has produced. His “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” is generally recognized to be among the handful of indispensable books in the vast secondary literature on Dostoevsky. “Rabelais and His World,” the rejected doctoral thesis, finally published in 1965, is among the most important books on Rabelais. And “The Dialogic Imagination” is perhaps the century’s seminal work in the theory of the novel. (It is likely that we would also think of Bakhtin as the greatest scholar of the Bildungsroman–or novel of education–had the German bomb not done away with it. Bakhtin himself did away with the drafts and notes for the book, tearing them into small pieces and using them for cigarette papers when wartime rationing left him with nothing to wrap his tobacco in.)

Bakhtin is also one of the great philosophers of our age, though he did not do philosophy as it is typically understood in American universities. And the body of his work, taken together, provides an enormous resource for Christian thinking on a vast range of subjects–a resource that I hope will be recognized and used now that the question of Bakhtin’s own Christian faith has been settled. (In the early 1980s, when his work first became widely accessible and, in short order, fashionable in the West, and he began to be cited with a frequency rivaling the triumvirate of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, Bakhtin was not recognized as a distinctively Christian thinker. As we shall see, some Western readers still find it difficult to acknowledge the fact of his faith.)

Bakhtin thought of himself primarily as a philosopher and described his work as the articulation of a “philosophical anthropology”: an account, one might say, of what it means to be a human being in the social world. Only in light of this lasting commitment can the incredible diversity of Bakhtin’s work be understood as something other than incoherence. I have already mentioned his major works on literature–works that display immense learning in social and cultural history–but in addition to them, there were many philosophical essays, treatises on aesthetics, a book on Freudianism, another on the school of literary critics and linguists known as the Russian Formalists, yet another entitled “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.”

These last three appeared between 1927 and 1930, and though all of them were published under the names of Bakhtin’s friends–for reasons that probably involved Bakhtin’s lack of involvement in party-approved activities and institutions–it is now well-established that Bakhtin wrote most if not all of each of these three works. The Dostoevsky book, which, significantly, Bakhtin did put his name on, was published in 1929 (though it may have been written some years earlier). This phenomenally fertile period for the still-young scholar came to a sudden end in January of 1929 when he was arrested and charged with participating in various illegal religious activities involving the Russian Orthodox Church and with “corrupting the young.”

At this time, Bakhtin was in fragile health, suffering from, among other things, serious kidney troubles and osteomyelitis (the latter problem would result, a decade later, in the amputation of his right leg). When he was convicted and sentenced to ten years on the Solovetsky Islands, a prison colony in the far north that was widely regarded as a death camp and where he would have had virtually no chance of surviving, his friends appealed to every authority they knew for clemency. In the end, his sentence was commuted to internal exile in Kazakhstan. There he found work, stayed out of the government’s line of sight–unlike many of his friends, who were being murdered in the Stalinist purges of intellectuals in the late thirties–and wrote (though he did not publish) his great works on the novel and his revolutionary study of Rabelais’s links with medieval and Renaissance folk culture.

For most of the rest of his life, Bakhtin stayed in the provinces, teaching at obscure quasi-universities and writing whenever he could. He knew that his exile had actually been a blessing in that it kept him beyond the long arms of Stalin’s thugs. If he could not publish, he could think and write and teach and enjoy life with his beloved wife, Elena Alexandrovna. One wonders whether what he thought and wrote in those days would have been possible without his encounter with Stalinism, to which it was in many respects a powerful response.

2. Bakhtin’s thought is enormously complex and his writing always hard to read largely because he made a conscious and lifelong practice of avoiding the Western tradition of critical analysis, in which the object of study is broken up into its component parts to see what it is made up of and how it works. Bakhtin wanted to understand the things he investigated in their full living wholeness: even a sentence will always be misunderstood when seen as just a sentence. It is not enough to analyze the sentence, no matter how carefully. We must ask who said it, to whom it was said, where it was said, when it was said, and in what context (or, to be more accurate, contexts) it was said.

Every sentence is a human utterance, a human act, never a merely linguistic phenomenon. It makes no sense to think of language as though it could be separated from the people who use it–and are in turn shaped by it: the languages we know both enable us to think and set limits on what we can think. Every sentence arises within psychological, geographical, historical, and sociological contexts, as well as within narrowly linguistic ones. If we exclude some or all of these factors from consideration, even of one puny sentence, we make our jobs easier, but only at the price of forgoing genuine understanding.

Bakhtin’s characteristic way of putting this is to say that not only language but human consciousness itself is always and inevitably dialogical. We come into this world responding to the world’s promptings, the information it presents to us, the pleasures and pains it deals out to us. When we learn to speak and to understand words, we do so only and always in response to the words of others. Every word we meditate or utter for the rest of our lives will be, in some way and to some degree, an answer to the words of others.

This is why Bakhtin loved Dostoevsky and why, in one of his first mature works, he praised Dostoevsky as “the creator of … a fundamentally new novelistic genre, … the polyphonic novel.” It was Dostoevsky’s polyphony that I tried to describe at the beginning of this essay, his bringing together of many different voices into a sometimes harmonious, sometimes cacophonous ensemble. The voices speak, while we are invited to listen; neither Dostoevsky nor his narrator will force a response upon us–unlike, say, Tolstoy, who often tells us precisely what we should think about his characters: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

Dostoevsky would never say such a thing, but not because he didn’t care what we think; he is no less active than Tolstoy, but his activity is that of the conductor, not of the soloist. As Bakhtin said of Dostoevsky’s predecessor in dialogism, Aleksandr Pushkin, “the author participates in the novel (he is omnipresent in it)” but “cannot be found at any one of the novel’s language-levels: he is to be found at the center of organization where all levels intersect.” Pushkin, and to an even greater degree Dostoevsky, does not appear in the orchestra of voices, and yet he is responsible for every word those voices utter. He is in one sense fully in control, and yet in another sense he sacrifices some of that control to his characters.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

(continued in Part 2)

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Pastors

Surviving an IRS Audit

Richard R. Hammar

Recently the Internal Revenue Service issued “audit guidelines” for ministers’ tax returns. Here are attorney and accountant Richard Hammar’s conclusions of the risks and benefits of the new guidelines.

Is a minister an employee or self-employed?

The guidelines inform agents that most ministers are employees for income-tax reporting purposes, and that this is “the first issue that must be determined.” The guidelines do not say that all ministers are employees but “are generally considered employees.” Self-employed status will be the exception, however, and any minister reporting income taxes as self-employed must expect to have his or her status challenged if audited.

Who is a “minister”?

Happily, the guidelines apply a flexible definition of the term “minister.” It is more likely that associate pastors, and clergy employed by seminaries and parachurch ministries, will be considered “ministers” for federal tax purposes. There is less risk of an auditor challenging ministerial status.

What is considered “income”?

The guidelines urge agents to look for several kinds of taxable income that may not have been reported, including:

  1. “Special gifts.” It is more likely that ministers will be asked if they received gifts during the year (for example, on a birthday, an anniversary, Christmas, or retirement). In most cases such gifts are taxable—especially if funded through offerings collected during church services from donors who receive charitable giving credit for their contributions.
  2. Business expense reimbursements. Many ministers are reimbursed for business expenses under a “nonaccountable” reimbursement arrangement. For example, your church pays a monthly car allowance to staff members, without requiring substantiation. Or your church reimburses business expenses without requiring receipts for expenses of $75 or more, with the date, place, and business purpose of each expense. Or your church reimburses business expenses once each year, rather than within a “reasonable time” (generally 60 days or less). Or your church provides travel advances and requires no accounting for the use of these funds. First, all such nonaccountable reimbursements must be reported as taxable income to the minister (on a W-2 or 1099). Second, ministers can deduct such expenses only as miscellaneous itemized deductions on Schedule A. (Ministers who cannot use Schedule A lose any deduction for their nonaccountable business expenses, even though they must report all of their church’s reimbursements as taxable income.) If you have a nonaccountable reimbursement arrangement, immediately convert it to an accountable arrangement.
  3. Amounts paid to cover self-employment tax or income tax. Many churches pay ministers an additional amount to help them meet their self-employment tax obligations. Such “contributions” represent taxable income to the minister and will likely be identified in audits. The same rule applies to any amounts paid to a minister by a church to cover income taxes.

What risks come with housing allowances?

Increased audit risks face ministers as a result of the new guidelines:

  1. Designations in advance of the year. Unfortunately, the guidelines state the housing allowance “only applies if the employing church designates the amount of the allowance in advance of the tax year.” While this statement is not true, it will make it far more likely that IRS auditors will question ministers’ housing allowances that are not designated prior to the beginning of each new year. It is best to play it safe: Have all housing allowances designated prior to the beginning of the applicable year.
  2. The “fair rental value” limitation. The guidelines clearly instruct agents that ministers who own their homes can exclude from taxable income “the least of (1) the amount actually used to provide a home, (2) the amount officially designated as a housing allowance, or (3) the fair rental value of the home, including furnishings, utilities, garage, etc.” In other words, ministers cannot simply exclude the housing allowance designated by their church if one of the other limitations applies. Many ministers have ignored the other limitations, and particularly the “fair rental value” limitation. All three limitations will likely now be applied, and a minister’s housing allowance exclusion will be limited to the lowest of the three amounts.
  3. Housing allowances paid to retired ministers. The guidelines instruct IRS agents to be sure that retired ministers report any housing allowance they receive from a retirement plan as taxable for purposes of the self-employment tax. Most retired ministers do not presently follow this rule, and the guidelines’ position on this point is most unfortunate. On the other hand, the guidelines confirm that retirement plans can designate housing allowances for retired ministers and that such allowances are tax-free for income tax reporting purposes (if legal requirements are met).

What is legitimately a business expense?

Here are increased audit risks to be aware of:

  1. Salary-reduction arrangements. Does your church reimburse your business expenses by reducing your salary? This is a question auditors will be asking ministers as a result of the guidelines. Such arrangements are not illegal or improper, but since they cannot be accountable, all reimbursements must be reported as taxable income to the minister.
  2. Business use of a home. The guidelines instruct agents to “question closely” the necessity of a home office. This expense should not be claimed unless there is a reasonable basis for it.
  3. Personal use of business equipment. Many ministers own computers that they use for both business and personal use. The guidelines make it more likely that ministers will be asked to prove the percentage of time the computer is used for business purposes.
  4. Contributions to a church or denominational agency. The good news is that the guidelines concede that modest annual renewal fees paid to a denominational agency that are required to maintain a minister’s credentials are deductible. On the other hand, contributions made by ministers to their employing church are not business expenses but must be reported as charitable contributions.
  5. The “Deason” allocation rule. The guidelines instruct agents to apply the so-called Deason allocation rule. This requires that a minister’s business expense deduction (for income-tax reporting purposes) be reduced by the percentage of total compensation that is tax-exempt as a housing allowance. The good news is that the rule can be avoided completely if a church simply adopts an accountable business expense reimbursement arrangement. Richard R. Hammar is an attorney and certified public accountant, and editor of Church Law & Tax Report.

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Excerpted by permission from Church Law & Tax Report (September/October 1995).

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

To Quip

AGING

Jeanne Calment, at 120 years and counting, is the oldest living human who’s birth date can be authenticated. When recently asked to describe her vision for the future, she replied, “Very brief.”

From Win Arn comes another quip about an aging woman. When the reporter asked the birthday girl what she like best about being 102 years old, she answered, “No peer pressure.”

Finally, John Fetterman, rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, Wisconsin told of an elderly woman who died last April. Having never married, she requested no male pallbearers. In her handwritten instructions for her memorial service, she wrote, “They wouldn’t take me out while I was alive, I don’t want them to take me out when I’m dead.”

—From Homiletics, Jan-Mar 96

ASSUMPTIONS

In “Point Man,” Steve Farrar tells this story:

The photographer for a national magazine was assigned to shoot a great forest fire. He was told that a small plane would be waiting to take him over the fire.

He arrived at the airstrip just an hour before sundown. Sure enough the Cessna was waiting. He jumped in with his equipment and shouted, “Let’s go!” The pilot swung the plane into the wind and soon they were in the air.

“Fly over the north side of the fire,” said the photographer, “and make several low-level passes.”

“Why?” asked the nervous pilot.

“Because I’m going to take pictures!” retorted the photographer. “I’m a photographer, and photographers take pictures.”

After a long pause, the pilot replied. “You mean, you’re not the instructor?”

—Ron WilloughbyAugusta, Georgia

DOUBT

The only thing that casts doubt on the miracles of Jesus is that they were all witnessed by fishermen.

—A Wisconsin fishing guide

FINGER POINTING

At bedtime, Lillian Holcomb told her two grandsons a Bible story, then asked if they knew what the word sin meant. Seven-year-old Keith spoke up: “It’s when you do something bad.” Four-year-old Aaron’s eyes widened. “I know a big sin Keith did today.”

Annoyed, Keith turned to his little brother: “You take care of your sins, and I’ll take care of mine.”

—The Christian Reader (Jan.-Feb./95)

PARENTING

Did you know there’s a special chain letter for parents? It reads:

 Dear Friend: This chain letter is meant to bring relief and happiness to you. Unlike other chain letters, this one does not cost money. Simply send a copy of this letter to six other parents who are tired of their teenagers. Then bundle yours up and send him or her to the parent at the bottom of the list.

 In one week, you will receive 16,436 teenagers—and one of them should be worth keeping. Warning: One dad broke the chain and got his own teenager back.

—Roger PoupartKaufman, Texas

PRAYER

Herb Miller wrote in Connecting with God:

When a nightclub opened on Main Street, the only church in that small town organized an all-night prayer meeting. The members asked God to burn down the club. Within a few minutes, lightning struck the club, and it burned to the ground. The owner sued the church, which denied responsibility.

After hearing both sides, the judge said, “It seems that wherever the guilt may lie, the nightclub owner believes in prayer, while the church doesn’t.”

WORSHIP

A woman entered a Haagen-Dasz store on the Kansas City Plaza for an ice-cream cone. After making her selection, she turned and found herself face to face with Paul Newman, in town filming the movie Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. He smiled and said hello. Newman’s blue eyes caused her knees to shake.

 She managed to pay for her cone, then left the shop, heart pounding. When she gained her composure, she realized she didn’t have her snack. She started back into the store to get it and met Newman at the door.

“Are you looking for your ice cream?” he asked. She nodded, unable to speak. “You put it in your purse with your change.”

When was the last time the presence of God quickened our pulse?

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What’s made you laugh—and made a point? Send us clean, fresh, funny stories. For items used, Leadership will pay $35. If the material has been published, please indicate the source. Send submissions to: To Quip … , LEADERSHIP, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188.

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

Wing Walkers

WING WALKERS

Folks came from miles around when the wing walkers brought their show to town. These ultimate risk takers combined aerodynamics and acrobatics to thrill and amaze. Would they soar—or crash?

Today’s pastor knows how high expectations can be—and how it feels like stepping onto the wing of a moving biplane to try to meet them:

“No, I didn’t leave a message. When I call the church I expect to talk with a person, not a machine.”

“Why don’t we have a program like that?”

“How can you listen to everyone else’s problems all day long, then ignore your own spouse when I need to talk?”

By God’s grace, we defy gravity often enough that we can begin to accept unrealistic expectations from our congregations, our families, and ourselves.

Leadership assistant editor Ed Rowell spoke with six pastors to find out how they keep their balance when expectations soar.

WHAT IS YOUR ROLE AS PASTOR?

Ted Haggard: I see myself as a coach. A coach is a teacher, an encourager, and a motivator. A coach has to discipline people and at the same time keep them on the team. Most coaches are athletes who have just gotten older and wiser. That’s a pretty good description of what a pastor should be. I do not see my role as a shepherd.

Maynard Mathewson: I’m a shepherd of God’s flock. As the single-staff shepherd of a rural, western church, I do a little bit of everything! But mostly, I spend time with people.

We have outfitters and guides in our church, and I spend time with them. We have ranchers, and I’ve ridden with them in the high country, checking cattle. We’ve got carpenters and builders, and I’ve spent time with them. You have to do these things if you’re going to relate God’s Word to their needs.

John Macarthur: I teach the Bible and preach the good news that God saves sinners. The New Testament job description in Titus 1:9 is “holding fast the faithful word so that you can exhort in sound doctrine.” There are a lot of ancillary things a pastor is involved in, but there doesn’t need to be an identity crisis. You’re to preach the Word in season, out of season.

Heidi Husted: My role is as a guide—to help people make the next step in a Christward direction. Everyone is somewhere along the road of faith. I want to point them in the right direction and help them take that next step.

People need to be convinced of grace more than anything else. If people got hold of that—rather, if grace got hold of them—their lives would be transformed. I spend a lot of time convincing people that Jesus really does love them.

Kevin Cosby: As pastors, we are friends of the Bridegroom, watching over the Bride until the day they are fully united. But we are not married to the Bride!

I am also the leader. No other person in the congregation influences attitudes or behavior more.

Leadership: What does your congregation expect from you?

Maynard Mathewson: When someone visits our church, they expect the first visit to come from the pastor. When there’s a death or a serious illness in this church, they expect me to be there. That’s why it’s called pastoral care. And when there’s a special event, like baptism and Communion, they also expect the pastor to do it.

John Macarthur: People want to hear the Word of God made clear to them. We hear all the time, “I come here because I want to be fed the Word of God.” In fact, it’s interesting that people will say to me, “I came to Grace while you were preaching from First Corinthians 3” or “I came in Matthew 7.”

Ted Haggard: They expect me to do the things no one else can do. Only I can do the leader’s prayer and fasting for the entire church. No one else can study for my sermons. No one else can take care of my family. No one else can dev elop and minister to my staff.

Kevin Cosby: Actually, the expectations that weigh heaviest may be from our peers, not our flock. When we apply the measuring sticks of success—bucks, buildings, and bodies—we can slowly but surely lower our standards.

Heidi Husted: Rather than focus on what people want or need from us—that will suck us dry—it’s better to be in touch with what God expects. That’s so freeing for me. To listen and try to respond to all the human expectations is terrifying.

A book that helped me was William Martin’s The Art of Pastoring. When giving spiritual direction, he looks first at a pastor’s daily planner, “because it reveals volumes about that pastor’s spiritual condition, their values, fears, and ambitions. It tells me who their bosses are, who their lover is, and how much value they place on their soul.”

He goes on to say, “If you’re working more than fifty hours a week, you’re not doing it for God, no matter how eloquent your rationalization. Take a long, prayerful, meditative look at your calendar. Whom are you trying to impress? God? Give me a break. The congregation? Possibly. Yourself? Bingo.

“Now, cut some big chunks out of each week for family, rest, meditation, prayer, and flower sniffing. When you’re done with that, then we’ll talk more about the path to God.”

Leadership: When have you failed to meet someone’s expectations?

John Macarthur: I think of a man who had a little boy who was the light of his life. The boy had a brain tumor and died. I was there during the time of the dying. I was there to support the family. I did the funeral service.

Two years later, he came to me after church one Sunday and said, “I’m leaving the church.”

“Why?”

He said, “You were there when our son died, but you’ve never spoken to me in the two years since.”

My first thought was, Well, it’s a busy place. My second thought was, He’s right.

I fulfilled my professional duty, but my lack of sensitivity to the aftermath broke his heart. Sometimes those things happen, and you’ve really got to grab hold of your heart and do an honest inventory.

Gary Preston: In a previous church, the expectations were for the pastor to function as a priest: be there at birth, death, marriage, hospital beds. But the church needed a spiritual leader. Their expectations of a pastor clashed with my understanding of what they needed.

Maynard Mathewson: When I came to this church, I was told not so subtly, “Pastor, you do the marrying, burying, evangelizing, praying, and counseling. That’s what we pay you for.” I’ve done all that, with joy.

But along the line, folks have learned that I’m committed to Ephesians 4:11-13, “to equip the saints to do the work of ministry.” Because of the example I’ve set, even long-time members are beginning to catch that vision.

Rather than grow unhappy, change my role, or look for the perfect church, I set out to train people in what the scriptural role of the pastor and the flock ought to be. That takes time. It meant I had to commit to a long-term ministry.

Leadership: What’s the most demanding part of ministry for you?

Gary Preston: Without a doubt, it’s the unrealistic expectations of people. I have a shepherd’s heart, so I want to help people, please people, love people. But their expectations—well, sometimes they’re downright carnal.

People expect me to produce an exciting, life-changing, challenging sermon every Sunday, yet they also expect me to answer my phone every time it rings. It’s a great challenge to instruct people on how unrealistic their expectations are. The best way to do this is by constantly communicating what my life is really like Monday through Saturday.

John Macarthur: Without question, the incessant discipline of study. Once you make the commitment to be an expository preacher, you have committed yourself to relentless and careful discipline. To interpret Scripture, put it in theological context, and then find things from the world around you to give impact and clarity—to do that week after week, year after year, is a formidable task that demands exhausting effort.

Maynard Mathewson: Maybe the hardest thing is that you never quite feel, “Hey, the job is done.” You’re never caught up. There are just so many people to see, so many things that need to be done.

Heidi Husted: We’re counselors; we’re administrators; we’re communicators. The thing that can put you over the edge is believing you’re supposed to be good at every one of those roles. For instance, I’m supposed to stand up in a pulpit and hold people’s interest and be as funny and as good-looking and as articulate as the best media personalities.

Kevin Cosby: To persevere in spite of criticism. I can’t get frustrated with people who don’t buy into my vision; I must work with those who do. I practice what I call “The Little Bo Peep Principle.” You know, “Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them. Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.” Some sheep you have to leave alone while you work with the sheep who will follow. The other sheep will eventually come home.

Maynard Mathewson: It is so painful to see someone who doesn’t really want to grow in Christ. Some people grow like gangbusters, while others don’t. The frustration is knowing that those who aren’t growing could be—but they refuse to take hold of what’s available to them.

Gary Preston: Relationships. Some days, it’s a challenge to love all the people. If I weren’t a pastor, I’d be apt to choose my relationships. Those who tick me off—well, I just wouldn’t be friends with them. But as a pastor, I have to work hard at loving and accepting even the ones who tick me off.

We’ve gone through budget issues recently about the percentage of money we give to missions, and we’ve had sharp disagreements. But I tried to make sure that people knew I loved them, even when we disagreed.

John Macarthur: I guess the thing that cuts most deeply, the thing you never expect, is when your dear, familiar friend, with whom you break bread, turns on you and sows seeds of discord or false accusation. It leaves you stunned. There’s no way to tell when it’s coming and no way to deal with the pain of it, the disbelief. The people who know you best have the potential to wound you most profoundly.

Leadership: How has your expectation of the pastoral role changed since you’ve been in ministry?

Heidi Husted: I had no idea how draining, how challenging ministry really was. No one told me how much I would live on my growing edge. I never read about how difficult it would be to take good care of myself.

I never dreamed it would be as conflicted as it is at times. I guess I didn’t read the Book of Acts very closely. I thought church would be a big, happy family. Well, it is family—and families argue and disagree.

Kevin Cosby: My greatest mistake was trusting God too little. There is so much more we could have done, but I didn’t think we could. I was putting my trust in finances and what the books said we were capable of doing.

I’ve learned to trust people as well. I was conditioned to see deacons and other leaders as potential adversaries. That mindset is counterproductive to leadership.

Gary Preston: I grew up in a healthy church, in which the pastor had a certain respect given to him. I was surprised to discover churches that don’t respect the position of pastor. I was also surprised that people aren’t sitting on the edge of their seat in anticipation of a sermon!

Leadership: Is it possible to separate your personal identity from your pastoral identity?

Kevin Cosby: It’s possible, but it means, for me, almost demanding that people recognize I’m a man first, then a minister. I’m protective of my time away from the pastoral role. At the barber shop, I don’t want to counsel someone; I just want a haircut.

I don’t care what’s going on at the church on Saturday; people know I’m not going to be a part of it, because that’s my day. I’ve been able to do this by learning two things: I can say no, and I’m not indispensable.

One reason we neglect our life outside the church is that ministry can become a narcotic, a form of escape from things like a bad marriage or a painful past.

Gary Preston: The pastoral vocation can steal things you never realize are gone until someday you wake up and look in the cabinet for them and they’re no longer there. One is your sense of balance, of recognizing what’s important, your priorities.

Early in our marriage, my wife and I made a covenant with each other that we would not allow ministry to overshadow our family. My wife will say, “You know, we miss you, and the kids are wondering if you’re going to be gone another night this week.”

Heidi Husted: As a single pastor, I don’t have a family, but I need a life that’s separate from my role, from my job. For the first ten years of my ministry, I thought if the church were healthy, I would be healthy. That’s backward. It’s only in the last five years that I’ve learned that to the extent I’m healthy, the church can be healthy. It’s hard to understand because it sounds selfish.

Kevin Cosby: Having a life apart from ministry requires incredible discipline. It means having a schedule and sticking to it. I schedule time for study, administration, and prayer. I also schedule time for exercise and family and Monday night football.

Ted Haggard: Every month, I take three days for prayer and fasting. It gives me time alone, time to rest, and time to soak in the Word so I come back refreshed.

Heidi Husted: I started thinking about what I did outside of the church. Answer: nothing. The church, in many ways, was consuming my life. A local high school offered a course in carpentry. I talked to our session [board] about pursuing it. They knew they wouldn’t be getting any less of my time, so they said “Go for it.”

For nine months, I learned carpentry skills and a summer later built a cabin with some friends. Carpentry is rewarding, because after a day of framing you stand back and say, “Look what I’ve done. It’s tight. It’s square. It’s plumb. It’s wonderful.” The fact that things were finished really scratched an itch in me. We all know ministry is not like that.

Frankly, part of my thinking was that I could be a carpenter if I ever needed an out. But the upshot was, I found carpentry even harder than ministry! I joked with a friend, “No wonder Jesus started out as a carpenter and ended up in ministry.”

Leadership: Amid all the expectations, how do you keep your passion for ministry?

Gary Preston: When expectations and frustrations are rising, I look for someone who’s up ahead to give me perspective.

Our family has climbed several 14,000-foot peaks here in Colorado. As I get older, it gets harder for me to make these climbs. My kids are always up ahead, so I’ll say, “Look down at the trail and tell me if there’s a better way to go.” They’ll yell down, “Go farther to the west, or circle around this knoll.”

Maybe they didn’t go that route, but when they’re up above, their perspective is different. If I follow their directions, I see they were right. I need the same kind of people in ministry.

John Macarthur: I try to remain thankful. My greatest joy is that my four children love Christ. Those who have married chose Christian spouses. They love their mom and dad and believe in the ministry. That’s a tremendous encouragement, because it says that at the most intimate level of your life, there is enough reality to convince your kids they ought to walk with Christ.

Maynard Mathewson: I tell myself, “Instead of blaming people, instead of going to another church, commit yourself to the time and patience needed here to teach, train, and show them the scriptural role. Give them time and space to make adjustments so these frustrations gradually turn into satisfactions.”

I also remember my job is not to make people happy. I just try to please the Lord. First Thessalonians 2:4 warns us not to be a people pleaser.

Heidi Husted: I remind myself that every pastor is an interim pastor. My predecessor was an interim for thirty-one years. Realizing we aren’t going to be here forever allows us to hold the ministry lightly and not clutch it.

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Kevin Cosby is senior pastor of St. Stephen’s Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ted Haggard is founding pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Heidi Husted is senior pastor of Columbia Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, Washington.

John MacArthur is pastor/teacher of Grace Community Church and president of Master’s College and Seminary in Sun Valley, California.

Maynard Mathewson is pastor of Paradise Valley Community Church in Livingston, Montana.

Gary Preston is pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Boulder, Colorado.

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

Cloud of Witnesses

Dave Hansen

When my wife, Debbie, and I and another couple arrived at the nursery after the midweek evening program, we discovered our toddlers playing church.

Here’s how it went: The 3-year-old “parents” were taking the 2-year-old “babies” to “nursery,” then the “parents” went to “meetings.” The attendant said they’d played the game over and over all evening.

We laughed out loud, but we glanced at one another’s eyes; we knew how sick it was. Our children’s first word to describe the gospel ministry was “meetings.” It wasn’t a cuss word they’d learned at the neighbor’s. This was home-grown heresy.

I didn’t do anything about it. I started things, I planned things, I taught things, I organized things, I ran things, I built things—of course I had a lot of meetings to go to. Isn’t that ministry? It sounded professional when I said it, but coming from our babies it sounded horrible, like a betrayal. It occurred to me that I was the one playing church.

ALEXANDER WHYTE’S LARGE LIFE

G.F. Barbour’s “The Life of Alexander Whyte” (out of print) began to dissolve the glue that pasted together pastoral ministry and human management technology. This old book about a nineteenth-century Scottish Presbyterian pastor taught me deep inside, wherever things like paradigm shifts occur, that pastoral ministry is not the exercise of a pastoral technique; it is a work of Spirit, soul, gospel, and life.

Whyte was born January 13, 1836, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. He was raised in a single-parent home, an only child, an illegitimate child, in extreme poverty. When Whyte’s mother wouldn’t marry him, his father moved to America where he eventually fought in the Civil War. His mother raised Alexander to work and worship. His first promptings to ministry came before he was old enough to know that his socio-economic situation should have made his vision impossible; he damaged his health with the work and study required to answer his call. Eventually he became pastor of Free St. George’s in Edinburgh, where he served for more than fifty years.

Alexander Whyte worked constantly. On the other hand, and this was terribly attractive to me, he was awesomely free in what he did. He preached and taught and prayed, wrote thousands of letters, read great books, and gave spiritual direction (” … something in his face and bearing attracted those who were passing through deep waters”). He wrote and lectured and called tirelessly on his people in their homes. He suffered from depression, disappointment, and exhaustion, just like the rest of us, but he always seemed, somehow, to be in control of his life in a positive, free manner.

Barbour tells us this wonderful story of Whyte the preacher and man of prayer: “Once, after a singularly solemn New Year’s sermon, a devoted member of Free St. George’s went to the vestry to thank his minister. He ended with the words, ‘It went to my heart as if you had come straight from the Audience-chamber [the throne of God].’ ‘And perhaps I did,’ was the quiet and grave reply.”

Whyte was not patient with laziness: “I would have all lazy students drummed out of the college, and all lazy ministers drummed out of the Assembly.” Yet he was also famous for his long vacations with his family, his love of fishing, nature walks, and mountain climbing. One assistant said of him: “Along the line of duty he is one of the most determined, I would venture to say one of the most dogged, persons whom God ever created. … And yet with this so grim determination—and at times it can be very grim—with this will, built up through a thousand minute victories into strength and liberty, there is a certain tenderness about him, a large sympathy, a sweet and gracious courtesy, that are infinitely attractive and endearing.”

Alexander Whyte’s breadth of reading and acquaintances was remarkable, even by today’s standards. He and his wife, Jane, entertained Salvation Army founder William Booth; he was personally acquainted with and corresponded with Robert Louis Stevenson; he met Cardinal Newman as a young man and studied him his whole life; theologian Baron von Hgel and he were friends. His deepest spiritual passion lay with the Puritans, especially Thomas Goodwin, Samuel Rutherford, and John Bunyan. He gave away literally hundreds of copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress. To say that he was a Dante fanatic might be an understatement.

“Few men with such firm, clear views,” a colleague said of Whyte, “have had such a genuine tolerance, love and understanding for others whose views were very different. He had it because he knew the things that matter, and had an instinct for discerning his brothers under sometimes strange guises.”

TECHNO-PASTOR’S EPIPHANY

Reading The Life of Alexander Whyte I found myself saying to myself over and over: You mean I can really pastor this way?

I wanted to pastor like Whyte long before I knew of him. Actually his ministry captured many of the best qualities of three wonderful mentor-pastors I’d known. But somehow in my training, in seminary, in church work, in the current literature, I’d gotten all turned around.

The power of this book to reshape my vision of ministry came from the fact that The Life of Alexander Whyte pictures his whole life. It starts with his birth and ends with his death. In it I saw that the true effect of ministry comes from the pastor’s whole life, not from the exercise of an infinite number of individual tasks.

Techno-pastor always gets chopped into littler and littler pieces. The church is divided into programs, which are divided into gatherings, which are planned at meetings, which are divided by agendas, which have many sub-agendas, all of which are constructed of many individual details, all of which Techno-pastor must master.

But Techno-pastor does not master details; details master Techno-pastor. Techno-pastor does not chop the church into bite-sized pieces, the church chops Techno-pastor into bite-sized pieces. What all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never do, “The Life of Alexander Whyte” did; it put my life back together again. And it still does.

I spend less time at meetings now, more time in parishioners’ homes, in my home, in prayer, in good books, and in trout streams!

In many ways Eugene Peterson is a modern Alexander Whyte. Both Presbyterian, their shared recreational passion would be not golf but mountain climbing. And mountain climbing is an apt metaphor for their reading and writing habits. I met Eugene in 1986. We were sharing favorite books. I mentioned The Life of Alexander Whyte. His face lit up. He had feasted there. His eyes sparkled like St. Nick’s as he gave me this present: “When I first started preaching, I decided that before I could preach to others, I needed to hear a sermon myself. So every Sunday morning, I got up early and read a sermon of Alexander Whyte’s. I’ve done it my whole ministry.”

HIGHLIGHTS OF ALEXANDER WHYTE ON PREACHING

  1. “Never think of giving up preaching! The angels around the throne envy your great work. You ‘scarcely know how or what to preach.’ Look into your own sinful heart, and back into your sinful life, and around on the world full of sin and misery, and open your New Testament, and make application of Christ to yourself and your people; and … you will preach more freshly and powerfully every day till you are eighty.”
  2. “[In preaching] do not despise delivery, falling back on matter. The matter is dead without delivery. Delivery! Delivery! Delivery! said Demosthenes to the aspirant. You able fellows are tempted to despise delivery as being ‘popular.’ I implore you to rise above that delusion … “
  3. “The pulpit is a jealous mistress and will not brook a divided allegiance.”
  4. “Many a time I feel so cold and dead that I might doubt if I had ever come to Him at all; but I go about my work notwithstanding, looking in His direction, and my heart fills by and by with His love to me.”

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Dave Hansen is pastor of Belgrade Community Church in Belgrade, Montana.

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

For Heaven’s Sake

In this new column, Linda Riley reflects on the many people we encounter in ministry. Linda is a pastor’s wife and director of Called Together Ministries in Torrance, California.

I hate hospitals. I hate the smell, the grim faces of the waiting, the pained, weary faces of the recovering, the factory-like processing of anguish and distress.

Years ago, though, an afternoon accident transformed me into a regular hospital visitor. It wasn’t my accident that put me in the hospital. It was Yolanda’s.

Yolanda was an imperfect stranger who went screeching by on a main thoroughfare. I commented to my daughter, “There’s an accident waiting to happen.” It didn’t wait long. Two blocks up, Yolanda met four cars full of strangers. Her van turned over, rested upright.

Yolanda stumbled out as I pulled alongside. A crowd gathered, but no one approached the injured out of fear or perhaps repulsion. I locked my young daughter in the car and raced over the crunching glass toward the most injured.

Someone handed me a clean cloth from a nearby bar. I helped the staggering woman to lie down, cradling her head in my arms so she wouldn’t lie in the glass. She had been just about scalped by her windshield. I applied pressure to her head wound to stop the bleeding while covering her eyes with the same cloth so she wouldn’t see what was left of her shredded arm. Certain her soul would soon enter eternity, I ignored the crowd and prayed out loud. She was coherent, so I asked her name and had her pray after me, not taking time for the four spiritual laws. At my prompting, she asked Jesus to forgive her of her sins and to help her.

While I prayed out loud for her life, her appearance was so terrible I also prayed silently that I would not lose my lunch on the poor woman. Her arm seemed beyond saving, and her head was in horrific condition, and all she could say after praying was “Oh, my stomach, my stomach, it hurts so bad.” She was six months’ pregnant and seemed to be delivering at that moment.

The emergency team finally arrived and took over. I gave an accident report to the police, picked up my other daughter from school (my original destination), and went home to wash Yolanda’s blood out of my hair and clothing.

Then I braced myself for the hardest part of the day: a visit to our local “indigent care” hospital. This hospital is known for two things: the best trauma care and the worst ambiance. The walls are painted Nausea Green, the smell is “Eau de Antiseptic Masking Death and Decay.” The staff are like robotons, when you can find any staff. The rooms are crammed with people.

Not my favorite place to spend an evening. But, this girl’s blood had been literally on my hands, and I felt responsible for her. I couldn’t just call, since I was not a relative and didn’t even know her full name.

I found that she had indeed had her baby boy, three months’ premature and not expected to live. The doctors were trying to hold off performing an arm amputation.

It took three days for Yolanda to improve enough to receive visitors. I entered her room with a gift for the baby, a tape player, and some Christian music tapes. When I introduced myself she cried out, “Oh, it’s the voice of the angel who prayed for me. I thought it was a real angel!”

After apologizing for not being an actual angel, I got to know Yolanda. I discovered she had been running away from God all her life. Many of her relatives were believers and felt that God had placed me there to intercede at a crucial time.

I visited Yolanda every day for weeks. She recovered and was able to keep her arm, though not the use of it, because of the extensive nerve damage. Her forehead was scarred with one line of stitching, reminiscent of the “Bride of Frankenstein.” Her son miraculously lived, with no impairment. Gradually, I lost touch with her.

Recently, a beautiful, joyful young lady with a scar on her forehead walked into our church, holding her young son’s hand. Yolanda. She wanted me to know that she and her son were serving the Lord.

I still hate hospitals. To move from a comfy living room couch to the local hospital ward is a sacrifice; though not quite the sacrifice Jesus made in leaving a magnificent heaven for a smelly, messy, painful world. I imagine Jesus isn’t too fond of hospitals, either. But whenever someone we love is there, he and I go together for a visit.

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Linda Riley is director of Called Together Ministries in Torrance, California.

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

Ideas that Work

DISCOVERY DAY

Last May, a demographic survey revealed that nearly 70 percent of our people had attended the church only three years or less. So we designated one Sunday in September as “Discovery Day,” to help people discover—or rediscover—the church ministries and opportunities to be involved.

Lay ministry leaders hosted tables (booth-type displays) along the sidewalk of our parking lot that Sunday morning. Even our elders hosted a table. In addition, the staff distributed a booklet of the names and telephone numbers of ministry leaders.

I preached an abbreviated sermon (playing off the discovery theme), to leave people time between services to browse at the tables and socialize. We provided refreshments and music in the parking lot. This year, in addition, the children’s ministry had a large outdoors gathering for elementary-age kids, sponsoring a speaker from a local professional sports team.

The Discovery Day has done a great job helping new people to get more involved.

—Bill Oudemolen

Foothills Bible Church

Littleton, Colorado

GET-UP-AND-GO GROUP

Thinking how lonely some widows in our church might be feeling, I thought about a support group for them. I invited the widows to a salad luncheon and shared my idea with the twenty who attended. We agreed to meet on a regular basis.

The group meets after church for lunch and keeps in touch by phone. When there is a death, members are the first to bring comfort, food, and encouragement. One member, Gladys, said, “When I became a widow, I didn’t feel I fit anywhere. Now I have a social life again.” The members now call themselves the “Get-Up-and-Go Group.”

P.S. The Men’s Fellowship wanted to help; when a widow has a repair need, she fills out a form and a volunteer from Men’s Fellowship does the repair work.

—Darlene Neubauer

Hope Baptist Church

Phoenix, Arizona

COMMUNITY BLOCK PARTY

Second only to “more interesting sermons,” “a church involved in the community” is what church seekers look for. To showcase Trinity Lutheran’s involvement, we organized a Downtown Community Block Party on Trinity’s front lawn, to encourage volunteerism in downtown Orlando.

News releases were sent to newspapers and TV stations, and three promotional pieces were mailed to downtown residents and businesses.

On that early spring Saturday morning, volunteers set up table decorations, and 27 community agencies set up booths. A catered meal was served by Bubbalou’s Bodacious Bar-B-Que, and live music and entertainment throughout the day kept excitement high. At 2:30 P.M. Orlando’s mayor gave an address. With Trinity’s youth selling pop and elders serving barbecue, we raised $2,400 for “People to People,” a local charity that links churches and social agencies.

Average worship attendance at Trinity had been 500; that weekend 700 people attended four services. The Block Party also let the community know our interest in their needs.

—Mark Joeckel

Orlando, Florida

THANKSGIVING PIES

Our Sunday school attracts 700 people weekly, so our church neighbors put up with a lot of traffic and noise. To thank them, church members baked pies, and then our pastor went door to door, saying, “Thank you for being such good neighbors. Here’s a pie to show our appreciation. We want to be as good a neighbor as you are to us.”

In the five years our pastor has served the church, we’ve never had an angry neighbor.

—Stan Sullinger

Memorial Baptist Church

Baytown, Texas

A MORE INTERACTIVE IDEAS THAT WORK

To make this column more useful, each issue will address a specific question. Then, in the following issue, we’ll publish the best responses.

This time the question is:

WHAT CREATIVE IDEAS HAVE WORKED IN HELPING TRANSIENTS?

We’ll pay from $25 for accepted items of about 150 words. Send E-mail to LeaderJ@aol.com or write to:

LeadershipIdeas That Work465 Gundersen DriveCarol Stream, IL 60188.

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

Thriving with Limitations

A conversation with Joni Eareckson Tada

Joni Eareckson Tada’s story has become legend: On July 30, 1967, the athletic 17-year-old dived into the Chesapeake Bay, striking a submerged rock, crushing her spine. Instantly, she was a quadriplegic.

In the preface of her book Joni, written almost eight years after the accident, she wrote, “I have found that God knows my needs infinitely better than I know them. And he is utterly dependable, no matter which direction our circumstances take us.”

Little could she know which direction God would take her. Today, twenty-eight years after her accident, Joni is a painter, writer, singer, speaker, advocate, executive, and Christian leader. She heads JAF Ministries, a parachurch organization located in Agoura Hills, California, that advocates the cause of, and ministers to, those with disabilities.

From her first book Joni to her recent release Heaven, Joni has grappled with the inexorable issues of purpose in pain and suffering. In Joni, she declared, “Pain and suffering have purpose.” A few years later in One Step Further, she admitted, “While [suffering] is God’s choicest tool to mold our character, it also has the tendency to breed self-centeredness.”

Only someone who has suffered greatly and cares deeply about ministering to others could write that honestly. Leadership associate editor Dave Goetz asked Joni how she meets the needs of others when life hasn’t met hers.

Dave: You’ve faced a great deal of pain. Does it ever subside to a point that you stop being conscious of it?

Joni: I don’t want to sound morbid, but I think life is supposed to be difficult. A lot of life is grabbing your leg by the calf, jerking it out of the earth, putting it down in front of you, and going onward.

With my disability, some days are easier than others. But for me, life is always difficult. These are issues I must face every single morning.

Every morning somebody has to give me a bath in bed, dress me, lift me into a wheel-chair, comb my hair, brush my teeth, fix my breakfast, cut up my food, feed me.

When it comes to the day-to-day routines of dealing with the paralysis, at worst, it’s depressing; at best, it’s boring. I can’t live with those flat facts. I have to turn them, by God’s grace, into something that has meaning and purpose.

Dave, would you give me a sip of my coffee?

Dave: I’m new at this, so you have to help me out.

Joni: That’s okay. Are you married? Do you have kids?

Dave: I’m married but have no children.

Joni: This will give you practice for the kids. (Sips coffee) Thank you.

Dave: When life gets hard, one thing that may wane is the desire to reach out to others. How do you continue to reach outside yourself?

Joni: The woman who helps me each morning is going through some difficult times. When she tells me her struggles, I could say, “Snap out of it. I’ve been paralyzed for 28 years. You only think you’ve got problems.”

But I need to look at her needs rather than my own. How can I bless her today? How can I be the balm of Gilead where she’s hurting? I must ask, “Out of my weakness, Lord God, would you please give me strength to minister to her.”

So we pray together and sing hymns together. We’ve stopped in the bathroom in between her brushing my teeth and combing my hair, and recited four stanzas of “May Jesus Christ Be Praised.”

These kinds of small, drastic steps of obedience become, miraculously, a blessing in her life and a strength to me.

Dave: What does it take to move beyond a limitation?

Joni: In a way, I’m somewhat blessed by my circumstances because I’m forced to lean on God whether I like it or not. My choices are limited. Let me give an example—and this truly is the fuel that fires all my days:

For the most part, I have to be in bed by eight o’clock at night because of my physical condition. I used to hate that, because when I’m lying in bed paralyzed, gravity is my enemy; I’m more limited than when I’m sitting in a wheelchair. At least in a wheelchair, I’ve got shoulder muscles and biceps. But lying in bed, I can’t move at all. It used to be so frightening and made me feel so claustrophobic. I couldn’t move except to turn my head on the pillow. It really was a bed of affliction for me.

Some years ago, somebody put a plaque by my bedside that reads BE still and know that I am God. I looked at that verse and thought, Well, here I am being still, physically. Maybe these are the structural boundaries that God is placing on me and pushing against me that I might see some other kind of stillness that is deeper. I decided that if I’m to believe God at his Word, and if he is with me in the pit of hell, then there’s something far more beautiful that can come out of these ashes than I can possibly imagine.

Now, many years later, it’s not a bed of affliction any more. It’s become an altar of praise. This physical enforcement of stillness causes something in my life that wouldn’t happen if I were on my feet running around. Perhaps I’d be putting the third kid to bed or folding the second load of laundry or emptying the dish-washer. But I wouldn’t be praying.

Dave: So it’s when we can’t free ourselves from a situation that we discover what God is teaching us?

Joni: It’s the old adage of Job—”God has hedged me in.” The hedges were thorny and thick and high, and there was no escape, no way out. The only place Job could look was up. I used to look at the four walls of my bedroom at night and say, “The hedge forces me in bed, which confines me, but, nevertheless, it makes me look up.”

I love the verse that speaks of the love of God “constraining” me. The word constrain means “to press in on all sides so as to impel forward.” You press something in, in order to push it forward. It’s the same with the limitations of my disability—they’re constraining, but it’s all to push me forward.

Dave: What can prevent you from seeing suffering this way?

Joni: So much of the battle is in our thoughts. The other night I was reading in Psalm 119 about keeping my eyes from looking at worthless things. There are so many things we look at that are just worthless. So many times we let our minds wander. Undisciplined, furtive thoughts that we allow to nest in our heads build strongholds in our thinking.

Forgive me for speaking so informally, but many men don’t want to talk about their thought life or let it be exposed because it is shaming; it reveals too much of who they are on the inside. I can identify with that because my world is the world of my thoughts. If I don’t watch it, I can live in fantasies.

For example, we spend too much time in an introspective way about the sermon we preached on Sunday, thinking, I should have said this. Why did I say that? How come no one’s complimenting me?

Thoughts like that consume too much of our time. It orients us toward self—self-appreciation, self-absorption, self-consciousness, self-awareness, self-gratification. The self becomes the rule. That sets us up for defeat.

Dave: How much should we think of our own needs as we minister?

Joni: I think God places in the sphere of our ministry those special people who can “meet that need.” However, I’m not big into focusing on needs. I get impatient with people who want to get their needs met. It’s indicative of our culture.

Recently I went to a women’s retreat and listened to a marvelous missionary speaker, a woman who had served in the jungles of an equatorial country for almost forty years. She had a somewhat dowdy appearance; she wasn’t dressed in the latest styles. Her hairdo was a little out of fashion, and she was not a particularly polished speaker. She shuffled her notes a few times and looked for a couple of quotes she’d lost in her notebook. She spoke quietly and humbly.

But I was so invigorated and challenged. She told stories of her and her husband taking their small children into jungles where malaria was running rampant, where rivers were infested with crocodiles, where the monsoon rains came down, and where their tiny grass hut, up on twenty-foot pilings of bamboo, was shaking in the wind. The natives they were trying to reach were cannibals who practiced head-hunting.

The fact that she wasn’t a polished speaker made her stories and testimonies and insights from God’s Word all the more brilliant. They shined with a kind of unpolished shekinah glory. Her speaking was so unmanmade, so divine.

Near the end of the retreat, I had lunch with several of the women. One said, “I couldn’t relate to the speaker. My life is about carpooling, children, and laundry. I came to this retreat tired and exhausted, hoping my needs would be met. I’m sorry; my needs are not getting met.”

I wanted to say to her, but didn’t, “What is your problem of too many kids crowding in your van on your carpool day compared to a river full of crocodiles?” I thought, Have we lost the ability to translate another’s testimony into our own experience? Can we not rely on the Word of God or the Spirit of God to enable us to look at somebody through the light of his grace and to see character, perseverance, self-control, self-discipline, a desire to obey—all these things that ought to be easily applied to our lives?

I never got married to get my needs met. My husband does not exist to meet my needs. I exist to meet his needs. And, incidentally, while I’m doing that, a couple of my needs might get met. Surprise, surprise. That is the joy, I think, of being married. It’s also the joy of ministering.

Dave: What has helped you maintain that perspective?

Joni: A portion of Scripture that guides me constantly is 2 Peter 3:8, where Peter says, “To the Lord, a thousand years are as a day, and a day is as a thousand years.”

I believe that every moment is an opportunity to be seized. Each day is as a thousand years; our twenty-four-hour slice of time is a sunrise-to-sunset opportunity for us to do something, by the grace of God, that counts for eternity, multiplying out to more than a thousand years.

I’m not saying that every moment, every day here equals a thousand years there. The proportions are what I think Peter was trying to get across: that this is how sacred, how valuable, how sanctified our moments really are.

Our days are short—a couple of score and ten. Everything we do here has a direct bearing on what’s going to happen there. When you think about it, it makes you not want to waste your moments but to redeem the time, to seize the opportunity.

A French mystic of the seventeenth century said that God does not give us time in which to do nothing. There is no such thing as empty time. Now, certainly there must be times of rest and respite, in which you go before the Lord in solitude. But even our meditation has a beautiful purpose—not utilitarian, in that it is something to be used—a sweet repose in which those moments of rest benefit the soul and end up glorifying God.

I don’t think this is a burdensome yoke to bear; it is easy and light, because it makes our work meaningful. It makes our suffering purposeful. It doesn’t mean you’re any less busy—it may mean you’re more busy. But the load is lightened knowing that this translates out to eternity—in your life, in another’s life, and for the glory of God.

Dave: What would it mean for us to embrace fully our allotted suffering in this life?

Joni: I don’t know. I’m just finishing Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections, a classic that I read every five years or so because I need that plumb line. Reading Edwards helps me ground my perceptions, making certain I see everything through the lens of God’s Word. I know that my suffering is “successful” when I am faithful to Christ in it. I’m choosing to be obedient, even if it’s a drastic, small obedience that goes against the grain of my nature. To be faithful to him, even when there are no evidences of joy or peace or blessing or camaraderie of spirit with other Christians, is the measure of success.

Recently my pastor and I were reminding each other how grateful we are that when we go to be with the Lord Jesus, he’s going to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things.”

How incredible that is—God thinks exponentially! If we’ve been faithful in a teeny, tiny small matter, then God uses not arithmetic but trigonometry; he multiplies it a hundredfold. How good of God to do that based not on our success but our faithfulness and our mission. God will never do a cost-effective analysis of our ministry.

Our ability to persevere, to be like a fox terrier that grabs a bone and won’t let go until the Lord blesses—that is the true measure of success. We must decide to stick it out, to screw our feet down into the bolts of the earth, and not to let the world’s criteria of success be our standard of measurement.

Dave: Do you spend much time thinking about the future?

Joni: I get frightened thinking about another thirty years in a wheelchair. This sounds trite, but I can take only one day at a time—grace only for today, manna fresh for this moment. I’ve got to quit worrying that a year from now my lungs might give out, that in five years my husband might not be able to take care of me and I’ll have to go to a long-term care facility.

It’s overwhelming to think that until I die, I’m always going to be in a wheelchair. I’ve got to hold on to God’s Word. Christ says seven times in Matthew, chapter 6, not to worry about tomorrow, so by gum, I will not worry about tomorrow. I will trust that his grace will be sufficient for today. There’s no grace available for tomorrow or next week or next month; it is new and fresh only every morning.

That’s the way I must live—in the power of God’s Spirit, day by day.

Dave: How do you resolve the tension between ministering here to your fullest but still looking forward to heaven?

Joni: Sometimes life is so hard for me that I would rather disappear. I’m not talking about suicidal thoughts. But I have days when I think, I’ve written a bunch of books. I’ve encouraged people. God, you’ve used my wheelchair. My life has had an impact on a few people. Can I go home now? Please, can I come home now? I’m tired of struggling with sin. I’m tired of prying the world’s suction cups off my heart.

But time and again, the Holy Spirit impresses upon me that verse in Philippians in which the apostle Paul says, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. … I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.”

The only thing holding Paul down to earth was those to whom he was ministering.

It is better for the woman who bathes and dresses me every morning. It is better that I stay and impress upon her the balm of Gilead, soothing her heart, touching her where her hurt is. It’s better for her that I remain.

That’s the whole answer to the struggle of being here and not quite there—one foot down in the mud of earth, one foot in heaven. Our heart constantly wants to yank this foot out of earth and get it up there with the other one where it belongs.

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Would you like to talk with Joni about ministering when life gets hard? She will lead a live, online discussion on Monday, February 19, at 8:00 P.M. (Central Time). In America Online, type the keywords “CO Live.” To enroll in Christianity Online, call 1-800-413-9747, ext. 174021.

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1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

Heart & Soul

Marshall Shelley

How is a pastor to answer this question: “Are you qualified to lead the church?”

For pastors, it feels a bit presumptuous to say yes. The church is Christ’s body, his bride, the temple of his Spirit. What human is worthy to guide it? But it feels hollow and faithless to say no.

In some ways, the question reminds me of a cartoon we ran in Leadership a while back: “You say you covet your neighbor’s humility … that’s a tricky theological issue.”

One pastoral staff member I asked this question of, replied, “I feel qualified educationally and professionally. My personality and my desire to minister qualify me. But on the spiritual level, when I examine myself, I sometimes feel completely unqualified.”

How do we handle the stringent biblical expectations (1 Tim. 3:1-13; 2 Tim. 2:1-15; Titus 1:5-9), which Darrell Johnson in the Leadership Handbook of Practical Theology summarizes in four words:

Commitment. Are you clearly committed to Jesus Christ? Do you have a passion to know him?

Convictions. Do you have biblically informed convictions—about who God is, who humans are, the meaning of history, the nature of the church, and especially the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection? Are you learning to “think Christianly” about every dimension of life—money, time, sex, family, recreation?

Competence. Do you know how to make your way, and help others find their way, through the Bible? Have you identified your spiritual gifts, and can you help o thers discern and deploy theirs? Do your relationships, especially with family members, display the integrity and love of Jesus?

Character. Do you exercise self-control, hospital-ity, gentleness (control of anger), quest for holiness, temperance? Is there evidence of dying to the love of money, to manipulation, to always having it one’s own way?

The standards are high, rightly so, not only to insure the church’s vitality, but also for the leader’s sake. Unless leaders have strength of character, they won’t survive the pressures and temptations of leadership with faith intact.

Do you meet these standards? Most of us, if totally honest, would have to say, “Not always.” Does that mean we’re disqualified? No. Many leaders in the Bible whom God recruited—Moses, Gideon, Isaiah—felt unworthy. They questioned their competence. They knew they didn’t always meet the standard.

Someone has astutely observed, “It’s not a matter of perfection, but direction.” Are you moving toward greater Christlikeness? Do you desire to take on the character of Jesus? Are you willing to admit when you fail? Being a leader doesn’t mean faultless perfection, but it means we act in faith, doing our best, confessing and repenting of our sins, and seeking, by grace, to grow.

This takes courage—not the absence of fear and doubt, but following God’s call in the midst of fear and doubt.

At Leadership, we recently saw an embodiment of this kind of courage in Bonnie Rice, our editorial administrator for ten years. Battling cancer, Bonnie’s body was severely weakened, and the doctors suggested a ventilator to give the chemotherapy a chance to work.

Reluctantly Bonnie agreed, but told her husband, “Make sure it doesn’t stay in long. Because with a ventilator, I can’t sing.” Within a week, Bonnie’s body wore out. We mourn her death, but I’m confident this courageous woman is now joyfully singing the praises of her Lord.

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Marshall Shelley is executive editor of Leadership.

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

Pastors

Helping the Successful Become Significant

Ever since James warned church leaders to avoid showing favoritism, pastors have wrestled with how to minister to individuals with significant talent, power, or resources.

Whether the wealthy farmer in a rural congregation or the corporate CEO in a suburban one, ten-talent people can make a big impact for good or ill. Will they dominate a congregation—or refuse to invest their lives in a local fellowship at all? How can church leaders help ten-talent people channel their abilities and resources into God’s kingdom?

To answer these questions, Leadership editors sat with Bob Shank and Bob Buford.

Bob Buford is chairman of the board and CEO of Buford Television, Inc., a Texas-based cable TV company. Bob is founder of Leadership Network, an organization that supports pastors of large churches, and The Foundation, an annual conference for high-capacity Christians. He is author of Half-Time: Changing Your Game Plan from Success to Significance (Zondervan).

Bob Shank is senior pastor of South Coast Community Church in Newport Beach, California. Before entering vocational ministry, he worked in the construction industry; in 1984 he sold his business and founded Priority Living, an outreach to the business and professional community. Bob is author of “Total Life Management” (Multnomah).

HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE CAN SOMETIMES BE INTIMIDATING. HOW CAN A PASTOR RELATE WELL TO THEM?

Shank: One way is to realize how insecure that leader may actually be. Go to Wrigley Field in Chicago and look around. Who’s more secure—the usher who takes the tickets, or the pitcher on the mound? The reality is, the usher is more secure. He’ll be written up in the sports section when he hits the thirty-year mark, and he’ll talk about the great pitchers he’s watched on the mound.

He’s secure, yet he lives at a much lower economic level than the pitcher does. He probably thinks, If I could just make what that guy on the field makes, life would be great.

That pitcher, though, could be traded tomorrow or cut from the team at the end of the season. The guy who seems on top of the world is the guy in that stadium who is least secure.

The same system that will reward him handsomely if he wins will pull the rug out from under him if he loses—even though the loss is driven by circumstances he never controlled.

Buford: The insecurity, for me at least, was “I am so busy doing this, and I’m so thrilled by doing it, I wonder if I’m not making a Faustian bargain?”

A fair number of people—particularly those in large companies in which they don’t control their destiny—ask that question. You’re being paid $100,000 or more, but in the process you’ve sold your soul. You’re wondering whether the next boss that comes in isn’t going to get paid $2 million a year to lay off fifteen thousand people, one of them being you.

Shank: A lot of things play into this insecurity. The youth culture says you’re going to peak in your thirties: you’re going to find out whether you’re a major league player, an AAA player, a AA player, a A player, or cut. Not knowing where you measure up in terms of the field is an uncertainty.

At the Indy 500, it doesn’t do any good to blow up your engine in the qualifying laps, because if you’re not running for the main event, you can’t even compete, let alone place. Yet many people suffer the delusion that the first half of life is the main event. They will sacrifice things that are irreplaceable in the effort to peak too soon. The family becomes the sacrificed commodity. Their faith becomes the compromised value.

I am convinced more all the time that life begins at 50 for our generation. So business leaders are asking, “How do you prepare to be in the race when the race really does begin?”

LEADERSHIP: So successful people are asking questions of meaning? Why now?

Buford: Chronologically, our generation has twenty-five additional years of life that our predecessors didn’t have. And they’re not twenty-five years where we’re broken up from being behind a plow. At 50, your network is at its peak, your Rolodex is large, your financial base is in pretty good shape, and you know something about yourself that you didn’t know when you were 38. When you’re 50 years old, you know what your skills are.

WHAT NEEDS OF TEN-TALENT PEOPLE ARE OFTEN UNMET?

Buford: People are not hired, paid, or rewarded for being balanced, whole human beings in their work environment. They’re rewarded for being highly specialized and for being on someone else’s agenda—the large company’s agenda, the law firm’s agenda, the client’s requirements. A lot of people lose touch with the “me” underneath all the performing.

Peter Drucker once told me that’s why people go to pubs. There, they discover what he calls the “third person.” The first person is the work person—the role you are at work. The second person is the role you are when you walk in your home. The third person is who you are when not confined by those other two roles. Perhaps the church equivalent of a pub is a small group. There, in a group setting, you’re able to be that person God designed you to be. You’re not circumscribed by your roles as sales vice-president or parent.

SO THE TEN-TALENT PERSON NEEDS THE SECURITY AND IDENTITY THAT A CHURCH CAN PROVIDE IN CHRIST?

Shank: Absolutely. If you’re a banker, and you go to work today and your bank has just merged and they don’t need you anymore, your identity has just been taken away from you without any say.

If your identity is being a husband, and your wife just fell in love with her tennis instructor and lets you know that she wants half and she’s out the door, your identity is gone.

The question of who you are is one of those profound questions that even successful people have not necessarily answered. In fact, their discovery of identity is complicated by their success. The more successful you are in your field, the more you tend to be niched in most people’s thinking.

HOW HAVE YOU DEALT WITH THE ISSUE OF IDENTITY?

Shank: I had a serious auto accident twenty-two months ago, and when neurologists looked at me, they said, “You’re going to be fine. We just don’t know whether you’re going to have your mental edge and your memory.”

I said, “Can I tell you what I do for a living? I stand for an hour in front of people every weekend trying to convince them that I’m one step ahead of them on the most important issues of life, and I do it from memory!”

What I had to deal with was, “Do I find my identity at work or do I bring my identity to work?”

Two days after I left the hospital, the phone rang three times in an hour. It was this guy (pointing to Buford) and Howard Hendricks and Greg Laurie calling to say, “How are you doing? What happened? What’s the prognosis?”

The last thirty seconds of each of those twenty-minute conversations was, “Oh, and how are things going at the church?” It was the afterthought. What it told me was, “Those closest to me aren’t close because I pastor South Coast Community Church.”

Buford: When I was 34, I asked myself, “What am I going to lose with all this gaining?” All people who are highly successful are tightly focused—a neurosurgeon, a salesman for IBM, an investment banker. They are asked to work longer and harder in an increasingly focused and narrow area of life.

The question for me was, “What would be there if my life were rounded and successful in more ways than financial or business success?” I wrote down six areas that were important to me, business being only one.

When a business leader goes to church, he or she may get the impression, “I’m only needed to serve here; it’s just like my job.” But when a church communicates, “We’re here to help you discover who you are,” that changes everything. That makes the church distinctively different from other involvements a business leader can have.

WHAT DISTINCTIVES CAN THE BUSINESS LEADER BRING TO THE CHURCH?

Shank: Business leaders understand the mission of their business. They create an environment in which the mission can take place. They develop people, creating teams that pursue the mission. And they manage resources because resources are finite and must be maximized. That’s what business leaders do.

Those same things need to happen for a church’s mission to be achieved.

Buford: This makes those leaders partners—not antagonists or competitors.

HOW CAN PREACHERS CONNECT WITH BUSINESS LEADERS IN SERMONS?

Shank: By helping them understand how truth is life changing. By answering the questions they didn’t know anybody else was asking. Maybe most important, by telling them they can count for much. To the degree they are willing to be committed to a primary loyalty, to Christ, they can count for much.

I came to Christ as a little kid. As I was coming through school, the impression in my mind was there were two buses leaving for life. One was the team bus, and the other was the fans. The team bus had the professionals on it—the pastors and the missionaries. The boosters got on another bus. When they got to the stadium, they sat in the stands and watched the team do their deal.

But you had to make a decision: Were you going to be on the team bus or the booster bus? The booster bus went to the marketplace, and the team bus went to the seminary. I got on the marketplace bus, and it was years before I heard that the buses had been mislabeled. Both buses were team buses. Sadly, I never heard that in church.

Buford: The question most people are asking when they listen to a sermon is, “So what?” And specifically, “So what for me?” This is especially true of high-energy leaders. Sermons that speak to them often have a form like this:

Stage one is connection. They talk about some issue or situation in the person’s life; the listener connects with the person delivering the message.

The second stage is Scripture. The preacher answers the question, “What does Scripture have to say about marriage, about career, about the things of my life? How does the eternal connect with my issue?”

The third stage is application. Listeners are asking, “If Scripture has just spoken to me, how can I apply it? Business people live in an action-oriented world and want to take action steps.

The fourth stage is a vehicle. People want to know, “What does that mean to me? What can I do about it?” So someone must provide a vehicle through which they can do something: Sign up in Room 402. Attend a class about evangelism. Participate in ministries to the poor.

WHEN A BUSINESS LEADER WALKS INTO CHURCH, WHAT MAKES HIM OR HER FEEL, “THERE IS A PLACE HERE FOR ME”?

Shank: Initiated interaction on the part of the pastor. An interest expressed on a personal level between the pastor and that business leader to assess the availability of his or her time and talent.

I won’t approach someone with my need: “I’ve got five spots I’m trying to fill for this prison ministry.” Rather, I approach the person in a way that says, “I recognize your distinctives. I want to get a sense from you about the availability of your time and your talents and to think with you whether there’s a place that fits you.”

Buford: The central concept is ministering to people as individuals—whether a young working mother with three preschoolers, or a 55-year-old executive. The church should minister no more and no less to each of those people.

Leaders in a church can start with the individual—rather than with the church jobs—and ask “What can we do to help you to grow in Christ?”

One reason I’m interested in churches is that few of us can function effectively outside an organization anymore. When we find our function—how we’re designed by God—then we quickly need to find a place to exercise that.

The greatest management text ever written was not written by Peter Drucker; it was written by St. Paul. In 1 Corinthians 12, he said we’re like a body. Can the hand say to the eye, “I have no need of thee?” He goes on to say that God has placed each of us exactly where he’d have us in the body. The big issue for lay people, especially the ones we’ve been discussing, is to find out where they fit, how they’re designed.

Shank: It’s easy for us pastors to think the kingdom work that’s important is done in a church.

I have a friend who retired from his dental practice in his early forties. After playing at his recreation for a few years, he wanted to make his life count for something. He became involved in ministry in his community, working at his own expense. He was also a deacon at his church.

One Sunday, the twelve deacons were lined up in front of the church to serve Communion. The pastor was introducing the deacons and their respective roles.

He came to my friend and said, “Well, here’s So-and-so. You know, if we could ever get him to channel any of that energy that he channels into the community into the church, he could really count for something.”

That’s now his former church.

The experience reminded me: we need to honor the work someone is doing in the name of Christ outside the church.

HAVE YOU HONORED SOMEONE IN THAT WAY?

Shank: Yes. I’ve been close to two guys for a decade. One is in our church now, the other attends another church in the community. They have consistently not had a volunteer assignment in the church. They’re both builders, and they’ve been leaders in the county building industry association.

A few years ago, they were instrumental in creating a non-profit entity, under the auspices of the building industry association, that brings materials and labor from building companies to serve organizations that provide housing for homeless people.

Most of those organizations are Christian organizations. So two builders have gotten the professional building industry to move millions of dollars of resources into Christian organizations.

For a pastor to give honor the work someone is doing in the name of Christ outside the church is tremendously empowering.

The question of who you are is one of the most profound questions that even successful people have not necessarily answered.

1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal

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