Harnessing People Power

Running over people may produce short gains, but you’ll pay the price down the road.
—Donald Seibert

Pastoring a congregation is sometimes like refereeing a set of Golden Gloves matches. Fighting begins with the preliminary scraps: music committee versus choir, nursery workers versus Sunday school superintendent, Christian education board versus youth pastor. And then the championship bout: elders versus trustees.

You may not see any knockouts; few wild haymakers ever land solidly. But the infighting can be brutal. Participants can be sore for weeks.

Once I was involved in a church that had a strong commitment to foreign missions—a high-profile missions conference and large missions budget. A few years after I joined, the pastor was succeeded by another man who shared the commitment to missions but also felt that our church’s involvement in local ministries was not what it should be.

So he tried to motivate us in the direction of local ministries, but his effort was completely misunderstood as a denunciation of foreign missions. Communication broke down.

I faced similar challenges when I served as chairman and chief executive officer of J. C. Penney. It is often said, “You can’t run a church like a business,” and in many ways that’s true. Some business practices should not be brought into the church. But sound management and leadership can often overcome misunderstanding. Here are a few principles that can help harness the gifts and abilities of people.

Foster communication

There are some similarities between the pastor of a church and the CEO of a corporation, but the two positions are not parallel. Like the CEO of a corporation, pastors have the obligation to articulate direction clearly—to educate the church on what they’re trying to do and how they want to do it. At J. C. Penney, whenever our management team prepared to issue a statement, whether a press release or an internal memo, we asked ourselves two questions: (1) Is this easily understood? and (2) Can this be misunderstood?

These questions are quite different, and often our original statement failed the second test and needed to be completely rewritten.

We used a number of techniques to test the effectiveness of our communication: attitude surveys, informal visits by members of the senior management committee, discussions with people at different company levels. If you take time to ask questions, you find out quickly what your people understand and do not understand.

All this sounds rather basic, but communication skills are based on common sense. Often they’re so simple you ignore them.

Be a manager and a leader

There’s a distinction between management and leadership. Management is the process of assuring that the programs and objectives we have set are implemented through effective administration. Leadership, on the other hand, has to do with motivating people.

Both management and leadership are strategic skills.

Leadership. In this unique role, the pastor has to be the initiator of clearly defined, easily understood spiritual goals. I don’t expect him to develop all the programs to accomplish these goals, but he has to initiate them.

Over the years, some of the pastors I have worked with have succeeded at this, but not all of them. In some places I was never sure not only of what I was expected to do in the church but of where the church was going in general.

Most leaders would benefit if they distributed three-by-five cards in the weekly bulletin and asked members to write down in twenty-five words or less their church’s purpose. (Participants would want to know later how the survey came out, and if the results were not good, you might have to acknowledge publicly that the church is not together in its mission. But if you didn’t reveal the results, people would be cool to later surveys.) An easier way might be to survey verbally a small sample of your most committed people.

If a pastor is not strong in motivating, he can enlist key people who have demonstrated over time they have influence with others. If you can identify these people and get them committed to your objectives, they can help sell your programs and motivate others to put them into effect.

Management. Every pastor needs to know what he has to work with before any work can get done. This means taking inventory of resources—noting where they’re placed, and eliminating structural impediments. These are basic management tools.

The buck stops with the pastor, who must assume final responsibility for the way the church is administered. That’s not to say every pastor is a good administrator. You have other functions to perform, and you’d probably like to spend more time on sermon preparation and counseling, for instance. But regardless, you have to be accountable for how the church is run. You can delegate administration, but you can’t delegate accountability. The big danger in delegating administration—if you then walk away from it—is that the wrong administrator can gradually change the whole program of your church.

But that doesn’t mean a pastor must supervise each ministry of the church. I feel I’ve been a more effective leader when others have actually done the work. And I want everyone to know who accomplished what. It’s the same with pastors. The feeling that you can do the job better yourself makes delegation difficult. But delegation is a must in any organization.

Many pastors feel unnecessarily threatened by people in their congregations who have greater expertise in certain skills. I think it’s a given that the pastor will not be the most skilled person in the church at everything. Otherwise he’d be leading the choir, singing the solos, and running the air conditioning. In my company, I can find someone who is better than I am at performing almost every function. Marketing, advertising, writing product specifications—you name it, someone can do it better.

But a symphony conductor is not usually the best French horn player, and he or she doesn’t feel threatened. The conductor’s role is to make the whole orchestra function to its potential. You should not feel threatened by an individual with greater administrative skills. Use him; help him realize his potential within the church.

Of course, you wouldn’t want the best French horn player in the world if all he wanted to do was play solo. Participatory leadership may encourage some people to try to exert too much influence. But when a number of people participate in leadership and administration, they help deal with the would-be soloist. The responsibility doesn’t rest entirely on your shoulders. Furthermore, in my church experience, most problems of this nature spring from deeper spiritual problems within the individual—not the result of management styles.

Shared goals

In business, tensions arise when the chief executive’s objectives somehow differ from those of longstanding workers in the business. In the church, the same tensions arise when the senior pastor wants to do one thing, and some of the church pillars—Sunday school superintendent, chairman of the board of elders—want to do something else. But the tensions are further compounded by misunderstandings about where the church is really heading.

Let’s suppose a pastor communicates to a church that God’s purpose is for them to live holy lives and preach the gospel to the world. Based on that purpose, they decide on the specific goals of sending out x number of missionaries and building new Sunday school facilities. What should they do next?

First, as the pastor, I would want to know exactly how equipped I am to handle these ministry goals. I must find out how financially able the church is to meet these goals and whether we have the potential to raise the money. I ask specific things like, Is labor available in the church? Will we have to hire outside help?

Then I ask some more difficult questions: How many people are committed to these broad ministry objectives? Where is the support going to come from? If I don’t have a lot of people behind me right off the bat, it would be foolish to go ahead with a building program. Instead, the first objective would be to spend a whole year doing nothing but gaining support and developing understanding for the programs within the church.

The point is, it’s critical to know you and your people are together in your goals and objectives!

Finally, goals need to be kept simple and within reason. I’ve worked with several volunteer choirs, for example, and found that a group of amateur singers may not be able to do justice to some of Handel’s music, but if you select material within their level of competence, they sound magnificent. It may take lots of time and effort, but you can gradually raise their level of competence. Perhaps in a few years, you’ll be able to come back and have these people sing Handel.

Team planning

Conflict often arises in the local church because leaders overlook an important management principle: the need to agree not only on goals but on a plan.

In the churches I’ve attended, one of the biggest conflicts has been between lay stewardship leaders and lay spiritual leaders—typically the trustees versus the elders. Ideally, trustees raise and manage money and tangible resources; elders provide spiritual leadership. These two functions aren’t mutually exclusive, but too often laypeople can’t see how their goals and objectives have anything in common. It’s a chronic problem.

Here’s how we solved a similar problem at Penney’s. We used to agree on our main objectives and then turn each division loose to plan: the retail division produced a plan; the buyers produced a plan; marketing produced a plan. Even though we were all working from the same objective, things didn’t mesh. And when the results weren’t productive, we had a lot of finger pointing as to whose plan failed.

A few years ago, we moved to a team management approach. We gathered the leaders from each division into a room and said, “Don’t come out until you’ve produced one harmonious plan.” Not only did we start to get good results, but the finger pointing stopped because each leader was coauthor of the plan.

I don’t want to oversimplify, but is there any reason why the same principle can’t work in the church? The elders and trustees, for instance, could put together leaders from both boards and produce one good plan. Of course, for the plan to work, all board members must fully understand the plan and be sold on it. Again, communication must prevent misunderstanding.

As is obvious by now, I believe in a democratic rather than autocratic leadership style. Running over people in any kind of situation, church or business, is not only questionable morally, but it’s counterproductive. You may produce short gains that way, but you’ll pay the price down the road in alienated and departed parishioners. True, many organizations prosper under an autocratic leader. But in those places, you’ll also find a lot of unhappy people. When they find they just can’t work in that kind of environment, they leave. You don’t want that to happen in your church.

What’s more, in large churches that have autocratic leaders, a significant part of the congregation becomes so dependent on this type of leader that when he steps down, he’s almost impossible to replace. One of the principle responsibilities of a CEO is to assure his company that an appropriate successor is ready to step in if something happens. There can be no interruption of the company’s growth. That is hard to pull off in companies led by an autocratic leader. In a sense, it is much better if my organization depends not on me as an individual but on my part in the long-range, goal-setting process. And when I leave, this process must go on.

Learning continuously

Fred Boyce surveyed 1,022 pastors in sixteen denominations about the frequency with which they encounter twelve kinds of management problems. They ranked them as follows:

1.Development of lay leaders.

2.Recruiting and motivating volunteers.

3.Motivating church members to accept needed changes.

4.Budgets for operations, buildings and equipment, cash flow, and appeals.

5.Maintenance of membership and financial records.

6.Planning and controlling effective use of my own time.

7.Fund-raising for the church.

8.Church property management—maintenance, repairs, insurance, taxes, or payments in lieu of taxes.

9.Construction of new facilities.

10.Employee relations—recruitment, supervision, compensation.

11.Purchasing of materials, supplies, and services.

12.Investment of church funds—long- and short-term.

Forty percent of the respondents indicated they had no prior education or experience for church-management problems. Eighty-seven percent thought that theological schools should offer a course in church management, preferably using the case-study method. Some commented that the courses and material now available are too general and/or theoretical. Other felt that most material is addressed to pastors of large churches.

If pastors sense they don’t have a good understanding of management skills, they can still have a significant ministry. But they need to recognize that management does need to happen in their church. You can have a great sense of mission, but if you don’t understand how to accomplish it, you’ve failed yourself and God. And just because you’ve never worked with management principles and tools doesn’t mean you can’t learn.

I believe a lot more pastors would surprise themselves by discovering what good administrators and managers they really are. A pastor could have the gift of administration and not even know it. We all know people who became good golfers past the age of fifty. They never knew they had the talent. My formal education was not in business administration, and I know other highly successful businesspeople who have degrees in music, English, and philosophy. Administrative skills were picked up along the way.

But we all desperately need to keep ourselves current in our fields. If a person feels weak in management, I suggest that he or she read a lot, listen a lot, and go to seminars tailored especially to the ministry.

In summary, I offer the following action list:

Understand your own objectives, your own sense of mission and goals.
Clearly articulate those objectives to your lay leaders, and try to get some feedback as to how well they understand them.
Exercise patience, realizing that it will take time before you have enough of your parishioners behind you so you can turn objectives into working programs.
Take an inventory of your personal resources and those available within your congregation.
If you find you’re lacking in personal resources and know-how, resolve to acquire management or leadership skills through continuing education.