Indexed by Size

IN 1978, AFTER THREE YEARS as a college and youth pastor, I moved with my wife and son to the Chicago suburb of Evanston to plant a church. I was twenty-four and bristling with ambition. Riding the wave of the Jesus revival, the college group I had helped lead had grown to eighty. I heard reports of Illinois churches growing rapidly, and I revered their pastors as role models. I dreamed of planting a church in Evanston that would grow to number in the hundreds.

We started with only three people—myself, my wife, and our two-year-old son—but I had faith and a plan. I would distribute literature door to door in a several-block area and then telephone each of those families the same night.

We moved into our second-floor apartment on Washington Street, and I started working the neighborhood. After slowly developing a list of twenty or so interested people, I tried to launch meetings at the local Holiday Inn, but only a handful came and those never returned. I kept working my plan but I was never able to pull together even a regular Bible study. As a church planter I was a spectacular bust.

In Evanston I started asking the questions that I would repeat many times in the years to come. Why does God “bless” some pastors and churches and not me? Why won’t God answer my prayers? What is it that some people don’t like about me? What’s the matter with me?

I learned in Evanston that God is not concerned about stroking my ego, which definitely took a beating. There I felt the full effect of what it means to index my identity to the size of my church. Of course I had done that when leading the college group, but I had always had “success” before. Now the equation worked against me and it hurt badly.

I played baseball for several years in grade school. Only once did I pitch. On that fateful day the manager summoned me to the mound after several other pitchers had taken their lumps. Well, I changed that; I did not take any lumps because I did not give anyone a chance to swing. I threw one ball after another, walking the batters, loading the bases. Then I walked in run after run.

When you are failing on the mound, that spot in the center of the field is a stark, lonely hill. You hear teammates and coaches and parents yelling, “You can do it!” “Just get it over the plate!” “Make him hit it!” You feel as though everyone in creation is witnessing your inability to produce, and you groan inside as you fail them—one pitch at a time.

I do not recall if I started crying out there on the mound but I know I felt like it. I died several dozen deaths that day, my male ego mortally wounded each time my pitch hit the catcher’s glove or kicked up a little pile of dust somewhere around home plate and skidded in futility to the back fence; each time that umpire yelled out for all to hear how I had missed the mark. It was perhaps the most devastating day in my young athletic life. Finally, after far too long, my coach walked to the mound and mercifully took away the baseball.

That day is the closest thing I know to what it is like to pastor a church that will not go. Heaven and earth, it seems, look to you to carry the day, and the day just will not budge. You feel like a fool—a failure who is letting others down. (Perhaps the most ludicrous part of it all is when denominational superiors or well-meaning others try to say things to motivate you to get your church to grow, as if you are not motivated and are not trying!)

I guess there is another analogy for what it feels like to pastor a shrinking church, or one that has plateaued. I have had my share of dreams in which I am in public or, worse yet, in a church meeting, and for some unexplainable reason I am there in the buff. The shame in these dreams is overwhelming. Proverbs 14:28 says, “A large population is a king’s glory, but without subjects a prince is ruined.” When I stand as pastor to a group of thirty people, I can feel naked. Leaders by definition have followers, and those who don’t are not leaders, or so you think. False shame—not hardship or little money—is really what grinds pastors of smaller churches to dust, to despair, to a desire to quit.

After one year in Evanston I desired precisely that. Explain it as best I could—”I feel led to another place”; “It just doesn’t seem God is in this”—the truth was, I was discouraged and nothing was going right and I did not know what else to do. I asked my superintendent to come out to the mound and put me out of my misery.

Into the fire

I told my superintendent I felt called to inner-city ministry, so he recommended me to a church several blocks from Comiskey Park on the south side of Chicago. The church had twenty-five saints in a small building, across the street from a block-square government housing project. Most people in the church were poor, and the church was poor, but I was determined to be their full-time pastor.

The first year a few trickled away and none replaced them. To an ever-increasing degree, much more was at stake in the numbers than my ego. This was stark survival in a hostile environment. This was visceral desperation.

I felt like a green insurance salesman on full commission. Such salesmen do not have the luxury of worrying about their ego; they watch the numbers in terms of feeding the children. Frankly, I watched our attendance less for my compassion for people who needed Christ and more for my livelihood.

But there in the wasteland, God and I developed something special in our relationship, and there he taught me how he would work through me, as he works through each of us uniquely. This Judean desert was one of the defining periods of my life and the one that gave me the greatest hope, for after one year of slow decline we turned a corner. We held a week-long outreach that brought life, hope, and even a few souls into the congregation. That started seven years of slow, incremental growth. Each year five or ten new people would take a liking to us; a precious few would decide to follow Christ, be baptized, become members. Gradually the church grew stronger in community, leadership, and maturity. When I left the church after eight and a half years, we averaged around ninety on Sunday mornings.

At this church I learned that, for me at least, numbers take time. My mix of assets, gifts, and passions do not add up to quick results. On the natural level, my voice, personality, and appearance are not commanding. As a leader I am a consensus builder who patiently lays the groundwork of vision and values rather than a mover and a shaker. As an evangelist I work at leading others to Christ but I see few conversions. My primary gifting is teaching and preaching.

Even so, I know God uses me. Time is on my side because God has a purpose for me and he wants to build his church. If I just hang in there with prayer, faith, and diligence, doing well what I do best—time is surely on my side.

I am convinced by verses such as John 15:8 that God wants to bring fruitfulness of some sort (not necessarily significant church growth) from each of us, but we cannot put a deadline on it. The fruit may take a year, three years, thirty years. But if I am spiritually vital, if I work hard and pray with faith, sooner or later God will build his church.

That conviction requires several things of me. I must have patience. I cannot be intimidated by the expectations of others but must have a sense of security about who God has made me. And I must have faith in God’s Word despite what I see now. In short, I must follow in the steps of Abraham.

No other person shows how important it is to give God time. In Abraham, God did many of his greatest works over a long span of time. Abraham did not even embark on his greatest adventure with God until he was seventy-five, and it was another twenty-five before Isaac brought laughter to his tent. Abraham’s descendants did not inherit the Promised Land until hundreds of years after his death, and the full measure of God’s promise to give Abraham descendants like the sand by the seashore is still being fulfilled thousands of years later. From Abraham I learn that when I give God time, he does a work greater in breadth and scope than I can imagine.

God has an interesting perspective on my life—eternity—and he has a way of working with that perspective in mind. The One who knows the end from the beginning never feels rushed, knowing full well that many of his highest purposes are fulfilled through what is my greatest frustration: time.

My experience of pastoring near Comiskey Park developed these convictions like cement footings in my soul. Then I moved northwest thirty miles to suburban Arlington Heights and a church of thirty people that met in a grade school gym. In this upscale suburb my convictions were tested, found true, then tested in another way.

Arlington lows

In Arlington Heights I would pastor three years. The first year went as my first year in Chicago had: seemingly nothing happened. Even though I was armed with my convictions about perseverance, this year was nevertheless equally hard for me because I was now much more driven by numbers than before. My drivenness had many sources:

I thought I was in my prime, that this was an area conducive to church growth, and that God had clearly led me to this church with “blessing” in mind.
I dearly wanted to be respected by my peers. In retrospect I think this was my primary motivation. (Lord, have mercy.)
I wanted to see people come to Christ, be helped, and grow in full devotion to Christ.
I wanted to be a part of a strong, fruitful, dynamic community of believers.
I wanted to survive financially, not only as a church but as a full-time pastor with a family of five (soon to be six). We were again in a pioneer situation, with a large neighboring church committed to support the church $400 a month for one year, and then we would be on our own, do or die.
I wanted to produce so this supporting church would feel their investment was worthwhile.
I wanted to make our church more attractive to visitors. One of the high hurdles for smaller churches is that many newcomers want to attend a larger church (but your church cannot expand until they attend). Valid perception or not, I had the sense that our size was an automatic limitation, preventing us from reaching people.
I wanted to bolster my identity. I still felt as though being the pastor of a small church meant I was insignificant.
I believed that what I read in church-growth literature could happen for me.
I wanted to be respected by my denominational superiors.

A large batch of mixed motives, to be sure, which brought mixed results. After one year at Arlington Heights we turned a corner. Although few visitors had previously ventured into our grade school gym, one Sunday in January our attendance nearly doubled—and most of those newcomers joined the congregation. As the spring progressed, we added more people, with attendances climbing into the eighties. This fed my appetite for growth, an appetite that had big downsides. Aside from my mixed motives being displeasing to the Lord, the more driven I became for numbers the more prone I was to despair.

I grew discouraged more easily because my emotions were linked to attendance rather than to individual growth in Christ. An “up” Sunday caused me to dream euphorically of greater things. A down day left me despairing that all was lost. Every visitor brought promise; every discontented member threatened my dream. Emotionally I was subject to others and to circumstances instead of being directed from within by my identity in God. No worse roller coaster exists than the one I rode when my emotions were tied to Sunday attendance.

A pastor friend recently admitted to those of us at a pastors’ meeting that for some six years he had ministered with the wrong motives. “I was doing ministry ‘in the flesh,’ ” he said. “I was using people. Flesh gives birth to flesh; only Spirit gives birth to Spirit. So I was dead; they were dead. By the time I got up to preach each Sunday, I was completely discouraged by thinking about those who weren’t there, and I was ready to quit every single week.

“Then last summer God spoke to me about my motivations. He showed me my heart and it wasn’t pretty. He asked me if I was willing to serve him even if we never grew. I had to admit that I wasn’t willing, that I was serving numbers not God. But God broke me. I dedicated myself to setting my heart on God not growth, and it has made all the difference in the world in my attitude and in my ability to lead this church.”

Another fallout from my mixed motives was that I became somewhat manipulative and angry. Yes, angry. That has been one of my biggest surprises, in retrospect, to realize that during this time I was an angry person, though others probably did not see it. The more driven I was for numbers, the more disappointed I became with those who were not performing the way I wanted them to and were thereby frustrating my dreams. The more frustrated I became with people, the less I enjoyed my ministry. The more I tried to administrate and “make things happen,” the more discouraged I became when I could not.

I found out firsthand that God and people control church growth; I do not. If God and others did not do what I wanted when I wanted it, my emotions were subject to meltdown. Too much of my energy was tied up in something I could influence but not control. With church attendance, too much was at stake for me personally: my very identity, my future, my hopes. The temptation to try to manipulate God and others becomes overwhelming, and that is a prescription for anger and failure.

I have heard that anger leads to depression, and from my own experience I think it is true. It seems to be true for others as well. A friend of mine has a relative who went to Bible school and then became a pastor. He was sharp and highly motivated. He read books on church growth, management, leadership, and success. He went to seminars for pastors. His goal was growth, and his church grew—but not fast enough for him. Even though his church was fruitful and filled with potential, he was in deep despair. After a few years he resigned from the church, quit the ministry, and went into business.

An excessive focus on numbers as an end in itself leads to discouragement for another reason. I tended to compare myself and our church with others. I could not hear what was happening in another church without comparing it with what was happening in our church, and ours almost never measured up. My expectations were higher than God’s. Comparing myself with others was completely unrealistic.

After two years in Arlington Heights, my bubble burst. A small group of people rose in opposition to my leadership and talked to others in the congregation about how they felt. Within a few months the church dropped in attendance by nearly half. We were back to square one; and those who left were the workers.

That revolt was the first large-scale opposition I had ever faced in ministry. But it proved to be a gift from God, for it taught me how vulnerable the size of a church is. Basing my identity on numbers was like building my life on soap bubbles. Abraham Lincoln once said: It is foolish to take either praise or criticism too seriously. The same goes for church attendance. The numbers on Sunday are not who I am. My true identity is who I am in God.

The Leadership years

It took a five-year hiatus from pastoring, however, for this truth to settle thoroughly into my soul. I stayed at Arlington Heights for nearly a year after the meltdown, and then Marshall Shelley at Leadership invited me to work as an associate editor.

There my eyes were opened to what had happened to me (rather, what I had done to myself) while pastoring. For the first time in twelve years, my identity was connected to something other than the size of my church. New acquaintances no longer asked how big my church was as their first question. For my soul, it was as striking a change as moving to another country or another planet as the reference points of my self-concept were realigned. An emotional block of limestone had been lifted from my shoulders.

What magnified my new realization further was my conversations with pastors. With somewhat of an outsider’s perspective (I was still credentialed and continued to preach), I saw them going through the same syndrome I had experienced. When I asked about their churches, most answered first in terms of numbers, and no matter what the size of their church, they usually did so apologetically. I wanted to say, “You do not have to apologize! I am not taking your measure by how big your church is!”

But in my case, the fault was not in other people or in pastoring as a role, but in allowing myself to subscribe to a false value system. To measure a church primarily by its size is to miss how Christ evaluates a church. In Revelation, when Jesus wrote to the seven churches, he addressed issues of quality not quantity. I had let myself be controlled by the expectations of others. I was seeking to please people rather than God.

I learned something else during this hiatus: No one can minister to everyone. Each of us is wired by God in such a way that no matter how godly or gifted we are at ministry, we will be able to minister only to certain people effectively. Our vision and values, personality and gifts will touch some and not others. I must not take personally another person’s decision not to attend our church. They may choose not to attend because they don’t like the color of our walls, or our music, or any number of reasons. We are going to be able to minister to a certain number of people and win a certain number of people to Christ. I need to be true to how God has made me and let God work through me with whomever he will.

Another molding force in my life was Daniel Brown, pastor of The Coastlands in Aptos, California, who gave me a more realistic perspective on ministry. Brown says we tend to view a church as a reservoir, and so our goal is to accumulate as much in the reservoir as possible. The real point of ministry can become accumulation instead of changing lives. And that is a model for frustration because in our volatile culture people are always leaving.

Better, says Brown, to view church ministry as a river. When people enter the river, we are called to bring the Gospel and discipleship into their lives for as long as they remain in the water. But sooner or later, most move on (how many in your church today were there five years ago?), and with a river paradigm, that is okay because the important thing is what God has put into people’s lives while they have been with us. The measure of my ministry is not how wide the river is; it is the degree of growth and fruitfulness that occurs while a person is in our tributary.

To use another model, I look at pastoring believers the way a schoolteacher looks at teaching students. A teacher’s goal is not to hold on to as many students as possible for as long as possible, but rather to build as much as possible into students’ lives while he or she has them.

Armed with this new perspective on church ministry, in August 1995 I became pastor of a church of thirty-five people, which meets in a high-rise in downtown Chicago. I answered this call with a conscious determination that I would not fall back into the numbers obsession that had caused me such despair in the past. I would focus on the quality of our ministry in evangelism and discipleship, and trust that quantity was simply a byproduct of obedience to Christ.

The first effect of that determination was that I entered upon this stage of pastoring with more joy than anything I had ever done. On my first Sunday I wanted to tell God over and over again how thankful I was that he had allowed me to pastor.

The second effect was that now, two years into this ministry, I can say that discouragement has been extremely rare.

Of course, my convictions are being tested. So far we have seen growth in individuals and we are progressing well in crystallizing the church’s vision and values, but numerically we have stayed steady at around thirty-five on Sunday mornings. We have gained some people and seen others move on.

In three months I will have my annual review with my denominational superior, and I am starting to feel a tinge of anxiety. He has made it clear that he wants to see results, that my ministry will fall short “if you’re having good services and people love each other, but in three years the church is still running thirty-five people.”

At this meeting I will have to point to progress primarily in intangibles and brace myself to hold true to my convictions. I refuse to be ashamed of the size of our church, for that has proven deadly to me and to the church.

The other thing testing this conviction of late is some of the comments of people in our church. I sense that some feel insecure about the numbers. They want to grow, as I do. But I think some of them may also be concerned that I will lose heart and leave. I occasionally make comments to reassure them about this. I keep saying that I am in this church for the long haul, Lord willing, and I am convinced that over a period of several decades we will see significant progress.

A few weeks ago a man called me on a Sunday morning and asked about attending our church. Toward the end of the conversation, he asked how large our church was. After I told him, he said, “I was looking for a larger church. Can you recommend one in your area?”

I gave him the phone number of the largest church in the city, and he said good-bye. I put down the phone and realized something wonderful. I was not the least bit resentful, insecure, or discouraged about what he had said. I smiled at the thought, picked up my Bible, and went with enthusiasm and confidence to minister to those whom God would bring our way that day. I was free.