ONE DAY WHILE JESUS, Peter, James, and John were on retreat on a mountain, the nine disciples left behind got into a hot fight with the scribes over ministry techniques. It seems the disciples botched an exorcism on a vicious, intractable demon that had possessed a boy for many years; the demon often cast the boy into fire and water.
The scribes observed the tragedy like a holiday and with perverse joy seized the opportunity to attack the disciples and, by inference, the entire mission of Jesus. The scribes questioned the integrity of the exorcisms the disciples claimed to perform up to that point. They splashed the Law—like acid—into the disciples’ faces, citing Jesus’ lax attitude toward the Law as the reason the devil withstood their ministry. This forced the nine into a two-front war.
Outwardly the disciples defended their ministry while inwardly they questioned why their exorcism techniques failed. If they were at all like many pastors today, the disciples probably took a lot of the blame onto themselves—and secretly wondered if the scribes were right: maybe they needed to observe the Law better to get the ministry results they wanted. The demon controlled the argument by distracting the disputants away from the tortured boy and his exasperated father to generalities about the Law, demonology, and exorcism.
Meanwhile Jesus, Peter, James, and John had clambered up a mountain where Jesus was transfigured before them. He stood flanked by Elijah and Moses clothed in shimmering white raiment. The three great ones spoke amiably while the three disciples watched, confused and terrified. Thoroughly flummoxed, Peter felt a need to establish Transfiguration procedures. He suggested a building program as a way of preserving the experience. God interrupted Peter’s misunderstanding by enveloping the mountain in a cloud. God spoke. It was like Sinai. But instead of receiving a new set of Ten, God told the disciples: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mark 9:7).
The event passed quickly. Walking down the mountain, Jesus told the three to keep quiet about what they’d seen, and he answered some questions. They asked him about scribal theology on the coming of Elijah, hoping he would tell them what he and Elijah talked about. They felt high at the sight of the three great figures, the light, the cloud, and the voice. It overwhelmed their minds. They felt prepared to change the world. But their glimpse of heaven did not change the fact that they were reentering a world of chaos and division.
They eventually came upon the nine disciples, the scribes, the crowd, and the argument. The crowd recognized Jesus as the solution to the roundabout, so they ran to him, leaving the scribes and the nine disciples without much of an audience.
Moses came down the mountain to debacles like this, Jesus must have thought to himself as he saw the crowd run toward him.
Peter, James, and John probably secretly relished the trouble the nine had gotten into: “Now it will be official. Jesus will install us as the top three disciples.” Then they argued over which would rule the other two.
Of course Jesus did solve things—not with Law, but with faith and love. Jesus ignored what the devil found amusing—the religious fight—and went up to the boy’s father. Jesus listened to the father, then he turned to the disciples and scribes and blasted them. It angered Jesus to see the boy ignored while the demon laughed. He exorcised the demon with force exceeding the power of the Transfiguration.
Later, the disciples asked Jesus why they couldn’t drive that demon out. They’d succeeded in the recent past with some loose-knuckled demons, and this led them to believe they understood the ministry of exorcism. Thinking how happy they should be that they hadn’t succeeded with that demon, since when it left the boy, it probably would have grabbed them by their necks and thrown them into a lake, Jesus calmly answered his disciples, “This kind can come out only through prayer” (Mark 9:29).
Thug or Brahma bull?
Some churches are possessed by spiritual dysfunctions as virulent as that demon. A religious organization (which calls itself a “church” but is really a gang of chugs) may be possessed by a demon or may be doing Satan’s work so well that he leaves it to perverse paths of destruction. But a church possessed by a spiritual dysfunction doesn’t have a real demon like a church of Belial may have; its spirit is the spiritual dysfunction of the gathered pain, anger, grudges, and fears of decades of gospel impotence and love failures. This spirit scatters pastors violently. This spirit makes the church leap, writhe, and spin, throwing pastors like an enraged bull pops cowboys into the air like tiddlywinks.
But these maladjusted centers for the worship of almighty God house angels. Their lampstand burns with a flame as stubborn against the night as any in Christendom. These churches brim with saints. Because individuals in these churches are so wonderful, ministry begins full of visions, dreams, and confidence. Our hopes may be backed up by some tangible gifts for ministry and a positive calling of the Holy Spirit. Bleary-eyed, we dismiss the fact—if we’ve even taken time to look at the church’s past—that pastor after pastor has failed to make a dent in the church’s circumstances.
Even if we know the church’s past, we may feel quite certain that we can succeed where no pastor has succeeded before. I know from personal experience that the devil loves this kind of pride because eventually it breaks our faith-grip on our call. The devil draws us into a two-front war: We can’t fix the church, so conflict erupts in our ministry, just as it has in the ministry of almost every pastor for the previous sixty years. Outwardly we defend our ministry, inwardly we doubt it.
These inner conflicts weaken our sense of call to our church, and it weakens our sense of call to pastor any church, ever again. But if we hear Jesus tell us, “This kind can only be driven out by prayer,” we may just ride the bull out. I once heard an old cowboy make a comment under his breath about a young man who’d just bragged he rode bulls in the rodeo: “A bull rider? That kid ain’t no bull rider. His eyes ain’t set close enough together to be a bull rider.” I’ll admit I’ve looked into the bathroom mirror the morning following a rough council meeting to see if my eyes were set close enough together to pastor the church. Sometimes a No. 2 pencil looks as thick as a rolling pin.
Then I get back on the bull and ride another day.
But this ain’t no ride into a glorious sunset; this is a ride in an arena—the crowd, a cloud of witnesses and the church triumphant, is cheering, hoping this pastor has enough guts to ride the beast to the full count. Even the church cheers for us. The church wants us to win.
Here’s the real difference between a church that’s tough as a Brahma bull, but good deep down, and one that’s a gang of thugs: The church that’s tough, but good, will cheer for you and pray for you while you ride, hoping you’ll succeed, while it’s trying to throw you. The thug-church doodles with your mind for a time while it wires a bomb to your family car.
The difference is sort of like the difference between the demon-possessed boy and the scribes and Pharisees. Given the chance, the boy would have gone for the disciples’ throats, hoping the whole time they could cure him. The scribes and the Pharisees on the other hand played games with Jesus and his disciples, waiting for the right moment to arm the bomb.
Prayer for howling spirits
How do you pastor a church that needs a pastor, deserves a pastor, desperately wants a pastor—a church in which most people hope you succeed but together can’t help but try to destroy you? Do these churches need a pastor with well-honed administrative skills? With heat-seeking crisis management tools?
Not if the church is largely blue-collar—which is so often the case; these folks already despise the people in their workplace who get paid to manipulate them with strategies. And not if the church is largely middle-management, because middle-management folks already know all the strategies; they take pride in counter-managing to take the advantage. And not if the church is largely white-collar executives who resent sniveling bureaucrats crying to wangle promotions out of them. And if teachers and civil servants run the church, don’t even think about trying to crisis-manage it.
Such churches usually operate inefficiently, and they appear to be poorly organized. But most church leaders run their businesses, offices, construction sites, classrooms, and homes quite competently. They can organize their home; why can’t they organize their church?
Because in many instances, the leadership runs the church like the couple trying to push each other over the cliff of divorce runs their home—with an endless series of contradictory rules, boundaries, and agreements born of desperation and resentment. Common sense can’t figure into it.
What they do not need is more rules.
They need less rules and more love. As they begin to love one another, the church begins to run better. To succeed in pastoral leadership in a tough church is to understand one simple principle of church organization and that principle’s only vital but devilishly complicated corollary: Churches are not inherently complicated organizations.
Yes, churches do need good organization and competent administration, especially when a church grows or changes. But in reality, churches work best with simple leadership structures and simple programs. The spiritual dynamic in a church may be complex, yet the answer to this complexity is not more highly developed management but better prayer.
On the other hand, churches are bafflingly complex human-personal systems whose organization is complex in direct proportion to the historical dysfunction of the relationships in the church. The human-personal side of the church is highly complex. People are inherently complicated by the vagaries of human existence. When parishioners get locked into decades-long grudges, most of which are hidden beneath the surface of the church’s everyday workings and often hidden to the wrestlers themselves, the church as a human system becomes virtually incomprehensible.
Still the answer is not more complicated church management. When the human-personal dynamic of a church is devastatingly complex, the church often attempts to hide the damage with increased administrative procedures. Simplifying the leadership and the program structures forces the people in the church to live their life together in love and in faith—that is to say, in prayer, listening to Jesus. This brings conflict to the surface where it can be dealt with. Another way to put it is that only prayer can cast out the howling spirits of dissension that snarl at every dream of succeeding in ministry.
Everything else needs to get done: preaching, calling, administration, sacraments, etc. But they cannot succeed unless prayer is the main tool of ministry. But here’s the good thing: If you tell the church that you need to leave your office to go off and pray for them for an afternoon or a whole day, they are generally glad to let you do chat. Why? Because they live in a bed in ICU, with nose tubes and heart monitors and catheterization. If you call on a church in the hospital, and you tell that church that they wouldn’t be so sick if they just managed their church better (and you’ve got a great plan), they might just sock you in the mouth. If you tell that church that everything would be fine if all the members would just invite a friend to worship, the church will scream for the nurse to boot you out.
But if you gently ask the church if you can pray, it will be pleased as punch. That’s because the church is sick, not bad. What kind of prayer helps? Only long, wrestling, agonistic love dialogues with God can cure this patient.
Long-wrestling prayer
It is far from simplistic to say that if a church is characterized by agony that her pastor’s prayer life will be characterized by agony. Pastors who serve churches shot through with discord must pray through that discord and thus live through it. If it took a long time for the church to develop its deeply clever, covert misanthropy, it will take a long time for that distorted corporate psyche to be rectified by prayer. Such prayer can only be long, it can only be hard, and it can only be wandering; it requires a type of concentration bordering on free association. The couch may be a stream or a hay field or a mountain trail or the church sanctuary, but God listens quietly, making only slight comments along the way to micro-direct what often feels to the pastor like a meaningless monologue.
The pastor who is bound in compassionate covenant with a church—which, in spite of so much, he or she delights to serve—will freely sacrifice countless hours to agonizing intercession with God and will be baptized into solidarity with the church, making hesed with it, suffering compassionately for it, grieving over its lost image of the body of Christ, and undergoing healing with the church, as a member of the church, in complicity with the church’s sin. So this kind of prayer usually isn’t pretty, but it is honest.
After all, the pastor is rarely an innocent bystander in the church’s escapades. Until in prayer we recognize our complicity in the human foolishness of our church, we can do no healing, no pastoring.
We come to the church as a hero. The church slices us and dices us. At that point we may leave, to wander the earth, to look for a church worthy of our heroism. Or we may join the church in her misery by recognizing our own. Sinful churches require sinful pastors saved by grace. Only pastors like this can understand churches like that.
What is our complicity with the church in its decades-long foolishness and failures?
Perhaps I should speak only for myself. My complicity in the crime comes at the beginning of the ministry, even before I accept the congregation’s call. It comes as I willingly, gladly, joyously allow the congregation to seduce me into thinking that I am the pastor who can bring them new life. It’s as if the church is saying, “Yes, I’ve had seven husbands, but I know that you are the one who has what it takes to make me happy.”
And I believe the church. How is this possible?
Our whole system of pastoral training—from the first affirmations of gifts for ministry to local church mentoring to academic theological education—stresses that with the right theology, the right skills, and enough charisma we can win over a church. I call it the Jim Morrison School for Pastoral Ministry—pastors are taught how to light the church’s fire. Who doesn’t want to be able to do that? Who will say no to a church that makes them believe they can do that?
What caused me to give up trying to fix the church by getting it enthused—and begin praying for it instead—was when I became acquainted with the pastors who had preceded me.
All were sharp, gifted, fine pastors. I was not more gifted than they were. I was not more committed than they were. I was not more spiritual than they were. And I was definitely not better with people than they were. Some of the parishioners preferred one or more of the previous pastors to me, and I could see why they did. When I saw how good the other pastors were, I said to myself, I guess I’m number eight.
I decided that all I could do for the church was pray. I decided to spend so much time praying that if the prayer was ineffective my ministry would fail. I still prepared rigorously for preaching, because the ministry of the Word needed to play a major role. And I still called on the sick and disabled people. But many things were simply left undone. I spent much of the time I would normally have spent trying to fix people, by praying for them. (Every time I went against that principle, the counseling failed.) I didn’t spend much time preparing for council meetings; I spent time praying for council meetings. I didn’t spend a lot of time showing laypeople how to do things in the church; I spent time praying that they could figure things out for themselves. This meant I had to let people fail (which some did), and then I had to take responsibility for the fact that they had not been trained properly to do their job.
If the prayer failed, the ministry failed. Then again, the way I figured it, if prayer doesn’t work, what good is pastoral ministry anyway? If prayer doesn’t work, then pastoral ministry is nothing but a chronically inflamed cultural appendix. So I stood to win either way. If long hours of praying worked, the ministry worked. If praying failed, that was fine too. I could quit pastoral work and join my former colleagues by getting a real job.
The prayer often felt so meaningless that I hoped that the project would fail. But the prayer worked. I found that I could not eject myself from the ministry by praying too much.
Long hours of prayer aren’t easy. How do you pray all day? Prayer books seemed like they were written by super-intense, highly focused people who were a lot better Christians than I was. How could I do what they did? In school I was a goof-off. A day-dreamer. A cutup. I have never successfully memorized a Bible verse intentionally in my life (I still need a Bible to quote Psalm 23 to parishioners).
How can something I’m so bad at be God’s will for my ministry?
The number one misconception about long, hard prayer may come from our limited experience with it. We’ve tried it but feel like we fail so miserably at it. But feeling miserably unsuccessful at long prayer is an essential part of the process. Probably no one is good at long, hard, wandering, wrestling prayer, just like no one is good at undergoing psychotherapy. Psychotherapy isn’t any good until it makes us unbearably uncomfortable; as long as we are in control, we aren’t being helped.
That’s what this kind of prayer is like; if we’re good at it, we aren’t doing it. The whole point of long, hard, wandering prayer is to break down the pride that makes us just as enticed by the glory in fixing these churches as the nine disciples were by the glory they would have had if they’d been able to drive out the pernicious demon in front of the scribes and the crowd.
The only real intentionality in long prayer is to be there with God for the church.
Yes, I prayed for specific issues as they arose. But mostly I prayed for the whole church and for the church’s pastor—one as guilty and as hurting as the church.
So a lot of this prayer is for mercy.
We ask for mercy only when we are desperate. With this kind of prayer, we begin by feeling desperate; that’s why we go out to pray in the first place. But the prayer makes us feel only more desperate because when we try to pray all day and fail to maintain our concentration within the first five minutes, we lose confidence in our prayers—which is precisely what must happen. Only when we lose all confidence in our ability to pray do we really beg for mercy!
As long as we feel like we can pray we are still playing the same old game.
The only way to pastor a church that has not been successfully pastored for twenty or even ninety years is to be the one who becomes absolutely positive that the church cannot be pastored except by prayer. Then ministry proceeds specifically on that basis. The minute I trust in my gifts—no matter how strong they are—I begin to die.
It’s like being in a boat on a stormy lake and every gift we possess for rowing, anchoring, and balance mean nothing. All we can do is cry out, “Jesus, don’t you care if we drown?rd;
He does care and he does calm the storm. Then he upbraids us for our lack of faith because the faith we had was a stupid mix of idealism, optimism, works-righteousness, and confidence in talent and hard work. Jesus tells us this in long prayer, and it humiliates us. And when we are humiliated, Jesus picks us up and gives us one more sermon, one more call, one more day to serve him. If we can string together enough one-day pastorates in a church, eventually we can look back and see them as a whole—in Christ. Looking back at eight years can seem like eight seconds.
Prayer for a tough little church
Deep in the heart of the ball-cap crisis (discussed in the first chapter), with only pain and no answers, I took a long walk in a suburban neighborhood of Spokane, Washington. My family and I were in town to visit my parents. The visit was almost over. After lunch we planned to get on Interstate 90 and head east for the four-hour drive home.
It was early Saturday morning, and some of the residents moved about their yards slowly, preparing for lawn rituals. This gave me some time in the cool air; I would not feel watched as I stubbed around the streets, talking to myself and to God. Rural people and urban people accept this activity as normal, but suburbanites seem to fear it; they band together to escape kooks. As I recall, I was barefoot.
Unable yet to see the deeper issues of the ball-cap situation, I was still mad at the church for rejecting a few good young men for wearing caps in worship. In the course of my wanderings through a newer section of the housing development, I came upon a nearly finished Mormon church. I broke the Tenth Commandment. In the context of thinking and praying about the trials of an old struggling church, I couldn’t help but covet the new glass and the clean bricks and all the space! As I glared into the windows, I thought about the power of conformity in human systems. No one does sameness better than the Mormons.
Leering at a temple to homogeneity made me madder than ever at the situation in our church. Are we going to be like them? I wondered. We can’t. At that moment, I did not ask myself about the price of diversity and whether there ever are boundaries. In the presence of that new Mormon church, I wanted something tidy.
So I walked and prayed and thought, chewing out the church as I masticated the issues. I defended the ball caps to the church in the theater of my mind—and, of course, my defense was brilliant (mental lawyering always is). I stopped to ask God if it was his will for me to blister the church the next morning from the pulpit. I had another sermon ready, of course; I served two rural churches at the time, so I needed a “regular” sermon for the other church anyway.
This long walk was one of those times when you really don’t know what to do—when you ask God for direct guidance, hoping that the next thing that comes to mind will be the right thing, or that maybe one of the possibilities will carry special weight pointing to a solution.
The thought came strongly to me that I needed to put together another sermon that would level the church. However, another thought crossed my mind—quickly, like a hummingbird whirring over my head—It won’t do to preach the sermon with the boys and their families there. They would take it wrong. But things had been so hot in church lately that the family had been gone camping most weekends—something they did every summer anyway. I was quite sure they’d be gone. But I did decide chat if the boys were in church I would wait to preach the sermon.
So for the rest of my walk and for most of the drive home, I prepared a sermon as hot as an acetylene torch, praying the whole time.
On Sunday morning the “regular” sermon came off pretty well in the first church, especially considering that while I preached I rehearsed the “other” sermon in another part of my brain. I then drove to my other congregation, the one with the ball-cap crisis.
I remember walking up the wheelchair ramp at the church, desperately unsure of the next step but knowing that the future of the church might hang on the next few minutes. I opened the door, and who should greet me but the ball-cap boys. My face may have flushed red. I only remember looking down at the pages of my Bible and seeing two open spaces—one space contained the folded notes of the “regular” sermon and the other space contained the folded notes of the sermon inspired at the steps of the Mormon church building. I should have known all along which one I would end up preaching. That week the crisis began to turn in a different direction—I gained my first glimpse that the ball-cap dilemma was a control crisis and not a diversity crisis.
I can’t tell you how glad I am that I did not preach that sermon—or how helpless I felt in the face of the fact that I nearly drove the church over a cliff—and that I was saved from doing it by circumstances completely beyond my control. So what good was the long prayer?
In the short run, the answer I “received” was dead wrong. I prayed and thought and schemed for about two hours, and the only fragment of truth that stuck in my mind was that I shouldn’t preach the sermon if the family was there. But that was enough. In the process I worked through some pretty sore feelings, something I needed to do badly, and the Lord saved me from acting on them.
The real lesson was humility. I am little in control of my ministry if I am in such poor control of my own thoughts and feelings. I have to compensate in some way. Without a doubt the best venue for being an idiot is before the Lord; in some ways that is what long prayer is all about. Of course, the more crazy thoughts you have in your head, the longer you have to pray to sort them through.
Maybe those who pray shorter just have fewer brain cells devoted to foolishness (or maybe the lesson is to refrain from praying while coveting Mormon church buildings). But long prayer is the only way I know how to process the intricate crises chat come from pastoring a tough little church whose pastor almost always thinks the wrong thing first … second … third.…
And thus the need for long prayer.
Copyright © 1998 David Hansen
