FROM MY THIRD GRADE year through junior high, our family moved frequently. Being the new kid can be tough enough, but I was somewhat small for my age and had begun to wear glasses, and that made me an easy target for playground bullies and their hangers-on. I tried to deal with conflict by learning how to fight, but soon discovered I was much better at talking my way out of a mess than fighting my way out. In fact, one bully became one of my closest friends. Of course, by then I had “hit my growth”; perhaps that helped, too.
That early training in persuasive speaking served me well in life. As a hunting guide, I convinced men more than twice my age that I was indeed skilled and dependable enough for them to entrust with their lives for a week in the wilderness. During a four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force, I supervised skilled people, many of them older than me, when most others my age were still attending frat parties.
Based on my prior experience and giftedness, when I finally got around to attending college, I chose a major in communications. Particularly satisfying were my classes in persuasion, learning how to move people toward a decision. I became a sales representative in the financial services business; I seemed to have a knack for closing the deal.
I learned how to make the most of my persuasive gifts. So when I made the decision to enter pastoral ministry, I believed my abilities to make things happen and to influence people would be a great asset—for the kingdom, of course. And surely that would be most evident in the pulpit.
This was all long before I began to pay attention to the character of an Old Testament persuader who had also learned to make his living by his wits. Jacob, son of Isaac, would have been the superstar of any used-car sales force. He had a sharp mind, a silver tongue, and absolutely no scruples.
When we eavesdrop on Jacob in Genesis 27, we hear him telling his mother, in King James language, “Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.” His literal meaning was, “I can’t grow a whisker, while my brother is the human sweater.”
But I can’t read this passage without thinking how much it serves as a description of his character as defined by his name: “He grasps the heel,” was sort of like, “He pulls your leg.” It could be translated “deceiver” or “smooth operator.” Jacob was a natural born con artist; he had a smooth way of always getting just what he wanted. The context of this self-revelatory statement, “I am a smooth man,” is just prior to the con he pulled on his blind, feeble old daddy, Isaac.
Almost toothless, the creaky patriarch had a hankering for one last meal of tender young venison, so he sent his favorite boy Esau out to the woods. “Prepare it just the way I like it so it’s savory and good, and bring it here for me to eat. Then I will pronounce the blessing that belongs to you, my firstborn son, before I die” (Gen. 27:4, nlt).
Smooth-talking, smooth-walking Jacob, ever the manipulator, ever the control freak, wanted one more thing from his older-by-just-a-minute brother. He’d already snatched the elder son’s share of the inheritance from Esau in exchange for a bowl of stew. (The big, hairy redneck had no grasp of the concept of delayed gratification.) Here was opportunity knocking at Jacob’s door.
Their mother, Rebekah, had the makings of a grifter herself. She sent her “mama’s boy” out to the herd to butcher a couple of kid goats.
After preparing the meal, Rebekah secured the goat skins to Jacob’s smooth arms and neck. He put on the hairy brother’s clothes, probably rolled in the compost pile to approximate Esau’s earthy smell, then approached the bed of the old man with a tray holding savory meat and hot biscuits on one of Rebekah’s good plates.
Even in his aged state, Isaac was not senile. His sight might have been gone, but his ears still worked—and that tenor voice sounded like Jacob, not his wild man Esau. His hands could still feel, and did. Sure enough, this man bearing supper had arms as hairy as a goat’s backside. Ah, but did he smell like the wilderness? That was the true test. At Isaac’s request, Mr. Smooth leaned over his daddy and gave him a noseful. His trickery succeeded. Convinced at last that he was really dealing with Esau, Isaac gave his patriarchal blessing to the wrong son.
Jacob was used to getting his way. And once again he proved he knew just how to control the people and situations in his life so as to achieve the desired outcome. Later he would meet his match in his future father-in-law, Laban, but for the most part, Jacob got whatever Jacob desired.
Control freaks anonymous
None of us would be thrilled to discover that a small but malignant portion of our drive to preach well, to preach with passion, comes from a desire to control people. I can think of no deeper disappointment with myself than this self-revelation. Hiding beneath my sincere desire to see people grow in their faith, to see our church grow in effectiveness, was an insecure little boy who wanted to make sure that no one outsmarted him, that things unfolded according to his plan, that no one ever took advantage of him again.
I realize now that, in my application of all I had read and learned about preaching, I was hoping, in part, to discover the keys to the flip side of persuasion; that is, manipulation. My goals, I would have insisted, were benevolent, not evil like some people’s, of course. Therefore, they justified a little arm twisting now and then.
Like the evangelists of my childhood, I wanted to be able to turn up the volume and the heat, until every sinner within earshot fell to his or her knees and cried out for mercy. We Baptists are big on “walking the aisle.” While the congregation sings a hymn of commitment, the preacher exhorts people to come pray to receive Christ or kneel at the altar as a public acknowledgment that the sermon touched them.
I can’t recall too many altar calls I’ve given to which someone didn’t respond. Maybe it was a cartoon I saw, or maybe too many episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes,” but I can see myself as the commandant, dressed in black leather, slapping my palm with a whip and saying in a bad German accent, “Ve hafvays of making you valk.”
Okay, that’s a bit overstated, but surely calling someone to repentance is an acceptable use of manipulation, er, I mean, persuasion. And who could object if I were successful at encouraging people to read their Bibles more? And what if I could talk people into praying more? Nothing wrong with that, is there? Most days, I’d resort to just about any measure, without a trace of guilt, if I could figure out a way to get people just to be nice to one another.
Jacob’s name was a play on Hebrew words that sounded like heel-grabber. Preachers like me often yearn to be the heart-grabber, the conscience-grabber, and, sometimes, the throat-grabber. In my zeal, I can mistake badgering, bullying, browbeating, coercing, wheedling, and nagging for passionate preaching. A man in a former congregation once told me, “I don’t feel like I’ve been to preachin’ if my ribs ain’t bruised when I leave.”
Why should anyone be surprised when one of us, schooled in this type of preaching, gets our own television show and, before we know it, starts hoodwinking little old ladies out of their social security checks in order to pay for the airtime? Believe me, that’s not a long step from shaming someone into signing up to be a nursery worker.
Don’t breathe easy if you don’t fit the stereotype. Just because we fail to shout, stomp, snort, and spit when we preach, just because we don’t hawk our merchandise over a toll-free number doesn’t exonerate us from the charge of manipulative preaching.
Some preachers are blessed (or cursed) with a measure of duende, the power to attract and influence through a charming personality. Winsomeness can be a dangerous thing. While screening tapes for Preaching Today (and even my own), I heard a style of manipulative preaching that is beyond the caricature. Usually it’s from sophisticated, well-educated preachers with voices like honey butter. The finely tuned insinuation, just the right touch of well-placed guilt, the understated application of shame, all of these can go a long way toward controlling the immediate actions, if not the long-term behavior, of congregants.
Measuring our control
In the months I worked on this book, I scratched out a dozen different chapter outlines on how to measure the results of a sermon. It’s something most preachers want to know. How’d I do? we start wondering immediately after the benediction. As we shake hands with congregants, our minds are keeping score. There’s the predictable “Nice job” or “Good sermon, Pastor” (worth just a point), the nice-to-hear “Boy, you’ve been reading my mail” (5 points), to the highly prized “That message really touched me. Could we talk about some things later this week?” (a whopping 25 points).
The attempt to measure effectiveness continues after I get home. At the dinner table, I hound my wife, Susan, “So, what did you think?”
“About what?” she invariably asks.
“The sermon. How’d it go?”
“Oh. It was fine.” (Subtract 5 points.)
“I had trouble following you this morning for some reason.
” (Subtract 20 points.)
“Where did you get that story you told about our vacation? I don’t remember anything like that ever happening.” (Subtract 50 points.)
Earlier, I discussed the tendency to overestimate the effectiveness of a single sermon and underestimate the net result over time for someone who digests our preaching on a regular basis. Any attempt to measure effectiveness is guesswork at best, so I scrapped my attempts to quantify results for any one message. More importantly, I came to realize that, for me, attempting to control the outcome in order to more accurately measure my effectiveness could easily degenerate into just another expression of this desire to control people.
I never used to think of myself as a controlling person, until I was waylaid recently by a passionate sermon entitled “The Breaking of a Control Freak,” based on the further exploits of our man Jacob, Mr. Smooth.
After several Sundays away preaching, I attended our home church with my family. Our pastor took Genesis 32 as his text. Now, Rob, at least in his preaching, seems to be the antithesis of a control freak. As a leader, he’s a great consensus builder. As a preacher, his approach is usually quite understated, more didactic than pragmatic. He’ll say stuff like “May I suggest to you …” I can’t imagine anyone ever feeling manipulated by his sermons. Nonetheless, not long ago, he hit me between the eyes.
He set the stage by telling us, from verses 7 and 8, that control freaks usually operate out of insecurity and fear. Boy, he was right on that count. I was taking notes but thinking about all the people I’ve known who fit that category. People I’ve worked for. People who have worked for me. My drill sergeant. Denominational types. Other pastors who run their congregations with an iron fist. Yeah, these people really have a problem. I hope he can get the attention of any control freaks we have in this congregation. I looked around the crowd with interest, trying to guess who was going to be nailed by this message, hoping everyone who needed it was listening.
Rob went on to verses 13-15. Jacob hopes to buy off Esau’s anger with a substantial bribe. He took that opportunity to define a control freak as “one who does inappropriate things to manage the outcome of a situation.” Busted. Had Rob looked my way, he would have noticed my deer-in-the-headlights look.
I quit glancing around and began to pay attention to my own heart, especially when the preacher got to verses 22 and following. I needed to hear a word of hope for me as he described how God broke the cycle of control and manipulation in Jacob that night beside the Jabbok river.
Wrestling with God
As cryptic as the identity of the wrestler in the other corner of the ring is in that passage, something profound happened to Jacob that night. The masked man (who was really an angel, or God, or the preincarnate Christ, depending on your commentary) put a move on the Tenacious Trickster that made his sciatic nerve begin to scream with pain. Even then Jacob would not give up without getting something out of the encounter. “I’ll let go when you bless me,” he said with a grimace.
Jacob became “Israel” that day, because “you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.” Jacob the trickster became Israel the prevailer. The conniver came face-to-face with the Covenanter. Jacob had a new name and a limp to remind him forever of that long night at Peniel.
That Sunday morning, I had a series of flashbacks to my own wrestling matches with God:
Flashback 1: Remember that first church plant I told you about? My role was to be a catalyst; once the new work was firmly on its feet, I would move on, presumably to begin another new work. (It was a strategy widely practiced in my denomination in those days that, thankfully, is now regarded as flawed.)
That work grew quickly. I grew quickly—especially in my preaching. I would never have pleaded guilty to the charge that I preached to tickle itching ears, but I was definitely too close to the line for safety. After the encounter with the professional communicator, that ego-busting experience I wrote about in an earlier chapter, I soon learned some tricks of the trade. If attention seemed to be wandering, I employed certain phrases that immediately elicited a nonvocal response from most and a hearty amen from a few transplanted Texans in the crowd. I was able to use humor effectively, so I spent a significant amount of prep time each week figuring out how to solicit laughter.
Always the pragmatist, I liked results. And we seemed to be getting them. I couldn’t buy enough church-growth material: it promised results, and I loved the feeling of controlling our destiny. It looked like I was well on my way toward becoming the successful pastor and preacher I had set out to become.
Flashback 2: After graduating early from seminary, I sat home taking care of our first daughter for six months while waiting for a place to serve. We finally hooked up with a church in the Southwest that had virtually died but wanted to begin all over again. Unable to discern the differences in skills needed to deliver a new birth, which I had used in the church plant, and the skills needed to resuscitate the terminally ill, which I had never attempted to use, I accepted the challenge. After all, I was pretty persuasive, pretty smooth. If anyone could make it happen, I reasoned, I could. I went for it.
The denomination promised us financial support for just a short period; the denominational types wanted results as much as I did. So I went after them with a passion. I preached hard. I twisted arms. I drove people. I used people.
You must come to faith in Christ. You’ve got to work harder, make more sacrifices. It’s absolutely imperative our offerings increase by 35 percent this year, or we’re doomed.
Sixteen months later, the whole thing folded. I had failed. I left that ministry limping, forever crippled. (In my mind, “crippled” was pretty much the same as “rendered useless.”)
A few months before we left, a neighboring church burned and needed to borrow our folding chairs for the facility they were renting in the interim. We had plenty to spare, so we loaded them in a pickup one hot August night, just about dusk. As the locusts began to buzz, the pastor and I stood around talking. He looked at our pathetic building and said, “Ed, I don’t know what God wants to do here with this church, but I’m convinced he wants to make a humble man out of you.”
Flashback 3: After finding initial success in my writing, when the opportunity came to join the staff of Leadership, I struggled with doubt. Can I really do this? What if I fail? These questions had never been uttered by my lips before. Nonetheless, I knew unmistakably that God was leading, and the thought became I must do this.
Something had changed within me. Somewhere between success and failure, something new within me was born. Instead of asking, Can I control the situation? Can I manage the processes and outcomes? Will I be successful at this? I narrowed my questions to one: Is God leading? If so, I will follow without regard to outcome.
Those three snapshots of character-shaping events took place in a matter of seconds. As a recipient of the sermon, I felt the supernatural effect of the Word that morning. Jacob’s story became my story. I was the man who had wrestled with God at Peniel and walked away richer for having been crippled by him.
I was both convicted of my ongoing tendencies to control in other areas of life and strangely warmed to discover that, at least in some areas of my life, God was breaking the control that controlling has on the controller.
Until that sermon, I had not completely grasped all that God had accomplished in me through my greatest success and my greatest failure in ministry. That initial success had reinforced my belief that I could make things happen. My subsequent failure was the beginning (and it’s a work still in progress) of the end of trying to control the outcome of ministry, including the outcome of the sermon.
Which was better? Success or failure? The surprising answer is “failure.” I know now that I can’t change anyone. Not my wife or my daughters, my colleagues, and especially those to whom I preach. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I can’t assess changes in them with any more accuracy than I can assess changes in myself.
Who’s responsible?
So if manipulative preaching and trying to control the results is the behavior of a control freak, is that a case for bland preaching that never calls for a response from people?
Obviously not. Jesus, as revealed in the Gospels, was full of duende. Compassionate, charming, and yes, persuasive. He wasn’t afraid to challenge the disciples to lay down their nets and ledger books to become disciples. He got results but he didn’t seek results. He sought relationships. He sought reconciliation, man with God. He sought restoration of lost sheep to their Shepherd.
I am not God. I am not Jesus Christ. And I am not the Holy Spirit. Being able to say, mean, and understand the implications of these three statements can be the first step toward liberation for a control freak. It means that none of their jobs are vacant, nor will they ever be, nor will I ever possess the skills to do their jobs. Therefore, the best I can do is believe Jesus’ words, “Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me” (John 15:4, niv, emphasis mine).
So what’s the antidote for control freaks? According to the sermon I heard from Rob Bugh, it comes when we firmly grasp the reality and the consequences of this truth—God is calling the shots, not me. He alone can accurately assess the outcome. Therefore, I will not ask, “Will this message be well-received, connecting people at their point of felt needs?” I will ask, “Is God leading me to preach this text?” The first question gives the preacher a passion of sorts, anticipating the end result. The second, however, empowers us to stand and deliver both healing and severe words with equal fervor. Preachers never again need to be apologetic for preaching about stewardship, repentance, or commitment, if the right question is asked, which the preacher will never ask if he needs to maintain control over the outcome.
The crippled Jacob/Israel could never have predicted, controlled, or manipulated the circumstances of the following day. As he limped toward his big, red, hairy brother, he was totally unprepared to meet a man whose heart had been changed—not by bribery, but by God. Instead of hatred and a sharp spear, he was greeted with a sweaty hug, a kiss, and tears of joy.
What’s going to happen next Sunday when I preach? I don’t know and I won’t hazard a guess. Some may hug me, others may curse me. Some will think I’m profound, others will think I’m shallow.
I cannot control any response but my own. And here’s my best response: Study hard. Be creative. Challenge people. Use duende, but don’t rely on it. Crucify my will. Draw passion from obedience, and leave the results to God.
Preaching is a lot more freeing that way. And passion flows from the heart set free from the need to control.
Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell
