Working hard to make a decision work is even more important than making the decision in the first place. One of the dangers is people making a decision, then thinking, ‘Oh, that’s it,’ when the thing has only just started.
Lord Pennock1
Measuring the risk of difficult decisions does not guarantee our decisions will be good ones. Just as risk stalks our every action, so fallibility will always characterize the leadership we give our churches. We make mistakes.
Yet our mistakes need not consume us. We gain some comfort by knowing we are not alone in this human enterprise of making errors. Consider the record company that turned down the Beatles, the seventeen publishers who rejected the best-selling novel M*A*S*H, the editor of the San Francisco Examiner who told Rudyard Kipling his writing was “simply ridiculous.” These monumental errors of judgment remind us that mistakes are inevitable. In a small way, that knowledge makes our misreading of a counseling situation, our failure to fully step up to the challenge of a difficult sermon topic, or our well-intentioned faux pas at a church social seem more manageable.
We cannot hide behind this knowledge of our fallibility, however. We may not be able to error-proof our ministries, but we can certainly improve our fielding averages. The thesis of this book has been that one good way to hone decision making abilities is to measure the risk element in each decision. Knowing when to jump into a tough situation and when to bide one’s time and gather more information and support can make the difference between a good decision and a foolhardy one.
If our survey information is any indication, most local church leaders already make far more good than foolhardy decisions. Respondents told of successfully dealing with problems ranging from choir robe controversies (“Do we really need new choir robes?”) to telling 77-year-old organists afflicted with arthritis that their skills no longer aid worship (“It’s like being asked to execute your grandmother”) to negotiating a truce between one group of families who had discovered the more dramatic gifts of the Spirit and the thirty other families in the church who weren’t interested in any gifts except those that came from Santa Claus.
Yet, when we asked, “Please describe your biggest mistake in ministry,” every one of the returned surveys told of a decision gone sour, an oversight that in retrospect seemed obvious, a minor ripple that turned into a cascade of trouble. And frequently the descriptions ended with a comment like, “I sure don’t want to go through that again.” One major impression bled through: help of any sort would be readily accepted.
Our personal interviews accentuated that impression. When to take a risk haunts many local church leaders. They alternate between what often turns out to be brash boldness and terminal tactfulness. With no clear strategy on when to act and when not to, frustration threatens every situation. Too frequently it dominates.
One pastor told of successfully confronting a couple who had thwarted effective ministry in his tiny church for years. But instead of satisfaction at its conclusion, he felt only fear and anxiety that it would happen again, that the next difficult decision he would have to face, he wouldn’t be able to step up to:
“The trouble was I didn’t choose the confrontation. I didn’t prepare for it. Throughout the whole situation I never felt in control. I felt like I was being swept away by events and people. I didn’t like that. I have always had a sign on my office wall that reads, fight sin, not people. I suppose that can be good advice, but ministry means a little of both, and sometimes I can’t tell the two apart.”
Our hope is that the insights we have outlined in this book will give that sense of control. The preceding chapters have provided a program of action that can help measure risk and provide the information one needs to confront head-on both sin and people.
The program cannot do it all. Life’s most difficult issues don’t lend themselves to one-two-three solutions. Such steps put us in position to solve problems, but other elements enter in. One of those other elements is hard work. Successful decision making is made up of preparation, courage, and hard work, but the greatest of these is hard work.
One of my favorite Bible settings is Moses standing on the wrong side of the Red Sea, the side that has an angry, well-trained army of Egyptians bearing down on his ill-equipped band of freedom seekers. “General” Moses is not quite sure what to do. Perhaps he was thinking, What would Joseph have done in this situation? He probably couldn’t recall anything, however, with his followers screaming sarcastically in his ear, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?”
Finally, Moses remembered enough about God’s sustaining power to blurt out, “Stand firm.… The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”2
Standing still and letting the Lord do all the work was not the program God had in mind, however. I love the Lord’s answer: “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.” Having stimulated them to action and spurred them to move beyond their paralyzing fear, he then parted the sea, and the Israelites escaped.
After deciding to take a risk, we can’t sit back and think the job is done. We are still required to make our decisions work.
Having said that, we must not ignore the power we have available to us in the Holy Spirit. Good ministry and good prayer lives go together. Few of us would survive in ministry if it wasn’t for this inexhaustible source of power. It’s been said that without devotion, knowledge and action are cold and dry and may even become shackles. The knowledge of when to take a ministerial risk is essential; the willingness to invest the hard work to make that risk work is crucial. But only God’s blessing insures any kind of effective ministry.
We pray for that blessing for your ministry.
Quoted in Edward de Bono, Tactics, 132.
Copyright ©1987 by Christianity Today
