Leadership Journal

In grade school I played baseball for several years. Only once did I pitch. After several other pitchers had taken their lumps, the manager summoned me to the mound. It was awful. I threw one ball after another, walking the batters, loading the bases. Then I walked in run after run.

I don't remember if I started crying, but I know I felt like it. I died a dozen deaths that day, my ego mortally wounded each time my pitch skidded in futility to the backstop, each time the umpire yelled out my failure, "Ball four," for all to hear. Finally, after far too long, my coach walked to the mound and mercifully took away the baseball.

Pastoring a church that is stagnant or declining feels like that. Everyone (including God) is looking to you to save the situation—or a few souls—and you're not doing it. You feel like a fool and a failure; worse, you're doing it in front of an audience.

Sometimes I dream I'm naked in a church meeting. 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 before a group of 30 people as their pastor, I can feel naked. Leaders by definition have followers, and if there are few followers, then what kind of "leader" am I?

It isn't the lack of money or the presence of other hardships that eventually grinds pastors of smaller churches into the dust. It's shame. And unless we recognize that false shame and seek God's help in overcoming it, we will fall into despair and may be driven from the ministry entirely.

My roller-coaster journey through ministerial shame and pride began in 1978 in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, a small and cosmopolitan city in itself. I was there to plant a church, and at age 24, I bristled with ambition. Riding the wave of the Jesus revival, the college group I had helped lead had grown to 80. I heard of other Illinois churches growing rapidly, and I revered their pastors as role models. I dreamed of planting a church in Evanston that would soon number in the hundreds.

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

We moved into our second-floor apartment, and I started working the neighborhood. After slowly developing a list of 20 or so interested people, I tried to launch meetings in the Holiday Inn, but only a handful came and 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.

I started asking the questions I would repeat many times in the years to come. Why does God "bless" other pastors and churches and not me? Why will God not answer my prayers? Why don't people follow me? What's the matter with me?

So I left. Explain it as best I could—"I felt led to another place," "It just did not seem ...