In our conversations with church leaders around the country, one of the recurring requests is for help on how pastors can relate better to their lay leaders. “Can you print articles on how to make elders feel like team members rather than watchdogs?”
Unfortunately, such a complex problem can’t be solved in one or even a series of magazine articles. But we’ve taken some steps to help. We began to ask church leaders how they go about developing good pastor-board relationships. From many valuable suggestions and comments a common theme emerged: “Spending time with one another discussing problems of mutual interest does more to foster teamwork and fellowship than anything else.”
We’ve decided to publish one article in each issue of Leadership designed to deal with the pastor-board tension. Since the problem is one that needs to be solved jointly, we suggest you photocopy this article and distribute it to your group. Let them know what you’d like to do. Saying “I’d like to get to know you better” is the first step in doing so.
We would also like to hear what topics you’d like to see covered in future issues. Some of our ideas are: “What Every Board Wishes the Pastor Knew about Them”; “What Pastors Wish the Board Knew about Them”; “How to Do Ten Hours of Committee Work in One and a Half.” What others would you suggest?
In this first article, Roy Price, pastor of Salem Alliance Church in Paradise, California, talks about something he has found to be effective in creating good board relationships.
“It’s so simple! Why didn’t I do this before?” I exclaimed to my wife after having lunch with another board member. The need for better communication with the board had been apparent, but I hadn’t been sure how to go about it.
After considering several options, I had decided to begin having regular luncheons or breakfasts with them individually. No agenda. No pressure. We talked about their areas of responsibility and prayed together. I came away knowing my leaders better, sensing their concerns about the church and about their own lives.
About the same time I read a comment by Richard Halverson: “Whether a pastor is starting a new church or beginning his ministry in an established one, he will find Jesus’ fundamental strategy of personally training individual leaders to be the key for a strong, healthy church with an effective outreach.”
That made sense to me. In a way, I had always believed it, but I had allowed this productive idea to get squeezed out of my calendar. I rationalized that the leaders were too busy with their jobs and families to spend time with me. But the truth was, I was allowing myself to be swamped with the immediate and had lost my priorities.
Not long ago I had a chance to ask Dr. Halverson a question: “What do you do when you can’t get along with a board member?” “1 had such a man on my board once,” he recalled. “He was very strong, with definite convictions about everything. He had the kind of wisdom that comes more from experience than from education. We clashed.
“But after many struggles, we came to have a very close relationship. I could go confidently to him and get the support I needed.
“How did this happen? I’ve learned through the years that struggle deepens intimacy. The approach I’ve used when having difficulty with a brother is to love him, submit to him, and pray much.”
Donald Bubna, pastor of the Alliance church in Salem, Oregon, tells of a persistently strained relationship with a church leader that began shortly after he arrived in Salem in the early sixties.
“We had radically different personalities. It strained our relationship. Yet over the years, through mutual discipling and praying together, we’ve become very special brothers.”
I’ve just gone through one of the most painful periods in my pastoral experience. It has revolved around my relationship with one man. From the first time I met him, things were strained. A former leader in our church, he returned to our church and the board after living a few years in another state. I had come to the church in the meantime.
Before long, I sensed negative vibrations. When I initiated monthly luncheons with each board member, he wouldn’t meet with me. The end result was that he has now left the church. Although I leave the matter with God, I’m convinced that regular personal meetings with him would have made a difference.
A pastor in a Michigan church of over 400 told me that every month one of the pastors meets with each lay shepherd to pray together and discuss concerns. One of the shepherds wasn’t functioning. Offers of help were met with indifference. He had become angry with God because of business failures and personal health problems.
Eventually he was removed from the shepherding team. However, the pastors continued to meet with him regularly. Because they had been meeting together before, it was easier to keep going. After two years of love and prayer, the leader was restored.
Why was this change possible? Pastors have two sources of power: their position and their personal influence. In position power, a job gets done by someone in the church because the pastor asked him or her to do it. The person might grumble and fuss during the project, but he feels the intimidating power of pastoral authority driving him to do the work.
What is power from personal influence? Paul Hershey and Kenneth Blanchard, in their book Management of Organizational behavior, describe it this way: “The extent to which followers respect, feel good about, and are committed to their leader, and see their goals as being satisfied by the goals of their leader.” Because of that internal motivation close supervision is not required, and the leader is effective. This is the kind of leadership that makes pastors effective in their work. It also reduces tension and stress. Unfortunately, too many of us pastors are more concerned about tasks than people. We have sermons to prepare, committees to attend, agendas to develop, hospital calls to make, bulletins and orders of service to write. We communicate a lack of trust by refusing to delegate tasks and then give people the freedom to pursue their work in their own style. By encumbering ourselves with paper shuffling, we lose contact with people.
The cure to this is spending more time with key leaders. Make no mistake, this will take time and a shuffling of your schedule. But more than that it will take an adjustment in your thinking.
Step One: Commit Yourself to Leadership Development
I’d like to suggest four reasons why this makes sense:
1. It deepens personal relationships. The quality of interpersonal relationships with lay leaders will spell success or defeat for a pastor. In most churches, it’s impossible to know everyone intimately but it is possible with a select group of leaders. This means spending personal time with them. Mark 3:14 (NASB) tells us Jesus “appointed twelve, that they might be with Him.” By the time the apostles were on their own, they had gained the reputation of being “little Christs.” How did they get that way? By being with Jesus
2. It deepens spiritual relationships. In making a disciple, I teach him to obey the words of Jesus. God told Joshua that the key to his success would be obedience to the Word. It hasn’t changed through the centuries. My effectiveness with my leadership is directly proportional to my helping them grow in understanding the Bible.
Realizing this a few years ago, I asked a group of men to meet me for Scripture memory and prayer while we had breakfast. They thought that was great and selected 6 A.M. Monday morning! More mornings than not, I had to force the covers back at five o’clock, slide out of bed, and dash cold water on my face in order to make it to breakfast still half asleep. But I so needed that fellowship that I stayed with it. And although I left the church five years ago, that little group still meets every week.
3. It equips for ministry. Halverson has a superb approach to new ideas or program innovations: “Rarely do I put myself in the position of having someone oppose my proposals. If I have what I believe is a good idea, I plant it in the mind and heart of someone else and allow it to grow there.
I do this by asking them what they think about it and to pray about it, without putting them under any pressure to approve it or support it. I think of ideas as seeds rather than bullets. I plant them rather than hit people with them. It takes longer this way, but the long term results are far superior.”
Donald Bubna seeks to equip his leadership through the sub-parish system. His church has a total of twelve groups under the direction of elders. The elders are in turn divided into three groups, with one staff member assigned to each. Don has done inductive Bible studies with these men and other potential leaders to develop their research and study skills. The classes require three to five hours of preparation each week. In this way, the personal ministry filters down to the personal level through lay leadership.
It is worth saying, in a day when discipleship is the hot-selling theme, that all the ministries of a biblical church are discipling ministries. Preaching, choral work and other musical expressions, all phases of Christian education, women’s mission work, service projects, and home Bible studies are all part of discipling. Let’s not slip on the banana peel of false guilt just because we don’t have the newer forms of some programs. The church has discipled for 2,000 years, or there wouldn’t be a church today.
4. It improves communication. Good communication builds trust. After Jesus had taught the people, he asked Peter to put out into the lake to catch some fish. The sky was blue, with a gentle breeze blowing cotton like clouds. Peter was tired. All night he had been fishing with no results. He protested, but in condescension to Jesus’ wish, he lowered the nets. The haul was so great they called for help. Fish flipped everywhere, and the boats were filled to the point of sinking. Their catch that day may have financed several months of ministry. It made a believer out of Peter. This was the turning point of his commitment, for he found Jesus to be greater than his own vocational skills.
A pastor doesn’t have to shoot a hole-in-one or catch the most fish to win the confidence of his leaders, but he does have to be with them. They need to know him as a man in touch with their world. When two men pray, the masks are off, and loving acceptance and trust can be established. The Gospel accounts indicate that the Pharisees and other religious leaders were aloof from the people, while Jesus was with them. He understood them, being one of them, and they trusted him. Peter was even willing to fight for Jesus in the garden. Pastors could benefit from that kind of loyalty once in a while.
Step Two: Choose Effective Leaders
Although every church has formal leadership (those elected), it also has informal leaders. The pastor needs to determine which leadership will produce the long-term benefits. Some basic questions might help identify potential leaders:
1. Is there a desire to learn or grow? Every church board ought to get away at least once a year, preferably with their mates, for spiritual refreshment. A board member must want to do that. It can do much to develop warmth, acceptance, and trust. In addition, I have found it extremely helpful to have regular Saturdays of work or study together on church matters.
2. Is there a willingness to give priority to time together? Discipling demands commitment. You can’t instill life into the dead. We need to love and pray for everyone but put our energies into lives that are responsive and eager to grow. A leader who wants to grow will take time to cultivate growth. Whatever pattern a pastor may adopt, the benefits of spending personal time with lay leadership are worth it: the warmth of knowing your people and their knowing you; the removal of negative filters that distort communication; the personal enrichment of lives; the resolution of conflicts before they become big issues, because there is no darkness to nurture them; and the building of trust, because staff and laity know there is love for each other. Although it is axiomatic that the church goes on when the pastor leaves, it is also true that a pastor’s effectiveness is measured by the quality of people he leaves behind. If he has spent time with them, they will be always grateful for a shepherd who made a big difference.
