Sitting in a congregation listening to Chuck Swindoll preach is like having a heart-to-heart talk with a favorite uncle. There’s never any question that the wisdom warrants serious attention, but neither is there any doubt that it’s delivered with love and warmth.
His open and honest style makes him an ideal candidate to talk about the temptations of ministry.
Since 1971, Swindoll has been pastor of First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, California, where Sunday morning attendance averages 5,000. He preaches five days a week on a half-hour radio program, “Insight for Living,” and has written numerous books, including his recent Improving Your Serve.
At forty-eight, Swindoll has faced the temptations that haunt a young pastor starting out in a tiny church as well as those that attack the high—profile pastor with a large, well-known ministry. He recently shared both kinds of struggles with LEADERSHIP editors Terry Muck and Paul Robbins.
What’s the major temptation you’ve struggled with as a minister of the gospel?
I don’t know if I can pick one particular Achilles’ heel. I have always wanted to be a good preacher, and Satan often tries to use high goals to detour us. Sometimes I’m tempted to try to develop my preaching skills through my own energy and ability rather than through the power of the Spirit.
A preacher’s job is to move black print off white pages into the hearts and minds of men and women. From the strictly human point of view, some manipulative techniques can make that happen better.
I purposely refuse to milk situations where I have people moving in a certain direction, where if I would just illustrate more deeply or probe a little further, I could break them wide open. The few times I’ve done that I’ve felt ill at ease about it.
So I consciously work at not trying to draw tears or use guilt. I want God at the center of the process. Whether it’s a twenty-minute or a forty—minute talk, I want him to be seen and felt and honored through the whole time.
What would happen if you succumbed to that temptation?
I’d be guilty of manipulating an audience. Preaching is a sacred part of my calling, and I’d feel most uneasy about corrupting one of the most significant parts of my contribution to the body. If I succumbed to that on a regular basis, I would begin to rely on it in the regular sweep of my ministry. I’d manipulate counselees, I’d manipulate my staff. It would be incredibly ego-building for a while. But before long, I would lose my authenticity. If there’s one overarching goal I have in my preaching, it’s to be authentic.
What’s another area of struggle for you?
Gluttony. Recently I looked in the full-length mirror and decided I had been fat long enough. Food was a temptation I had yielded to regularly. Fitness is a subject too little mentioned by clergy, because too many of us are fat ourselves. In the last four months, I’ve lost fifty-two pounds. I feel better than I’ve felt since I entered seminary. I’m running daily, eating less, thus thinking more clearly.
Why is food such a strong temptation?
I compensate for being fat by doing a number of things really well, so I don’t face the fact that I’m fat. I compensate for my poor condition by meeting people’s needs. I’m a servant at heart, a people helper. The least of my vices is a bit more food than I ought to eat.
So gluttony is a safe vice?
Yes. At least it’s a more-or-less acceptable one. We do a lot of semantic footwork when it comes to those gluttony passages in Scripture. I did. I was going to put something about gluttony in one of my books, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, because as I was writing, I was looking over fifty-two pounds of ugly fat. Food is a powerful temptation for church leaders. We have many lunch meetings, and you order a dessert because you have a little more to say. Or you get a big meal for lunch and then come home tired, broken, discouraged, and have a big meal for supper. Eating is an emotional lift. It’s a reward for a tough day.
And you have to build some rewards into a life that can be lonely sometimes.
That’s true. The isolated nature of ministry reminds me of another temptation for strong—minded ministers: to do one’s own thing, to set up a kind of ministry where you do what’s fun, enjoyable, and rewarding without the hassle of nit-picking. For example, at certain low points I have been tempted to leave the pastorate for a ministry of radio, writing, and travel. I’d avoid the hassle of shepherding, meetings, committees, and letters of criticism. The temptation is to say, “I don’t need all that.”
My wife and I have a favorite place when we think of escape—Bend, Oregon. I was there for a few days once and just loved it. I came home, and Cynthia was in such a mood she said, “Let’s go now!” It’s a little place where we could ski in the winter, jog in the summer, have a few friends, and just lie back and watch hubcaps rust.
What keeps you from doing it?
I know it’s not best for me. David said, “It was good for me to be so that I might learn your decrees” (Ps. 119271). I need hate letters at times. I need to know not everybody’s applauding. I need to know I have a staff meeting in the morning and must be ready. I need to know that next door to me is someone who asks hard questions, because I invite that. I need associates around me to ask me “Why?”
How would you respond to the statement of one Christian leader who said men and women can’t really minister until their hearts have been broken?
I would agree. It reminds me of Tozer’s words, “It’s doubtful that God can use any man greatly until he’s hurt him deeply.” As Scottish people say, some things are better felt than telt. You can feel if ministers are broken. I long to have a ministry marked by realism. The things from which I’m tempted to run are the very things necessary to make my ministry real.
Was there a pivotal point in your ministry where you grasped this truth of brokenness?
In my first pastorate in Waltham, Massachusetts, I fell on my face before God with an anguished cry, asking, “How do I fit in your ministry plan? I know I’m called, I know I’m trained, but I don’t feel real. I don’t sense that when I communicate, I’m your man.”
You see, I was still trying to copy my professors from seminary—l was a little bit of this teacher, a little bit of that teacher. I was like Daniel’s beast—a conglomerate. But the only thing that really fit me was the clay feet. Cynthia said on more than one occasion, “You know, honey, I think it would be great if you would just be you.”
A terrifying thought! I had the strange idea that being me was not what ministry was about; I needed to be like the great models. A lot of the dreams that had been built upon these collapsed around me. There weren’t great results from my ministry; people weren’t hanging on every word. I was just slugging it out with 200 people—-on a good Sunday 300, on a poor Sunday less than 100. I had a problem, not the church. I had gone to Waltham to set them straight.
How did that feeling of failure affect your ministry?
It created resentment. I resented the people in the church. I resented what I had been told about ministry. I resented the lack of realism in my training. Some profs, like Howard Hendricks, had talked reality, but not too many were like that. Most implied that if you really preach the Word expositorily, they’ll be crawling in the windows to hear you. Well, in Waltham they weren’t. I felt isolated, and when that feeling mixed with my independent spirit, I pushed people further and further away from me.
In the brokenness of it all, my wife proved to be the real friend I needed. She made our home my refuge. Our family took up camping; we bought our first little tent-trailer and pulled it up to Vermont and New Hampshire. I made friends with my children and started to get my priorities straight.
What changed in your thinking?
The turnaround came when I realized that no matter what the result is, I’m God’s man and I answer to him. A university librarian used to sit in front with a grim face every Sunday. I could just see her picking apart this and that. At first it bothered me a great deal, but after a while it didn’t. I could even agree with her that there might be better ways to approach a passage and better people to preach it. I became much less intense. The need to impress started to fade.
Did the need to succeed also fade?
Yes. When I left Massachusetts, I went to a smaller church in Irving, Texas. I’m from Texas originally, and I thought I’d made so many mistakes in Waltham I needed a place to start all over again. So I went to Irving convinced that if this church stayed at 150, that was fine.
My commitment was to be myself, to be real. I was like Moses at the well in Midian—high1y qualified, feeling completely useless. Moses had been driven out of Egypt with broken dreams. He sat down with a box of medals from all his achievements in Egypt and knew everything was down the tubes. I could preach on Moses. I understood what he must have gone through. So can many ministers, but we don’t linger often on Moses at the well. We immediately rush him to the burning bush and on to the Exodus. In real life, we must be willing to stay at the well as long as God wants us to.
At Irving, I discovered what it meant to become more me and less what others expected. I developed three goals for my preaching: accuracy, clarity, practicality. I didn’t want to talk to myself in the pulpit. I wanted to be sure that when I was through, the people saw how the sermon made sense in their lives. I became more and more interested in identifying with their struggles, and I talked less and less about theoretical passages of Scripture. In the process, the teachings of Christ became more real to me.
It sounds like you found contentment.
I really am a contented man. I am not driven. I have more fun than any pastor I know. If my associates weren’t gone today, you would hear more laughter in this hallway than any other sound. We’re relaxed. It’s not that we’re doing anything frivolous. We take our God seriously around here; we just don’t take ourselves that seriously.
Paul says it rather clearly: have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (Phil. 4:11). This goes back to the temptation of restlessness. The problem is, you have to take yourself wherever you go. S0 that wonderful sense of belonging and identifying with your people, feeling a part of their lives, letting them know you enough to feel a part of your life, means you have to accept yourself. Without that contentment, you’re always biting your nails. You’re driven, which leads to an enormous emotional shakeup such as a midlife crisis. Or later, in the fifties, your dreams are broken; you’re not even on the staff of a large church, much less its head pastor.
Everybody’s impressed with size. Everybody but God. The grass-is-greener concept has to be put to bed. But there’s a lot to say for analyzing how green the grass is where 0ne’s life is. After serving in three churches, I realized there was no sine qua non of pastorates, no final resting place in the ministry. There are pros and cons wherever you are, and it takes some maturity to believe that.
Does that mean you could have been content for the rest of your life with a salary of $15,000, which means your children might not have been able to enjoy a private college education? Could you really have stayed in that little two-bedroom house with the carport?
I love to see growth. I love to see lives maturing and multiplying. I couldn’t be content without trying to make growth happen. But how that happens is in God’s hands.
I expected the church in Irving to grow. They had a building large enough for more growth. But I was thinking in terms of multiplying congregations and not having it all right there. I would have been satisfied to see our growth fill the building and then spin off another church.
We did eventually build a larger building, but that wasn’t part of my dream. It’s what the church decided. We ultimately reached about 700.
At the time we built the new building, we were into double services and I was really a satisfied man. This struggling church was now on its feet, and I began to have greater freedom in the pulpit. A number of the programs I suggested became successful. About that time, the Fullerton church and several others got in touch with me, but I was not interested. I had the best of every world. My roots were there, my family was there, and my wife’s family was in Houston.
So your ministry at Irving was a success in terms of growth. What new temptations faced you in that four-year span?
I had some interpersonal struggles that completed the process of my brokenness. A couple of very strong laymen didn’t feel I was God’s gift to the world at the time, and I battled with one especially. Also, I was strained a bit financially, and so on Mondays I became a counselor for a Christian builder’s sales force of ten men. I learned to talk the language of laymen. I was in touch with their world, their brokenness, their divorces, their guilt, their need for Christ.
Where does Satan attack the pastor of a successful church?
When you grow from having someone sit in the front row with a tape recorder to a recording studio in a new building, you’re tempted to start believing your own stuff. Other people believe your voice, and you begin to think, Maybe my voice is really worth hearing.
What helped me most during this period was a very simple thing: my wife and I began to forge out a commitment to ministry together. We talked very seriously and decided our major goal in ministry was ministering to people in need. We wanted to serve people who had needs and really wanted to know what the Bible said to them about their lives.
At that time, several unwed mothers lived with us; then my mother died, and my father moved in with us—all in a little three—bedroom home with a garage converted into living quarters. Now we had to put into action the things I’d been giving from the pulpit. The temptation there was to move into a big arena, to get a big bell to ring and start announcing ourselves. But I held still, and my partnership with my wife helped a great deal.
The other thing that helped was sitting down with the board and saying, “I’d like to have more one-to ones with you guys. I’d like us to spend more time together out of meetings and more with each other as friends.” I began to breakfast with them. We went to weekend conferences together; we even camped with one or two of the families and began to spend quality time with one family especially. They became very close friends with all the Swindolls. That helped break down the temptation of feeling This is all mine.
Talk a little more about drawing your wife into your ministry. Too many church leaders compartmentalize their ministry and their family life.
Cynthia, as I mentioned earlier, began in New England to say some of the best things I needed to hear, so I had to face the fact that she had more to offer than romance. She has a bright mind, good insight, and an intuition about other people that I don’t possess.
Everyone’s spouse is gifted in some way. The trick is to identify how that particular giftedness can be plugged into your mutual ministry. But remember, a great deal of our ministry partnership blossomed after her childbearing years when the kids were in school. For example, she always gave me good insights, but now she has the time to be executive director of our radio ministry, “Insight for Living.”
Do you face financial temptations these days?
No, not really. Financial benefits come along with certain levels of ministry, and they can create ethical problems. People write and ask what I charge to do such-and-such. On only one occasion did I ever state a fee for speaking, and it led to a misunderstanding that took months to clear up. I got burned so badly from that situation I decided I’d never state a fee again. You can print that! It’s just not my style to declare that for $500 I’ll speak on Sunday, or for $1,500 I’ll give you this weekend. It can leave a greedy impression, which bothers me.
I don’t have a speaking agent. I have to have a radio agent to handle legal affairs, but he’s really like a consultant. He’s a professional who knows the world of media and saves me a lot of hassles in areas I don’t know much about.
Did you develop a personal financial plan?
Yes. When my kids reached the teenage years, some men from the church said, you’ve got to look further than next week’s lunch. You’re going to have to do some planning.” An attorney friend was especially helpful. Our kids are pretty close in age—twenty-one, nineteen, fifteen, and twelve—so we’re talking education for the next ten to twelve years. To make that happen, I needed something to supplement my salary. Books help. Outside speaking helps, but not that much. (Anyone who thinks you get rich traveling and speaking is not on my speaking circuit.) I make sure I’m in my own pulpit about forty-five Sundays each year.
Would you encourage other pastors to take an outside interest, like you did with this sales force, to keep them in touch with the commercial world?
Every pastor needs some avenue to the concrete jungle. One of the best things I ever read from a minister was Richard Halverson’s Perspective, which he dedicates to people in the competitive world of sales. I’m lucky to have worked my way through school as a machinist for 4 ½ years. That kind of thing is great background.
When you would clash with a board member, what was the temptation you struggled with in your own mind?
To use the pulpit as a hammer. I would find something he needed to hear, and he would hear it, along with 400 other folks! My dear wife would say, “Were you preaching to one or to 400?” You have the ultimate clout in the church when you have the pulpit.
How many times have you “quit the ministry”?
Several. It seemed like every other week in New England! I thought of so many other things I could do well. When I struggled in Irving, I thought maybe I could go into counseling full-time. But my call to ministry has always been bedrock.
I remember Dr. Don Campbell asking when I went to seminary, “Do you think you’d be happy doing anything else?”
I don’t think so,” I answered. He told me later, “If you had given any other answer, we wouldn’t have admitted you.” Would I be really fulfilled doing anything else? I love to write, I love to minister to a broad section of the body, but I need the accountability of the local church pastorate.
Any temptation to rely on yesterday’s sermons?
Good preaching is hard work, but I’ve taken to heart what Bill Pannell over at Fuller says: “If you’re going to preach, then for God’s sake, preach we11.” That takes constant study. The temptation to lie back and rely on something you discovered several months ago results in poor preaching.
Many of our readers seem to agree that there’s a lot of mediocre preaching around. What’s the key to good preaching?
I don’t think I can tell you. I think I can model it, but one of my hardest assignments is to spend a week with our interns and tell them how I do it. Not because I don’t want to be interrupted, but I can tell them better how to counsel than how to preach, even though I’m not as good a counselor.
I guess if I had to mention one key, it could be relevance. The pulpit of the sixties is not the same as the pulpit of the eighties. For example, the rat-a-tat hot communication of a Walter Winchell in the forties is downright offensive today. I can’t remember the last time I leaned across the pulpit and said, going to tell you this once and you get it straight—I’m not telling you again.” Yet that was Winchel1’s style and people of that day sat in awe.
Have you ever analyzed your own gift and compared it to other preachers?
I try not to.
Let us press you a bit here. Why are you able to paint word pictures in the pulpit, while others struggle their whole lives and can’t do it?
I’m sometimes stunned that others can’t do it. I’ve decided some people naturally think in pictures, others don’t. Good preachers use known terms to make unknown terms clear. Two unknowns, however, result in confusion. I’ve heard preachers try to explain the sovereignty of God using nuclear physics as the illustration. You’ve got to go to everyday things—a cat and mouse, a child, a familiar event in history, the frame around a picture.
Is preaching hard for you?
No, it isn’t. I love to do two things in the skill of communication—preach and write. Of the two, writing is harder.
So Sunday morning when you get up, you can’t wait to get to church?
That’s the delight of my week. Now there are some Sundays … I was in Hebrews 6 last Sunday, and I was hoping for a migraine so I could pass the job on to someone else. But the actual task of saying what I have to say is not difficult. I don’t know how those who find it difficult keep on. I would have to find an associate who could share it with me.
Do you preach expository sermons or topical sermons?
I preach both, but I prefer exposition. I read expositorily; I think that way. I like to see an article that follows a logical progression. So I approach the Bible the same way.
But I’m not ready to say I would want only to go through books of the Bible—Ephesians this year, Philippians next year, 1 Samuel the next. I do a lot of book studies, but I mix other things in.
I like preaching that is real to life. It doesn’t thrill me to know that people left church understanding 1 Samuel 16. It thrills me to know they left knowing what 1 Samuel 16 says about everyday life.
You said earlier the three things you look for in a sermon are accuracy, clarity, and practicality. Why do so many preachers stop after the second one?
In order to jump from clarity to practicality, you have to go beyond normal God-talk. You’ve got to get into the realm of everyday living. You’ve got to start with the first sentence to bring it where the listeners are. I don’t know how a preacher can begin, “Well, we come today to the fifth chapter of Ephesians.” That’s the most uncreative beginning you can have in preaching.
I like the way Haddon Robinson describes this in his book Biblical Preaching. He quotes Paul O’Neil, a writer for Life Magazine: “Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, sink your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.” When I begin my sermons, I dare the person not to listen to me. Not that I’m that great—-it’s just that I’ve got something to say that’s too important to ignore.
How hard do pastors have to work to preach well?
A pastor has to earn the right to be heard every week. S0 if you have a high standard for yourself in preaching, you must work hard. The turn of a phrase has to be worked on. The style of a delivery takes time. Heavily doctrinal passages, such as mans 9 or Hebrews 10, are difficult to bring to life. That’s hard, time-consuming work.
I don’t make the Bible relevant; I show how relevant the Bible is. That takes concentration. I don’t ever have more than twenty hours to give to any one message; usually it’s a little less than that, sometimes a lot less. I could always do it in less; if l didn’t care, I could wing it. I could skip the tough passages, use cute stories here and there, and come up with enough stuff to fill thirty minutes. But I don’t give myself that privilege.
A preacher settles in on a style, and a congregation determines if that’s the level they like. People vote with their feet and their pocketbook. Nobody makes you go to church. The temptation is to think the people will come forever. Some preachers do very well their first four or five years. But then they quit reading and open the barrel too often. I battle that sloth by forcing myself to read. I’ve got a churning desire to keep preaching well.
Actually, my struggle is not with sloth but with balance. On Friday at 5:30, I’m exhausted. I want to be with my family. My sermon could use another three hours, but I choose not to because there’s something else to do besides preach on Sunday. The drive to do well must be balanced with the priorities of life.
You seem to have come to grips with who you are.
The old Greeks weren’t that far off when they said, “Know thyself.” If I ever would have to candidate somewhere else again—and that’s a disgusting thought for me – I’d take this approach: “Let me tell you folks who I am. I am good at this, I am almost great at that, I am poor at this, and I am embarrassingly poor at that. That’s me. And here’s what I think I can do here. Does that match up with what you expect your new pastor to do?”
Can you fill in those blanks of what you’re good, great, and poor at?
I’m good at negotiating conflicts. I’m very good at communicating and knowing what communicates well. I’m quite good with a staff in terms of letting them be who they are and giving them room. I’m not too good at confrontation. I’m not too good at counseling. I’m rather poor with vision. I am embarrassingly poor with regard to money, management of the church, and the business side of the ministry.
In Massachusetts you learned to be yourself. In Texas you began to learn the lessons of accountability. What are the temptations of your great success at Fullerton?
The temptation to isolate myself. It’s a continuation of the accountability lesson in a way. But it’s a deeper problem really, because the give and-take a young pastor gets has ebbed away. A man in my position must almost invite accountability. He must give signals that say, “It’s not only OK, it’s preferred.”
But he must ask the right people, discerning people. They must understand that the ego of a high-profile pastor is, to the surprise of many, rather fragile. S0 they must know when they’ve gone far enough. It’s like your wife criticizing you. She can really put you under if she says too much.
I think the temptation to isolate is the number one threat to the local-church leader today. Psychology day did an article in 1980 called “The Age of Indifference,” in which Philip Zimbardo says: “Isolation is a killer. It has been shown to be a major cause in the ideology of depression, mass suicide, rape, schizophrenia, and several other diseases/states.” I might add that, professionally, nothing is more tempting for the minister than isolation. In the final sense, you answer to God alone, but that can blind you to your human needs to socialize.
How have you avoided the temptation to isolation here at Fullerton?
I came here in fear and trembling. This church was not that much larger than the one we left in Irving, but it was ready to grow. Also, I left the independent-church syndrome to join an association of ministers, the Evangelical Free Church. Independent churches, it seems to me, breed independent pastors. So being with a great staff and understanding denominational personnel has been a great help.
Does isolation increase sexual temptation?
It can. Speakers have overextended privacy. We travel alone, staying in a motel room or an empty house. And who knows what you’re going to do in Montreal or Miami? Many of us work alone at a church where we have prolonged contact with the same female, either a counselee or a secretary. Even though I have a lot of people around me here, I guard against trouble by not seeing any counselees more than three times. During counseling, I position myself behind my desk. Though it isn’t the best for open communication, it helps me discipline myself to look into her eyes and to think why we’re here and what we’re about. I may be able to help her a little, but I don’t intend to go in depth to the sexual side of life. I simply recognize that being a man, temptation is always on the back burner waiting to singe me.
I remember a conference I addressed. I was getting on the hotel elevator—alone as usual—and two women followed me on. I smiled and said “Hi,” punched my floor, six, and said, “What floor would you like?” They said, “six would be fine.” I suddenly felt a little flattered.
But it was remarkable what happened between the first floor and the sixth. I had a momentary fantasy, but then God pulled a shade between the three of us, and on that shade I could read clear as day, not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” If we let God protect us, he will. God pulled that shade right when I really needed it.
Even pastors with large ministries can be severely tested.
Even more so. I praise God I’ve never been tempted to the point of breaking—and Cynthia deserves most of the credit for that—but I’ve been very close to men who had marvelous ministries, yet later events proved that even as I knew them they were fooling around—and I never suspected a thing. You can fake it right down to the final line. I heard a man preach as good a sermon as I had ever heard him preach on 1 Peter 3—the husband/wife relationship—but three weeks later he left his wife and ran off with his secretary.
We need open accountability, regularly. I need friends to look across the desk, lean over, and say, “I love you too much to let you live in an isolated world of dreams and fantasy. You’re not doing that, are you?”
And I need to say, “No, but keep asking me. I don’t want to start doing that.” It’s almost an epidemic.
What are some other antidotes?
Keep the romance in your own marriage. Don’t take your secretary to lunch. Don’t see the opposite sex alone at night. Don’t meet them in their homes. Don’t sit on their beds in the hospital. Don’t hold their hands when you talk. Don’t put your arms around their shoulders. I’m not saying those are standard axioms for everybody in the ministry, but they work for me.
What do you do when a woman really gets aggressive with you, even though you’ve done nothing to encourage her?
First, I share it with my wife. I call her every day when I travel. I don’t say, “Well, I had four encounters today, three of which were really appealing to me,” but I will say something like, “Boy, when one of those aggressive gals makes the moves …”
And she’ll say, “Well, you know how to handle that.”
The secret is to keep out of situations where that can happen. Once someone becomes aggressive, I stop spending any more time with her. I have been told by more than one woman that I seem a little distant, and that’s true. It’s by design.
In twenty-five years of ministry, has the packaging of sexual temptation changed substantively for you?
I suppose the kind of woman that would appeal to me is different now from before. Appealing to me now would be a woman who thinks well, reads widely, who would stimulate me in areas outside of bed. I don’t know if the lacy nightgown style is as attractive to me now as it was when I was twenty five. Still, I do like lacy nightgowns!
Do you get hate mail?
Yes. As Harry Ironside said, “Wherever there’s light, there’s bugs.” Hate mail comes from people who disagree with your position or think you didn’t fairly represent where they’re coming from. Sometimes they have legitimate disagreements; sometimes they misunderstand or distort you. You have to answer them regardless.
This kind of thing works to keep me down to size. It’s never easy to hear. Pastors who say criticism doesn’t bother them and then spend twenty minutes telling why it doesn’t bother them are fooling themselves. Criticism takes its toll on everyone. The secret is to cultivate a tough hide but a sensitive heart.
The key concept you keep mentioning is authenticity—be yourself.
I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge who said, “It’s virtually impossible to present an authentic message through an inauthentic medium.” As I recall, he was talking about television, but it applies to preachers too. Instead of television, we speak live to our audiences. But if we’re not authentic in who we are, then we fail as surely as if we tape-recorded our messages.
How do you remain authentic with your staff?
I meet twice a week, on Tuesday with my three closest associates, and then with all the staff on Wednesday. We evaluate everything. When I’m gone, they preach, but that’s not too often. So we talk about ways to make their ministries known to the church as a whole.
One thing we do is have them lead Sunday worship. All I do is preach; the others rotate with everything else. Sunday evening I occasionally take time to affirm one of the ministries of the church.
I am a great one for promoting the value of a whole staff. The secret of my ministry here has been our staff. We’ve had a couple of heartaches, but not much turnover, because men who come and are strong have a place here. We have altogether eleven full-time staff members plus three interns who are here nine months of the year.
How do you feel about Chuck Swindoll, the humble, no-name kid from El Campo, Texas, who finds himself here in Orange County before thousands of people scrambling to find a parking place for Sunday morning worship?
Well, at least it wasn’t contrived. I’m as surprised as anybody. Whenever I’m asked to describe our “master plan for growth,” I usually smile and say, we’re just a bunch of guys in the back of a pickup truck trying to get our stuff together.”
Becoming big was never my goal. I’d like to believe it is simply the result of God’s working.
I try to stay available, especially Sundays after services. I make it a point to sit down on the steps with an eleven-year—o1d boy or girl for twenty minutes, or a family that brings a child in a wheelchair. I take time to be at the church picnic. I really do love the people part of ministry, and so do the men and women on our staff. I’ve loved another thing about this particular 1ninistry—the freedom to be creative and innovative. I’ve done things in the Communion service that have never been done anywhere else to my knowledge. And I don’t care if they’re ever done anywhere else.
I don’t see myself as a Shell answer man for Christian circles today. I like to talk; I like to be with journalists, writers, concrete-thinking people. When I go into a group, I don’t want them to notice me. I really like anonymity in the sense that if I visit a fellow’s church to hear him, I don’t want him to tell that I’m there. I don’t go visit a college friend thinking the president needs to ask me to speak in chapel.
How do you handle interministerial jealousies, the envy you sense from others because, planned or not, your ministry has grown?
I try to lift myself out of the picture. Their battle is not with me. Their battle is inside themselves. My battle in Waltham, Massachusetts, was not with Harold Ockenga or Park Street Church; my battle was inside Swindoll.
I try and diffuse my fellow ministers’ smoldering jealousy by saying, “What is it that really bothers you? Is it comparison?” I help them see that even if they were at First Presbyterian in Pittsburgh, there’d be some bigger church in the suburbs.
The mental plague of the church is the comparison syndrome. I fight it. I was at the Moody pastors’ conference with Warren Wiersbe, John MacArthur, Howard Hendricks, David Jeremiah, Stephen Olford, and Dave Burnham. I went back to my hotel room thinking, What can I say this afternoon that hasn’t been said nine times this morning? I finally concluded, I’m the only one with my voice, my name, and my style, and I’m going to be me. It worked. I was freed from comparison and able to deliver the goods without internal struggle.
What spiritual disciplines do you exercise to make sure you retain the whole armor of God?
I guard my time with God as jealously as anything. I get up early. I jog, and afterward I spend a few minutes alone just gathering my senses.
I sometimes get a chill at my back when I think about the responsibilities I carry: for the people of this church, not to mention the twelve staff families that really hang on my being what I’m supposed to be. Then I remember there are eleven other ministers in this place. I do not want this to be known as Swindoll’s church. It has never been Swindoll’s church. It’s God’s church. He’ll take care of it.
What’s the Lord teaching you right now?
Patience. I am not very patient with myself, mainly, but also with my two younger children. God is teaching me to wait for some things I’ve been talking to him about and haven’t changed. I’m also facing the fact that I don’t know where all this is going to wind up. It’s not that I need some other world to conquer, but I haven’t written all I want to write. In my preaching, I struggle with the question of good, better, best. I live in that realm. I’m forty-eight years old this year. I don’t think I’m in a mid-life crisis, and I don’t feel the need for some sparkling new something, but it’s always nice to anticipate.
Last Sunday I preached on Hebrews 6. I hammered away at it; I had eighteen commentaries out on my desk. Finally I got to my position and presented it on Sunday. When I got all through, I said, “Now let me tell you something—I don’t want anybody writing me this week and giving me another opinion.” It brought the house down.
That’s the dynamic of Chuck Swindoll, I think. I’d prayed, thought, read, sweated—and when Sunday came, I was really kind of fearful because I didn’t want to be wrong. But it came time to preach it, so I did. I hope there are always Hebrews 6s for me to tackle.
