What does it take to minister effectively to one congregation for thirty years? Are there secrets that could enable thousands of pastors to dismiss forever the thought of packing up and moving on? How can lay leaders stop worrying about the next pulpit vacancy?
To discuss these questions, LEADERSHIP brought together four veterans who have served their present congregations for twenty-seven, twenty-nine, thirty-one, and forty-one years respectively:
Bartlett Hess, pastor of Ward Presbyterian Church, Livonia, Michigan, since 1956.
Jacob Eppinga, pastor of LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, since 1954.
C. Philip Hinerman, pastor of Park Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, since 1952.
Wendell Boyer, soon-to-retire pastor of People’s Church in Beloit, Wisconsin, where he began in 1942.
Leadership: When you came to your current pastorate-who was president of the United States, and what kind of car were you driving?
Bartlett Hess: Eisenhower was president, and we arrived in a 1950 Chevrolet.
Jake Eppinga: Eisenhower . . . and we came in a green ’47 Studebaker. The first week I was there, I had the funeral of a rather well-to-do person, which meant the procession to the cemetery was mostly Cadillacs. We got about three blocks from the church when my old Studebaker, right behind the hearse, died. We had to push it into a side street and then continue. So my beginning at this church was hardly impressive.
Phil Hinerman: I’ve always driven Chevys, and in those days I could trade for a new one for $1,600. When I arrived in Minneapolis in the summer of 1952. Harry Truman was still in office.
Wendell Boyer: I came to Beloit on June 29, 1942, driving a ’41 Studebaker, what we called a “double-date coupe,” Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, and the war was going badly for the Allies.
We had thirty-five people the first Sunday in a two-story rented building. On Sunday mornings we could use the whole place, but on Sunday evenings they often rented out the ground level to other groups, particularly for dances. There were big, wide heating ducts that came up through the floor . . . I must be the only preacher who’s ever given an invitation to the strains of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
To start our building fund, we tried to raise $18.75 each week to buy a war bond until we were ready to use the money.
Leadership: Fascinating. What would you say are the benefits of long-term ministry in a place? What happens now that could never have happened in your first five years at the church?
Hess: New ventures come easier because of the pastor’s long track record. We’re now preparing to start our second branch church, and people have caught the vision-whereas when I first came to Detroit, I could only persuade the session to buy the land where our church now stands by saying, “My wife and I will forgo the manse you promised.” We had to continue with four children in a small, one-bathroom house in order to get the church to look to the future.
Boyer: The bankers warm up to you the longer you stay. When we tried to borrow $30,000 for that first building, we had real problems especially being an independent church, with no denominational backing. Since then, we’ve been through five building programs, and the bankers now say, “Whatever you need, just let us know.” That’s because we’ve always paid off our loans early. One of them asked me if we had a lot of tithers in our church. When I said yes, he replied, “That’s a program you can’t beat. It’s very effective.”
Eppinga: The longer I stay, the better I understand the people. I’m now baptizing children whose grandparents I married. I understand the students in my catechism classes better as I see their family roots showing through.
Another thing: somewhere along the line I’ve acquired a greater freedom to just be myself. New pastors are on their best behavior for a while, but as the years go by, you let down the facade, and people become your family.
It’s getting harder and harder to bury people now-they’re my brothers, my sisters.
Leadership: How long does it take a congregation and a pastor to get comfortable with each other? Five years? Seven years?
Eppinga: So much depends on the personalities involved. At first I didn’t rock the boat at all, but I suppose I started moving around with a bit more authority in about five years.
Boyer: For me, things began to jell after about ten years, when we moved into our new building. You have to pastor ten years or so before you really enjoy it. Only then do you begin to know your people: which ones need their hands held through a crisis, which ones will come through it on their own, and so forth.
Hess: On the other hand, sometimes you make a lot of dust in the beginning if you and the church have an advance understanding. When I was called to Cicero, Illinois, early in my ministry, I said, “I can’t come unless there are some radical changes.” The youth program had been nothing but Sunday evening dances; the women’s program was all bazaars and suppers; there was no clear presentation of the gospel. The congregation re-voted to accept my program, and we had no problem. But ordinarily, you don’t sweep in like that.
Leadership: Are there signs that indicate you’ve won your spurs and now you can move ahead with changes?
Hinerman: I don’t know, because my case was unusual. As a Southerner, I felt a lot of Scandinavian restraint when I went to Minnesota. I don’t know whether the problem was mine or theirs, but I would preach my great, powerful sermons, and nobody told me how great and powerful they were. Then came the death of my first wife. When I lived through that and didn’t collapse, something changed. From then on I felt more wanted, more accepted, more appreciated.
I had been at Park Avenue five years by that time, which was already a full term by Methodist standards. But we were just beginning to hit our stride, so I stayed . . . never expecting to remain this long, of course.
Eppinga: In my first church, when I went to buy Communion wine at the age of twenty-four, the storekeeper wouldn’t sell it to me. I said, “I’m the pastor of the church down the street.”
He looked at me and said in a tired voice, “I thought I’d heard all the excuses, but this is the worst!” (Laughter)
When I came to my present church, I was thirty-five but looked much younger, and the median age of the congregation was fairly high. I’m sure it was a good five years before anyone in a discussion said, “Well, what does dominie (pastor) think?”
Leadership: Bartlett, you were forty-five when you came to Ward Church. Did acceptance come more quickly as a result?
Hess: Not necessarily, because I followed Evan Welsh-a tremendous, lovable pastor. I remember a full twelve years after I came: some people would still greet me at the door and say, “That was a good sermon, Dr. Welsh.” And he’d been there only nine years.
But by then most of the people had made the switch. They would say, “Dr. Welsh came when we needed him, and now you have come when we need you.”
Hinerman: When I came to Park Avenue, a predecessor who had led the church for forty-two years was still living across the street. I was the fourth man in ten years to try and follow that act. It wasn’t easy.
Those of us who stay a long time have to think about this dynamic, too: someday somebody is going to have to follow us.
Eppinga: I had a very respected predecessor, too, who moved only about five miles away. So for the first two years we shared a lot of funerals. But we had a good relationship.
I remember one lady in the congregation who was one of his most fervent fans. She would shake my hand every Sunday but say nothing. Finally after five years or so she volunteered her first comment: “You’re getting better.” (Laughter)
Hinerman: Bishop Colaw was pastor of Hyde Park Church in Cincinnati for eighteen years before his election, and he used to tell about one man who never accepted him, fought everything he proposed, never had a good word for anything. But on the farewell Sunday, as a long line of people were coming up to say good-bye, many of them weeping, here was this fellow. He took Bishop Colaw by the hand, looked him straight in the eye, and said: “Don’t sing so loud when you’re standing near the mike!”
Leadership: Some denominations have legislated terms of service. How does this affect the dynamics of pastoral tenure?
Hinerman: The Methodist tradition is four years in one place, particularly in the South. It goes back to Francis Asbury and the early circuit riders who spent six weeks or six months building a church and then moved on. After a while, preachers stayed a whole year, and then, two years. By the turn of this century, that had evolved into four-year appointments.
It still prevails under certain bishops, who enforce it selectively. It’s called a “connectional itinerant system,” which in reality means “Keep your bags packed, and never unpack your books.”
Leadership: Are there weaknesses to such a system, and if so, what?
Hinerman: I’ll try to be candid-yes, there are. You never solve the problems. The chance to grow, to work through hostilities, to reconcile is forfeited. The local committee votes on the pastor every year if it wishes, and if the vote is no, then they go to the district superintendent and tell him how bad things are, how greatly they need a change. Over time, a small coterie, a power clique begins to rule that congregation, killing the preacher whenever the preacher doesn’t suit their fancy. It’s so sad.
Eppinga: It’s interesting to hear you say that, Phil, because in the Reformed tradition we have no such mechanism, and many wish we did. I wrote an article not long ago for our church paper saying I favored the bishop system, provided I could be the bishop. (Laughter) But we do have many ministers who wish they could move; the only way is by getting a call from another church, and they’re frustrated. There’s no one to move them.
We’ve always had a high view of calling, but I can’t believe some of the changes in the last ten years. Now congregations are actually advertising for ministers in the denominational paper-something that would have been highly frowned upon in the past. We’ve also had a rule that no one should be called to another church during the first two years in a charge. That’s also being forgotten occasionally.
Hess: In Presbyterianism, the life pastorate was certainly the old Scottish tradition. When the minister was installed, they used to say he was “married to the kirk,” which meant that only under the most unusual circumstances would he ever move to another parish. Times have altered that as well.
Leadership: Give us an independent-church perspective, Wendell.
Boyer: Well, when we started writing our constitution in Beloit, I wanted so much to be fair with the congregation that I insisted on an every-year vote on the pastor. We followed that for eighteen or twenty years, until the official board finally did away with it.
By then I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. I remember the one year there were four votes against me-that was the “worst” it ever got-I spent the whole next year wondering in the back of my mind, Who are those four? I worried about that for twelve months. But the next year, all the same people were at the business meeting, and they approved me unanimously. That taught me a lesson: if someone gets a little unhappy with you over some circumstance, they’ll vote against you-but it doesn’t mean total alienation. I had done a lot of worrying for nothing.
Leadership: How have we gotten to the place in America where the pastorate is generally assumed to be only a four-to-six year thing? When you ask P.K.s where they grew up, they often just smile and say, “My father was a pastor”-that says it all.
Hess: The population as a whole is moving more often. We’re in a shifting society, with family life changing, more and more singles, and all the rest-which means the church must change to minister to real needs. If it won’t, for whatever reason, either congregational or ministerial, then voices will begin to say, “We need a change in leadership.”
In many congregations, morale is low. In some, there’s also division over theology or other matters. People have so many problems in their everyday lives that when they come to church, they don’t want to face still more problems. It’s just easier to try a new pastor.
Leadership: How have you four been able to stay so long? What has kept you fresh over the years, flexible to the times?
Boyer: Perhaps I’ve been fortunate, but from that first day in 1942 until I announced my resignation a couple of months ago, I have felt all the way that I was in the center of the Lord’s will. Beloit has been my town; it’s where the Lord wanted me to invest my life. The church has been happy and growing steadily, and now at the age of sixty-nine, I’ve said to myself, What better time to step down than when no one has suggested it?
One thing that has kept us on track has been our decision, from the very first, to make missions number one. We made “Tithes” the second listing on our offering envelopes so we could give “Missions” top billing. I remember the time we didn’t even have a building of our own, and there was a challenge to build a church in Cuba. We shelved our building program and spent the next year paying for that mission church. The amazing thing was that whereas we had projected ten years to complete our own building, we occupied it a year and a half later. This kind of emphasis has kept both me and the congregation alive and stretching.
Hinerman: Wendell, how large is People’s Church now?
Boyer: On Sunday morning, we’ll have about 600 in two services. This is in a town of about 35,000 people.
Leadership: How about the rest of you? What is the secret of freshness?
Eppinga: To be honest, I think the first building program at LaGrave Avenue sapped some of my freshness. I was going to so many committee meetings I didn’t have enough time to read, study, and pray. If you spread yourself too thin, it will eventually show up in the sermons. And the discerning listeners will sense it.
Even Spurgeon couldn’t just stand up and shake it out of his sleeve.
I remember that in my first charge, I felt completely preached out after six months. I’d already covered the whole Bible-what else was left? Now that I see retirement on the horizon, I wonder how I’m going to find time to say everything I want to say. The feeling is exactly opposite from the beginning.
But in between, there have been dry spots. I’ve felt more imaginative and productive at some times than others, and part of that relates to how much I was trying to keep my finger in everything.
Leadership: Is there a trap here, that the more one’s ministry is blessed and the larger the church grows, the more administration is required . . . which eats away at what caused the growth in the first place?
Boyer: Usually what happens is that growth comes as you get older and more experienced-but less energetic. It’s too bad growth can’t happen when you’re younger, before you get weary.
A. W. Tozer once said it’s almost impossible to be a good preacher and a good pastor. You have to choose between the two. That’s debatable, I suppose, but I know that had it not been for certain men in my congregation who carried the ball on the building programs, I wouldn’t have lasted forty-one years.
Eppinga: In another sense, though, the pastoring work feeds the sermon preparation. You face the needs out there, you work with people’s hurts, and then you try to preach to those needs.
Leadership: Your church’s summer brochure, Phil, looks like a whirlwind of activity. And you’ve done this kind of thing for ten years or more. Does it exhaust you?
Hinerman: Well, when you’re in the inner city as we are, you don’t dare take a vacation in the summer. June, July, and August are when we really make it happen, because that’s when the neighborhood is in turmoil and all the sociological and domestic problems boil to the surface. We go for seventy straight days with about forty people on the payroll, trained to do everything from sports clinics to canoe trips to backyard clubs.
But obviously, I don’t do it all. I oversee it, like a chairman of the board.
Freshness depends on whether you want to stay fresh. After all, we all have the same number of hours to work with. Underneath all my activism, I’m really a pietist. The quest for freshness, to me, means getting up at five every morning and spending two hours cultivating the inner life before I go down to the church. The rest of the day may be a blur of administration, counseling, and all the rest, but I can discipline the day if I discipline when I get up.
Leadership: What do you do in those two hours?
Hinerman: Drink enough coffee to make sure I’m awake, and then get into Bible study and waiting before God. The interior life is of the essence for me; I can’t function without it.
The two-hour slot is a devotional/creative package; I don’t try to separate my own growth from sermon preparation here. I pray, I study, I write sermons, I prepare myself for the totality of ministry.
Hess: I once heard E. Stanley Jones say, “Most of us are half-full vessels trying to run over.”
Eppinga: I admire your discipline, Phil, and would only add that other people can do the same thing at night. My most productive time, for example, is between eight and one in the morning, when the telephone quiets down and I can concentrate on the Word.
Another key to freshness is the stimulation of conferences. Part of my longevity, I’m sure, is due to the fact that after the first seven years, the church gave me a six-month sabbatical, which I spent at Union Seminary in Virginia. Seven years later they sent me to Cambridge, England, where I wrote a book and recharged my batteries.
Congregations must realize that ministers cannot go nonstop. I met a colleague from Iowa at a conference once who had had to ask his consistory twice for permission to attend. They had finally said, “OK, you may go, but we expect you back here in the pulpit on Sunday.” So there he was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sitting up nights in the hotel room working on a sermon. I was angry. That’s why we have so many people leaving the ministry.
Hess: For me, expository preaching has been a well of freshness. I determined from the beginning to expound the Word verse by verse, section by section, and I find it feeds my soul as well as builds people up in the faith. It also saves me the wondering of what to preach about.
Another thing is wide reading. I’ve read both The Christian Century and Christianity Today from the start as well as a spectrum of current books and various magazines.
Eppinga: I agree with your point about expository preaching; it keeps you fresh and also keeps you close to the Word. Sometimes I look back at “the barrel”-my sermons from the past, especially the first five years-and say, “Oh, no! I preached that?”
It is true that some of the great sermons of history were topical-Thomas Chalmers’s “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” for example, or some of Jonathan Edwards’s masterpieces. But that is not the way for the long term.
Preaching at summer Bible conferences has been invigorating for me, too. It has reminded me of the church universal, which I need.
Hess: Sometimes we pastors simply push our program, our ideas too hard. I remember back in Cicero coming home from a terrible session meeting, and the Lord saying to me, “Bart-this is not the way you are to do my work.” About that time Norman Grubb came to our church, and his message on the surrender of the will-“Not I, but Christ”-spoke deeply to me. I learned to go and apologize to people for pressing too much.
I can’t say I’ve always stayed in this place of surrender, but I know what it is, just like a musician knows when he’s on pitch and when he’s not. When I exert too much effort of the flesh, I’m in trouble. When I stand aside and let God work, things go entirely differently.
As someone recently wrote in The Presbyterian Journal, Jesus didn’t say, “I will build your church” or even “You will build my church.” He said, “I will build my church.”
Leadership: Over the years, how seriously have you thought about relocating?
Boyer: I’ve always known I was supposed to be in Beloit. Once I was invited to a church of 800 when we were running only about 75. But after I spoke there on a Sunday, I still knew in my heart that God wanted me to stay put.
Eppinga: I’ve been tempted many times-usually after coming back from a visit to a mission field.
I’ve also had a running fantasy of being a small-town pastor . . . sitting on a park bench with folks . . . going down Main Street in the mornings, stopping in at the stores to say good morning, knowing everyone in the village. … Something about that attracts me.
But when the Lord places you somewhere, you have to go to work there and ignore the grass on the other side of the fence. This is “where it’s at.” This is where, in his providence, he keeps challenging you.
I’m not saying it is wrong to move. I believe the Lord has all kinds of ministers-some starters, some relievers, some sprinters, some milers. So the right length for one is not necessarily the right length for another. But all of us have to meet the challenge where we are instead of leaving it unresolved.
Hess: In my first church out of seminary (it’s now extinct, so I can tell this story!), I never saw such a collection of difficult people. (The man who followed me, in fact, finally called the session together and gave one woman a letter of transfer addressed “To any evangelical church” because she’d been such a problem.) I wanted to get away every day, I think.
About then I read an article about a minister who badly wanted to leave his church. But the Lord showed him that what was needed was not a new church, but rather a minister with a new attitude in the old church.
At that point, I was being considered for an executive position. We waited eagerly for the letter to arrive. Finally it came . . . informing me that I was too conservative theologically for the situation. My wife and I knelt down at our secondhand sofa that day and said, “Lord, if you want us to stay here all our ministry, we’ll stay. Our future is in your hands.”
Immediately, that little church began to blossom. The whole experience was invaluable to my entire ministry.
Eppinga: I stayed at my second charge only two years. I left because I felt we were not quite right for each other. Maybe I was wrong to leave. It is a good church, but I thought they would be better served by a different type of minister.
The short pastorate was right for me in that situation, I believe. And it didn’t mean I was a quitter. I went to the next church . . . and have now stayed almost thirty years.
Leadership: How have you handled the times when people have given subtle (or not-so-subtle) hints that maybe you ought to be moving along now? How have you responded to those who were upset with you?
Hess: If you feel the Lord wants you to stay, you ignore the hints and you keep treating the people kindly. I had a wonderful experience just yesterday: a woman who had given me all kinds of trouble and had gone elsewhere came back to say, “We want to join your church again.” Consistent love and kindness paid off.
Boyer: I learned early in my ministry never to answer a nasty letter with a nasty letter. Some of the best people in my church today are those who once thought I should have left town, and said so. I never quit loving them and always left the door open for them to return.
I’ve preached from the pulpit that for those of us beyond the Cross, there may be differences, but these are family matters. We can talk about them, work them through-but we forgive and forget in the end, because we’re family.
Hinerman: My experience is quite different from the two of you, because I’ve been in a thirty-year fight to stay alive in the inner city-and have lost about 3,000 members along the way! The neighborhood was changing even before I arrived, but there were no blacks in the membership, and as an old Southern boy, I knew that wasn’t Christian. One of the first questions I raised was “Will it be all right if your pastors bring into membership anyone who has faith in Jesus Christ?” The debate went on till midnight, because they knew exactly what the code language meant.
The curious thing is that race was never mentioned. There are no racists in Minnesota, you see; this is the land of Hubert Humphrey. I’d grown up next to people who were rednecks and proud of it, but the denial of racist feelings even as church members exited for the suburbs was new to me. Over the first twenty years, we basically lost my entire generation, the forty-to-sixty crowd. Some of them would have moved out anyway, but my ministry at Park Avenue didn’t help to hold them.
What were the reasons given? Well, they didn’t like this program or that program; they didn’t appreciate the way so-and-so was leading. The youth program has been the bane of my existence, because it reflects the neighborhood-about fifty/fifty black and white. So if you had three or four daughters, you really didn’t want to raise them in Park Avenue United Methodist Church. People would never come up to me and say, “I don’t want my daughters growing up here”-they’d say instead, “That’s a lousy youth pastor you’ve got, and if you don’t get him out of here, we’re going to move, and we’ll be taking our money with us.”
There has never been a move to oust me personally. But the pursuit of my conviction that the church ought to reflect the demographics of the neighborhood has been one unbelievable fight.
Leadership: How have you survived? Why have you stuck it out for thirty-one years?
Hinerman: Well, sometimes I just say I’ve stayed because the bishop can’t find anybody else to go to Park Avenue. When I plead with him for relief, he says, “Well, stay one more year,” because he doesn’t want to move me and have me wreck some other good Methodist church somewhere.
Seriously, in the midst of all the pain, there has been the joy of seeing a truly multiracial church come into existence. We had 700 people there yesterday, 70 percent of them under thirty-five. We’re just shoving the doors out trying to accommodate Christian education. The church experts have looked at us and said, “You can’t be doing this. You don’t fulfill any of the guidelines for church growth-no parking, no homogeneity. This is impossible.” The fun is trying to grow where you’re not supposed to. It’s exciting to have 1,500 to 2,000 people out on our black top in the summertime for a weeklong festival. It’s fun to try to be the church in the middle of the world.
One of the neat things about this ordeal has been that we’ve kept getting a new congregation. When Bruce Larson asked the rector of Church of the Redeemer in Houston why he had to stay twenty years before renewal took place, the man said, “I had to stay long enough to get rid of everyone who didn’t want renewal.” That’s a lesson for many churches. Most of us come out of seminary geared to holding the faithful at all costs; nobody ever tells us that sometimes it’s important to lose some people before an awakening can occur.
Hess: That’s true. Many people subconsciously prefer a church of a certain size, and so as a church grows, their ceiling is gradually passed. Sometimes people leave for the wrong motives, but sometimes they really need to move on for their own spiritual benefit.
Eppinga: I haven’t faced the racial problem, but I, like the rest of you, have stayed long enough in one place to live through a social revolution. When the disestablishmentarians began taking over in the late sixties and early seventies, wanting to scrap the monologic sermon, wanting to sit in circles on the floor with a guitar-that was a rough time in my ministry. No one actually asked me to leave, but I’m sure some thought it would be a good idea.
I’d never thought of myself as rigid. In our circles, I was known as a progressive. And suddenly, I was a conservative. It wasn’t I who had changed, but rather the context. I tried not to be rigid, to allow some of these things and still keep the church on an even keel.
Leadership: What are the dangers of staying at one church a long time?
Hess: If the minister goes dead, then the congregation dies, and the longer the minister coasts toward retirement, the lower the church drops. To me, that’s dishonest.
Every year my session appeals to the presbytery, “Even though Bart is past seventy, we’d like to have him continue his ministry.” But when I see that the Lord is not continuing to bless, then I’m going to retire.
Eppinga: Yes, it’s easy to grow comfortable and coast. It’s also easy to identify more and more, as the years go by, with a certain clique. You have to remember you’re the pastor of everyone, not just the kindred spirits.
Another danger lies in coming to think it’s your church. People sometimes look at the Roman Catholic steeple on the other end of our block and say, “That’s Saint Andrew’s,” and then look at our tower and say, “That’s Saint Jacob’s.” But it really isn’t.
There are a lot of long pastorates these days that are really personality cults. In fact, one of the greatest dangers of a long pastorate is pride. When you’ve lasted in a church for a while, and things are going well, the Devil loves to heap up the credit in your direction. He wants you to forget that even Jesus did not come to be served, but to serve. If you’re a proud pastor, you’re a contradiction in terms.
Hinerman: If you stay long enough, you become the resident historian, don’t you?
Eppinga: Yes. For example, when the board is contemplating something, it’s a temptation for me to say, “No, that’s not the way we did it fifteen years ago. … ” Sometimes you have to be silent and let them work through a problem all over again.
It’s a funny feeling: our treasurer was once my catechumen. I used to make him get in line; now he signs my checks. I have to constantly adjust to changes like this.
Leadership: Can you have personal friends in a congregation and remain long?
Boyer: When I started the church, I told the people I would not be able to make personal friends in the congregation. We would gladly be their guests for dinner or any kind of event, and we have. But we’ve refrained from taking the initiative-having them over to our house and so forth.
This has made for a lonely life sometimes, especially after church on Sunday night when you’d just like someone to be with. But the congregation has never been able to say, “Well, so-and-so is his buddy.” Still, there’s a warmth in the church; visitors often comment on it.
Hinerman: I probably agree with your goal but have taken the opposite route to get there. My dearest personal friends are at Park Avenue. My staff is closer to me than anyone in this world except my own flesh. I’ll socialize with parishioners like crazy and even call them at two in the morning if I need help.
Hess: I’m glad you mentioned staff closeness. It’s sad when a church and a pastorate is built at the expense of staff relationships. It ought not to be as Phillips Brooks (the Episcopal bishop who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem”) once said when a woman asked him how to become a good Christian. He replied, “Believe in Christ, be confirmed, be faithful in attending worship, reading your Bible, praying-and find out as little as possible about the inner workings of the church.”
Leadership: What would you four like to say to young pastors just starting their careers?
Hess: Work as if everything depended on you, and trust as if everything depended on the Lord.
Eppinga: Despite what you may have heard about the glories of specialization, there is no more satisfying work than the parish ministry. Parish pastors are getting to be like general practitioners in medicine-an endangered species. But there is marvelous variety and challenge in serving the local church. I’m sorry I’m not twenty years old; I’d love to start all over again.
My second word would be enthusiasm. On one of my sabbaticals, I sat down one night and read Paul’s writings straight through, from Romans to Philemon. It was so intriguing I did it again the next night. I kept it up for two weeks. His personality began to come alive, and I noticed something: Paul never writes with moderation. He’s about the most enthusiastic fellow you can find. When he wants to describe Christ’s power, he calls it dunamis. When in Philippians 3 he describes what he gave up to follow Christ, his language becomes downright crude. “Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ,” he says in Romans 8, and he’s off into an extravaganza of comparisons. You almost feel like saying, “Take it easy, Paul-you’re going to have a heart attack.”
We need enthusiastic people in the ministry today, good replacements for those of us who are soon tiring out.
Boyer: I would ask young pastors to realize how much we Christians need each other. I would urge them to preach and teach a family spirit of loving and praying for one another’s hurts. More than at any time in my ministry I sense the need to rejoice with the joyful and weep with the distressed.
Hinerman: I think we need to caution seminarians, however. We’re not always honest about what the pastorate is really like. I say to young people, “Don’t even think about going into the ministry if you can get out of it. It’s the worst job in America, the most overtrained and underpaid professional group there is. The only rewards you get are internalized, at least during the early years.”
Don’t misunderstand me-I’m happy in my work, especially now that I’m reaping a harvest I never expected. And I pray that some young men and women will find the ministry unavoidable. But I want them to have a sense of “Woe is me if I preach not the gospel” burning inside to carry them through.
Leadership: Now let’s turn the clock forward a dozen years or so. What would you like to say to the mid-thirties pastor-let’s say a man with a wife and two children in school, who’s now in his third parish, and he’s feeling like it’s time to move, and his wife is saying, “Oh, please, not again.” How would you counsel him?
Hess: My father was a man like that; we moved every eighteen months, it seemed. My mother said he was an evangelist in the pastorate. In his case, it was legitimate. The Lord had called him to do certain things in a series of churches.
But there are many who keep running from themselves and their problems, and they really should come to terms.
Boyer: A lot of times something happens in a church that involves maybe five people-and the pastor assumes the whole congregation is against him, so he takes off. The whole congregation doesn’t feel that way at all. A conflict with even ten out of a hundred is not impossible to overcome; in the next church there might be twenty.
You don’t help anything by moving in such cases; instead, you must get on your face before God and work through the problem. You talk with the persons involved, pray with them, reconcile if possible, and keep ministering regardless.
Eppinga: We have a new mentoring system in our denomination that assigns seminary graduates going into parish ministry to older, experienced ministers who meet with them monthly. We hope this will stem the dropout rate we’ve been seeing in recent years.
The fellow who is burned out at thirty or thirty-five perhaps needs the same kind of help. Sometimes you can be so despondent you can’t even pray. You need a friend in the ministry to guide you through, help you think straight, and seek God’s direction for your life.
To my shame, I must say I’ve been so busy I’ve often failed to notice someone who was struggling, and all of a sudden, I hear he’s out of the ministry. I should have talked with him.
It’s a two-way street: the young pastors should seek help when they need it, and the rest of us should keep our eyes open.
Leadership: What has changed during your years in the ministry and what has remained the same?
Eppinga: Ever since I was ordained, the world has been going downhill, and I hope there’s no connection! (Laughter)
Hess: I’m seeing the unsaved come to church like never in the past. A man sitting by my wife in a Sunday evening service not long ago said, “I can’t believe I’m here. I’m an alcoholic; I lost my job as well as my family; I was in a tavern when I heard about Single Point” (our ministry to singles) “and so I came. Then I tried the church services, came to know the Lord, and now my whole life is changed. I’m even working again.”
In years past we were scared to death of singles groups, forgetting how our Lord associated with all types of people. I’ve never seen such spiritual hunger as there is today. People are looking for answers to their needs, and the Word of God is the only thing that will satisfy them.
We hold a divorce recovery workshop three times a year, and over 200 people show up-90 percent of whom I’ve never seen before. They’re bleeding, they’re hurting. The Sunday morning singles class runs up to 400.
Boyer: A lot of churches have come and gone in our town over the years. But among the survivors, closer fellowship has come as we’ve worked on joint projects. We’ve held a united county crusade thirty-one years in a row, for example. This morning, two busloads of teenagers from not only our church but the Congregational church around the corner left for camp.
The youth music has created some problems at times, but I see the young people there in church every Sunday morning and Sunday night, and I’m encouraged overall. More of them are going to Christian colleges than in the past. They’re very serious about doing something significant with their lives-often, missionary work.
Hinerman: Paul Rees’s book Don’t Sleep through the Revolution was to me a powerful word to the church. At first we tried to ignore the social upheaval that began in the sixties; we hoped it would go away. Only belatedly have we faced into it.
And we’re still the most racist institution in America. This is one of the most tragic failures of Christendom. The judgment of God is going to shake us eventually for playing games while the revolution roars on.
Leadership: How has your attitude toward that failure changed over the years? Are you angrier now, or less angry?
Hinerman: I don’t know. I’m just a journeyman pastor who works every day in the trenches. People say to me, “What’s your five-year plan?” I say, “Hey, we were torched three times in one year-I don’t have any five-year plan.” I’m just trying to survive and grow in the midst of difficulty, and I hope others will join me in that pursuit.
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