Condensed and adapted with permission from A New Design for Family Ministry (David C. Cook Publishing Co., Elgin, IL 60120) (c) 1982, Dennis B. Guernsey
When I was in seminary, I worked as a probation officer for the juvenile court. My duties involved night intake. I often had to decide whether to return an erring juvenile to his or her parents or to detain the kid until the next day. Also, I often had to decide what to do with younger children who, through no fault of their own, had come into the custody of the police.
Many parents mournfully admitted their failures with their children. But I never once had a parent admit he or she had intended to do a lousy job. Their hearts were always in the right place.
It is possible for one’s intent to be inconsistent with one’s behavior. Nowhere in the world today would you find a pastor or a director of Christian education who would admit to making decisions that consciously hinder Christian family living. In the educational establishment of Christian higher learning, I doubt if we could find a lecture entitled “How to Foul Up the Families of Your Church.”
Neither could we find a board or congregation deliberately set on ruining the pastoral family by their insensitive demands and expectations.
On the other hand, we must ask ourselves, are we making it better or worse for families-lay and pastoral alike? The answer for each church falls somewhere on a continuum.
The parasitic church
On the most negative side of the continuum is the parasitic church. A parasite feeds off its host without making positive contribution. Parasites are legion throughout nature. Even the word elicits a flesh-crawling response when we hear it.
Can a church be a parasite? Let me suggest several ways.
In the first place, the church body may think of its pastor and staff wholly in terms of itself without reference to the pastoral family. Do the members of the church have unbridled access to the leadership? Are the pastor or the elders expected to lead even though the pay is inadequate?
I know a doctrinally sound church that hangs on to its existence by asking its pastor year after year to forgo even a cost-of-living raise. The church serves a middle- to upper-middle-class congregation, but the pastor is asked to live near the poverty level. When the pastor finally gathered up enough courage to ask the church board for a raise, they had the temerity to ask him to submit a detailed budget demonstrating how he was spending his money. Clearly this church was not paying their pastor the honor he deserved, and that is the nature of a parasite.
On the other hand, take a look at the time and number of regularly scheduled meetings for parishioners. I have known pastors who demanded, however gently, that meetings be held only during prime time-prime not in terms of television but in terms of the family’s opportunity to be together. The reason given is that you’re more likely to be able to “get them there.” Such an attitude is parasitic in its rawest form. It falsely requires the people to make a choice between the church and the family, assuming the church schedule should be given first priority.
In the parasitic church, the energy demands are seemingly limitless. One residual effect is midlife dropout. I recently had a discussion with a small group of committed Christian laymen. Without exception they complained of severe fatigue and wondered what they could do about it. Each had served on the ruling boards of the church, only now to find themselves on the periphery of church life with little motivation to reenter the demands of leadership. Without exception, they were looking forward to weekends in a camper, at a cabin, or just “away from it all.”
Later, I was asked by their pastor to consult about his recent rash of resignations. He was running out of leaders and was searching for the reasons. He was concerned that somehow he was undoing the exact purpose for which he had been called to the ministry.
His problem was not organization, nor was it structure. It was perceptual. As long as the people were seen as a means to an end, he would continue to face problems of leadership.
The competitive church
Next on the continuum is the competitive church. It is similar in kind but less severe than the parasitic church.
The competitive church recognizes the validity of the pastor’s family, but often the relationship between the two is adversarial. Words such as jealousy, resentment, and bitterness typify the attitude of the pastor’s family toward the church. Often the pastor is not available for important family events. He seldom makes an open house at the children’s school.
These pastors usually feel torn between two competing loyalties. They are in a no-win position. Someone has to lose, and either way they are going to pay the price.
In terms of the people, the competitive church is in a race to see who can consume the resources of the family first. Whereas in the parasitic church the family is typically passive, in the competitive church the family members are resistive. They battle all the way.
The pastor can seldom find a compatible time to hold a meeting or initiate a program. Nothing goes down easily. The yearly church calendar becomes a pitched battle. Youth directors and leaders try to schedule more activity into a young person’s life than he or she can handle, and the family is left with what is left. On the other hand, the family seemingly schedules vacations on purpose to conflict with camps and conferences.
Faithful workers for the church are forever combing the rolls, seeking new bodies to replace those who have been expended during the battle. After a few phone calls, the recruiter begins to realize people are deciding to expend their energy elsewhere. A sense of panic sets in.
The cooperative church
This church has a sense of relative protectiveness toward its members’ family life, maybe by deciding to have no meeting one night each week. This makes sure the family is free (as far as the church is concerned) on that night. That is certainly a beginning.
The pastor may have a real “day off.” The people may respect a sense of privacy in their leaders’ lives. The church may care that the pastors’ and elders’ quality of life is good.
In a cooperative church, a positive mind-set is fostered-the church is the friend of the people. Between friends, people can say no without offense or tension.
The cooperative church has the ability to be healthily other-directed. By this I mean it defines its role as being truly in the world. It also senses that the work of God is much bigger than one particular church. Cooperative churches have a sense of near and far mission.
A truly cooperative church does more than provide seminars on family-related topics, however basic they may be. A cooperative church defines its role in such a way that it genuinely serves its members by actively strengthening their families. If viable families are not available to some of its members, the church provides new or substitute family-like relationships and environments.
The symbiotic church
Farther out on the positive side of the continuum is the symbiotic church, similar to the cooperative church but differing in degree. The relationship between church and family is more than cooperative; it is mutually interdependent. The two lives are inextricably tied to each other. If the viability of one is threatened, the life of the other is threatened as well.
Recently a young couple involved in evangelism in the Soviet Union was in our home. As a part of the evening, they eagerly showed slides about their ministry. The image of one of the slides still hangs in my mind. It was a picture of a small underground church that met together in spite of incredible persecution and hostility. There they were, gathered for a photograph around a small dining room table in the cramped living quarters of one of their members. On the table was a meal, a love feast. The young couple reported they had been extended remarkable hospitality in that home.
They were meeting in a home. The vehicle of fellowship was the hospitality of that household. Perhaps, whenever persecution forces the church to return to basics, we return to the natural and necessary symbiotic relationship between family and church.
Although the church in the Western world enjoys relative peace and freedom, part of its struggle to grow comes not from faulty methods of church growth nor from inadequate preaching, but from self-defeating philosophies of ministry that do not take into account the natural and critical importance of the family.
It is a deadly commentary that some church leaders can trumpet distress calls on behalf of the family while at the same time proclaiming the health of the church. How can one be well if the other is sick? The answer can only be that the life of the two are not, in fact, dependent upon one another. Somehow one can live while the other dies or is diseased.
What I am suggesting is not a change in pulpit rhetoric but in philosophy, in which the relationship of mutual interdependence, or symbiosis, is basic to the ministry of the church. The health or disease of one is measurably experienced by the other.
-Dennis B. Guernsey
Fuller Theological Seminary
Pasadena, California
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
