It was George Bernard Shaw who said the most difficult instrument to master is second fiddle.
I confess a love of symphony but a rustic understanding of orchestras. Violins are the stuff of orchestras, but fiddles? Isn’t a fiddle a violin that thinks too little of itself—a Stradivarius with low self-esteem? Violins are singing strings urged by the gentle bow of art to seduce the ear of gods. Fiddles, they say, are cat intestines rasped over by horse tail.
Sometimes there is more fiddle than violin in church-staff relationships. Excellence is the goal, but the unsettled feelings that keep some church staffers unhappy (and frequently resigning) make fiddles out of violins.
I am writing the morning after the sudden resignation of a three-year staffer. I felt we were good friends, and I have been ever pleased—as has the whole congregation—with his work. But he’s leaving.
In our denomination average staff tenure is better measured in months than year—fifteen to be exact. The average pastor lasts twenty-eight months. Although our church beats the average, I am still alarmed by the facts. We have experienced five staff resignations in ten years, and the average stay of each was about three years.
In only one case did our trustees ask a staffer to resign. The rest chose to do so. Our pay scale beats the average, fringe benefits are adequate, and the church is growing significantly. So why the turnover?
Most resignations read like the current one; it speaks of “the call” of God to a new congregation. The statement usually speaks of “the will of God”—a nondebatable, nonnegotiable recourse. When God continually speaks at fifteen-month intervals, however, he makes himself look unsettled.
Lottie Moon said we blame too much on God. Finding herself the only missionary in China in the nineteenth century, she wrote, “It seems queer that God would call five hundred preachers for Virginia alone and leave one lone woman for all of China.”
No, there is more of psychology in the issue than of calling. So often in the resignation of staff persons, I feel I can hear music—not symphony but the ill-tuned strains of second fiddle.
However, second fiddle is a hard instrument to discuss. It seems un-Christlike to protest it. Truly those who object to it must do it in a way that defends themselves against accusations of arrogance. “If you want to be first chair in God’s kingdom,” said Jesus, “second fiddle is your calling” (a loose translation of Matthew 20:26-27).
Ambition and the Pastor
I am loathe to bring this up, but perhaps staff members would be more content with their position if they clearly could see the pastor was content. Staff members often fear the shepherd may abandon them on the way to a more prestigious pulpit that would minister to his self-esteem at their expense. To use the metaphor at hand, maestros may not change orchestras as often as violinists, yet they change so often the orchestra is insecure.
Each time a pastor flirts with a search committee, a tremor passes through the staff. They wonder if they might not be wise to beat him to the punch by offering their resignations first.
Besides, it is hard to convince a staff member to be content while the pastor plays pulpit roulette with every enticing offer that comes along. The temptation to land a large church by “shepherd’s bingo” is infectious. The pastor who is a denominational climber cannot model contentment for the staff.
Yet ambition is ever with us all.
Several years ago my son came home from school where he played the trumpet in the band. “Dad,” he boasted, “I’m good on the trumpet.”
“Better than you are at modesty,” I alleged.
“Dad, I’m in sixth chair, but I’m a lot better than the kid in fifth chair,” he said, literally tooting his own horn. “The kid in fifth chair is skinny with fat lips; I’m going to challenge him for his chair.”
He did, of course, and took the kid’s chair. His vaulting ambition began to o’er leap itself: “Dad, there’s this kid in fourth chair, he is forever licking his mouthpiece—it’s gross!”
It sounded like it.
“I’m going to challenge him for fourth chair.” And so he did. And in this fashion, my son tooted his way to the top.
I was all too prone to criticize him. While my son was climbing to prestige in the school band, I often loitered near the coffee urn at the local pastors’ meeting. It occurred to me that our church was very small. In fact, of the seven pastors present, I was sixth chair on the basis of congregational size. Finding little joy in being sixth, I often stared across the doughnut dish at the man in fifth chair. He seemed thin with flabby lips. Inwardly I wondered, Should I challenge him and move to his place? Then on to the man in fourth chair: I wondered as he licked his Styrofoam cup if he could be beaten.
Instantly I rebuked myself!
Ministers are not competitors; we are team members. Staff will take on that perspective if the pastor does not appear to be competing for someone else’s chair from year to year. If the maestro is always shopping for a bigger orchestra, musicians may consider it a reasonable venture and vent their own ambitions by seeking an ostensibly more rewarding post.
Ambition and the Staff
Still, much of the unrest in church staffs is born in the ambition of staff members who begin to compete with each other for congregational prestige. This kind of strife is not usually sparked by the senior pastor. Indeed, it often catches him by surprise.
A pastor friend came back from a trip to find his education director and music director quarreling over which of them was “top dog” in his absence. It reminded me of Jesus’ having to rebuke the two sons of thunder.
This whole neurotic need for preeminence derives from the notion the pastor occupies first place in the church and others are second. This may be true administratively, but it is certainly not true when one considers the whole task of ministry.
A part of the discord is cultural, I’m afraid. It’s a competitive world, and almost every church member is measured by occupational advancement. The golden best seller of yesteryear called The Peter Principle taught it is customary in corporations to climb the ladder rung by rung until reaching the level where one is no longer competent.
This kind of advancement forms the matrix of mobility in the world of corporate esteem. In suburban congregations like my own, it is the way of life for most of the male (and some of the female) members. It is a familiar path for Christian Yuppies on their way to the “yippee!” of executivehood.
This principle, however, does not hold in the church. Each staff position is so specialized that there is little opportunity for promotion. A church staff member, finding it hard to receive promotions within the church, may begin to feel locked-in with no place to go. Surrounded by so many executive climbers, the staff member longs for some way to measure personal advancement. Changing churches becomes a kind of answer. A larger church might satisfy Yuppie tendencies, while a smaller church may at least celebrate a person’s newness for a while.
Staff members are little different from pastors. Both have identity needs, and both are called to serve the church. Both look for solid spiritual evidence that they are central in God’s will. I know my life and joy in Christ is made full by the men and women who serve with me in ministry.
Adjusting to Ambitions
Still, almost all head pastors I know agree that staff relationships are their greatest single time consumer. They want to lead in a positive but gentle way, one that sets the direction of the church and yet accords to all team members a feeling of worth and dignity. And that is not easy.
Life itself is hard. The search for self-worth is universal. Most of us are trying to make beautiful music in the congregation while we struggle with finding out who we are, and once we discover ourselves, we must like who we are as well.
But back to fiddles a moment. Tevye reminds us that life is fragile and the trick is to scratch out some kind of tune without breaking our necks. The fiddler on the roof is an existential politician. He must find meaning, stay alive, and keep his balance—or be lost. The church staff member is a fiddler politician who teeters in his tune making and sometimes tumbles ingloriously into the abyss of resignation and the oft-visited denominational placement channels.
Bitterness and hurt often result, adding unpleasant discord. One pastor of my acquaintance, when questioned why he resigned, said it was because of sickness.
“Sickness?” he was asked.
“Yes, they were sick of me and I was sick of them.”
Relational dissonance dwells in low self-esteem and second-fiddle feelings. The ill harmony sounds like, “I don’t count for much in this program,” “I’ve been in this church a year, and nobody listens to me.” How quickly these feelings rise. There is little distance between the honeymooning staffer who cries, “All is joy and newness; I just want to serve the Lord!” and the one who demands, “When is it my turn to lead the band, anyway?” The performance and tenure of staff is tied to their own sense of personal adjustment.
But what if the “first fiddlers” suspect the music of their subordinates is really better than their own? In The multiple Staff and the Larger Church, Lyle Schaller claims the average pastor cannot add more than one other full-time staff member because he cannot split the ministerial esteem more than that. Obviously second fiddle is not just an instrument that staffers are loath to play.
We Baptists quarrel and split as often as any. In our city, eight of the nine churches in our denomination grew out of church quarrels. Most of the time such quarrels are neither theological nor academic, but a power contest. And these conflicts of power grow directly out of fiddlin’ issues. The psychology of who holds first chair gets cloaked in theological disputes or spiritual verbiage when the real questions are: Who is fiddlin’? And in what order?
Keeping the Music Sweet
Concerts are never the place to discover the politics of an orchestra. The music always sounds good at a concert. Rehearsals and post-rehearsal coffee klatches are the places.
One potential church member told me at a business meeting—the first service he had ever attended at our church—”We’re looking for a new church, but our last five churches have been unhappy experiences. We never discovered it at worship—only at business meetings. Now we’ve decided we will never join a church till we have visited at least one business meeting.”
The remark evidences a kind of wisdom, but is not altogether wise. The truth is, the key thing about an orchestra is not the roughness of its rehearsals but the quality of its concerts. It is true, however, the mood of its rehearsals usually colors the quality of its concerts, and so it is with business meetings.
I remember a symphony intermission when my wife leaned over and said, “Beautiful—beautiful!”
“Ah yes,” I replied. “Too bad about the violin section.”
“What about it?” she asked.
“Didn’t you know the second chair has been mad for years about not being promoted to concertmaster? The concertmaster was brought in from out-of-town, and frankly the second chair’s burned up about it!”
“Really?” she said.
“Not only that,” I said, “but the oboist is upset with the percussionist. She thinks he’s anticipating the maestro’s cues.”
“Unbelievable,” she said.
“The flautist is upset, too!” She began to eye me suspiciously. “Yes,” I said, “she thinks the maestro is partial to the performance of predominately string pieces . . . and the pianist is nearly sixty and she knows she can’t hold on forever, but she came to this orchestra in her forties and has no intention of giving up her position till her fingers knot up in her mittens.”
My wife could see where it was going, knowing I really didn’t know them personally. “Yes,” she said, “somehow we can forgive all their pettiness as long as the music is good.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “So long as the music is good.”
On my church staff, the music sometimes gets a little rough. I must confess when there is trouble in the fiddle section, my nerves get a bit frayed. My heart aches that all of us, called by our Lord to be the servants of all, cannot do better than talk about the glories of second fiddle. Few ever master it.
But most long-term pastors can play it fairly well.
They have learned second fiddle by playing in the gaps between the comings and goings of staffers. In the smaller church, the pastor may have to take upon himself most of the responsibilities of an unfilled position. In the larger church, the duties of an absentee staff position may be shared by a collection of ministers, each assuming a portion of the duties for a while. Still, the administration of the work falls squarely on the pastor.
Across the years I have developed a terrific respect for the maestro who leads the same orchestra for a long time, for such a person is an expert at second fiddle. When the prima donnas of churchmanship wrangle over the best seats, the competition is fierce and the arguing can be raucous. The good maestro picks up the fiddle no one wanted and manages to keep the melody going a little louder than the quarrels.
Every long-tenured shepherd has quietly picked up the fiddle and played in moments of trouble caused by resignations. These periodic storms of congregational unrest are bridged by the godly pastor who reaches out to the hurting staff member, even when that associate is the problem. Almost always the pastor gets hurt by innuendoes that accompany resignations, if not by direct accusation. But his years have taught him that the church will survive if he can keep the music going—even when it is hard to play above the noise.
My favorite story in the Gospels speaks of a basin and towel. On that night in which every musician was first chair, Jesus picked up the basin and reminded the world that second fiddle is a beautiful instrument when properly tuned in humility and played in service.
Fanla Fenelon was played by Vanessa Redgrave in the wonderful documentary movie, Playing for Time. Jewish musicians—all women—were spared the gas chambers in Nazi Auschwitz as long as they played beautifully. They were dressed in drab gray—all alike—and their heads were shaved. Thus both identity and femininity were taken from them. Everything, even their right to live, became irrelevant. Their lives were reduced to a single proposition: music or death.
Perhaps I’ve spoiled the metaphor by speaking so plainly, but we must remember that the music of the church is the evangel—the good news that God was in Christ. If poor orchestration obscures the theme for long, the church will begin to lose members and, worse than that, may actually lose its way. And a lost church can do little to redeem a lost world. It must keep the music going or it will die. In this strategic, saving symphony, every instrument counts.
In a sense, these are the glorious options of the church: music or death. We must therefore play as well as we can, for the quality of our instrument is not as important as the certain, unfailing sound of the music.
Calvin Miller is pastor of Westside Baptist Church, Omaha, Nebraska.
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
