After a year of parish ministry, most pastors are ready for a vacation; after a decade, a sabbatical looks grand. After a lifetime in churches, many are ready for a good, long rest.
Robert Boyd Manger is ready for more.
Half a century after ordination, Bob Manger-Presbyterian pastor, seminary professor, author of My Heart: Christ’s Home, and elder-statesman of the church-still enjoys ministry. Young ministers seek his counsel and many older pastors model their ministry after his.
What has kept the twinkle in his eye and the devotion in his heart? LEADERSHIP contributing editor Don Bubna interviewed Manger to find out.
What led you into the ministry?
I never had a clear call into the ministry. It was more being confronted by the reality of the one in whom I believed.
Although I was raised in the church by godly parents, it didn’t seem to take with me. It wasn’t until late in college, after a summer as a deck hand billeted in a freighter’s forecastle with hardened old salts, that I realized there must be more to life than living for animal appetites and creature comforts.
At a Mount Hermon youth conference I opened my heart to Christ. But I didn’t know beans about the gospel and got into drinking with fraternity buddies. Finally during a summer on grounds crew at Mount Hermon, the thought hit me: Do I really believe Christ is alive? And is he Lord? If so, I’d be stupid if I didn’t take him seriously. So I began to.
After a year at Moody Bible Institute, Bob transferred to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1936. His first call was to the South Hollywood Presbyterian Church, a neighborhood church on the border of Los Angeles and Hollywood. He remained there nine years.
You had a mixed experience at South Hollywood, didn’t you?
The church had little vitality and was deeply in debt. But there was an initial response, particularly with the young people, and so the first couple of years showed growth. But there came a time when the growth leveled off. I didn’t have a staff-not even a secretary-so who else could I blame but myself?
When you try to change people who have never really known wholehearted commitment to Christ, and the old leadership is threatened by the younger eager beavers, you have tensions. I didn’t know how to handle them then, and I was too proud to let anybody know what I was going through. I just redoubled my efforts to pray and work. But the pain was acute and it lasted a year and a half.
How would you describe the pain you were feeling?
There were times when I would have welcomed anything to get me out of that situation-even death. It was intolerable. How can you stand, still believing the gospel, still convinced that Christ is Lord, and yet you do not experience the reality of his warm, living presence? When there’s nothing around that gives evidence of new life, when you see things falling apart-trouble with the choir, trouble with the youth?
My heart was like a rock trying to talk about love and joy and peace, yet not experiencing it.
Who else knew of these struggles?
I’d been taught in seminary, “Don’t talk about yourself. Be a man of faith. You and Jesus-you do it.” I didn’t have enough sense to pour it out. I was ashamed. I felt as though I were a failure.
What got you through this draining period in your first pastorate?
First was my own spiritual renewal, the inner renewal of faith. That issued in my preaching and teaching. Almost immediately people knew they had a man who was now talking from a different quality of faith. And so things began to happen. New leaders came in. The ones dragging their feet began to feel their old bones stirring. They felt the presence and power of the Spirit of God at work.
But how did you get this power?
Over an eighteen-month period, I did begin to share my problems with a few pastors. I chose ones I didn’t know very well because it seemed easier. One dear friend, a Lutheran pastor, said, “When you’re ready, God’s going to meet you.” I could have kicked his shins! I was so ready I would have jumped out a window if I felt God said to go.
He invited me to a pastors’ prayer group. With my blue-stocking Presbyterian background, I wasn’t all that comfortable with them. But they did pray and talk about the things I wanted to know-particularly about the Holy Spirit. I began to study about the Holy Spirit, beginning in a concordance in Genesis 1:1 and going through the Bible. The further I got, the more hungry I became. Finally I got into John: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me.” And it became obvious to me that I’d been in a wilderness with maybe just enough water to keep me alive and enough food to keep me on the trail, but I had not gotten into a land flowing with milk and honey.
Many Christian leaders have gone through a desert experience. It’s like going through the eye of a needle to get rid of a lot of baggage you’re carrying around.
Once you parted with that baggage, what sustained you?
What I really wanted from the Lord was his smile: “If I know you’re there and you’re pleased, that’s all I need.” I can’t say there was any immediate change, but I had a spirit of expectation. I had nothing more, but I expected something.
We usually need to be broken to shift our confidence away from ourself to the Savior. Jesus said, “Without me you can do nothing,” but we don’t believe that until God shows us we can do nothing. When we hit that nothingness, we’re ready to be broken-at least that’s the way it happens with me.
My remaining four years at South Hollywood were much better. The main thing was the change in me: I had a new prayer life, a new authority, a new presence, a new sense of joy. And it began to affect people around me.
In 1945 Manger was called to his home church, First Presbyterian, on the edge of the University of California campus in Berkeley, California. Bob later said, “The church had come upon difficult days, so anything I did looked great.” He gave the church seventeen good years.
In 1962, University Presbyterian Church in Seattle called Bob as senior pastor of that four-thousand-member congregation. The years in Seattle proved trying.
What made your years in Seattle difficult?
I served in Seattle during the sixties, hard times throughout the church everywhere-civil rights, revolution, the turn-off of students to the church, even churches trying to do something with the gospel and world missions. They couldn’t see churches fleshing out the gospel where they were-on the streets. I felt that severely because every Sunday we had hundreds of students in church, mature, thoughtful men and women who knew the issues. They were just not going to be happy with somebody who was not confronting the wrongness of the world out there.
Non-Christian students told me, “All we see when we walk by your church is a lot of cold, hard, uncaring bricks. We want to see some people out in the street who care. Why should we go inside to a lot of frozen people?”
What were you feeling?
Tension. My predecessor, a dear friend, had different emphases than mine, and I assumed people were with me, as they had been in Berkeley where I started with a handful and things grew. In Seattle, I felt as though I were drowning in a sea of people. How do you keep on top of four thousand members and all the visitors when you do not have the relational ties? I felt it most acutely with the students. They were the most radicalized and aggressive I had known.
What did you do to cope with this new problem?
I had learned a few things over the years, especially the importance of a shared ministry. I lost a choir director in the South Hollywood church mostly because I had treated her from a position of authority rather than lifting her from beneath. So I decided to be a team builder.
To build a staff team takes time. There is no such thing as instant intimacy. I’m convinced there’s a strong link between giving up yourself and maturity on a team. Jesus laid down his life for his disciples. And the way we lay down our lives today is giving time. You ask a pastor what hurts most, and it’s when his schedule is interrupted, his priorities upset. You cannot give a greater gift to someone who knows you’re busy than the gift of your time.
So our staff had to get together. I gave every Tuesday morning to ministry staff, and once a month a whole day. We’d go to a house somewhere where we could be alone and give of ourselves. “How can we pray for you? What’s happening to you as a person? And what’s happening in your ministry? Let’s brainstorm how we can help you.” We couldn’t have survived without this.
Bob did survive Seattle, and in 1970 was called to Fuller Theological Seminary’s faculty of theology in Pasadena, California. At Fuller, it was time for “Dr. Bob” to teach another generation the practicalities of ministry and excite in them an interest in evangelism and renewal.
By 1979 Bob was well past retirement age but not ready to quit. He joined the staff of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, located on the San Francisco peninsula.
As a pastor again, how did you proceed in ministry?
I wasn’t a senior pastor, but I felt I needed a close-knit fellowship within the body, for my own support if nothing else. So I prayerfully got together a group of six men. I didn’t say, “I want to disciple you lucky men.” I said, “I’m going to need you. I don’t know the people. I need your prayer, your counsel, your honest feedback, your love. And I’ll try to give you the same.”
If you keep faith with them and model openness, it isn’t long until someone says, “We’ll pray for you, and will you also pray for me?” He begins to tell you about his needs, and so you develop a mutual relationship. That’s the best way to disciple I have found.
Four of the six men who started with me are still meeting and two new men have come. Just two weeks ago one man said to me, “The most significant occasion in my Christian life was when you fellows supported me when I needed you.” He was comptroller of one of the larger industrial outfits in Silicon Valley and the burden of it was so heavy, he felt it pushing him out of shape spiritually. He needed to break out for the sake of his family and personal life. Yet that would mean loss of income, prestige, and security. And so we prayed with him about it for maybe six months.
Finally one of the brothers said to him, “Well friend, what are you going to do?” I still remember how this strong, able guy got scared: “I just don’t know if I can cut it out there!” As was our practice, he got on his knees, and we gathered around, laid our hands on him, and prayed for him. We affirmed him as God’s servant and helped him determine what God wanted him to do. I believe this encouraged him to venture out with God. He decided to leave the job, and he was eventually offered a position of more responsibility but less pressure on his family.
In 1983 you were pretty ill. How did that experience affect you?
I should have been under the sod years ago. I am able to function only because of the grace of God. I’ve been taking insulin for thirty-six years as a diabetic. That means I’ve learned the importance of the disciplined life just for survival.
So when I found out I had intestinal cancer and had to face major surgery, I was prepared for it in a sense; I was already living on borrowed time. I got through the surgery OK, but as I was pulling out of it, I came down with hepatitis from the blood transfusion. I returned to the hospital for three weeks after having been there nearly two weeks for surgery. I had a long period of recovery, weak and running a fever much of the time.
Just as I was coming back into active life, I had a heart attack. I went back to the same old hospital. Every three or four days I’d have another attack. Finally they did bypass surgery, and I immediately picked up. Now I’m feeling good again. But I spent fifty days in the hospital in one year.
In that dark period, did you learn anything you can pass on?
In Philippians 1, Paul says, “It’s my earnest expectation that now as always Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life or by death. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” God could glorify himself either by my living or my dying. If my life goal was to honor Christ, then I could do it either way. It resolved the tension for me. It wasn’t all that important that I live. It was for my loved ones I felt pain.
That realization has freed me, now in this stage of my life, to enjoy the journey. Why not, if God’s in charge? Why take so seriously our aches and pains or our problems and difficulties? Why is that so all important?
Maturity is adjustment to reality. The mature person in Christ is the one who has faced and adjusted to the facts of the real Christ. It’s not your happy experience; it’s the fact that the real world of God is still firm, and you’re in it.
Bob’s health returned, and he served at Menlo Park until the end of 1985. Early in 1986, he returned to Fuller Seminary to begin his sixth decade of ministry.
What’s on your agenda now?
My two questions for ministry are: How may I glorify God? And how may I give myself to others for Christ? So when I asked myself recently, What am I going to do with the few remaining years? I decided to set up shop as a volunteer pastor-in-residence for Fuller students. Being clear on my purpose and priorities, I can be assured I’m where I want to be: in the will of God.
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
