We are highlighting Leadership Journal's Top 40, the best articles of the journal's 36-year history. We will be presenting them in chronological order. Today we present #30, from 1987.
A sense of failure in the ministry can pervade all areas of a pastor's life, and spouses particularly share that darkness. In this article, Kent and Barbara Hughes provide two sides of their experience with Kent's struggle over his apparently unsuccessful ministry. Kent begins:
During seminary I began ten years of ministry in my family church, first as youth pastor and then as associate pastor. This was in the late sixties-restless, unsettled, but a time of wonderful spiritual harvest.
The highlight of that ministry is captured in a five-by-seven photograph hanging in the hallway of our home. The photo was taken in 1968 in Parker, Arizona, during our high schoolers' Easter outreach week at the Colorado River. In the foreground are five young men posed on a boat trailer. They're tan, windswept, and holding beers with postured male lan.
Three of those young men would confess Christ that day. Today, two of them are in the ministry, and one of their friends, who followed them in receiving Christ, is now a prominent Christian counselor. That picture demonstrates for me the sovereign, ineluctable power of God. Those young men, before completely unknown to me, not only were revolutionized by God's grace but have led unusually productive Christian lives and have been my good friends for almost twenty years.
If only all of ministry were as triumphant as that picture! Even in that golden era of youth ministry, I knew the privileged vicissitudes of ministry. But at that point I found them bracing, even exhilarating.
Greater Expectations
The church I served decided to mother a new church with me as the founding pastor. In this adventure, the sponsoring church and its pastor were wonderfully magnanimous. Together we produced a multimedia presentation to communicate to the congregation the potential of the new work. When the pastor urged all to respond who felt the call of God to help plant this new church, twenty families decided to go with us. To top that off, the church gave $50,000 to get us started.
What a way to begin a church! Optimism ran high. As the fair-haired boy, I was told by friends that great things were about to happen, and it would not be long before the new church would be larger than its mother. Such talk enlarged my expectations. I believed it.
The people who gathered with us to begin the church were terrific. We left our initial meetings amazed at the array of gifted, hard-working, visionary people the Lord had brought with us. With such people we expected to grow.
And we did things "right." We retained a church-growth expert who instructed us in the broad principles and minor subtleties of growing churches. The denomination sent me to seminars on church growth. We obtained aerial photographs and demographic projections, commissioned ethnographic studies, consulted with the county, and chose the target community with painstaking and prayerful premeditation.
Beginning a new church is exhausting work, and we gave it all we had. I found myself attending meetings, strategizing, canvassing, counseling, preparing sermons, and borrowing pianos, pianists, projectors, and pulpits. Then came the Sunday ritual of preparing the rented facilities for worship services-sweeping out the beer cans and trash from the community center, helping Whitey Cary unload the big storage trailer holding the pulpit, microphones, hymnals, rugs, rockers, and playpens, and then in the evening working in happy Christian bonhomie with the entire congregation to disassemble and pack up our church for another week.
We had everything going for us. We had the prayers and predictions of our friends who believed a vast, growing work was inevitable. We had the sophisticated insights of the science of church growth. We had prime property in a fast-growing community. We had a superb nucleus of believers. And we had me, a young pastor with a good track record who was entering his prime.
But to our astonishment and resounding disappointment, we didn't grow. In fact, by the middle of our second year, we typically counted fewer than half the regular attenders we had in the beginning. Our church was shrinking, and the prospects looked bad. This can't be, I thought. I'm not living up to my expectations. I'm failing!
So in the hot summer of 1976, after over a decade of greatly satisfying ministry, my little world of bright prospects and easy success melted around me.
So Many Questions
I was not feeling well as I stepped from the car and walked, briefcase in hand, toward the shade of the front porch, where Barbara greeted me through the kitchen screen. Seeing her smile, I brightened, as always. For the next few hours I was occupied with my young family. But after dinner, when the children were in bed and we were alone, I resumed my previous despondency.
Barbara knew something was troubling me, but not that I was in doubt about continuing in the pastoral ministry. The doubts troubling me were so repugnant I couldn't bring myself to verbalize them. As I'd suppressed them, my depression had become increasingly deep and more difficult to hide.
She correctly observed that when things were going well at church, I was okay. When church attendance was up, I was up. But when it was down, so was I. And it had been going down for a solid year.
Years of cultivated Christian civility served me well in hiding the animosity in my soul. Inside I was angry, but I kept it from even my wife. My resentment was toward God, who had called me to this. I had given everything, I thought-my time, my education, years of ministry and true Christian devotion-and now I was failing. God was to blame.
No one except Barbara, it seemed, cared as I did. The people around me were benignly watching me sink. When Barbara tried to cheer me by saying that Noah had preached for 120 years without a single convert, my grim-humored response was, "Yes, but there wasn't another Noah across town with people flowing into his ark!"
But that evening I finally poured out all my dammed up, unacceptable feelings. Barbara, sensing this was a decisive night in our lives, began to write what she heard. This is what she recorded:
Most men I know in the ministry are unhappy. They are failures in their own eyes. Why should I expect God to bless me when it appears he hasn't blessed them? Am I so ego-centered as to think he loves me more? My observations bore no hyperbole. A few moments of personal exchange with pastors almost invariably reveals immense hurt and self-doubt.
In cold statistics, my chances of being a failure are overwhelming. Most pastors do little more than survive the ministry on starvation wages in piddly little churches. I rehearsed how a professor had stood before my seminary class and said, "Eight out of ten of you will never pastor a church larger than 150."
The ministry is asking too much of me. How can I go on giving all I have without seeing results, especially when others are? I had been working day and night with no visible return. Everyone needs to see results. Farmers gain the satisfaction of watching their crops grow, but my field bore nothing.
Those who really make it in the ministry have exceptional gifts. If I had a great personality or natural charisma, if I had celebrity status, a resonant voice, a merciless executive ability, or a domineering personality that doesn't mind sacrificing others, I could make it to the top. But where is God in all this? I defied my wife to disprove it. "Just look at the great preachers today," I said. "Their success has nothing to do with God's Spirit; they're just superior people."
Conclusion: God has called me to do something he hasn't given me the gifts to accomplish. Therefore, God is not good. I had been called by God, and now I was the butt of a cruel joke.
I was a failure. I wanted to quit. And in aching desperation, I asked Barbara, "What am I to do?"
She replied, "I don't know, but for right now, for tonight, hang on to my faith, because I believe God is good. I believe he loves us and is going to work through this experience. So hang on to my faith. I have enough for both of us."
Having unburdened myself, I went to bed exhausted and fell into fitful sleep. Later I learned Barbara stayed up far into the night.
Barbara continues the story:
"Hang on to my faith." Did I really speak those words only a few minutes ago? Sitting alone at the kitchen table, I wondered if I had simply been mouthing pious bravado. What about my faith? Do I have enough for both of us? Is my faith strong enough to survive on its own, or did Kent marry a spiritual dependent? If Kent's faith fails, will mine shrivel and die like a parasite separated from its host?
As I thought about it that night, I concluded that no, Kent had not married a spiritual dependent. My faith pulsated with life and love for the God we both felt called to serve.
But in my sheltered atmosphere, surrounded by good church people who seldom challenged my faith, I had become soft. It was easy for me to slip into the mind set of an announcer at a train station who has never been beyond the boundaries of his own city but imagines he has traveled far because he is always calling out destinations for others. I had been piggybacking on my husband's spiritual journey.
Now it was time to see what I was made of. During the months I had observed my husband's inner struggle, I had become increasingly dependent upon the Lord. And with this reliance had come a sense of well-being. God was with me, and the refrain on my lips had been "God is good."
But now, reflecting on the angry thoughts Kent had expressed, I wasn't so sure. As I sat in my gaily decorated kitchen, amidst yellow gingham and blue chintz, my spirit played counterpoint: Maybe we have believed a lie. Perhaps I should encourage Kent to quit the ministry and cast off whatever it is that keeps us bound to a deteriorating faith in God.
I felt alone and afraid. I needed reassurance, so I did what I have always done when confronted with fear: I picked up my Bible.
C. S. Lewis once said, "God whispers to us in our joys, speaks to us in our difficulties, and shouts in our pain." I needed his shout. I took a deep breath and opened my Bible. My eye fell on a verse underlined in red: "Though he fall, he will not be utterly cast down, for I am holding him with my hand."
I was spellbound, actually feeling if I peeked over my shoulder, I might see God. Afraid to turn, I looked again at my open Bible and read the previous line: "The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delights in his way."
I have never known a moment more holy. God's presence was accompanied by the exhilarating awareness that he indeed did absolutely love and care about us. "Yes, Kent," I wept, "hang on to my faith." With that, I joined Kent in bed and fell asleep reciting the promise: "Though he fall, he will not be utterly cast down, for I am holding him with my hand."
What Is Success?
In the next few days, Kent fluctuated between feeling relieved because the cat was finally out of the bag and groping because he still was battling unanswered questions. I didn't know the answers, but I was confident they were to be found, and I began looking for clues everywhere.
Later that week I encountered two friends whose husbands had recently left the ministry. Their studied California chic exuded prosperity. They were doing g-r-r-r-reat. I could almost hear them purr.
I asked about their spouses. One replied, "He's super-never been happier! He's selling life insurance, you know." Then she added, "It takes a special kind of man to be in the ministry. You just can't measure your success, and every man must be able to do that to have a good self-image."
She was echoing my husband's present struggle, and I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the thinking. But I didn't know what it was.
"I've never thought of Kent as extraordinary," I responded, "just called."
"Well," she spoke with emotion, "if your church doesn't grow"-and I knew she meant grow big- "Kent is going to feel like a failure."
With that I became angry, though not at my acquaintance. In fact, I was sad for all of us. But I was angry that her husband, who at one time had felt the call of God to preach the gospel, was now selling insurance. I was especially angry that the same dark force was presently working on my husband. I wasn't going to allow it.
"I don't know why," I said, "but you are wrong, and I'm not going to rest until I find out why!"
At home that night I related my conversation to Kent, and our spiritual adrenalin began to flow. The problem was success. That was what we had to think through. It was a subject we had never attempted to define-really define.
I found the tablet on which I had earlier recorded my husband's thoughts and wrote three questions:
-Can a pastor of a small church be a success in the ministry?
-What is failure?
-What is success?
The two of us sat staring at those questions. Seeing them in black and white made them look embarrassingly crass. What in the world had brought us to the place where we were asking such questions?
Kent: To crystallize our thinking on what had brought me to such despair, we began to list the almost-subconscious input we had received over the years. Many voices had come to us from diverse and well-meaning sources: our educational background, our denomination, colleagues, our imaginations. None of the input was necessarily bad in itself, but the underlying premise of the advice was deadly.
-Marketing. Simply stated it is this: If you want to sell hamburgers, you must make sure your store is visible and easily accessible to the community. The same is said of churches.
-Sociology. In the early stages of planning, a church-growth expert had pronounced us "perfect" for the work. Our family had just the right economic and social status to lead a growing church in our community.
-Stewardship. In the back of my mind, I believed "a church that gives, grows" and "a church that gives to missions will be a growing missions church." I somehow retained an unfortunate hybrid strain of the prosperity gospel in my unarticulated thinking. Giving was supposed to mean getting more people.
-Godliness. Also unarticulated but firmly rooted in my thinking was the belief that if our people were truly godly, exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit, their spiritual ethos would attract the lost and searching, and our church would grow. Behind this lay the ever-so-subtle thought that godliness is merely a means to something more important, in this case, bigger numbers and success.
-Preaching. In my seminary years, the chapel parade of pulpit stars from large churches unwittingly emphasized the belief that if you preach the Word effectively, your church will grow. My interpretation: Growing churches have fine communicators. Those not growing have otherwise.
So the messages kept coming to me: "If you will do this one thing well, your church will grow."
The Wrong Goal
I had prided myself on my discriminating use of methods and principles. I thought God was certainly going to bless my ministry with great numerical growth because I was doing things "right."
But I did not realize I had bought into the idea that success meant increased numbers. And since to me success in the ministry meant growth in attendance, ultimate success was a big, growing church.
Certainly, nothing is wrong with the wise use of church growth principles. Principles such as targeting a culture, keeping an eye toward visibility, and preaching biblically should be part of the intelligent orchestration of ministry.
However, when the refrain they play to is numerical growth, when the persistent motif is numbers, then pragmatism becomes the conductor. The audience inexorably becomes man rather than God, and subtle self-promotion becomes the driving force. Success in the ministry becomes the same as success in the world, and the servant of God evaluates his success like a businessman or an athlete or a politician.
Given my thinking, the only conclusion I could derive was that I was failing. I knew what makes a church grow. I had done my very best. I had little to show for it. Therefore I just didn't have what it takes. God had called me to a task without giving me the gifts to succeed, and I was justifiably bitter.
A Subtle Seduction
Years earlier when I began the ministry, my motivation was simply to serve Christ. That was all. My heroes were people like Jim Elliott. His motto-"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose"-was part of my life. All I wanted was the approval of God.
But imperceptibly my fine Christian idealism had shifted from serving to receiving, from giving to getting. Now I was beginning to realize I really wanted a growing church and "success" more than the smile of God.
Subconsciously I was evaluating nearly everything from the perspective of how it would affect my success in the new church. In the extreme, such thinking reduces people to so much "beef on the hoof"-a terrible thought.
Instead of evaluating myself and my ministry from God's point of view, I was using the world's quantitative standards.
When Barbara and I saw that the goal of numbers was wrong, we began to get excited. We realized we were at the foot of a great mountain, but we could at least see it. We fiercely determined to henceforth evaluate our success from a biblical point of view. We had to learn to say confidently, "If our church doesn't grow, we will remain faithful to God and serve him joyfully, because God is worth serving. He is worthy."
New Criteria for Success
In our urgent Bible study as we looked for the real meaning of success, we considered Moses. When he struck the rock twice and water poured out (Num. 20:1-12), he became a hero to the people of Israel-a vast success. But not with God. Since Moses had performed that miracle in disobedience to God's clear command, his apparent success proved an abysmal failure. We realized that good results, the kind everyone lauds, don't necessarily mean we're all that successful in God's eyes.
Barbara and I did, however, find four criteria for success:
-To love and worship God. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (Deut. 6:4-5). Now that's the beginning of success! If we didn't have that love in our lives, we realized, then whatever we might accomplish would be ashes.
-To be a faithful servant. "Let a man regard us in this manner, as servants of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy" (1 Cor. 4:1-2). Success, from God's point of view, is found in the faithfulness of a servant, and obedience-doing things the Master's way-is the essential element of faithfulness.
-To be a hard worker. It is impossible to be a lazy faithful servant. I can't excuse a lack of results that come only from sloth. Alexander Maclaren went to his study every morning at 6:30 and pulled on his work boots. "I want to be in my office before the men are out on the pavement," he said, "and I put on these work boots to remind me that I'm there to work."
-To maintain a proper attitude. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the older brother was faithful to the father by staying home and working the farm, but when his brother came back, his true attitude burst through. He was bitter and resentful A faithful servant is one whose heart attitude is faithful and loving.
We decided that success in numbers, the kind of success the world talks about, is only accountable to the sovereignty of God. Not to us, but to God. And we were not to seek the high places for ourselves, because those places of esteem and "success" are dangerous. But we could seek to love and worship God with all our hearts and to be faithful servants, joyously and vigorously serving the Lord, not our egos.
Eleven years ago, we found success in the midst of what the world would call failure. We were successful in a small, even dwindling, church because we learned to measure success by God's standards.
Barbara: One Sunday evening a few weeks into our search for the meaning of true success, we were in the evening service at our church. Counting the children, we had twenty-five present. But as I watched Kent preach, I saw a new man.
I looked at Kent, and a silent communication passed between us: Thank you, God, for these twenty-five dear people. What a privilege it is to serve them here!
Once again we were flying.
Later when we moved to College Church and it began to grow, we were excited to be a part of that growth, but actually it meant less to us than people expected. In our hearts, we knew, and we continue to know, that we may never be more successful than we were that Sunday night in our church with twenty-five people.
Kent and Barbara Hughes live in Wheaton, Illinois, where at the time they wrote this article, Kent was pastor of College Church.
Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
