PEOPLE IN PRINT

To See Ourselves

Counseling Christian Workers by Louis McBurney, Word, $12.95

Reviewed by Randy Alcorn, pastor of small group ministries, Good Shepherd Community Church, Gresham, Oregon

Four years ago when my doctor took my blood pressure, he said, “Wow!” followed by “This can’t be right.” Unfortunately it was. My life was an endless string of insomnia, rashes, chest pains, and stomachaches.

Louis McBurney helps people like me-professional Christian workers who draw from energy reservoirs until nothing is left but sludge. He helps us see ourselves as we are, and in the process discover how to refill that depleted reservoir.

Since 1974 more than seven hundred Christian workers have come to Marble Retreat Center near Aspen, Colorado. They stay for two weeks, usually with three other couples and Louis and Melissa McBurney, who serve as cotherapists. When all you do is counsel Christian workers, you pick up insight along the way. McBurney shares these insights in Counseling Christian Workers.

Reading it was like overhearing a conversation about me. As I eavesdropped, I also learned how to better understand and assist my colleagues in the ministry.

McBurney’s heartbeat is clear from his previous book: Every Pastor Needs a Pastor. He loves ministers and devotes his life to helping them. But beware, pastors-McBurney has our number.

He knows we can be (and often are) guilty of the bluff, bluster, and bravado that marks insecure human beings. Nothing about the ministry automatically builds inner security and peace. Much about it challenges both.

From the beginning McBurney warns, “We will look behind the masks, take off the clerical collars, and see the wounded, desperate, lonely, lovely people who have given their lives to minister to their world in the name of Jesus.” The book is filled with examples, and if you’re like me, you’ll see your colleagues-or yourself-on every page.

The book’s eight chapters fall into three parts. Part I, “Understanding the Hurting Christian Worker,” deals with the problems and pressures of the ministry, and the minister’s resistance to counseling. One chapter addresses “role-specific pressures,” in which McBurney paints enlightening pictures of pastors, missionaries, youth workers, music ministers, evangelists, and parachurch ministers.

Part II looks at marital maladjustment, depressive illness, and dysfunctional personality. McBurney told me about half of those coming to Marble Retreat are experiencing marital crises. Often a neglected spouse full of anger, frustration, and loneliness evidences it in nagging, retreat, and retribution. McBurney keeps track of his “graduates” and is thrilled that of the two hundred couples who have come to Marble with major marital crises, only seventeen have divorced.

He also deals with the Christian worker’s temptation to infidelity. “There are aspects of the ministry that increase vulnerability to infidelity,” he says. These range from “the similarity between spirituality and sexuality” to the “angry seductress.”

“Therapeutic Techniques,” Part III, covers the principles and spiritual aspects of counseling Christian workers.

McBurney points out that many Christian workers are skeptical of psychology, sometimes with good reason. When asked to elaborate, he said, “I want people to look at psychology as they would surgery. Some surgeons are poor surgeons, some surgical techniques may be bad, but you can’t throw out all surgery on that basis. Some psychology is unbiblical, but some of it has real value, and we need to appreciate and make use of it.”

McBurney’s insights into people have not come only from the text books, but from caring human relationships. He is a pastor’s friend.

I ended our phone interview with this question: “If you could send just one message to pastors and Christian workers, what would it be?”

Long pause, then this response: “Accept for yourself the grace you preach to others.”

No book, including McBurney’s, can strip the ministry of its hazards. But this one can surely help us accept the grace we preach.

The Human Element

Pastors Are People Too by David B. Biebel and Howard W. Lawrence, editors, Regal Books, $6.95

Reviewed by Steve Harris, pastor, Maple Lake Baptist Church, Maple Lake, Minnesota

“Seminary taught me hospital visitation, what side of the bed to sit on, what Scriptures to use, and gave an occasional warning to expect the unexpected-but not what to do when told to get lost.”

How does a pastor react when caught off-guard? How do we handle situations that just didn’t show up in Practical Theology 101? How do we feel about situations that show us as humans with weaknesses and limitations?

Those are the issues behind Pastors Are People Too, a collection of real-life incidents-sometimes humorous, often painful-that give both pastor and layperson an inside look at the ministry.

“Not only do we face intense life situations, but we often feel we need to be ‘perfect’ to serve God effectively,” explains co-editor David Biebel, a New Hampshire pastor and retreat-center director. “It’s nice to learn that God can use us because of our difficulties, not just in spite of them.”

Originally titled What You Always Needed to Know About the Ministry but Never Learned in Seminary, the book presents thirteen first-person accounts covering a wide range of challenges within the parish, the parsonage, and the pastor. The authors, all Gordon-Conwell alumni, are not identified, allowing a transparency that at times is shocking, even difficult to read. Some examples:

The pastor sitting next to the hospital bed of a terminally-ill parishioner who suddenly reaches out, disconnects his respirator tube, and motions to the pastor to “please let me die.”

The pastor who hears his wife tell him after the monthly ministerial potluck, “I’ve fallen in love with someone else, and I’m going to divorce you.”

The pastor called to stand and preach before the six caskets of a family killed in a fire-shortly after his own young son had died.

The pastor who spent Saturday morning preparing a sermon on “addictions,” Saturday afternoon downing whiskey with beer chasers, and Saturday night at the local tavern before finally asking himself, “What’s a good minister like me doing as an alcoholic?”

Seminarians will find the chapter on candidating particularly helpful. While describing the acceptance of a call as “a giant leap of faith,” the author (a self-confessed “professional candidate”) does offer practical advice. He outlines pulpit committee strategies such as “the marathon weekend” and “the inquisition.” He also recommends using sanctified common sense: leaning hard on a spouse’s impressions and avoiding the paralyzing fear that you might make a “fatal mistake” in your choice of a church.

Valuable insight is offered in areas such as:

-conflict management: “The church often becomes a battleground for unresolved personal conflicts in many of the parishioners.”

-power struggles: “Deacon Tuttle was doing his best to pastor the church through me.”

-congregational criticism: “It’s like mothers with their babies; you may just have to let them burp on you to alleviate their discomfort.”

The “war stories” will be appreciated by veteran pastors in an often-lonely position. My wife was moved by its depictions of parsonage life. Seminarians may have their eyes opened to inherent dangers. But according to coeditor Howard Lawrence, another target audience is the people in the pew.

“I’m using it with my diaconate,” says Lawrence, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Haverhill, Massachusetts. “Lay people need to better understand their pastor, to see that he or she, too, is a person in process who doesn’t have all the answers. That encourages their ministry, because if the pastor stays on a pedestal, the priesthood of believers never has a chance to happen.”

A brief “How Do You Identify?” section follows each chapter to promote clergy-laity interaction.

Biebel explains, “We’re not presenting untarnished heroes. The Scriptures don’t do that. We see God using people like Peter, Elijah, and Moses through their weaknesses. We don’t need to present ‘victorious Christian pastoring,’ whatever that is. We need to offer ourselves.”

The realistic nature of these pastoral snapshots might be heavy sledding except for two redeeming factors. One is a good dose of humor sprinkled throughout, a welcome gift for professionals so often called to combine the divine with the ridiculous.

There’s the pastor trying to immerse a convert who simply refuses to submerge. And the rookie minister officiating at a funeral who suddenly realizes he’s never even been to a funeral and doesn’t know what to do next. And the rural New England pastor whose four yoked parishes share twenty-six bank accounts and a parsonage with cracks in the floor so wide he can tell if the cellar lights are on from the second-story bedroom.

An even greater help is the book’s call to trust in a God whose grace can handle every situation. “God is sufficient,” says Lawrence, “even for those problems that don’t show up in any textbook, even when we feel overwhelmed, ill-prepared, and terribly human. If we learn to trust in him, we know he can use us to his glory.”

When I told my deacon chairman that I was reading Pastors Are People Too, he responded with a smile, “Oh, fiction?” A few more books like this, and before long people in the church will realize, as Biebel and Lawrence put it, “We’re all in this together.”

Tapping the Secular Market

Your Church Has a Fantastic Future by Robert Schuller, Regal, $14.95

Reviewed by Robert Barber, pastor, Huntsburg (Ohio) Congregational Church

Pastors desire to accomplish God’s will for their churches, but they also struggle with questions like “Can I really be the instrument I need to be?”

Robert Schuller, founding pastor of Garden Grove Community Church in California, enthusiastically writes that we can achieve God’s will. God’s power can be unleashed in us and our churches.

Schuller’s name evokes response of all kinds. How does Schuller want us to respond to his latest book?

He wants us to stimulate our churches to go beyond the normal bounds of our foresight, to open our minds “for God to unfold the ways in which his will can be accomplished.” This “possibility thinking” is to be taken into our board meetings, our dealing with “negativist and “impossibility thinkers,” our sermons, our prayer life.

Schuller also pounds home his desire for us to become leaders. This advice can be frightening because the leadership Schuller champions can cause some rather noisy friction in long-running and self-lubricating machinery.

As Schuller retells the Garden Grove story, we realize he knows the inner struggles and disappointments common to pastors. He notes, “For two years I went to my study under the enormous weight of awareness that nearly half of my people were violently opposed to the direction in which I was leading the church. … Nevertheless, we had to move ahead.” His message, however, is that the battles can be won.

Schuller also urges us to turn our attention to the unchurched. “Just who are you trying to impress?” Schuller asks. Are our sermon titles filled with theological terms? Is our architecture steeped in liturgical meaning? Then we’re aiming at people already interested in Christ. “For the church to address the unchurched with a theocentric attitude is to invite failure in its mission,” he warns.

How do we reach out to the unchurched? “Find the hurt and heal it” is Schuller’s response. Find the non-Christian community’s sore points and build a program to meet those needs.

A second challenge is the most powerful in the book: “The sacred must become secular and the secular must become sacred.” Schuller has spent thirty years adapting his message to the human needs of highly secular Southern California.

When we become secular to reach people on their ground, he says, the secular can become sacred through rebirth and resurrection. Indeed, the challenge is to establish a balance of the sacred and the secular, and Schuller leaves much of that to us in our own settings.

Still I wondered, Can I? After all, I’m not Schuller, and Huntsburg, Ohio, is hardly Orange County.

Nestled in the middle of the book are twelve testimonies written by pastors who have used Schuller’s principles. At first glance they look like a commercial for Schuller’s institute, but, coming from pastors of many kinds of churches, they tell us the principles do adapt.

Richard Rhem, pastor of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, a town of three thousand, wrote one of them. He told me, “The positive mental posture works for congregations of one thousand or one hundred. It’s not a question of being large or small; it’s an openness to being an implement of healing for the community.”

Schuller’s principles are not intended for a one-man show, Rhem advised. “Taking nine lay leaders with me to the institute made all the difference. I knew a pastor who went alone, came back, and among all the negativism, resigned.” Lay leaders need the same motivation as pastors.

Stephen McWhorter, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Walnut Creek, California, wrote of his growth and the growing ability of the parish to reach out. When I spoke to him, he mentioned the need to “retail” the church program: “We have the best and most unique product in the world. Our churches must make that product available.” McWhorter has worked to make the liturgy more attractive and the advertising warmer.

Schuller’s advice may need some adaptation outside the Southern California glitz, but he motivates us to do what we all desire: reach people outside the church.

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY

Personal Ministry Handbook by Larry Richards, Baker, $9.95

How do you help a woman considering abortion? Or a father struggling with an alcoholic wife? A child in danger from abusive parents?

Knowing pastors cannot be experts on every issue that arises in pastoral work, Larry Richards catalogued relevant Scripture passages and psychological insights on seventy topics. Included are issues as wide ranging as divorce, homosexuality, depression, and suicide.

Designed as a ready reference for ministering in the press of human need, the book also includes a training guide for individual or group use.

Create in Me a Youth Ministry by Ridge Burns with Pam Campbell, Victor, $11.95

This is a book for battle-weary youth workers. Burns and Campbell go beyond pizza parties and program gimmicks to explore how youth ministry “grows out of our lives-the experiences, expectations, and emotions.”

They do this by giving a candid glimpse of their blunders and successes. This book helps with some of the vital intangibles, like developing self-confidence, or rebounding after facing wary youth and demanding parents. Whether discussing the importance of God’s call or stressing the importance of tempering vision with flexibility, this book helps a youth pastor tackle the conflicts, challenges, and everyday joys of ministry to youth.

The Presence of God in Pastoral Counseling by Wayne E. Oates, Word, $12.95

Forty years of practicing and teaching counseling have convinced Wayne Oates there is more to pastoral counseling than science and psychoanalysis. “To many who come to us,” he explains, “our counseling room is the nearest thing to home or church they have. It is God’s dwelling place.”

Oates advocates moving beyond dialogue to “trialogue,” in which pastor and client listen to and experience the “Third Presence.” More than we realize, Oates cautions, people come to us with unspoken desires to cultivate such awareness.

Oates also advises counselors how to stay open to God’s presence in a troublesome client, use prayerful silence in the counseling session, and move through weariness and “dark nights of the soul.” Other more technical issues such as transference, confronting the client, and dealing with anger receive helpful treatment. As readers of Oates’s other books would expect, biblical underpinnings make this work both technically relevant and theologically sound.

Evangelizing the Hard-to-Reach by Robert D. Dale and Delos Miles, Broadman, $4.95

Many growing churches, these authors believe, are “living off the easy ones.” Settling for membership transfers and easy converts, they sometimes ignore the hard-to-reach.

Dale and Miles believe that situation can change. They outline four categories of hard-to-reach people: A group to start with is the Left-Outs-the poor, the migrants, the handicapped. Another is the Drop-Outs, who hold membership in the church in name only. More challenging for the average church, perhaps, are the Locked-Outs. These are the addicts, sexual deviants, and ex-convicts. Opt-Outs likewise need ministry, but are more likely to worship their RVs or TVs. Other Opt-Outs are perennial atheists and garden-variety hedonists.

This book can help churches and pastors learn strategies of preaching, witnessing, and congregational caring for these hard-to-reach individuals, and more important, spark an urgency to actually reach them.

The Church Office Handbook by Carol R. Shearn, Morehouse-Barlow, $12.95

Up-to-date membership rolls and organized files are the stuff of a humming church office. But sometimes, writes veteran secretary Carol Shearn, the very people in charge lack experience or need direction. This may include a church secretary who faces tasks never covered in school or the business world. Or pastors like the one who confessed, “I don’t know enough about what secretaries need to be doing.” Then there are the countless ministers of small, staffless churches, who must perform all the office duties.

Shearn’s years working as a secretary helped her discover ways to manage the mountains of information in churches. Tips on handling church money, using computers, processing mail, and storing records make this a comprehensive guide.

Outgrowing the Ingrown Church by C. John Miller, Zondervan, $7.95

Renewing the ingrown congregation begins with renewing the ingrown church leader. Miller explains how prayer and openness to God can transform the pastor into a pacesetter who “moves ahead of the pack and sets the example that gets the others moving.”

Drawing on his own pilgrimage of disillusionment and renewal, Miller shows pastors how to lead congregations from “niceness” to radical obedience to the Great Commission. When that miracle of transformation takes place, he argues, a small ingrown congregation becomes more than just a large ingrown one.

A Silence to be Broken by Earl D. Wilson, Multnomah, $6.95

Incest is a shockingly common skeleton in the closets of American families. Studies noted in this book estimate 40 percent of all girls and 20 percent of all boys will be incest victims by the time they reach adulthood. And despite stringent biblical injunctions, incest finds its way into Christian homes.

Psychologist and seminary teacher Earl Wilson leads the reader in understanding the roots of sexual abuse in our society. He sympathetically explores the needs of, and healing steps for, the victim, offender, and spouse. A final chapter lists agencies, volunteer support associations, and other sources of help.

“It is God’s power that enables us to forgive and go beyond even a thing as devastating as incest,” Wilson writes.

Handling Church Tensions Creatively by Fred W. Prinzing, Harvest, $4.95

Diversity may be the spice of life, but it creates tension in a church. Rather than bemoan this fact, pastor and seminary professor Fred Prinzing suggests we learn ways to use it.

“The existence of tension is a sign of life,” he argues. Through the ministries of conflict managers (“tension adjusters” he calls them), the church can begin to listen better to one another and deepen its life together.

Prinzing explores the friction common in churches, tensions between power and authority, structure and spontaneity, uniformity and diversity, home and world missions. The methods Prinzing offers for sensitizing members and working together can help turn conflict into a potential force for renewal and change.

-Reviewed by Timothy K. Jones

Christ Our Peace Church of the Brethren

The Woodlands, Texas