Misunderstandings and disagreements can grow between pastors and lay leaders at any time, but they seem to multiply in conditions such as these:
the resignation of a long-standing, greatly beloved leader
the coming of a new pastor unfamiliar to the church and to the region of the country
a churchwide crisis
a severe illness in the pastor’s family
a restructuring of the pastoral staff
the development of a building plan.
Such circumstances are precisely what Howard Clark and elder R. Judson “Jud” Carlberg have come through.
Howard Clark, since 1986, has served as senior pastor at Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts. Previously he led a church in Pacific Palisades, California.
Jud Carlberg is dean of the faculty at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, and chairman of Grace Chapel’s overseeing elders.
Their working relationship was tested under national scrutiny when, shortly after Howard’s coming, Grace Chapel’s former pastor, Gordon MacDonald, confessed to marital infidelity. In the weeks and months that followed, the congregation displayed remarkable maturity in forgiving MacDonald, carefully working through a year-long process of discipline and development, and eventually restoring him to public ministry.
Through such crises, as well as day-to-day church life, Howard and Jud have not always agreed. But as you’ll see in this interview, they have developed a warm and honest respect for each other and learned how to work well together.
Leadership: What fears do pastors have in working with lay leaders?
Howard Clark: That some who have been successful in business, industry, or education will approach their service on the board strictly as they would another job. The ones who do it as a job tend to treat the staff as hired hands. They vote and come back next month to check on progress. But the board members who are fellow ministers and see their role as a lifestyle come by during the week, talk with you about issues, pray with you, offer suggestions, and run interference. They make it a team effort.
Leadership: Jud, what fears do lay leaders have in working with pastors?
Jud Carlberg: First, the fear that a pastor might be a dictator. Especially in a church with a number of corporate executives or high-powered professionals, someone telling us what to do would not work.
Second, there’s an uneasiness from being out of one’s element in the pastor’s world. The church is not a corporation, not a naval ship, not a football team. The model for the church is different, and the rules are different. The pastor interprets the rules through his preaching. So to a certain extent we’re playing on his turf.
If you criticize the pastor, you fear it will be perceived as unscriptural, unspiritual, ungodly.
Leadership: What have the two of you had to adjust in order to work together better?
Clark: Jud’s education has trained him to look at the broader picture; I’m trained as a theologian to look more tightly at things. He helps me to look more broadly-not to compromise my convictions but to look at implications. I’m learning to ask, “If this is the biblical principle, how does this work in the world? How does this wear with real people?” Through the influence of Jud and others, I now look much more from the human side than I might otherwise. That’s been a big help.
Carlberg: Lay leaders tend to see things in the short term-getting through the next board meeting, or to the time when they’re off the board. That’s not the way to develop a vision. So the pastor has to protect the vision, and Howard does that. More and more, Howard is developing a long-range view of where he’s going and where the church is going. That helps us to think that way, too.
Also, Howard has been able to bring incisive biblical teaching on issues we’re wrestling with and present some issues in black and white rather than all the gray we so easily can see.
Leadership: Have you ever had to evaluate or correct the work of the other? How did you feel about the experience?
Carlberg: After Howard had been here a year, three other elders and I got together with him and gave him a free-running assessment of his ministry. That was a shock to him. I wouldn’t do it that way again. We didn’t have a structure in which to do an evaluation, and we didn’t prepare him. The surprise element was probably the worst part of it.
Clark: The meeting was at a home, and I understood it was going to be a discussion about the staff. When I got there, it was a discussion about me.
The lack of warning was difficult. I had been in New England for only a year and was still in culture shock, and I was in the middle of a struggle with the staff. Things were not going well.
Carlberg: And of the four people, one was a psychiatrist, one was a psychologist, one was a high-powered lawyer, and one a college dean. That’s an intimidating group to be hearing this stuff from, especially when we hadn’t rehearsed what we were going to say. All we knew was that we had some concerns that we thought we ought to share with the pastor.
Clark: It was, “Let’s get together and talk and see if we can be of some help.” But without specifics, it came off as a turkey shoot. The four went on for a couple of hours, and then the chairman turned to me and said, “How do you feel about all of this?” I remember thinking, I feel lousy. I wanted to hit him.
Leadership: What, specifically, did they say?
Clark: I’m sure if I had a tape of it, the conversation would sound very different from the way it sounded to me, which was, “You’re not doing anything right.”
They brought up some problems they saw in my preaching, and I said, “I’m going to have to take what you’ve said and go through my notes to figure out what I’m not doing.” And then one of them said, “Oh, the hermeneutics are fine, and the illustrations are fine. But there’s just no sparkle.”
Inside, I erupted. How can I deal with “sparkle”?
Carlberg: Howard is more didactic and less relational than our former pastor. We were getting used to that change in style, but it was not easy.
Clark: When they finished, I said, “I don’t think I’m as much defensive as I am in shock. What you’re telling me is 45 to 90 degrees away from what I’ve been hearing from the congregation.”
To be honest, my reaction was revulsion. I thought, I’m still being compared to my predecessor. I’m just not a sparkler.
I don’t even know what “sparkle” meant, and I doubt the person remembered saying it a week later. But for a year after that, every time I would get up to preach and make eye contact with any of the four, a knot would come in my stomach and I’d be afraid the next sentence would be taken wrong.
Leadership: What are the lessons to be learned from that experience? In evaluations, prepare what you’re going to say and be specific?
Clark: And know what you’re measuring against. Now we’re establishing goals that give us something objective. Before, in some people’s minds, I was being measured against the past.
Leadership: Howard, that was a time when Jud’s efforts were not helpful to you. What about a time when they were?
Clark: When I arrived there were five divisions in the ministry, and I wanted to have weekly contact with the five division heads in order to influence the direction of the ministry and to understand what they were doing. But I also recognized the staff was really larger than just those five people. I felt the other people who played a day-to-day role in the ministry ought to be part of the team. So without really understanding the culture of the church, I quickly expanded the staff meeting to fifteen people.
Leadership: What effect did that have?
Clark: The meeting became a free-for-all. The people with the least experience often dominated the conversation, while the more mature ones who had a different perspective hung back. I wanted to go back to meeting with just the division heads. Well, I found you can’t give power and then take it away. The timing was lousy, too, because I reversed the decision at a time when everyone was feeling insecure.
Not knowing the players, I was too aloof, too unaware of the emotions behind the things that were being said. In my ignorance I responded to the surface issues, which I later discovered had nothing at all to do with the real issues, and all that did was make things worse. That’s when Jud came along and said, “I think we need to look at this from a broader perspective.”
Carlberg: When Howard restructured the staff, I happened to be in Africa for five weeks. I came back and found that this had happened and people were taking sides and saying, “I’m hurt.” I discussed with Howard his perspective, and I suggested that we had some rebuilding to do.
Clark: I invited Jud to come twice to our staff meetings. We had long sessions, both half a day, in which he worked with us on building community and dealing with conflict.
Carlberg: I think at the end of the second session we began to get at the problem. Tremendous strides have been made since then, and we now have a unified and productive team.
Clark: We made some adjustments this past fall, and yesterday one of the staff members turned and said to me, “I just love coming to staff meetings now.” That was good to hear.
Leadership: Howard, if Jud had been at home, rather than in Africa, do you think you would have called him and said, “I’ve got a tough decision to make. What do you think?”
Clark: If it happened now, I would give him a call. At that time, I don’t know. I’m not sure I had that kind of trust in Jud at that point, and I wouldn’t have risked his saying no.
There are times when you want to go a certain direction, and if you know one of the lay leaders is against it, you’re probably not going to ask him first. But now I would approach Jud, because this last year has deepened our relationship. We see that our ultimate goal is the same, so we can trust each other and can afford to discuss something and disagree.
Leadership: Are your visions of the church different? In what ways?
Clark: Perhaps in the sense of timing.
The average church member, who considers this church as home, doesn’t want to risk changing it.
A board member, on the other hand, has at best a four-year term of office, and he wants to make sure a decision is reached before he goes off the board so he can feel he did something productive.
In between the two is the pastor, who under good circumstances has a ten- to fifteen-year commitment to the church. A pastor has to have objectives that go beyond what this year’s board is looking at, so he has to pace things. I think of myself as running a middle-distance race. I’ll be faster than some people want and slower than other people want. But I must have a sense of pace and be committed to a state of “progressive stability.”
Carlberg: We sometimes differ in how to reach the vision. At times, Howard has made a quick decision that I wouldn’t have approached in the same way. I tend to be more of a consensus builder.
Clark: I appreciate that when Jud challenges something I do or say, it doesn’t come across as a personal fight. I’ve sensed the genuine desire on his part to help make my ministry effective. He asks me, “Howard, is this really going to help the ministry?” That perspective helps keep me out of trouble and also keeps us both heading in the right direction.
For example, the church had a personal conflict that had existed for years before I arrived. I tried to bring resolution to it, and finally, in frustration, I made a sudden, firm decision. That wasn’t wise in the long run, and Jud pulled me aside and tried to talk me into a saner course of action. I only wish we’d had the conversation before I made the decision. But we rarely have that privilege. We often put our foot in our mouth before somebody warns us about the taste.
Leadership: Jud, what is the most important thing you can do to make Howard effective?
Carlberg: Publicly I have to be extremely supportive of the pastor. No matter how I feel about a matter, I cannot afford to be critical of Howard in public.
The flip side is that privately I must be compassionately honest with Howard when there are problems that need to be addressed. By being honest, I don’t mean dumping on him any point of view that comes to my attention. I purposely have not shown him some critical letters. I filter them because a lot of the complaints are unjustified, and he doesn’t need to carry the emotional impact of them.
Leadership: How do you respond to critics of the pastor? You don’t want to reject the person who’s taking some risk to tell you what’s genuinely on his mind, but at the same time, you don’t want to encourage chronic complainers.
Carlberg: First, if the criticism is appropriate, and it’s an issue Howard isn’t aware of, I ask, “Have you talked this over with the pastor?”
But often it’s an old issue, and Howard doesn’t need to hear any more about it. He knows what the person is going to say, and the comments would only pressure him. So I say, “I think he’s aware of that.” Of course, if the elders have discussed it and taken a position, I can tell the person where the elders stand.
The final type of concern deals with something Howard knows about but the elders haven’t discussed yet. In that case, I’ll thank the individual for bringing it to my attention and say, “Howard is aware of this, but the elders haven’t really discussed it yet. We’ll put it on the agenda.”
I should say that these responses have come with age. I’m almost 50 now; twenty years ago I would have popped off and told the critic exactly what I thought. (Laughter)
Leadership: Which approach works better? (Laughter)
Carlberg: The problem with the frontal, direct approach is that sometimes I misjudge how well people can take it. Last week, for example, I said to a staff person, in essence, “It is time to stop complaining and start working. This is a minor issue in my mind and in the board’s mind. It might be a major one in your mind, but I’m sorry, that’s not the way it’s going to be.”
The person was crushed. I wish now I hadn’t been so direct. I wish I’d been more gentle.
Leadership: What stages have you observed in a pastor/lay leader relationship?
Carlberg: First, there is the recruitment stage. It’s short, and by definition, difficult. The pastor doesn’t know what he’s getting in terms of a church, and the church doesn’t know what it’s getting in a pastor.
Then there’s the commitment stage when the call is extended and the candidate accepts the call. The church is committed to the person but is not ready to make any big jump forward. You know the pastor signed on and you’re on with him, but you don’t know where you’re going.
The honeymoon stage comes during the first few months after the pastor is actually on board. You find eager anticipation, extreme expectations, and a superficial agreement on vision.
Then the reality stage sets in, usually between three and nine months after the pastor is on board. At that point critics begin to emerge, and questions begin to be raised: Can he make it? Is the church going to falter? He’s not exactly what we thought; how do we communicate it to him?
Next is probably the testing stage. Will the pastor be able to be flexible? Will he make some changes in light of our concerns? Will he go too far in one direction or the other? Will we be flexible? That’s where the crisis sets in.
After you get through that, there’s a reaffirmation of working together. Rather than having a vague, general vision, you can have a mature, specific vision of where the ministry is going and what roles the lay leaders and pastor have.
Then, I think you come to a partial accomplishment stage at which you say, “We did it. We created a new ministry. We launched some new mission effort. We created a new building. God helped us to get through that awful time of testing and misunderstanding.”
There will be times, though, when you loop back through the stages. I think you go back to the testing stage every once in a while. We all have to be flexible.
Leadership: From the pastor’s point of view, how do you see the lay desire for a pastor to be flexible? Does everybody want the pastor to be flexible in his or her particular direction?
Clark: Yes. If I were to try to be what all the letters ask me to be, I’d go crazy. It affects me emotionally, but I try not to let it adversely influence my decisions.
At the same time, I can’t expect too much change or flexibility from the church. If the church is an ocean liner and the pastor is the tugboat, you see that the pastor can change direction easily. But most churches cannot change direction quickly. If the pastor expects a church to change too quickly, both are going to get frustrated. My brother used to quote the old Arkansas saying, “Never try to teach a pig to sing-you’ll get frustrated, and the pig will get mad.” (Laughter)
Leadership: Howard, how do you feel a lay leader should portray the pastor to others?
Clark: The key lay leaders need to remind the congregation that the pastor is God’s person for this moment. That’s different from saying the pastor is infallible. It’s saying, “We believe God called him; we ratified that call by hiring him; now we must seek God’s wisdom to shape the relationship.”
If we really believe that, then the pastor-church relationship is like an Old World marriage-arranged. Love isn’t the first issue; commitment is. It’s that we believe God brought us together, and that sense of destiny will help us work through the inconveniences, differences of style, and problems we’re bound to face.
Carlberg: Yes, and that may mean, at times, saying to a small group within the church, “We are 100 percent behind what the pastor is doing, and you are not going to frustrate that process. We are working with him; we’re behind him.”
Clark: That’s very different from seeing the pastor-church relationship from the romantic view of American marriage-when problems arise, we seek a divorce. Some churches are quick to say, “This was a mistake” and try another pastor.
I prefer the commitment that says, “Our purpose is not to get rid of the pastor but to make him better.”
Leadership: And often the first years of that marriage are the rockiest.
Clark: In my case, the transition to a much larger church was difficult. I had come from a church that had a third the membership and a sanctuary about one-fifth the size. The room was small enough to allow eye contact with every person. When I stepped into Grace Chapel, it felt like being in a football field.
In addition, things were tense on the staff. Someone told me, “Howard, you are in the same position as a stepfather,” and the more I thought about it, the more that made sense. To some staff members, I was like Mom’s new boyfriend, forced on them.
Leadership: We’ve seen pastors and lay leaders split during a crisis. What causes some people to bond as a result of the crisis, and others to splinter?
Carlberg: If the board and pastor are working together before the crisis, it’s less likely a split is going to occur. But if the board and pastor are working on a fault line, it’s very possible that eventually you’ll have an open split within the church.
Clark: I saw this when we found out my daughter had leukemia. The crisis gave me an opportunity to share from experience what I had been saying theoretically before. Suddenly, when I said, “Trust God; you really can trust him,” it had a ring of authenticity. A lady came to me last Sunday and told me the things I say today make much more sense to her now than they did a year ago. From my perspective, I haven’t consciously changed my message or style. Yet I’m heard differently today. The congregation isn’t looking at somebody in the pulpit who’s got it all together. They’re looking at a fellow traveler who knows crisis.
Carlberg: I remember saying to my wife, “If anything positive comes out of this tragedy of leukemia, it might be that people will see Howard in a different light. They’re not going to put him on a pedestal and say he’s aloof. He’s demonstrating the struggle of living with a child who could die, of living with the uncertainty day to day. He’s showing the emotion and pain in that, and yet he’s showing, too, that God is sufficient. God is providing the strength for him, and so he’s a living example of what it means to go through struggle and tragedy.”
Clark: I had been preaching through the Lord’s Prayer, and I had completed the message on “Forgive us our debts,” but the Saturday before I was to preach it, Kristen’s symptoms were diagnosed as leukemia. So I didn’t preach that Sunday.
The next Sunday, the congregation knew we had just been kicked in the gut and were gasping for air. Where do you turn at a time like that? I went to Psalm 42 and 43 and preached to myself and to the congregation about God’s comfort in times of deep, deep trouble.
The following Sunday, we were back on schedule, and it was time to speak about forgiveness. But on the intervening Monday, the national press carried the story of our former pastor’s resigning from the InterVarsity presidency. If I had preached the message on forgiveness before the announcement concerning my daughter, I may have been perceived as an aloof, doctrinaire professor. But in that one week, there had been a deep grieving and bonding with the congregation. That put credibility behind a message about forgiveness, and that helped us minister to the MacDonalds with integrity in the year that followed. It’s been a different church since then.
Carlberg: We may not have developed to the point where we are today if it hadn’t been for the way God took us through those two crises.
Leadership: How would you describe that development?
Clark: We have made great progress in the past three years. We have seen new ministries develop and giving to missions increase. And we have paid off the church mortgage.
Although change does not come quickly, it does come. Recently we conducted a churchwide survey that indicated strong support for the leadership, both lay and pastoral, and for the direction of our ministries. This is a significant improvement over a similar survey taken two years ago. And at our recent congregational meeting, the church authorized the boards to find a suitable relocation site.
Leadership: Looking back, what does it take for lay leaders and pastors to develop respect for each other?
Clark: I don’t think respect is something you earn; it’s a gift. You choose to give a person your respect, and then you relate on the basis of the decision. One thing I value so much about working with Jud is the fact we have chosen to respect each other. As Jud has given me his respect, and as I’ve invested my respect in him, our relationship has blossomed. Now, even if we disagree on something, we know the other person is coming from a pure place. We simply didn’t know that our first year.
Carlberg: I need to sense that the pastor wants to communicate with me, that he wants to be a friend and to share his joys and his frustrations. We must have the ability to communicate with each other, even if it’s just in passing. I need to sense that I can trust him and predict in which direction he’s going to go. One of Howard’s great strengths is that he’s predictable and fair. I know how I can expect him to respond to a certain situation.
Clark: In California there was a member of our board who was a wise man. He was the age of my father, and over time, a deep relationship between us developed.
The thing I appreciated about Dick was his caring and honesty. I’ve never had a critic who was harder on me than this particular friend, yet I’ve never had anyone I could take correction from as easily. One time after a board meeting, he boxed my ears: “Don’t you ever expose yourself like that in front of this board again. If you’ve got a sensitive issue that needs to be brought up, we’ll talk about it ahead of time, and I’ll take the initiative. You can come in later and support it. But don’t go out in front and set yourself up to get shot at.”
Carlberg: I think it’s important for the pastor to have a friend or a small group of friends who are not in the official leadership position. For example, when I built a friendship with one of our former pastors, I avoided taking any church offices so that he could say to me, “That board last night did this or that,” and I could provide perspective for him.
It’s important for a pastor to have a lay person he can talk with, one who knows what’s going on but who doesn’t have a vested interest in the process. Both lay people and pastors need people they can talk to who will be sounding boards and provide perspective.
Epilogue: Subsequent to this interview, Kristen Clark’s leukemia worsened, and she was given an experimental transplant using her father’s bone marrow. Several months later, Kristen succumbed to a rare pneumonia that often accompanies transplants. Following her death, Howard reflects that “the outpouring of love and compassion were evidence of God’s power to bring a pastor and congregation together.”
Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
