LEARNING YOUR LIMITS - Christianity Today

A pastor who knows me well once told me, “Jack, you have a bias toward action.”

I took this as a compliment. For fifteen years, I have been active serving New Life Presbyterian Church, a growing congregation in suburban Philadelphia. As I thought about that comment, in September 1987, we were planting a daughter church in nearby Fort Washington. Each Saturday I lectured to our leadership training class and on Sunday shared the preaching with another pastor. I helped initiate our fund-raising program for a new building; we needed $1,200,000 in pledges by early December. I was also scheduled to speak at a seminary in late October and at a missions conference in another church in November.

One Tuesday I picked up my Day-timer to review the week’s schedule: four seriously ill people to call on, my own doctor’s appointment, several requests for counseling, a sermon outline for the church bulletin to be completed by tomorrow morning, a fund-raising letter to be written to the congregation by Thursday evening; in addition, five meetings were scheduled between Tuesday evening and Friday noon; Friday night and Saturday I was speaking three times to our leadership training class and on Sunday preaching twice.

My Sunday sermon topic was “Doing What You Can,” but I knew I was way beyond that. I survived the week only by postponing some visiting, giving up my day off, and canceling out of two meetings.

My wife, Rose Marie, had been troubled by this nonstop activity. She once said to me, “Jack, you have made New Life Church into your mistress.”

But how could I stop? What could I give up?

A Jolt

Three weeks later I checked into Germantown Hospital for a routine visit, but the doctors detected a rapidly growing cancer in my abdomen. “You have lymphoma,” they told me. Soon, pressure from the mass caused my kidneys to fail. The cardiologist was afraid my heart might fail.

Following surgery, I spent four days in intensive care, with intravenous lines and a heart monitor connecting me to the world. In answer to the prayers of many Christians, however, my kidneys soon began to function. Within two weeks, the lymphoma was substantially reduced by chemotherapy. I found it hard to sleep, though; at least twice I woke in a state of hallucination. Rose Marie was shocked to see how fragile I had become. So was I.

During the ordeal, I began to wonder about my “bias toward action.” I regretted that I had been so busy and had not spent more time meditating on God’s love, since I now found myself unprepared for this trial and tempted to think that God did not love or care for me.

But even in ICU my mind reverted to its hyperactive state: If I go to be with the Lord, how will this affect my family? Our church stewardship campaign? Our other pastors? And-still the question-does God really love me? I had never had so much time to think, and the words that came repeatedly to my mind were limits and finitude. The conflict between my racing mind and wild emotions and my helpless body forced me to realize: If I am going to live and recover my ministry, my priorities require a major overhaul. What did God want to teach me about a different style of life and ministry?

I sensed that God wanted me to move toward him at this time. But how? I was so sick that I was able to meditate on just one passage: 1 John 4:9-16, which focuses on God’s love for us. I read it over until it etched my memory. I often repeated 1 John 4:16: ” . . . we know and rely on the love God has for us.” The more I turned my thoughts from relying on myself, to God’s gift of his Son for me, the less pressure I felt from my circumstances. My busy mind slowed, and my physical condition improved. It was healing for mind and body just to rest in the love of God. In fact, I believe that along with the prayers of many Christians, this meditation saved my life and gave me back my ministry.

Freed by this meditation, I found my sense of humor returning. When my hair began to fall out, I spent a laugh-filled hour with one of my daughters selecting appropriate hats from an L. L. Bean catalog.

Thus began my struggle against “messianic pastoring.” Since those days, I have found four guidelines that free me from doing everything and help me focus on the truly essential aspects of ministry.

Develop the Mindset

I love getting things done because it provides me mental and emotional satisfaction. But I can end up enjoying the work more than I enjoy God. If I do not maintain my awareness of the gospel of grace, getting work done once again will become the actual and primary goal of my ministry. Then I will become what Oswald Chambers styled “an exclusive worker,” a person who serves God with passion but more out of his own resources than out of conscious dependence on God.

To combat this unhealthy mindset, I have begun to stress to the congregation, to fellow leaders, and to myself that Christ alone is our chief executive officer. My drumbeat has become: Christ alone has a ministry of strength; therefore, let us all shift our trust away from leaders and onto Christ and his grace. I must die daily to my love of human applause and accept my true calling-to be a servant with distinct limitations. My incapacities and visible weaknesses help me, even compel me, to draw near to God. I must say no to the concept that pastoral ministry has unlimited duties.

I now plan enough stops and spaces in my schedule so that I can regularly draw back from intense ministry, examine my mental state, and refocus on the love of God. One way I do this is to set aside time right in the middle of my busiest seasons to read the Scriptures until my fellowship with God is renewed.

With extra time, I found, my Bible reading and meditation reshaped my thinking at a deeper level. My ideas on how to do ministry became more flexible and creative. Most important, I began to see that my prayer for people was at least as important as my labors with them.

For example, during my time of meditation and prayer I made a list of church members to receive special prayer. Some had been disciplined; others had disappeared from the church or rarely attended. Some I had not seen for ten years. But I prayed for them in my times of daily communion with God. 1 asked that they would come to know God’s love for them in the way I was beginning to.

Several months went by. Then one Monday morning at 5 A.M. our doorbell rang. On the porch stood a woman who had left the church in bitter anger ten years before. She said, “My conscience so troubled me during the night that I woke up at 3 and decided to drive the two hours to Jenkintown to talk to you and Rose Marie.” She then apologized for her behavior and was reconciled with key leaders in the church.

Some of those I have prayed for have not turned up, but others have contacted me and are slowly rebuilding their spiritual lives. This development has confirmed my conviction that it is supremely worthwhile to maintain the mindset of fellowship with God. This perception freed me to engage in the three practical strategies that follow.

Prune the Schedule

The perceptive Oswald Chambers says of the Christian leader’s life and work, “There [in the Sermon on the Mount] our Lord says to take no thought for your life: be carefully careless about everything, saving one thing, your relationship to God.” That relationship takes much care. It requires significant time in the schedule, and that time must be protected by saying no to some other things.

To help with pruning the schedule, I have asked three close friends to monitor me and tell me when I am allowing busyness to crowd out fellowship with God. Recently I handed one of them my proposed monthly schedule. He responded, “Looks like your month was planned by Robert Ludlum” (a spy novelist whose heroes move with breathtaking speed through the world). “You seem to have put about six weeks of work into a month, with no real stops and spaces in it.” I swallowed my pride and cut my work substantially-not just for that month but also for the whole quarter.

What have I pruned? Not everyone will choose to prune what I did, but knowing my choices may help you wrestle with yours.

With few exceptions, I turn down speaking engagements at conferences, seminars, or retreats. My health limitations alone would justify this decision. But the more important reason has been my need to concentrate my energies on primary tasks.

I also have tried to step back from most cases of interpersonal conflict that arise in our church and mission. John Yenchko, a fellow pastor at New Life Church, bears the brunt of the church ministry problems, and Paul Miller, associate director of our World Harvest Mission, does the same for any conflicts in the mission.

I also no longer attend evening meetings of our local “mini-church,” a neighborhood home group made up of fifteen to thirty people.

At first, I decided to jettison pastoral counseling. But that has not proved practicable. So I have discovered another way to bring it under control. I set aside a number of hours each week for personal counseling, and when those slots are filled, I do not make any more appointments for that week.

But how do you stick to this principle when someone comes with an emergency? Here is what I did recently when Patricia, a distressed wife, came to me about a shattered marriage relationship. At my request she briefly summarized her painful story. We prayed together, and I gave her a copy of an appropriate book and arranged for an appointment with me late in the following week. I then asked her to call a young wife in our congregation of her own age and background. The woman has completed our leadership training course and has the gift of friendship and common sense. I then telephoned the woman and gave suggestions for helping Patricia. This took only about twenty-five minutes. Sometimes I do this kind of preliminary counseling over the telephone.

This issue of scheduling can be approached positively. Often the single pastor can prune the workload by spreading out the number of meetings and counseling appointments. For example, recently I was working with a committee charged with developing a new approach to small groups for our congregation. We took over four months to get our work done. We could have completed our work in a month if I had worked at my usual pace. But the members of the committee and I decided that there was no need to do our work under pressure, and with my encouragement we met once a month instead of once a week.

Still, pruning involves pain. It hurts when a good friend criticizes me for not attempting to meet his needs immediately. Though the leaders of our church and the congregation as a whole have wonderfully supported my pruned schedule, an angry, accusatory letter is sitting on my desk. A man had an interpersonal conflict, and he charges me with sin because I did not step in and “straighten it all out.” That hurts deep down.

But gradually I realized that the man’s messianic pastor had been dethroned. Now he could learn- along with me-to look to Christ as the real CEO of the church and to discover that fellowship with him is the only thing that ultimately matters. Cutting back the schedule enables me to fight my tendency to give all my caring either to meeting people’s expectations or pursuing secondary issues.

Stop Moving the Piano

If I trim my schedule, what happens to the comprehensive pastoral care of the congregation?

The answer, I’ve found, is to “work smart.” The idea is to learn not to make quick decisions about what should be on my schedule as a pastor. “Working smart” means concentrating on my priorities and then thinking creatively about how to handle the spheres of ministry that are left untended.

Sometimes working smart means that a pastor must have a core of study and prayer time marked out for him by other leaders, and explained to the congregation by them. While speaking several years ago in a church, I learned that the elders and the pastor had agreed that he was not to answer the telephone, do any counseling, or hold any meetings before 11 A.M. each day. This decision was made formally by the elders and publicized by them, with a full explanation of the reasons for it.

Unfortunately, we good-hearted pastors sometimes are the least smart in the use of time. We hardly seem aware that other leaders in the church are willing to help us maintain the core of ministry. For instance, the pastor of one church that included many retired people soon found himself getting swamped with requests for physical help. He was moving members’ pianos and refrigerators and repairing their plumbing-until the leaders in the church urged him to delegate deacons to undertake this ministry of mercy.

Working smart begins when you see that if you invest more time at the beginning of an undertaking, you may be able to save loads of it later. For example, a few years ago I was overwhelmed by requests from men in our church for counseling, fellowship, or leadership training. It was clearly not possible for me to meet with each one separately, so I began to form small groups of men. Rose Marie began to do the same with women in our church. Eventually this led to a leadership training course, managed entirely by others, which has multiplied leaders for our church.

Train Others to Follow Core Priorities

If we’re to “work smart,” we have to find, motivate, and train teachable people. The most effective method is to spend lots of time with these teachable believers and then work alongside them in ministry assignments. Later you increase the responsibilities and check on progress only occasionally.

But here’s the catch. Most of us pastors come to the ministry with seminary training. Our idea of mobilizing people for ministry grows out of the classroom, where the professor gave assignments and the students did them almost automatically. In my first year of ministry, I recall how frustrated I grew because few church members seemed poised to volunteer. In disillusionment I said to myself, Our church members seem busy and preoccupied-even self-centered; they do not appear all that trainable. Gradually I gave up on them.

I was overlooking the motivational dynamic that must empower all service. I did not see at that time that all of us need to learn to worship before we can learn to work. In all mobilization for service, living communion with Christ must precede service for Christ. So our present pastoral staff and I look for potential leaders by looking for men and women and young people who are hungry for more communion with Christ.

We have decided that the obvious place to begin is with our own hunger. Under the leadership of John Yenchko, we are using our official biweekly elders’ meetings not only for business but also for prayer. We devote one of our twice-monthly evening meetings exclusively to building unity and vision among us as elders. Our aim is to model unity for the church by functioning more and more as a fellowship of shepherds.

For example, recently John invited eight elders to go to the mountains with him for a day of meditation, prayer, and repentance. Deep changes occurred in their lives, and now they are hoping to go on retreat quarterly. These leaders have also been reading together Richard Lovelace’s book, Renewal as a Way of Life. Two elders have organized an informal Sunday school class by the same name, based in part on the book, and it has proved to be unusually helpful in promoting spiritual renewal in our congregation.

Our dream is to see each elder in one way or another ministering actively on Sunday mornings. Two elders who are experienced Christian counselors are organizing a peer counseling group to counsel and pray with hurting people.

Personally, I have chosen four leaders to whom I give my primary attention, prayer, energies, and counsel. I have chosen these four because they are pacesetters in the church and each has taken over some important aspect of my work. I have told each of them, “My goal is to make you successful in your life and ministry.” I open to each almost all the letters I write to people in the congregation, give them books, talk to them weekly on the telephone, and spend time with them whenever possible. They, then, expand the ministry.

How this training develops can be illustrated by the progress of our youth pastor, Angelo Juliani. When he became a Christian, I took him and another young man with me once a week to do evangelism. Afterward we gathered at McDonald’s for refreshments, prayer, review of our evangelism, and a study of Galatians.

Eventually Angelo took over our youth ministry and labored as though he had no limits. He says, “I began the youth ministry with superhuman efforts to entertain the young people. They were entertained, but none of them was becoming a disciple. It proved to be a dismal failure.”

At my urging he joined another pastor and me in a Thursday morning meeting where we interceded for this ministry. As we prayed together for lengthy periods of time, Angelo began to do the same with the young people. At the outset he could find only three who were willing. But at the end of six months there were at least ten young people who were praying and studying the Bible with him. This development became the foundation for all the exciting youth programs that have come into being in our church since then.

The Difficult Lesson

Learning to live with limits is no easy lesson. Something within my soul loves the role of the omnicompetent pastor and the approval that goes with it. Other pastors have told me they have the same inner compulsion.

Our misdirected love, however, can be expelled by a greater love. Such love is celebrated in 1 John 4:10: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Here is hope for the pastor with a bias toward action. I can be constantly cleansed and renewed by meditating on the divine self-giving of our God in the atonement of his Son.

I am relying on this compelling love to stir in me a bias toward fellowship with God and for this fellowship to empower my life and ministry.

It took a highly abnormal situation to introduce me to what is normal for pastoral ministry. My weakness showed me it is not normal for a pastor to present himself as the person with all the gifts. Instead, the pastor’s fundamental calling is to be filled with faith. A minister’s strength lies in his believing, not in his everlasting doing.

I realized I had, for a long time, set before the church the image of a messianic pastor. When I was sick, for example, some church members who came to comfort me ended up telling me all about their own conflicts and problems. Obviously the impression had been deeply stamped on their thinking that I was a man without limitations.

Finally I told one man who telephoned me in the hospital wanting job counseling: “Look, I’m really sick. I can’t help you now. But I do need your prayers!” This open acknowledgement of my weakness became a breakthrough.

My insistence upon their recognizing my weakness virtually forced them to shift their faith from me to Christ. I became increasingly bold in telling them that this shift in their trust was going to do great things for them. It was astonishing how the simplicity of this approach helped some stagnating Christians find Christ’s help for themselves.

Actually the whole situation in our church with its weakened leadership forced us all-leaders and congregation-to look to Christ alone for our strength. We prayed as never before with a dependence borne of our deep needs. One elder came to me and reported with a big smile, “Jack, we really need your ministry. But look at what has happened since you became sick! Ron Lutz and John Yenchko are preaching with unusual power, the building fund has been oversubscribed, and both congregations are growing. Your weakness has driven all of us to seek Christ in a new way! He is really working among us.”

C. John “Jack” Miller is a pastor of New Life Presbyterian Church in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.