Matchmaker, Matchmaker
The Complete Search Committee Guidebook by Robert W. Dingman, Regal, $6.95
Reviewed by Heidi A. Hasted, associate pastor, Bidwell Memorial Presbyterian Church, Chico, California
Perhaps you’re about to call a new person on staff. How do you help the Christian organization you lead call a qualified person? Or maybe you’re a pastor who has received a new call and has just notified the board of your decision to leave. How can you help the congregation you are about to leave prepare for their future?
You form a search committee and let them search, which is easier said than done, as search-committee members and candidates agree. Whether you’ve labored diligently on an overwhelmed and under appreciated search committee or endured an interview conducted by a search committee confused about its task, take heart.
Combining a wealth of personal experience as a committed churchperson with over thirty years’ experience as a professional search consultant and head of his own executive search firm, Robert Dingman has written a step-by-step guidebook to walk committees through the formidable search process in an organized manner.
The Complete Search Committee Guidebook is filled with practical nuts-and-bolts suggestions, from how to rate a candidate to how to write a thank-you note; from how to check a candidate’s references to how to talk about salary and “close the deal.”
And this user-friendly guide is presented in witty, down-to-earth language. For example: “God did not leave with the departed pastor,” or “Physicists say that nature abhors a vacuum. So do anxious groups who can’t learn what’s going on. … A good search committee will give their constituency regular reports that progress is being made.” If a candidate has “stumbled over a cleverly concealed theological trip wire and just blown himself up in the opinion of your committee, you owe him every possible consideration and courtesy, despite your lack of continuing interest.”
The crucial step in the search process is the appointing of the committee itself, and, in Dingman’s estimation, when the search committee is formed too quickly, “half the damage is done.”
Also, committees need to be careful not to administrate the Holy Spirit out of the search process. Prayer may well be the most important thing a committee does. One “perceptible benefit that a praying search committee enjoys is that as they pray for each other, they are more likely to be building the needed trust and basis for cooperation a good committee requires.”
Dingman confronts churches that neglect to sign off with other candidates after they have called a leader. Those other candidates often get lost in the shuffle and begin to feel about as appreciated as a dangling participle. But, says Dingman, “If you look at the search process as ministry . . . you should be caring as much for the ‘ninety and nine’ candidates you will dismiss as you do for the one you select.”
Dingman frequently refers to the search-process formats developed by denominations (and the appendixes contain several important documents). Thus my guess is that this book will prove most helpful to those who do not have a denominational structure or attendant placement systems.
A pastor or church leader seeking a new position will find a list of ways a candidate can determine the truth when he or she suspects the committee is holding back, such as, “Don’t let one person do all the talking. Get the quiet ones to respond to your thoughtful questions,” and “Get the committee to list the successes and failures of the previous leader.”
In the chapter on “The Candidates Look at You,” the reader is reminded that a good interview is a dialogue with give and take. Dingman also lists questions candidates might ask committees such as, “What is the most significant event in the life of this congregation since you’ve been a member?” and “What formal and informal methods of support have you used in the past to help your pastor become a better minister?”
Naturally, he also includes questions a search committee might ask candidates, such as, “As you look back over your life, where do you see yourself making critical choices?”
So, the gold is there, although those seeking a new call may have to dig around here and there for the nuggets. Then again, the search process from the church leader’s perspective is another book-one the energetic and upbeat Dingman someday hopes to write. In the meantime, this will do nicely for seekers and splendidly for search committees.
New Glasses to See Hurting People
Counseling Families: From Insight to Intervention by James P. Osterhaus, Zondervan, $12.95
Reviewed by Michael E Phillips, pastor, Riverside Alliance Church, Kalispell, Montana
Mom and Dad drag their 9-year-old boy in for counseling. “He is totally out of control,” they exclaim. Even while in the counselor’s office, the boy kicks and screams, especially at his mother. He will not go places with the family. He is abusive to his sister, and his mother fears for her own safety.
Now, you’re the counselor: what is the problem? Who needs help, the boy or the parents? Does the boy need discipline or compassion? Do the parents need instruction or sympathy? Where do you begin and then continue with this family?
In Counseling Families, James Osterhaus, director of the Community Presbyterian Counseling Center in Danville, California, shows us how to determine the root cause of this and other family dilemmas. He blends analysis with anecdotes and applies them both to actual cases. His purpose: to help pastors understand family relationships and change them if they go awry.
Osterhaus rarely does family counseling with only one member of the family. He insists on counseling all the family members who may be even remotely involved with the client. That’s because of the particular emphases he brings to his counseling practice.
In part one, “Foundations,” Osterhaus rehearses left-brain/right-brain theory. Where the left hemisphere helps us organize reality logically, the right “understands and carries out relationships among people.” The right hemisphere also synthesizes experience into an image or a “map” that guides our relationships. For example, the person who sees the world as dangerous more likely will be suspicious and hostile toward others. Understanding people’s maps, then, is vital to effective counseling.
Next Osterhaus describes how communication takes place at two levels: content (what is said) and processes (how content is communicated). “Pastors must look at the relationships as well as the stated problems,” Osterhaus said in conversation. “Solutions should aim at primarily changing the relationship process. Many times pastors tell a couple what to believe, but that is not enough.”
I asked him if objective propositions are unimportant. “Not at all,” he replied. “The truth must be told, but not to the exclusion of relational processes. Propositions set boundaries; processes tell how to stay within those boundaries.”
For Osterhaus, nonverbal clues, such as facial expressions and body positioning, often unveil what a person really thinks and feels. Osterhaus offers several questions the counselor can mentally ask when evaluating a family session:
-Who sits where?
-Who initiates conversation?
-Who withdraws?
-How does the family act (e.g., blaming, distracting, soothing)?
-Who interrupts?
Sometimes, right-brain body language is ingenious at communicating reality. Osterhaus relates how a 19-year-old woman, depressed and passive, came to him complaining of pain in her neck. As the family and counselor talked, the mother, with both verbal and nonverbal clues, demonstrated how intrusive she had become in her daughter’s life. For the young woman, the mother was literally a “pain in the neck”!
Part two, “Applications,” describes methods that help counselors get at the reality of a family’s problems. For example, Osterhaus encourages counselors to practice pacing, “stepping into another person’s world . . . meeting the person there to let him know we are truly ‘with him,’ ” before leading the person through change.
Verbal pacing means matching the client’s feelings with verbal affirmation: “It hurts terribly inside right now, doesn’t it?”
Or a counselor might match some of the client’s body language, leaning forward, crossing legs, and so on.
Osterhaus also suggests counselors practice structuring, looking for patterns by which families relate. “If one knows what to look for,” he says, “a redundant pattern of acting will always emerge in a family.” The relationships between Isaac, Rebekah, Esau, and Jacob, for example, show a shattered family structure: the mother and one son in an alliance against the father and the other son.
Osterhaus also suggests how to begin helping families overcome problems caused by structural difficulties. Referring to the example at the beginning of the review, Osterhaus writes, “In working with couples who cannot control their children, we will find that they often tend to discount each other and undercut whatever measures the other initiates. … Rarely do parents lack specific skills in parenting . . . they just have not been able to be mutually supportive and in agreement as to how to get the job done.”
As a result of reading Counseling Families, I now see processes as well as problems, structures as well as individuals. For me this has been more than a mere change in nomenclature, but a new way of seeing and helping hurting people.
Right Church Practice
Feeding and Leading: A Practical Handbook of Administration in Churches and Christian Organizations by Kenneth O. Gangel, Victor, $14.95
Reviewed by William A. Teague, church administrator and director of program, Lake Grove Presbyterian Church, Lake Oswego, Oregon
The church engages in battles on many fronts. The purity of the church requires a stout defense of orthodoxy, while, says Kenneth Gangel, the peace, mission, and practical functioning of the church demand loyal devotion to orthopraxy-the right way of doing things.
The warm and engaging Gangel, chair of the department of Christian education at Dallas Theological Seminary, knows well the enemy of orthopraxy but maintains complete confidence in the arsenal of weapons he has learned to use in a thirty-year career as pastor, administrator, and teacher.
Feeding and Leading, the most recent of his twenty-plus titles, grows out of Gangel’s love and concern for the people he has observed in ministry who regularly ask such questions as, “How can the board begin to make better decisions?” “Why can’t I seem to communicate with that particular elder?” and “How can we get those great ideas turned into great programs?”
For Gangel, at the heart of administrative issues lies the art of “doing things right,” and deeper still lies the issue of right belief. For example, Christian leaders are often chosen today because they seem successful, assertive, and powerful. When they fail or fall, the church wonders why.
Gangel insists that the belief system that installed those leaders was wrong. Right belief takes seriously the scriptural standards for servant leadership, seriously enough to defy cultural practice with right practice. Gangel insists, for instance, that no matter what other abilities they may possess, “weak fathers make weak elders or deacons.” Enculturated churches fill their boards with directors; “orthoprax” churches fill them with strong parents.
Gangel is quick to point out in conversation and writing that he is not one to propose easy answers or quick fixes for the leadership and administrative dilemmas facing leaders. He believes firmly, though, that if leaders will be faithful to their call and stay put until it’s clear that God has called them elsewhere, solutions can and do emerge.
Gangel the theologian and theorist knows the major denominational battles and doctrinal rifts of the times, but he argues it is rarely those mega-issues that get pastors and church leaders into trouble. Gangel the practitioner knows rather that misunderstanding stemming from change-change in the order of service, programming, or Bible version-causes the most serious discouragement and despair. Too often, though, the suffering church-with a suffering pastor in the middle-is testing not its commitment to biblical scholarship or authority, but its ability to change.
To Gangel, then, much of the practical administration in the church has to do with change. From personal conversion to institutional effectiveness, the church is in the business of promoting right change. Gangel, in fact, thinks churches can change carpet colors, choir robes, and Sunday school curriculum without changing pastors!
The key is the leaders’ ability to master change instead of being mastered by it, and that means knowing how to use the tools of good administration with groups responsible for change.
Gangel lays out some basic principles of change, such as “Changing people is more important than changing things because if you only change things, the people will change them back again as soon as you are gone,” and “Change begins at the point of greatest control (e.g., for a pastor that might be the Sunday sermons or the order of service).”
In chapters dealing with motivating volunteers, Gangel argues against wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing short cuts: “The three fearful emotional states used to manipulate children-ignorance, anxiety, guilt-are the same ones used in leadership with adults and passed off as motivation.”
Instead he takes a positive approach and demonstrates (by summarizing various motivational studies) that people want to be needed, to help others, to learn new skills, to belong to a caring community. The church administrator is most of all a teacher who shows people how to fulfill these desires in the church.
Gangel includes not only a fresh perspective, but also some practical tips for motivating volunteers. For example, in quoting advice from another source, he writes, “Avoid collective reprimands. … Nothing so infuriates an innocent staff person as to be unfairly included in a collective ‘blast’ or punishment.”
The book is also crammed with diagrams and charts, from sample position descriptions to employee-evaluation forms, from the stages of decision making to communication skills. And there’s a wonderful summary of Robert’s Rules included, as well.
In short, Gangel’s assumptions are theological, practical, and memorable: servant leadership, lay leadership, team play, maximum personal participation, decentralization, and delegation. He is an enthusiastic advocate of good management technique and has tailored the book to those who need to hear the good news that leadership, administration, and management are worthy companions to a sense of call and ministry.
NEW AND NOTEWORTHY
Pastoral Care for Survivors of Family Abuse by James Leehan, Westminster/John Knox, $13.95
James Leehan not only reminds us about the prevalence of abuse-indeed, 70 percent of certain populations (e.g., drug addicts) were abused as children-but also the local church’s role in ministering to the abused.
Leehan, director of the University Christian Movement and adjunct faculty member of Cleveland State University, defines physical, sexual, verbal, psychological, sibling, and elder abuse as well as neglect and battering. He then identifies a victim’s behavior through several stages, such as attachment to approval, manipulation as survival, excessive control, and comfort with chaos.
Leehan shows how to recognize, accept, minister to, and even celebrate healing in abused people.
The Inward Ear: A Sermon Evaluation Method for Preachers and Hearers of the Word by William H. Roen, Alban Institute, $7.95
William Roen, pastor of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bradenton, Florida, argues that pastors must listen to their own sermons.
Employing Aristotle’s terms ethos, pathos, and logos, Roen shows us how to listen. Ethos refers to how the preacher reveals himself in the sermon. Pathos, the emotion and heart of the sermon, allows the congregation to feel the sermon truth through images. Without pathos, a sermon is mere lecture. Logos, the logical aspect of the sermon, persuades.
Roen skillfully illustrates his points with rich examples from American poetry and sermons by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.
New Beginnings: A Pastorate Start-Up Workbook by Roy M. Oswald, Alban Institute, $10.95
At any one time, almost 20 percent of my denomination’s churches have just acquired (or soon will) new pastors. To help ministers during this unique transition, Roy Oswald has written an updated version of this book.
Oswald helps pastors understand their style of entering new situations, analyze their new parish system, assess their leadership style, develop a plan of ministry, choose the best time to make changes, develop the support systems they need, and work through their first trouble spots.
Oswald makes moving a comprehensible, and therefore less threatening, experience.
Elements of Style for Preaching by William H. Kooienga, Zondervan, $5.95
Having preached over five hundred times, I hadn’t considered preaching as having a style. But William H. Kooienga, pastor of First Christian Reformed Church in Crown Point, Indiana, persuaded me that it does, whether I am conscious of it or not.
Kooienga shows how preaching grew out of the disciplines of rhetoric and oratory. He then offers a theory of style and guidelines to choose one. Finally, to help preachers develop an effective style, he highlights the importance of clarity, interest, evocation, energy, and emotion. He shows that “style is not mere ornamentation; it is essential for effective communication.”
When the Vision Has Vanished: The Story of a Pastor and the Loss of a Church by Robert C. Girard, Zondervan, $9.95
Heritage Wesleyan Methodist Church was birthed with appealing idealism but amazing naivet, according to Robert Girard, who successfully led his flock through fourteen years of almost constant growth. A radical change in the church’s structure caused its collapse. Its end, however, marked the beginning of a new life for Girard.
In this book, Girard, now pastor of another congregation, reflects on his experience with humility, insight, and honesty. His chapter “The Pathway to Success” offers an exemplary Bible study of success and failure. Success, he writes, is “experiencing inner spiritual riches in the midst of external poverty and difficulties.”
Team Spirit: A Management Handbook by David Cormack, Zondervan, $9.95
We are born into groups (families); we are educated in groups (classes); we play in groups (teams); we work in groups (companies); we worship in groups (congregations); we fight in groups (armies). Since we spend so much of our waking life in groups, how can we build team spirit and make our groups more effective? David Cormack, a consultant to businesses and governments, offers some answers.
Supporting his points with Scripture, Cormack examines styles of leadership, the risks and rewards of team building, criticism and encouragement, the use and abuse of authority, and conflict and reconciliation.
He sees five stages in building a team: committing yourself to the process, acquiring the skills, applying the skills, evaluating your performance, and building on your experience.
-Reviewed by Jim Stobaugh
Harvard Divinity School
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
