"We have to face reality," I announced to the congregation one bright October Sunday morning. "We are not bringing people to Christ."
Before me, seated on stacking chairs in a grade-school gym, were our fifty adults and a few children, appearing as civilized as landed gentry (toddlers excluded).
"The Great Commission is our mission," I continued. "We have to do whatever it takes to become a church that leads people to Christ."
Our church was nine years old, and I had now been the pastor for two years. We had grown from 35 to 80 on a bang-up Sunday, but I wasn't satisfied: it was transfer growth. We weren't reaching unchurched people.
I took responsibility and resolved to do something about it. I blocked out time in my schedule, prayed intensely about the problem, and birthed an idea-a seven-step strategy for breaking out of our shell.
Confidently and with great expectations, I handed the congregation my baby.
The Coming-Out Party
The first step was prayer, and on this Sunday morning, I was using my sermon to introduce it.
"James 4:2 says, 'You do not have because you do not ask God,' " I said. "We must base our outreach on prayer." For the next thirty minutes, I introduced three key prayer requests based on three Scriptures.
As we drove home after the service, my gentle wife didn't say anything about my sermon on this watershed day in our church's epic history. Finally, hoping that things had gone better than I had sensed, I asked, "How did it go?"
"Well, it went okay. But maybe you should have focused on just one Scripture and one prayer," she said. "I think people got a little confused."
"Three Scriptures, and they're confused?" I said incredulously. I had felt insecure, now I was burned. I had offered a clearly biblical message, presented it with passion, and the only response was a tepid critique of my sermon structure. I looked at my wife as if she were Attila the Hun holding my firstborn.
In the next few weeks, I discovered my wife's reaction was one of the most positive. My intensely felt vision wasn't immediately celebrated by the rest of the congregation. The reawakening of passionate prayer, the resurgence of evangelism wasn't ushered in by my introduction of the seven-part strategy. I was crushed.
When we develop a creative idea, it becomes our baby, the most wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, and promising child ever to grace the earth. However, the time soon arrives for proud parents to bring their brainchild into public, and that can be traumatic.
When we present our idea for approval and support, others may frown at our baby. They have the gall to scorn our baby's looks! If we place our baby in their arms, they hand her back without gushing over her. Some actually seem bent on harming our beloved offspring.
Often that's our own fault. Although the people we lead are thoroughly "civilized," we sometimes present creative ideas in ways that provoke what seem like savage reactions. Upon reflection, I realize more members of my congregation would have welcomed my ideas if I had done five things differently.
Keep It Simple
I love to analyze. I can multiply points like children spawn excuses for not cleaning their bedroom. Give me several weeks to develop a plan, and it can rival a computer chip for microcomplexity. Here was the thumbnail sketch of our evangelism strategy's first step-the prayer plan:
1. We would make three specific requests each day. "Make our church and me fishers of men." "Send us as laborers into the harvest." "Show me the people you want me to share Christ with."
2. We would develop a "Love List" of ten friends, family members, neighbors, and fellow workers and pray for them daily. Those who were willing would turn their list in to me, and we would compile a church Love List we all could pray for.
But I wanted us praying more specifically than "Save Aunt Mildred and Becky Sue." So I developed a list of sixteen scriptural prayer requests (two to the fourth power, no less!) for non-Christians. For example, "Convince _____ of sin and righteousness and judgment" based on John 16:8-11.
In our church meetings, I modeled these prayers, and in newsletters I explained them. After a few weeks, I wanted to involve others, so at the close of a meeting I asked anyone who felt prompted to pray our three strategic, evangelistic prayers.
Silence.
Silence that lasted longer than it takes to reach a human being when a voice-mail system answers your call. (There is no deeper silence on our vast planet than that which engulfs a room of people when no one wants to pray.)
Finally, thoroughly frustrated, I prayed.
On another occasion I popped a spontaneous quiz. "What are the three requests I'm asking everyone to pray daily?" Two out of three was the best the congregation could do.
Further removed from my baby, I can now see my plan was too complex. The people weren't obtuse. The plan simply struck them as so complex they didn't want to start. And this was only step one!
If Jesus had adopted this plan to evangelize the world, Peter and the Sons of Thunder would have gone home with an industrial-strength headache. If people ever get the idea something is complex or beyond them, many won't even try.
Here's the painful but simple truth: The more complex our brainchild, the more concentration required to understand it, the more others will seem to us like barbarians.
Be Realistic about Commitments
Once I had begun developing my new outreach strategy, it became my bonfire-sized passion. God answers prayer; I knew it would work. Many lives would be changed, and our church would turn into a pulsing evangelistic center.
Naturally I implemented the plan into my life, as best I could. Incorporating the three key prayers into my day was a snap. I did so once or twice daily.
But then I also began praying for the twenty-five people on my Love List. I found if I named each person and made my sixteen specific requests for the whole group in a heartfelt manner rather than just mouthing words and names from a list, it could take twenty minutes. When I prayed for people individually, it was a schedule buster. I had many other things to pray about as well.
I soon found it challenging to keep praying for my personal Love List even every other day, and I only prayed for ten or twenty names from the church's accumulated list of several hundred names once a week. If such difficulty in follow-through beset me, the originator of the plan, the one for whom the whole church enterprise was most dear, it's no surprise church attenders did less. A few implied they used the prayer guide sporadically, but most discreetly avoided the subject.
I still think the prayer program was a great idea for some, but an unrealistic theory for most. Getting adults to do anything out of the ordinary is as difficult as outdueling the American Gladiators; if we ask for significant commitment, we find significantly fewer people ready to respond.
Douglas Hyde, in his book Dedication and Leadership, says if you ask for great commitment you get a great response; ask for Mickey Mouse commitment and you don't even get that. I first read that while ministering to idealistic collegians, and I still subscribe to it. But I've also learned that asking for a significant commitment rarely gets a quick response from the majority of set-in-their-ways adults.
Ask someone to babysit your brainchild for a few minutes, and there's a good chance they'll agree. But ask them to adopt her, support her from their own means, and promise to send her to a private college, and you'll have far fewer volunteers.
Remember Your Parental Bias
I presented the prayer strategy to the church in a way I hoped would seize attention, using the church's desktop publishing program to design a professional looking handout. I chose a distinguished looking type font and a large point size for easy reading.
Then, like an artist penciling in the eye-lashes of a portrait, I painstakingly enlarged and put in bold the first letter of each prayer request. When it was ready to print, I stood with anticipation watching my 24-pin Epson craft the words line by line onto paper. I took the original to the office, copied it on goldenrod paper, and immediately slipped one copy into a vinyl sheet protector in my desk-size Day Timer. (Compulsives keep the stockholders of sheet-protector producers rolling in dough.)
The next Sunday, with concealed pride, I nonchalantly handed those precious documents to the ushers to distribute to the congregation, keeping my eye on them lest any be dropped. (I resisted the temptation to put every copy in a sheet protector.)
After my sermon explaining each of the prayer requests, I urged everyone to "take this intercessory guide home, keep it with your Bible, and pray these requests regularly for the people on your Love List. And do a Bible study of each Scripture so you see how it inspires the prayer."
We closed the service in prayer, and I walked to the hallway, ostensibly to greet people, actually to garner rave reviews. After shaking the last hand-no one said much about the sermon-I returned to the gym and found to my dismay a number of the goldenrod prayer guides littering the seats. In shock, I went through the rows picking them up. Some had been scribbled on with crayons, folded into airplanes, or doodled on by adults-desecrated.
To many in the congregation, this was just another handout, church junk mail. To me it was the master key to our church's future, the product of weeks of thought and prayer, something that in my day-dreams I could see helping hundreds-perhaps thousands-of people find a relationship with Christ. (The truth is, I saw it on the same scale as Bill Bright's Four Spiritual Laws!) And there it was, left behind like trash in an alley.
No one adores our high concepts-these reflections of our intelligence, personality, and vision that resemble their parents so closely-as much as we do. We usually believe God inspired the idea. We felt the concept grow in the womb, we labored to give her birth, we nursed and cared for her in the middle of the night. We're emotionally, permanently bonded. To others, our baby-powdered idea is just another one of several million unexceptional children born into the world each year. Cute, yes; adorable, maybe; a prodigy, mmmmmm, we'll see. Even if they're warm to the idea, they won't fall over themselves to support it, yet.
I needed to present my ideas not like a mother proudly presenting her newborn in public but like a pregnant woman who sincerely wants help from a midwife. Church innovations are team efforts.
Give People Freedom to Choose
Conferences and books are hazardous to a pastor's health. A few months before conceiving my prayer strategy, I read a popular secular book on leadership. With the book's emphasis on communicating vision fresh in my mind, I campaigned for my prayer program through every available means.
I reminded the congregation of our "three prayer requests" in every weekly newsletter. At the end of our church services, I closed in prayer with them.
In my sermons and pastoral comments during services, I told stories of how I had seen those prayers fulfilled in my life during the week, seeing opportunities arise to share Christ and feeling equipped to do so.
I "asked" everyone in the church to sign a form saying they would commit to pray daily. "We need everyone to join in this effort," I emphasized repeatedly from the pulpit. "We have to be a team." A dozen people complied (anything to placate me).
I even asked people one-on-one, "What do you think of our prayer plan? Have you started praying regularly?" In short, for about four weeks I was twisting limbs as relentlessly as a cranky KGB interrogator.
I felt the awkwardness of my putting people on the spot, and I softened it with a laid-back smile and demeanor (check the mug shot accompanying this article; is that the face of an intimidator?), but everyone in the church soon knew that there would be no exceptions and no anonymity. No one had the freedom to say no and remain in a comfortable position with me. I hadn't given a challenge; I had set a policy.
I didn't feel guilty about drafting GIs rather than recruiting volunteers. Strong leadership is appropriate for a mission church. We needed a highly committed, special-forces-type platoon to fulfill our reason for being. We might lose a few people, but at least the ones who remained would be fruitful.
That may be true, but I quickly found that the more a leader pressures followers to adopt an innovation, the more resistant and resentful many become. If you twist the arm of someone unmotivated to support an idea, you get an elbow in the chops.
My first inkling of dental trauma was a letter from a woman explaining she planned to leave the church because, for one thing, I was "pulling teeth" to get everyone to support my prayer program.
That startled me. For the first time I realized what I had been doing for the previous month. I don't consider myself a manipulative person. I doubt if anyone from my previous church would have described me as such. In my previous pastorate, when I challenged people to commit to deeper involvement, I offered optional programs, growth tracks for volunteers, and didn't pressure the uninvolved. But my urgency to reach out coupled with my convictions about the need for strong leadership had changed my leadership style.
Within weeks nearly a dozen people in the church had become strong opponents of my leadership. I learned that the more we coerce people to adopt our brainchild, the more they will seem to us like barbarians.
Give Extra Attention to "Educators"
Church opinion leaders with a clearly defined, albeit unwritten, philosophy of ministry are as likely to stonewall avant-garde ideas as Kathy Lee Gifford is to have her mouth wide open in a magazine photo.
"Alan (name changed), how do you feel about our prayer plan?" I asked one of our men. "Are you using it to intercede for others?"
"Not really," he answered. "I try to pray under the leading of the Spirit, and so I don't use lists or written prayers."
"But the prayers are based directly on Scripture," I responded. "Isn't it possible that a prayer based on Scripture could be Spirit-led?"
I continued to argue my case, but our conversation ended with Alan unconvinced. Deeply committed to prayer and evangelism, he had his own well-established ideas about how both should be done. He had read a lot of books, and his mind was sincerely made up on most things related to the Christian life.
Expertise, real or supposed, often causes hardening of the categories. Just as a specialist in early childhood education may test a girl's IQ and conclude she belongs in the "slow" group, only for the world to later discover she's a genius (for example, as children both Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill were deemed slow learners), so "experts" in the church often dismiss a brainchild as stupid.
But church opinion leaders can't be by-passed. As I look back, I think one of my biggest mistakes was presenting my prayer strategy to the whole church rather than first going to the opinion leaders one-on-one, inviting their feedback, giving them time to process the idea, and then presenting it to the congregation. People in the know take kindly to being consulted, require extra attention and respect, and need it early in the process.
The people in my church who said "no thanks" to my pink-ribboned baby weren't the Teutonic hordes. If they seemed like it, that was largely my fault.
Frankly, with perspective I see that few of my brainchildren are wunderkinds and many of my ideas are stupid (though I still think these prayers will replace the four spiritual laws, no offense, Mr. Bright). What's more, most good ideas require considerable feedback to truly find "the mind of the Lord."
And so although it never feels like it, I've decided the "barbarians" in my life just may be godparents in disguise.
44 SUMMER/93
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
