Next month marks ten years since I came to LEADERSHIP. During that time, a lot has happened.
I’ve looked at more than 10,000 cartoons. (It’s a rough job, I know.) Read a few thousand manuscripts, letters, faxes. Learned a lot from pastors. Written one book and a pile of articles. Made a few people mad. Won a few awards. Watched Marshall Shelley’s hair turn gray. (I may be partly responsible.)
A lot has happened in my personal life as well. In the past ten years, Karen and I welcomed one child and grieved two miscarriages. Moved twice. Changed churches once. Wrote a book about marriage. Buried my father.
That last event, on a blustery April weekend almost four years ago, continues to affect me. I remember driving in the long line of cars down the winding, narrow cemetery road in western Maryland. Ahead was the shiny, black hearse, and in the next car, silhouetted in the passenger’s seat, was the back of my mom’s head. That must be the longest, loneliest ride in the world, I thought.
At the graveside, ducks waddled about. Dad had hunted ducks most of his life; maybe they were celebrating the downfall of their Goliath. Later that day cemetery workers lowered the carved wooden casket into the ground, and Dad, resting within in his navy blazer and Lands’ End tie, disappeared from sight.
Only now am I realizing how much he taught me about church leadership. Dad is the only layperson I know who left a church because it wouldn’t pay the pastor a reasonable salary. He stood in the annual meeting and called for a long-overdue raise. But some folks in small towns see financial matters a certain way, and the proposal was rejected. So Dad left.
Maybe he shouldn’t have, but to him it was a matter of principle. Generosity marks a person’s character, he believed, and so does miserliness. Disrespect is never appropriate toward any person, especially toward a leader.
Dad also taught me the importance of developing people under your leadership. He used to say, “If the son’s not a better man than his father, they’re both failures.” My job as a leader, I’m reminded, is to see that people working around me become a success. That’s my measure.
Dad said grace every night before supper, but he never felt comfortable talking about his faith. He liked action. He would come into my room and say, “C’mon, kid, let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“Lucy’s.” Once a month he would visit Lucy Butchko, a woman whose body had been twisted and pinned into a wheelchair by arthritis. He would reach his big arms around her frail body and lift her out of the wheelchair and place her in the front seat of the brown station wagon. Then he would fold the wheelchair, throw it in back, and drive Lucy to the monthly Communion service for shut-ins. Here was a vice-president of a major publishing company (Harper & Row) shuttling shut-ins.
I don’t want to paint this too rosily; Dad had a sharp tongue and knew how to use it. He also worked too hard; I’ve had to learn on my own about balancing work and rest, ministry and family.
If the ultimate test for a Christian leader, though, is how well you serve and develop people, then Dad taught me that. At the funeral, people told me he’d paid the college tuition for one woman to get her associate’s degree, so she could break out of the cycle of poverty. Then, while in the hospital, trying to recover from a massive heart attack, he found out that a family down the street didn’t have enough money to buy groceries. So he wrote them a check. It was the last thing he ever wrote, and a lasting lesson in leadership.
Kevin A. Miller is editor of Leadership.
1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal
