In grade school I played baseball for several years. Only once did I pitch. After several other pitchers had taken their lumps, the manager summoned me to the mound. It was awful. I threw one ball after another, walking the batters, loading the bases. Then I walked in run after run.
I don’t remember if I started crying, but I know I felt like it. I died a dozen deaths that day, my ego mortally wounded each time my pitch skidded in futility to the backstop, each time the umpire yelled out my failure, “Ball four,” for all to hear. Finally, after far too long, my coach walked to the mound and mercifully took away the baseball.
Pastoring a church that is stagnant or declining feels like that. Everyone (including God) is looking to you to save the situation—or a few souls—and you’re not doing it. You feel like a fool and a failure; worse, you’re doing it in front of an audience.
Sometimes I dream I’m naked in a church meeting. The shame in these dreams is overwhelming. Proverbs 14:28 says, “A large population is a king’s glory, but without subjects a prince is ruined.” When I stand before a group of 30 people as their pastor, I can feel naked. Leaders by definition have followers, and if there are few followers, then what kind of “leader” am I?
It isn’t the lack of money or the presence of other hardships that eventually grinds pastors of smaller churches into the dust. It’s shame. And unless we recognize that false shame and seek God’s help in overcoming it, we will fall into despair and may be driven from the ministry entirely.
Big dreams, big flop
My roller-coaster journey through ministerial shame and pride began in 1978 in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, a small and cosmopolitan city in itself. I was there to plant a church, and at age 24, I bristled with ambition. Riding the wave of the Jesus revival, the college group I had helped lead had grown to 80. I heard of other Illinois churches growing rapidly, and I revered their pastors as role models. I dreamed of planting a church in Evanston that would soon number in the hundreds.
We started with only three people—my wife, our two-year-old son, and me—but I had faith and a plan. I would distribute literature door to door in a several-block area and then call each of those homes that night.
We moved into our second-floor apartment, and I started working the neighborhood. After slowly developing a list of 20 or so interested people, I tried to launch meetings in the Holiday Inn, but only a handful came and never returned. I kept working my plan, but I was never able to pull together even a regular Bible study. As a church planter I was a spectacular bust.
I started asking the questions I would repeat many times in the years to come. Why does God “bless” other pastors and churches and not me? Why will God not answer my prayers? Why don’t people follow me? What’s the matter with me?
So I left. Explain it as best I could—”I felt led to another place,” “It just did not seem God was in this”—the truth was nothing was going right. I asked my superintendent to come out to the mound and put me out of my misery.
The desert by the ballpark
From Evanston I headed south, to a church several blocks from Comiskey Park on Chicago’s South Side. The church had 25 saints in a small building across the street from a block-square government housing project. Most people in the church were poor, and the church was poor, but I was determined to be their full-time pastor.
The first year a few trickled away, and none replaced them. Basic survival became the imperative. I felt like a green insurance salesman on full commission. Such salesmen do not have the luxury of worrying about their ego; they watch the numbers in terms of feeding their children. I watched our attendance less out of compassion for people who needed Christ and more out of concern for my livelihood.
But there God taught me how he would work through me. This Judean desert became one of the defining periods of my life and the one that gave me the greatest hope, for after one year of slow decline, we turned a corner. We held a week-long outreach that brought life, hope, and even a few souls into the congregation. That started seven years of slow, incremental growth. When I left the church, we averaged around 90 on Sunday morning.
I watched our attendance figures less out of compassion for people who needed Christ and more out of concern for my own livelihood.
At this church I learned that for me at least, numbers take time. My mix of assets, gifts, and passions do not add up to quick results. I don’t have a commanding voice, personality, or appearance. As a leader I am a consensus builder who patiently lays the groundwork of vision and values.
I also learned from Abraham.
No other biblical personage shows how important it is to give God time. Abraham did not even start his greatest adventure with God until he was 75, and then it took 25 more years until Isaac brought laughter to his tent. Abraham’s descendants did not inherit the promised land until hundreds of years after his death, and the full measure of God’s promise to give Abraham descendants like the sand by the seashore is still being fulfilled thousands of years later.
From Abraham I learn that when I give God time, he does a work greater in breadth and scope than I can imagine.
This time God will bless
I took those convictions to Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb far from the South Side both geographically and economically. Those convictions were sorely tested over the next three years. The first year went as my first year in Chicago had: seemingly nothing happened. Despite what I believed about perseverance, this year was harder because I was now much more driven for numbers than before.
My drivenness was propelled by mixed motives. On the plus side, I wanted to see people come to Christ and grow in him. I wanted to be part of a fruitful and dynamic community of believers. I wanted to support my family of five (soon to be six). I wanted to make our church more attractive to visitors. One of the conundrums for smaller churches is that newcomers want to attend a larger church, but your church cannot expand until they attend. Valid perception or not, I had the sense our size was an automatic limitation, preventing us from reaching people.
Other motives were more ambiguous. I thought I was in my prime, that this was an area conducive to church growth, and that God had clearly led me to this church with “blessing” in mind. I dearly wanted to be respected by my peers—in fact, in retrospect I think this was my primary motivation. (Lord, have mercy.) I wanted to feel more significant, less like a lowly small-church pastor.
These mixed motives brought mixed results. After a year we turned a corner on one January Sunday, when our attendance nearly doubled—and most of those newcomers joined the congregation. As the spring progressed, we added more people, with attendance highs in the 80’s. But with success came more trouble. An “up” Sunday had me dreaming euphorically of greater things. A down day left me despairing that all was lost. Every visitor brought promise; every discontented member threatened my dream.
Emotionally I was subject to circumstances instead of directed from within by my identity in God. No worse roller-coaster exists than the one I rode when my emotions were tied to Sunday attendance.
A friend recently admitted the same feelings: “When I got up to preach each Sunday I was completely discouraged by thinking about those who weren’t there, and I was ready to quit every single week.
“Then last summer God spoke to me about my motivations. He asked me if I was willing to serve him even if we never grew. I had to admit that I wasn’t willing, that I was serving numbers, not God. But God broke me. I dedicated myself to setting my heart on God, not growth, and it has made all the difference in the world.”
The emotional cost
I had a ways to go before I could make that kind of commitment. During this time I was angry and disappointed with those who were not performing the way I wanted. The more frustrated I became with people, the less I enjoyed ministry. The more I tried to make things happen, the more discouraged I became when nothing did happen.
Too much of my energy was tied up in things I could not control. My expectations were higher than God’s.
After two years in Arlington Heights, the bubble burst. A small group of people rose in opposition to my leadership and talked to others in the congregation about how they felt. Within a few months, the church dropped in attendance by nearly half.
As it turned out, that revolt was a gift from God, for it taught me that numbers that go up can also go down, but who I am in Christ is the person who endures.
An outsider’s perspective
It took a five-year hiatus from pastoring, however, for that to settle thoroughly into my soul. As associate editor of Leadership, my identity derived from something other than the size of my church. For me it was as striking a change as moving to another country or another planet, as the reference points of my self-concept were realigned. An emotional block of limestone had been lifted from my shoulders.
What magnified it further were my conversations with pastors. Now, with an outsider’s perspective, I saw them going through the same syndrome I had. When I asked about their churches, most answered first in terms of numbers, and no matter what the size of their church, they usually did so apologetically. I wanted to say, “You don’t have to apologize! I don’t measure you by how big your church is! Christ doesn’t measure you by how big your church is!”
I learned something else during this hiatus: no one can minister to everyone. Each of us is wired by God in such a way that no matter how godly or gifted we are at ministry, we will be able to minister effectively only to certain people. Our gifts and our personalities will touch some and not others. I can’t take it personally when somebody decides not to attend our church. I need to let God work through me with whomever he will.
Reservoir or river?
Another molding force in my life was Daniel Brown, pastor of the Coastlands in Aptos, California, who gave me a more realistic perspective on ministry. Brown says we tend to view a church as a reservoir, and so our goal is to fill the reservoir as full as possible. The yardstick for ministerial success, then, becomes accumulation rather than changed lives. But that is a model for frustration because in our volatile culture, people are always moving on.
No matter how godly or gifted we are, each of us will minister effectively only to certain people.
Better, says Brown, to view church ministry as a river. When people enter the river, we are called to bring gospel and discipleship into their lives for as long as they remain in the water. But sooner or later, most move on (how many in your church today were there five years ago?), but the important thing is what God has put into their lives while they have been with us.
The measure of ministry is not how wide is the river; it is the degree to which people flow toward godliness and fruitfulness while in our tributary.
Chicago hope
Inspired by this new paradigm, in 1995 I became pastor of a church of 35 people that meets in a high-rise in downtown Chicago. I answered this call with a conscious determination that I would not fall back into numbers-obsession. I would focus on the quality of our ministry in evangelism and discipleship, and trust that quantity is a by-product left up to Christ.
That resolve enabled me to enter this next stage of pastoring with more joy than anything I have ever done. On my first Sunday, I wanted to tell God over and over again how thankful I was that he had allowed me to pastor. It also brought me to a place where I can honestly say, three years into this ministry, that discouragement has been rare for me.
It hasn’t been easy. We’ve seen growth in individuals, but we’re still around 35 on a Sunday morning. And I’m sensing insecurity in some of our people. They want to grow, as I do, but they’re also concerned that I will lose heart and leave. I reassure them that I’m in for the long haul, Lord willing.
A few weeks ago, a man called me on Sunday morning and asked about attending our church. Toward the end of the conversation, he asked how large our church was. After I told him, he said, “I was looking for a larger church. Can you recommend one in your area?”
I gave him the phone number of the largest church in the city. After I hung up I realized something wonderful: I was not the least bit resentful or discouraged about what he had said. I smiled at the thought, picked up my Bible, and went to minister to those whom God would bring my way that day.
I was free.
Craig Brian Larson is pastor of Lake Shore Assembly of God in Chicago.
1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.
