Scan the brochures that hit a pastor’s desk, and you’d assume the greatest challenge facing pastors today is providing leadership. Many conferences pledge to help with casting vision so you can, to paraphrase Star Trek, “boldly lead where no pastor has led before.”
But as difficult as leadership is, pastors face a greater challenge: to love the ordinary church.
It’s hard to lead; it’s even harder to love. And to love an ordinary church requires a lifetime of spiritual growth.
On blue Mondays, we may wistfully long to pastor the extraordinary church—the kind that’s growing, that boasts great lay leaders and spiritual intensity and power, that offers PowerPoint presentations, a cool Web site, and conferences to help ordinary churches become extraordinary.
But in our saner moments we remember that even the high-visibility congregation is an odd-lots assortment of messed-up people who found Jesus. A cutting-edge worship band does not eliminate parishioners’ Original Sin. Every pastor faces that most difficult of tasks: to love the ordinary, and often unlovely, church.
An ordinary church has at least one ineffective but entrenched worker. It lacks vision (or more commonly, has enough vision but no idea how to achieve it). In the ordinary church, miscommunications and misunderstandings arise from pride or from people simply not reading the bulletin. Traditions have outlived their usefulness, but people feel attached to them, and there are never enough Sunday school teachers. Did I mention that there’s not enough money, too little parking, and the facility needs work?
Professor and church consultant Gary L. McIntosh often asks pastors at his seminars, “If you weren’t the pastor, would you attend your church?” The overwhelming response: No.
It’s hard to lead; it’s even harder to love.
But it is precisely here that we can, if we want to, grow spiritually and become more like Jesus Christ. We can choose to embrace the ordinary community of sinners God has given to us.
The leadership DNA of Jesus is to love the unlovely: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “He came to his own, and they received him not.” “Where are the other nine?” “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have wanted to gather you under my wings.” Jesus spent his life not just providing leadership to a dozen apostles, but loving ordinary, ornery, ungrateful, and hateful people. He decided they were worth everything he had.
A. W. Tozer called this kind of discipleship the School of Renunciation. It’s a difficult graduate school, for it calls us to not brush off the parishioner who expects us to fill her every childhood deficit, to be patient with the listless and unproductive committee, to extend grace to the amateur musician, to try to understand the no-show volunteer. The final exam: to do all this, knowing that while we love the ordinary church, we may never lead the conferences that other pastors drive long distances to attend.
Over time, we may even come to see loving the ordinary church no longer as a sacrifice but a privilege. Why would God allow us, weak and errant as we are, to serve a group he died for? To enjoy Christian fellowship when so many believers endure persecution isolated and alone? To study and to preach his Word?
Our longing for an extraordinary church is good, only impatient or misdirected, for someday God will gloriously fulfill our longing. We look for the extraordinary church on earth, but the assembly of souls made perfect is waiting for every Christian pastor in heaven.
In the meantime, we’ve been given the church Christ died for, and a lifetime to learn from him how to love it.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
