When Stuart Briscoe took his first (and only) pastorate, his friend Alan Redpath, former pastor of Moody Memorial Church, told him, “I know you, and I know the pastorate; and I doubt if you’ll last 12 months.”
His prediction was wrong—by 29 years.
Stuart and his wife, Jill, left England in 1970 for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city Dwight L. Moody called the “graveyard of evangelists.”
Rather than being buried, however, the Briscoes were planted at Elmbrook Church for 30 years. The result has been phenomenal numerical and spiritual growth of the church (eight daughter churches have been planted around Milwaukee) and the development of the couple’s international preaching and teaching ministry.
Now, even after transitioning from Stuart’s senior pastorate to their new role as joint ministers-at-large, the Briscoes continue to expand their ministry. Stuart tells of flying over Africa and gazing across the bush at the fires of a thousand villages. “Out there are little churches with pastors who have little help and very little encouragement. This is where we need to be.”
Evidence of their mission of encouragement can be seen from Barnabas Boulevard (the name of one of Elmbrook’s parking lots), to the narthex (where stands of photographs show the Briscoes speaking all around the world), to Jill’s words in one of her many books:
“Give my words wings, Lord.
“May they fly high enough to reach the lofty, low enough to breathe the breath of sweet encouragement upon the downcast soul.”
Leadership editors Marshall Shelley, Eric Reed, and Drew Zahn traveled to Elmbrook to ask the Briscoes about the temptations and graces of a lifetime of ministry.
Let’s go back in time 30 years. Stuart, you’re an evangelist, and Jill, you’re at home in England raising a family. Why did you uproot and cross an ocean to pastor a church in Milwaukee?
Stuart: I had no previous experience in a vital church, none at all. My attitude at the time was, “I’m all in favor of Jesus Christ, but forget about the church.”
Jill: My experience with the church consisted of bringing in street children who had found the Lord, only to be asked to leave—with the kids—because they weren’t well behaved.
Stuart: Someone challenged me, “Stuart, the problem with your theology is that it incorporates no ecclesiology.” This brought me up short. He was right.
As I started to read about the church in Ephesians, I grew excited thinking of what the body of Christ could become. I wanted to see if the idealism in Ephesians could actually be translated into a local geographical situation.
So becoming a pastor was a grand experiment?
Stuart: Very much so. But there was also the family consideration.
Jill: We’d had eleven years in Torchbearers, and Stuart’s job necessitated him being away long periods of time, helping to establish the mission around the world. I was really struggling. One year Stuart was on the road for nine months.
I’d watched the models around me in that particular mission and realized the children would never have the opportunity to know their dad. With the kids at eleven, nine, and seven, the opportunity was too good. I cherished the thought of the children, with their dad in the pastorate, seeing him almost every day.
Both of you came into the pastorate with only negative church experiences. Now you were leading a congregation. What struggles did that present?
Stuart: My huge trepidation was this: I have not a clue what I’m supposed to do. I’ve never done this. I’ve never been trained for this.
On my opening Sunday at the church, I told them, “You’re either the most courageous or the most stupid group of people on the North American continent.
“All I’ve got to offer you is that I know an excellent book on the subject (the Bible), and I will read it and mark it and learn it and digest it and teach it. All I ask is that you be willing to join me in doing it.”
Jill: I felt inadequate, too, because I had never belonged to a church before I became a pastor’s wife.
I remember my first church meeting. I was so excited. I went all bright-eyed, and I sat down next to a deacon.
But as the meeting progressed, anger and hostility began rising in the congregation. The issue was whether or not to accept certain forms of baptism, and the discussion grew heated. The deacon next to me started badmouthing my husband: “He’s arrived here and now he’s going to destroy this church.” I sat there not saying a thing. He was getting personal!
What’s a good pastor’s wife to do? I didn’t know. So I got up on my feet and quickly began making some defense of my husband. I got halfway through and burst into . …
Stuart: Not halfway through; halfway through the first sentence! (Laughter)
Jill: I burst into tears and rushed dramatically from the sanctuary. I darted out the door and arrived in the ladies’ room in a flood of tears.
It didn’t help me to hear Stuart saying as I left, “Thank you, Jill, for your contribution.” (Laughter)
A dear lady, who is now a liaison to the elder board and has been a mentor here all these years, arrived in the restroom and loved me and hugged me and after a while said, “Now, come on, dear. We have to go back.”
I said, “No, I’m not going. I’m never going! I’m going to get leukemia and die and God’s going to get Stuart an American wife who can do this job!”
And she said, “When you fall off the bicycle, you get back on the bicycle.” With an iron grip, she took my hand and she took me back.
At that point, the temptation of disillusionment must have been pretty powerful.
Jill: Stuart would come home and say things like, “I’ve taken more low blows in this year than I did in my entire previous career.” So, yes, you have this idealistic concept of mission, dreaming of a bubble where everyone is like Jesus, and you find that’s not so. You get disappointed and disillusioned.
You talk about Elijah under the broom tree saying, “I’ve had it, Lord.” I think all pastors at some point get to that.
Stuart: That’s right. All I was interested in was this organic body of Christ with disparate people being molded into a wonderful cooperation and coordination to bring untold blessing to Milwaukee. I knew the church was an organism. I’d overlooked the fact that all organisms have a structure.
Jill: And people.
Stuart: And people.
Jill: In those early days, we really didn’t know what we were doing, but our zeal caused us to try all kinds of crazy things. I remember clearly standing in the kitchen and saying, “How long do you think this will last? How long do you think we’ve got before they reckon this isn’t just because we’re British?”
Stuart: But because we really have no idea what we’re doing? (Laughter)
Jill: We began hitting bumps right away. It seemed as if the honeymoon tiptoed out the door as soon as we arrived.
Stuart: On the second or third Sunday of my ministry, our song leader didn’t show for the evening service. So I stood and asked if anyone had seen him.
After an awkward silence, someone whispered, “He quit. And his wife, the organist, she quit too.”
At the next deacons meeting, the deacons were busy discussing the resignation. After twenty minutes, I asked my first-ever question in a deacons meeting: “What are we doing?”
“We’re discussing his resignation.”
“Why?” I asked. “What is there to discuss?”
“We’re discussing whether to accept his resignation. He’s asking for a vote of confidence from the new pastor.”
That was a novel thought to me. “Tell him he hasn’t got it,” I said. “Why would I have any confidence in a fellow who quit without notice or explanation?”
That did it. A heated debate broke out, and now I was the subject. I learned that night for the first time that there was much disagreement and opposition about our call to Elmbrook.
Suddenly a bleakness like nothing we had known before entered our lives. We had left home and kindred, uprooted enthusiastically. We had “gone West” with a keen sense of moving to new horizons, only to discover them clouded and somber. We had responded to the call of God, only to discover opposition as we had never before known it.
Do you ever recover from such disillusionment?
Jill: There came a point when I said, “Stuart, we should never have given up a career and done this.” That was a definite low point in our ministry.
He said, “Let’s sit down and think what got us here. Look at our guideposts. We know we had to come, and until God leads us out as surely as he led us in, we’re staying.”
Looking back at the certainty of God’s calling confirmed we were in the right place. Theologically, that’s what helped us. We knew we were in the right place. It’s not about our disappointment or our feelings or our people. It’s about the God who brought us here and the things he called us to do.
The circumstances of the calling are secondary to the calling itself. We dare not move unless God directs.
What about those people who disappoint you? Isn’t there a temptation to dismiss them and say, “I’ll just do it myself”?
Jill: Five years into ministry, Stuart and I realized that we were like a pair of rugby players. We developed this great play between ourselves, throwing the ball back and forth, and we went into the game striving for the goal. But we left our teammates behind. We were exercising our gifts, our strengths, but the point of church is not the two of us showcasing our gifts; it’s helping other people play to their strengths.
The attitude “If you want a thing done properly, do it yourself” is totally wrong. We discovered over the years that decentralizing and diversifying enabled creativity to spring up. One of the reasons Elmbrook has flourished is because everyone feels ownership, feels needed.
Stuart: I distinctly remember when we were debating how big to build the new church, the chairman of the board said, “It doesn’t matter how big we build it, you’ll fill it with disgruntled people.”
“What?” I asked.
“You’re a superb motivater and a hopeless mobilizer,” he said. “You can’t just get people fired up and leave them with no idea what to do. It will simply frustrate them. You and Jill are self-starters and you assume everybody else is, but most people aren’t. You wonder why people aren’t committed enough to start something. It has nothing to do with commitment. It has everything to do with uncertainty, feelings of inadequacy, not knowing how.”
After that, I began to explore this whole business of diversity of gifting, diversity of ministries, and different ways of doing things. The role of the pastor is equipping the saints for ministry. You’ve got to put that deeply into a pastor’s heart. That’s where the real action is.
Jill: The whole experience taught me that my greatest joy in ministry is helping people put their gifts to work—multiplying ministry. I cherish giving the ministry away, discerning women who have gifts and pushing them off the deep end, swimming with them. That’s been a trip.
People constantly say to Stuart, “How are you keeping control of this?”
Stuart says, “I’m not. You have to trust people.”
Part of diversifying and growing leaders is discerning the potential in people and giving them responsibility. If you wait until somebody’s fully responsible, trained, and ready, you wait an awfully long time. The way to get them ready is to trust them before they’re responsible. It’s a risk, but nearly every time, our people have risen to it.
What’s your role as pastor in this? An indispensable element, or insignificant as God works with or without you?
Stuart: You have to understand that gifting is all about the Giver, not the receptor. And so if I am gifted, which I am, there’s no reason for me to get any grandiose ideas about it; I’m simply the receptor of what God has sovereignly given to me. This says nothing about me; it says much about him.
At the same time, there are gifts of wisdom and insight scattered throughout the whole church and you need to reckon with those as well.
So the pastor does have a significant role. It would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise. I am gifted and called to this. But everyone else in the church is also gifted and called to their role. My role is key, but it’s only one of the necessary parts of the whole. The pastor must be encouraging, discerning, developing the giftedness of all the people around him.
We’ve talked about the temptations of disillusionment and the urge to perform rather than equip. What recent temptations have you observed?
Stuart: One thing I see is a “failure of nerve,” particularly in preaching. Our culture urges us to include more and more music, drama, and other elements in ministry, pushing preaching to the back burner. We’re told not to bog things down with too much detail from the Word.
We’re told from communication theory that the monologue is the least effective way of effecting change.
But no one should ever confuse preaching with monologue. Preaching is delivered in an environment where the Holy Spirit is actively interpreting and infusing it. A Spirit-anointed preacher releasing the living Word in an environment where the Spirit of God is at work—no one should ever confuse that with monologue. Between the Spirit of God and the spirits of the people, it’s more a dialogue.
So the failure of nerve is the failure to really believe in the power of the Word?
Stuart: And the hard work that goes into preaching it.
The thing that alarms me after 30 years at Elmbrook is how much of Scripture we haven’t gotten to yet. I’m haunted by Paul, “I have not hesitated to teach you the whole counsel of God.” There’s no shortage of things to talk about, we just run out of time to address them all.
Jill: This “failure of nerve” brings to mind the opportunity I had to speak one year at the graduation of Patricia Stevens Beauty College. It was a totally secular opportunity, and I envisioned these cosmetology majors parading across the stage to get their diplomas, all identically primped and curled. I was going to turn it down, but Stuart said, “Oh, you have to do this.”
What do I say to these graduates and their parents? I was faced with the temptation to have a failure of nerve.
I bit the bullet and unashamedly based my talk on Scripture. I opened up to Isaiah 64 and the potter with the clay. I talked about how the exterior of pottery is pleasing to the eye, but how the potter needs to get his hands on the interior to shape things right, and I shared how to allow the Potter inside to do his work.
I was shaking, trying to balance using the opportunity to share the Word on one hand without abusing the opportunity they’d given me on the other.
Afterward, the president of the school asked to meet me backstage. He wanted the Potter inside. That incident convinced me that wherever I was speaking, I did not need to have a failure of nerve where the Word was concerned.
Many pastors today are also struggling with another failure—marriage failure. How have you maintained a strong marriage in ministry?
Stuart: Jill and I, before we met, were both struck with the principle, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Each of us was determined that if we found a life partner and established a family, the dominant theme of that family would be service.
Everything flows out of this understanding. In other words, right from the beginning there was no sense that ministry is the rival of marriage, but that marriage is the vehicle of ministry.
Jill: I hear pastors’ wives use the word “intrusion.” They ask, “How can I limit ministry’s intrusion into our marriage?” But we don’t see the ministry as a separate entity. Now that we’ve committed to each other, we can’t envision ministry without marriage, or marriage without ministry. The two are the same.
Stuart: We’ve got to avoid the whole ministry/marriage dichotomy. If two people become one, which is certainly what the Bible teaches, then what does that mean?
Jill: I speak to groups of pastors’ wives, and I’ll ask, “How many of you feel called to marriage?” Everyone raises a hand. Then I ask, “How many of you feel called to ministry?” Only half raise their hands. It’s that dichotomizing again.
It becomes, “As for him, he will serve the Lord,” but not the “me and my house.”
It shouldn’t be like that. The family mustn’t be God. Our guiding principle has been, “We will serve the Lord.” The ministry provides the service, the marriage—and family—provides the “we.”
I hear from youth pastors’ wives who resent their husbands for not tucking the children in at night. Well, youth ministry is a night job.
Stuart: Like selling insurance, it’s part of the job.
Jill: There must be a shared calling to ministry.
Stuart: Or ministry becomes the opponent of marriage and vice versa.
Jill: Stuart has described it well: “You can sacrifice marriage on the altar of ministry, or you can sacrifice ministry on the altar of marriage.” In many ways in America we’re in danger of the second. In the attempt to help marriages that are falling apart, we’ve circled the wagons to protect marriage from the bandits of ministry. It makes ministry a threat, something to be held at arm’s length.
Stuart: There was a time in itinerate ministry when I would be gone for long periods of time, and Jill was basically raising the children on her own. The ministry was very demanding on our relationship, severely limiting our time together.
But we regarded that as a matter of calling. We were agreed that God had called us to this. We knew it was abnormal; we expected our life to be abnormal. But we believed if God had called us to an abnormal situation, there would be unusual enabling there.
There did come a point at which I became insensitive to the stress this was putting on Jill. It really hit me when I was reading Ephesians 5, where Paul says the husband is to love the wife as Christ loves the church and gave himself up for the church.
I asked myself, “What in the world have I ever given up for Jill?” I couldn’t think of anything.
I reasoned if Jill is going to be nurtured by me as the church is nurtured by Christ, then she needs a whole lot more encouraging than what she’d gotten to that point from me.
At the same time, I was challenged by the parable of the talents and the rebuke of the man who buried his talents. I realized that’s exactly what we were doing with Jill—burying her talents.
There’s a very real temptation for a man here—to hide behind headship and say, headship means head honcho, and a wife simply comes along for the ride, not realizing that to be the head means “responsible to nurture, encourage, and develop.”
Jill: I would never have written a book, and I would not be doing what I’m doing today if Stuart hadn’t seen that theologically. All my gifts could have sat with hats on because I was content to leave them undeveloped. Only later did I come to his theological conclusions, and it was frightening to do what he then began to insist I do.
Stuart: God knew what he was doing when he brought these two disparate called and gifted people and blended them into a new entity. There’s a great humor in this. Two diverse people becoming one requires humor, humility, and the ability to adjust.
As you now move to a new season of life, what temptations do you anticipate?
Stuart: As I turned 70 and completed 30 years at Elmbrook, I concluded that at my stage of life, there are three things that can happen to a pastor: you can be carried out, you can be kicked out, or you can walk out.
As I’m totally committed to self-preservation, I decided to walk out. (Laughter)
Elmbrook has been incredibly gracious to us as we stepped down. They said, “You have a lot to offer still. Be our ministers-at-large.” Immediately they commissioned us to that ministry.
Jill: And Elmbrook called Mel Lawrenz, who served for 10 years as our senior associate pastor, to become the new senior pastor. We’re delighted to serve under Mel’s leadership.
Stuart: This, however, leads to the temptation of having technically taken our hands off, but not practically keeping them off. I’ve told the staff, “I don’t think I’ll have any problems taking my hands off. I may have difficulty keeping my nose out.”
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