We specialized not in prescriptions but in diagnosis.
—Raymond Bakke
John Wooden, the successful basketball coach at UCLA for many years, can teach us something about pastoring.
When Wooden began his “ministry” of coaching, he won a national championship with a team whose tallest member was only six feet five inches. He had a fast-guard offense, a high post, and a lot of backdoor plays and quick screens. Wooden kept his players moving all over the court.
Then he was fortunate enough to recruit a couple of seven-foot centers, so he totally changed his system. He went to a low-post and strong-forward system. And he kept winning championships.
For Wooden, the goal was to win, not to run a particular offense. He changed to incorporate the gifts of his players.
Pastoral ministry demands similar flexibility. If Wooden was a pastor, he wouldn’t insist on preaching the same way everywhere. He wouldn’t try to run the same church program in every context. Pastors need to understand the environment in which we’re called to preach the Word. We need to exegete both the Word and the world.
Exegeting my church
If we don’t take time to understand the environment of our ministry, we’re in danger of franchising it. Instead, we need to custom-build each ministry—move into a community, exegete the context, exegete the Scripture, and bring the two together.
I pastored ten years in the inner-city Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park. To exegete the culture the first thing I did was get to know the loyal core that had kept that church alive over the years. Their urban church was now declining. It was losing touch with its community and prided itself on programs that ran every night whether anybody needed them or not. Meanwhile houses on the block were burning, and the neighborhood was up for grabs.
So I turned away from programs. That wasn’t easy for me. I had been associate pastor in three churches during college and seminary and had been a master of programming. I even received the Christian education director-of-the-year award from the local Sunday school association. I knew how to run programs. But if you’re going to catch fish, you have to change the bait and go where the fish are.
What really taught me the importance of this was reading the story of Henry Ford in Amitai Etzioni’s Modern Organizations. Ford made a perfect car, the Model T, that ended the need for any other car. He wanted to fill the world with Model T cars. But when people started saying, “Mr. Ford, we’d like a different color car,” he remarked, “You can have any color you want as long as it’s black.” And that’s when the decline started.
Back in Humboldt Park, I saw churches doing the same thing. Pastors were franchising programs rather than doing what an anthropologist does—learn the language and communicate Jesus with concepts people understand.
I had to learn that the hard way. I tried to run youth retreats at out-of-town camps. But when I invited Spanish kids and black kids from the neighborhood, some white parents resisted. The camp retreat program didn’t work here.
So I went back to the basics. Eleven people ran the Fairfield Church, the youngest of whom was 54. They provided 90 percent of the funds. I spent an evening with each one and asked three questions:
1.How did you become a Christian?
2.What is your history with this church?
3.If you could wave a magic wand and bring about a future for the church, what would it look like?
On the way home, I dictated my responses to those interviews and later studied the transcriptions.
I was profoundly moved by those eleven people and their commitment to this church. At the same time I realized they didn’t want to change. Because the world outside their doors was fluctuating so dramatically, they wanted to grab the church and say, “I dare you to change it!” It wasn’t because they were inflexible people—as young people they had gone through a dramatic Swedish-to-English language change. But now, because they were proud of what their church had been, they were resisting another major change to make their church more relevant to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. They had come full circle; now they were the group resisting change.
Their expectations of what the church should be were almost completely different from mine. They wanted a shepherd to feed the sheep. I was up there saying, “Onward, Christian soldiers!” That’s what you call a conflict of images, of expectations. (Both are biblical—in fact, there are almost a hundred different images of the church in the New Testament; the context a church finds itself in decides which models are most appropriate.) I decided that if the church were to survive, I needed to disciple one new board member per year, to replace the ones who would be moving away. It would take at least five years before the board would commit to change. That’s what it took.
We were in effect replacing many of the backward-looking people with forward-looking ones. But you need both. In pastoral work, this means taking the ethos of a group of people—the great memories and traditions of the church—and showing how they can be translated into present-day deeds that best serve the future.
One way we did this at Fairfield Church was to hold monthly memory dinners at which we could remember how God had blessed us. I began to lift up their memory. I had an older Swedish woman tell me stories by the hour of the great acts of God in the church’s past. Then, when I was preaching about something contemporary, I could say, “What I’m asking you to do is not new; this church did this back in 1902.” I became a broker of their memory rather than somebody trying to take away the church and make them do things they didn’t want to do.
Understanding my neighborhood
I also made it a priority to exegete my neighborhood. I spent one day a week “networking.” I went to all the pastors in the neighborhood, introduced myself, and asked them, “What is the most important lesson you have learned about being a pastor in this neighborhood?” Some of them took me by the hand and showed me the community—where kids hang out, where drugs are dropped, where things happen.
I also visited all the agencies in the community. At the police station, I asked, “What kinds of arrests do you make in this neighborhood?” I went to the schools and asked the principals, “What kinds of school problems do you have?” I went to the public-aid office and the legal-aid clinic. I went to forty-four agencies the first year.
I also visited businesses. I met presidents and personnel managers. They told me the history of their businesses, the way they related to the community, the problems they had doing business here. The barber, the gas station attendant, the person who runs the fruit market—these people can tell you better than anyone what makes the neighborhood tick.
Such networking, of course, leads to opportunities for ministry. In one case the owner of a little factory with eighty employees told me he needed people who could run machines. Over the years, I sent him a number of people. In another case, someone walked in the office in desperate financial trouble because his social security checks weren’t coming. Well, I had been to the social security office and knew whom to call, so I cut through a lot of red tape quickly.
Networking also made me streetwise to the con games people try to play on churches, especially young ministers. I could say to a public-aid mother playing a rip-off game, “I really admire you. You’re like a mother in the Bible, Moses’ mother. During a hard time she let her baby son float down the river to the princess who eventually hired her to mother her own child. I have a feeling you’re a little like that.” (There’s always a way to affirm a person without getting conned.)
Five distinct groups
To educate myself further about the people I was pastoring, I studied ethnic backgrounds and cultural units. I was a country boy surrounded by strange people. I identified at least five groups I needed to study: youth gangs, Swedes, Appalachians, Puerto Ricans, and Poles.
The youths in the neighborhood all belonged to gangs, so I studied gang structure and how to work with them. I learned these groups miss certain things in the mainline culture, such as a feeling of belonging to something. But when they try to create these things on their own, they sometimes exaggerate them, and the gang becomes deviant.
I came to a church pastored by old Swedes, so I studied Viking history. I learned it took one thousand years for German missionaries to make Swedish Baptists out of violent Vikings. I studied the missions strategy used to bring about that conversion. And I preached about that on a day after two Puerto Rican kids were killed in our neighborhood. I said, “Who better than a Swedish Baptist church to be in the middle of this violent community? We’ve been through this before—on the other side. Maybe it will only take five hundred years for us to convert Puerto Ricans.” That’s how I used people’s history in my preaching.
I also studied the Appalachians. I had a problem with them: If their kids got too involved in the church, often the parents pulled them out. I couldn’t understand what was happening until I learned about clan structure. In the hills of Kentucky, the patriarch of a clan is powerful. But in the inner city he loses much of his power. I realized I was competing with the father, who was feeling emasculated. So I changed the way I dealt with them.
When you pastor a clan culture, the significant events are weddings, funerals, fires, and fishing seasons—these get the clan together. I stopped seeing people as individuals and began ministering to a whole clan as much as possible. Our missionary strategy could no longer be to look around the fringes of a group for some disaffected person being disciplined by the tribe.
I studied the Puerto Ricans and began to understand their feelings of being used. Five European nations conquered Puerto Rico in a period of three hundred years, using it as a military colony while they plundered South American gold. In the first year of their independence in 1898, we became the sixth outside power to occupy them. Now there are more Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland than in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, about 65 percent of the Puerto Rican population is on public aid. Learning this made me far more sensitive to their feelings of disenfranchisement.
Learning their history and telling the great stories of Puerto Rico from the pulpit really affirmed the Puerto Ricans in our church. The same with the Polish and the Irish. It built a great sense of identification with the church.
Clearly we didn’t worry too much about homogeneous units—although in some cases it’s a useful principle. I had a student named Craig Burton who started a church in Chicago’s Loop. Before he started, he asked, “Who is unreached in the Loop?” He profiled a twenty-five- to forty-five-year-old, bar-hopping, wine-and-cheese-party-going, vocationally-identified professional. After getting a feel for these people, he asked himself, “What would a church have to look like to reach them, and how would I have to pastor it?”
That’s using the homogeneous principle to good advantage. I have trouble, however, when the principle is misused to resegregate the body of Christ. I’ve seen pastors work in just the opposite way Craig did. They say, “I’m going to find out what I’m comfortable with and then build a church out of those people.” That cuts the nerve of any sense of mission into the world. This country is internationalizing, and our churches have to deal with that. At such a time we can’t afford to cater to a siege mentality.
This has become especially real to me since we adopted a black son. One of my other sons brought him home one day, and Brian stayed. Eventually we went to court and made it legal. It was electric in the Fairfield Avenue Church for the pastor to have a son who was not white. It affirmed a lot of things about our ministry. A church with a racially mixed membership roll can model care in a world of prejudice.
Helping the church understand itself
Another big part of the pastoral task is discovering people’s expectations. You must discover them for two reasons: so you can effectively speak to them, and so you can make the people aware of them if they aren’t already. You study the church’s history, read the annual reports, find out where they spent their money—which may contradict what they say they want to do. You don’t have to be in total agreement with those expectations. But that’s where you have to start.
If I were pastoring the Loop church Craig Burton started, I might take a group on a retreat and lead them through an exercise of designing a logo for their church. I’d give them four ground rules:
First, the logo must be biblically and theologically sound. We’d see who they were spiritually, what they considered central to their beliefs.
Second, the logo must have some sense of history. As I mentioned before, these people see themselves not as cultural or ethnic groups but as vocational groups. But even then they bring history to any situation, and that will show up in subtle ways. They may have been the protesters of the sixties, or involved with the Jesus people. Those experiences still affect their lives.
Third, the logo must communicate God’s concern for people, the pastoral dimension.
Fourth, it must be intelligible to the unchurched as well as to members.
After agreeing on a logo, we would discuss it. “Does this capture who we are?” If the answer is yes, then I would suggest using the logo to identify Loop Church in the future.
Exegeting the culture in this case means studying the tradition not of an ethnic group but of a cultural one.
Missionary calling
Often when we exegete the culture of our church and town, we will come face-to-face with how different we are from the people to whom we feel called to minister. You’re called to Poplar Bluff, Missouri, for example, and you’re originally from Boston. In such circumstances how much of a chameleon should you be? Should you buy a pickup truck and listen to country music?
These are missionary questions. You have clearly crossed a culture to minister, and you’re doing just what a missionary is doing. You’re stammering in a new language, trying to understand how people think, and trying to keep from thinking your culture is superior. Yes, you may want to buy a pickup. Try out the culture. You may come to love it.
But you may never love that culture; in fact you may hate it. The ability to be bicultural is a gift, so if you don’t have it, that’s God’s will. But I think it’s a more widely distributed gift than people allow for. It’s one I covet for myself and others. Pastors need to give a church a good shot before they decide it’s not for them.
After ten years at Fairfield Church I felt God telling me to move on. I was gratified by the progress we saw. When I came in 1969, we had about 100 members on the roll, mostly poor families. We had a fairly significant youth group but no middle class and no middle age. Sunday attendance averaged between 110 and 120. The neighborhood was just starting to change; we had a turnover rate of 70 percent on the block that first year. Many of the white people moved away, so the bottom dropped out of our traditional “market.”
Still, we managed to survive, even grow a little. When I left, we had about 140 members. We had helped spawn seven Spanish daughter churches. If you added up all the ministries of Fairfield Church, we were touching at least 200 families a week. We had many ways of reaching out and touching people but never tried to pull it all into one building. Our theory was that in a diverse neighborhood, smaller, multiple churches were the way to go.
What enabled us to have such a diverse and, others say, effective ministry was the effort we put into understanding the church and the neighborhood. When we came to Humboldt Park, we specialized not in prescriptions but in diagnosis.
Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today
