Amazing Grace

There’s no defeat, in truth, save from within;
Unless you’re beaten there, you’re bound to win!
Henry Austin

Thy part is with broken saber
To rise on the last redoubt.
Louise Imogen Guiney

In 1928 Alexander Fleming made a careless mistake, which wasn’t his custom. He had completed university and medical school with academic distinction and served with honor in the army medical corps in World War I. Then he returned to research and teaching at the Royal College of Surgeons, trying to find antibacterial substances that would be nontoxic to animal tissues. And he had achieved a measure of success.

While researching influenza, however, he somehow contaminated a staphylococcus culture dish with mold and ruined the culture.

That uncharacteristically careless act resulted in what has been termed a “triumph of accident and shrewd observation,” for Fleming noticed the mold had produced a bacteriafree spot in the previously thriving staphylococcus colony. Upon further investigation, he observed the mold produced a substance that prevented staphylococcus growth, even when diluted eight hundred times. He christened that substance penicillin, and medicine has not been the same since.

For his mistake, Fleming was knighted, and in 1945 shared the Nobel prize. Because of Sir Alexander Fleming’s mistake, hundreds of thousands of people have been healed and even saved from death. We could use more mistakes of that sort.

When another man was but seven years old, his family was forced out of their home on a legal technicality, and he had to begin working to help support them.

At age nine, his mother died.

At twenty-two, he lost his job as a store clerk. He wanted to go to law school, but his education wasn’t good enough.

At twenty-three, he went into debt to become a partner in a small store. Three years later his business partner died, leaving him a huge debt that took years to repay.

At twenty-eight, after courting a girl for four years, he asked her to marry him. She said no.

At thirty-seven, on his third try, he was elected to Congress, but two years later he failed to be reelected.

At forty-one, his four-year-old son died.

At forty-five, he ran for the Senate and lost.

At forty-seven, he failed as the vice-presidential candidate.

At forty-nine, he ran for the Senate again, and lost.

At fifty-one, he was elected President of the United States.

Abraham Lincoln is considered by many to be the greatest leader this country has ever produced. Yet in his day, even as president, many considered him a failure.

Today in schoolrooms across the United States, students study the Gettysburg Address as a triumph of composition. Yet in 1863 it was greeted with hostile reviews. The Patriot and Union said of his speech: “The President succeeded on this occasion because he acted without sense and without constraint in a panorama that was gotten up more for the benefit of his party than for the glory of the nation and the honor of the dead.… We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”

In a like manner the Chicago Times wrote: “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”

What a failure this bumbling president must have been! We could use more failures like him.

To Err Is Human; to Benefit Is Grace

Not all mistakes cause failure, and not all failures remain so. Amazing grace often intervenes.

William A. Ward observed:

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker.…

“Failure is delay, not defeat.…

“It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end street.”

The mistakes a pastor makes along the way, even the big ones, can usually be weathered, even though they leave their marks. Often the imprint of those hard mistakes becomes a source of character far surpassing anything learned in soft prosperity.

So should we err that character may abound? No, but once an error is committed, grace may guide the course toward a positive outcome.

Why do some pastors crumple under the effects of a mistake, while others gain backbone and grow strong through the process? Perhaps the answer lies in the attitude of living through mistakes in the presence of God. Solomon wrote: “My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Prov. 2:1-6).

In pastor after pastor I interviewed for this book, I observed wisdom and sensitivity engendered by past mistakes. As they told their stories, their eyes and voices indicated the pain they had borne, the guilt, the humiliation, the sorrow. But for the most part, their lives and ministries evidenced stiffer resolution and greater clarity of purpose. They had learned to place their mistakes in perspective, gain wisdom from the experience, and live with the grace of God.

The driven achiever was wounded, and thus made more human, more compassionate with the pains and struggles of his parishioners. The cocky theorist had his misconceptions pierced, but deflated, more vulnerable, he has a much more effective ministry. The hesitant soul unsure of his ideas and afraid of every step fumbled the ball anyway, but found he could survive the experience and even learn from it. He’s less timid now. The cold husband now cherishes his wife. The fiercely independent pastor now values his colleagues. And on and on.

Ministry mistakes may leave their scars — broken marriages, wasted years, lowered horizons, injured relationships, misdirected congregations, a snickering world — but they also can sharpen the mind and temper the soul. The Comforter intervenes to help pastors learn from mistakes and grow through them. Those who emerge from mistakes with their attitudes softened and their character honed are the better for their testing.

The Greening of a Pastor

Bob Rhoden arrived in Richmond, Virginia, in 1969 with a Bible in his hand and a dream in his heart. Fresh from school at twenty-six years of age, he intended to establish a great church to minister to folks on Richmond’s growing fringe. West End Assembly of God got off the ground with twelve people, but it’s closer to one hundred times that figure today. In the intervening years, Bob made some mistakes and learned a few lessons. He tells about the major one:

As I look back on my early days of ministry, I must confess I didn’t really know how to pastor. I didn’t come into ministry with much background. I hadn’t grown up the son of a pastor or enjoyed any great mentor. My schooling was not in the area of pastoring. So whatever I learned, I had to gain by trial and error.

But lack of background didn’t keep me from grand ambition. I wanted to be successful, and the only measure for success I understood was numbers. And starting out with a mere handful does tend to make a crowd look pretty good.

I began to schedule the kinds of events that would draw an audience. My method was to book as many as I could. Around the big events, I tried to weave the other elements of ministry, like preaching and evangelism and discipleship. Before long, we developed a reputation as an exciting place to be. People started coming to see if our reputation was true.

In a city with three or four churches using this kind of event programming, you end up with a crowd of followers who “want to be where the glory comes down.” People flock to one church or another in search of excitement, not commitment. And that’s the major problem.

I patterned West End Assembly as a Christian center, not a church. A center is a place where attention is focused on the needs of the individuals rather than on what they can give to God. There’s not much said about involvement; the focus is on “what I can get from this meeting.”

Our ministry was built on false expectations. People came with the idea that this meeting was going to be bigger and better than the last one. They were pumped up, wondering, What’s going to happen tonight? So the church staff found itself on edge, constantly having to provide a better extravaganza, a greater thrill, a steeper emotional ride — for basically uncommitted people.

At the time, I thought I was building a church. I was doing the things that brought people. The institution was growing. We were definitely out of the tiny stage and on our way to bigness. But my understanding of the church had not been refined. We were on our way, but I got us off on the wrong foot.

We had no way of integrating people into the life of the church. There was little sense of family, little commitment. For instance, I couldn’t even depend on consistent attendance. If I didn’t promote some exciting event any given week, practically nobody would show up. If some unknown singer was scheduled, only fifty people would come, rather than the five hundred who would come for a big-name entertainer. We had a flock of groupies looking for the best show in town.

When we started hiring staff, we discovered the people didn’t actually consider our staff their pastors. Merely attending the events at our church didn’t give them a sense of being under our care. They didn’t pay their share of pastoral salaries. They would leave a good offering at an event, but they weren’t prepared to underwrite a church program.

Then we made another strategic mistake. Because we had so many people coming to our events, we decided to emphasize what we thought was our strength. We concluded we needed more room. The leaders and I thought the right way to build would be to pay as we go. We tried to sell our decision to the congregation, giving them all the reasons why this was the proper course. We came up with projections of growth and income. We showed how we absolutely had to have the building and how the new people it brought in would help us pay for it.

But the people weren’t with us. Many said we were presumptuous and unrealistic. But we went ahead anyway, thinking we knew better. It wasn’t long, however, before the projected costs of this new building escalated beyond our ability to pay.

By this time, however, we were deeply into the project. We had to back off from our original projection. The leaders agreed we needed to take out a loan to pay for part of the building costs. Since we had given the original sales job such a spiritual flavor — “God has told us to do this!” — we then came across rather poorly, saying, “Well, now, maybe God didn’t tell us to do it.” With all this backpedaling, our credibility as wise leaders was shot.

We invited some of the high-powered critical members to meet with the elders and deacons. We said, “Let’s get together and talk this through.” The meeting turned out to be a barroom brawl as they told us flatly, “You need to file for bankruptcy and put the church in the hands of a receivership.”

I arched my back and declared, “We’re not going to do that!” Tempers rose. The meeting degenerated from there.

One of the critics finally said to a deacon, “Do you want to step outside and settle it?” It was not an idle threat.

An elder who is an FBI agent happened to be sitting between the two, and he stood up and said, “Hey! This is no place to talk like that.”

The deacon who had been challenged said, “I’m leaving!” and walked out. The other guy remained, red faced. He muttered something like, “I shouldn’t have said that. I probably spoke too soon,” although it was hardly an apology. We tried to smooth things over, but I was so upset I don’t even remember now how the meeting ended, though I remember being there until 3 a.m.

Our problem had become enmeshed with personalities. People were as upset with each other as they were with the crumbling building plans, and I had to take blame for the fiasco. I had given members the sense that I was not a good financial manager. It was true; I had not managed the building project well. The disgruntled people, some of our heaviest contributors, saw me as the incompetent president of the company, and I think, at that point, some were actually anxious to see me fail so the church would fall into different hands.

Everything was on the line — my ministry, our vision for the church, even the existence of the church — and we knew it.

The church was walking through the motions of a plan they considered my dream, not their own. People began coming to church not to grow spiritually but to find out how much money we owed. This state of affairs was partly a function of bad decisions, but more fundamentally of people’s expectations for the church — what I had unfortunately led them to believe a church was about.

How do we get out of this? I wondered. I had to come up with some kind of solution. Our church has a saying: “If we do the natural, God will do the supernatural.” So we did the natural.

At the time, I had two other staff pastors and two lay elders on our leadership team. When we gained some presence of mind, we started to ask, “Okay, how is God at work in this mess?” The five of us decided to get apart for a retreat to analyze what was going on. We knew we couldn’t keep grabbing at air.

On that retreat, we didn’t actually come up with the center-versus-church idea, but we did realize we needed to do something about commitment. Over the next few weeks we slowly came to the conclusion that our church was nothing but a center, a gathering place for people not integrated into the life of the congregation.

We started talking about commitment with the members and leaders at every opportunity. We made it our theme for the year. I preached on commitment, and we did Bible studies about it. I’d like to say our brilliant revelation was met with resounding cheers, but actually it was very unpopular. Our attendance decreased when we stopped having so many special guest speakers. But rather than thinking “How many people will this speaker bring in?” our criterion was “How will the speaker further the purpose of our church?”

Still the building problem hung over our heads. At one meeting our associate pastor volunteered, “You know, if we had something that could get our eyes off this and onto something more significant, we would be better off.” The idea caught us, and we started throwing around wild ideas. Finally we settled on a plan only Christians would consider: We agreed to help a congregation in the Dominican Republic by building a church for them — we who couldn’t even agree on our own building!

When you think about it, it’s ridiculous. There we were, owing more money than we thought we could find to build our own church, yet we were considering building one for someone else. All the leadership agreed on it. All the people, too. It didn’t matter which side of our building problem people were on, they liked the idea.

With little effort, we got twenty people to go, paying five hundred dollars apiece for plane tickets. The church quickly raised nearly twelve thousand dollars for the Dominican building. The people went and the church prayed, and it was a marvelous success.

I think the genius of the project was that it was right. It was a good thing to do. It drew us together for a manageable problem that was focused outside our own petty bickering. The prevailing notion seemed to be: “Here is a common project we can work on, and let’s believe somehow we are going to get our problems taken care of in the midst of it.”

We put up our own building after that and got it paid for promptly. And we did it with a new sense of unity. In the months following that experience, we came up with a church theme: Touching People. As I reoriented my organizational model from a Christian center to a loving, committed church, we found we could grow together as a family.

We did lose some people. The man who challenged the other to a fight left along with about thirty-five others six months later.

Our church has nearly doubled since that time. We’re even thinking of expanding our facilities again, and the best part about that is, all the decisions to this point have been unanimous!

Bob Rhoden came close to seeing his dream for the church crumble, if not his very call. He had to shoulder responsibility for a cluster of mistakes that brought him to that point. But what I found in Bob, and witnessed over and over again in other pastors’ stories, is that most pastors don’t remain locked in the grief of their mistakes.

Bob took some proper steps, and the Holy Spirit met him more than halfway. Renovation was the outcome. But even renovation is a weak word, for it implies Bob returned to his previous state following the mistake. Bob was not brought back to an existing condition; he was pushed forward to a new level of maturity in ministry. And the church Bob brought through his trial emerged, with him, the better for it.

It doesn’t happen only for Bob — or Stan or Josh or Mark. The apostle Paul, that dauntless first-century pastor, well understood the path a life can take after even the worst of mistakes. Late in life he wrote, “Not that I have … already been made perfect, but … one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:12-14).

That’s what God does in a life. That’s how he works.

Mankind devolves to the Flood (obviously the end) yet grows again through Noah’s seed. Abraham, whose offspring would be as uncountable as the stars in the heavens, grows ancient without a single legitimate heir (ha!) but eventually becomes the father of a great nation. Jesus Christ dies (cruel twist) but is raised the absolute Conqueror of death and King of Kings. God is the master of imparting winning spin to tricky shots. This same God can rescue us from the effects of errors any of us may perpetrate in ministry.

The psalmist writes: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust” (Ps. 103:13-14).

Dust indeed, but cherished dust — dust “a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned … with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5).

The dust makes mistakes, but the Lord, the Redeemer of dust, has a different outcome in mind: perfection, transformation, Christlikeness. God wants us to accomplish all he plans for us, and the path to that accomplishment leads us through — and beyond — mistakes.