If you accept the notion that a church can have a mission (other than shepherding), then you will take on a strategy of leveraging your time in the areas that will bring the greatest payoff.
—Carl F. George
Pastors make many decisions every day, but too often they are handicapped because they almost inevitably think only in moralistic terms: rightness versus wrongness. “What’s the right thing to do? What ought to be done?”
But there are other modes to consider: effective versus ineffective, good versus best, safe versus risky.
I’m not dismissing the moral dimension—virtually every decision has a moral aspect, either in its consequences or in the way the decision will be implemented. And most of us in the ministry carry an intuitive desire to reach for the godly, to hear the words of God on a given issue and line up with him rather than against him. But not all church administration deals with Mount Sinai issues. Many decisions are more mundane and subtle, yet they still require thought.
Time evaluation
Of the range of decisions a pastor faces, one of the toughest ones, in my judgment, is what to do with one’s time on a daily basis. When I ask a pastor, “Who are you going to call on this week?” and the pastor says, “Well, I have seven sick people, a couple of appointments from the new-members class … and I suppose other people will call during the week about various things.…”—he is basically playing fire fighter. He’s waiting for the bell to ring (or the axle to squeak, or the Spirit to move). He doesn’t see that there is such a thing as taking intelligent initiative in the area of contacts.
This same person may be very conscientious about sermon topics, laying out an annual preaching plan. He may be very intentional about selecting themes and texts. But when it comes to people, he’s a shepherd waiting for the lost sheep to show up, listening for a call from the wild.
If you take the notion that a church can have a mission (other than shepherding), then you will take on a strategy of leveraging your time in the areas that will bring the greatest payoff. You’ll spend it with the key contacts who have the potential to lead others. You’ll seek out those who show the greatest readiness to make a decisive commitment at the next interview.
Shepherding does give a certain sense of worth; you’re the rescuer, the one called in when things are desperate. But if a church leader has a vision that goes beyond being well thought of, a vision that includes harvest, then some important decisions must be made intentionally.
The pastor must say, “Given my limited resources, the most precious of them being my time, with whom or on what should I be spending it?”
There are two dangers for pastors: spending too much time getting ready for Sunday, and spending too little time. The right balance contributes to an optimum quality of sermon and optimum exposure to people who need to be recruited.
In the average-sized church in America, the pastor is still the key person to make people feel they are entering a church legitimately. Frequently it requires no more than a five-to-fifteen-minute touch to create a favorable disposition toward the church. From there on, lay people can finish the fishing, hauling the prospect into the boat. All the pastor needs to do is set the hook.
When I was a pastor, I noticed a curious thing: a fifteen-minute visit with someone would produce a member, while if I spent forty-five minutes, I’d never see the person again! Apparently they got too much of me (or I got too much of them). They must have assumed the expected level of commitment in our church was just too high, and they were frightened away.
If you go to a new bank, and the president takes the trouble to shake your hand, ask your name, and say they’d all be glad to be of service to you, you are impressed. You don’t expect the president also to take your money; that’s the tellers’ job. In fact, you may not see the president once in the next two years. But it doesn’t matter. You’ve been favorably disposed to bank there.
The average visitor does not expect nearly as much of the minister as the average member does. That seems counterintuitive; you’d think outsiders would be clamoring for as much attention as insiders. But in most cases it isn’t true. In fact, if non-members are given that much exposure, pastors can actually thwart their coming to the church.
Multiplied options
The biggest problem I see is in decision-makers not taking the trouble to multiply their options before deciding. Church leaders tend to construe each problem as black or white, either/or, right or wrong, when, in fact, they need to unravel it a bit. They might see four or five different ways to proceed if they did.
Dave Luecke, a vice-president at Fuller Seminary and a former professor of administrative science, says the English language has a helpful convention along this line in the words better and best. If I look at a problem and come up with an option, I can say, “I have a good solution.” But I cannot say, “I have a better solution,” until I have looked at two possibilities. And I cannot claim “I have the best solution,” until I have checked out at least three.
Here are some questions to help discover other options:
“What are the decisions I could make, and what will be the outcomes? Are they significant to my long-term ministry? Which decisions ought to be deferred?”
“What are my options? Is this really a yes/no? Or are there options A, B, and C to be considered?”
“Who should be involved in the decision-making process in order for implementation to be effective?”
“How do I know when I have enough information? When is going for more research just a way of delaying the decision? Is it time to bite the bullet?”
The best solution is one that has been weighed and selected from an array of potential outcomes, including whether I should do anything at all. In the last thirty or forty years, doctors have been learning that in a lot of cases they shouldn’t do anything. They can give the patient sugar pills and send him home. The body will take care of itself, given time.
But there are times when decisions have to be made. For example, say a pastor gets word from someone that a teenager in the youth group has been seen drinking. If that pastor feels it is critical to represent God’s opinion accurately, he may come out with guns blazing, hitting every target in sight with: God is against teenage drinking!
If, however, he sees this as a human behavior with certain causes, he can more accurately decide where to apply the medicine. What is this kid fleeing from? What’s he trying to identify with? What hungers, what fears are just beneath the surface? Who are the significant others in his life, and how many of them do I have input to? Once he studies the context, the parents, the peer group, and the teenager himself, he may find that the cure belongs nowhere near the symptom. Only after determining the appropriate assignable cause can a good decision be made on how to respond.
The person who reported the incident probably expects the pastor to take out the whip of fury and go after the offender. But if it were that easy, why hasn’t somebody already done that?
The pastor might even probe to see whether the reporter is a causal person in the teenager’s life. “Who else have you discussed this with? Were they concerned? Are they making any plans? Are you making any plans? You know this teenager; you care enough about him to bring the matter to me. What do you think God may be calling you to do?” You see, if the pastor treats this as a fire call, reaches for his hat, and runs out the door with sirens blazing, he may be overcome with smoke. How much better to say to the caller, “I’m sort of the coach here, and I’m deeply concerned about this, as you are. Let’s get down on our knees right now and pray until we have some insight on what each of us is supposed to do next in this matter.”
Pastors can never forget that people are always testing them. Some of these reports are brought simply to see what the pastor will do about it. The teenager in question may not have been the one drinking; it may have been the reporter himself or herself, who wants to know what the pastor will do. And the way he responds will determine whether or not he is granted any further franchise for ministry.
When a pastor hears about a sheep who has become entangled, the goal is to unsnare him. You may mutter under your breath about the sheep’s stupidity, but berating him for being entangled does not produce deliverance. Beating the thorn bush doesn’t help, either. The only effective action is to disengage the sheep from the snare.
Choice wisdom
After exploring the options, the key, of course, is to choose the best one. That takes wisdom. And not every pastor has that gift. If a pastor does not have a wisdom gift, he would do very well to find someone who does and talk it over. In many of the cases I’ve counseled, the pastor’s wife has the gift her husband lacks in a critical area. The only question is whether he’s willing to consult her.
In other cases, key laypersons have such a gift and are discreet enough to be talked to about a problem. The resource is right there in the flock, if pastors have the wisdom to see it. But who does? The person who lacks wisdom may also lack the wisdom to find it. And some leaders may struggle with ego; they don’t want to defer, because they hold the power to decide. They forget that even if they defer or delegate, they still have the power to review. They can decide:
- that a decision doesn’t need to be made
- to make a decision alone
- to make a decision with the help of someone else’s input and counsel
- that someone else needs to make this decision.
These last two involve the difference between knowing your mind and having your mind made up. When you know your mind, you know generally where you are on certain elements of an upcoming decision, but you don’t know exactly how it ought to come down or what your part should be. When you’ve made up your mind, you’ve closed the door to further input.
On certain issues, it’s all right to make up your mind—for example, the role your spouse prefers in a congregation. You know her preferences in advance, so that when criticism comes, you can respond without flinching.
But in other matters, such as whether or not to build a new parking lot, you’re far better off simply knowing your mind and then remaining open to other angles, weighing the options. You know you intend to minister to more people, and the current space is inadequate, so something has to be done, but as you begin, you haven’t locked into “We must put fifty more parking spaces where the playing field is now.”
In some ways it is best if the pastor arrives at a new action last rather than first, after developing broad congregational support. Some decisions need a lot of process attached to them because they are so hard to undo.
I sat with one pastor who was trying to decide how to proceed with planting a daughter church. The problem was, not all the proponents’ attitudes regarding the new mission were wholesome. We spent an hour talking and praying together about how to facilitate the dreams and wishes of these people in an affirming, legitimizing way.
We finally came down to “What are the next steps?” At that point, he called in a wise and sensitive staff member, and we tossed it around for another half hour. We explored what actions would keep from hardening attitudes or making people feel fearful. Because of the staff member’s input, we wound up with a much different, more seasoned set of action steps than if the senior pastor had written them alone or with me.
This man knew when to stop thinking about the decision himself and call for help. He showed his exceeding wisdom. After I left, the two of them took the plan to a larger group of key laypersons for comment and refinement before proceeding further. The result was a successful launch.
Pulpit decision-making
A leader is a person with the willingness to cast the vision and then call for it to be manifested in behavior. Who will cast the ideal? The leader. That is the one thing he has going over everyone else: He knows where the group is headed.
Effective leaders understand both the nature of power and the nature of giftedness. They behave in a way that enables people’s gifts to be brought on-line. Some notions of democracy are so egalitarian that everybody is the same little brick as everyone else. This fails to recognize people’s gifts. In any given group, the Holy Spirit does not give everyone equal ability to lead. If that is not recognized, there are going to be problems.
Someone has said the chief officer of any group has more ability to discourage something from happening than to make something happen, and that is true of pastors as well. By our inattention we can allow almost anything to die if we don’t want it to prosper. It takes a very strong layperson to come forward and minister month after month, year after year, without encouragement or recognition. The pastor holds the power to bless or wither virtually any part of the church by what he chooses to stroke.
Pastors have the incredible power of the pulpit to cast vision. Each week they get one or more opportunities to set the tone for the entire congregation.
I sat with a group of ministers who were worried about growth in their denomination. I didn’t have much time to work with them, so I said, “What do you think? Can you grow?”
“Well, I hope so,” said one man, “but I don’t know. I preached at one of our conferences recently and said I thought maybe we were dead if we didn’t do something pretty soon.”
“That sounds like an interesting sermon,” I said. “Do you have a copy of it?”
He found a copy, and I took it back to my hotel room. There I spread out the eight pages and began a content analysis. In college I studied a little bit of theater, and so I took this sermon apart just like I would a play, noting the various episodes, the climax, the proclimaxes, the anticlimaxes, and so forth. I circled every illustration and examined it for vividness and emotion. The greatest emotional power, as dramatists know, lies in the themes of life and blood; these move an audience profoundly.
This speaker used one illustration from his childhood about the time his father took him fishing. The first time the boy put his hook in the water, he didn’t get a fish but instead a snapping turtle. He excitedly reeled it in.
The father was perturbed, however; he seized his filet knife, grabbed the turtle, and proceeded to saw off its head. He threw the body up on the bank behind and then said, “Now, son, let’s get back to fishing.”
The preacher went on: “But in a little while, I looked back—and lo and behold, the turtle had righted itself and was walking back down the bank—headless. I said, ‘Dad! Dad! The turtle’s coming down the bank!’
“And my father said, ‘Aw, son, don’t worry about him. He’s dead, he just doesn’t know it yet.'”
This was the speaker’s analogy for the denomination! His audience included a lot of small-town and country people, farmers, weekend fishermen. Talk about impact! A Jungian psychologist would go wild just thinking about it. In that one illustration, he planted despair and hopelessness more firmly than any straight-on assertion ever could.
That pastor didn’t know it, but he had used a flame thrower on his audience. He didn’t realize what he had done. Illustrations command the imaginations of the people; there is no greater force. With negative imagery pastors can suggest withdrawal; with positive imagery they can suggest victory. Most don’t realize they are artists, painting on the inner canvas of the listeners’ minds the scenes that will dominate the life of the whole church.
The power of the pulpit is a major factor in decision-shaping. With it we can school people either not to attempt great things for God or to attempt them. We can preset their attitudes in the mold either of “we can’t” or “we can.”
We simply have to think about what we’re doing and make intelligent, God-honoring choices.
Copyright © 1997
