Whether you fight clutter isn’t a matter of right or wrong; it’s about what you want to accomplish.
— John Maxwell
Our church office area was designed for clutter — not the clutter of paper and files; rather, the cluttering of the pastor’s schedule.
The door of the pastor’s office opened into the waiting area of the administrative lobby. When the pastor exited his office, he couldn’t help but see whoever was there for whatever reason. Being a people person, I would walk up, kiss the baby, and say, “How are you doing? It’s good to see you. How are the kids?”
In the process I would hear an illness described or learn of something I needed to do.
Although I enjoy interacting with people like that, I found it distracted me from larger issues. It lessened my effectiveness. It was clutter.
Clutter is anything that distracts, that takes me out of focus, that keeps me from thinking or doing what I ought. Clutter is weight, baggage, whatever bogs me down.
Time wasters, for instance, are clutter. A tiff with a Sunday school teacher that preoccupies me while I pray is clutter. Thinking about my sermon while counseling is clutter. A knock at the door while I’m preparing a sermon is clutter. Trying to remember the five things I’m supposed to do today is clutter.
A pastor’s life can resemble a teenager’s bedroom with dirty clothes, school books, and plates strewn on the dresser, bed, floor, and desk: one-hour meetings that turn into three-hour meetings, backed up church toilets, concerns about unpaid bills, a line of Post-it notes, volunteers who don’t show up, staff conflict, five-nights-a-week committee meetings, paperwork.
Under such a cascade of clutter, we may accept confusion as the norm in the local church. Or we can take positive steps to straighten up — if we really want a clean room.
Convincing Oscar Madison
Oscar Madison, of “The Odd Couple,” liked clutter, and so do many pastors. It’s part of their personalities.
One of my staff members can write music, listen to a lecture, and ask a question at the same time. He thrives on having more than one thing going at once. But I’m more typical. I have to focus on one thing at a time or my work suffers. Whether you fight clutter isn’t a matter of right or wrong; it’s about what you want to accomplish. The less mess in my life, the more I can follow priorities, lead the church, and minister to people.
While it may not be a question of right or wrong, the more important you are in an organization, the less you can afford clutter. Effective leadership demands prioritized work, that we invest our time, gifts, and energies to fulfill a strategic vision.
Many pastors are Oscar Madisons in Felix Unger disguises. They are extremely organized yet beset with clutter, filling their schedules with things others can do. They prepare the weekly bulletin, for example, taking a day or two out of every week to write, type, cut, and paste it. That’s a distraction from other priorities.
Once we decide to fight clutter, we need to recognize three kinds: schedule, emotional, administrative.
Schedule Clutter
Interruptions clutter our days like commercials during a football game. While we can cut down on them by controlling our availability to others, such “people filters” make some pastors uncomfortable. “I’m in the people business,” they say. “Being available to those in need is what ministry’s all about.”
I don’t feel guilty about limiting people’s access to me because I operate on three assumptions.
First, a pastor’s job description doesn’t mean being indiscriminately around others. Even Jesus limited his contact with people because of his priorities. Because he wanted to be with the Father, he went into the wilderness or up a mountain to get away from people and pray. Because he wanted to minister to Jews rather than Gentiles, when he traveled near the region of Tyre and Sidon, he ignored the request of a Gentile woman.
Was Jesus not a people person? Did he lack compassion? Of course not. Jesus limited his availability to fulfill God’s special calling, which in the long run would help the most people.
If we look honestly at ourselves, we may discover that we feed on indiscriminate contact with people. It gives an excuse for avoiding other, more difficult tasks. Then we finish the day exhausted, patting ourselves on the back for having ministered to fifteen different people, half of whom did not have appointments; meanwhile sermon preparation, vision casting, or planning goes begging.
To avoid misusing time, I’m careful to protect myself and my time. When I saw how the pastor’s office was set up at Skyline, with the doorway facing the main waiting area, we built a wall between the office and waiting area. That way I could walk from office to office without having to greet everyone in the lobby.
I have a second office in the attic behind our sanctuary, which provides an added level of inaccessibility. There I have most of my books and illustration files. My staff knows that I’m off-limits there except for the direst emergency. Other pastors have a second study at home or regularly use the public library or retreat centers.
A good secretary can provide help, smoothing the way for ministry while protecting leaders from clutter. If the church cannot afford a secretary to filter calls, mail, and walk-ins, a phone-answering machine will help.
Second, I minister most effectively to people if I control my availability. I need time to focus on what no one else in church can focus on: preaching, my walk with God, and leadership of the entire church.
My goal is to multiply my ministry through others. If I make myself totally available to people, I can’t lead and train others effectively. Our church’s ability to help people is then limited to my energy and time.
That’s why I set a prioritized schedule in advance. If you don’t set your schedule in advance, others will fill it for you — with no regard for your priorities. A prioritized schedule protects against interruption by providing a valid reason to say no. We can tactfully and honestly explain, “My schedule is full.” On the other hand, who could say, “Your request isn’t a high enough priority”?
Third, the person who wants to see me now may not have the most critical need. Consider Pastor Henry Johnson, who prepares his Sunday sermon every Friday. One week at 9:30 a.m., he begins study on a sermon on forgiveness.
At 10:30, Hilda, a church member, calls to chat. Forty-five minutes later, after cataloging her aches and pains, Hilda says good-bye.
At 11:30, Bill pops into the office. “Let’s grab lunch and talk about my Sunday school class,” he says. At 1:15, Pastor Johnson returns to his study.
At 1:45, the church secretary knocks on the study door and reports, “Sorry, there’s something wrong with the copy machine, and we need to get the bulletin printed.” So Pastor Johnson fiddles with the machine, reads much of the copier’s owner’s manual, and finally at 2:30 calls a repairman.
At 3:00, the repairman arrives. The secretary has left the office early, so the pastor explains the problem to the repairman. At 3:20, he returns to his study.
At 3:50, Greg calls. “Pastor, Al asked me to mow the church grass today. Will you be there so I can get into the shed?” Fifteen minutes later Johnson walks outside with Greg to get him started.
At 4:40, Mary, a new believer, calls. “Pastor, I’ve been reading the Gospel of Mark, and I’ve got a question about …” Twenty minutes later, Pastor Johnson hangs up the phone and rushes out the door, late for a dinner with his new neighbors. Having barely written two pages of his sermon, he sighs, I’ll just have to write this tomorrow.
Saturday morning, however, he receives a phone call. One of the members has had a heart attack and has been taken to a hospital an hour away. Pastor Johnson spends the entire day with the family, and that night he is too exhausted to open the books. I’ll have to get up early and do a quickie, he decides.
Sunday morning he rushes through an hour and fifteen minutes of hurried sermon preparation and then concludes, This one isn’t going to work. I’ll have to preach one out of the file. Instead of preaching on “God Will Forgive the Worst of Sinners,” he stumbles through a message on “How to Have Good Devotions.”
Henry Johnson feels he’s done the best he could under the circumstances: “Besides, I helped a lot of people over the weekend.”
What Henry Johnson doesn’t think about, though, are the number of people in his congregation — people who didn’t interrupt him on Friday and Saturday — who nonetheless are in trouble: those struggling in marriage; those recently left unemployed; teenagers who are alienated from their families; seekers who are looking for meaning in life. After an ill-prepared service, such people likely walk out as they walked in: carrying the same load.
In allowing others to interrupt our schedules, we assume that whoever wants to talk to us right now has the most important need in the church. Though some of the needs pastor Johnson addressed over the weekend were critical, others were not, and as a result, some critical needs were left unmet.
With these three assumptions in mind, I can better remain a people person, and I have no qualms about controlling schedule interruptions.
People generally don’t begrudge us the times we’re inaccessible if we’re completely available at other times. One day I was visiting with people in our church lobby when I saw Dan, our intern pastor of six months, walk in the door, briefcase in hand. On his way to his office, he strode past six people without even saying hello. Though we’ve set up the office to avoid indiscriminate encounters, when they happen nonetheless, I want the staff to be pastoral.
I asked to be excused from my conversation, and I followed him. “What are you doing?” I said. “You passed six people without greeting a single one.”
“I’m feeling rushed,” Dan responded. “I wanted to get to work.”
“You just passed work when you passed people.”
He worked through that over the years, and now Dan, who is now our executive pastor (and permits me to tell this story), is probably the best in our church at relationships. Fresh out of seminary, though, he thought in terms of books and paperwork; with my not-so-gentle prod, he quickly became a people person. Now he’s the one I want to have handle sensitive situations, because he understands and cares deeply about people.
When we restrict our accessibility, we have to ask ourselves an important question: Am I doing this because I want to help as many people as possible, the people God wants me to help, or because I don’t want to bother with people? If our goal is to help people, we will be readily available at other times during the week.
On Sundays my number-one priority is the people who attend. I mingle before and after the services, touching and greeting and praying with as many as I can. I stay out of my office and am in no hurry to leave after the service.
I go the extra mile to show people I care about them as individuals. I can greet 2,400 people in our church by name. I page through our directory weekly to pray for people and remember their names. We shoot a Polaroid picture of visitors, and I memorize their names so that when they walk through the door the following Sunday I can greet them by name.
I write personal notes to fifteen people every week:
“Just wanted you to know I prayed for you this week.”
“Great job on that poster.”
“Congratulations on John’s graduation.”
At church banquets I generally don’t eat. I dine beforehand, assign someone else to keep our guest speaker entertained, and spend the entire time mingling.
Also, although I almost never take calls as they come, callers who do need to talk to me are told when I will return calls. Returning calls is scheduled into my day. When people learn you call as promised, they respect you and don’t mind you being temporarily unavailable. It’s not a sin to refuse interrupting calls, but it is not to return them.
Emotional Clutter
What male pastor hasn’t squabbled with his wife in the morning, gone to the church in a huff, and been distracted for the entire morning. He replays what he said, what she said, what he’s going to say when he sees her again. Supposedly preparing a sermon — on family life, no less — he stares at the note pad for two hours but barely writes two pages.
That’s emotional clutter. Feelings like anger, fear, pressure, anxiety, depression, and guilt distract us as relentlessly as the pounding bass of a teenager’s stereo, making concentration and productivity impossible.
I lower the volume of emotional clutter in these ways.
• Remember who’s in charge. It’s not what happens to me but what happens in me that’s critical. I’m the one who decides how I will respond to any situation.
Long ago I realized right thinking didn’t eliminate difficult times. In fact, positive thinkers have as many problems as do negative thinkers. The difference? Negative thinkers react wrongly and therefore compound their problems. Positive thinkers respond correctly and therefore conquer their problems.
• Deal aggressively with overcommitments. Stress does more than make us nervous; it pumps steam into all our emotions, heightening their intensity, distracting us even more from our focus. Instead of getting only a little irritated over a volunteer who drops the ball, we’re furious. Instead of being only slightly let down by low attendance on a Sunday, we descend into deep depression and consider resigning.
So one key to handling emotional clutter is to guard against the stress that comes from overcommitment. Here are five ways I turn down that heat.
1. Delegate tasks. I tend to believe I can always do more, that a job needs less of my time than it actually does. When I’ve overcommitted myself, the first thing I do is delegate.
That was possible even before I had a staff. In my first church I had no staff. My method was to spend as much time with people as possible, visiting, praying, meeting needs, making new acquaintances.
As the church grew, I did much of the office work myself, typing, filing, paying bills. Eventually I was stretched too thin. Since we couldn’t afford a secretary, I asked members to answer the phone and take messages. Before long they picked up other office work. It wasn’t a perfect arrangement, but it relieved some of the pressure.
2. Regain your perspective. When I’m feeling the pressure that everything depends on me, I’m taking myself too seriously. I need to back off.
When you’re in a rut, the answer is not to shovel more furiously; it’s to get out of the hole, to gain perspective. Why am I doing this? Maybe I shouldn’t even be shoveling that hole. Will it help to keep doing more of the same? Should I be digging somewhere else?
My wife, Margaret, is my best friend. Often she helps me gain a balanced perspective about my life and family. Occasionally we have “one of those talks” where she helps me step back and see where my life is headed. When I listen without defensiveness, I often see my error and begin to make needed adjustments. With proper perspective, I make sound decisions on how to shuffle priorities.
3. Jettison unnecessary commitments. If I can’t delegate my overcommitments, as a last resort and as much as I hate to, I occasionally ask out of an obligation.
I once canceled a commitment to address a conference in New Zealand. It was a painful decision, but I had been asking my family to sacrifice time with me for too long, and enough was enough. They needed to spend more time with me, and my schedule had no openings in sight.
4. Prevent overcommitments on the front end. I now have an evaluation committee comprised of my wife, my administrative assistant, and a couple of other trusted individuals. The committee reviews all speaking invitations and decides which I can accept. They help me see things more objectively and allow me to say no to people I’d have a hard time turning down.
5. Accept tradeoffs. Our church is about to begin a huge fund drive, and so for the next three months I will have to be at my best. The church cannot be distracted, and all plans and programs have to be well-prepared. So I’ll need to be in church every Sunday to have things running like clockwork.
I’ve discussed this with my family, and they understand that for the next few months they’ll see less of me than they’d like. But I promised to make up for it: “Over the Christmas holiday we’re going to take a special vacation, a trip to Hawaii.”
Obviously this was an exceptional tradeoff, but we can always make it up to whomever is paying an extra price for our busyness. When we do promise a tradeoff, we have to follow through. “Honey, something else has come up,” will be the end of us.
• Pursue intimacy with God and spouse. Emotional clutter results when the deepest need of our hearts — closeness, intimacy —goes unmet. That can lead to disaster
There are lots of substitutes. Instead of finding satisfaction in being close to God, we may pursue success. If we don’t succeed, we become angry and frustrated.
Or we may try to find meaning in needing to be needed — codependency. We run ourselves into the ground trying to please everyone. We end up angry, depressed, and anxious.
If we lack intimacy with our spouses, we may try to find it in other relationships, sometimes ending up in sexual sin or pornography, awash in guilt. Efforts to fill the void in our hearts outside of intimacy with God and family make us emotionally vulnerable.
Now and then I tell my congregation, “I love you with all my heart and am committed to serving you. But my love for you can’t compare with the love I feel for my Lord, my wife, and my kids. They are the highest joys in my life. Ministry is gravy.”
Administrative Clutter
Administrative clutter includes paperwork, work done by you that should be done by others, and snarls in communication or the chain of authority.
Administrative clutter seems to come from everyone and everything around us, like debris carried by swirling flood waters. But its real fountainhead is within, springing from the needs, fears, and desires of the leader. Here are some essentials for straightening up administrative clutter.
• Release the need to control everything. Someone asked me once, “Are you still running the church?”
“No, I haven’t run the church for about five years,” I answered. “I’m leading it, but I have a lot of people running it.”
The greater our need to control every decision, practice, program, and activity of our church, the more nonessential matters will consume our time and energies.
For example, while I need to train those who work around me, I also must let them work in the way they find best. Recently I’ve hired a new personal assistant. She’s a competent administrator who organizes her schedule and mine with a different system than the one used by my previous assistant — an extremely competent woman as well. But I don’t care how she organizes the details as long as we get as much done, and done as well. As long as people hit the ball, I don’t worry how they swing the bat.
At Skyline, at least ten people know more about what’s happening in the church than I do. I have confidence in them, and I’ve released control. I have no qualms about giving them credit for what’s getting done.
We’ve made light-handed leadership our church policy. At Skyline, decision making and problem solving are done at the lowest possible levels, by the staff members, committee members, or leaders directly working with ministries. The board doesn’t decide whether or not the church should buy a new typewriter! The only matters that come to me or the board are those only we are qualified to handle. (We even canceled one board meeting this year because we didn’t have enough to talk about.)
• Overcome the need to be needed. When our need to be needed gets out of hand, we attract clutter like an electromagnet attracts scrap iron. As pastors, we like being the information hub of the church. We feel important when time and again we’re asked, “Pastor, what should we do about …?” It’s draining, but we like it. Having to know all, though, fills our ministries with clutter.
I do several things to repel information clutter. I’ve told my staff and leaders that while there are some things I always want to know — the mood of the church, relationship problems among staff or leaders, decisions that aren’t working — I don’t need or want to know everything.
For example, my assistant meets for lunch regularly with various leaders in the church, and she returns with a list of ten or so things that are happening in their areas. I’ve told her, “Select the two or three most important points on the list. That’s all I can remember or do anything about anyway.”
In other settings I handle information in one of four ways:
1. Don’t receive it. People in your church learn what information “turns your crank.” If someone passes “scrap iron” to me — for example, minor conflict among workers in one of the departments or criticism of a staff member’s program — I’ll dryly say, “Okay; thanks,” and that’s all. I won’t dismiss it arrogantly, but people get the message.
2. Receive information with someone who can manage it. When I attend a meeting where there’s a possibility I’ll walk away with something to do, I bring my assistant. I can delegate the work to her on the spot without having to explain the context of what needs doing, as I would if I left her at the office.
This can be done with lay people, but we have to get comfortable bringing others into the process. A secretive, play-things-close-to-the-vest approach to ministry insures that your vest pockets will be full of clutter.
3. Receive information after someone has worked on it. When we need to process information into a message, article, or report, or when we need to research a subject, we have a choice between two leadership styles. We can do the spadework ourselves and then hand it to another for reaction, editing, and improvement. Or we can have someone research and put together the information, and then we review, edit, and refocus as needed.
My preference is the latter. After someone else does the first 80 percent of the thinking, I add my 20 percent. After my assistant carries the ball as far as she can, I take it the rest of the way.
4. Receive it and immediately do something about it. My goal here is to plug information into a calendar, file, or box so I don’t have to bother remembering it. Anything to remember is clutter.
When I go to denominational conferences, for instance, in my briefcase I have files labeled for the information I’ll receive or produce — one file for my assistant, another for our executive pastor, another still for sermon outlines and illustrations. As I think of things to do or receive printed material or write messages, they immediately go into the appropriate file. That way I can forget about them, and when I get home, I just hand out files.
• Release jobs that are enjoyable but not essential. I used to keep track of the numbers at church: offerings, attendance, baptisms, conversions. I would spend an hour each week compiling records, as gleeful as a toy maker at Christmas, thanking God for progress, envisioning new goals.
At my second church one day, I was seated at my desk with ushers’ reports and financial reports spread out before me. Suddenly I realized, This is ridiculous! I’m spending my time with an adding machine and graphs when someone else could do this and give me the results. So I sheepishly got out of my chair, walked out of my office, and said to my secretary, “Give me fifty minutes, and I’ll show you what I’d like you to do for me.”
At the time, that was one of the hardest things for me to let go of, but it was unnecessary clutter. Obviously we need some emotional rewards in our work, and I could have kept doing it for the sake of enjoyment, but I chose to release it to devote my energies to “new and better toys.”
• Overcome the fear of a subordinate’s failure. If you can’t bear a job done wrong or risk the failure of subordinates, the work piles will litter not their desks but yours.
When our executive pastor hired his first employee, he quickly discovered he chose the wrong person. But I couldn’t fault him, because when I look in the mirror I see someone who makes mistakes every day. So we sat down and discussed how to prevent a repeat performance.
I have an understanding with subordinates. They have the freedom to make mistakes as long as they allow me the freedom to step in and use those mistakes as teaching opportunities. I take time weekly to sit down with my executive pastor and discuss wins and losses.
Delegating clutter is never enough. Without adequately training workers, we actually increase snarls. For example, when others seek help and your subordinate can’t solve their problems adequately, people lose confidence in your subordinate and quickly learn to bypass him or her and come straight to you. My aim: to recruit the right people and train them until they inspire confidence, until others would rather deal with them than me!
God is creatively at work in his church. But the pastorate, like virgin wilderness, can be a tangle, cluttered by trees, underbrush, and rocks.
These acres don’t change from wilderness to productive farmland without brush clearing, rock collecting, and sod busting. Ministry doesn’t become a place of order and fruitfulness without clutter clearing.
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
