Pastors who lead effectively must be willing to risk the ship repeatedly for the sake of the gospel.
—Leith Anderson
It was May of 1969. I had just crammed three years of seminary into two and couldn’t wait to reap the rewards of surviving my education: full-time ministry. The church I had been serving part time asked me to become their associate pastor. My wife, Charleen, and I were ecstatic.
By the end of that summer, the senior pastor had resigned, and I was named his successor. At age twenty-four, I was handed the reins of a local church.
Most of my training prepared me for the one hour on Sunday morning. The first few months, I studied and planned until lunch. After lunch I headed for home. With my parishioners working during the day, I had nobody to visit, so at first I took afternoon naps or caught up on the soap operas! I returned to work in the evenings, visiting or attending church meetings.
A lot has changed since then—I now work afternoons. But regularly I’m faced with the same question: as a leader, exactly what am I supposed to do? This is especially relevant for the first days of a new pastorate (or during the transition into a new chapter of church life). What should I do with my time? Where exactly should I lead the church? And what are the first steps I should take to lead them into the future, whatever that might represent?
Recognize your swirling emotions
I enjoyed baseball as a boy. Once while playing catcher, I stood up to grab a wild pitch. As I stretched for the ball, the batter swung, hitting me on the back of my head and laying me out across home plate. After that, I became a reluctant catcher.
Pastors can also feel reluctant to stretch in a new direction, fearful of risking their neck in the process. Many emotions swirl within us as we begin a new ministry. These emotions are neither good nor bad. But we are wise to monitor them so they don’t undermine our work.
First, we may begin to wonder if we’re using our time wisely. I felt guilty for not working afternoons during the early days of my first pastorate, even though I studied at the office until noon and attended church meetings in the evenings. It never dawned on me that I didn’t have to work from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.
We are wise to be aware of the emotional tug to be busy, making sure our emotions don’t pressure us into patterns of ministry that will raise false expectations. Some pastors, especially in smaller communities, feel the pull to visit every family in their congregation during the first year. This can have enormous value for pastors’ immediate credibility, but it also raises expectations that can destroy them later.
People will expect to be visited regularly and have a special friendship with the pastor. When that doesn’t happen—and it can’t over the long haul—pockets of dissension about not being nurtured surface. Relationships with members, important though they may be, can consume an inordinate amount of our energies. This can undermine our ability to lead the church effectively.
I wound up filling many afternoons by reading biographies of famous Christians such as Robert Murray McCheyne, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and David Brainerd. I gleaned much from the trials and successes of these great people.
Another powerful emotion is the desire to be accepted by the members. When Patti Hearst, a member of a wealthy California family, was kidnapped in the 1970s by the Symbionese Liberation Army and held for ransom, no one suspected she would surface with a submachine gun, robbing banks in Northern California alongside her captors. Through her long ordeal, she was sucked into acting like them. She became one of them.
The Patti Hearst syndrome can also affect pastors. Wanting to be accepted and liked by our congregations, we can become too much like those we’re trying to lead.
One Saturday morning, while I was standing in my Colorado church parking lot, a man walked up to me and handed me a copy of the church constitution. Pointing to the section regarding pastor’s responsibilities, he had highlighted my duty to do pastoral care.
“I think you’re neglecting the elderly in our church,” he said. What he really meant was “I want my own elderly parents to be visited more.”
“Visitation is only one of my many duties, Bob,” I replied, “and I believe the bases are being covered.” I, too, felt pastoral care was important, but I refused to let it become the driving force of my ministry—it isn’t what I’d been called to emphasize.
I also felt the pressure to offer altar calls at the end of each church service. But I believed it to be counterproductive to evangelism, making it more difficult for the people in our community to believe.
I wanted to be liked, but I resisted the temptation to blend in with the members’ ways of doing things just to please them.
A third strong emotion is our eagerness to succeed. I am the son of a successful pastor. Thirty years ago, few Protestant congregations could boast a thousand Sunday morning worshipers. The church my father pastored, located near New York City, could. It bore many of the external trappings of success, including a sizable staff and a large budget. This became to me an unwritten standard of success.
Financial considerations intensify the pressure to be successful. When Charleen and I left seminary, we needed a washer and dryer, so we drove to Sears and charged them. We also needed a new car, so we obligated ourselves to car payments for three years. In short, I couldn’t afford to lose my job.
Tangled up in the emotion of wanting to succeed is the fear of failure. I still feel this fear. I sometimes wonder if a reason I’m still at Wooddale is my fear of not being able to repeat success in another church. Ultimately, I’m convinced Wooddale is where God has called me, and frankly I’m excited about what He is doing in this church. But periodically, a subtle fear of failure lets itself be known.
Finally, there is the fear of inadequacy. Even though I had grown up in a parsonage, I wasn’t prepared for the emotions that stirred within me when I dealt with people’s problems. When I was a young pastor, a woman came to see me about her difficult marriage. In addition to her marital struggles, she had physical and financial problems. Her list of maladies seemed to be endless. I helped her as best I could. I prayed with her and even called a local physician to make an appointment for her.
One afternoon, after hearing about her tragic life again, I drove home, laid down on my bed, and wept. I felt so inadequate to deal with her problems.
Entering a new phase of ministry can raise latent fears about our capabilities. When we’ve admitted these emotions, we’re ready to tackle the tasks of leadership.
Do first things first
When entering a new ministry, we’ve got to do some things, and that means not doing other things. But of the multitude of possibilities that exist, what are the essentials, the wisest investments that will yield the greatest return?
First, I do the things that the culture of the particular church demands.
A pediatrician in our church completed a short-term mission service in Africa. She was the only physician on duty in the African hospital where she worked. On one occasion, she admitted a woman who couldn’t deliver a baby normally and needed a Caesarean section. Though the pediatrician wasn’t skilled in delivering babies, much less by Caesarean section, she performed the operation, saving the lives of both the mother and child. The doctor did what she had to do.
The same holds true for pastors. There are certain things that pastors must do—whether we are experts at them or not, and whether or not we like them.
Some pastors might say, “I’m not a morning person.” But if they are ministering in communities where people rise early for work, they too must turn on their office lights at 8:00 a.m. Otherwise, they will be perceived as lazy, even if they work late into the evenings. The church culture demands that only after their credibility as hard workers has been established can they revert to their preferred routine.
When I became a full-time pastor, I recognized that something needed to be done about evangelism. Although my father was a pastor and I a seminary graduate, I didn’t know much about evangelism. So I started reading books on the subject until I thought I had the principles down pat. One of these was training laypeople. So I found a layperson, dragged him with me for my first evangelistic visit, and made a complete fool of myself.
Evangelism wasn’t—and still isn’t—my gift. But it needed to be done. The context dictated that I begin a program, even if evangelism wasn’t maximizing my own personal giftedness.
Doing what has to be done initially runs counter with today’s emphasis of focusing on one’s gifts. I also subscribe to Peter Drucker’s principle of going with our strengths, not our weaknesses. Beginning a new chapter of ministry, though, requires us to do what needs to be done, priming the engine and then fueling it later with someone who is gifted and much better at it than we are.
We must resist the temptation to build a twenty-year strategy based on our weaknesses. Still, we must be driven by mission and purpose rather than personality.
Second, I try to get some successes under my belt. Success will give us credibility we’ll need later. One way to success is visiting revered, elderly people in the congregation. Another may be asking a beloved predecessor to speak some Sunday, validating the church tradition that preceded you.
Planning and executing church programs with a high probability of success is also important. During my first summer of full-time pastoring, I proposed a four-week series of evening films called “August in the Park.” We gathered at sunset in a nearby city park and showed Christian films on a large screen. Hundreds came from the church and community. The effort multiplied Sunday evening church attendance, communicated that we were interested in outreach, made parishioners feel good about their church, and bolstered my pastoral credibility. Everyone was a winner.
Preparing for the long haul
As I take care of these two essentials, I’m already beginning to think about how I want to lead for the next few years. That to me is what it means to be a leader on day one, day two, and the rest of my ministry at that church.
To lead, the pastor must create vision for the local church. Vision has to start with someone, and that someone is often the pastor. Years ago, when Wooddale relocated to our present facility, no one believed it could be done. As a leader at Wooddale, I was responsible to voice the vision to build a facility.
Someone with vision lives in the future. I “lived” in our new building at Wooddale for years before the church actually moved in. The pastor, as a visionary, is like an architect who intimately knows each room in the building he or she is designing long before it’s actually constructed.
Though the pastor takes initiative, the vision is honed and further developed by others. The others may be talented staff members or gifted lay leaders who make real the dream God has given, giving it sophistication, expanding and developing it in ways the pastor never could.
Tailoring the dream
A visionary pastor faces a big challenge: creating a dream that is rooted in the timeless truth of Scripture and then tailoring it to reach the local community for Christ. Here is a framework to begin:
Develop a theology of ministry. My basis for local church vision is grounded in the birth of Christ. By invading time, the Son of God risked all, inaugurating the recovery of paradise lost by coming to do the work of the Father. Christ is our model, the prototype for taking risks and planning to reach our community to do God’s work in our locale.
This transcends New Jersey, Minnesota, or California. The vision for a Colorado community corralled by sugar beet fields and cattle will look different than one for downtown Minneapolis, which is inhabited by universities, corporations, and hospitals. But the underlying theology is the same: to do the work of the Father.
Discover the church’s values. In addition to rooting our vision theologically, we also must understand the community where we live. The pastor must function like a physician diagnosing a patient’s condition. Often this requires digging into the past.
One of the first things I did in Colorado was read the minutes of the various boards and committees covering the entire history of the church. I also visited families in the congregation to hear their perceptions about the church. Such research pays rich dividends.
Recently I talked to a pastor who ministers in a 140-year-old congregation. Flipping through the church’s minutes from over a hundred years ago, he discovered that the last names of those making and seconding motions were often identical to those making and seconding motions on his present board. The grandparents and great-grandparents of his congregation dealt with the same issues the same way their children and grandchildren were dealing with them. The church’s problems, he realized, had less to do with the issues and more to do with the families who dominated the church.
Discovering the values of a local church is usually learned the hard way—through experience. Wooddale’s previous pastor was a gifted musician who led the church successfully for nineteen years. I, on the other hand, took piano lessons for eight years as a child but never finished the second lesson book. So when I arrived at Wooddale, I couldn’t match my predecessor in many areas. Even though I had carefully researched my compatibility with Wooddale, I endured criticism for my inabilities.
Become an ethnologist. Several years ago, a California church pursued me to be their senior pastor. I discovered later that they had hired an FBI-type person to research me. I also was surprised to find out that he knew so much about me. That church was committed to matching someone to their specific culture.
I had this same commitment coming to Wooddale—only I did a background check on a church, not an individual. In a library, I scanned the history of Minneapolis. I familiarized myself with the local schools as well as the local economy.
I also found another candidate whom Wooddale had previously interviewed, and I talked with him at length. Before I ever agreed to a first interview, I had a general picture of the church and the community in which it was located.
Begin studying the local subculture. While construction was underway for our worship center at Wooddale, a visiting church consultant, leading a group from his local seminar, walked through our partially completed building and remarked, “Here is a good example of how not to build a church. It looks like a church—a turnoff to today’s generation.”
He assumed what worked in Southern California would work in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In our research, though, we discovered that people in our subculture wanted a church to look like a church, a value embedded in the heritage of the community.
As a new pastor I studied and analyzed the local subculture immediately. During the candidating process, this cannot be done in depth. But it is essential in the early phase of a new ministry. We cannot discover our church’s priorities without understanding the culture in which we minister.
Put it all together. As I think about my theology of ministry, the church’s values, and the culture of the community, I ask myself: what would the church look like if these three elements were combined?
The vision for a church includes imaginary people (who they are and how they relate to each other), imaginary programs that touch the community with the gospel, and imaginary facilities that allow the ministry of the gospel to penetrate the local subculture. Long before we relocated and became a church that reaches out, we “saw” ourselves reaching new people through a new program of support groups. To some it was an idea on a list. To those of us with the vision, we could almost see the faces, hear the voices, and watch people pull up chairs in a room.
Investing in momentum
Actually, putting those three ingredients together doesn’t solve my problems. It probably produces more ideas than can possibly be accomplished in a three-, five-, or even ten-year plan. Next is to decide which idea should be tackled first.
Go with your strengths, individually and corporately. Too often, churches invest heavily in weak programs, never developing the momentum needed for growth. If a church is strong in worship and weak in Sunday school, the worship must be promoted and expanded first. Later the Sunday school can be nurtured, fed by the resources of a healthy worship service.
Not long after I arrived at Wooddale, we inaugurated a smallgroup ministry and various social activities, emphasizing our strength in fellowship. Our people were good at relationships, and so focusing on their gifts became an effective means of incorporating new people.
Often right choices run counter to peer pressure. Designated gifts to bolster weak areas, for example, can undermine this strategy. It’s tempting to accept these gifts. But just because someone donated $1,000 for refurbishing Sunday school rooms doesn’t mean the church should make plans for renovation.
Find the quickest return. One year we faced the important decision of whom to add to the staff. One faction in the church lobbied heavily for a counseling pastor.
But our counseling program was weak. Our singles ministry, however, was already up and running. In addition, the Minneapolis metropolitan area provided many resources for Christian counseling, while a largely unreached singles population existed in our community. So we went with a singles pastor. As a result, our singles ministry exploded, reaching many unchurched singles in the community and adding excitement to a growing congregation.
In American culture, most suburban and urban churches need a critical mass of people to develop growth momentum. To reach that critical mass, which hovers near three hundred worshipers in most suburban settings, pastors must invest in programs with quick returns, targeting ministries with high impact and immediate results. Churches today need an irreducible minimum of resources—people and money—to attract newcomers. Basic programs like children’s and youth ministries are needed to draw the people that will enable the church to grow.
Shifting gears
Creating a local church vision is one thing. Implementing that vision is another. Small churches function on a hub-and-spoke model of operation. The pastor is the hub, and the church members are the spokes, relating directly to the pastor.
One frazzled pastor was at the end of his rope. He had led his church to exciting new growth—700 attenders filled the sanctuary on Sunday mornings—but now he couldn’t keep up the pace. During our long conversation, he complained about his unmotivated congregation and the problems on his elder board.
“There’s nothing wrong with your church,” I said, when I finally got a word in. “The best solution may be for you to leave, to hand the reins of leadership to someone who can lead a church of that size.”
As his church grew, I discovered, this pastor wasn’t able to change his leadership style. He started working harder, still trying to operate on the hub-and-spoke model. He ended up logging eighty-hour workweeks.
When I pastored a small church, I frequently stopped by the hospital on my way home from work, just in case someone I knew was there. When a baby arrived, I was the first to know, even if it was 2:00 a.m. “It’s a girl” or “It’s a boy,” I’d often hear as I’d pick up the phone in the middle of the night.
Few call me today. I had to relinquish close relationships with a majority of the congregation so that their needs could be met by someone else and the kingdom of God could be expanded. I had to move from being the hub of the wheel to being the axle, moving from a direct to a more indirect relationship to the congregation. New systems of leadership had to be developed, distributing relationships and power to other pastors and leaders in the church.
Risking the ship
In 1990, when Wooddale was building its worship center, I was convinced we should be planting churches to reach the community for Christ. If we were serious about evangelism, then we needed to grow new churches, one of the most effective means of evangelism. A church building was merely a means to an end, not the end itself.
Some thought I was crazy. They argued that we’d be committing financial suicide by planting a church in the middle of a building project—we needed all the money and bodies we could muster.
“Wait until we have more people,” I heard over and over again. “Plant a church after we move into our new worship center.”
By planting a new congregation, I felt we would make a powerful statement about our purpose: we were willing to risk crippling a major church project to reach people for Christ. The leadership got on board, and finally the congregation voted to plant the church, which in the end didn’t sabotage our building project.
Recently, while sitting on an airplane, I glanced at the aeronautics magazine the passenger next to me was reading. A picture of a Boeing 777 accompanied the article. The headline read, “Boeing Risks the Company Again.”
I discovered Boeing had risked the company in 1957 when it unveiled the first commercial jet aircraft—the 707. Boeing gambled again in the late sixties by producing the first wide-body plane—the 747. Now they were planning to do it again with the 777.
I realize there will never be a time when I’m not carrying out these principles. While these issues are most acute in a new situation, new situations never really go away. Pastors who lead effectively must be willing to risk the ship repeatedly for the sake of the gospel. In one sense, we’ll never stop asking, “I’m the leader, now what?”
Copyright © 1997
