The Insidious Mistake

A small error in the beginning is a great one in the end.
Thomas Aquinas

Perhaps you have read this far with a sense of relief: no drug problem, your initial pastorate went smoothly, nobody yet has tried to take your scalp, you get along with your co-workers, and the family appears content, even if they do grumble some now and then.

Maybe mistakes are for other, less fortunate, leaders. You’ve scanned the horizon without sighting any torpedoes.

Beware the barnacles!

Most of us aren’t spectacular in our error. For every sudden fiery wreck exist numerous slow sinkings brought on by years of negligent maintenance. A popular Christian writer divorces, and people everywhere register shock. Twenty drained pastors quietly resign, and it is hardly noticed. Yet in either case, the damage is considerable.

Or a minister pockets part of the offering — and creates a stir. But many other ministers slowly deplete their spiritual substance — and cause a wider loss. The insidious mistakes can sink us almost imperceptibly, but sunk is sunk.

So what are these chronic little mistakes, the overlooked systemic errors that bring more than their share of grief? Most anything in immoderate quantities will do the trick. For instance, pastoral calling is a time-honored duty; yet do only pastoral calling, and people get upset.

Tagging all the dangerous little mistakes is impossible, but listing a few common ones will make the point.

Goatfeathers

A sensitive Reformed pastor provided this colorful tag for a common behavior: “It seems we pastors are often out collecting ‘goatfeathers’ for our cap. By goatfeathers I mean those pats on the back for the favors we do. Somebody asks me to pray for Rotary, and I do it. I know I’ll be awarded a couple of goatfeathers for the effort, and I kind of like the approval.

“The problem is, collecting goatfeathers takes me away from my real ministry. I easily can get so involved in my collection that I miss the essence of what God called me to do. I’m not in the ministry to grant favors and collect approval, but those very activities can subtly distract me from the essential tasks of ministry like teaching and preaching and caring for people.”

Goatfeathers are awarded for many activities, most of which are honorable enough in themselves. It’s just that they can consume a ministry. One pastor found himself taking a woman to the doctor’s office several times a month over a period of years. It was a caring thing to do. It showed pastoral concern. But this and similar activities took so much time that his administration of the church fell into shambles and his sermons started sounding like he composed them on the spot — which he sometimes did.

Some pastors, finding little satisfaction in a local parish, harvest goatfeathers farther up the denominational ladder. One middle-aged pastor of a dead-in-the-water church feathered his cap with district responsibilities. Mainly by the volume of time he spent at the district level, this pastor eventually found himself chairman of the regional policy board. He had clout. He had a title. He had a gavel.

He also had a church still struggling to remain viable, struggling now without benefit of the time or interest of its pastor. He could make most of the district meetings, no matter where they were, because he preferred traveling to them over calling at the hospital. He spent far more effort preparing opening remarks or press releases for the district than he did preparing his weekly sermon.

Many pastors have found the little mistake of pursuing goatfeathers leaves themselves short for the truly important matters. And that lessens their value. When someone asked Mark Twain how he would feel about being ridden out of town on a rail, he replied, “If it weren’t for the honor of it, I’d just as soon walk.” Goatfeathers carry little esteem when attached to the body with tar.

Tangents

It’s easy to lose track of what business we’re in. An English newspaper reported in 1976 that certain buses no longer stopped for passengers on the Hanley to Bagnall route. The official reason made transportation history: If these buses stopped to pick up passengers, it would throw off the timetable!

Tangents plague ministry, too. “I’ve got to keep myself from going off on tangents,” one pastor confided. “I can easily become so concerned about some cause that I’m apt to redefine the gospel around it.”

Theoretically, a ministry can be centered on any number of things. In some churches, fellowship is supreme; in others, a teaching ministry. One pastor will shepherd her congregation with evangelism as the guiding principle; another will mold his congregation around serving a deteriorating neighborhood.

The question is not so much which activity will be the rallying point (as long as it is an honorable undertaking for a church), but is it appropriate to the congregation? Churches will rally around any one of many different flags. It is a mistake, however, to wave too many, or ill-chosen, flags.

“In Pittsburgh in the sixties, I stood up for the blacks,” our tangent-prone pastor continued. “It was an honorable thing to do, but I put the heat to my people too quickly. If they weren’t ready to agree with me, I was about ready to read them out of the kingdom.

“Civil rights, as good a cause as it was, angled us away from the heart of our ministry. If I make anything other than Christ the center of my ministry, I’m not sticking to my gospel work.”

The Evil One delights in perverting a good activity. If he can get us to chase butterflies — even majestic ones — instead of following the Dove, he would be pleased. The little mistake of choosing the wrong center, or too many centers, keeps much essential work from being accomplished.

Stunted Growth

Another insidious mistake especially plagues overbooked pastors.

The dossier told of fifteen years of pastoral experience. The frank reference painted a different picture: “Although Scott has been ordained for fifteen years, it appears to me that he has had three years of experience five times over. I have witnessed no growth.”

Scott was not much of a student. He did okay in college and squeaked through seminary. Leaving the commencement proceedings, Scott whooped, tossed his mortarboard in the air, and proclaimed: “Free at last! I never want to see another book.”

He was called to a small church in rural Montana and immersed himself in ministry. In two and a half years he moved to another church. Three years later he moved again. He stayed four years at a third, one and a half at another, and was four years at his fifth church in fifteen years. Now he is looking again.

The problem? “I start out great,” Scott says, “but about two years into a pastorate I begin to wonder, What do I have left to say? By that point I have used up the sermons I wrote in Bible college and seminary. I’ve covered the basic points of doctrine. So I get restless.” No church has asked Scott to leave; they like his warm spirit and easy way with people. He just gets antsy about every three years. He’s suffering from stunted growth.

In Scott’s busy schedule of people concerns, administration, and personal fitness, he has carved no niche for study. He seldom reads. He doesn’t listen to other preachers. He takes no magazines or journals. There’s no continuing education program that interests him.

Nothing feeds his springs of creativity. He has to rely on his limited supply, and when that runs out, he’s off to a new spot where he’s again a novelty.

Scott is now getting bored with his life as a pastor. “I’ve thought about becoming a lawyer,” he confides, “but does the world need any more lawyers? And besides, it would involve three more years of school and the bar exams. I couldn’t take that. I just wish I found ministry a little more exciting. Maybe the next church will be more stimulating.”

It probably won’t. Scott has made the little mistake of forgetting one precious element in the pastor’s schedule: personal growth and enrichment. Ministerial midgets think small, preach small, and live small because of this small mistake.

Unreliability

For nearly five of his eight years in a small Oregon town, local seniority made Don the dean of clergy in town — all five of them. Since other pastors were arriving and departing with the regularity of a commuter train, he was considered president of the ministerial association by default.

Most of the time he considered the pastoral fellowship a lifesaver. The majority of his fellow pastors were nice enough, but some he found annoyingly unreliable in keeping commitments. “I’ll take the benediction for the sunrise service,” one would promise, but when Easter arrived, the supposedly willing participant would be a no-show.

“Then it’s agreed. We’ll jointly sponsor that musical,” the group decided. Celebrate Life! came and went with scant attendance and a bundle of bills for Don’s church to cover. Then he’d hear, “We decided to have our retreat that weekend. By the way, how’d that revival go?”

“It was a Christian musical.”

“Yeah, that’s right. How’d we do, anyway?”

The “flake factor” worried Don. He often wondered if the fellow who never wrote down the next meeting but always said, “Now you be sure to call me!” missed as many of his other appointments. Did the one who committed himself for every baccalaureate service and never came do the same with weddings and funerals? How can he build solid ministry on unreliability? Don wondered. Then he looked at the fellow’s work and he understood: he didn’t.

Forgetfulness, irresponsibility, or downright dodging commitments usually come in small doses. No one occurrence is all that damning, but the cumulative effect of each small mistake leaves the scent of unreliability across one’s whole ministry.

Workaholism

I once knew a woman who was convinced that ministers were “no-account sponges.” As she was growing up, her parents entertained countless itinerant preachers. She’d watch them show up at mealtime — sometimes uninvited — and thin the servings of fried chicken. Why don’t they work for a living? she wondered. Then they wouldn’t have to eat other people’s food.

Admittedly, not all her models were prime specimens, but I would beg to differ with her. The pastors I run across, if anything, edge toward workaholic practices. Their high calling and the never-ending nature of their profession tend to produce too taxing a schedule. And who was ever acclaimed for moderating ministry expectations? The strokes go to those who practically (and sometimes literally) kill themselves.

One pastor’s confession: “I worked seven days a week for years. Mornings, holidays, late at night — I’d be at it. I had a messiah complex: If I don’t do it, it won’t be done right. But I hurt my family. That’s where the rub comes. You can’t be absent all the time and expect your family not to feel the pain.” For this pastor it necessitated a long, slow process of change. He feels fortunate; it didn’t take a total disintegration of his family to trigger his change. He caught the distress signals before his ship went down.

Marilee Pierce Dunker’s Man of Vision, Woman of Prayer sheds light on the terrible price she, her mother, and her siblings paid for the indefatigable ministry of her father, Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision International. Pierce would not be hindered in his compassionate crusade for the needy of the world. Hundreds of thousands were literally saved from death, in part by his work. Yet his single-minded zeal cost Pierce. A daughter committed suicide. His praying wife separated from him. The rest of his alienated family were reconciled to him only hours before his death.

Bob Pierce really did do much for so many. How could devotion to his calling be a mistake? His “little” mistake was pushing himself beyond his own capacity. He could not be all things to all people. It may have been intemperate to try, but it wasn’t hard.

Workaholism at first gives out the wrong signals. Life’s reinforcements appear set up to instill the workaholic nature. Success, acclaim, and results come from hard work, and the more you work, the greater the return — for a while. Only later does the law of diminishing returns set in.

This economic law states that although greater investment usually brings greater returns, at some point the ratio of returns to investment begins to diminish; the harder you work, the less you get in return. Knowing the point where the law kicks in is the essence of economic planning — and the key to wise stewardship of one’s time and energy.

A pastor in Los Angeles took a worn-out church, and through love and superhuman efforts turned it into a showcase congregation. He followed several pastors who had either shocked, neglected, or abused the congregation. The folks in that church had seen it all, and been turned off.

This new pastor showed them they hadn’t seen it all; a good church could be exciting. With incautious disregard for his own physical limitations, he determinedly nursed the church back to health.

Eventually the church was doing fine, but he was nearly gone. In the midst of his success, this enormously talented and deeply committed pastor entered a deep depression. He came within a hair’s breadth of taking his own life. He learned he absolutely could not continue taxing his body as he had done, and his body had simply shut down and pulled him into the depression until he conceded.

Workaholism cheats not only one’s family; it puts one’s body into a deficit economy, and only a government can sustain that kind of “small” mistake.

Sticky Involvements

Sometimes projects begin well but digress from that point. Roger Carpenter, a Methodist pastor, experienced such a problem.

“My wife got involved in selling home-care products in our community — soap and things like that,” Roger said. “She wanted to put aside some money for our kid’s college years, and besides, it gave her a creative outlet. As her sales picked up, she asked me to help. I wasn’t too excited about an outside business proposition, but I decided to join her for something to do together — to give her my support. Well, I got pulled in hook, line, and sinker.

“Before long we were inviting friends and church members over for sales presentations. I tried to keep this aspect of my life separate from my identity as pastor of the church, but it was impossible. Soon I started being seen as ‘the pastor who hustles soap.’ It compromised my witness in the community, and all the time I was becoming more and more embarrassed by it. I should never have allowed myself to spoil my witness.”

Not everybody would censure Roger. Had he broken any laws? Deceived anybody? Bent any commandments? No. Had he misused church time and pastoral influence? Maybe a little. However, Roger felt he had compromised his station, succumbed to the route of least resistance. He was so embarrassed by his involvement in the sales scheme that he welcomed a call to a new community where he would not be known as the compromised preacher.

The insidious mistake traps its prey like the proverbial frog who boiled to death in a pot warmed slowly. Degree by degree, instance by instance, the chronic mistakes work their evil. Rarely spectacular in their course, they nonetheless become deadly in their metastasis.