The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on our gains. Any fool can do that. The important thing is to profit from our losses.
Congregations sometimes judge leaders by “apparent success”—and we sometimes judge ourselves that way as well. But leadership is more than outward. To lead a congregation, we must recognize some intangible factors, both good and bad.
Let’s start by identifying three false indicators of successful leadership.
1. Succeeding at a private agenda. When this happens, the leader progresses but the people don’t. A pastor builds a large church, for example, in order to win a denominational post rather than to serve the people.
General Electric once learned that young eager beavers running branch or subsidiary operations would sometimes take short cuts that didn’t show up until after they were promoted upward. They would cut maintenance expenditures, for example, and throw the money into the profit column. That made them look extremely good. The next fellow would come along, however, and find a lot of overdue maintenance waiting for him. GE decided to add a section to its evaluation procedure for executives: What effect has this person had on the future of the operation?
In the same way, the pastor who takes too many outside speaking engagements is pursuing a private agenda. The person who wants to pray at every football game or social event, to be continually seen with the right people, looks like a leader—but is he? He may become a prominent person but not be leading the church to help people mature or to reach the lost. It’s a private agenda.
2. Measuring success by the competition. Why do we seldom refer to the pastor of a small church as a “leader”? Because we’ve adopted a competition mode of thinking.
Doing better than other people doesn’t mean we’re successful. We still might not be doing anything close to what we ought to be doing. The essence of leadership is progress toward our spiritual goal, not competition.
But it’s easy to get diverted. In fact, some who are renowned for leading congregations are really immunizing the people against real responsibilities. I sincerely believe pastors of many large churches have learned how to make the irresponsible comfortable. For my personal edification, I once made a list of the ways it can be done. For example, talking only about the total budget, seldom about per capita giving. That way, a pastor can emphasize the seven- or even eight-figure sum—and the people are impressed because the budget is usually larger than last year. But on an individual basis, they may be doing far less than a tithe, perhaps less per capita than the year before. To me, that’s not leading people to responsible giving.
When there’s lots of hype and little effort required, people will gather. True leaders, however, help people assume responsibility, not avoid it.
3. Popularity. The fact that people feel warmly toward a pastor doesn’t mean he’s a good leader at all. It simply means he has a likable personality. A lot of times it’s more important to get the job done than to be liked.
I got some criticism once from my Sunday school teaching, so I had my secretary type up a card with a quote from Martin Luther: “I find it impossible to avoid offending guilty men, for there is no way of avoiding it but by our silence or their patience; and silent we cannot be because of God’s command, and patient they cannot be because of their guilt.” Every Christian leader ought to put that in a frame. There’s no way to keep the hit dog from hollering. The trick for a Christian is to continue to love that hollering dog.
What Derails Leaders
Impressive-looking leaders can veer into the ditch for a couple of reasons:
• They were steered by their ego. This kind of person reminds me of the inspector in the underwear commercial: “It isn’t Hanes until I say it’s Hanes.” That was pretty much the style of one association president I knew, who when asked for the basis of a certain decision, replied, “My word.” This man was elected to twenty-seven one-year terms in a row, and he even-tually got to thinking he was God. Then came his downfall.
I saw the leader of a major church fail not long ago. His word had gotten to be law. If he said it, you didn’t argue with it. In the end, all moral ground gave way.
A lot of leaders start out humbly, with right purposes, but get diverted into ego trips. Many electronic preachers start out sincere as they can be, but often the ratings catch their eye, and they become showmen.
• They became discouraged. This is an opposite reason for derailment, and a more common one. Some of us don’t have enough success to get on an ego trip. The train isn’t rolling that fast.
But we do get sidetracked by small failures. We somehow can’t quite muster the second and third effort to keep trying again. Leadership means plugging away until the break-through comes. My mother, in the midst of raising five boys on a preacher’s salary, used to repeat and repeat: “Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Gal. 6:9). That’s a great verse for the heart of any leader.
Staying on Track
Bill Glass, All-Pro football player of the 1960s, said he was never on a winning team that didn’t have high morale. But the morale came from winning; winning did not come from the morale. “That’s what people who are not in leadership don’t understand,” he said.
It’s important for a leader to generate some progress—some “wins”—to show people. Browbeating them with their failures is a poor way to motivate. People need to see success, to catch a feeling of progress.
No matter what the circumstances, there is always some kind of progress to be made. A congregation of 250 farmers will make progress different from a city church’s. But progress is possible. The leader finds out what that is and leads in that direction. It may not be dramatic. But as long as he’s making progress, he’s leading.
Charles Pitts, the man whose company built the Toronto subway, told me, “When you ride up to a site and find fifty or a hundred people standing there waiting for the boss to make a decision, you don’t call a committee meeting. You get them busy immediately. If you don’t know exactly what to do, you at least get them doing something that won’t hurt. People have got to feel the boss knows what ought to be done.”
A leader simply must have the confidence to lead. You can’t afford to get confused in front of your people. If you want to be confused, do it at home! Confusion, like prayer, is best in a closet.
Every leader also needs to understand that early sacrifices have to be made in order to earn a place in leadership. When you are young, you can’t set out to be both a Rubenstein and a baseball star. You have to pay the price of preparation, both formally and informally. A lot of people come out of seminary thinking they’re automatic leaders. No, they’re candidates for leadership.
A friend of mine, Glenn Baldwin, upon selling his very successful investment company, was asked the secret of his success.
“Well,” he said, “back when I started twenty-two years ago, I worked very hard and had a good year. Twenty-one years ago, I worked hard and had my second good year. Then twenty years ago, I worked hard and had my third good year.… The secret of my success was twenty-two consecutive ‘good years.'”
The questioner replied, “Is that all? Wasn’t there some secret?”
“There was no secret, no trick,” Glenn said. “I just put one good year on top of another.”
People these days will read In Search of Excellence and think they’re going to find some secret formula. More than any secret techniques, the quality companies all have quality leadership.
Now I will admit the magnitude of a leader’s success is not always determined by the person or his qualities. Often, the times bring special opportunities. Abraham Lincoln would never have been known as perhaps our greatest president without the Civil War. Winston Churchill’s career was fading into insignificance until the Second World War came, and Britain needed a man of his talent.
But this is only one factor. Far more is decided by how intelligently we work. We cannot dictate the times, but as Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?” We are responsible for the situation into which we have been placed.
As the sign my wife hung over the washing machine says, “Bloom where you are planted.”
An Eye on the Destination
A leader should never try to lead without first being captivated by a vision. Paul never lost the vision of his divine appointment to be an apostle to the Gentiles.
Intensity must always have focus, of course. If you are intense about the wrong things, people will lose respect and think you are a neurotic or religious fanatic. The vision must always be of the possible. It’s very romantic to say, as some do, “Never attempt anything that isn’t too big for you, so you’ll be sure God has to do it.” How much better to tackle those things he gives that are at hand and doable.
Seldom does an unknown person win an Olympic gold medal. Seldom does a no-name catapult into a place of leadership. In fact, the Scripture says not to use a novice. We disobey that sometimes by taking a person who’s been successful in one field and moving him into the spiritual arena. Just because someone’s led a business or made money does not mean he’s a spiritual leader. Leaders are grown; they accrete. Leadership requires experience and emotional control. It demands the ability to persuade, and the ability to solve problems.
The vision we pursue must be worthy. It must make the effort seem like a good investment. Those asked to do the work must say, “What I’m doing is worth the cost.” This is one weakness in the Soviet system right now. People don’t see anything happening that’s worthy of their effort.
When Torrey Johnson, a young pastor of a small Chicago church, founded Youth for Christ back in the 1940s, he wasn’t just chasing numbers. He saw an opportunity to do something for soldiers hanging out on the street on Saturday night. From that movement has come some of evangelicalism’s greatest leaders. At the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, there was a gathering of former YFCers, and the room turned out to contain much of the leadership of the evangelical world. That’s what can happen when you pursue a worthy vision.
Leadership is the ability to see beyond the odds—to see how you can change the odds. If you don’t see that, you are asking for failure.
The goal may not be reached in your lifetime. But as Lincoln said, “I would rather fail in a cause that will ultimately succeed than succeed in a cause that will ultimately fail.” Sometimes we leaders have to realize we are laying foundations—which always take shape much more slowly than superstructures. We can’t get dissatisfied with the slow work of the diggings and pilings just because the person who will do the superstructure will appear to be doing so much more.
Leadership requires a certain patience. Generally our ego is the overlord of our patience, but in leadership it must be subservient. Six times around the walls of Jericho wasn’t enough to make them fall. In the same way, a few years later it took Gideon quite a while to find his three hundred core men.
We don’t lead masses except in entertainment, or at best moving them by short-term enthusiasm. On the other hand, developing people takes time. But it also has much more long-lasting effects. We need to remember we are serving the God of eternity.
Knowing What People Need
Leaders do not usually know, through intuition, what direction people need to be led. Most effective leaders pick up cues from their people’s needs.
In the business world, Ted Levitt described the difference between sales and marketing. If you’re oriented to selling, you start by deciding to manufacture a product—say, baby carriages—and you get the sales force to go out and sell them. In marketing, you go out and find what customers would like to buy; then you make that product. You start near the end of the process and work backwards.
Proctor and Gamble, for example, is a marketing company. Being a chemical company, they can make soap or toothpaste any way they want. But they went out and asked consumers, “What do you want?” Well, people said they’d like something to stop cavities. That sounded rather far-fetched at first, but before long we had flouride in the toothpaste, and our dental bills went down.
The church is a combination of sales and marketing. The gospel is fixed, but not the emphasis. If you read Paul’s letters, he spent much of the space dealing with what his readers wanted to talk about. They had written him with questions, and he was answering them. He always included the gospel, but he applied it to their specific needs.
If I said to a group of preachers, “Give people what they want,” many would see it as a prostitution of the gospel. But the gospel is so broad. Yes, we all believe the Scripture provides answers to problems, but we’ll get people much more involved if, like Paul, we talk about what their problems are. Too many say, “Well, I think the people ought to know Romans, or the Decalogue, or the miracles.” Is that what they sense a need to know?
As long as you are dedicated to bringing scriptural principles to bear on people’s problems, you’re a marketer. You’re helping people with the problems they have by applying “the mysteries of God,” as my friend Ray Stedman would put it.
We’ve learned in industry that most people will not learn anything they are not going to use shortly. Very few are intellectually curious, wanting to learn for learning’s sake. If you tell somebody how to get to a certain stadium, he’ll probably forget—unless he wants to go to the stadium. If somebody stops you and says, “How do I get to the stadium?” you can be sure he’s going to listen very well.
Somebody was raving to me recently about a certain television preacher. I said, “Is he good?”
“Oh, he’s wonderful.”
“What makes him a good preacher?” I asked.
She answered, “When you get through listening to him, you’d think he’s been in your living room all week. He knows where you are.”
Interior Leadership
While leaders at the top are evident and visible, leadership must be exerted all through an organization. That’s why Jethro told Moses to divide up the responsibility and the authority. Moses didn’t keep it all to himself.
In any well-run organization, a whole group of leaders and developing leaders are coming up. Leaders cannot operate without help. That is why, at another time, Moses needed to have his arms held up. He knew what he wanted to accomplish. But he was physically incapable by himself.
I know a preacher right now who’s tearing a church apart because he’s saying to people, “Look, we’re going to succeed whether you come with us or not. Stay under the stairs if you want. We don’t need you—you need us.” That’s not good leadership.
Leadership is more than personality; it’s character. The accomplishment of a goal requires synergy. For each goal is part of a larger goal, thereby developing momentum. You don’t get diverted; you stick with your master plan. The followers then enjoy the fruits of their labor. There are celebration times, when you say, “Hey, we’ve done well. I appreciate you; your hard work is recognized.”
Good leadership brings out the best in people; it makes more of any individual than he would have been had he not followed. Winning makes the organization willing to pay the price of discipline. And unless you make people conscious of winning, discipline becomes very odious. This has been a weakness of puritanical Christianity.
One of the toughest bandmasters I ever knew was Willy Fenten, a German who produced a championship high school band year after year. I can still hear him hollering at one trumpet player, “You can’t play like that and play in this band! This is a championship band.” Fenten didn’t emphasize his own personal displeasure. He emphasized the student’s contribution to the organization, and the quality of the organization. Therein lies a significant difference.
Is It Worth It?
When Harold Hook was voted “CEO of the Year” by Texas A&M, he outlined in his acceptance speech what he called three important questions for leaders:
1. Am I enjoying what I am doing?
2. Am I happy with where I’m going?
3. Am I satisfied with what I’m becoming?
I was impressed with that and sent it along to some friends of mine, including a young man, who three days later called me. We had an interesting conversation.
“Fred, you’re going to think I’ve gone off my rocker.”
“Why?”
“I just liquidated my investments.”
That stopped me for sure. I said, “Do you know something about the stock market I don’t—like, a crash?”
“No.”
“Were you losing?”
“No, I was making money.”
“Did you need the money?”
“No.”
“Then why’d you do that?”
He said, “Fred, I’m sick and tired of grabbing The Wall Street Journal first thing every morning. That is not the object of my life. And when I read that thing you sent about ‘Am I satisfied with what I’m becoming?’ I said no. I’m becoming too involved in my investments. So I liquidated them today.”
I said, “You didn’t do a silly thing. You simply looked at your priority list and took action. You did well.”
I saw him three days later. “How do you feel now?” I asked.
“I feel exactly like I did when I quit smoking,” he said. “I’m free.”
It is important that the act of leading make us become what we want to become. This way we do not end up hollow, having our insides eaten away by success. Paul said he had run the race and finished the course; he was satisfied with his leadership. That, in the end, should be the product of any leader’s life.
Copyright © 1986 by Christianity Today
