Leading Reluctant Followers

Mistrust of leadership has reached pandemic proportions.
— Ben Patterson

Some people become reluctant followers early in life. I know I did.

I was just 8 years old when my uncle convinced me that if I sat on top of the roof, held my breath, and jumped off, I would float down. I believed him. Fortunately nothing was broken — except my ability to trust people.

I’m not the only reluctant follower. Since becoming a pastor, I’ve realized how difficult it is for some people to trust the church’s leadership. At times, such mistrust can get out of hand.

One evening a member of our board was presenting a proposal to the annual meeting. In the middle of her presentation, several people actually began booing her. The hissing and catcalls were a scene right out of the English Parliament. I was stunned by their behavior. I wanted to drag the hecklers outside. The entire incident reminded me again that those most in need of leadership are often the ones most opposed to it.

Sometimes reluctance to follow serves a congregation well — not everything a pastor says should be taken as straight from the mouth of God. Yet, overall I am disturbed by the trend I see in our culture. Mistrust of leadership has reached pandemic proportions. I regularly meet people who’ve learned mistrust as a lifestyle. They’ve been hurt by the people they should have been able to believe. They can’t defer to anyone now. They’ve become trust-impaired.

In the church the result is strangulation. Members can’t follow the lead of a pastor or board. The pastor, for instance, is given enormous responsibility but little authority. We’re called on to save the world, but we can’t distribute ten dollars from the benevolence fund without calling a board meeting.

The proliferation of church committees is a sign of this trend. Committees tend to diffuse authority throughout the church. That may empower the laity, but the church can nearly grind to a halt over relatively insignificant decisions. You can’t paint the library without checking with the Christian education committee (which oversees the library), the youth group (which meets in the library for Sunday school), the building and grounds committee (which monitors the building), and the budget committee (which authorizes money for painting). Naturally, if the young couples group is going to do the painting, you’ll have to check with them as well!

But such is the culture we try to minister in today. We’re called by God to lead a people who don’t seem to want to be led. It’s not a new problem; Moses faced it long ago. And it is a problem that can be effectively dealt with. Here’s how I’ve tried.

Encouraging Followership

Since we can no longer assume that people want to follow our leadership, we need to encourage them to do so. At a minimum, that means not putting stumbling blocks in their way. But it also means setting a tone to my ministry that will entice people to follow.

• Don’t butcher the sacred cows. People will not follow us if they sense we’re trying to rustle their sacred cows. Knowing that, early on I try to discover the location of that herd. That’s difficult sometimes because most sacred cows are invisible ground round — they aren’t easily identified. The moment I stumble into a corral of sacred cows, though, I know it.

For example, I served a church with a long history of faith pledging, in which people promise in their hearts, though not on paper, what they’ll give for the coming year. Wanting to plan wisely for the coming year, I thought it would be good to get some indication of what we could expect from the congregation. So at one board meeting, I asked the elders each to write down what they gave to the church the previous year. I might as well have asked them to undress publicly. In the quiet, frozen atmosphere of the room, I distinctly heard the mooing of sacrosanct bovines.

“Okay,” I said with a smile, “I see I must be careful when we start talking about stewardship.” Polite laughter around the room put the matter to pasture.

• Get your board on board. Perhaps the most crucial element in successfully winning the congregation’s support is to get the board behind you. Leaders have a great deal of latitude as long as they enjoy the board’s support. If the congregation understands the board is foursquare behind the pastor, they will fall in line.

As a young pastor I was naive about this. I thought it was enough to get “the people” behind me. But “the people” is an ill-defined group. It’s far more important that I have the solid support of the elders, who will provide a buffer when the criticism comes. As Proverbs says, four things move with stately bearing: a lion, a strutting rooster, a he-goat, and a pastor surrounded by his elder board!

As a result I spend a majority of my time with three groups in the church: my staff, the elders (board members), and developing leaders. The latter group will one day be my board, and it’s vital that I begin building relationships long before they reach the board.

• Listen for the personal dimension. A few years ago, an elder on our board resigned, claiming he was under-utilized by the church. That made me angry. He had a history of dropping the ball whenever he was given an assignment. It was ridiculous for this irresponsible person to accuse others of failing to recognize his gifts.

When we finally got together to talk things out, I thought I needed to exert strong leadership, to hold this man accountable. But I lost it. I just chewed the man out. It took a year before we could speak about this incident again.

That’s when I found out that during the time leading up to his departure from the church, his marriage was falling apart. He was angry that we hadn’t noticed, but then, he hadn’t told us. Still I felt badly that I hadn’t thought to go beyond his public reasons for quitting.

Not every situation in the church calls for strong, dynamic leadership. Often the pastoral touch is the most effective way of building trust in your leadership.

• Lead boldly and let grace abound. Even though I know people are hesitant to follow, I’m not hesitant to lead. In fact, if I were hesitant, it would undermine my credibility. So I have to make tough decisions and voice my opinion about the direction of the church, albeit with some discretion at first.

Still, at times pastors must act on their best instincts and leave the results with God, particularly when the issues are not clear-cut. It’s what Martin Luther referred to as “sinning boldly” in the gray areas of life.

I’m not always 100 percent certain I’m doing the right thing, so I’ll often find myself praying, “Lord have mercy on me” or “If I’m wrong about this, please redeem it.”

A decisive leader who occasionally makes mistakes is to be preferred to a paralyzed individual who fears a misstep. The difference between General George McClellan and General Ulysses Grant was simple: each commanded a vast army, but one was afraid to use that command; the other was not.

Especially Good Times for Leading

Part of the discretion I use has to do with timing. Not every issue needs bold leadership from the pastor. But sometimes it’s best to flex my leadership muscles a little more, times when even reluctant followers appreciate leadership.

• The paradox of the new kid on the block. A congregation is most eager to follow my lead when they are also the least apt to follow it — when I’m new. When I plot two lines on a graph, one for the willingness of a congregation to follow a pastor’s leadership and one for its level of trust in him or her, I find several fascinating trends.

First, in our early years we find great expectation and excitement, which translates into eagerness regarding our fresh ideas. But our chief asset, our newness, is also our chief liability. No one knows us, so few people trust us. So while eagerness is sky-high, the trust level lies on the bottom of the graph.

As the years go by, however, our trust level rises while our leadership punch sags. The reason for less leadership octane is institutional contentment. I find that once churches adjust to who I am and what I believe in, they become content with the way things are. They know me well, and they’re happy with the status quo. So there just doesn’t seem to be much reason to change anything.

If familiarity breeds a certain contempt when it comes to the willingness to follow, one antidote is to maintain a certain mystique. Great football coaches, for example, keep themselves aloof from their players, their staff, and the fans. You almost get the feeling these coaches watch the game from the highest seat in the stadium.

I don’t want to become aloof. In fact, some of my colleagues think I err on the other side — they say I’m too open with my congregation. It’s a thin tightrope to walk, but I never want to reveal so much of myself that my congregation can predict what I’m going to say or do next.

• Healthy desperation. Churches are usually ready to set aside their reluctance to follow when they experience healthy desperation. The church has fallen on hard times. Giving has collapsed. Membership had dropped and the avalanche hasn’t slowed. If a plane bounces through heavy turbulence, people will reach for their seat belts when the captain flashes the buckle-up light.

I recently received an inquiry letter from a church with a great history. One pastor served the church for several decades. Within three years of his retirement, though, the place began unraveling. The people cherish the memory of the former church, and now they’re in pain. They’re ready to trust a pastor who can show them the way out.

A word of warning: churches that have experienced nothing but grief and desperation for years are just about impossible to turn around. Certainly, a supernatural working of the Spirit can accomplish it, but not much else. Usually, such churches can be only maintained and take decades to move forward once again.

• Good enemies produce strong allies. A neighborhood petition, a zoning board fight, or a caustic article in the newspaper can galvanize a congregation behind the pastor. A good enemy will unify people behind a leader. While certain radio and television preachers seem to create (and exploit) a “crisis of the month” to boost donations, a realistic threat from the outside will almost always draw the congregation to the pastor.

• A grand project. If the program or plan is big enough, people feel over their heads, and they are more willing to be led.

Building projects are sometimes used in this way, though I’m cautious at this point. They are long and exhausting ordeals. They can come around and bite a pastor before he or she knows it. I recently read of a large church that received incredibly bad press because a mud slide from its building project blocked a road. A driver lost control, and there was a minor accident. The paper depicted the church as environmentally insensitive. Building projects can find a hundred ways to break your heart.

One of my experiences in California was just the opposite. Everyone knew we needed a building, everyone wanted one, and the church supported my leadership. It turned out to be a marvelously unifying experience. And we had few complications unlike the church above! But I tend to believe our experience was rare.

• The right age and size. I’ve also found that age can be an asset in persuading people to follow my lead. I jokingly advise others that it helps not to be too young or too old.

My own strength as a leader seemed to take a quantum leap when I hit age 40 to 45. I was no longer seen as the young kid with great potential and rough edges. At the same time they weren’t expecting me to have a cardiac arrest any day. In some ways, I have reached the summer of my life. Maturity doesn’t necessarily come with age, but it doesn’t come without it either.

The size of a congregation can also affect your ability to lead. Lyle Schaller’s book, Looking in the Mirror, details the changing dynamics of church leadership according to the size of the congregation. For instance, small churches, which he describes as “cats,” can be particularly difficult to lead. Like felines, they do what they please, with no regard for anyone else’s wishes, let alone the pastor’s. They are so small, everyone feels as if they own the church — and practically speaking, it appears they do. They can operate with or without a pastor, and they know it.

My experience in California, of growing a church from approximately 60 people to 700, allowed me to glimpse firsthand the various leadership passages a church goes through. The easiest stage to exert leadership was from approximately 150 to 550 people. At that size it was just large enough to recognize its need for someone to give clear direction.

As it passed the 600 mark, though, I noticed little duchies began forming. City-states began declaring their independence and carefully guarding their turf. One city-state was composed of charismatics, another of those deeply committed to foreign missions, and so on.

Strangely enough, the small and large church share something in common: they’re both hard to lead. If smaller churches are independent, larger ones are fragile and require skillful leadership to avoid fracturing. Whereas financial or attendance tremors may temporarily rattle a small church, they can produce high-end-Richter-scale damage in a huge congregation.

What They Say Is Not What They Mean

To become a good leader, you have to distinguish between what people say they want and what they really want. In counseling it’s called the difference between the “presenting issue” and the “real issue.”

For example, one couple in my church had a passion for the pro-life movement. Since I shared their convictions on the issue, I was eager to help them. What I didn’t understand at the time was the wife’s true motive.

Her husband was reluctant to get involved in our church. Because he didn’t respond to Sunday school, small groups, or evening pot-luck dinners, she decided to use his commitment to prolife to bring him into the church, through the back door, so to speak.

I thought they were involved because of their respect for life. Instead, it had to do with their marriage. When I tried to provide direction for their cause, I ran into problems. I was increasingly spending time in their home for one meeting after another. Finally, I had to back away, explaining that I couldn’t give so much time to one cause. Eventually, I sorted things out and realized the woman had been using me, the church, and pro-life.

The whole episode reminded me of what the Gospel of John said about Jesus: he didn’t entrust himself to others because he knew what was in their hearts. While I’m not entirely certain how to apply that truth to my life, I now move much slower when people ask for my leadership. I listen to see whether people want me to lead them or simply get behind them. If they’ve outlined everything they wish to do and how they’re going to do it, I’m cautious: they may want support rather than direction. On the other hand, if they have a burden to do ministry but desperately need help organizing their efforts and ambitions, they need a leader.

Transformational Leadership

With all that said, I believe there are immense possibilities for providing leadership that people will respond to, and with integrity and enthusiasm.

Leighton Ford, in his book Transforming Leadership, stresses the difference between managers and transformational leaders. Managers attempt to do things right, while leaders are those who try to do the right thing. Leadership includes the ability to present a compelling vision to people. When people have a vision, you can withstand all manner of problems, glitches, and screw-ups. It’s like an orchestra that recovers from a sour note or two — together they go on and finish the symphony.

Here are some things I keep in mind as I try to practice transformational leadership.

• The vision thing. It is thrilling to be able to share with a congregation an outline for future ministry, especially if it promises to transform people’s lives: “Here’s where we can go as a church, and here’s why I think we should go there.”

When I began a new church development in California, we began services for a small nucleus of people, and three months into the venture, I suggested having a membership class. The people responded with an enthusiasm that left me dizzy. Out of ninety or so people attending the church, eighty enrolled in the class.

There I laid out my vision for the church and its future. In those days, I took a prophetic stand against the materialism and hedonism of the Southern California culture that surrounded us. I urged that we become a body of believers that would carefully think through our life together. I appealed to the group to spend their money in ways that glorified God rather than fed an insatiable appetite for more and more toys.

I was thrilled to preach freely like that. That preaching energy coupled with a willing congregation proved synergistic. The commitment to a simple life and the level of giving was extraordinary. The congregation seemed to enjoy following as much as I enjoyed leading.

As a church we were self-consciously countercultural. The timing was right; the antiestablishment sentiment ruled the land from San Francisco to Woodstock. We offered people a chance to fulfill their unspoken dreams. Many of our people had become disillusioned with large, wealthy churches, which they had just left.

That vision didn’t last, as none do. But that vision at that time helped me to lead and people to follow.

In my current setting, vision is summarized by the slogan, “To the Village and Beyond.” The church is nearly two-and-a-half centuries old, so the challenge is to transform a village with a private, rural history into a dynamic body that can impact the great metroplexes that touch our community (New York City, in particular). I am urging the people to allow our church to become a center of renewal and mission to the massive urban areas right at our doorstep.

• Assure the flock the pastures will stay green. People might intellectually agree with your new vision, but their heart is still with the way things used to be. So while leading people to new vistas, I have to assure them I will continue to love and nurture them.

That doesn’t mean that the pastor has to do the loving and nurturing directly — I can’t make every hospital call or attend every graduation party. The challenge, then, is to show people how they can care for each other through strong lay ministry. Qualified deacons and elders can provide hands-on, intimate, person-to-person ministry.

To accomplish that in our setting, we’ve divided the congregation into “flocks” that elders and deacons nurture and shepherd. They guarantee that the lonely, the sick, the depressed, and the grieving are cared for in a compassionate manner. That gives the pastoral staff the freedom to spend more time beyond the village.

In the final analysis, I want people to know that more is being given to them than is being taken away. Once you’ve established that, you’re on your way toward a new day in the church.

• Unwelcome visitors. New ministry attracts new people, and that can be a threat for some longstanding members. They start counting noses and speculate that soon there will be more of “them” than “us.” People begin asking themselves quietly, “What will my place be in this new church?”

One way of counteracting parish xenophobia is to assure people that the new changes are going to benefit their children and their grandchildren. I offer the assurance that the church will still be viable two generations from now if we do the right things today. I ask people, “What type of church and world do you want to leave to your grandchildren?” In this disintegrating society, that is a powerful motivator.

• The parable of the pear trees. After all is said and done, a leader must sometimes be willing to leave some reluctant followers behind. Jesus did; Paul did. Every generation of church leaders have. That’s not the perspective of an ecclesiastical sociopath; that’s the reality of leadership.

As much as I would like everyone to follow, sometimes it isn’t realistic. Many who aren’t willing to follow early on, probably never will. At some point, you have to make a hard decision as to how much time you want to spend in changing reluctant attitudes.

Louis Evans, the former pastor of the National Presbyterian Church for eighteen years, had been leading the church through a long, agonizingly slow process of change. He had just finished a meeting that had gone badly. He went back to his study, slumped in his chair, and looked out his window. The gardener was pruning trees.

He admired this gardener for the way he lovingly and patiently sculptured the trees into globes. Once, though, while the gardener had been in the hospital for heart surgery, some temporary help had changed the shapes of the trees from globes to pears. Louis Evans remembered how the gardener, upon returning to see his trees, turned the air blue with his profanity.

He also remembered something else the gardener said: “It will take years to change the shape of these trees, because you can change the tree only to the degree it has grown.”

You can shape a church only to the degree it has grown. For me that means I should invest myself in the process of sculpting new leaders, through discipleship and nurture. Presently I’m trying to spend a year of my life with a small group of men. My plan is for them to go out and spend a year with a similar group of men. Today, by my best estimation, some seventy men in my congregation have been impacted.

• Staying the course. Building trust depends on establishing your integrity. And that means staying with something long enough to become believable to people. If I say I’m interested in reaching urban areas with the gospel, I need to hang tough with that dream even if it’s not immediately embraced. If I’m still saying the same thing three years from now, people know it’s not a passing fad. Doing what you said you were going to do from day one builds trust.

That’s a crucial difference between what Leighton Ford calls transformational and transactional leaders. A transactional leader always negotiates his vision, testing its acceptability, watering it down to suit the people. A transformational leader stays with his dream regardless of the storm.

For example, I know a pastor who was having difficulties with a staff member. Her husband was one of his outspoken critics in the church. Finally, he confronted her and said, “This is awkward. But do you feel as negatively toward me as your husband does?” After some hesitation, she said yes. Somewhat stymied as what to do next, he called a friend in the ministry.

After patiently listening to his story, his friend offered some simple advice, “You’re the head of staff. If your staff isn’t going to be loyal to you, you don’t have to work with them. I’d fire her.”

He went back and did just that. The husband went ballistic. He was furious at the pastor and insisted he should have “worked it out with her.” As my friend said, “I’ve been hired to lead. It’s her job to negotiate her relationship and attitude toward me as her supervisor, not the other way around.”

If a church isn’t willing to follow my leadership, I don’t want to be called the pastor. Call me the facilitator, call me the negotiator or the arbitrator, but don’t call me the pastor. Pastors should have the understood right to lead.

The Benefits of Frustration

When the congregation is reluctant to follow, it can hurt. But it can also give one a sense of humility. Our pride and arrogance can deceive us into believing that we have a right to a happy and fulfilling life. But in reality, hardship and suffering are part and parcel of ministry. Just because I have a burning vision doesn’t mean I should have an easy road to actualizing it.

I’m reminded of missionaries to India or the Middle East, who might spend an entire lifetime and win only a handful of converts. Is their vision invalid? No; they are just paying the high cost of discipleship.

And when my dreams are stuck in neutral because of congregational reluctance, I’m reminded of the difference between God’s eternal purposes in the world and my own limited grasp of what they are. It’s more important that I be right about my place in the kingdom of God than insisting on seeing all my dreams be fulfilled. That type of opposition I see as an opportunity for my soul to be cleansed, my focus clarified, and my devotion to serving God renewed.