Virtually every decision has a moral aspect, but there are also other modes to consider: effective versus ineffective, good versus best, safe versus risky.
Carl F. George
It’s not stretching it too far to say a leader is much like a basketball referee: in the middle of the action, trying to keep the game clean and fair, and above all, calling ’em as he sees ’em.
Decision making is just as important and difficult to the pastor as to the ref — and occasionally just as unpopular.
One of the best at making the right call is Carl George. Director of the Pasadena-based Charles E. Fuller Institute of Evangelism and Church Growth since 1978, he spends a full one-third of his time with individual churches and pastors who have requested help. His wisdom is a combination of thirteen years in the pastorate (University Baptist Church, Gainesville, Florida), consulting work with more than three dozen denominations, postgraduate study in sociology, and wide self-education, all processed by one of the fastest minds in the West.
Here are his thoughts on the demanding art of making decisions.
Everyone knows leadership involves making decisions; that’s “what we get paid for,” as the saying goes. How can church leaders do it better?
As I spend time with pastors, I find them making many decisions every day. But they are handicapped because they almost inevitably think in moralistic terms only: rightness versus wrongness. “What’s the right thing to do? What ought to be done?”
I keep reminding leaders that there are other modes to consider: effective versus ineffective, good versus best, safe versus risky.
You’re not dismissing the moral dimension?
Not at all. Virtually every decision has a moral aspect, either in its consequences or in the way the decision will be implemented. And most of us in the ministry carry an intuitive desire to reach for the godly, to hear the words of God on a given issue and line up with him rather than against him. But not all church administration deals with Mount Sinai issues. Many decisions are more mundane and subtle.
That’s why I prefer to guide pastors toward such questions as:
— What are the decisions I could make, and what will be the outcomes? Are they significant to my long-term ministry? Which decisions ought to be deferred?
— What are my options? Is this really a yes/no question? Or are there options A, B, and C to be considered?
— Who should be involved in the decision-making process in order for implementation to be effective?
— How do I know when I have enough information? When is going for more research just a way of delaying the decision? Is it time to bite the bullet?
These are the questions that aren’t asked often enough.
Of the many decisions pastors face — from “What shall I preach?” to “Whom shall we hire?” to “How shall I arrange my life to be a good spouse and parent?” — which tend to buffalo pastors the worst?
One of the toughest ones, in my judgment, is what to do with one’s time on a daily basis. The trouble with time is that no one holds pastors accountable for it. They can wallow along ineffectively day after day, their actions not really adding up to anything in particular, and no one notices.
How do you notice, when you’re called in as a consultant?
I’ll say, for example, “Whom are you going to call on this week?”
And the pastor will glance at the chalkboard on the wall or pull out a card and say, “Well, I have seven sick people this week, and then there’s a couple of appointments from the new-members class, and I need to see a couple of Sunday school teachers.…” He’ll pause, then continue, “And I suppose other people will call during the week about various things.”
This pastor is basically playing firefighter. He’s waiting for the bell to ring (or the axle to squeak, or the Spirit to move). He doesn’t see that there is such a thing as taking initiative in the area of contacts.
This same person may be conscientious about sermon topics, laying out an annual preaching plan. He may be intentional about selecting themes and texts. But when it comes to people, he’s a shepherd waiting for the lost sheep to show up, listening for a call from the wild.
If you take the notion that a church can have a mission (other than shepherding), then you will spend your time in the areas that will bring the greatest payoff. You’ll spend it with the key contacts who have the potential to lead others. You’ll seek out those who show the greatest readiness to make a decisive commitment at the next interview.
And I’ve learned you can train pastors to do this — if they’re hungry. If someone is content with the reactive style, of course, not much can be done. Shepherding does give a certain sense of worth; you’re the rescuer, the one called in when things are desperate. But if a church leader has a vision that goes beyond being well thought of, a vision that includes harvest, then some important decisions must be made intentionally.
What are they?
The pastor must say, “Given my limited resources, the most precious of them being my time” (many pastors don’t value time as the most precious resource, but it is), “with whom or on what should I be spending it?”
There are two dangers for pastors: Spending too much time getting ready for Sunday, and spending too little time. The right balance gives an optimum quality of sermon and optimum exposure to people who need to be recruited.
I really think the pastor (at least in the average-sized church in America) is still the key person to make people feel they are entering a church legitimately. Frequently it requires no more than a five-to fifteen-minute touch to create a favorable disposition toward the church. From there on, lay people can finish hauling the prospect into the boat. All the pastor needs to do is set the hook.
When I was a pastor, I noticed a curious thing: a fifteen-minute visit with someone would produce a member, while if I spent forty-five minutes, I’d never see the person again! Apparently they got too much of me (or I got too much of them). They must have assumed the expected level of commitment in our church was just too high, and they were frightened away.
If you go to a new bank, and the president takes the trouble to shake your hand, ask your name, and say they’d all be glad to be of service to you, you are impressed. You don’t expect the president also to take your money; that’s the tellers’ job. In fact, you may not see the president once in the next two years. But it doesn’t matter; you’ve been favorably disposed to do your banking there.
The average visitor does not expect nearly as much of the minister as the average member does. Pastors can get confused about that. They may think outsiders are clamoring for as much attention as the insiders. In most cases, it isn’t true. In fact, if pastors give them that much exposure, they can actually choke off their coming toward the church.
This has profound implications for time management.
What other decisions slip past many of the pastors you talk to?
Many are not taking the trouble to educate themselves in needed areas of management.
Almost all ministers are well educated theologically. Most seminary graduates have more to teach than anybody wants to learn. If we spend any time at all preparing for a given sermon, we will meet the needs of the listeners. As Dan Baumann, author of a widely used preaching textbook, says, “Anyone who simply sets forth the text and gives its meaning distinctly will be accused of freshness.” (Laughter)
Meanwhile, the serious deficiencies are in management and leadership skills.
The question is, how does a pastor gain these skills, short of bringing in Carl George for a week.
Well, that gets expensive! A better approach, for starters, is to subscribe to leadership, which does a good job of touching both the theological and management topics of local-church ministry.
Beyond that, you simply have to glean the business fields for concepts that will transfer. An example is Andrew Grove’s book of a few years ago, High-Output Management. He’s the president of Intel, the electronic chip manufacturer. You can get lost in all his jargon, I admit, but the last half of the book is solid-gold stuff on the role of meetings: the one-on-one meeting, the group meeting, the ad hoc meeting, the routine meeting, and so forth.
I know some pastors say, “Well, that’s different from how things are in the church,” but I believe the God of creation is the one who made organization both necessary and possible. When a fallen world makes organization work, it does so with the principles of truth provided by the Creator.
Do you think more pastors make decisions too quickly or too hesitantly? Are they usually too fast on the trigger or too slow?
That depends on temperament. The biggest problem I see is decision makers not taking the trouble to multiply their options before deciding. Church leaders tend to construe each problem as black or white, either/or, right or wrong, when they need to unravel it a bit. They might see four or five different ways to proceed if they did.
Dave Luecke, a vice-president at Fuller Seminary and a former professor of administrative science, says the English language has a helpful convention along this line in the words better and best. If I look at a problem and come up with an option, I can say, “I have a good solution.” But I cannot say, “I have a better solution,” until I have looked at two possibilities. And I cannot claim, “I have the best solution,” until I have checked out at least three.
We must get this into our thinking. The best solution is one that has been weighed and selected from an array of potential actions, including whether I should do anything at all. Doctors, in the last thirty or forty years, have been learning that in a lot of cases, they shouldn’t do anything. Just give the patient sugar pills and send him home. The body will take care of itself, given time.
How would that work in the church? Let’s say, for example, a pastor gets word that a teenager in the youth group was seen drinking. One option is to corner the kid next Sunday and yell at him. What are the other options? Or is this a time to do nothing?
If you feel it’s critical for you to represent God’s opinion accurately, then you may come out with guns blazing, hitting every target in sight. God is against teen drinking!
If, however, you see this as a human behavior with certain causes, you can more accurately decide where to put the medicine. What is this kid fleeing from? What’s he trying to identify with? What hungers, what fears are just beneath the surface? Who are the significant others in his life, and how many of them can I give input to? Once you study the context, the parents, the peer group, and the teenager himself, you may find the cure belongs nowhere near the symptom. Only after determining the appropriate assignable cause can a good decision be made on how to respond.
The person who reported the incident probably expects you to take out the whip of fury and go after the offender. But if it were that easy, why hasn’t somebody already done it?
You might probe to see whether the reporter is even a causal person in the teenager’s life. “Who else have you discussed this with? Were they concerned? Are they making any plans? Are you making any plans? You know this teenager; you care enough about him to bring the matter to me. What do you think God may be calling you to do?”
You see, if the pastor treats this as a fire call, reaches for his hat, and runs out with sirens blazing, he may be overcome with smoke. How much better to say to the caller, “I’m sort of the coach here, and I’m deeply concerned about this, as you are. Let’s get down on our knees right now and pray until we have some insight on what each of us is supposed to do next in this matter.”
Pastors have to posture themselves as both caring persons and persons dedicated to the righteousness of God. In a few strict parts of the church today, pastors don’t have to show care for people but do have to uphold righteousness. In other parts of the church, you have to care about people’s feelings whether God is offended or not. I think the best thing to do is to coach people toward redemptive acts rather than just crusade for group moral standards.
And besides, pastors can never forget that people are always testing them. Some of these reports are brought simply to see what will happen. The teenager may not have been the one drinking; it may have even been the reporter himself or herself, who wants to know what you’ll do. And the way you respond will determine whether you are granted any further franchise for ministry. There are a lot of snares in these kinds of decisions.
Decision making is dangerous, isn’t it?
Certainly — especially in this area of “enforcing righteousness.” The thing to remember about the prophets who enforced righteousness is that most of them became martyrs!
When a pastor hears about a sheep who has become entangled, the goal is to unsnare him. You may mutter under your breath about the sheep’s stupidity, but berating him for being entangled does not produce the deliverance. Beating the thorn bush doesn’t help, either. The only effective action is to disengage the sheep.
Once you’ve multiplied your options, how do you decide the best of the bunch?
That depends on whether you have the gift of wisdom or not. I wish God had given every pastor all the gifts. But then we wouldn’t need the body, so we wouldn’t have a church.
If a pastor does not have a wisdom gift, he would do well to find someone who does and talk it over. In many of the cases I’ve counseled, the pastor’s wife has the gift he lacks in a critical area. The only question is whether he’s willing to consult her.
But God hasn’t left his church without what it needs. In other cases, key lay persons have such a gift and are discreet enough to be talked to. The resource is right there in the flock.
There’s also a problem of ego, isn’t there?
That’s right. Leaders don’t want to defer, because they hold the power to decide. They forget that even if they defer or delegate, they still have the power to review. They can decide:
— that a decision doesn’t need to be made
— to make a decision alone
— to make a decision with the help of someone else’s input and counsel
— that someone else needs to make this decision.
These last two involve the difference between knowing your mind and having your mind made up. When you know your mind, you know generally where you are on certain elements of an upcoming decision, but you don’t know exactly how it ought to come down or what your part should be. When you’ve made up your mind, you’ve closed the door to further input.
On certain issues, it’s all right to make up your mind — for example, the role your spouse prefers in a congregation. You know your preferences in advance so that when criticism comes, you can respond without flinching.
But in other matters, such as whether to build a new parking lot, you’re far better off simply to know your mind as you remain open to this angle and that, weighing the options. You know you intend to minister to more people, and the current space is inadequate, so something has to be done. But as you begin, you haven’t locked into “We must put fifty more parking spaces where the playing field is now.”
In some ways it is best if the pastor arrives at a new action last rather than first, after developing broad congregational support. Some decisions need a lot of process attached to them because they are so hard to undo.
That’s another part of wisdom, isn’t it — knowing which decisions to make unilaterally and which to make corporately?
Yes. I sat with one pastor who was trying to decide how to proceed with planting a daughter church. The problem was, not all of the proponents’ attitudes regarding the new mission were wholesome. We spent an hour talking and praying together about how to facilitate the dreams and wishes of these people in an affirming, legitimating way.
We finally came down to “What are the next steps?” At that point, he called in a wise and sensitive staff member, and we tossed it around for another half hour. We explored what actions would keep from hardening attitudes or making people fearful. Because of the lieutenant’s input, we wound up with a much different, more seasoned set of steps than if the senior pastor had written them alone or with just me.
This man knew when to stop thinking about the decision himself and call for help. He showed his exceeding wisdom. After I left, the two of them took the plan to a larger group of key lay persons for comment and refinement before proceeding further. The result was a successful launch.
How do you think the wind is blowing these days in terms of who makes church decisions? The North American weathervane swings all the way from strong congregational rule on every detail to strong pastoral initiative.
I think the same trend is happening in the church that is happening in business. Over the last five years, we’ve seen more and more evidence of a return to direction-giving leadership. The notion that leadership should be shared and democratic has been under revision. The swing is toward a more hierarchical system.
The new authoritative leaders, though, are concerned to be more open to feedback as they go along. They don’t want to be cut off or remote. But society does seem to be leaning toward persons of certainty who can call a shot.
Are the assertive leaders getting their feedback more informally than formally?
Not necessarily. Politicians are conducting polls constantly to take the pulse of the people. More and more churches are using surveys to get widespread input.
You know, many of our assumptions are fiction. The effective old-time “dictator” still had his listening posts, his grapevine taps to tell him what was going to succeed and what wasn’t. It’s the fellow who didn’t handle those powers sensitively who forms our caricature. But the great empires were built by people who had a good sense of the market, knew where people were and where they were willing to follow. Those rules haven’t changed much.
We go through fads of leadership style, with some appearing to be very democratic. David Watson, shortly before his death a few years ago, wrote about sharing the leadership of his church at York, England, and how he came to realize — after some major mistakes had been made — that you simply cannot abdicate leadership in the process of sharing it. The apostolically gifted person still has to be leader among the leaders, or else the ministry goes nowhere.
This is one of the issues where I disagree with some advocates of multiple eldership and so forth. They are afraid of the abuses possible in a hierarchy, and so they want to imagine that there is no gift of leadership, that there are no apostles or evangelists.
But in any given group, the Holy Spirit does not give everyone equal ability to lead. If that is not recognized, there are going to be problems.
We’ve talked about how pastors don’t often get adequate training in decision making. But do pastors enjoy any natural advantages when it comes to deciding matters in the church?
Someone has said the chief officer of any group has more ability to discourage something from happening than to make something happen, and that is true of pastors as well. By our inattention we can allow almost anything to die if we don’t want it to prosper. It takes a strong lay person to come forward and minister month after month, year after year, without encouragement or recognition. The pastor holds the power to bless or wither virtually any part of the church by what he chooses to stroke.
Secondly, pastors have the incredible power of the pulpit to cast vision. Each week they get opportunities to set the tone for the entire congregation. Even more important than the stated topic or Scripture are the illustrations. The pastor’s power of illustration and imagery is awesome.
Why is that?
Because illustrations command people’s imaginations. There is no greater force. With negative imagery, pastors can suggest withdrawal; with positive imagery, they can suggest victory. Most don’t realize they are artists, painting on the inner canvas of the listeners’ minds the scenes that will dominate the life of the whole church.
I sat with a group of ministers who were worried about growth in their denomination. I said, “What do you think? Can you grow?”
“I hope so,” said one man, “but I don’t know. I preached at one of our conferences recently and said I thought maybe we were dead if we didn’t do something pretty soon.”
“That sounds like an interesting sermon,” I said. “Do you have a copy of it?”
He found a copy, and I took it back to my hotel room. There I spread out the eight pages and began a content analysis. In college I studied a bit of theater, and so I took this sermon apart just like I would a play, noting the various episodes, the climax, the proclimaxes, the anticlimaxes, and so forth. I circled every illustration and examined it for vividness and emotion. The greatest emotional power, as all dramatists know, lies in the themes of life and blood; these move an audience profoundly.
This speaker used one illustration from his childhood about the time his father took him fishing. The first time the boy put his hook in the water, he didn’t get a fish but instead a snapping turtle. He excitedly reeled it in.
The father was perturbed, however; he seized his filet knife, grabbed the turtle, and proceeded to saw off its head. He threw the body up on the bank and said, “Now, son, let’s get back to fishing.”
The preacher went on: “But in a little while, I looked back, and lo and behold, the turtle had righted itself and was walking back down the bank —headless. I said, ‘Dad! Dad! The turtle’s coming down the bank!’
“And my father said, ‘Aw, son, don’t worry about him. He’s dead; he just doesn’t know it yet.'”
This became the speaker’s analogy for the denomination! His audience included a lot of small-town and country people, farmers, weekend fishermen. Talk about impact! A Jungian psychologist would go wild just thinking about it. In that one illustration, he planted despair and hopelessness more firmly than any straight-on assertion ever could.
I sat there thinking, What in the world am I going to say to this group tomorrow morning? The damage was already done. Once an image is placed in a mind, you can’t erase it. All you can do is convert it. What converting power would the gospel have in this case?
I decided to preach on Jesus Christ as the Head of the church. “We are the body of which Christ is the Head,” I proclaimed. “And any body that becomes disconnected from the Head is dead whether it knows it or not. But in the gospel, life follows the agony of death. The gore of the Crucifixion was not the end; the Resurrection reversed all that. By the suffering and death of Christ, he earned our forgiveness and salvation, and only through the risen Christ do we have the power not to be a dead church.
“What have you done to reunite this body with the Head? What can you do? Are you giving allegiance to the Head? Are you willing to follow his orders? Because apart from him there is no power.”
Fascinating.
That pastor didn’t know it, but he had used a flame thrower on his audience. He didn’t realize what he had done.
The power of the pulpit is a major factor in decision shaping. With it we can school people not to attempt great things for God or to attempt them. We can preset their attitudes in the mold of “we can’t” or “we can.”
We simply have to think about what we’re doing and make intelligent, God-honoring choices.
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