The most important lesson I learned from Circle Church was to change my perception of how to measure success.
—David Mains with Philip Yancey
When I was first approached to write an article on painful lessons I learned from ten years at Circle Church, my immediate reaction was to review instead all the successes. Pastors easily fall into the success trap that permeates our culture. We laud winning teams, fire coaches of losing teams. And while we read about “the largest Sunday schools in America,” we rarely read about struggling or declining churches. They just don’t make the news.
I have already had my chance, though. I wrote the book Full Circle when our four-year-old church in Chicago was still moving toward its zenith. We had started with a few friends and a dream to establish a church in the infertile inner city. Ultimately, five hundred people piled into a union hall ballroom each Sunday morning to participate in stirring, creative worship experiences. Circle was a beehive of activities: modules met on art, communications, music, outreach, and urban interests. A drama group wrote and produced several full-length plays. Our musicians gave professional-quality concerts. Prayer, social action, evangelism, and small groups were all finding beautiful expression.
Many of our members moved into the Austin community, which then had the second-highest crime rate in Chicago. Our people responded to the urgent needs around us with a legal clinic, a youth program, social workers, counselors, the beginnings of a medical clinic, and dreams of an alternative school program.
In some ways Circle Church was viewed as a model of an inner-city church. We had a full-orbed ministry of creative worship and social outreach with a racially mixed congregation, and all this was accomplished without pouring money into a church building. Soon I was flying around the country to lead seminars on what made Circle Church work. With Larry Richards and Clyde Hoeldtke, I helped to found Step 2, a national organization designed to stimulate meaningful church renewal. About a dozen times a year I spoke to pastors and denomination heads on the principles that fueled the activities at Circle. The book Full Circle expresses those principles.
Today I admit to some embarrassment about the attitudes expressed in that book. I still hold to the same principles, but some of my comments seem cocky and presumptuous now. I saw Circle Church as the tip of a new wave that would sweep across evangelical churches. It didn’t happen, at least not as I had envisioned it. Circle Church still exists, but in a smaller form and with a more specialized emphasis.
In my last few years there, I saw many of my dreams crumble. Conflicts arose among the staff that split the very foundations of our church experiment. We could not resolve them. Ultimately, one of the areas that had given us the most satisfaction—interracial mixing in the congregation—failed utterly, and all the blacks pulled out. Everyone in the church felt great pain because of those conflicts, and I’m sure mistrust and bitterness remain with some even today.
As pastor, I experienced a profound disappointment. Did these failures invalidate my entire ministry? Was God telling me I was an unfit leader?
Where had I failed him? Questions such as these tormented me. Although the process involves pain, I feel I need to look back at those years and discern what God taught me through my failures. Even as I think of them, I must fight back a desire to rationalize them away, to blame them on sociological factors of the early seventies or on personality quirks of some of the members. But that process is merely a form of pride, trying to align failures so they look less and less like my own failures.
At times, as I have worked on this article, I have felt like a middle-aged man standing naked before a mirror. His receding hairline shows, as well as a paunchy distribution of twenty extra pounds. As he looks over his body, he flinches slightly … then suddenly realizes to his shame that a crowd of people is standing behind him, staring at his nakedness. Exposing failure is never easy.
Fortunately God keeps “success charts,” though they are entirely unlike ours. On his, a colossal failure in human terms can rank as a spiritual victory if it pushes a person closer toward him. Although I admit my broad goals for Circle Church ultimately failed, God used my experience—all of it—to teach me important lessons about myself and about him. Let me share with you four warnings.
1. While pastoring, I often allowed myself to fixate on issues.
If a church attempts to reduce a pastor’s duties to a written job description, it soon discovers it has created a position that demands superhuman abilities. A good pastor must demonstrate public poise, comfortably leading ceremonies and preaching. He must act as a warm and wise counselor, a “people person” whose vulnerability and compassion invite others to open up to him. Yet he must be an efficient, time-conscious manager who can run committees, meet deadlines, and manage employees. Is it any wonder that a high percentage of churches are at least slightly dissatisfied with their pastor’s performance?
Of these three areas—the pulpit ministry, counseling, and management—I would rank my strengths as highest in the pulpit and next in counseling. Yet I consistently found myself getting bogged down in management. When an issue arose in our church and I saw it one way, I had trouble if my pastoral staff or the church board viewed it differently. Frequently I would lock onto that issue with bulldog tenacity and not let go until the dissidents came around to my viewpoint. Obviously I felt I had good reasons, backed up by prayer and Bible study, for espousing my position. But as I insisted on aligning the church behind me, unconsciously I let my real areas of strength slip away.
I have since recognized this problem of fixation as a family trait—a great strength, I might add, in business ventures, but often a hindrance to accomplishing God’s work in a volunteer organization. I needed to give problems more time to find resolution, to allow personalities more time to reach consensus, and to allow programs more time to gain momentum. The end result was important, yes, but I have learned the style of achieving that end result can be equally important.
Pyramid-type sales organizations have a firm rule: no plan will work unless the idea and motivation come from the seller. You cannot gather a bunch of salesmen in a room and force-feed a fully developed program to them. Somehow you must win them over to the extent that they accept the program as theirs, not yours. In churches, built to a large degree on the clergy’s leadership skills, we pastors tend to violate that truth about human nature and think our charisma is sufficient to gain the congregation’s support.
For example, the issue of leadership by women arose in our church, as it does in most churches in our society. I resolved the issue in my own mind quite early; however, I discovered to my surprise that others in the church did not resolve the issue nearly so neatly, and some absolutely opposed my position. I would fixate on such an issue and not let go.
Reflecting now on my actions, I can sense at least two warning signals that should have alerted me to my problem. First, I talked about the unresolved issue all the time, much more often than it merited. Second, I kept going after the opposition, seeking to remove it to reach consensus. If in an elders’ meeting the sympathies were running fifteen to one in favor of a certain position, I would home in on the one stubborn dissident. How could I get him to change his mind?
Normally I did not try to get my way through overt displays of power. But I would concentrate so intensely on reaching consensus that I have heard people begin to describe me as manipulative. I hated that accusation because I did not feel it was deserved. Yet, as I look back, I can see that I was unwilling to let God have the freedom to accomplish his work in his own way. Privately I prayed pushy prayers: “Come on, God, why don’t you resolve this now!” I have since learned to practice a prayer of acceptance every night. It says, “God, some things happened today that I don’t like. I want you to know that I accept these, and I’m putting them in your hands.”
I encountered a situation in the church I now attend (I am not the pastor) that reminded me of what God has taught me. I was serving on a committee to select an assistant pastor, and I was confident that I had God’s mind on who should be invited. The other members of the committee did not act on my recommendation. Their action frustrated me because I knew this man better than any of them, and I was certain he could fill the job. As I prayed about it, I sensed the fixation problem rearing its head, and I decided to back off. The committee asked another prospect. He turned them down. Later they asked him again, to no avail. Finally they turned to me and said, “What about that man you recommended some months ago?” As I look back, I truly believe that if this man had been offered the job when I initially presented him, he would have turned it down; in the ensuing months the Lord had prepared him to accept the call.
2. I was overwhelmingly naive about certain social problems.
Circle Church sprang to life in the sixties, and its genes included all the turmoil and idealism of that remarkable decade. I, in my early thirties, was very dissatisfied with what I saw as the disinterest in meaningful change within the traditional church. The group of people who birthed Circle were just awakening to the racial barriers in Chicago, the oppressive side of capitalism, the class barriers, and sexual discriminations that seemed to explode into light during those years.
We deliberately located Circle Church in the hub of a wild mix of neighborhoods. Across the expressway loomed the University of Illinois Circle Campus, one of the world’s largest medical centers; to the rear of our building stretched Chicago’s famous westside black ghetto; Skid Row was a couple of blocks north; and a small, Greek commercial district thrived eight blocks east.
We wanted to draw from all those people and show that the church of Christ could break down the walls, and all of us could live together in peace before the world. I still think, idealistically perhaps, that such a confluence of cultures and backgrounds can work, although the scriptural examples of fusing different cultures usually point to severe problems.
I confidently assumed that with God on our side, we could move in, and problems that had been hundreds of years in making would softly melt away. Our ideals were good—the same ideals, I believe, so eloquently stated by the Old Testament prophets. But we consistently underestimated the stranglehold of the enemy.
Christians tend to read overstated biographies of great, godly men like William Wilberforce and John Knox and come away with the impression that they single-handedly remade a society in twenty years. Actually, if you study the historical situation, you realize that though they played a key role, those men were just a part of an incredibly long and complex process that God used to advance righteousness. Like Esther, they responded to God in the right place at the right time. The abolition of slavery in England was the culmination of centuries of Christian concepts eroding an institution that had stood firm for all recorded history. Slavery was rooted deep. Although only Christianity was finally able to help topple it, its dissolution took a long time, and the residue of the problem remains with us today.
For a model of a Christian involved in social change, I look at a man like the apostle Paul, who was as wise as a serpent in the ways of the world. He knew that the full effect of the gospel he preached would take years; he had counted the pain and personal cost involved in attacking evil. Unlike Paul, I was naive. Today I read bold statements in Full Circle and cringe, because we didn’t even scratch the surface. We were one tiny ripple, and those who watched us probably learned more by our failures than by our successes.
In America we tend to write stories about what people have “achieved” for the kingdom rather than trying to write down from God’s perspective and mentioning how people fit into his movements. When Paul wrote about his accomplishments, I think his main concern was to communicate the incredible spiritual warfare that was going on and how he was committed to the side of God. At Circle, and in many places where God is advancing his kingdom, the temptation seeps in to throw the spotlight on the neat little experiment that the world can watch unfolding. Human beings do not respond well to spotlights. It’s like that law of indeterminacy in physics: as soon as an action of the Holy Spirit is observed, its nature changes.
If I had not been injected with so much of the American success serum, I would have approached the racial problem with this attitude: “I will do what can be done, and maybe others will join me. Someday my son or my son’s son will finally see significant change in one small corner of a major metropolitan area.” That approach would have been far more realistic and God-honoring, I believe. Instead, with the first flush of success, as blacks and whites achieved real harmony in worship and fellowship, I naively chalked up a huge breakthrough.
The racial area, which we had pointed to with greatest pride, directly led to a dissolution in Circle. We gradually gave the minority element more and more power within the church. Finally they sought to express in absolute terms that the number one priority of the church should be to address social issues, with the minority pastor answerable to no staff leadership. I don’t want to describe the conflict in detail, but they demanded a major shift in the emphasis of Circle.
At one point I realized the problem was developing and tried to split off a branch from our church that would accept this new direction. But I spoke up too late—they wanted the racial issue to be the chief focus of Circle Church.
I was shocked by this. I was too naive to understand that oppressed people have a problem with fixation too. We should not have expected the fiery emotions of a minority that had been downtrodden for several centuries to find a comfortable niche in the multifaceted agenda of our church. Before unleashing those emotions we should have been prepared to deal with them. We weren’t.
The racial area was not the only one in which I showed naiveté. I now realize that I lacked a balanced appreciation of human depravity along with the marvel of regeneration.
When the Holy Spirit of God comes to live in someone, a tremendous thing happens. Yet, as the Bible graphically illustrates, the depravity of a person still asserts itself. Apart from an unusual walk with God, human beings always tend to move toward lower levels. I did not give credence to that factor as I should have.
Especially with the new believers, I think I should have realistically assumed that these people had a long way to go in their Christian walk, and that they very likely would not be able to come together without strife, especially because of their diverse backgrounds. Indeed, their insecurities surfaced much faster than their new maturity in Christ. I can hardly remember referring to human depravity while at Circle. I just kept preaching the ideal. And I was very surprised when signs of depravity broke out among the congregation. Now I would look at a given group and almost anticipate it.
In America we are bombarded with anti-God philosophies. The tug of the world is very powerful. Combine with that the conflicts and tensions normally present among diverse people—different tastes, prejudices, expectations, needs—-and you can guarantee certain problems will arise.
Just the difference in education created tension. We would work for scores of hours on a creative, God-honoring worship service or a beautiful anthem and find it went over the heads of the uneducated people we had worked so hard to bring into church. Or we would gear programs to them and find another segment bored or resentful.
I was also naive about the pastor’s role. Circle began with a cluster of people who loved God but were disillusioned by local churches. Starting from scratch, we tried to create the kind of church that we wanted, making adjustments as we grew. As such, it was a unique phenomenon, not at all the typical church ministry situation. We had the fun and the fireworks and the enthusiasm that many churches lack. But much of pastoring is not vision or glamour; it’s patching up wounds and desperately trying to hold families together.
I was only thirty years old when Circle started, having never pastored before, meeting in a very different territory with a demanding audience. I managed to ignite the people with my dreams—to some degree. But perhaps I did not carefully enough peel back their skin to fully see and feel their needs.
In a way those years at Circle were a skyrocket. We attracted attention, and yes, I believe we brought honor to God. We tapped an unusual level of commitment—more than one hundred people moved into one community to have closer fellowship as a result of Circle. We affected lives. God can use skyrockets. But perhaps a better metaphor would be to view pastors as the glue of society. I believe a country will rise or fall based on the quality of its pastors. I do not know of a more demanding or fulfilling occupation.
3. In encouraging the gifts of the congregation, I minimized my leadership role.
When Circle Church was born, discussion about the gifts of the congregation was quite new. The body-life movement had not yet reached toddler stage, and I don’t know of any books that existed then on how to mobilize the gifts of the congregation. We tried not just to talk about the gifts but to utilize them. We canvassed people so that when they joined our body, they had a clear idea of what the church expected them to contribute. We tried to make everyone in the church feel like an equal, essential part of the body, and I believe we succeeded.
The church, however, is also an organization. Although every part of the body is important, for certain functions, such as decision making, some members are more important (or specialized) than others. It was hard for people at Circle to understand how we could be equal and yet not equal. A deep, holy fellowship can thrive among peers, but the church also includes a structure in which some people are recognized as leaders among those peers. The leaders are set apart by God to instruct and nurture the flock.
As I look back, I can see that my walk with the Lord was further developed than many of the members’. I had led many of them to Christ. They had weak backgrounds in such areas as prayer life, victory over basic temptations, and knowledge of the Bible. But in setting up the climate of leadership in the church, I stressed the equality of all believers almost to the exclusion of the hierarchical gifts of leadership. I discovered that fact too late; I couldn’t turn the congregation around. I had put us all on level ground for so long that they couldn’t look up anymore.
Whenever one of the three pastors at Circle would preach, he had to submit his sermon to advance critical review by the other staff members. We also held a lively reaction session after church where members responded to the sermon. These practices were healthy; but we did not balance them with proper teaching on the role of leadership and spiritual maturity.
As I hired each staff member I told him or her that we comprised a team, of which I was the leader. I understood the distinction of leadership, but I am not sure all of them did. When a conflict arose, some would say to me, “We’re a team,” but no one ever said, “But you’re the leader, so we’ll defer to you.”
For example a staff member submitted a sermon to the team to evaluate in advance of his preaching. Because there were doctrinal problems, I could not allow the sermon to be preached. He responded by going over my head to the board of elders, causing a serious rift from which we never fully recovered.
In setting up the church, I had deliberately played down authority structures and invested power in a broadly based board, not in the pastor. Our members came with an antiauthoritarian bias, and I consented to it. And when it finally came to the place where I said, “I’m sorry, but for the sake of the body I must take this action,” they could not follow me. They had not been prepared to accept leadership and could not adapt even when it came to the most crucial issues of the church. By not directly exercising leadership for so long, I had forfeited my option to use it.
I believe this problem of minimizing the pastor’s leadership is a disease spreading wildly through evangelical churches. Fifteen years ago the opposite problem existed: authoritarian leadership. But when the laity began emerging with a strong excitement about the faith, attention was so focused away from the pastor that this function was perceived to be almost unneeded. Seminaries began teaching the pastor’s role as “enabling the congregation,” without balancing emphasis on being a spokesman for God and leading by exhorting.
Awakening of the laity is a beautiful thing, a pulsing, vital sign in the history of the church. But I believe in the Old Testament symbol of the mantle; the cloak signifying that God has set aside a leader for certain strengths and skills. Jesus wore the mantle in a beautiful way. Although he was a servant, he also carried authority, and no one questioned who the leader was.
If you push servant leadership too far, you can turn the leader into a doormat and destroy him. Only if a people recognize that a leader holds tremendous invested dignity will they respect him and treat him as a leader. Throughout church history, without strong leaders even outbreaks of church renewal quickly fizzle.
I would express the balance this way: leadership describes the office; servanthood describes the style of exercising that office.
Almost all conflicts I observe between congregations and pastors hinge on matters of opinion rather than absolutes. In such cases, I believe the congregation would be wise to say, “As long as this is an opinion, and not an absolute, we will yield and follow you as the leader.” But too often, they fall victim to the human urge to assert themselves and pick at the scabs of the leader. They end up dehumanizing him. Churches have the power to dethrone leaders who stray way off from God’s standards, and that is good—but in these peripheral issues I believe they should practice some following.
4. I feared failure so much that I held onto the church too tightly.
My wife, Karen, has said, thankfully, that she has complete trust in me as a husband; she does not fear my unfaithfulness. But she will also tell you that I had a mistress once—Circle Church. I clung to the church too tightly at the expense of my own family.
In C. S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves, he illustrates the principle that first something becomes a god and then it becomes a demon. It seems that the higher we reach and the more good we achieve, the greater will be the temptation to cling to those accomplishments and use them to build ourselves up.
If Circle had been another plodding, no-growth, no-excitement church, I would never have become so emotionally involved. But, truthfully, God was in our midst. The worship services abounded with joyful exuberance and creativity. We came together to worship God. We believed he was there, and we tapped all our creative energies to express our love and devotion to him. I don’t know how to express this other than in crude human terms, but I think God left some of those Sunday-morning services with a smile and a confidence that “those people love me. They enjoy my presence.”
At Circle, a buzzing conversation in the lobby concerned not weather or baseball but the Lord. We could converse comfortably about our faith. We also learned the true meaning of worship—to attribute worth to the Lord.
All of those occasions were wonderful spiritual experiences that honored God. I still rejoice in them. But as I reflect on how I responded personally to the congregation, I now see that I allowed my own identity to merge with the church. I should have been God’s man and let the church develop its own personality. But I cared too much. We became one. I have seen this process duplicated often in the lives of leaders of religious organizations. After twenty or thirty years of slaving away, they awake one day and feel burned out. They have made their ministry almost an idol. I did that at Circle.
I ask myself now in what specific ways this tendency expressed itself. The most direct clue I can identify is that I know I never could have left Circle on my own. The Lord himself had to break me. Except for his intervention I would still be there today, because of too great a love for the people, the church, and the potential they represented. God wanted me out of Circle, and he made it impossible for me to stay.
I say those words very academically now, but they represent so much pain. I can now say that the best thing that ever happened in my life was the process of the breaking of my pride. During that time I felt as if I had been rejected by the church that I had poured my life and soul into for ten years. For a brief time I questioned my faith: Do I believe in God? Can I trust him? Once I worked through those initial doubts I still had to wrestle with the serious question of whether I should continue in the ministry.
I fought back waves of shame. Circle Church had been viewed as a model, yet I had failed at leading it. I wondered who would believe in me for the future. There were temptations, of course, to open up festering wounds before the congregation and to defend myself, but I knew that would only spread the pain.
Elisabeth Elliot, in her novel No Graven Image, describes the growth of a young, frustrated missionary who suddenly realizes this: God is not the accomplice of our work; he is the work. We are merely his tools in getting it done.
Gradually I went through the process of consciously releasing my dreams and expectations and even my own personhood. I came around to embrace Christ as head of Circle Church. The body was his, not mine. I chose to submit all things to him.
My worth as a person rests solely on my confidence and faith in his redeeming process in my life. By that standard, Circle Church and specifically its failures have been the greatest aids to spiritual growth in my life. The most important lesson I learned from Circle was to change my perception of how to measure success.
After leaving, more than a year passed before I began to feel like a man again. Now I have sensed a new filling of the Holy Spirit that I believe comes only after a complete surrender to God. Some broken people end up resentful and bitter; but in my case the process taught me to put confidence not in myself but in the Lord. As never before I identify with Paul’s words that God’s strength “is made perfect in weakness.”
Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today
