The pastor as coach is not satisfied with good ritual and good buildings; he is satisfied only when people are being recruited into the ministry of daily life.
—D. Elton Trueblood
I meet hundreds of strangers while traveling, and I nearly always ask, “Are you in any church?”
The usual answer is “Sometimes I go to such and such a church.” It sounds like going to the theater or the ballpark. Once in a while someone will say, “Yes, I’m deeply involved in …” but it’s rare. I’m afraid the majority still think the church is something you go to.
When we look at the state of Christians and the church, at our values, beliefs, and lifestyles, there is certainly room for holy dissatisfaction. We are too easily satisfied with conventional success. We fall into an Old Testament mind-set in which we look mostly at how many people come to the temple for the ritual. Meanwhile we forget Jesus’ words in Matthew 12:6, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.”
Cheap Christianity can usually pull a pretty good attendance on Sunday morning. It is cheap whenever the people think of themselves as spectators at a performance. I’m always shocked when I hear Christians talk about being “in the audience.” Audiences are fine at the opera or the symphony concert, but worship is another matter.
In Christ’s clearest call to commitment, he didn’t say, “Come join the audience.” He said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me.” The yoke refers to the operation of a team. Early Christians called each other yokefellow (Phil. 4:3) in order to signify a practicing Christian engaged in a team effort.
So when leaders ask how the general operation is going, they must not be too easily satisfied with numbers. You can always get a crowd if you demand little and put on a show. Rather, we need to be asking ourselves, “Are we increasing Christ’s kingdom? Are we doing what he intended when he invented the church?” I use the word invented deliberately because there was no church before Christ. An amazing invention it was, something far more revolutionary than we normally suppose.
The church can only accomplish its revolutionary purpose, however, when it has certain characteristics.
Rank-and-file ministers
I heard a true story about a preacher who came to Laymen’s Sunday and preached on the lay ministry. (That was his first mistake; he should have had one of the members do it.) He was persuasive, however, because at the end when he said, “Will any men who are willing to dedicate themselves to the lay ministry please come forward?” a hundred men responded. Someone who was close to the pastor heard him mutter softly, “O God, how can I use a hundred ushers?”
He entirely missed the point of his own sermon.
I call pastors to engage not in Operation Addition but in Operation Multiplication. This is the point of Ephesians 4. For the pastor to think he is the only minister is to minimize the task. Whenever we make minister synonymous with clergy, we are pre-Christian. A clergyperson is a professional—one who takes on a responsibility and gets a certain prestige for doing so. One pastor actually said to me, “I know lay Christians need to be developed, but I’m not going to have a book table because I don’t want them to know where I get my stuff!” He thinks of himself as part of an upper class, which is precisely what the priests did.
All cultures before Christ had priests. They enjoyed great prestige. They were always closely allied with the monarchy, whether in Mesopotamia or Egypt or Israel. Julius Caesar was made pontifex maximus in Rome, even though everyone knew he was an immoral man. It didn’t matter; he had the title.
Christ turned all this around, and we tend to forget how drastically he did so. “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,” he said in Matthew 20:25, “and their great men exercise authority among them. It shall not be so among you.” Then he made his revolutionary statement about coming not to be served but to serve. He turned the world upside down that day.
Unfortunately, we tend to forget, slipping back into the pre-Christian model of priests and temples. Jesus sent out teams of workers not to perform a ceremony but to liberate and to heal. Instead of employing the priests, who were numerous, he entrusted the future to ordinary persons. Have you ever thought what a good joke it was when he gave Simon the nickname “Rocky”? That’s like our calling a tall man “Shorty” or a fat man “Slim.” Certainly others laughed when Jesus said it, because Simon was anything but solid. He was more like rubble than rock.
When I talk with rank-and-file church people, I don’t call them laypeople. A layperson is a second-class citizen. I am a layman in regard to law because I have not passed the bar; thus, I am not allowed to practice law. There is no place in the church of Jesus Christ for those who cannot practice. I said to people, “You are not a layperson. You are a minister of common life.”
I would be willing to ordain people to the ministry of journalism, banking, or photography. Why not? What an opportunity they have. They meet people I never will. Think of the chances a loan officer has to minister: he can keep young people from ruining their lives by overborrowing.
I was pleased when I saw one signboard outside a church in South Carolina. It read:
MINISTERS: ALL THE MEMBERS
EQUIPPER: THE REV. JOHN SMITH
The true ministers were the folk in the pews.
Penetrating people
A healthy fellowship is a redemptive fellowship. It is penetrating the world not for its own aggrandizement but to change the world. Almost all of Christ’s metaphors for the church are penetrators: salt to penetrate the food and keep it from decay, light to penetrate the darkness, leaven to penetrate the lump. The emphasis is never on the instrument but on the function. So a successful church is one that is changing the world, chiefly through the action of its members.
The true church is not the structure on Jackson Avenue; it is where one person is teaching philosophy and another is cobbling shoes and another is teaching kindergarten. If you had gone to ancient Corinth and asked where the Christian church was, nobody would have sent you to the corner of Eighth and Main. They would have sent you to where Paul and his friends were making mobile homes—tents, that is. He himself explained this on Mars Hill: “The God who made the world … does not live in shrines made by man” (Acts 17:24).
This is why the Quakers call it “meetinghouse” instead of church. We’ve lost on that one as far as the general speech is concerned, but the term does preserve the distinction between the redemptive fellowship on one hand and the building on the other.
The most exciting thing I know here in Richmond is a soup-and-salad luncheon every Thursday for men, all of whom are ministers in common life. Physicians, lawyers, factory workers, businessmen of all kinds, and even a few pastors meet at the library of the First Friends Meetinghouse exactly at noon. We begin with prayer, led by someone in the group, not an imported professional. We eat our simple lunch, prepared by people of the church, and leave our $2 on the table. At 12:20 we introduce new people, and then one of the group speaks for sixteen minutes, sharing something that has strengthened his life in the ministry. Last come questions and answers and a closing prayer. We average more than the Rotary Club in town—sixty-five men on a normal Thursday.
All of these men are not from the Friends church. That would destroy the idea. The mayor, who is Roman Catholic, is nearly always there. The only thing we have in common is we are all ministers in daily life. We have no officers, no structure, no budget, no minutes, no reporting—that’s what wears people out. We simply want to help each other penetrate the world.
I suppose I’m acting as sort of a pastor to the local group, in that I take more responsibility. But I am simply a coach. The pastor as coach is miles away from the idea of pastor as priest. The pastor as coach is not satisfied with good ritual and good buildings; he is satisfied only when people are being recruited into the ministry of daily life.
Certainly this recruitment can happen in public meetings. Lives are changed there, but not as often as we might think. I led a retreat in northern Ohio for twenty-two people, and I went around the circle asking each one to tell what had brought him or her into a full Christian commitment. I assumed some would mention a public meeting or a sermon. Not one did. They told about little people—the shoe repairman whose life was such a testimony that it made a deep impression—inconspicuous people.
Nobody said Billy Graham or Elton Trueblood. I didn’t expect them to say Elton Trueblood, but I thought someone would mention Billy Graham. Lives have certainly been changed by his public preaching, but my experience is the great majority are changed in a much less obvious fashion. If the church could make members realize this, that they are the team, what a difference it would make. How it would raise their sights!
Someone might question whether my friends on Thursday are actually penetrating the world or just showing up for lunch. Well, here’s one measure of penetration: How many of them are visiting in the jail? We got a fellow out of jail who apparently had been arrested unjustly. I went to the prosecuting attorney in Richmond and persuaded him to drop charges. The point is, I could go to bat for the man because of my life in the city. I was heard, while he never would have been.
At lunch the next Thursday I told what had happened and gave the man’s name and address. One of the group said, “I’ll go and see him.” He found the man, his wife, and child in a poor little shack with almost no food. So my friend got the members of his church to stock their pantry.
This is no big thing, but it’s concrete. At other times, those in our group who sell cars have arranged decent transportation for people who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
This kind of penetration is not easily put into an annual report. Attendance and money are easy to write up for the annual business meeting, but you can never have a full report of the ministry of penetration. What people need to realize is that this is expected, this is what the church requires.
Church is more than an hour a week. That is what I was trying to say when I wrote Your Other Vocation—that the Christian always has a two-pronged life. He or she must be a competent journalist or lawyer or industrialist, and must also be a minister of Christ in the world.
Trained minds
I once wrote, “An untrained ministry is potentially harmful.” There’s more to being a healthy church than just mobilization.
Faith has three essential aspects: the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality. The third area needs lifting, too; all three legs of the stool are essential. We must teach people to pray, to serve, and to think.
Jesus said not only, “Take my yoke upon you” but also “Learn of me.” The church must become a seminary if it is going to have a universal ministry. The pastor is the ideal person to be the dean of the seminary, drawing out the ministry of others, equipping, enabling. Those potent words of Christ, “Learn of me,” will change our whole focus on ministry.
I spend a lot of time with laypeople, often when their pastors are not in the room. I hear them saying they are dissatisfied because they are not getting the kind of education that would develop them. They assume these great courses are going on in the theological seminaries, and they think their minds are equally as good as the students there, so they want to know why they’re being cheated. They are tired of the tough questions being avoided.
Often a pastor will feel as though he is the dean of a seminary, but he has no faculty. Still, he must not fail to make a start. He has to develop his faculty by training some of the members to train others.
In the curriculum of this seminary, the first task is to deepen the spiritual lives of the people. So many live superficially. They can be awakened and enriched through the classics of Christian devotion, a rich body of material that is mostly unknown. If I were a pastor, I’d spend most of my time teaching, and I would start right off with a class on these books: Confessions by Saint Augustine; The Little Flowers of Saint Francis; The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis; Pensées by Blaise Pascal; The Journal of John Woolman; A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law; Doctor Johnson’s Prayers; The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith; and Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly.
All of these are in paperback in modern-English editions. Any ordinary person can grow tremendously through this type of material.
Most people don’t know how to pray, for example. What better way to teach them than through Samuel Johnson’s prayers? At the end of his life, in desperate sickness, he asked his physician how many more days he would live. The doctor estimated two, barring a miracle. “Very well,” he replied. “Stop all medication, though the pain be terrible, for I would meet my Maker with a clear mind.” He then wrote this prayer, the last thing he penned:
Almighty and most merciful Father, I am now, as to human eyes it seems, about to commemorate, for the last time, the death of thy Son Jesus Christ our Savior and our Redeemer. Grant, O Lord, that my whole hope and confidence may be in his merits, and his mercy; enforce and accept my imperfect repentance; make this commemoration available to the confirmation of my faith, the establishment of my hope, and the enlargement of my charity; and make the death of thy Son Jesus Christ effectual to my redemption. Have mercy upon me, and pardon the multitude of my offenses. Bless my friends; have mercy upon all men. Support me, by the grace of thy Holy Spirit, in the days of weakness, and at the hour of death; and receive me, at my death, to everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.
That teaches not only the devotional life; it teaches theology. No wonder Malcolm Muggeridge called him the greatest Englishman who ever lived. Johnson even wrote a prayer when he commenced work on the dictionary. Reading prayers such as this gives people ideas for their own lives. They learn that prayer befits all occasions of life, not just the church. If we don’t raise the sights of people with this kind of training, they will pray in strings of clichés. We must soak them with great models.
There are other parts of the curriculum for a healthy church, of course: the Old and New Testaments, theology, the history of Christian thought, Socratic logic, Christian ethics. I have dwelt upon the devotional classics only because they are so often ignored.
We teach people to think chiefly by dialogue. That’s what Plato said. One person’s thinking stirs another person’s thinking. My great teacher at Johns Hopkins, professor Arthur Lovejoy, said, “All the history of philosophy is one continuous dialogue.”
Tonight I have a group of young pastors and their wives coming here to talk. We’re going to deal with hard intellectual problems so they could return to their churches and do the same. We’re going to talk about how to be fair to other religions without compromising Christ’s claim to be the only Way. This is the hardest intellectual problem many of them face. So I must help them.
Why? Because the Christian must outthink the world. We must not leave good thinking to the pagans. We’ve got to get in there and fight if the common opinion is ever to be changed and the Christian cause to prevail. Christians must be better thinkers if they are going to penetrate the world.
It is more important than ever for the church to be healthy. It is often poor and dull, but it’s the best thing available. However sick the church is, this land would be much sicker without it.
If Christians could see the church as a society of ministers in the world, they would approach the radical change Christ sought to initiate. If that were generally accepted, the change would not be small. It would be enormous.
Copyright © 1996 by Christianity Today/Leadership
