SOME PEOPLE PAY a bigger price to minister than others. Take my friend Tim, for example:
After Bible college, he went to work for a para-church ministry. He was completely sold out to the cause; the organization’s membership requirements were so stringent, his friends wondered if he had gotten involved in a cult. His job involved doing all the front work for an evangelistic team.
My buddy would arrive on a college campus the day before an event, often bribing the security guy with a box of donuts before he could set up the stage, lights, and sound. The next morning, he would crank up some loud music while a crowd gathered. The main speaker was a name you would recognize, a popular guy who literally wrote the book on apologetic evangelism. Sometimes he would preach, other times he would debate some professor from the philosophy department. Either way, it was always interesting. The organization saw some people get saved, made a whole lot of people mad, even got in a few fights.
In between passing out flyers, going out for coffee and sandwiches, and running the lights and sound, Tim very occasionally got on stage to share his testimony. But then, while the speaking team was on a flight headed home, Tim was left behind to pick up the mess and smooth over relationships with the local ministers.
After a couple of years, Tim had had enough of the itinerant stuff. He longed to settle into a local parish and minister out of the limelight. Tim’s mentor dropped his name in the hat of a big suburban church that had gone through a couple of pastors in quick succession. Informed sources described the church to Tim as “having lots of potential.”
When the search committee came calling, Tim answered.
He didn’t have the boxes in the garage unpacked before the fecal matter hit the rapidly revolving cooling unit. The church’s troubles started at the top. A number of the elders and deacons were of questionable moral stature. They were noted in the community for their lack of scruples. Their marriages and families were in shambles, and several had problems with substance abuse. With few exceptions, their wives were vicious gossips.
Tim sized up the situation pretty quickly, and on his third Sunday he blistered them with an angry sermon on character and holy living. They politely ignored him on their way out the door, but to one another they said, “That’s one.”
Then there was the matter of a couple of popular Sunday school teachers who could really draw a crowd. The only problem was their definition of orthodoxy was broader than the San Fernando Valley. One guy, for example, taught a class on comparative creation myths. He had a Powerpoint presentation with cool graphs and charts that compared and contrasted the Genesis account of the flood with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. He had one slide of Noah and Utnapishtim squaring off in a wrestling ring, just like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior. People loved it, but attenders left class each week believing one was as fake as the other.
Tim had a much higher view of Scripture. He drew a line in the sand, requiring teachers to sign an agreement of basic doctrinal standards.
“That’s two,” they said in the parking lot after the meeting.
The church constituency was sophisticated, highly educated, and loaded with dough, which, frankly, intimidated Tim. They were giving zip to missions and community outreach, and that, frankly, infuriated Tim. He knew firsthand what it meant to be down and out. He had grown up in a trailer park in the stereotypical small town: Tastee-Freeze at one end and farm-equipment dealer on the other. His dad was a trucker who, not long after Tim’s birth, quit coming home. His mom raised him on a waitress’s salary, with a little help from Grandma’s pension.
Tim couldn’t stand the thought of such an affluent church with a core value of miserliness. He took on the budget committee, asking it to ante up 20 percent of the budget for missions and appointing a task force to investigate community needs, especially to single mothers.
“That’s three” went the conversation on the prayer chain that week.
In addition, Tim was quite a bit younger than the majority of his congregants, and he was also cursed with a baby face. His mentor had told him once, only partly in jest, that he needed two things to be successful in ministry—gray hair and hemorrhoids. The gray hair, he explained, would make Tim look distinguished, and the hemorrhoids would make him look concerned.
Tim was forced to minister without the benefit of either.
Though the search committee and elder board assured Tim the reason they wanted a younger pastor was to reach young families, they insisted he do it with a worship style that had ceased being culturally relevant just after the war. Tim would not acquiesce; he blew them away one morning with a worship band. To make it worse, the drummer had a ponytail, and was known to work nights in a local bar band.
Just how the upright church members knew this, no one could say, but one thing was sure—that was four.
What do you do when you’ve used up all your downs and you haven’t moved the football even a yard?
Tim first got an ulcer, then he e-mailed his mentor—”I’m dying out here. You gotta tell me what to do.”
As it happened, the old guy was taking a hiatus from the road and promised to come as soon as he could. In the meantime, he took the time to write from his new residence. Here’s the word that came back from AposPaul@jailbird.com:
Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through a prophetic message when the body of elders laid their hands on you.
Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers. (1 Tim. 4:13-16, niv)
I know Timothy. I feel for Timothy. Man, I am Timothy. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, the souvenir cup, the scars, and the ulcer. When I read Paul’s counsel in 1 and 2 Timothy, I feel like these letters were intended for my mailbox. I’ve dealt with every issue Timothy faced in Ephesus, and like him, I had to stand in the pulpit every week and face the crowd, sometimes not knowing for sure who was friend and who was foe.
I’m probably most qualified to discuss how not to preach during church conflict. Almost half my years in the pastorate were spent in a congregation whose predisposition to conflict was in its genetic code. Much of what I have to say about preaching with passion in the midst of conflict I learned by doing the wrong things first:
- I’ve stood up and pretended everything was okay when everyone knew it wasn’t.
- I’ve confused the crowd by making thinly veiled references to conflicts only a few knew anything about.
- I’ve hid behind the pulpit and said things I wasn’t brave enough to say in board meetings.
- I’ve rooted through the Scriptures selecting heart-seeking missile texts to preach with specific targets in mind.
- I’ve lost my focus on reconciliation and actively pursued retaliation.
I’ve probably done all of the above on the same Sunday. Time and again God has graciously brought me back to Paul’s advice to Timothy. In times of conflict, I’m sorely prone to ignore the gift of preaching and to watch everyone’s life and doctrine but my own.
Here are several lessons I’ve learned in those times of rebuke:
1. Keep public-relation promotions out of the pulpit. During one stretch of conflict, while confiding in an old seminary buddy who pastored half a continent away, I described the parties behind the conflict, their ungodly motives and their Philistine tactics, then moved on to assert my own dovelike innocence and Christlike conduct. My buddy stopped me.
“Now hold on just a minute,” he said. “I’m having a hard time believing those people are as evil as you say, and I know you ain’t as full of sweetness and light as you just described yourself. Think maybe you’re overstating the case a bit?”
Of course not.
But I’ve noticed others tend to sanitize and saintize their motives. If I were to magnify the purity of my own actions and motives, I’d pay attention to the kind of personal illustrations I used in preaching. And I’d be sensitive to the temptation to use the pastoral prayer to underscore subtly but surely my spiritual and moral superiority. I knew I had sunk to a new low when I caught myself directing my prayers toward the people listening in and not to the Father.
In conflict, the ever-present temptation to use the pulpit to make ourselves look smarter, funnier, and kinder than we really are increases, but the pulpit is no place to conduct a public-relations campaign.
A few days after the death of Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth made a short but memorable address to her bereaved nation. While such a speech was unusual, some reporters said the Queen’s uncharacteristically personal speech was delivered primarily to counter the perception that the House of Windsor was cold and uncaring. Prince Charles allegedly told his mother if she didn’t speak out, that would be a public-relations nightmare for the already beleaguered royal family.
Crocodile tears usually reveal crocodile teeth. Self-promotion is seldom effective.
2. Get it out of your system before stepping into the pulpit. Most often, preaching will not be the primary means by which we solve conflict that revolves around personalities; that is a private matter best settled face-to-face. Matthew 18 indicates public discourse is the last resort in a reconciliatory process.
Unless there is a rampant corporate sin that affects a majority of people, my goal during conflict is to preach as I would under normal circumstances. The temptation to vent is just too enticing. Angry preaching is a mutation of passionate preaching, but not the kind of energy I can run on for long. Anger is the high-octane fuel that burns white-hot, but it always causes damage. When angry, I usually deliver the kind of message I long regret.
In a recent Leadership article, Calvin Miller, former pastor and writer-in-residence at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, recalled the time someone preached a message in seminary chapel entitled “Are There Any Fat Cows of Bashan on Seminary Hill?” It seems that just about everyone on campus showed up to find out if there were any and left convinced that there were, but they personally were not counted among the bovine.
That response is typical. Too often the people I’ve wanted to blister from the pulpit either don’t show up that Sunday or don’t seem to recognize when I’m talking directly to them. By venting in the pulpit, I run the risk of alienating those who have yet to jump into the fray.
3. Spend time with both enemies and friends. I tend to vacillate between introversion and extroversion. When things are going well, I draw energy from people, but in conflict I can become a recluse. Not wanting to run into the opposition, I’m tempted to stay behind the books. And since I’m not that good at hiding my feelings, I’m equally afraid of running into a friend who might ask, “So, how’s it going?”
When I gave in to my inclination to hide, my preaching inevitably suffered. There is information in the opposition. And there is encouragement and support from those who aren’t participating in the current round of fighting. In one church, my cross to bear was an electrician named Wally. He was both a church leader of considerable influence and a habitual liar. The first couple of times I realized he wasn’t shooting straight with me, I gently confronted him.
His denial was so vehement I backed off—maybe I had been wrong. But then I began to watch how others in the church reacted to him. Suffice it to say: this was a sick family system, and Wally had surrounded himself with enablers who aided and abetted his frequent inexactitudes.
The only way to discover what was reality and what was reality only to Wally was to spend time with him. As I continually made excuses to be with him, I found out he was generous, talented, and actually pretty likable. But he lived at such a high level of overcommitment that he was constantly lying to get himself out of a pickle—at work, at home, at church. I learned how to get information from him without forcing him into a corner where he had to lie to cover his failure. And I always gained some information that I could take with me to the pulpit.
As an influencer, he had the inside scoop on the other long-term families of the church, and I gleaned many insights into the motives and methods of my antagonists. Those insights helped me apply my preaching in ways that dealt with the issues behind the conflict.
For example, I found out that one couple who made life particularly hard on me was living with the guilt, anger, and shame of a son who had adopted a promiscuous homosexual lifestyle. That family was on my mind on occasions like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. The Sunday I preached about the Prodigal Son, though the text is primarily about Father God as the seeker of lost children, I was able to acknowledge the pain of parenting a child who rejects the values of his or her parents. I live with the hope that the emotional iceberg blocking our relationship melted just a bit on those days.
In that same church was an elderly couple who honestly believed I was the heir to Billy Graham. Every Sunday, I knew just where to look to find their smiling faces and a nod of affirmation as I preached. During several periods of congregational uproar, I made a pastoral visit to their country home. Though we never discussed the conflict, over pie and coffee they affirmed me, prayed for me, and sent me back into the fray. I would never have found that source of hope and encouragement if I’d stayed sequestered in the study.
4. God has charged me to love these soreheads. When hampered by a handful of church soreheads, I’d like to have a comeback like Elijah did in 2 Kings 2. The prophet was being harassed by a crowd of baggy-pantsed kids with odd hair and body piercings. They kept circling Elijah on their skateboards, making fun of his follicularly-challenged condition. The Bible says he turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.
What I want to know is, where exactly is that curse found?
I’m not balding, but I think knowing how to call down a curse in the name of the Lord would come in handy in all kinds of situations, especially during periods of church conflict. But since I can’t do that, the next best thing would be to preach the text with the implication that I know how to call in the bears, so people better not mess with me. I’m just kidding, of course. Mostly. At times I’ve wondered if that noted theologian Al Capone was right when he said, “You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun, than a kind word alone.”
A preacher’s chief antagonists, however, will not be strangers.
They will be the people to whom God has charged the pastor to love and develop, often people in whom we have invested significant amounts of time and energy. When a fight breaks out, there is no more crucial time to demonstrate publicly the love of a pastor’s heart.
In The Reformed Pastor, more than 300 years ago, Puritan preacher Richard Baxter said:
If ministers were content to purchase an interest in the affections of their people at the dearest rates to their own flesh, and would condescend to them, and be familiar, and affectionate, and prudent in their carriage, and abound, according to their ability, in good works, they might do much more with their people than ordinarily they do.… Labour, therefore, for some competent interest in the estimation and affection of your people, and then you may the better prevail with them.1
Baxter’s right, of course. While Al Capone enjoyed a certain amount of success in his chosen profession, he would have made a lousy preacher.
Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, reprint 1979). First published in 1656.
Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell
