Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller
We are not used to thinking of ministry in terms of risk. Risk implies an element of doubt and uncertainty. It suggests dangerous initiative. Risk is a frontier word, a word borrowed from the arenas of war and business.
Religious propagators, on the other hand, tend to present the church as a risk-free zone, a haven of rest floating on clouds of salvation. This view has understandable roots. God has promised us the security of eternal life. Where is the risk in such certainty? Many of us have sung the Daniel Whittle hymn: “I know whom I have believed / and am persuaded that he is able / to keep that which I’ve committed / unto him against that day” (italics mine). No uncertainty there. With such an absolute theology, it is only natural to think that a church, properly functioning, hums along without the risk associated with the secular world.
Intuitively, local church leaders know different. They know the gut-wrenching decisions they are forced to make and the pain a misstep, or even the proper step, can bring. They have made many difficult decisions and waited for the consequences — occasionally peaceful resolution but more often explosions of varying magnitude.
In spite of such crises, the popular image of the church as a smoothly operating temple of God’s Spirit remains strong. It is an image all of us would like to believe, so we sometimes work on two different planes. On one level, we present a smoothly functioning facade to the world (occasionally even in our own thinking), all the while trying to cope behind the scenes with the reality of administering a complex church institution — a task that requires every bit as much skill as handling a small business.
Thus, too often the image of harmony, good and worthy in itself, hinders the strong, direct initiative called for in the everyday functioning of the body of Christ. Would coming to grips with the concept of risk taking help?
The following story of one pastor and his antagonist can be read two ways. It can be read passively, without the notion of risk, with only the feeling that this kind of thing should never happen in the body of Christ. That disavowal, as we shall see, is itself why many of these skirmishes escalate into full-scale war.
Or it can be read actively, with an eye to danger and decision, putting yourself in the place of Pastor Stoller, and asking: What would I have done differently? When would I have taken a stand? When would I have risked the short-term pain of a difficult decision in anticipation of long-term health?1
A Case History
Al Stoller always relied on two things to work himself out of tight spots — his gift for dealing with conflict and the belief that God would take care of people problems. So when trouble surfaced in the person of Pete Mankin, Al figured things would work out.
Al, with his wife, Marcy, had been pastoring the Christian Church in Hamilton, Ohio, for eight years when they met Pete. Hamilton is a town of seven thousand west of Pittsburgh, and Pete was a local businessman whose factory employed many of the people in the church. They met when a flood damaged a dozen houses in the neighborhood where many of Pete’s employees lived.
Al’s congregation had a disaster unit. When a house burned or a barn collapsed, the unit would offer food and assistance. Following this flood, they brought in tractors and trucks and brooms and buckets to clean up. Several days after the flood, Pete heard from his employees how the Christian Church people had helped. So he dropped by the church and asked, “Who are you? Why are you helping these people?”
The Mankin family started attending Al’s church. It began to make a difference in Pete’s life. He had been living in the fast lane, but soon opened his home for a Bible study. Then he became involved in the administration of the church’s grade school and served on its board of directors, eventually becoming chairman.
“We recognized right away he was a strong man,” remembered Marcy. “He had charisma, which made it easy for people to take his side, even if they didn’t really believe in what he was doing. He was attractive and warm in many ways.”
“He was generous,” said Al. “He and his wife had a large house and would have the whole congregation in for a pizza party. He even bought a bus for our Christian school — a twenty-thousand-dollar gift.”
The first year after Pete joined the church, everything went smoothly. He continued to grow spiritually. He initiated men’s Bible studies at his home or at restaurants. He would stand up on Sunday and tell the people how much they meant to him. Al felt they had found a strong leader. He remembers telling Marcy one Sunday evening, “Pete is really growing. I can see him being an elder of the church one day.”
Pete’s spiritual growth, however, proved selective. Certain areas of his life remained untouched by repentance and grace, particularly the material side of life. He had lots of money and enjoyed spending it on comforts and entertainment. He did a lot of expensive traveling. He was known as a sharp businessman, occasionally too sharp.
“It’s hard to describe the problem I began to sense. So much of it dealt with his motives,” said Al. “Pete was outwardly supportive of the church, but he did things that made me wonder.
“For example, I would preach about fairness in our financial dealings with others, and Pete would nod his head. But then he would tell me privately how great it was that he could pay his employees so little. He said he wouldn’t be able to compete in the Pittsburgh market, but here the rural environment enabled him to get cheap labor and make good money.”
Al suggested that Christian managers should want employees to benefit when the company benefits.
“These people are happy with what they have,” snapped Pete. “They wouldn’t know how to handle more money if they had it. They’re just grateful for a job, and that’s what I’m giving them. If I weren’t here, where would they be?”
Soon Al realized that Pete was telling his employees a different story. “Some of the employees who attended our church reported that Pete would go through the shop and say, ‘We’re having a bad year, guys. We’ve got to do better. We need more production.’ At the same time he would be telling me how much income he’d made this year, and how great the bottom line looked.”
Pete’s sharp business practices extended beyond low wages, however. Although others in the church didn’t know much about Pete’s business ethics, he took Al into his confidence, probably out of a need to engage in the executive’s version of locker-room talk.
“He told me things that I kept confidential. But I would tell him how I felt about those things. He didn’t like that, of course. He would tell me, ‘You’ve never been in business, so you can’t possibly understand all the issues.’
“This put me in an awkward position. I felt a need to keep it in confidence, because I didn’t want to prejudice the church against an immature Christian. But I also realized some of the things he was doing, particularly where they affected other members of our church, had broader implications than Pete’s own spiritual well-being. The church would eventually be adversely affected.”
The trouble started shortly after Pete announced he wanted to make his business a Christian establishment. Calling his workers together he said: “I want my business to be run the same way we run the church — by New Testament principles. I may have been lax in this in the past. But from now on I want to run not only a profitable business, but one that is as ethically sound as any organization there is.”
That sounded great. But pretty soon the men from the church who worked for Pete started telling Al: “He still swears like a sailor. And he mocks leaders of the church, both the elders and the pastor.”
Al asked them why they hadn’t told him this before.
“Before, we put up with his double standard because we all do it to some extent,” one young engineer confided, “but his grand announcement was too much. Announcing he’s going to run his business by Christian principles — and then not changing anything — is pure hypocrisy.”
That was Al’s first sign that all was not well between pastor and nascent disciple. Viewed alone, that would have been disturbing, but not enough to keep Al awake at night. But other collisions of the pastor’s sphere with Pete’s sphere began to make Al wonder if he wasn’t involved in a game that had more at stake than simple competitive pride.
For example, the principal of the church’s grade school resigned. Attempting to aid the search for a replacement, Al, as the church’s chief administrator and thus ex officio member of the board, suggested a teacher from the staff. An excellent teacher, who had been with the school from the beginning, she had just gotten her master’s degree in school administration. She wanted the job and was fully qualified. Pete, however, started the rumor that Al was twisting his arm and trying to take over his job as board chairman.
Marcy, not knowing Al had recommended this teacher, also recommended her to Pete. Pete then told his friends that Al was using his wife and “several others” (the church secretary had also talked to him) to sway him.
“It was simply a case where there was one logical, qualified candidate, and everyone recognized that — except Pete,” Al said later.
In the end, Pete didn’t consider the teacher, and she left to teach in another private school. That was a loss; dedicated teachers were hard to find. Even after she left, Pete persisted in implying that Al tried to twist his arm.
Al finally talked to the elders of the church about Pete. “Of our four elders, two were cautious about Pete and were aware of some double-dealing; the other two were favorable toward him, and they soon let Pete know I was raising questions about him.
“Another time we were building a new building and some people were painting at night. We needed lights and used some stage lights Pete had loaned the school stage troupe. He got angry about the lights being used that way. I offered to buy new lights, and he said no. But he continued to tell people how he resented it.
“These all sound little, but I felt a growing conflict. I should have dealt with it, but I let it slide, hoping it would go away.”
The conflict was beginning to take its toll on the pastor’s home life. Marcy noticed all was not well.
“I was aware of what was going on, but not its intensity,” she said. “Al would tell me some things people were telling him, and I couldn’t understand how Pete could lead two such different lives. How could he keep from tripping himself up? How could he remember what he said to someone at work and not contradict himself at church?”
Gradually the emotional anguish became more obvious.
“I knew Al was struggling, and my intuition told me big trouble was brewing. I knew two of the elders would have a hard time standing up to Pete, so when Al mentioned setting up a retreat with the elders to determine what direction to go, I was all for it.”
The elders went on retreat in the Poconos in March. Things appeared to go well. Al outlined the growing conflict with Pete, and after discussion the head elder told him, “We don’t see any problem with your ministry — let’s just keep working at this.” Even the two who were more supportive of Pete agreed that Al was the person to support.
When the elders came back and told the church they were in full support of their pastor, Pete started coming on strong. He began to tell members of the church, “If you aren’t men enough to stand up to the pastor and get him out of here, I will.”
Six weeks later one of the elders came to Al and said, “I’m withdrawing my support from you.”
“What changed your mind?” Al asked.
The defecting elder didn’t have an explanation.
Again Al remembers that as a time he should have acted: “I knew the elder was withdrawing his tithe from the church, and he acknowledged his loyalty was withdrawn. I should have asked him to step aside until the problem could be worked through. But I didn’t.”
The next Sunday, Pete stopped Al after the service and said, “If you don’t leave the church, I will.” Al could only stammer something about those not being the only alternatives, but he knew he was in for a battle.
The pressures mounted. At a church business meeting, Pete told the congregation, “The Lord has told me it’s time we got new leadership. The time has come for Pastor Al to move on.”
Apparently, God hadn’t been telling any one else in the congregation; Pete’s reasoning came across as unclear and arbitrary. The people didn’t know how to take Pete’s “message from God.” No action resulted.
For Al, the message was especially confusing: “I’m not sure what was the root of his motivation to have me ousted. Theologically, we disagreed over prosperity teaching. Pete would say things like, ‘The more money you give, the more you’ll get back.’ It affected the way we did some of the business of the church. I told him, ‘Pete, I believe the Bible says the Lord is going to give back to us, but not necessarily in dollars. And that’s a low motivation for giving.’
“He was particularly disturbed when I said in the pulpit that I disagreed with a preacher I had heard say, ‘God gave his Son in order to get more sons.’ To me, God’s love is so pure that if only one person had responded he would still have loved. He didn’t give his Son only to get a greater return on his investment.
“Yet I can’t believe theology was the real reason. Much of it was personal, I’m convinced. He knew I was learning more and more about his business practices, and that made him uneasy. I learned that in order to get rid of his plant manager, he accused him of having an affair with someone in the office. There was no basis to the accusation. The man did leave the plant, however, with a broken life.
“Few people in the congregation were aware of what was going on, and I didn’t tell them. The elders and I didn’t know how public to make it. Now I see it was weak leadership on my part that I didn’t do something publicly. We had disciplined people who were unfaithful sexually and released them if they were unrepentant. We should have followed the same procedure in this case. Pete’s actions were just as harmful spiritually and should have been dealt with.
“Yet if we had confronted Pete with these things, he would have gone to any length to convince people they weren’t true.”
Once an employee at Pete’s business overheard him talking on the telephone about the pastor: “We almost have him broken down. Just hang in there. We’ll get him to resign yet.”
Al asked Pete to come to an elder’s meeting and there he asked him about the story. “That’s a big lie,” Pete said. “My entire office staff will deny it ever happened. I’ll swear on the Bible it didn’t happen.”
There was a pause, and one of the elders said, “Pete, you may not like this, but you did make that telephone call and say those things. I was the one you called.”
Pete started to backpedal. “Boy, I don’t remember saying that.” But he was caught red-handed.
Al let his defenses down. The battle was the Lord’s, and the Lord would win the battle. Hadn’t the elder, one of his opponents, held Pete to account? Surely they all could see what kind of man they were facing. But Al hadn’t seen the end.
In the middle of May, two days before Al and Marcy were set to leave for their vacation, another elder withdrew his support from Al.
“That didn’t give us time to do anything,” remembers Al. He told Marcy, “We can’t leave now.”
But the other two elders urged Al to go: “We will keep things under control until you get back.” They wanted Al to get the rest he needed.
“We did need the time off. Because of the day school, I worked seven days a week. I was really tired. So we went.”
Shortly after Al and Marcy left, there was a death in the congregation. Al flew home for the funeral and immediately sensed things were not well. He performed the funeral Sunday afternoon and was told the church was having a congregational meeting that evening — and he wasn’t invited. Their reason: “Things that need to be said can be said in your absence.”
Al flew back to Vero Beach, Florida, where they were staying with friends. When Marcy saw him, she immediately knew something was wrong. “We walked the beach, and Al was beside himself. Being in the dark about what was going on made everything seem a hundred times worse than it might have been. Finally he said, ‘If the people can’t see what’s going on, maybe we ought to resign.’
“Al felt betrayed by the elders. He couldn’t bear the tremendous gulf between himself and the congregation he’d been so close to. I was angry at God a little myself for what it was doing to Al. Many nights I would lie awake listening to him sob in his sleep.”
Finally Al called the chairman of the elders and said, “I’m going to give it another twenty-four hours of thought, but I think I’m going to resign.”
“Boy, that’s going to be hard,” said the elder, “but that’s up to you.”
After thinking about it for one day, Al called the elder and dictated a letter of resignation that he wanted read to the congregation. “The elder told me later he cried that night, but he didn’t say anything then. He felt I was resigning for my health, and he didn’t want to talk me out of it. I felt he wasn’t supporting me, that Pete had gotten to him, too. I knew this man had a heart for the church, and if he didn’t think I should stay, I didn’t want to. If he didn’t want me to resign, I didn’t get the message.”
By December, Al and Marcy left the congregation they loved and cared for. To this day they both feel their work there was left unfinished.
“Marcy had told me in March we should leave, and I had said, ‘I won’t run from trouble. We’ve had difficulties before, and we’ve always worked through them.’ She felt this was different, but I still think we could have prevented it, and I also think I made too hasty a decision. I walked away from a lot of people who didn’t know what was going on and who would have jumped to my support if they had seen the whole picture.”
* * *
Al has done a great deal of reflecting on what happened: “What could I have done differently? A lot of little things, I suppose. But I can think of two major things that might have made a difference:
“First, I could have taken the risk of confronting the situation much sooner. I might have lost the battle with this powerful man earlier, but I doubt it. It would have been better to act early and perhaps get my nose bloodied than to wait until my entire ministry was at stake.
“Second, I could have involved more people and told more of what I knew. I felt a responsibility to keep in confidence things I knew were going on. Now I feel that when sin is occurring in a parishioner’s life, the elders should know about it.”
Two months after Al and Marcy Stoller left the church, Pete Mankin left also. Several months later, the two dissenting elders left. A behind-the-scenes power struggle decimated the leadership and left a church full of bewildered people wondering what happened — and why.
What to Do?
What happened to Al and Marcy Stoller is replayed someplace almost every week. A powerful person or group in the church develops a dislike for the pastor, and over time the bad feelings escalate to warfare and dismissal, resignation, or church split. Even in milder cases of conflict, bad feelings and hours of wasted ministry time leave the church weakened.
What can be done? Al recognized he needed to take the risk of confrontation sooner. He didn’t because it would have involved a fight. There was a chance, however small, that the conflict would have dissipated without confrontation. But there was a chance it wouldn’t have. How could Al have gauged the relative probabilities of the two possibilities?
It was possible Pete would have a miraculous change of heart. It was possible he would leave the church of his own accord. It was possible someone in the church, a strong elder perhaps, could have seen what was going on and put an end to Pete Mankin’s shenanigans. It was also possible no one would notice what was happening until it was too late. What resources do beleaguered pastors have, and how can they measure the strength of them?
Knowing when to act decisively in hard situations is one of the arts of ministry. It can make the difference between productive ministry and spending all one’s time putting out fires.
Not that aggressive decision making will remove hard decisions. No amount of wisdom removes the risk from ministry. There will always be Pete Mankins ready to challenge the integrity of the work and our right to do it. Nothing will change that.
Risk is part of church life, just as it is part of everyday life. Everyone tolerates a certain amount.
But it is possible to avoid being paralyzed by the prospect of risk. Understanding risk helps strike the best balance between opportunity and fear. There is no opportunity without risk, but there can be risk with minimal fear.
Similarly, understanding the relative riskiness of various church decisions will make us more comfortable with those decisions, and thus more efficient and effective in making them.
We have changed the names and identifying details in this story.
Copyright ©1987 by Christianity Today
