Tom McKee
I love visionaries, and Nick was a visionary. In fact, Nick’s enthusiasm and love for the Lord were contagious; he was a great impetus to the vision of the church. But Nick was coming up with a different idea each week.
One week he walked into my office with an idea how we could reach all the Vietnamese refugees in our city. Two weeks later he was wanting to sponsor a World Vision hunger campaign with our young people. The next week he was ready to take a group to Haiti to help construct a hospital. Nick wanted to do it all, and in fact, many of his programs were effective. But he burned out many people in the process and rolled over anyone who did not agree with him—including me.
The term administration is a confining word for a visionary; it seems to limit the Holy Spirit. Visionaries prefer spontaneity and allowing the Holy Spirit to lead. They say too much administration hinders the Spirit and limits the vision of the church. In short, they consider administration and vision contradictory.
It is refreshing to work with someone who wants to move. But with two or three visionaries like Nick, the church can become spastic—jerking and groping this way and that without any real direction.
How do you manage a visionary? How much freedom do we give the youth group, for instance, to have its own dreams and then act on them? How do we allow other groups in the church to have their own authority for making decisions without creating church-splitting issues?
This tension reminds me of the faculty member who told his colleagues in a leading university, “The state legislature has always granted us complete academic freedom here, and if we don’t do what they want, they are going to take it away from us.”
Pastors stand in the middle of a tension. We want visionaries to make decisions and carry them out; on the other hand, we want to have some sense of control. Our fears of either too much or too little control often cause us to set up unconscious roadblocks that hinder the work of the Holy Spirit and limit our visionaries.
In order to allow both freedom to experience the gifts of the Spirit through the visions of our people and to establish some guidelines to keep our direction sure, I’ve discovered two roadblocks that must be eliminated and two guardrails that must be erected.
Roadblock 1: My Way Is Best
Being a former youth pastor has its benefits. I get to speak at occasional youth meetings; people respect my experience and ask for my advice. There is, however, one major drawback: I have to keep reminding myself that the way I did it may not be the best way.
There have been times when our youth sponsors have an idea that, because of my vast experience, I know will fail. I don’t want to discourage them when they are so excited, and because I know we learn through failures, I grant them my blessing. Many times, however, much to my surprise, they see fantastic success.
One example is the way young people report back to the church after a camp or mission experience. I had some terrible experiences with spontaneous reports from teens. One young person told the congregation about driving down the highway at high speeds and how “God had protected them” (I am constantly amazed at the “blessings” credited to the Lord). We had an interesting deacons meeting after that testimony time. Strict rules were imposed on the youth group, though I felt them unnecessary because I knew the incidents had been greatly exaggerated.
As a result of that experience, I became very careful about services when young people would report back. I appointed the individuals who would share and gave each of them a subject. I coached them in their presentation. The next sharing time was dynamic. People left the church service uplifted and moved. What a difference from the previous experience! I called it a success and drew the conclusion that “organized sharing” was the only way to go.
Now, ten years later, I am still running scared when young people speak. But when I imposed my feelings on our youth sponsors and told them to pick certain young people to share and assign them subjects, the sharing was stiff and artificial. As I listened, I saw my own over-reaction to a situation. I had to swallow my fear and tell the youth sponsors they were right and needed to let the young people share more spontaneously, like they wanted to. The next sharing time was great—and without any horrendous stories.
There are also tremendous differences from church to church, from group to group. What works in one church may not fit in another. Sometimes even within the same church, what works one year may not work the next. I often forget that and start telling people what worked for me, assuming it will work for them. The way I did it is not necessarily the best, even if it worked once. Things may be different now. Visionaries must be given permission to try new things—and even some old things over again.
Roadblock 2: Decisions Come from the Top
As a youth minister, I experienced one of the most dramatic changes in a group I have ever seen. It began with about twenty high schoolers who met with their sponsors to pray and plan for the coming year.
Our group was in limbo. We had an active program—Sunday school had over 200 attending, youth choir around 100, Tuesday morning discipleship training about 100, Wednesday night prayer meeting about 30, and monthly socials with anywhere from 50 to 200, depending on the activity. On the outside it looked fine, and most of the young people enjoyed coming. But something was wrong.
There was no fire. Few young people were being changed. Even fewer were making an impact on campuses. Most were just living quiet lives of going to school, attending activities, and living at home.
I was concerned but did not know what to do. How do you turn a stationary ship? And even if I knew how to change it, I was not sure what direction I would go. People were coming to me from all over the state to see our youth group, but I felt it was stale. There must be more.
We began to ask ourselves hard questions about our ministry, and before the evening was over we had a new vision of what needed to be done, and it was the group’s vision — not mine alone.
Our young people decided they wanted to drop Wednesday night prayer meeting and begin an outreach ministry called “Breakaway” on that night. My job was then to present this idea to our senior pastor. I have to admit I was afraid to go and tell him the young people wanted to drop prayer meeting. We were a Conservative Baptist church, and the idea of not having a prayer meeting on Wednesday evening seemed radical. I had been in the church as long as I could remember, and at times I thought midweek prayer meeting was one of Paul’s instructions to the church.
We were also proposing a change in the unwritten dress code. Girls always wore dresses to prayer meeting, but since they were going to sit on the floor, we were telling the young people to come in jeans. In 1968, that was radical! Anxiously, I made an appointment with our pastor.
I was floored when he said, “That’s what we need around here — some enthusiasm from people who really want to reach out beyond our walls! Let’s go for it!”
How grateful I am for the lesson I learned from my pastor: Initiative doesn’t have to come from the top. I am so thankful for a pastor who allowed us to make decisions and follow through. He knew the group that initiates has the vision, and he knew that if the group was constantly hemmed in, they soon would lose all vision.
With the support of the pastor and board, Breakaway took off, growing in its outreach until two hundred to three hundred young people would crowd the church each Wednesday evening.
An interesting footnote: In about three years, Breakaway died. The twenty young people who had prayed and planned Breakaway into existence all graduated, and those left in the group did not have the same vision. To them, Breakaway was a program that had been handed down. I had a hard time trying to excite the new group to the old group’s vision. They needed to pray and seek God for a vision that was their own.
I don’t think of myself as traditional; however, I have to admit at times I am. Since so many foundations are being shaken in our society, I do find security in some traditional programs that offer permanence and security. But I’m also learning to allow freedom. Now, from the pastor’s viewpoint, I’m learning to eliminate that second roadblock.
This, however, raises perhaps the most complex problem. We need an atmosphere of freedom to spark vision, but where do we draw the line? How do we keep the fire of enthusiasm from raging out of control? Too many ideas, even good ideas, leads to anarchy. How do we harness the energy of a visionary? We need a few guidelines — guardrails —to point our visionaries in the right direction.
Why We Need Guardrails
When working with an enthusiastic visionary, we must remember that not every vision is God’s plan for our church. It took me years to learn this principle, but when I did, I was liberated from the tyranny of following everyone with a conviction.
I often think of the story about the farmer who got up in the morning to feed the sheep. He started to get the feed when he saw the tractor needed to be fixed. He started for the barn to get the tools when he saw that the wood needed to be chopped. He started to the wood pile to get the ax when he noticed the horses were out of the corral. He ran to catch the horses and then noticed the barn had caught on fire, so he forgot the horses and ran to put out the fire. While putting out the fire, he heard his wife yelling to him that the gas stove was not working and he needed to fix it.
I feel that way sometimes in the church. I am so busy fixing up everything that I don’t have time to feed the sheep, which is what I started out to do in the first place. I see broken programs and broken lives; I run from crisis to crisis and at the end of the day wonder what I have done. Then someone comes up to me with a new vision—which is usually a new broken person or group of people who need fixing. The next thing I know, our church is directionless as I chase from one fix-it project to the next.
I need guardrails to keep me from straying too far off course.
Some years ago, I discovered a helpful metaphor: In many cities the gospel message is preached in many languages, perhaps as many as a hundred. However, there is not one local church that preaches the gospel in every one of those languages. Each unique church has a special calling of God for ministry. This was a liberating concept for me personally, because I go to bed at night thinking of much more that could have been done and more people who could be reached. And when I had listened to visionaries like Nick, I struggled between guilt and fatigue. However, I began to realize that as a church we cannot meet every need. Churches each have a different “language.”
So how do we know which visions from our people are from the Lord? How do we know in what language we are to be preaching? How do we know just what specifically we are to do? I have two guardrails that help keep me on course.
Guardrail 1: A Philosophy of Ministry
One of the most important aspects of ministry for a pastor is to help each church develop a philosophy of ministry. This states the direction the church takes on certain issues. This style of ministry—this “language”—is what distinguishes it from the other churches in town.
Recently a mother walked into my office with a tape she had just heard. She was convinced that the Lord had directed her to this tape and the lecture by a youth pastor about the evils of rock music. She told me about the lecture and all the satanic messages in rock music. If young people would just listen to this tape, she contended, they would burn all their rock music records, including so-called Christian rock music.
I explained to her that if there were those in the church who wanted to listen to the tape and burn their records, that was fine; however, as a church we were not a “crusading congregation.” We do not lead negative crusades against such issues; our philosophy of ministry is to preach primarily reconciliation to God. Where the Bible is dogmatic we want to be dogmatic. But when an issue is open to individual interpretation, we want individuals to come to their own conclusions on those matters. There are many churches in town who are very involved in these kinds of crusades, but the elders do not sense that is the direction the Lord is leading Sun River.
This woman had a vision, but the vision was contrary to the direction of the church. When she heard our philosophy, she struggled with our church and since has left.
We have spent time on our elder board working on different issues that come up — the role of women in our congregation, the place of the divorced in ministry, etc. These are not easy issues, and in many cases I am not sure we are correct; however, we say this is the stand we take until Scripture and the Holy Spirit convince us otherwise.
To use the analogy of language, this is the language we preach, and there are many churches in town that preach the message of Christ in different languages. We encourage people to worship where they preach in their language.
This philosophy of ministry must be regularly communicated to the church. Olan Hendrix, in Management and the Christian Worker, says the effectiveness of any corporate effort depends largely upon our ability to concisely articulate our objective.
I believe the most effective way to communicate the philosophy is in the sermon. From time to time when a certain issue presents itself in a text, I will mention, “The elders of Sun River have taken a stand on this issue and are leading the church in this direction.”
In addition to the sermons, sometimes we devote our evening service to one aspect of the philosophy of ministry. Recently, just before the election, I presented our position on the separation of church and state. Our church would not endorse particular candidates or tell people how they should vote on issues. We would merely encourage people to pray, be informed, and vote.
Our philosophy of ministry is never static. We are constantly growing and being challenged. I hope that never changes, because I would never want our guidelines to become so rigid that they hinder the work of the Holy Spirit. We have to realize the Lord often sends a visionary our way to help us evaluate our philosophy of ministry and get us out of a rut. We need to be careful that we do not cut off our visionaries by having our guidelines too rigid.
To help us evaluate our guidelines, we need our second guardrail.
Guardrail 2: Clear Lines of Communication
In my first pastoral experience, as a summer intern, I made a big mistake. I wanted to attend a concert to hear the musical ensemble from the Christian college I was attending. The concert was on a Wednesday night (I’ve already mentioned how sacred the midweek services were then), and the college was an hour’s drive away. I asked the pastor if I could take the day off and attend the concert, and he gave me permission.
What I did not tell him, however, was that I also asked five young people to go with me. That Wednesday evening when the youth group arrived for prayer meeting, five of the youth group leaders were absent. When people began to ask where these young people were, the answer was “Oh, Tom took them with him to a concert.” This not only created jealousy among the young people, but the pastor stood there with egg on his face because he did not know the whole truth of what I was doing.
The next day the pastor and I had a confrontation. I have to admit I was not surprised. In my youth and determination to do it my way, I felt he never would have allowed me to take the young people, so I didn’t ask. I just took them and decided to face the consequences later. As they say, it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.
The consequences, however, besides getting “chewed out,” were far more significant. I lost credibility with the parents and with my pastor. He was surprised and hurt by my decision, and he explained that I had put him in a tough position. He desperately wanted a youth pastor in the church and wanted the experience of an intern to be successful. I had hindered that vision through my own selfishness. It took time to regain any credibility.
I learned a valuable lesson in communication. Years later when we wanted to start Breakaway and drop Wednesday evening prayer meeting, I knew there were certain lines of communication and accountability I had to follow. I would never have just dropped the prayer meeting without a discussion with my pastor and the board. The lines of communication were not merely a “permission step” but a “support step.”
The pastor and deacon board became so excited about Breakaway that they changed the plans on the church’s “facility priority list.” The deacons were going to remodel an old fireplace room, but it was twentieth on the priority list. They moved it to number one because they caught the vision for Breakaway. They knew we needed a comfortable, warm setting for our ministry and approved the considerable expenditures for the renovation job.
Every church must establish these lines. They can be through the Christian education committee, the church board, or the staff, but these important lines must be used. And when the committees and boards are aware of the philosophy of ministry and the lines of communication, a direction is set to keep our visions on target.
This is not to say that visionaries will not challenge our guidelines; I hope they never stop challenging us. As long as we have an active, ministering church, I can guarantee we will be challenged. That is the nature of a church on fire. But part of the process of growth and maturity is developing and refining these guidelines together.
© 1986 Christianity Today
