This fall marks my 24th year of leading Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon, and my 34th year in ministry. I thought I had seen all that ministry could throw at me, from the early days of fighting over pews versus chairs to the seeker-sensitive movement, which some translated as selling out the Bible. I’ve watched pastors fall; ministries fail; and the worst scandals that money, sex, and power can bring occur in the bride of Jesus. Still, the pandemic and all that’s followed have been by far the most tension-filled, challenging years of my ministry. And I know I’m not alone.
The pandemic revealed the inadequacies of many tried-and-true ways of measuring our ministry health. I had thought I was driving a Jet Ski but realized I was steering a barge. Regardless of how quickly I wanted to change directions, the thing just wasn’t built to do so. The pressure and stress of this unprecedented time also exposed the condition of my soul and emotional life as a leader. I realized to my shame that I had strategized too much and prayed too little.
In the midst of these moments of pain, I began to see how desperately I needed a dramatic disruption in my leadership. Please don’t hear me saying I am thankful for the pandemic, because I am not. It was awful for many people and ministries on a number of levels. But in the same way God redeems our pain and uses it for good, I can see ways he is using the disruption caused by this crisis to move me and others closer to where we should have been pastoring all along.
Competition to collaborate
In Imago’s earliest days, when I was planting the church out of my living room, few ministry thinkers formed me as deeply as Eugene Peterson. I read all his books, listened to every class he taught at Regent, and absorbed everything I could about his contemplative approach to the vocation we share. I didn’t just like Eugene; I needed him. I was terrified I would fail as a church planter, and that fear drove me to work hard and produce results.
I needed Eugene because I am hardwired for mission in ways that have, at times, been pretty dysfunctional. As our church plant grew, a strong movement formed among the churches in Portland. Pastors developed great relationships with each other. But beneath that comradery, I struggled to shake my underlying desire to compete—to be the city’s fastest-growing church, to be the largest urban church, to adopt every biblically solid and culturally intelligent strategy available.
If I heard a pastor was getting traction with prayer every day at 6 a.m., I would think, Can I pull that off? If I learned people left my church to go to a newer plant that focused more on the gifts of the Spirit, I would strategize ways to make room for charismatic gifts in our service. Sure, I had never even been to a charismatic church, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about revival breaking out in our community and people lining up around the corner to get in on the Spirit’s work.
Jekyll and Hyde were vying inside my pastoral self. I loved what God was doing in these other great leaders, and I honestly wanted more prayer and more of the Spirit’s work in our midst. But I was also jealous.
Then the pandemic happened. Because we had worked on building unity before this, a group of Portland pastors quickly began gathering online for weekly Zoom meetings. We realized we needed each other—not just to figure out the state and local guidelines for gatherings but also in other ways we hadn’t before.
I soon realized I had a lot to learn from these men and women. We all did. Churches helped each other get their services online. We created a fund for congregations in the hardest-hit area of Portland that needed extra resources to make it through those early months of the crisis.
We borrowed ideas and prayed for one another. I realized I needed to adopt ideas I originally rejected from a pastor with a polar-opposite philosophy and style of ministry. So I shifted from Jekyll-and-Hyde jealousy to a brotherly humility and asked to borrow great ideas from another faithful pastor in a time of need. Something significant was changing inside me.
My previous aspirations to “win” at ministry seemed small and petty in the shadow of this growing movement of God’s kingdom. I recognize now that even if my church reached 50,000 people, in a metro area of 2.5 million, that wouldn’t make much of a dent. But if every one of the churches in Portland flourished and became what Jesus intended, the impact would be exponentially greater.
In God’s kingdom, churches are meant to collaborate in service of the King, not build competing kingdoms for themselves. At least in my own ministry, the stress of the pandemic revealed idols of competition that Jesus in his mercy replaced with holy collaboration.
Certainty to creativity
Prior to COVID-19, if you had asked me how we were doing as a church, I would have talked about things like people coming to faith and ways we were reaching into our community. But inside my heart, I would have centered on our budget and attendance. Despite all the good things we do in the city and people finding Jesus, at the end of the day, they don’t determine whether I have to cut staff or whether the board will question my leadership when attendance slips. Money and attendance are the weak points in my ministry. When they’re up, I feel good. When they’re down, ministry feels really hard.
During the months of quarantine, we couldn’t gather in person, run programs in homes, or give as we had year after year for decades. I felt more vulnerable than I did when Costco ran out of toilet paper. I started wondering if those old metrics that felt so reliable—in many ways, the most easily tracked objective measurements of ministry vitality—actually created a false sense of certainty.
Certainty is often an illusion in a life of faith, especially for a pastor. We preach sermons, organize small groups, create leadership teams for kids, and try to reach out to our neighbors, but we fund the whole thing by passing the hat or its digital equivalent. Since we don’t sell or produce anything, we can’t increase sales or production when times are bad. Every single person engages our ministry voluntarily. They worship voluntarily, give volun- tarily, serve voluntarily, and sometimes leave voluntarily and silently.
Pastoring is by its very nature vulnerable. Yet I was shocked by how much more vulnerable the pandemic made me feel. I knew this new moment required a different, more creative way of measuring church health. Really, it showed me my confidence in easily measurable metrics of success had been misplaced in the first place.
The false certainty of weekly giving
Like many churches, our general budget struggled during the first year of the pandemic. Meanwhile, we saw an outpouring of generosity for a COVID-19 relief fund we started. Rather than measuring only general-budget giving, we decided that gauging our congregation’s overall level of generosity would offer a much more accurate picture of the church’s spiritual health. This required some creativity.
We started measuring both the money coming into the church’s general budget and the money going out in the relief fund.
We also started factoring in people’s acts of service. Throughout the pandemic, as needs surfaced and were vetted through a network of nonprofits, we connected people to meet those needs. When we discussed congregational generosity, we stopped thinking only in dollars and cents.
Over this past year, I also stopped looking at the weekly giving numbers. Not entirely—I have wondered about them more than a few times, and our executive pastor shares those details with me when I ask. But I no longer track them on a weekly basis or use them as my main indicator of congregational generosity.
When we began to focus on generosity and not just the weekly giving numbers, the Spirit birthed a new muscle of trust in my faith. If God could bring us through the past two years, I could trust him with this year as well. And he has shown me the fruit of generosity birthed by the Spirit in our community. Slowly I am learning to place my certainty in something bigger than the weekly offering for our financial security.
The false certainty of Sunday attendance
Attendance was another golden calf I had valued too highly for too long. I subconsciously treated discipleship like a binary choice. Who was at church on Sunday, and who wasn’t? Who was involved in small groups, and who was missing?
But during the pandemic, I began to ask, What if every person who engaged with us online, in person, through a podcast, on Instagram or Facebook, or by another form of outreach was entering the orbit of our discipling community? And if so, what would I want those people to experience?
The pandemic unlocked my creative energy and helped me break through old thought barriers. All of a sudden, what felt like a barren wasteland of absence became a wide-open field of possibility. I decided to explore a much bigger mission field with countless “front doors” that are not connected to the building.
With the false idol of in-person attendance busted and my understanding of congregational participation expanded beyond the walls of our building, I started imagining our facility as more than just a box to gather people on Sundays. Since church buildings were empty during lockdown, how else could they be used to minister to people?
That question led to a number of churches becoming drop-off centers for donated supplies for foster families. Other churches became daycare centers for parents who didn’t have the choice to stay home and whose kids couldn’t be left alone.
In September 2020, we experienced a series of uncontained forest fires outside Portland. Our facilities became places where meals were cooked and supplies were dropped off and distributed. And since then, even as people have returned to in-person services on Sunday mornings, I’m more aware than ever of how our space might be used the other six days of the week.
The need for certainty will drive us to false idols of control, but creativity will lead us to embrace the ways of the kingdom. The pandemic was a severe but gracious way in which God began to crush my need for control and birth a new pathway of creativity.
The speed of vision or the pace of the flock?
Right now I am experiencing a serious clash between my ingrained leadership values and Jesus’ kingdom values. We are in an awkward time where what has been is gone and what is going to be has not quite arrived yet. We are in a liminal space that I find highly uncomfortable.
I am wired to create vision and inspire the church toward that vision. But after two and half years of watching all my ministry plans get shattered by the next variant or unforeseen cultural issue, I am weary of casting a vision for the future when people in my church know I have no clue what’s coming.
In this liminal space, people in my community have big desires but small capacity. Their minds and hearts want to do more, but their anxiety, stress, and emotions call it quits before they even start. This is one reason why the shepherding gift is so needed right now. We have glorified visionary leaders with entrepreneurial skills in the church for so long that many people see shepherding as secondary. But when you go to the ER, you’re not hoping to run into a visionary CEO; you want a skilled nurse or doctor—someone with the patience and skill set to care for you and walk with you through what might be a long healing process.
Jesus is replacing my desire to make people run at the speed of my vision with a desire to walk at the pace of a wounded community. Jesus walked at the speed of the slowest sheep. Do I want to walk alongside him as he leads the church or power walk ahead of him to do my own thing?
Over the past two years, people have suffered. They have lost loved ones, jobs, and even relationships over politics. Single people have lived in painful isolation, and families have struggled to get by. And suddenly we are expecting them to dust themselves off and act as if everything is normal again. Is that what Jesus is truly asking of us and our people?
If I am honest, much of the vision I’m seeking for our congregation is just my attempt to get us out of this awkward liminal space. I want people to feel like everything is normal again. But it is not, and that is okay.
So I am trying to lead at the pace of my community, limping through this transitional moment like the rest of the world. If Jesus is willing to walk that way, then maybe I should be too. Because the kingdom of Jesus is not a sprint toward comfort. It is an eternal reign that is breaking in slowly, patiently, but surely as Jesus makes all things new.
Rick McKinley is the lead pastor of Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon. His latest book is Faith for this Moment: Navigating a Polarized World as the People of God.
This article is a part of our fall CT Pastors issue. You can find the full issue here.
