Why is it that some church people come early, stay late, and work hard in between-and in the same church others show up late, quit programs midstream, and leave in a huff over minor irritations? And why are the numbers committed to working in the nursery, teaching Sunday school, or sweating on church work days never seemingly sufficient?
In a day when, as one pastor put it, “Everyone I know is overextended financially, emotionally, and spiritually,” how much can a pastor ask for? Especially from volunteers?
To find out, LEADERSHIP traveled to Tennessee, the land of the Volunteers, and talked with four experienced pastors:
-Maxie Dunnam, pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Memphis;
-Don Finto, pastor of Belmont Church in Nashville;
-Duane Litfin, pastor of First Evangelical Church on Memphis’s growing east side;
-Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in downtown Memphis.
As you’ll see, the discussion soon wrestled with the deeper issues-spiritual growth, discipleship, leadership, and church structure.
Leadership: When you think of committed people in your church, who comes to mind?
Duane Litfin: An elder who has had opportunities to expand his business responsibilities and income, but he has chosen not to do that in order to retain maximum time for the Lord’s work. He chairs our missions board, which is a massive task.
Adrian Rogers: I thought of a man I greatly admire-Marvin Nelli. He operates a service station. He’s not a gifted speaker, but Marvin is perhaps the best personal witness I’ve ever met. He gets off work and visits in the hospitals-listening and sharing. Hardly a Sunday goes by that he doesn’t come forward with somebody he has led to a commitment to Christ. Sometimes it will be a whole family.
His commitment is not so much to the infrastructure as to what the organization is there to produce.
Maxie Dunnam: I think of Pauline Howard. People in the church call her to pray for them. Every week, though she’s about 80 years old, Pauline drives to a prison down in Mississippi and teaches people how to read. Hardly a week passes that she doesn’t call me and ask for $100 or $200 or $2,000 because somebody she’s helping needs something. It’s the most beautiful balance of personal piety and social witness I know.
Don Finto: We have a woman whose husband died of cancer ten years ago and left her with four children. People in the church helped her buy a car and do work on the house. Despite her financial difficulty, she gave the largest donation when another widow needed a car. A year ago she and her new husband and the two younger boys went to Haiti to minister, at their own expense, during their spring vacation.
Leadership: Powerful examples! The rub comes, though, because not everyone is this committed. What’s the “minimum weekly requirement” for the average member?
Litfin: Few things, I would say, are for everybody. Corporate worship on Sunday morning is about it. We do have Sunday evening and midweek services, but increasingly I’m willing to concede that we won’t get everyone back on all those occasions. In our culture, one gathering a week may be all you can expect everybody to attend.
Leadership: Anything besides worship attendance?
Litfin: Two other things: To be in a web of relationships and to participate in some form of ministry. We emphasize “one member, one ministry.” If you ask one of our members, “What’s your ministry?” he should be able to answer.
That’s what we expect, but we make a distinction between members and attenders. I’m delighted to have attenders-the more, the merrier. We’ll minister to them, woo them in, make the Christian life infectious, and try to help them grow. But when you say, “I want to join this church,” that is a statement of commitment. So for members, I expect attendance at worship, close relationships, and active ministry.
Leadership: What percentage of the members would you say meet those three criteria?
Litfin: You know the old 80/20 Rule-that 80 percent of the work gets done by 20 percent of the people. Well, I think our church does better than that. I’d put us at 70/30 or maybe 65/35. When you realize 50/50 is the ideal, 65/35 begins to look better. One of our strategic goals, though, is that by the year 2000 every member will be in some form of ministry.
Leadership: Do people know these expectations when they join?
Litfin: Yes, the “every member in ministry” is in our Target 2000 strategic plan. And in the new members’ class, I’m up front about the expectations.
Finto: It’s hard to place expectations on people if you do not have a formal membership.
In 1971, when I went to Belmont, I was so sick of dead institutionalism that my philosophy of church was, rent a warehouse and put up a sign that says, CHRISTIANS WORSHIP HERE. EVERYBODY WELCOME.
Well, that doesn’t work, because when you embrace everybody, you might end up with a New Ager or a witch teaching your children. So in the last six months we have come up with criteria for membership, one of which is: “to support the Lord’s work through Belmont Church with tithes, talents, and time.”
Leadership: How explicit do you make “tithes, talents, and time”?
Finto: We don’t spell it out contractually, but we make it explicit in new member classes. I’d like to think our involvement is at least 60/40 now, but we have a long way to go.
Again, that’s for members. Like Duane, I’m glad mere attenders are there, but on the other hand, I have to face the fact they’re a drain. We keep their babies in the nursery. We teach their children in classes. We financially supply for them. Yet they rarely contribute personally or financially.
Rogers: I differ. The only thing I look for when a person comes to join our church is commitment to Christ. Romans 14:1 says, “He who is weak in the faith, receive.” A newcomer is a babe, and I think every family needs a lot of babysitters. You can’t say to a baby, “We’ll let you into the family if you do the dishes, make the beds, mop the floors, bring in income.” He’s not equipped. He has to be nurtured and trained. So we keep a low threshold for new members.
Dunnam: We flirt with the danger of turning churches into elitist fellowships. Throughout my ministry, I’ve tried numerous methods to receive people into the church. First, I wouldn’t let them join until they’d been to twelve membership sessions. Then I reduced it to eight. Then to six. Now I don’t do anything. We have membership classes, but they aren’t a prerequisite to membership.
Interestingly, I cannot find any difference between the functioning of the members who’ve been through three months’ training and those who just walk down the aisle.
Leadership: So people don’t have to do anything to join?
Dunnam: Our approach is unusual in the Methodist church. Everybody who joins, whether from Adrian’s church or another Methodist church or by profession of faith, takes vows of Christian commitment and church membership. The vows cover commitment to Christ and the historic Christian faith, and then people are asked, “Will you be loyal to Christ through this particular church by holding it in your prayers, your presence, your gifts, and your service?”
Adrian’s point about “babies” is absolutely right. At the same time, I want my 2-year-old to learn to pick up something off the floor. So for a babe we have few expectations, but we still want some commitment as quickly as possible.
Leadership: If you keep entrance requirements at the infant level, what prevents you later from having spiritual teenagers who refuse to do any chores?
Rogers: The difference is between what we desire and what we require. You can’t require dedication, anyway. You can require some forms of legalism, but they won’t be a reality in people’s lives.
I believe you have to keep the theological standard high-the Lord said, “Be perfect,” and the leaders have to be striving for that standard with all there is in them. They are the spiritual fathers, John says.
But always there are the “little children” John refers to. They ought to grow rapidly, but you don’t screen them out on the front end. A church is an incubator, a nursery, a grade school. You start where people are and move them to where they need to be.
Leadership: When new people come, is it better to get them serving right away, so they don’t get programmed for inactivity? Or is it better to get them grounded in the Word and worship first?
Finto: It depends on the person’s background. If people are strong believers who have been active in ministry, we recruit them as soon as they’re ready. But if they’re inexperienced, we usually let them watch for a while.
Rogers: To me it depends on what you get them to do. When I meet with our new members, I tell them, “Every person has a gift, and our job is to help you discover, develop, and deploy that gift. There’s no clique to break into, but we feel it’s better for you to settle in and get acclimated. Don’t wait to serve, however, until you’re given an official position of service. If you’re the last one out of the room, turn out the lights. If you walk across the church grounds and see a piece of paper, pick it up and throw it away. Smile at the first person you meet in the hallway. That’s service to Jesus; that person may be the guy who came to church thinking, I’m going to give God one more chance before I jump off the Mississippi River bridge.”
So they begin to serve immediately. But again, we’re not going to give anybody a major responsibility unless he or she meets the criteria for leadership. You let a child carry out the wastebasket, but you don’t let him drive the car until he’s old enough and mature enough. And carrying out the wastebasket gets him ready to drive the car.
Dunnam: I believe in involving people in ministry as soon as you get a chance. Wesley talked about the means of grace. One means of grace he called “instituted.” This had to do with the Lord’s Supper, baptism, prayer, Bible reading, worship. But another means of grace was “providential”-simply works of mercy-to do no harm and to do all the good you can. I’ve seen more people serve their way into Christlikeness than I have seen pray their way into Christlikeness.
Leadership: Do you expect more from your lay leaders than you do from others? If so, what?
Rogers: There’s not one level of living here and another there; I believe God has the same high standard for all. But you can’t lead unless you’re out in front; those who lead must meet the standard. And so our requirements are holiness of living, doctrinal integrity, faithfulness, fellowship with the brethren. Then, of course, there’s spiritual giftedness, the ability to do the work we want them to do.
Finto: Paul doesn’t say anything in 1 Timothy about leaders that wouldn’t be expected of any Christian-with the possible exception of the things that talk about maturity.
But obviously we expect leaders to embrace the call we believe God has for our church. We’re an inner-city church, committed to stay, yet we had some elders who felt we should have moved to suburbia, so they were not supportive of the direction the church was going. Some weren’t supporting the church financially. Since we have lifetime elders, it led to tension within the eldership over many years.
So about a year ago, I felt the Lord was asking me to ask the elders as a group to resign. We operated with an interim group, and then the congregation affirmed a new group of elders. The church didn’t miss a heartbeat. Asking all the elders to resign was the right thing to do in our situation, but still, I’m appalled that I did it.
Dunnam: I’m appalled that you did it. (Laughter)
My hunch is that the real leaders of our church, unlike these other churches, are not necessarily in official positions. Many people in the body may be more committed, spiritually speaking, than some of the people on our administrative board. So if we do something that requires strong spiritual leadership and dynamic commitment, we’ll recruit those people from throughout the church.
For instance, we’ve just set up a nine-member committee to decide the mission and ministry of our church for the next five to ten years. Two of those people are from the administrative board, but we’ve drawn the rest from throughout the church.
If you were to ask the congregation, “Who are the spiritual leaders of this church?” they would name as many people outside the administrative board as they would inside.
Leadership: Is it your role to increase people’s level of commitment to Christ? To the church? Both?
Litfin: In our church, we rarely, if ever, talk about membership. Because there’s no pressure for membership, we have a large group of people who have never joined the church but are there week in and week out and involved in ministry. One family, for example, was from a Greek Orthodox background, and it was difficult for them to make a formal commitment. Not until after nine years of active involvement did they join the church.
But when someone is interested in leadership-elder, Sunday school teacher-we ask, “Are you a member?” Membership is for those who can say, “I’m willing to make an explicit commitment to this church.”
Is that what you’re saying, Adrian?
Rogers: No. If you’re a visitor or non-Christian, we consider you a welcome attender. But a commitment to Christ is ipso facto a commitment to church membership. To be in Christ is to be in the body.
Litfin: But that’s not the same as commitment to a local fellowship.
Rogers: I think it is. When the church is mentioned in Scripture, the great preponderance of times it refers to the local fellowship. When a person is committed to Christ, he needs to come under the authority of a pastor and be part of a church body. Like a newborn child, he is part of a family.
Finto: Our highest calling is to draw people to Jesus. The church is only to point people to Jesus.
Some may be hesitant to draw a distinction between commitment to the Lord and commitment to the church. Commitment to the church, ideally, ought to come about because I’m committed to the Lord and what he’s doing in this body of believers.
But in my background, I found many people committed to the church who weren’t committed to the Lord.
Dunnam: It’s our responsibility to see that the church’s ministry is centered in Christ and Christ’s mission to the world. Then you can see commitment to Christ and commitment to the church as one and the same.
Rogers: The problem is that in the minds of many people, committed to the church means committed to the meetings of the church. If we say commitment to the church is the same as commitment to God, then these people think they have to attend meetings in order to be committed to God.
I know some men who are having difficulty in their homes because of this. The wife can’t complain that she has an absentee husband, because he’s off “serving God” by sitting in meetings. In reality, he might better serve God by staying home.
I’ve never tried to get people committed to leadership or even committed to the church, per se. To go after church commitment is a mistake. It is a commitment to Christ that you want. People will do for Jesus what they’ll never do for you.
Dunnam: I don’t separate expectations of the church and expectations of Christ. If you do, you’re saying your church isn’t carrying out the ministry of Christ.
Finto: I am caught by the realization that we are never told in the Bible to draw people to the church. We are told to draw them to Jesus. The church is not to be lifted up, but Jesus is.
Dunnam: Theologically, I question that. Paul understood the church as Christ’s body. He was constantly calling people to be responsible to the body. You don’t draw people to Jesus in isolation, and you don’t draw people to Jesus apart from a fellowship of Jesus.
Finto: True, but many people today have to be converted to Jesus before they can tolerate the church. I’ve seen people committed to the institution who were not committed to Christ at all.
My destination likely is the same as yours, Maxie, because I think one has to be part of the church. But I’d take a different route to get there.
Leadership: What are your most effective strategies for building commitment: Preaching? Prayer? Establishing small groups? Visitation?
Litfin: One strategy is to have some sense of where the congregation needs to be going and then to call people to that end. If I as pastor don’t keep that vision before the people, who will?
The foremost strategy for me, though, is preaching. I’m an expository preacher, and I use every opportunity, as I work through the text, to be drawing this vision.
I’ve been preaching through Revelation, for example, and it’s extraordinary the degree to which it gives us the ability to call people to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. I can say, “This is what all of human history is about, and here we are on our way to accomplish it.”
Another way of building commitment is by influencing the leadership. I can’t be one-on-one with every member of the congregation.
Dunnam: I agree that the way you set the tone for commitment, more than any other way, is in the pulpit. I doubt if there’s a Sunday in which I don’t call people to examine where they are in relation to the Lord.
Yesterday I preached from Paul’s greeting to the Colossians, and I asked, “Are you growing in the gospel?” One way to tell you’re growing, I said, is if your dependence upon God is increasing and your dependence upon the props of life is decreasing. A second way is to ask yourself, Is there anything in my life that requires Jesus Christ to explain?
Finto: I don’t think we can lead somebody to a deeper commitment than we have. Patton said an army is like spaghetti: you can’t push it anywhere; you have to lead it.
I also believe I need to devote myself to prayer, and that everything else grows out of that. At least I believe that intellectually. Several years ago I heard Leonard Ravenhill say something that will haunt me until the day of my death. He said, “No preacher is worth his salt who doesn’t spend at least two hours a day in prayer.” I suspect he’s right.
Litfin: I work hard to avoid the notion that people are doing the pastor a favor by serving. They’re not doing this for me, and if they are, I don’t want them to be doing it. They’re doing it as unto the Lord.
Leadership: What do you do with people who seem to be loafing more than resting, who seem better at taking than at giving?
Rogers: You endure them. You love them. But you never accommodate the church to them, or everything will stop. You don’t move a church in convoy, because a convoy slows down to the slowest ship. So you move with the movers. If the rest want to move, fine; if they don’t, let them sit there. But as you move with the movers, a few who were sitting will start to get moving, too.
Why do we fall off in leadership exponentially from the top until there’s no commitment at all? It’s because too often we don’t choose Class A people to be leaders. I mean highly committed people who have a desire for excellence, who have the goods to be leaders. (A person can be a great, committed Christian and not be a leader.)
These Class A people will choose only Class A people to work with them. But if you let Class B people into leadership, they’ll choose Class C people. And there’s no telling whom the Class C people will choose.
Leadership: The key, then, is not to worry about the nonchalant but to focus on the people who are ready to go.
Rogers: It’s not a comforting thought to think that the average convert will become like the average member, but he will. (Laughter) But cream rises to the top. My goal is to work with those leaders. This means I’m ministering one on one to about the same number of people I ministered to when I pastored a small church.
Jesus told about the tree that didn’t bear any fruit. He said, “If it doesn’t bear next year, cut it down, for why does it cumber the ground?” The worst thing about it was it was taking the place of a fruit-producing tree. When someone can’t do the job, not only is the job not being done, but he’s standing in the way of somebody else doing the job.
Leadership: With this approach, how do you avoid the charge of elitism, that you’re not spending time with the outcasts, or even “average” people?
Rogers: You don’t avoid ministry to them, but Jesus’ overall strategy for building commitment was to reproduce himself through a few.
Leadership: Have any of you ever been criticized because of some commitment you were asking people to make?
Rogers: No. People want you to hold the standard high. They may not expect to reach it personally, but they’ll say, “Man, what a pastor!” Halfheartedness and mediocrity don’t inspire anybody to do anything.
Litfin: I work hard at not calling people to things that are unrealistic, but I have taken flak at times. People say, “You’re not being realistic,” or “It’s easy for you to say. You’re in full-time Christian work.”
I view myself as a projector shining on the wall Christ’s expectations for all to see. They’re not my expectations. I didn’t invent them. I’m here to say, “Look what Christ wants us to be. I haven’t arrived yet, either, but let’s go.”
Dunnam: Criticism, if you get it, comes not so much when you raise moral issues or standards as when you challenge people to give money. When you demand a pure lifestyle, you get avoidance, but when you ask for money, you get criticism.
Finto: Churches that are not holding the standard high are not getting anywhere. It’s the churches who call for commitment that are growing.
Litfin: I’m not sure, at least if you mean growing in number. An associate pastor of a large church told me recently, “What you’ll hear in this church week in and week out is, ‘Come; your sins can be forgiven. Come and let us meet your needs.’ But what you never will hear from the pulpit or anyplace else is, ‘Take up your cross, deny yourself, and follow me.’ ” And they are a huge church and growing.
I think of the difference between a willow tree and an oak. A willow grows very fast and gives shade quickly. But it’s soft wood. You climb the tree, and the branches break off. The tree is susceptible to pests and disease, and it’s short-lived. Oak churches grow slower, but they’re strong and resistant to pests and disease.
Leadership: Can someone be too involved in church ministry? Have you ever asked someone to do less?
Litfin: I try not to have expectations of our lay leadership that I’m not willing to fulfill myself. The average professional in our church is putting in over fifty hours a week at work. If I’m asking him to put in ten hours a week on leadership in our church, then his work plus church exceeds sixty hours a week. It’s not fair to ask that unless my total hours per week are the same.
Finto: Generally, people don’t burn out because they’re doing church work. There may be some exceptions, but usually people are burned out by many other things going on in their lives.
Litfin: Right. Many professional people have the tiger by the tail and don’t know how to let go. Their jobs are consuming them, and yet they want to be active in ministry. What they’re doing with their lives is killing them, yet they don’t know how to break free.
When I see someone who’s so tied into his profession he’s already putting in sixty or seventy hours per week, I know I don’t have any business trying to add another ten or twelve hours a week of church work to his load. A conversation about commitments and priorities might be in order, but not recruitment.
So a few times, usually because they were facing difficulties at home, we have asked elders to back off from church work so they could get their lives and families together.
Finto: When people are hearing God, I believe they’re going to have Sabbaths-ebb and flow-in their lives. When they’ve been with people too much, they need to back away from people. At times, people need to be not in assembly. Our people know I feel that way, and probably some of them will take advantage of it, but there have been a few times when I’ve encouraged my wife not to be at church because I felt she had been so overloaded. I let people know that.
Leadership: What was their reaction?
Finto: I think it caused me to go up in their estimation. They were shocked that a preacher would tell anybody to stay home and not come to church.
Litfin: When I call people to sacrificial living, they may be intimidated. I need to give them bite-sized ways to begin serving. For example, we had a Wednesday night dinner, and every week we had problems recruiting the workers. It killed the dinner and the woman doing the recruiting. So we broke down the dinner into small tasks-you stand here and wipe trays-and gave each one to an elder, deacon, pastor, or the spouse of one of those. We took on the dinner to model to the congregation the willingness to serve. Others joined in, and today the dinner is thriving.
It showed me that most people do better serving in an identifiable, manageable task. When you give that to people, they don’t burn out.
Finto: We’re writing job descriptions for every nonpaid person. We don’t call them volunteers anymore, though. We call them unpaid staff.
Leadership: What do you know now about calling people to commitment that you wish you’d known starting out?
Dunnam: That I don’t need to be intimidated by any lay person, no matter who he is. One of my problems for years was that I was intimidated by highly placed people.
When I came out of seminary, I organized a church that included doctors, lawyers, and professional people. I had trouble presenting the claims of the gospel and the call for stewardship. But as I’ve matured, I talk to them differently today than I did then.
A few months ago, for example, I told one man he had better think twice about how he was treating his pastor. That pastor was the best person they could have in that church at this time. Even though my friend didn’t agree with some of the things the pastor was saying, he needed to think about how he was treating him.
Rogers: The thing I’m still learning is that God has called every member to minister. The pastor is not the hired gun. I’ve gotten so bold as to tell my people they don’t pay my salary; they give the money to God, and God pays my salary. Now I say that with a smile. But I tell them, “You don’t pay me to do your ministry. My duty is to equip you for ministry.”
Litfin: I’ve learned not to be afraid to call people to a life of sacrifice. There’s a lot in me that doesn’t want to put people off. I think, If you say that, people may not be able to handle it. They may walk away. But I’m haunted by the Lord’s willingness to let the rich young ruler walk away. Jesus did not water down his expectations or fear turning people off.
Finto: In my early years I instilled guilt instead of conviction. I would read a passage like Matthew 25 about visiting the sick and the prisoners, and I’d get guilt-ridden. Then I’d pass that on in my preaching.
Later, as I came to believe that Jesus lives in us through the Holy Spirit, I saw that was the key to knowing which sick person and prisoner to visit. Now my goal is to challenge my people to hear from God and to obey his leading.
When people are hearing from God and obeying him, they’ll become fully committed.
Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
