Pastors

GIVING PEOPLE PERMISSION TO SUCCEED

Fred Smith

A look at one of the greatest gifts a pastor can give a congregation.

Recently I was talking with a minister who had just returned from a missions trip.

“What did you accomplish?” I asked.

“Well, the most important thing I did with the small churches in difficult situations,” he said, “was give them permission to succeed.”

That was an interesting thought. He must have sensed they saw themselves as losers. Their ministry was supposed to be tough, and they couldn’t expect more than meager results. He realized they needed to raise their sights, to see the opportunities for success.

His remark brought to mind a story about one of the gifted golfers on the LPGA tour. This woman, a Christian, possessed enormous talent but couldn’t get in the win column. In frustration, she went to a Christian counselor who discovered a surprising thing: subconsciously she didn’t think of Christians as winners. She had been raised in a strict home where she was taught that Christians are passive, they lose more comfortably than they win, they’re volunteer martyrs. As a result, she wasn’t free to win.

After the counseling, she quickly started winning. All the counselor did was give her permission to succeed.

Why We’re Afraid to Succeed

There are several reasons Christians are afraid to succeed.

Some have an incorrect concept of God. Last year while I was speaking at a seminary, a young man walked up and said, “God’s got me right where he wants me.”

I asked, “Where’s that?”

“Broke.”

“I have a son,” I said, “and it would disturb me if my son were to say to some friend, ‘My dad’s got me right where he wants me-broke.’ He and I would have to have a talk about his wrong concept of my feelings and desires for him.”

A second problem is an incorrect concept of how God works. Sometimes we hear, “Ask, and God will work a miracle.” Normally, that isn’t the way he works. God is the one who brought cause and effect into being, so usually right results come from right actions.

You have a right to expect pay when you work, because “a laborer is worthy of his pay.” In the same way, you have a right to expect results when you diligently and intelligently use the talent he’s given you.

Twenty-five years ago, at a laymen’s meeting in Palm Springs, a businessman asked if he could talk with me about a problem in his business. We met at 6 the next morning, and from the figures, I saw quickly that I was either missing his problem or looking at a most successful business. So I asked, “Am I getting the right picture? Is this as successful as it looks?”

He said, “It is.” I stopped talking for a minute to try to intuit what he might see as a problem, because it certainly didn’t show in the figures. On a hunch I asked, “What’s your religious background?”

“The Plain People,” he said, naming one of the Mennonite or Amish groups.

“You’re having trouble with success, aren’t you?” I asked. “You’re feeling guilty.”

He nodded. We closed the books and talked no more about the business but about his concept of God, and how the loving heavenly Father would be happy for him to succeed-in the right way, with the right motive, while sharing his success.

A third obstacle, particularly for those whose gifts bring them before people, is a hesitancy to accept plaudits for those abilities. Before speaking at a meeting of one of the very strict denominations, I was preceded by a young woman who sang beautifully. Afterward I said, “You have a lovely voice.”

She hung her head and said, “Don’t give me the glory. Give the glory to the Lord.”

I said, “My dear, I didn’t make a theological statement. I simply gave you a compliment from somebody who tried to sing and was not able to, and yet who recognizes that you can. Since I believe you have nothing except what you’ve received, any comments I make after that are within the scope of giving God glory.”

I remembered a much healthier response from a charming woman I’d met years before. After having dinner with her and her husband, I said to her, “I believe you are one of the most gracious people I have ever met.”

She smiled and said, “Thank you for noticing, Fred. I’ve dedicated it to Christ.”

She didn’t deny her graciousness; she confirmed it. Oswald Chambers said that worship is when you give your best to God. This was her best, and so she gave it to God as worship.

The issue, at its heart, is accepting a “worm theology.” Scripture makes many statements about our human condition, both complimentary and critical. The problem is that we are quick to accept the negative. We have a harder time accepting the positive, that “God made man only a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” Those who are most comfortable losing readily picture themselves not as children of a great God, but as worms. Now, compared to God, we are worms, but that’s not the way he sees us. He made us from the dust but didn’t intend for us to live there.

As Christian leaders we have the good news that breaks this psychological barrier and gives our people the freedom to enjoy success achieved with integrity.

What Is Success?

Before we go any further, let’s define success. Many people have the wrong understanding of it.

For Christians, success can never be measured by money. When people say to me, “That man’s worth ten million dollars,” that tells me he’s wealthy, but it doesn’t prove he’s successful. In some cases, it could mean the opposite. For instance, if Mother Teresa, whom I consider a tremendous success, confessed she was hoarding a million dollars, I’d think she was a hypocrite. Money would prove her a fraud, not a success.

Second, success can never be measured by numbers-regardless of what the numbers are. Some churches gauge success by the attendance or budget numbers. Some pastors measure their success by the number of “preacher boys” they have sent to the seminary from their congregation. If the statistic I’ve heard is true-that 40 percent of seminarians are there because they’re trying to find the will of God-I have to believe many of these students have been misdirected by people who were measuring success by a number.

The measurement of success is simply the ratio of talents used to talents received. What you are doing with what you’ve got, plus who you are becoming. Are you a growing, maturing Christian? Whether you work in business, or in Christian work, or as a day laborer, professional, or academic, if you are a maturing Christian, using a large percent of your talents, you are successful. Be glad.

Some of us tend to think, I could have been a success, but I never had the opportunity. I wasn’t born into the right family, or I didn’t have the money to go to the best school. But when we measure success by the extent we’re using what we’ve received, it eliminates that frustration. I’ve known many Christians who had limited opportunities, but they made the most of what they had. They had a great sense of responsibility, a love for God and other people, and out of that flowed a tremendous use of talents.

When I worked for Genesco, I promoted a young man from operating a machine into a lower managerial role because we wanted to test his capability. Shortly afterward, he was killed in an automobile accident near Lewisburg, Tennessee. Maxey Jarman, Genesco’s chairman, wanted to go to the funeral. We drove seventy-five miles to the funeral, and on the way back Maxey said, “I believe Bill was one of the most successful men we have had in the company.”

I said, “He was an hourly employee and was just promoted to a small managerial job. Why would you say that?”

“Because he used what he had.”

The person who’s doing the most with what he’s got is truly successful. Not the one who becomes the richest or most famous, but the one who has the closest ratio of talents received to talents used.

An unsuccessful person, on the other hand, is one who didn’t use the chances he or she had. He could have developed himself, he could have made a contribution to life, he could have become a mature Christian, but he didn’t. It is my challenge as a leader to keep this from happening, and giving permission to succeed is a good starting place. The Bible says that to whom much has been given, much will be required.

Encourage your people to measure success only by potential, not by what others are doing. One of the prominent realtors in Dallas came to me a few years ago after the bottom fell out of the housing market. He was very concerned, almost depressed, because business was down 40 percent, and he didn’t know how to get it up. We talked a little, and then I said to him, “Why don’t you change your goals this year?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why not measure success by survival this year? With the current condition of the real estate market in Dallas, anyone who survives is a success.”

I saw him two or three months later, and he was smiling. “Fred,” he said, “I’m going to survive, and for me right now, that’s success. I can’t beat last year, but I can beat failure.”

Another thing we often forget: being a success doesn’t mean everything in our lives has turned out well. We can be successful in coming back from a fall. I have a friend who got into an immoral situation. He genuinely repented and accepted God’s forgiveness and moved forward. To me, that was success.

I know a woman who right now is fighting severe depression, and winning. That’s true success. I’ve seen women lose their husbands to an affair, yet come through that great rejection and reestablish their lives. They have demonstrated the power of God in a human life. They’ve become successes. Our privilege as leaders is to commend their success!

Who Can Give Permission to Succeed?

Only a person in authority can give convincing permission. Anybody can encourage. But permission to succeed comes only from an authority figure-parent, boss, pastor. Permission from such a person dispels doubt and gives assurance this is right.

When my pastor friend went on that missions trip and gave those struggling churches permission to succeed, he was able to do that. As the pastor of a healthy, growing church, he is seen by the people as an authority because he came from where they were. Had he been, say, one of the members of those churches, he could have given encouragement, but not the same permission to succeed.

Many years ago I spoke at Baylor University and met a young woman with unusual character and ability. Toward the end of my stay, I told her, “I believe you could do almost anything you want to do.”

She became a missionary. Thirty years later, she called me. “I’m back in the States,” she said, “and I want you to know that when the going really got rough in Japan, I would say to myself, I know there’s one fat businessman back in the States who believes in me. That sustained me many times-just that one person believing.”

All I’d said was one simple sentence, but this was more than encouragement, because she saw me as vice-president of a large corporation, and so to her I had authority. She accepted the permission to succeed.

Experiences like this have taught me it’s not only a leader’s privilege, but also a responsibility, to give permission to succeed.

According to management experts, a manager’s number-one responsibility is to establish a vision for the company. I think this is also true with a church. And one of the ways you establish the vision is to give people a belief in what they can do.

What’s the alternative? If you don’t give people permission to succeed, you draw artificial boundaries for them. You say, “You can’t go beyond this fence.” Recently PBS aired a documentary on children who fail. A great many of these children, studies have found, are verbally abused by their parents: “I hate you. I wish I’d never had you. You’ll never amount to anything. You’ll never accomplish anything.” Yes, a tiny percentage of those people will, in rebellion against that, accomplish a great deal; we hear about those. But we won’t hear about the thousands who live mediocre, even criminal, lives. A prophecy of failure is wrong. Permission to succeed is right.

As a leader it’s my great opportunity-my great responsibility-to say, “You have permission to succeed, provided you succeed correctly, by using the right principles in the right way in the right time.” In fact, this is one of the thrills of being a leader: to recognize in other people talents they don’t know they have and then give them permission to enjoy their success.

What Giving Permission to Succeed is NOT

Often when I bring up this topic, someone will say, “But Fred, that sounds like prosperity theology, or possibility thinking.” It’s not. There’s nothing I oppose more than prosperity theology. I think it’s disrespectful to our intelligence and to our God.

Prosperity theology says, in effect, that because God likes me, he makes me rich. Not at all. The Bible says God gives opportunities and the ability to be faithful. He doesn’t work some formula for favorites. Personal success is possible, not divinely guaranteed. There is no automatic prospering here, no putting God under obligation.

But the key difference is in the definition of prosper. It doesn’t mean you’ll be better known than other people or richer. The biblical definition is that you’ll mature as a Christian and use a greater portion of the talents God has given you. That is true prosperity, true success.

And possibility thinking? I believe in keeping a positive attitude and seeing possibilities, if realistic. I do not accept thinking that says I can do anything I think I can do. That is unreal. And if something is unreal, it is not divine, because if there is anything God is, it’s real.

When I gave that Baylor student permission to succeed, I wasn’t telling her, “The whole world is yours; you can do whatever you think you can do.” I was simply saying that, based upon my hours of observation and interaction, I believed she had the ability to excel at her chosen profession. It was a positive statement but rooted in a realistic assessment of her abilities.

A second problem with overly optimistic thinking is that it can be rooted in egotism or in greed or in exploitation. I believe positive thinking, to be Christian, must be rooted in gratitude to God. You can think positively, for example, about your possibilities on Wall Street. But if your success is built on insider trading, you cannot thank God for that.

Permission to succeed is miles from these two unrealistic views. I’d like to offer four ways to give your people the genuine article.

Four Ways to Give Permission

1. Verbalize it. For some reason, many people find it difficult to tell people they have permission to succeed. It’s easier to do the opposite, to talk in a negative way. Quite often I hear people say to their organizations, “Now, we can’t expect to do miracles here. I mean, we’re just a little organization; we’re just a band of believers.”

But if the people in our organizations are going to reach their God-granted potential, it will usually require leaders’ saying, “You’ve got it. God hasn’t fenced you in capriciously. The psychological barriers you might have of how important you are or where your family comes from or your education-they’ll limit you only if you let them. You have the permission, my permission, to go as far as you can go.”

It doesn’t need to be said in a hyped-up way. A simple, matter-of-fact statement is powerful enough. When I was 3 years old, I fell on a Mason jar and badly cut my right hand. The cut became infected. The infection grew worse, and soon there was a question whether I’d lose the hand.

My parents took me to a surgeon in the city, who operated. My father was deeply concerned, but the surgeon told him, “This boy has something in him that he can thrive even without that hand.” As it turned out, my hand was saved, though I did lose major function in it. My father told me that story when I was 5 or 6 years old, and only two or three times after. He never told it in an inspirational way. He just repeated what the doctor said before the operation. But I felt that this was a form of permission. The surgeon, an authority, was saying, “He is a survivor.” That long-ago statement still motivates me.

2. Reinforce it constantly. One of the most powerful reinforcements is telling stories of people who are successful.

I walked into a plant the other day to meet the president for lunch. He’s a pragmatic, engineer type, a noninspirational sort. I knew it is uncharacteristic of him to verbalize his belief in people, and I wondered, How does he give his people the permission to succeed?

Then I saw on the wall a chart that showed the company’s production and sales for the past five years. The figures started at $200,000 and this year reached $5,000,000. With that chart, he’s saying, “Every year we have grown. Every year we’ve been more successful. Next year we expect to be more successful.” He’s giving the permission.

Recognizing individuals who have succeeded is another way we confirm the permission to succeed. If you see someone perform in an exemplary way, call attention to it. Some people are willing for you to accomplish only if you don’t feel successful. But to be honest, we have to give people the right to enjoy the feeling of success.

Consider the apostle Paul. He said, “There’s a crown waiting for me,” and in another place, “Only the winner gets the crown.” Paul is saying, “I plan to succeed! I’m a winner!” You catch the flavor, “I have paid the price of being successful, and I’m also feeling the joy of being successful.”

As I recognize success, I try to stretch people’s horizons. I might say, “That was terrific!” but I don’t stop there. Tomorrow I might return, repeat the compliment, and say, “Last year, would you have believed you could do that? You may be surprised at what you can accomplish next year.”

3. Implement it. Then we need to give people opportunities. In Worcester, Massachusetts, I created a task force of managers but put on it an hourly employee who hadn’t been recognized. That assignment gave him the opportunity to run in a different league, and he sprinted! I knew he would; he had the talent and simply needed the opportunity.

Last year we all watched the same thing happen with the NFL replacement teams. When the professionals went on strike, hundreds of unknown football players, who had been scrimmaging on YMCA fields, got the opportunity to be professionals. In that environment, several succeeded. Even when the strike ended, certain players were kept because the owners and coaches said, “Look at that Zendejas kick! That ol’ boy’s got it; we just didn’t recognize it before.”

That’s what I mean by implementing it-you give people opportunities to succeed.

4. Demand it. You don’t start by saying, “It’s your responsibility to be successful,” because you’ll overwhelm a person. You start by saying, “You have the permission to be successful.” That fuels his desire, and if he has the drive and desire to succeed, he will.

But after the person has become successful, you switch from giving permission to making it a responsibility. You say, “God’s given you something to develop. It’s your responsibility to take that and do as much as you can with it.”

Toscanini, for example, demanded near perfection from his musicians. Robert Merrill told once about singing under Toscanini’s direction and repeatedly missing the syncopation in a particular short passage. Toscanini kept bringing him back to it. Finally he walked over and with his baton tapped the beat lightly on Merrill’s head. Ever after, Merrill said, whenever he sang that phrase, he could feel Toscanini’s baton on his head. Toscanini demanded greatness, and he produced it.

Demanding success may sound harsh, but when done in the right way, and while there are still time and opportunities for the person, it’s one of the most caring things we can do. Let me be more specific about what it means to demand success.

First, demanding success means keeping people off dead-end streets. One young woman in our office was not a particularly capable clerk because she was enthralled with the idea of becoming an actress, and finally she went to New York to make it big. There someone was kind enough to say to her, “You are not an actress.” She decided to get her MBA instead.

She failed in the theater but now has become vice-president of one of the large international investment companies. She is a genius in finance, but she needed somebody to say that, for her, acting was a dead end.

Second, demanding success means keeping people from irresponsibility. I had breakfast recently with the chairman of the board of a corporation. He said, “Fred, the thing I need most is the accountability of Christian friends. I want someone to ask me, ‘Are you really being a good chairman of the board? Are you working as hard as you did twenty years ago? Are you arrogant?’ ” We all need leaders and friends who will see irresponsibility and point it out. How else can we be successful?

Third, demanding success means keeping people focused on results, not effort. A mediocre leader thanks people for effort without realizing that unsuccessful effort is a great waste. The time to thank people is when they’ve produced results. I had a boss once who taught this to me in a dramatic way. I didn’t have good results to show for a certain project, so I was telling about how hard I’d worked on it. Finally, he said, “Fred, show me the baby; don’t tell me about the labor pains.” He was right: what we’re here for is the baby. And he helped me become more successful by teaching me to focus on results.

Freely You Have Received . . .

One final thing: I find it difficult as a leader to give permission that I’ve not received myself. Sometimes people say, “But Fred, I didn’t receive a lot of permission to succeed in my family, or at seminary, or in my first church.”

To them I say, “Keep opening the vista. If you’ve been able to see a little further than where you are, it may be possible for you to see a great deal further than where you are. Yes, everyone has a limit, but most of us and our organizations are so far from that limit that we really don’t have to worry about that. It will be a long time before we bump against the limit.”

In many instances, that seems to give them permission. And those who feel they have received permission to succeed are always best equipped to give it. 

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

NEW WAYS TO MEASURE GROWTH

Stephen McMullin

How do you measure growth in a church? Are attendance and budget the only reliable indicators?

Not in my rural church. We were getting better in many ways, but bigger? Only barely. It got me thinking about alternative ways to measure the growth of a church. Here are some critical factors.

Decreasing average age. During my first year in a rural yoked parish, one church member commented, “We may not be growing, but at least we’re staying about the same as we’ve been for the last thirty years.” She was more right than she realized. Attendance was the same as thirty years ago, literally. The same people attended every Sunday, only they were all thirty years older. There were no resident members under thirty years of age. Today one-quarter of the members are under thirty.

In some churches, the average age of the congregation is so high that even though the pastor is helping to attract new people, overall numerical growth will be slim due to illnesses and funerals among the membership. Such a pastor needs to realize the church is growing in a significant and lasting way if the average age of the congregation is being lowered.

Decreasing average length of membership. A church with no new members is a hard church to motivate for evangelism; the people are likely to have forgotten the excitement of seeing others commit their lives to Christ.

Some churches have seen no new members for decades, except the children of existing members. As the congregation becomes stagnant and ingrown, newcomers feel less welcome. The welcoming of just two or three new members into the church can be the beginning of growth. So maybe we shouldn’t fret if we haven’t doubled the membership of our churches in two years; if we’re moving a few new members toward positions of leadership, our churches will be much more capable of future growth.

One lady who joined our church a couple of years ago was frustrated by the adult Sunday school class. The class had always sat in the pews while the teacher spoke from behind a lectern. I hadn’t heard complaints about the arrangement before, but once this new member voiced her concerns, the rest of the class and the teacher agreed that they were frustrated, too-and changed the seating arrangement and even the class material.

The class is now the scene of vibrant discussions, and it attracts non-Christians every week-all because a new member provided the catalyst to change some unhelpful traditions. A shorter average length of membership indicates that new members are joining the old guard.

Increasing interest in children. Beware of the church with no preschool department. That church is missing the families that can potentially bring new life to the congregation. Churches tend to try to reach people who are like the existing membership, and if most of the church is elderly, the church probably will neglect younger families in the community. I’ve heard people in such churches complain that “the pastor should spend less time with the youth and more with the elderly members.” I try to balance my time among different age groups based not on the make-up of the church but on the make-up of the community.

I remember the Sunday school picnic in my smaller church during my first few years there. It seemed that the picnic-a sit-down meal at someone’s house or the community hall-was more for the older members than the children. We recently began going to a nearby children’s playground and having hamburgers and hot dogs and lots of games. One year we even combined the picnic with a sleepover for the kids. The result is that the kids attend, and so do their parents.

Interestingly, the older members are so pleased to see us reaching so many more people in the community that they enjoy the picnic a lot more, too. One of the best ways I’ve found to minister to the spiritual needs of older people is to give them the joy of seeing the church effectively reaching the community.

Expanding geographic base. My smaller church had never entered the age of the automobile. Eight years ago, everyone who attended the church lived within one mile. Today the majority of our Sunday school enrollment is from outside that area, and two recent additions to the church membership have been individuals who live about three miles away-a major breakthrough in our church.

Getting just one family to attend from beyond our limited area has resulted in others’ being invited to church services and Sunday school who would never have been reached by our church otherwise. By beginning to reach a wider area, we are emerging into other kinds of growth.

Each of these factors indicates a type of growth that isn’t at first discernible. But when we recognize these foundational growth factors, we get a more accurate picture of our true health. And we like the picture.

-Stephen McMullin

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

Performance Reviews: Avoiding the Pitfalls

Larry W. Osborne

How pastors can get honest feedback without getting ambushed.

Most pastors I know are committed to personal growth. Not many are willing to settle for mediocrity. The vast majority spend hours reading, praying, and studying in an unending quest for spiritual and professional growth.

Yet, curiously, many of us avoid the most vital ingredient for continued growth-someone to candidly tell us how we are doing.

My friend Dave is a case in point. In fifteen years of ministry he has never received a formal evaluation. It's not that he is unaware of the potential benefits. It's that he is also keenly aware of the potential pitfalls. He knows firsthand the sting of betrayal. The thought of providing a platform for a small group of adversaries to air their grievances makes the idea out of the question.

In many ways, Dave is right. Reviews can be risky; handled poorly, they can give our enemies an opportunity to open fire. Expecting the precise scalpel of correction, we can get the blunt ax of criticism. I know two pastors who left seemingly successful ministries within months of a bungled evaluation.

Despite the potential dangers, however, the hazards of avoiding reviews are even greater. We all have a natural tendency to exaggerate our strengths and downplay our weaknesses. One study of over 800,000 people found that everyone in the test sample rated himself above average in "the ability to get along with others." Only 2 percent saw themselves below average in "leadership ability." Obviously at least half the people were mistaken in their self-evaluation.

The fact is, we are unaware of spiritual and personal blind spots-like a loose thread or a twisted collar-until someone dares to speak up. Many folks notice them but lack the opportunity, and sometimes the courage, to tell us.

Still, most of us will hesitate to open ourselves until we feel reasonably sure we'll get the advice we need without, at the same time, getting ambushed. I know the feeling, and so over the years I've developed guidelines for my pastoral reviews. They've enabled me to avoid the pitfalls, yet still receive the benefits, of a candid review.

Initiate the Process

Perhaps the most effective way to eliminate many of the problems is to make sure I am the one initiating the process. Somehow an evaluation I have requested is radically different from one imposed by others.

Asking for a review disarms most potential enemies. I've learned that critics often become friends when they perceive themselves as advisers. Instead of feeling a need to overstate every concern in order to be heard, they realize I actually want to hear what they have to say.

In addition, a self-initiated evaluation grants me a measure of control over the participants. The fact is, many reviews go awry because the wrong people do the evaluating.

This was Dave's major concern. His deacon board was a mess. Two of his biggest antagonists were members; most of the rest of the board gave little evidence of spiritual maturity or insight. As far as he was concerned, they had nothing to offer in the realms of spiritual or personal advice.

I would agree. But Dave failed to see it wasn't necessary for his board members to do the reviewing. By initiating the process himself, he could choose anyone he wanted.

For instance, while serving as an assistant pastor in one church, I felt the deacons, while fine people, simply didn't know me, or my ministry, I well enough to be of much help.

So I contacted individuals involved in my area of ministry, as well as is two staff pastors with whom I worked closely. I asked them to complete a brief questionnaire and then to meet with me to discuss any areas in which they felt I needed to grow. To keep the deacon board from feeling slighted, I was careful to present this as a request for personal evaluation and accountability rather than a job performance review, which would remain the board's prerogative.

The result? A helpful evaluation by people who knew me and my ministry well enough to move beyond superficial impressions. More important, I had no excuse to ignore their advice; after all, I had hand picked the participants.

Here at North Coast, I've been blessed with wise and godly elders, so I've used them as the primary reviewers of my life and ministry. Yet it's important to note that I've not relinquished control or institutionalized the process. My annual evaluation remains at my initiative. The board doesn't schedule it; I do.

Thus, if our board should ever suffer a fate similar to Dave's, I'd be able to avoid being led as a lamb to slaughter. I would simply hold off scheduling the event and instead quietly seek out another group of advisers whose insight and spirituality I could respect.

Obviously, there's great potential for abuse here. Like Rehoboam, I could surround myself with yes men rather than wise counselors. To avoid this, I've made a commitment never to change advisers because of what they say or think, but only when spiritual or moral failure has rendered their insight suspect.

A self-initiated review also allows me a measure of control over the process. When a pastoral evaluation is controlled by the board or becomes institutionalized, I'm left with little say about what tools are used or how the process is carried out. Since most lay leaders live in the business world, it comes as no surprise when they use appraisals and performance reviews that parallel the models there. I know one pastor whose evaluation was based on questions used by a large interstate trucking firm!

I don't want to be limited to the things covered by the typical employee review-how I'm doing my job and how I'm fitting into the organization's culture. I also want to know where I need to grow as a leader and as a person, and how I am doing as a father, husband, and spiritual example.

A final advantage of a self-initiated review is that it helps overcome the biggest obstacle to personal growth-my own defensiveness. Like most folks, I've struggled at times with those who disagree with me. When I feel threatened, I'm less likely to hear what others are saying. When criticized, I'm more apt to offer an excuse than change.

But asking for a critique transforms the environment. Instead of feeling attacked, I feel assisted. Instead of being cast in the role of an employee wondering if the bosses are happy, I'm put in the position of a leader soliciting candid advice. The difference is significant.

I consider this principle of self-initiated review so important that I've never forced a formal evaluation on staff members. While we do have job descriptions and annual reviews, they fall far short of the no-holds-barred evaluation of both professional and personal life that I'm talking about. I know the staff will benefit most from a review when they feel least threatened, so I let them pick the participants, process, and areas of review. More important, I allow them to choose even whether to be reviewed.

Choose the Time Carefully

I've also found it's important to avoid being reviewed during times of great personal failure or unusual stress. At times like these, we are aware of more than enough areas needing work. The last thing we need is the exposure of a few more blind spots.

My first two years at North Coast were difficult, to say the least. A change from the founding pastor's style of leadership, some mistakes by me, and a poorly equipped leadership board resulted in constant turnover. Old families seemed to leave as fast as new ones came in. Make that a little faster.

I felt I was failing miserably. Most of my peers would have agreed. I didn't need anyone to point out new areas demanding work. Based on the problems I could see, and the informal feedback I was getting, I had plenty of things to work on. Right then, a formal review might well have been the breaking point. I was too beaten down; a poor review might have sent me into another career.

So I didn't initiate a review during those two years. Only when the church had begun to turn around did I ask for one. This is not to say I don't seek feedback during difficult times. But I don't ask for a thorough critique of my life and ministry when I'm standing on the brink. Why invite someone to push me over?

I also avoid asking for a review during times of unusual stress or emotional pressure. Any candid review inevitably deals with weak areas and offers hard-to-hear criticism. That's the purpose. Yet when I'm emotionally strained, it's too easy for little things to be blown out of proportion.

I know a pastor who built a small rural church into one of the largest churches in his denomination. For twenty-four years he had enjoyed a great ministry. Then, during a personal low time, his board chose to review his administrative skills and conflict-management style. They were not too complimentary, though they loved him and would have overlooked weaknesses in these areas for another twenty-four years.

Because of his emotional state at the time, he was devastated. Feeling unappreciated and angry, he resigned within two weeks.

Both he and his board would have been better served had he asked for a delay in the process. But since the evaluation was at the board's initiative, not his, he felt trapped and unable to do that. Even so, it would have been worth a try. Things could hardly have ended up worse.

Obviously, if I find myself continually facing tough times, something is wrong. In that case, I probably need candid feedback to find out what I'm doing to help cause the situation. But during times of unusual failure or stress, I stay away from the high-intensity searchlight. I already have enough stuff to work on.

Avoid Anonymous Responses

Many people assume that anonymity increases candor. I have my doubts about that. I certainly know that anonymity undercuts an effective pastoral review-for two reasons.

First, anonymous responses ignore a basic principle of evaluation: Criticisms and compliments should be weighed, not counted.

A few years ago, one of our most strait-laced board members complained that I was too earthy. I merely shrugged it off. By his standards, I wanted to be. But when another, tough-skinned individual pointed out how I had hurt his feelings, I set about immediately to see that it wouldn't happen again.

I recognize that Dave will always want more of an evangelistic emphasis; Jim will want greater depth. Peter will think I am refreshingly candid; Don will label me as too blunt. Only by knowing who said what can I tell the significance of an observation.

A second problem with anonymity is that it often fosters misunderstanding. By its very nature, an anonymous response makes clarification and explanation impossible.

During one of my annual reviews, I received an evaluation that said I was a loner and unsupportive of others. I was shocked and hurt. That was one complaint I'd never heard; I couldn't figure it out. Fortunately, since the evaluations were signed, I was able to ask the individual what he meant. He told me he was concerned that I was not involved with, or supportive of, our denomination. In no way, he said, did he think I was a loner and unsupportive of the people in our church. He just wanted to see me more involved in the larger church family.

When I explained that I attended without fail a monthly meeting with our district superintendent, and I also served on the district ordination committee, he was satisfied. Because I rarely spoke of these things, he assumed I didn't support the denomination. Had his critique been anonymous, I would have worried I was somehow losing touch with people, and he would have continued to be irritated with my seeming lack of support for the larger body of Christ.

Perhaps the most common and dangerous form of an anonymous review is the one carried out in the pastor's absence. According to the typical scenario, a group meets to evaluate the pastor's life or ministry. When finished, they send one person to communicate the results.

This makes clarification and explanation nearly impossible. It forces the pastor to rely on one person's interpretation of what was said, meant, and felt by the others. The potential for misunderstanding is staggering. Even worse, it gives an antagonist an opportunity to make unchallenged accusations. Usually by the time these are cleared up, damage has already been done.

I've come to the conclusion that people who won't say something to my face have no right to be heard. If I can't get an honest answer without anonymity, I'm left with serious questions about their integrity and courage. And if, on the other hand, people are too intimidated by my presence to respond openly, I probably have bigger problems than any pastoral review will be able to solve.

Get It in Writing

Still another pitfall I've learned to avoid is the verbal review in which people give me their appraisals without first having written them down.

Why get observations in writing?

First, many people have a hard time expressing negative or critical opinions face to face. Others feel insecure thinking on their feet. To ask for a candid verbal review is unfair to them; they simply can't do it. Yet many of these same people have no problem when asked to put their thoughts on paper. Somehow, writing frees them to say things they would never dare say aloud. Their answers become more detailed and straightforward.

At the same time, our asking for written responses has never inhibited our more extroverted members. They simply jot a brief answer and then cheerfully expand on it when their turn to speak comes.

A second reason I insist on written evaluations is that they can't be swayed by the consensus of the meeting. Verbal responses, on the other hand, are easily molded by the remarks of those who speak first. I learned this principle when we set up home fellowships. Since these meetings were based on discussion, it was vital that everyone participate. But we discovered many people wouldn't give their original answer to a question once they heard another answer that sounded more insightful. Instead they would say, "I feel that way, too." We solved this problem by having everyone first write an answer, and then read it aloud. This committed them to expressing their original thoughts.

I use the same technique during my annual review. Either ahead of time or at the beginning of the meeting, I ask each participant to write his observations. Then, I either collect the papers or go around the room and have people read them. This way, I'll be exposed to their original thoughts and feelings. I also keep the more articulate members from controlling the meeting. Only after all the comments are out do we discuss them.

Change Evaluation Tools Often

Another way to maximize the benefit of a pastoral review is to change evaluation tools frequently. Questions, no matter how good or insightful, soon become routine. Only once have I used the same tool two years in a row. I did it because the first time went so well. But, predictably, the second was short and superficial. Everyone knew ahead of time what the basic responses would be. One man even asked, "Why do we need to keep harping on this stuff?"

The one advantage of using the same tool again is it allows you to see where growth has taken place from one year to the next. But I've found there is usually enough overlap from one tool to another to make this unnecessary.

By using a variety of evaluation tools, I've been able to get feedback from a number of different perspectives. Each looks at life and ministry through a slightly different filter, highlighting some areas while ignoring others. For instance, last year's review focused on my life in general. The year before I chose one that zeroed in on ministry skills. Others have focused on my preaching, leadership style, or spiritual walk. By looking at myself from each of these perspectives, I've been able to get a more accurate reading of my strengths and weaknesses.

These evaluation tools can be found in a variety of places (see "Where To Find Tools For Evaluation"). Even if you've not yet collected any, it's fairly easy to find one or two a year simply by keeping a lookout and asking a few colleagues for help. Whenever I come across a new one, I file it for future use. I seldom use one as found but instead adapt it to fit my situation.

Avoid Combining Performance and Salary Reviews

Finally, I've also found it's important to keep my pastoral reviews separate from salary reviews. Not that a salary shouldn't be tied to performance (Scriptures like 1 Timothy 5:17-18 suggest they're related), but I will not be as open to personal growth during a review tied to salary considerations as I will during one that's entirely separate. Frankly, if the results of my review affect my salary, I won't be too eager for people to bring up areas needing work. I certainly won't want someone exposing previously unknown blind spots! Yet, ironically, the most common time for pastors to receive an evaluation is at salary review time.

I usually schedule my review soon after our annual budget is set. As I see it, a pastoral review and a salary review have two different purposes. A salary review is to determine a fair and equitable salary in light of responsibilities, skills, and experience. A pastoral review is to help me see more clearly what I do well and what I need to work on. One sets my compensation level; the other determines my personal agenda.

If a review must be tied to salary considerations, I would schedule it three to six months before salaries are determined. That way, there is time to work on any areas needing improvement before final decisions are made. Otherwise, those who receive a negative evaluation are stuck for the next year with a monthly reminder of the previous year's problems. Rather than motivate growth, this is likely to arouse resentment and a change of address. Even worse is an excellent review followed by a meager pay increase. Most people quickly forget the positive words as they open their pay envelope each month.

Revitalizing Review

By carefully following these guidelines, I've been able to make my annual review something I actually look forward to. It's the one time in the year when I can take stock of where I've been, where I am, and where I need to go.

At my first review here at North Coast, we covered some heavy stuff. While I received plenty of praise, there were also some harsh criticisms. In particular, we discussed at length my insensitivity to people who see things differently. I also discovered I wasn't delegating nearly as effectively as I'd thought.

The next morning, our board chairman called. He sounded worried. "Are you doing okay, Larry?" he asked. "I was afraid you might have been crushed by some of the things we said last night."

Actually, I'd rushed home to tell my wife what a fantastic meeting it had been. My board had been open with me. I had learned a great deal about myself and my ministry. I had received a much clearer picture of my strengths and weaknesses, and now I could work on them.

What our chairman failed to grasp was that, in the controlled environment of my pastoral review, I had not been unfairly criticized. I had received the faithful wounds of my friends. There is no comparison between the two.

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

OVERCOMNG MISSIOS MALAISE

Paul Borthwick

What does it take to generate excitement instead of yawns?

A member of the missions committee came to me two years ago with this question: “Why do we get such great attendance at our Christmas pageants but such dismal attendance at missions events?” I gave a few trite answers in immediate response, but his question got me thinking.

Was it because our presentations were shabby? Perhaps, but we had worked hard to see that they were well planned and well delivered.

Was it because our speakers were boring? Maybe, but we had hosted some of the top missions speakers in the country, and the turnout was still poor.

I finally realized that the focus of the two presentations was different. The Christmas pageant was a festive celebration of the gospel, culturally acceptable. The essence of cross-cultural missions is also the gospel, but in the form of cross-bearing unselfishness. Christmas pageants could satisfy those who came to receive; missions meetings were for those ready to give.

That evaluation forced me to realize that the task of building a “vision for world missions” in the local church is full of obstacles that demand unique solutions. We can respond, but we must be realistic. Here are four problems we have discovered-and four ways we’re attempting to overcome them.

Problem 1: The Task Is So Big

People come to church for a variety of reasons. Some have genuine spiritual hunger that they come to satisfy. Others are coming to meet social as well as spiritual needs. Children and young people may come at the will of their parents. Hurting people come to be cared for. The motivations vary, although spiritual growth is at least one of the driving forces. It’s safe to assume, however, that most do not come to church to get overwhelmed by statistics, needs, and guilt-producing overviews of the task before us.

Here we face our first obstacle: people don’t want to be overwhelmed, but the realities of our world are overwhelming:

 more than 5 billion people now living on earth;

 urban sprawls that will soon (if they haven’t already) exceed the populations of major countries (example: by the year 2000, experts predict that Mexico City will be home to 30 million, which will make it more populous than Canada or Australia);

 more than 700 million people bound in the fatalism of the karma of Hinduism;

 more than 800 million giving allegiance (sometimes fanatically) to the Allah of Islam;

 one out of every five people on earth (over 1.1 billion) living in the People’s Republic of China, and many of these without any knowledge of Jesus Christ;

 greater needs than ever with respect to sickness, hunger, and poverty.

And these statistics just scratch the surface. The numbers of “children of the streets” in some cities, added to the people carrying the AIDS virus, plus the people in our own country who are responding to non-Christian religions that have come to the United States (like “New Age” Hinduism, the Black Muslim movement, or popularized “Zen” Buddhism) add up to one word: OVERLOAD!

A college group called recently to ask me to speak on being a “Global Intercessor.” When I asked for more detail on what they wanted, they explained, “We’d like you to teach us how to pray around the world.”

When I explained that with more than two hundred nations, more than fifty thousand missionaries from North America, and thousands of Christian leaders all over the world, “praying around the world” would take all day every day, they were overwhelmed. We settled on “Praying with a Concern for the World” as my topic.

Since 1983, “missions” has been a part of my job description. I’m supposed to know and manage some of these facts and reduce them to understandable terms for our church. It’s overwhelming. And I know that if it’s overwhelming for me, the person in the pew will shun missions simply because the task is mind boggling, and “what difference could my puny efforts make in the total picture?”

I don’t believe people are apathetic as much as they feel the subject is simply too large for them to respond to. So they shy away from it, believing their own worlds are the only places where they can make a difference.

The Response: Manageability. World Vision once printed a poster that summed up the need for a manageable response. The poster had a picture in the upper corner of a mass of suffering humanity. The question that followed: “How do you help 1 billion hungry people?” In the opposite, lower corner was a picture of one malnourished child. The caption: “One at a time.”

Missiologists may be able to think in terms of thousands, millions, and billions, but I can’t. My capacity is closer to “one at a time” thinking.

Our church supports more than seventy missionaries. Even that overwhelms some attenders who want to know more about missions. So, rather than encouraging them to get to know “the missions family,” we encourage people to adopt one missionary family. We give them Prayer Packets (with recent newsletters, a picture, and a one-page summary of the missionary’s work, as well as a pre-addressed, stamped aerogram to get them started corresponding) to help them begin a relationship with one of our mission families.

In addition, we’re trying other ideas (some original, but most borrowed from other churches we know about through our affiliation with the Association of Church Missions Committees [P.O. Box ACMC, Wheaton, IL 60189]) to make missions meaningful, practical, and manageable:

 encouraging the adoption of one “people group” for prayer and research (the folks at the U.S. Center for World Mission [1605 East Elizabeth, Pasadena, CA, 91104] are most helpful here);

 making the Frontier Fellowship Global Prayer Digest available for daily use (available from the U.S. Center for World Mission);

 inviting people to read The Church Around the World (Tyndale House Publishers, Box 220, Wheaton, IL 60189) on a monthly basis;

 creating our own missions calendar so that people are encouraged to pray for two to four missionaries each month;

 focusing on one missionary per month in our “Hall of Missions” display and one missionary per week in our pastoral prayer;

 recommending starter books on missions-for instance, missions theology: The Great Omission (Robertson McQuilkin); missions biography: Shadow of the Almighty (Elisabeth Elliot); general vision: A Mind for Missions (Paul Borthwick) or Wanted: World Christians (Herbert Kane);

 getting people involved in service projects in nearby areas as well as in other cultures in our region and the world;

 challenging people not to overcommit themselves by promising to pray for and support dozens of missionaries but rather to make only those commitments they can manage.

It is our genuine desire to stir people to action and involvement in world missions, but we recognize our responsibility to prevent them from being paralyzed by the enormous size of the task.

Problem 2: Zealots Poison Attitudes

While most members may be overwhelmed by the task of missions, there are often a few in the church who catch a vision for missions and become totally devoted. They are on fire for missions, and they expect the entire church to join them in their zeal.

Some may respond, “I wish I had one person like that in my congregation” or “If I didn’t have such people, there would be no missions emphasis at my church.” Why do I consider these people problems?

Missions zealots are assets to the overall program, but if their energies aren’t directed, they can also be liabilities, so on fire that they consume the people they touch rather than enlighten them. Zealots can erroneously communicate the message that only the extremely committed (a term that may be synonymous with “fanatical” or “weird”) can be involved in missions. Thus, they aggravate the problem of missions’ being perceived as only for the specialists rather than a church-wide challenge that involves every member.

We have had our share of missions zealots. I think of the woman who could quote so many statistics about world needs that we nicknamed her “The Grim Heaper” because of her propensity to induce guilt. Or the man who thought every Christian should be as concerned about the 16,750 unreached people groups as he was (and to question him was to bring your own salvation into question). Or the young person who had no tolerance for those who desired to expend any monies on the operation of our church because “the needs over there are so great.”

All these people have ultimately served our missions programs effectively, but their zeal has been channeled so that missions has become an inclusive activity rather than an exclusive one.

Our Response: Balance. The challenge to church leaders is to provide balance so that the enthusiasts keep growing and the uninvolved are invited to get started.

Jill came home from college totally committed to missions. She took time off from her schooling to travel the country, campus to campus, with a team of “missions challengers.” She explained, “We go onto a campus, challenge students to get serious about God’s call to missions, and then we deal with those who respond.”

“What happens to those who fail to respond?” I asked.

Jill replied matter-of-factly, “We shake the dust off our feet and move on!”

“Aren’t you thinking of being a missionary in North Africa with Muslim people?” I replied.

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said, “if you carry that philosophy of recruitment to North Africa, you’ll have clean feet, but no one will be won to the Lord.”

Jill had failed to make the connection between the patience she would need with Muslim people and the patience she needed with average Christians for whom a commitment to world missions was a new concept. Helping our zealots learn this patience is the most difficult part of the balancing act.

In practical terms, balance is best achieved when we’re setting the example ourselves as leaders. If we can demonstrate patience and concern for the uninvolved, the enthusiastic ones are more likely to follow. I try to communicate to those who are on fire for missions that growth occurs best if they:

1. Realize God has given them a unique ability and concern;

2. Realize they are a crucial part of God’s big picture, but so are the missions-docile members of our church who need rousing;

3. See themselves as motivators of others (I challenge them to warm others to their fire for missions rather than consume them);

4. Dedicate themselves to the patience, understanding, and vision needed to invite others to join them in fulfilling the Great Commission;

5. Recognize that many growing Christians are uninformed about missions or what it means to be a “world Christian,” but that this is a result of lack of manageable information, not aggressive rebellion.

God has brought us many wonderful zealots for missions, and it’s been a joy to grow with them. For Rick, balance has come as a result of working with junior high young people. His enthusiasm for missions and service caused him to volunteer for youth ministry. He thought, If I can influence these kids, they will grow up thinking about missions service.

Rick’s goal has been achieved, but in a way different from what he expected. At first he pushed the junior high boys to “get serious about God and commit to his purposes.” We worked with Rick and encouraged him to challenge his students from a platform of relationships. There are now many young people who have been influenced by Rick in their understanding of and commitment to missions, but it has come as a result of his loving them and investing time in their lives.

Ann’s zeal for missions service has been tempered by her leadership in a small group. She has been sensitized to the fact that not every Christian is ready at the same time. Gradually, she has been able to influence others by presenting a bigger view of God in their Bible study. In Ann’s words, “I learned that exciting people about missions is like serving a meal-it’s better to serve up just enough so that people can’t wait until they eat again rather than stuffing them with the first serving so that they never want to see food again.”

By working to help people balance their missions commitment, we’re able to utilize the energies of missions enthusiasts to make missions an inclusive rather than an exclusive church vision.

Problem 3: Missions Seems So Outdated

We face another obstacle-the image of missions as shabby and outdated. Sometimes this image is of our own making.

We requested and were granted space for a “Hall of Missions” outside our sanctuary several years ago. We hung flags, put up missions pictures, and assembled racks for prayer letters. It was adequate, but not attractive.

We let the Hall of Missions stand until the day Bob said, “Paul, the Hall of Missions is a good concept, but it always looks like it needs to be dusted.”

Bob is not antimissions. As a matter of fact, he’s very supportive. He was simply being honest. Our display looked shabby.

Many of us have had similar experiences with missions presentations. Some of them need to be dusted. Franklin Graham wrote that as a young person, his impression was that missionaries were people who were “always out of style.” We all know the stereotypes: out-of-focus slide shows with a predictable closing sunset shot, ill-prepared missionaries who really should not be preaching. Working to overcome the poor performances of the past, we find ourselves swimming upstream.

Mrs. Elton, a missions leader at a nearby church, told me recently, “We have solved the problem of poor attendance at our missions meetings. We used to identify upcoming mission speakers in our bulletin as ‘Mr. So-and-so, missionary from XYZ Mission.’ For those services, our attendance declined. So now we just say ‘Mr. So-and-so will be speaking,’ and we don’t tell people who he is. Now our attendance is steady.”

We are all working to repair the bad image that has labeled missions in the past.

Our Response: Nothing Succeeds Like Success. We’re trying to apply to missions the adage, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” If we do finally get the opportunity to present a missions focus in a major church service, is the interview well rehearsed, is the projector in focus, is the material to be handed out reflective of the caliber of work we want to support? (Has the Hall of Missions been dusted?)

To help our missionaries, we produce an informational bulletin entitled Doing Your Best at Grace Chapel. In it, we outline our church’s constituency, our expectations of them as speakers, and our plan for missions long-term. We get specific about our expectations: the length of time they’re to speak, the clothing appropriate for a given meeting (and we provide a clothing allowance, in some cases), language that will needlessly alienate some of our people (using “men” when referring to both men and women).

Our missionaries have expressed gratitude for our candid assessment of our congregation’s particular expectations. It helps them be culturally sensitive as they make the adjustment back to the United States.

One final lesson we’re learning is that we must bring missions to the people. If people are going to see missions as part of their daily commitment to Christ, we must start where they live, even in church life.

Several years ago, we planned a missions conference. We made sure our church calendar was cleared for the conference week. Despite no competing committee meetings or choir practices, however, the conference attendance was still poor. Why?

Our cleared-out schedule backfired on us. Most people looked at the schedule and said, “Great, a week off!” The people who came were those who believed in missions already. We didn’t touch those who knew nothing of missions.

For the past two years, we’ve changed our strategy. Instead of canceling regular group meetings, we have asked groups to host a missionary speaker or feature a missionary focus that week. The result has been outstanding. Although we would still like to see better attendance at our main conference sessions, we are seeing more people than ever exposed to missionaries and world needs. Consider these examples:

 Our single-parent support group wanted a speaker who could address both a missions topic and the needs of the attenders. One of our missionaries spoke to the group on “How God Uses Our Lives in the Midst of Our Brokenness.” It was one of their best missions meetings ever.

 Our children’s Sunday school leaders meet monthly for dinner and planning. We provided a missionary who spoke on “How to Make Missionaries Real to Your Students.” It was a helpful evening for teachers who are trying to expand young children’s views of the world.

 The community Bible study for women was reticent to allow us to make a missions presentation at their meeting because “many of our women are from other churches, and we don’t want them to think we’re forcing them to be involved in Grace Chapel activities.” So we suggested a creative angle. At the close of their Tuesday meeting, we set up a phone call with two of our missionaries, one in West Germany and the other in Haiti, both of whom previously had been small-group leaders in the Bible study and knew many of the women. We plugged the phone into the church’s sound system, and the entire Bible study group “talked” with their friends who were now serving overseas. It was a great day for building missions interest in the Bible study.

Several groups have adopted missionaries, while others have undertaken special financial projects. Close to 50 percent of our congregation gets exposed to some specific aspect of missions (in addition to the Sunday services) as a result of this “decentralization.” In our former cleared-calendar missions conference approach, we averaged only 10 to 20 percent throughout the week.

Problem 4: It’s So Easy to Give Up!

A friend in ministry wrote to me, “We tried making missions a priority. We were going to learn about other countries, expand our missions budget, and add some missionaries to our support list, but we got waylaid by ‘other things.’ A few deaths in the church family, a hassle over the Christmas program, and a staff resignation was all it took for our missions plans to be tabled for another year. I simply don’t know how to make the ‘over there’ aspect of missions real to our people.”

Missiologist J. Herbert Kane writes in Wanted: World Christians, “After the second or third generation, Christianity tends to take on cultural overtones, and soon its members begin to take their heritage for granted and lose all desire to share their faith with friends and neighbors. The churches turn inward on themselves, and soon their chief preoccupation is their own survival, not the salvation of the world.”

How can we get our people interested in being world Christians when the needs nearby distract our attention? With all the pressure to be more community minded or to attend to pressing needs at hand, it’s easy to give up on missions emphasis.

Our Response: Endurance. Needs close to home will demand our attention, but we cannot let these needs diminish our overall commitment to see the gospel communicated to all people. We need “bifocal” vision, a balance of being concerned close to home (nearsightedness) and committed to world evangelization (far-sightedness). Persistence is important in developing such vision.

Tom came to our church with a desire to see us involved with international students. At that time, only two or three families were interested. Tom persevered. Three years later, our church hosted the annual Thanksgiving conference for International Students, Inc. Over two hundred students attended, representing more than forty countries. Almost seventy Grace Chapel families hosted students. Tom’s endurance is bearing fruit.

Endurance is the willingness to persevere even when there’s little apparent interest. In 1978, we started sending out young people on summer mission service teams. At that time, only a few of our adults supported the idea. Now, eleven summers later, the endurance has paid off: more than four hundred young people, collegians, singles, and couples have gone out on some sixty service teams. The teams expanded in 1983 to include adults, and we have sent people as young as 12 and as old as 69 into foreign cultures and needy areas of the United States. Summer missions service teams have been our greatest asset for building missions excitement and commitment at the grassroots.

Seeing Both Far and Near

International missions cannot be our solitary focus. If it is, we’ll cease to exercise the day-to-day love toward each other that identifies us as the community of Christ. A commitment to missions does not imply a one-sided view of ministry, but rather the nearsighted/far-sighted balance. Missionary statesman Oswald J. Smith said, “The light that shines the farthest shines the brightest close to home.”

Jack is a bright light. He’s committed to evangelism and, as a layman, leads our training program for evangelism. He’s an active Christian witness in his place of work, but he is solidly committed to world evangelization as well. He makes sure his Sunday school class knows and prays for missionaries; he involves others in listening to missionary station HCJB (Quito, Ecuador) over short-wave radio; he’s using his international business travel opportunities to learn more about God’s work in other parts of the world. Jack has a growing “bifocal” vision.

Our missions events may never match our attendance for concerts, Christmas pageants, or Easter services, but we can get our congregations aware of missions. When I’m prone to give up, I remember the changes in people’s lives as they’ve opened their eyes to God’s world and their hearts to his service. I remember . . .

… Bryan and Janet, who have opened themselves to full-time ministry in a “second career” phase of their lives because they’ve been surrounded by missions-minded friends;

… Marion, who chose to go to Haiti to serve meals rather than enjoy retirement in a rocking chair;

… Debbie and Norm, who got started learning about India by inviting an Indian family to their home for their first taste of pizza;

… Nathan, who, at age three, doesn’t have a broad world vision, but is learning to say “Africa” with excitement;

… Bob, who has worked out his own international vision by leading our service teams and by serving in our functions for international students.

All these are lay people who have enlarged their vision for the world through the perseverance of some and the prayers of others. These-and the dozens of others being changed by a greater view of God and his world-encourage us to face the problems and move toward being a missions-minded congregation.

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

HANDLING NONCASH DONATIONS

Richard R. Hammar

Copyright 1987 Church Law & Tax Report. Adapted with permission.

Christians give substantially to their churches out of gratitude to God and obedience to his commands. Such giving to God’s work is, in itself, a reward.

But an income tax deduction doesn’t hurt.

Contrary to popular belief, charitable contributions to churches and other tax-exempt organizations are not automatically deductible. The benefit of a tax deduction comes only when donors satisfy certain conditions.

The conditions? One is that the donor be able to substantiate the contribution by maintaining records demonstrating that a contribution was in fact made and giving the amount or value of the contribution. The substantiation requirements, however, vary depending on the nature of the contribution, and donor and recipient have different responsibilities.

Donations of money offer few problems: churches merely receipt all donations, giving the donors a reliable record for tax purposes. But noncash gifts, because of their nebulous value, present greater difficulties. So let’s consider two categories of noncash gifts: property worth less than $5,000, and property worth more than $5,000.

Contributions valued under $5,000

Substantiation requirements for contributions of noncash property such as land, equipment, stock, books, art, or vehicles are stringent. Tax regulations require a receipt from the church showing the name of the church, the date and location of the contribution, and a detailed description of the property.

In addition, the church may specify on its receipt the value of the donated property. Church officers, however, are under no obligation to appraise donated property. But the church is free to list the value of the property as determined by the donor.

In other words, ask the donor to provide a valuation of the property, and then include a statement on the receipt that the donor has valued the property at the specified amount. In no case should a church act as an appraiser. A church receipt might read:

First Church, of 123 Main Street, Chicago, Illinois, acknowledges receipt of a charitable contribution from John Jones this 10th day of August 1987, at Chicago, Illinois, of a 1983 four-door Oldsmobile Regency sedan in good condition, vehicle identification number FE398R573201. The donor has valued the property as of the date of the contribution at $4,500. Signed, ____

So much for the church’s responsibilities. What are the donors’ responsibilities?

For each item of donated property, they must maintain a reliable written record that includes the following: (1) the name and address of the church; (2) the date and location of the contribution; (3) a detailed description of the property; (4) the fair market value of the property at the time of the contribution, including a description of how the value was determined; (5) the cost of the property; (6) an explanation of the amount claimed as a deduction in the current year (if not all is claimed during that year); and (7) the terms of any agreement between the donor and church relating to the use, sale, or other disposition of the property.

If the donated property’s value exceeds $500, the following additional written records are needed: (8) an explanation of the manner of acquisition by the donor (such as by purchase, gift, inheritance, or exchange), and (9) the cost of the property immediately preceding the date on which the contribution was made.

Finally, donors who contribute property valued between $500 and $5,000 must complete the front side of IRS Form 8283 and submit it with the federal income tax return on which the contribution is claimed. Since many donors are unaware of this requirement, churches can assist them by obtaining copies of the form from the IRS (up to fifteen are free) and giving one-along with a copy of this article-to each donor.

Contributions valued over $5,000

Once a noncash gift is valued by the donor at greater than $5,000, further substantiation requirements kick in. The new requirements for major donations were enacted in 1985 to make it more difficult for donors to inflate the value of their gifts and thus reap the benefits of greater tax deductions.

The Treasury Department specifies that no deduction for donated property valued at more than $5,000 will be allowed unless the requirements are satisfied. These requirements ordinarily apply to a contribution of a single item (real estate, a vehicle, etc.) valued by the donor at more than $5,000, but they also can be triggered by contributions of similar items (such as two lots or several computer components) within the same year if the combined claimed value exceeds $5,000.

Publicly traded stock is not subject to these requirements since its value is readily ascertainable. Contributions of nonpublicly traded stock (for instance, stock held by most small, family-owned corporations) are subject to these requirements if the value claimed by the donor exceeds $10,000.

Under the 1985 regulations, the donor must do the following:

 Obtain a qualified appraisal. Regulations define a qualified appraisal as one made by a “qualified appraiser” within sixty days of the contribution and containing the following information: (1) an adequate description of the donated property; (2) the physical condition of the property; (3) the date (or expected date) of the contribution; (4) the terms of any agreement pertaining to the use or disposition of the property; (5) the name, address, and social security number of the qualified appraiser; (6) the qualifications of the appraiser; (7) a statement that the appraisal was prepared for income tax purposes; (8) the date on which the property was valued; (9) the appraised fair market value of the property on the date (or expected date) of the contribution; (10) the method of valuation used to determine the fair market value, and (11) a description of the fee arrangement between the donor and appraiser. Donors ordinarily should refrain from employing an appraiser unfamiliar with these requirements.

A “qualified appraiser” is someone who: (1) holds himself or herself out to the public as an appraiser; (2) is qualified by education, experience, background, and membership, if any, in professional appraisal associations; (3) is not in any way a party in the transaction; (4) understands that a false or fraudulent overvaluation of property may subject the appraiser to civil penalties; and (5) does not base his or her fee on a percentage of the appraised value.

 Prepare a qualified appraisal summary. A donor must also complete an appraisal summary on the back side of Form 8283 and enclose it with the tax return in which the deduction is claimed. Various parts of this form include sections for: the church to acknowledge receipt of the contribution, a description of the donated property and an estimation of its value, a listing of similar donated items individually worth more than $500, and the appraiser’s certification.

 Maintain records. The donor ought to keep a copy of the qualified appraisal, along with a record of the name and address of the church, the location of the contribution, and the fair market value of the property.

A church receiving a contribution of property valued at more than $5,000 has the following obligations: (1) to write and sign an acknowledgment to the donor (thanks would probably be appropriate, too!), (2) to complete and sign the donee’s acknowledgement on the donor’s Form 8283 (as noted above) and, (3) if it disposes of the property within two years of the date of contribution, to complete and file IRS Form 8282.

A Form 8282 must be filed within ninety days after the property is disposed of, and a copy must be sent to the donor. The form is available from the IRS (the toll-free forms hotline is 1-800-424-3676) and is easy to complete. The IRS is primarily concerned with learning the amount received by the church as an additional means of verifying the valuation claimed by the donor. Failure by the church to file Form 8282 ordinarily subjects the donor’s tax return to greater scrutiny by the IRS, so the timely filing of the form upon disposal of the property is a courtesy to the donor as well as a requirement of the government.

Churches aware of these IRS regulations can help their donors receive the benefit of a tax deduction, for compliance with these regulations spells the difference between a tax deduction expected and a tax deduction granted. And that’s a big difference on April 15.

-Richard R. Hammar

legal counsel, Assemblies of God

Springfield, Missouri

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

Speaking to the Secular Mind

Bill Hybels

What does it take to preach convincingly to today’s non-Christians?

A pastor told LEADERSHIP recently, “The people I’m preaching to are increasingly secular. I can’t assume they have a Christian world view.” Said another, “I mentioned a Bible reference during my sermon, and after the service, a woman who was visiting asked me, ‘What did you mean when you said those numbers?’ ”

Today, the non-Christian who visits a church may find the Christian message utterly foreign. Even those who attend church these days are often influenced far less by Paul and Barnabas than by Cagney and Lacey. How can pastors effectively communicate the gospel to these un-churched people of the late twentieth century?

For the past thirteen years, Bill Hybels has served as pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, a ministry structured to reach contemporary un-churched people. In this article, he explains some of the lessons he’s learned about preaching to the secular mind.

Driving home from church the other day, I pulled behind a guy on his Harley-Davidson. I noticed a bumper sticker on the rear fender of his motorcycle, so I pulled closer. It read: SCREW GUILT.

After the shock wore off, I was struck by how different his world was from the one I’d just left-and even from the world a generation ago. In my day, we felt guilty, I thought. Now, it’s not only “I don’t feel guilty,” but “Screw guilt.” I find that the unchurched people today, whom we’re called to reach, are increasingly secular.

There was a time when your word was a guarantee, when marriage was permanent, when ethics were assumed. Not so very long ago, heaven and hell were unquestioned, and caring for the poor was an obvious part of what it meant to be a decent person. Conspicuous consumption was frowned upon because it was conspicuous. The label “self-centered” was to be avoided at all costs, because it said something horrendous about your character.

Today, all of that has changed. Not only is it different, but people can hardly remember what the former days were like.

Why We Need a New Approach

Many churches, however, still operate with the understanding that non-Christians are going to come through the doors, feel pretty much at home, understand the sovereignty of God and the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, and in one morning make a complete transition from a secular worldview.

Even twenty years ago, that was a reasonable hope. The secular worldview wasn’t that disconnected from God’s agenda. A guy would hear the claims of Christ and say, “Well, that makes sense. I know I’m a sinner” or “I know I shouldn’t drink so much” or “I really should be faithful to my wife.”

Today, even though we’re asking for the same thing-a commitment to Christ-in the perception of the secular person, we’re asking for far more. The implications of becoming a Christian today are not just sobering; they’re staggering.

Recently I preached on telling the truth, and afterward, a man came up and said, “You don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“What don’t I understand?” I asked him.

“You’re just up there doing what pastors are supposed to do-talk about truth. But my job requires my violating about five of the things you just talked about. It’s part of the job description; I can’t be ‘on the level’ and keep the position. You’re not asking me to adopt some value system; you’re asking me to give up my salary and abandon my career.”

We preachers, I was reminded that day, have our work cut out for us. The topics we choose, the way we present Scripture, the illustrations we use, the responses we ask for, all need to contribute to our goal of effectively presenting Christ to non-Christians.

For the past thirteen years, we’ve geared our ministry at Willow Creek to reach non-Christians, and during that time I’ve learned a lot, sometimes the hard way, about what kind of preaching attracts them, keeps them coming back, and most important, leads them to take the momentous step of following Jesus Christ. Let me share some of those principles.

Developing Sensitivity

If we’re going to speak with integrity to secular men and women, we need to work through two critical areas before we step into the pulpit.

The first is to understand the way they think. For most of us pastors, though, that’s a challenge. The majority of my colleagues went to a Bible school or Christian college and on to seminary, and have worked in the church ever since. As a result, most have never been close friends with a non-Christian. They want to make their preaching connect with unchurched people, but they’ve never been close enough to them to gain an intimate understanding of how their minds work.

If we’re serious about reaching the non-Christian, most of us are going to have to take some giant steps. I have suggested for many years that our pastors at Willow Creek find authentic interest areas in their lives-tennis, golf, jogging, sailing, mechanical work, whatever-and pursue these in a totally secular realm. Instead of joining a church league softball team, why not join a park district team? Instead of working out in the church gym, shoot baskets at the YMCA. On vacation, don’t go to a Bible conference but to some state park where the guy in the next campsite is going to bring over his six-pack and sit at your picnic table.

When I bring this up with fellow ministers, I often sense resistance. It cuts against everything we feel comfortable doing. And yet not knowing how non-Christians think undercuts our attempts to reach them. If we’re going to stand on Sunday and accurately say, “Some of you may be questioning what I’ve just said. I can understand that, because just this week I talked with someone about it,” then on the Tuesday before we’ve got to drive to the Y and lift weights and run with non-Christians. We can’t win them if we don’t know how they think, and we can’t know how they think if we don’t ever enter their world.

The second prerequisite to effective preaching to non-Christians is that we like them. If we don’t, it’s going to bleed through our preaching. Listen closely to sermons on the radio or on television, and often you’ll hear remarks about “those worldly secular people.” Unintentionally, these speakers distance themselves from the non-Christian listener; it’s us against them. I find myself wondering whether these preachers are convinced that lost people matter to God. It’s not a merciful, “Let’s tell them we love them,” but a ticked off, “They’re going to get what’s coming to them.” These preachers forfeit their opportunity to speak to non-Christians, because the unchurched person immediately senses, They don’t like me.

What helps many pastors genuinely like non-Christians is the gift of evangelism. When you have that spiritual gift, it’s easier for you to have a heart for non-Christians. Not every pastor claims evangelism as a gift. But I’ve seen many develop a heartfelt compassion for non-Christians by focusing on their needs. That takes away any intimidation they might feel around non-Christians; it frees them to minister.

When I was in youth ministry in the early seventies, kids wore their emotions on their sleeve. They’d come up crying, or mad, but I could readily recognize their need. When I started ministering to suburban adults, everybody was smooth. Everyone dressed nicely and had a nice-looking spouse, two nice-looking kids, a nice car, a nice home. I thought, What do these people need church for? Everybody’s getting along fine.

The longer I worked with them, though, the more I realized, These people have gaping holes in their lives. That pretty wife hasn’t slept with her husband in three months. Those kids, if you could ever get close to them, are so mad at their dad they’d fill your ears. That home is mortgaged to the hilt, and that job that looks so sweet isn’t all that secure. That guy who looks so confident is scared stiff inside.

That appearance of sufficiency is a thin veneer, and underneath is a boatload of need that we, as pastors and teachers, are equipped and called to address in the power of the Holy Spirit. As we learn the way non-Christians think and develop a genuine love for them, we can speak the words of Christ in a way they’ll hear.

Topics and Titles They’d Choose

Unchurched people today are the ultimate consumers. We may not like it, but for every sermon we preach, they’re asking, Am I interested in that subject or not? If they aren’t, it doesn’t matter how effective our delivery is; their minds will check out.

Five years ago the book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche came out, and immediately sales took off. Everyone was talking about it. As I was thinking about the amazing success of that book, I decided to preach a series entitled “What Makes a Man a Man? What Makes a Woman a Woman?” Unchurched people heard the titles, and they came; attendance climbed 20 percent in just four weeks. The elders were saying, “This is incredible!”

When that series ended, I began one titled “A Portrait of Jesus.” We lost most of those newcomers. Interestingly, the elders said to me after that series, “Bill, those messages on the person and work of Christ related to unchurched people as well as any messages we’ve heard.” In this case, the problem wasn’t the content; the people who needed to hear this series most didn’t come because of the title.

Since then, I’ve put everything I can into creating effective titles. I’m not particularly clever, so sometimes I’ll work for hours on the title alone. I do it because I know nonchurched people won’t come, or come back, unless they can say, “Now that’s something I want to hear about.” The title can’t be just cute or catchy; it has to touch a genuine need or interest.

Here are some series titles I’ve had good response to:

 “God Has Feelings, Too.” People said, “What? God has emotions?” And they came to find out what and how he feels.

 “Turning Houses into Homes.” When I announced the series (in church the week before it started), I said, “Our area is setting national records for housing starts. As you drive around and see one of the hundreds of houses going up, ask yourself, What’s going to turn this house into a home? That’s what we’re going to talk about in the next four weeks.” I could have used a thousand other titles, but this one seemed to touch a nerve.

 “Telling the Truth to Each Other.”

 “Fanning the Flames of Marriage.”

 “Endangered Character Qualities.”

 “Alternatives to Christianity.” I always begin a new series the Sunday after Christmas and Easter to try to bring back the first-time visitors. Last Christmas Eve we announced, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Christianity is the right way,’ or ‘The New Age Movement is the right way,’ or ‘Something else is the right way.’ We’re going to talk about the alternatives to Christianity, showcase the competition, and let you decide. We’ll make an honest comparison, and if it’s not honest, you tell us.”

That was an A+ title, as long as we dealt fairly with the opposing points of view. I could have called the series “The Danger of the Cults” or “Why Christianity Is the Only Sensible Religion,” but those titles would have attracted only people who were already convinced. From the very first words people hear about our message, we need to communicate, “This is for you. This is something you’ll want to hear.”

Sometimes people who haven’t heard me preach misunderstand this and say, “Yeah, it’s easy to attract people if you tiptoe around tough biblical issues and don’t get prophetic on areas of discipleship.” My experience, though, has been that you can be absolutely prophetic with unchurched people. We all should be like Paul when he said in Acts 20, “I didn’t shrink back from giving you the whole counsel of God. I didn’t shrink back in terms of the content or the intensity.” But to do that with any group, we need to preach in a way they can understand. We need to start where they are and then bring them along.

For example, we have a lot of people attend who can’t conceive of a God who would ever punish anybody. That wouldn’t be loving. They need to understand God’s holiness. So I’ve used the old illustration, “If I backed into the door of your new car out in the parking lot after the service, and we went to court, and the judge said, ‘That’s no problem; Bill didn’t mean it,’ you’d be up in arms. You’d want justice.

“If you went to a Cubs game, and Sutcliffe threw a strike down the middle of the plate, and the ump said, ‘Ball four,’ and walked in a run, you’d be out there killing the ump, because you want justice.”

A person hears that and says, “I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t want a God who wasn’t just.”

Then I can go on to say, “Now before you say, ‘Rah, rah for a just God,’ let me tell you some of the implications. That means he metes out justice to you.”

You can be utterly biblical in every way, but to reach non-Christians, every topic has to start where they are and then bring them to a fuller Christian understanding.

I’ve also found it helpful, as many pastors have, to preach messages in a series. With the non-Christian, you want to break the pattern of absenteeism. Over the course of the series, he or she gets in the habit of coming to church and says, “This isn’t so bad; it only takes an hour.” You’re trying to show him or her that this is not a painful experience; it’s educational and sometimes even a little inspirational. Sometimes it’s convicting, but in a thought-provoking rather than heavy-handed way. Pretty soon, a guy says, “Why don’t I come, bring my wife, and stop for brunch afterward?”

I’ve found I can’t stretch a series longer than four or five weeks, though, before people start saying, “Is there anything else you’re ever thinking about?” And obviously, if I’m going to talk about money or other highly sensitive issues, the series may run only two weeks.

Explaining the Wisdom of the Bible

Unchurched people don’t give the Bible a fraction of the weight we believers do. They look at it as an occasionally useful collection of helpful suggestions, something like the Farmer’s Almanac. They tend to think, The Bible has some neat things to say once in a while, but we all know it’s not the kind of thing I’m going to change my life radically to obey.

If we simply quote the Bible and say, “That settles it. Now obey that,” they’re going to say, “What? I’m supposed to rebuild my life on some book that’s thousands of years old? I don’t do that for any other respected literary work of antiquity.” It just doesn’t make sense to them.

So almost every time I preach, I’m trying to build up the reliability of Scripture and increase their respect for it. I do that by explaining the wisdom of God behind it. When you show them how reasonable God is, that captivates the secular mind.

Most of them have written off Christians as people who believe in floods and angels and strange miracles. My goal is to explain, in a reasonably intelligent fashion, some matters that touch their lives. I hope when they leave they’ll say, “Maybe there is something to the Bible and to the Christian life.”

Consider 2 Corinthians 6:14, the verse that instructs us, “Don’t be unequally yoked.” Some teachers speaking on that passage will say, “The implications are obvious: Don’t marry a nonbeliever. The Bible says it, and we need to obey it.” For the already-convinced person, who puts great value on the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, that might be enough. I don’t think most church people buy it as much as we hope they will, but let’s say they give us the indication that they do.

The secular guy, on the other hand, sits there and thinks, That is about the most stupid and discriminatory thing I have ever heard. Why should I refuse to marry someone I love simply because her religion is a little different? So one Sunday morning, I started by saying, “I’m going to read to you the most disliked sentence in all of Scripture for single people who are anxious to get married.” Then I read 2 Corinthians 6:14.

“This is that awful verse,” I said, “in which, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul cuts down the field from hundreds of thousands of marriageable candidates to really only a handful. And almost every single person I know, upon first hearing it, hates that verse. What I want to do is spend the next thirty minutes telling you why I think God would write such an outrageous prescription.”

During the rest of that message, I tried to show, using logic and their experience, that this command makes terrific sense. We were in a construction program at the time, so I used this illustration: “What if I went out to the construction site, and I found one contractor, with his fifteen workers, busily constructing our building from one set of plans, and then I went to the other side of the building, and here’s another contractor building his part of the building from a totally different set of blueprints? There’d be total chaos.

“Friends,” I continued, “what happens in a marriage when you’ve got a husband who says, ‘I’m going to build this marriage on this blueprint,’ and a wife who says, ‘I’m going to build it on this blueprint’? They collide, and usually the strongest person wins-for a time. But then there’s destruction.

“God wants his children to build solid, permanent relationships, and he knows it’s going to take a single set of plans. In order to build a solid building or a sound marriage, you need one set of blueprints.”

Over time, I want gradually to increase their respect for Scripture, so that some day they won’t have to ask all the why questions but will be able to say to themselves, Because it’s in the Book; that’s why.

Current Illustrations

I’ve found that the unchurched person thinks most Christians, and especially pastors, are woefully out of touch with reality. They don’t have a clue as to what’s going on in the world, he thinks. An unchurched person who does venture into a church assumes whatever is spoken will not be relevant to his life.

That’s why I select 60 to 70 percent of my illustrations from current events. I read Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Forbes, and usually, Business Week. Every day I read the Chicago Tribune (USA Today when I travel), watch at least two TV news programs, and listen to an all-news radio station when I’m in the car. Why? Because when I can use a contemporary illustration, I build credibility. The unchurched person says, “He’s in the same world I’m in. He’s aware that Sean Connery and Roger Moore no longer play 007. He’s not talking about something years ago; he’s talking about something I care about today.”

I sometimes joke that one of my goals in ministry is to complete however many years God gives me without ever using a Spurgeon illustration. Non-Christians (even most Christians today) don’t know who Spurgeon was. And once unchurched people find out, they wonder why I’m wasting my time with him. They think, This is 1988, and we’ve got missiles flying in the Persian Gulf, a teetering stock market, and political turmoil, and he’s spending time reading some dead Englishman? If he’s got the time to do that, he’s not living in the same world I am.

The second thing an up-to-date illustration does is put me and the listener on an even footing. He heard the same news report I did; he saw the same show. When I quote Augustine, he feels like I’m not playing in the same ball park. But when I say, “On ‘Nightline’ two nights ago, Ted Koppel was talking with. . .” the guy says to himself, I saw that! I wonder if he felt the same way about that as I did, and he stays with me. An illustration from current events includes the non-Christian listener; it puts him on an equal footing with everyone else in the audience.

I learned this principle from studying the parables of Jesus. I noticed him saying things like, “You all heard about those eighteen people killed in Siloam when the tower fell on them. . .” (Luke 13:4). As I charted Jesus’ parables, I saw quickly that these “illustrations” weren’t quotes from rabbinic authorities but stories of things average people saw every day.

When people feel that somebody’s in their world and has been real with them, that’s powerful. That’s why I’ll continue to use illustrations that are current.

Responses That Give Freedom and Time

When people walk into church these days, often they’re thinking they’ll get the party line again: Pray more, love more, serve more, give more. They just want something more out of me, they think, I wonder what it’ll be today that I’m not doing enough of.

It’s easy for us pastors to unintentionally foster that understanding. One pastor asked me for help with his preaching, and we talked about what responses he was asking for. I suggested, “List the messages you’ve preached in the last year, and write either pray more, love more, serve more, or give more next to any message where that was the main thrust of the sermon.”

He came back and said, “Bill, one of those was the thrust of every single sermon last year.” He recognized the implications. If every time my son comes into the living room, I say, “Do this more; do that more,” pretty soon he won’t want to come in the living room. But if he comes in knowing there is going to be some warmth, acceptance, a little humor, and encouragement, then on the occasions I need to say, “We’ve got to straighten out something here,” he can receive that.

Often the goal of a message can be Understand this reality about God or Enjoy this thing God has done. Recently my Wednesday night message was taken from Romans 12:3-8, a passage about using spiritual gifts. I could have pushed people to serve more, I suppose, but that evening I said, “This is the most serving church I have ever seen. You people are using spiritual gifts beautifully. What Paul is telling the church at Rome to get on the stick and do, you people have gotten on the stick and done.” Then I gave fifteen or twenty illustrations of ways people in the church are serving, selflessly, for God’s glory.

I closed, “I want to say I respect you as a church. You’re an unbelievable group of servants that God is pleased with. Let’s stand for closing prayer.” Parishioners are people, too, and sometimes people need to be commended for what they are doing already. In the case of the non-Christian, we may commend them for honestly considering the claims of Christ, for being willing to listen to what we have to say and not immediately writing it off.

With the unchurched, though, our primary goal has been determined for us: We want them to accept the lordship of Jesus Christ. Let me suggest two key principles in asking non-Christians for a commitment.

1. Give them freedom of choice. I’ve been surprised to learn you really can challenge unchurched people as much as you would anybody else-as long as at the moment of truth you give them absolute freedom of choice. At the end of an evangelistic message, I often say something like: “You’ve got a choice to make. I’m not going to make it for you. I’m not going to tell you that you have to make it in the next thirty seconds. But eventually you’ve got to make some decisions about the things we’ve talked about. As for me and my house, it’s been decided, and we’re glad we’ve made the decision. But you need to make that decision as God leads you.” I’m taking the ball and tossing it in their court. Then it’s theirs to do something with.

During one message recently, I made a strong, biblical case for team leadership. At the end I said, “I know many of you own businesses, and you’re accountable to nobody. I think from what we’ve read in the Scriptures today, you would be the primary beneficiaries of following God’s plan of team leadership so your blind spots don’t cause your downfall.

“But,” I said, “it’s your life; it’s your business; it’s your family; it’s your future. I trust that over time you’ll give this thought and make the right decision. As for me, I’ve got elders, I’ve got board members, I’ve got an accountability group. I feel glad I have a team to accomplish what God has called me to do. Let’s stand for prayer.”

When you give a person complete freedom of choice, he goes away saying, “Doggone it, I wish he would have laid a trip on me, because then I could have gotten mad at him and written off the whole thing. But now I have to deal with it.” Rather than letting people get away, giving them freedom of choice urges them to make that choice.

2. Give them time to make a decision. Suppose a guy came into my office and said, “I have a Mercedes-Benz in the parking lot. I’ll sell it to you for $500 if you write me a check in the next fifteen seconds.” I wouldn’t do it. By most counts, I’d be a fool not to buy a Mercedes-Benz for $500. But if you make me decide in fifteen seconds, I’d refuse because I haven’t had enough time to check it out. I have some natural questions: Is there really one in the lot? Do you have a title to it? Does it have a motor?

But on Sunday we’re tempted to tell people who’ve been living for twenty, thirty, or forty years under a totally secular world view, “You’ve got just a couple minutes at the end of this service to make a decision that’s going to determine your eternity. It’s going to change your life, and you might lose your job, but come on down.” The non-Christian is thinking, Whoa! This is a big decision, and I’ve been thinking about this for only twenty minutes.

When I ask today’s non-Christians for a commitment, I’m trying to persuade them about something that’s going to alter radically everything they are. They say things like, “You mean marriage is permanent? You gotta be kidding-like I have to reconcile with that witch? No way!” or “You mean I have to get serious about child rearing and not just hire somebody to do it?” Everywhere the non-Christian turns, he’s finding I’m asking for far more than he was first interested in. He senses a spiritual need-that’s what brought him to church-but he’s going to need a lot of time to consider the implications.

Most of the conversions that happen at Willow Creek come after people have attended the church for six months or more. The secular person has to attend consistently for half a year and have the person who brought him witness to him the whole time. He needs that much time simply to kick the tires, look at the interior, and check the title before he can finally say, “I’ll buy it.”

It’s interesting: I get criticized for this as much as for anything else in my ministry. People protest, “Bill, you had them in the palm of your hand, and you let them get away!”

I’ve heard this enough times that now I usually respond with some questions. “Do you think people heard the truth while they were here?” I ask.

“Yes, they heard the truth.”

“Do you think the Holy Spirit is alive and well?”

“Of course I believe that.”

“Do you think Bill Hybels ever saved anybody?”

They quickly say, “Oh, no, no.”

I say, “I think we’re okay then. If they heard the truth, and the Holy Spirit is alive and active, God will continue to work in their lives, and Bill Hybels isn’t the only way he can accomplish his will for them.”

Having said that, however, there is a time to close the sale. Not all the time, but sometimes, people need to be challenged. And when I do challenge people, I challenge them hard. Periodically I’ll say, “Some of you are on the outside looking in. You’ve been around here for a long time and have enough information. I’d like to ask you, what is it that’s holding you back from repenting of your sins and trusting Christ right now? Sometimes a delay can be catastrophic. It’s time to deal with this.”

But-and this is critical-when I do that, I always make a qualification for the people who aren’t to that point. I’ll say, “Now for many of you, this is your first time here or you’ve been here only a few weeks. You don’t have enough answers yet, so I’m not talking to you. You’re in an investigation phase, and that’s legitimate and needs to go on until you have the kind of information the rest of the people I’m talking to have already attained.”

Trying to reach non-Christians isn’t easy, and it’s not getting easier. But what keeps me preaching are the times when after many months, I do get through. Not long ago a man said to me, “I came to your church, and nobody knew what really was going on in my life, because I had ’em all fooled. But I knew, and when you started saying that in spite of all my sin I still mattered to God, something clicked in me. I committed myself to Christ, and I tell you, I’m different. My son and I haven’t been getting along at all, but I decided to take two weeks off and take him to a baseball camp out west. He started opening up to me while we were out there. Thanks, Bill, for telling me about Jesus.”

For a preacher, such a joy far surpasses the ongoing challenge.

Leadership Spring 1988 p. 28-34

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

HOW TO BID A HEALTHY FAREWELL

Donald L. Bubna

Leaving a church honorably means knowing what will help in the long run.

Bob had all the marks of a hurting pastor. I sat across the coffee shop table and hurt with him. He had recently finished his first year in Judson Church and celebrated the congregation’s fiftieth anniversary. It had not gone well. He needed to talk, and I provided the listening ear.

Bob’s predecessor, Wayne, had had a long and fruitful ministry at Judson. When he left for a larger congregation, the people were convinced they would be a long time finding a successor to match Wayne’s gifts.

The search committee, however, knew Bob had great abilities. When he came to Judson, the church zoomed forward. Bob’s sensitivity to singles, the divorced, and widows and widowers soon had Judson bursting with new people. The congregation had grown nearly 50 percent in the first year with its new pastor.

Some folks, however, didn’t like this. All these “different” people from the community took away the feeling of the “old Judson.”

In planning the fiftieth anniversary, the leadership pressed Bob into inviting Wayne, the former pastor, to be the guest preacher for the Sunday celebration. Bob was reluctant. He knew the divided elements in the congregation could be further polarized by Wayne’s return so soon. He hoped Wayne would be sensitive to the tensions. Wayne, however, readily accepted without asking for Bob’s opinion.

Arriving in town on Friday, Wayne never contacted Bob. He busied himself with parties the old leadership arranged. No one realized what that was doing to the new pastor.

When the fiftieth-anniversary Sunday dawned, Wayne arrived only five minutes before the service and asked Bob for a bulletin. This was their first face-to-face meeting. When Wayne was introduced, the congregation responded with applause. Wayne recalled pleasant things about their years together, making no mention of Bob, the new growth of Judson, or its future. After the service, Wayne announced he would be at the front, and people flocked forward.

The weekend was a great event for Wayne. His spirits were lifted, and his ego was boosted. The old-timers in the congregation remembered how good it used to be and asked, “Why isn’t it that way now?” In the months that followed, the polarization of the congregation continued.

Bob put down his coffee, looked me in the eye, and said, “Don, I can’t believe he did that. He couldn’t have understood what I was feeling. He certainly doesn’t understand how he hurt the church and threatened its future.”

While my heart went out to Bob, my mind was also racing over my own impending resignation at Salem Alliance Church, where I had served for twenty-three years. What was Bob’s pain saying to me? As I was about to become a “Wayne,” what would be the right things for me to do? When you’re involved with people and the emotional attachment is strong, how do you best say good-by?

If you’re in ministry, chances are that within the next few years, you’ll be leaving the church you’re currently serving. On the average, one-quarter of all ministers move each year. The departure guidelines I offer are based on the law of love. The bottom line: In this transition, what does it mean to love Christ and one another, particularly the congregation I’m leaving?

Preparations for Departure

Preparing the church. How we respond to the move prepares the church for the departure. No matter how great the new opportunity, it’s tough to leave old friends. There will always be pain, because leaving colleagues means tearing away some deep roots. Then there are those-many or few-who have added to our burdens over the years and may be glad we’re leaving despite the “sweet stuff” they may be saying.

Servants of God must choose to be happy in the difficulty of a move. It is a time to declare our faith in God. The worker’s attitude, more than anything else, prepares the church for his departure.

Ministering to your family. As in all our service, we don’t want to forget to minister to our spouses and children, who are also going through the pain of saying good-by. Their sense of loss may be much greater than ours. We may already have new friends where we’re going. They probably don’t. We may be leaving troubles as well as good memories. They probably have not been a part of this and may know little about it. They could well be thinking, How come my spouse or parent gets called of God and I have to move, too?

Giving your spouse a part in the decision can help bond your marriage. Praying and discussing options with your children make them feel a part of the team.

When we left San Diego to go to Oregon, our eldest child was in grade school, and the two other children were preschool age. We insisted they come when we candidated. Together we weighed the issues and prayed.

By the time of our move to White Rock, our children were all adults, but we still made them a part of the process. In many ways, this move was harder for them than the one before. This time their parents were leaving, and they weren’t. Now we were leaving grandchildren, and the periods of separation might sometimes be long.

To make the move easier for the family, we planned specific times together around the move and after we arrived in our new location. Salem Alliance brought our son and his wife from Alaska for our farewell. That was so important. The weekend after our farewell we spent together on the Oregon coast. Our married daughter and family then accompanied us on the move north. Each step was an important family celebration. We were still a team.

Breaking the News

I wouldn’t want my fellow staff members and church board to learn of my decision at the same time the congregation does. I chose to bring a few key staff and elders into my decision. I asked them to walk with me prayerfully through the remaining part of the process. I wasn’t asking them if I should accept the new call. I was asking for their support as I attempted to do what I believed was honoring to God. I also made myself accountable to them for doing it properly.

When I eventually decided, I first told these men, then the whole staff, and finally the rest of the board. I asked them to help make my closing time a unifying experience.

I specifically asked the staff, “What do you need from me during these last weeks?” Their responses were helpful, and I sought to carry them out. They included: (1) work to bring about acceptance of the decision; (2) help the board understand how to make the transition; (3) prepare us for the new leader; (4) don’t make us feel as though you’re leaving us forever. Many on the staff also felt their futures had been thrown into doubt. They needed care and hope.

A letter of resignation to the congregation needs to be a healing instrument and a statement of faith. It should convey a sense of God’s sovereignty and be filled with hope. Being positive about joys and victories together can help the congregation be joyful over the past. Stating our sorrow at leaving but our commitment to obedience affirms that we’re making what we believe to be a right choice.

The letter needs to be written out of a sense that the sovereign God is allowing these circumstances to be brought into our lives. Therefore, we submit to what is happening as part of his will. The people will also be helped if we can say we’re responding to a larger opportunity. I found that writing a series of drafts and “sleeping on it” aided in my saying it right.

By faith we can believe-and help the congregation believe-that the best days of the church are ahead. Thus I felt it was important to state in my letter that “new leadership would better serve this church” and “there is a danger in my overstaying here.” I also promised the church that I would pray with them for my successor and promised to support him or her as God’s person for the church. My affirmation seemed to help solidify the church.

As I composed my letter, it seemed to me that the real test of the effectiveness of my ministry would come in the interim between my leaving and the arrival of the new senior pastor. So I asked the people to be faithful. I acknowledged that some would be surprised, if not even disappointed, by my resignation. But I asked them to close ranks and believe God with me for my future as well as the future of the church.

I’ve found people respond positively if I’m positive. If I want my departure to be healing for the church, it will become that. If, however, I want my departure to broadcast my disappointments, I can easily sour others.

When we resign, we need to follow through. It’s tempting to use a letter of resignation as a negotiating tool. Once we’ve notified the church, however, we shouldn’t reconsider the decision.

The sooner one leaves following the resignation, the sooner the healing begins and the church can start to look for a successor. In my experience, two to four weeks is plenty of time to tie up loose ends.

Because our people were surprised, I knew grief and even anger might appear. Some of them avoided us because they didn’t know what to say. It reminded me of the way people treat an individual mourning the death of a loved one.

To try to ease the situation, I explained that some of us would experience the stages of grief in our pending departure. I assured them it was all right if they didn’t know what to say. This provided people with space and gave them freedom to come to us as they were able. During our last four Sundays, I didn’t go to the foyer after the service, as was my custom, Instead, my wife and I stood at the front of the sanctuary, where people could come as they were ready.

As in grief work at a time of death, we found it wise to listen and let them talk. When our turn came, we tried to recall happy or hard times in which we had stood together. “Look back with joy; look ahead with excitement” was our message.

Preparing the Church for Your Successor

When Donald Seibert was chairman of the board and CEO of the J. C. Penney Company, he told me, “The day I took this office, I began to prepare the way for my successor.” He understood the company was not his. As a good leader, part of his job was to prepare the corporation for the person who would follow him.

I also have to remember that the church is not mine. It belongs to Christ. We pastors are placed where we are for a season. Another will follow us. Even Moses, who led Israel for forty years, understood this and prepared the way for Joshua.

I tried to do this subtly over my years at Salem Alliance. While seeking to avoid the appearance of threatening to leave, I would occasionally refer to the long-range future of the church with such phrases as “When God will eventually lead me elsewhere . . .” To the elders I would sometimes say, “Remember I’m not dug in here. I won’t always be here.” After I announced my resignation, it was time to accelerate the preparation. I communicated to the congregation and the leadership that I would accept and welcome the new pastor. As I repeatedly affirmed “God is going to give this church a new leader,” my acceptance became contagious.

I gave the people practical ways to show love and caring for a successor. I described the good ways they had treated me and my family over the years, while pointing out how they could treat the person who would follow me even better. I also encouraged the leaders not to make a hurried decision on the new pastor. They seemed to understand that a time of adjustment would be necessary. This is important in both positive and negative departures.

There was also a responsibility to help the people understand that our relationship in the future would be different. Our church would have a new pastor. He would be different from me. But he would be God’s gift to the church, and if they really loved me, they would honor him. I tried to convey that while my family and the church would remain friends, I would need a lengthy separation from Salem, giving us a time to grow separately.

Even under the best circumstances, a lengthy separation is advisable. My own district superintendent recommends two years. J. Ralph Hardee of Southern Seminary cautions, “Under no circumstances should you return too frequently.”

When the reasons for your leaving are negative, loving preparation for your successor is all the more important. Likewise, the time of separation needs to be much longer. It’s best not to allow the time of separation to be interrupted by phone calls or correspondence, either. Don’t keep cutting the dog’s tail an inch at a time. To continue contacts for information or channels of advice can be destructive.

Whether or not the split was on friendly terms, any return to the parish needs to be instigated by the new shepherd without pressure from either the prior pastor or his supporters. The principle holds true for senior pastors and those in staff positions. Warren Wiersbe says, “Get out of the way of your successor and try and be an encouragement. … Treat him the way you want your predecessor to treat you when you arrive at your new field.”

Invitations for Weddings and Funerals

It’s only natural that some of those you have known for years will want you to return to officiate at weddings or funerals. Great wisdom and discretion are needed here.

Two months after leaving Salem, we returned to celebrate Christmas with our grandchildren. I determined to stay away from the church and the people but alerted the interim pastor to our presence anyway, a courtesy I intend to carry out for at least the first several years after my departure. Unfortunately, a car accident took the lives of two single adults, and the funerals occurred while we were in town. What was the loving thing to do?

We chose to go early in the morning to view the body before the public or family was around. This allowed us to express our own grief and register our having been there.

We chose not to go to the funeral. We could have become a distraction. Besides, our presence in the sanctuary would have opened the wounds of our leaving rather than promoted healing.

Dealing with such invitations needs to begin before you leave. I told the people it was best that I not return for special occasions so that a bonding could take place between them and the new pastor. If it seems that such an invitation must be accepted, I suggest contacting the new pastor to ask for his or her permission and participation with you.

At all costs, I think it’s important to avoid meeting with people who were my supporters unless my successor is present and participates in the event. And if I treat him as my pastor when I’m in the community, my supporters will follow my model.

If I couldn’t conscientiously affirm publicly the church and its new leadership, I would have no business returning to that church, no matter how long it had been since I left. The law of love and professional ethics demands that I recognize the leadership, even if I don’t agree with them, and not force them into situations in which they’ll be uncomfortable.

Staying in the Community

It almost never works for a staff member to resign from a church and then remain in the congregation while he or she moves into secular employment. When we leave the ministry, we’re saying our relationship with the church was less than ideal. Then our less-than-ideal feelings affect our attitudes toward the leadership.

There are times, however, when failing health or retirement may necessitate remaining in town. Again, some extended period of separation should take place before one returns to the fellowship. The rule of love is not what’s convenient for the former staff member but what is best for the church and its leadership.

Twice I’ve followed predecessors (though not immediate predecessors) who had been called back as pulpit supply before my coming. In both cases, age, health, and family ties called for them to stay in the community. Each separated himself from the church for some time and then returned to a strongly supportive role in the congregation. Their love and support for me was picked up by others.

When Your Successor Isn’t Doing a Good Job

We’re never going to be completely satisfied with the job a successor does. Differences in style, changes made in music, the format of the service, the bulletin, the Sunday school, the youth program, or office procedures naturally make us feel our ideas have been rejected. We need to be careful not to allow our egos to get in the way.

Of course, sometimes successors “stub their toes.” It may be evident to all that they’re not doing as well as everyone had hoped. This is a time for us to live out our commitment to God’s sovereignty and to recognize that the former church is no longer our responsibility. Neither is it our job to judge that person. It’s time for us to believe God.

A. W. Tozer, who pastored for many years in Chicago but spent his last years in Toronto, once remarked that “leaving a church is like dying and going to heaven and looking back to see what kind of a fool your wife married.” The real question, however, is not whether my wife’s new husband is better than I. Rather, the question is, How have I prepared my wife for life without me? And now that I’m gone, can I trust God to provide for her?

Should intervention be needed in the church I’ve left, I’m not the person to do it. A denominational official or a respected Christian leader from elsewhere needs to be called in. The more difficult the situation, the greater the glory that goes to Christ when we respond in love and do what is ethical.

Back to Obedience

In the agony of our leaving Salem Alliance, my family and I were probably helped most by the sense that we were motivated by obedience.

One day after we had been gone for several months, our daughter was driving across town with our 4-year-old grandson. When they were on the bridge they used to take to our home, little Brian said, “This is the way we used to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”

“Yes,” responded his mother, “but now they have gone to Canada to a new church.”

“We miss them,” Brian replied.

“That’s right,” said his mother, “we all miss them.”

After a pause, Brian said, “Yes, but it’s good that they obeyed God.”

Somehow, by God’s grace, this 4-year-old child had caught the message of the move. God is glorified in his church when we say our good-bys with a sacrificing love. Some people won’t understand the ethics of it all, but they can be drawn to God and to one another when we choose to do it right.

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

What Have We to Give?

Frederick Buechner

While a student at Union Theological Seminary following an early career as a teacher and writer, Frederick Buechner took part in field education in New York City. The following excerpt from Now and Then relates a slice of his experiences.

In addition to the worlds of Union and home, there was also the world of East Harlem, where, as part of the fieldwork program, I found myself running what the parish called an “employment clinic,” though all it was was me sitting with a telephone and no other qualifications in a storefront office on 104th Street.

I was born in New York and had lived there off and on all my life, but the New York I knew was bounded by Central Park to the west and Lexington Avenue to the east, to the north by 96th Street and to the south by Grand Central Station. Broadway theaters took me to the west side every once in a while and secondhand bookshops to the lower reaches of downtown, but by and large the city I knew was one relatively unscarred by violence, poverty, ugliness. … But East Harlem was another kind of city altogether-and with almost no beauty at all.

Many who happened into the storefront office on 104th Street did so simply out of curiosity. The place had something to do with the church, they knew. Maybe there would be a handout. It was a place to go anyway, different from most of the other places they went. Some of them were drunk, some glassy-eyed with drugs, but most of them, you felt, were just tired and bored with wandering the littered streets day after day to no particular purpose. There were a few chairs to sit in. In winter it was warm. Nobody tried to hustle them out unless they got obstreperous, and they rarely did.

One cadaverous man, however, got very angry once. He said if I was so good at getting people jobs, why didn’t I get a decent one for myself? Did anybody think I’d be piddling my time away up there in the slums if I could do any better anywhere else? The whole thing was some sort of racket, he said. I was some kind of phony. He wheeled around, looking for support that never came, and I remember his pounding my desk so hard that some papers slipped off to the floor, remember the deep, hollow notes of his rage, which he didn’t have the energy to sustain for long and which, except for me, nobody else there paid much attention to.

They seemed to know him. His name was George. Last names were rare in East Harlem. He quieted down eventually and showed me a tattoo on his arm that had something to do with his having been tortured once for being a Christian, he said. He looked like a man who might have been tortured once, but what it had to do with the tattoo he never made clear.

The part of his charge that stung, of course, was the part about my being a phony. I worked there only once or twice a week, and when I was through, I went back to a world that he could have known of only through the movies if, in fact, he ever had the price of a movie.

Every winter there were church groups that would send to the parish boxes full of the Christmas cards they had received that year, secondhand Christmas cards with the part torn off where the messages had been. Instead of throwing them out with the garbage, they sent them to East Harlem under the assumption that the poor people who couldn’t afford Christmas cards themselves would enjoy looking at; them, showing them to their children, maybe even pasting them in scrapbooks. There were times when I felt that what I was doing there was in roughly the same hair-raising key.

I managed to find a few jobs for people. The non-English-speaking Puerto Ricans had the hardest time a because in those days the state employment office wasn’t set up to conduct interviews in Spanish, but I discovered somehow that the Horn and Hardart restaurant chain occasionally needed dishwashers whether they spoke English or not, and the Eagle Pencil factory, if I remember rightly, also came through from time to time. I think I may also have gotten a few boys into messenger jobs and a woman or two into a housecleaning service, but the closest I came to triumph was with a man whose first name was Fred.

He was an alcoholic. Years before, he said, he had studied Greek and could still recite the Greek alphabet. It was true. He recited it for me. He was a thickset man in his late fifties or early sixties, white-haired, with a blurred, intelligent face. If he had ever had a family, I don’t remember his speaking of it. He seemed very much alone in the world, but without self-pity, hopeful in a sort of battered way, determined to pull himself together if he could manage it, but resolved to make the best of it even if he couldn’t. He made much of the fact that he and I had the same first name. He saw it as a bond between us.

When he first arrived in the of office, he was dressed like a tramp, but the parish always had a supply of cleaned and mended old clothes on hand, and by the time they had fitted him out, you might almost have guessed that he was a man who could recite the Greek alphabet.

We became friends. He dropped by the office from time to time. I made a number of phone calls for him about jobs, the drinking seemed more or less under control, and eventually one of the interviews I arranged for him worked out, and he got a position as night watchman at one of the faculty residences at Union.

I didn’t see him much after that. I ran into him once at the building where he worked, and there was a strangeness for us both, I think, in meeting each other so much out of our usual 104th Street context and in roles so different that East Harlem became like a secret we were keeping almost from each other. How were things going? He said they were going all right. Unless you had known, you wouldn’t have guessed that his overcoat was a church handout.

It was winter, and he had it buttoned up tight under his chin. His face seemed buttoned up tight too-less so as not to let the coldness in, I thought, than so as not to let some inner coldness out. Something good had started for him, but something good had also ended, if only something between us. Now that he had the job, his need for my services, such as they were, was at an end. What was left was just his need for somebody to be alone in the world with, and I didn’t have the wherewithal for that. We both of us knew it. How were things going for me? I said they were going all right.

The last time I saw him I knew it was the last time although I no longer remember how I knew. It was on a windy street corner up near the seminary. Had he started drinking again? Had he lost his job? Was he going away somewhere, or was I? I remember only that he had to hold his hat by the brim to keep it from blowing off and that for some forgotten reason we were saying a final good-by. I remember that I said, “I’ll be seeing you,” but that I knew it was not true.

When you find something in a human face that calls out to you, not just for help but in some sense for yourself, how far do you go in answering that call, how far can you go, seeing that you have your own life to get on with as much as he has his? As for me, I went as far as that windy street corner up around 120th Street and Broadway, and I can see him standing there as in some way he is standing there still, and as I also am standing there still. He is alone and making the best of it with his thin, church-rummage overcoat flapping around his legs. His one free hand is raised in the air to wave good-by. It was the last time.

“Here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves,” Tillich said, “is a New Creation.” This side of glory, maybe that is the best we can hope for.

-Frederick Buechner

Pawlet, Vermont

The gospel must be preached afresh and told in new ways to every generation, since every generation has its own unique questions. The gospel must constantly be forwarded to a new address, because the recipient is repeatedly changing his place of residence.

-Helmut Thielicke

If angels came in packages, we’d almost always pick the wrong one.

Even as the devil is evil disguised as good, angels are goodness disguised.

They show up in foolscap, calico, and gingham, and brown paper bags.

Jesus discovered the realm of God in a mustard seed,

the smallest and least portentous of all seeds.

Mustard seeds and angels have this in common.

They are little epiphanies of the divine amidst the ordinary.

-F. Forester Church

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

FROM THE EDITORS

Marshall Shelley

All of us want to know if our efforts make any difference. Most of us fear our impact is not what it should be.

Over the past few months, I’ve been asking pastors what comes to mind when they hear the phrase community impact. The responses ranged widely.

An inner-city pastor started talking about the pressure he feels: “It’s so dark out there. What happened to the light? Everybody is screaming for help. What will happen when the phone rings-will it be another overdose? Another rape? Another divorce? More child abuse and neglect? Another eviction? Whose lights are shut off now? The weight of the world is pressing down upon me. I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere.”

A suburban pastor shared a similar discouragement but from a different cause: “I don’t seem to be having any impact at all-either on the community or the church. I get the feeling that whether I’m here or not doesn’t make any difference. What happens just happens.” He was ready to leave his church.

The pastor of a church in a small town talked about the impact the community had on him: “My number one struggle is the deadening, drip-drip effect of secularism on the church-and on me.”

And a pastor of a country church talked about the challenges of fitting into the local social patterns: “In a rural setting, the school calendar dominates the community. And it’s full of events. Without becoming subject to the whims of the district, how does a church promote its program without unhealthy rivalry with the people it’s trying to reach?”

Each of these church leaders faces something different-overwhelming human need, lethargic saints, a God-avoiding culture, over-busy lives-and yet they all have the same underlying concern: Am I accomplishing anything? Is the world any different for all my work? Most of us fear our impact is not as great as it should be.

While wrestling with my own guilt in this matter, I came across an insight from Augustine, who struggled with the church’s impact on the supposedly civilized Roman Empire and the definitely undercivilized barbarian hordes. According to Oxford professor Oliver O’Donovan (and reported by Duke historian George Marsden), Augustine suggests that all societies-Roman, Goth, capitalist, or communist-should be thought of as governed by terrorists.

“The founding of every earthly city can be traced back to a contest between rival groups of thugs, each intent on beating the other’s brains out. One group eventually wins and pacifies the territory,” writes Marsden in The Reformed Journal.

“The Mafia will keep the peace as long as it reigns supreme. … Christians should thank God for such peace and order, should obey the laws the successful terrorists impose, and should work for relatively more justice in the cities of the world. They should have no illusions, however. … We might find one set of cutthroats far superior to another. We might prefer the Mafia to Khadafy or to Idi Amin. But when we unmask the seemingly more respectable alternatives, they too turn out to be brutal killers. It’s part of the human condition.”

This total depravity renders every government, every community, rotten. In this light, we realize why we in the church struggle so greatly with our community impact: our world needs change badly, yet it is controlled by forces that resist God.

Yes, we continue to obey Christ’s command to love our neighbors. But Augustine reminds us the church’s answer to society’s woes is not another attempt to make communities nicer; it’s to point out that only one solution will be ultimately successful: throwing ourselves on the grace of God, revealed in Jesus Christ.

* * *

As many of you know, several months ago LEADERSHIP launched a sister publication called LAY LEADERSHIP. This once-a-year resource is geared specifically for board members, key decision makers, and volunteers who make ministry happen in the local church. A number of churches are using it for lay leadership retreats or the orientation of new officers.

A few weeks ago I met a pastor who said, “We had a problem with LAY LEADERSHIP.”

“What was it?” I asked, ready to apologize for some editorial insensitivity or billing snafu.

“We ordered enough copies for all our board members. We planned to discuss the articles at our monthly meetings. But when the box arrived in the office, someone opened it and left it by the door. Between the office staff and people wandering by and seeing the articles and cartoons, the box was empty by that afternoon. Now we’re trying to track down the copies so our board members can use them.”

While attempting to be appropriately sympathetic, I confess I had an impish urge to say, “When volume 2 of LAY LEADERSHIP comes out next month, may such problems increase!”

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

To Illustrate. . .

DEDICATION

In the December 1987 Life magazine, Brad Darrach wrote: “Meryl Streep is gray with cold. In Ironweed, her new movie, she plays a ragged derelict who dies in a cheap hotel room, and for more than half an hour before the scene she has been hugging a huge bag of ice cubes in an agonizing effort to experience how it feels to be a corpse. Now the camera begins to turn. Jack Nicholson, her derelict lover, sobs and screams and shakes her body. But through take after take-and between takes too-Meryl just lies there like an iced mackerel. Frightened, a member of the crew whispers to the director, Hector Babenco, ‘What’s going on? She’s not breathing!’

“Babenco gives a start. In Meryl’s body there is absolutely no sign of life! He hesitates, then lets the scene proceed. Yet even after the shot is made and the set struck, Meryl continues to lie there, gray and still. Only after 10 minutes have passed does she slowly, slowly emerge from the coma-like state into which she has deliberately sunk. Babenco is amazed. ‘Now that,’ he mutters in amazement, ‘is acting! That is an actress!'”

Total dedication amazes people. How wonderful to be so dedicated to Christ that people will say, “Now that is a Christian!”

SIN’S DISTRACTIONS

A former police officer tells of the tactics of roving bands of thieves: “They enter the store as a group. One or two separate themselves from the group, and the others start a loud commotion in another section of the store. This grabs the attention of the clerks and customers. As all eyes are turned to the disturbance, the accomplices fill their pockets with merchandise and cash, leaving before anyone suspects.

“Hours-sometimes even days-later, the victimized merchant realizes things are missing and calls the police. Too late.”

How often this effective strategy is used by the Evil One! We are seduced into paying attention to the distractions, while evil agents ransack our lives. In times when well-publicized sins have captured our attention, we do well to check our own moral pockets to see if we have anything left.

– Tom McHaffie

Deerfield, Illinois

SALVATION

In 1818, Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis was born into a world of dying women. The finest hospitals lost one out of six young mothers to the scourge of “childbed fever.” A doctor’s daily routine began in the dissecting room where he performed autopsies. From there he made his way to the hospital to examine expectant mothers without ever pausing to wash his hands. Dr. Semmelweis was the first man in history to associate such examinations with the resultant infection and death. His own practice was to wash with a chlorine solution, and after eleven years and the delivery of 8,537 babies, he lost only 184 mothers-about one in fifty.

He spent the vigor of his life lecturing and debating with his colleagues. Once he argued, “Puerperal fever is caused by decomposed material conveyed to a wound. … I have shown how it can be prevented. I have proved all that I have said. But while we talk, talk, talk, gentlemen, women are dying. I am not asking anything world shaking. I am asking you only to wash. . . . For God’s sake, wash your hands.”

But virtually no one believed him. Doctors and midwives had been delivering babies for thousands of years without washing, and no outspoken Hungarian was going to change them now! Semmelweis died insane at the age of 47, his wash basins discarded, his colleagues laughing in his face, and the death rattle of a thousand women ringing in his ears.

“Wash me!” was the anguished prayer of King David. “Wash!” was the message of John the Baptist. “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me,” said the towel-draped Jesus to Peter. Without our being washed clean, we all die from the contamination of sin. For God’s sake, wash.

– Boyce Mouton

Carl Junction, Missouri

THE BLOOD

Dennis Fulton, former pilot with the Wings of Caring ministry in Zaire, tells of landing a newly purchased Cessna 402 at one of his regular stops in the back country. As always, the villagers excitedly gathered around the plane, but this time Dennis was approached by two men carrying a live chicken.

One had the bird by the feet, and the other had it by the head, and before either the chicken or Dennis knew what was happening, the fowl’s head and body parted company. The man with the flopping chicken corpse began swinging it over his head, round and round, with predictable results. Dressed in a freshly pressed white shirt, Dennis was splattered with chicken blood, as were the plane and the villagers.

When Dennis asked what that meant, a native explained that for generations, the splattered blood had signified an end to suffering. To the people of Zaire, the Cessna promised hope and help of all kinds.

In a graphic way, the splattered blood of that chicken, signifying the end of suffering, was a fitting reminder of the blood Christ shed to end the suffering of a world caught in the grip of sin.

– John Martyn

Russell, Kansas

SIN’S GRIP

Dr. George Sweeting wrote in Special Sermons for Special Days: “Several years ago our family visited Niagara Falls. It was spring, and ice was rushing down the river. As I viewed the large blocks of ice flowing toward the falls, I could see that there were carcasses of dead fish embedded in the ice. Gulls by the score were riding down the river feeding on the fish. As they came to the brink of the falls, their wings would go out, and they would escape from the falls.

“I watched one gull which seemed to delay and wondered when it would leave. It was engrossed in the carcass of a fish, and when it finally came to the brink of the falls, out went its powerful wings. The bird flapped and flapped and even lifted the ice out of the water, and I thought it would escape. But it had delayed too long so that its claws had frozen into the ice. The weight of the ice was too great, and the gull plunged into the abyss.”

The finest attractions of this world become deadly when we become overly attached to them. They may take us to our destruction if we cannot give them up. And as Sweeting observed, “Oh, the danger of delay!”

– Philip Williams

Meridian, Mississippi

GOD’S PERSPECTIVE

In How Life Imitates the World Series, Dave Bosewell tells a story about Earl Weaver, former manager of the Baltimore Orioles. Sports fans will enjoy how he handled star Reggie Jackson. Weaver had a rule that no one could steal a base unless given the steal sign. This upset Jackson because he felt he knew the pitchers and catchers well enough to judge who he could and could not steal off of. So one game he decided to steal without a sign. He got a good jump off the pitcher and easily beat the throw to second base. As he shook the dirt off his uniform, Jackson smiled with delight, feeling he had vindicated his judgment to his manager.

Later Weaver took Jackson aside and explained why he hadn’t given the steal sign. First, the next batter was Lee May, his best power hitter other than Jackson. When Jackson stole second, first base was left open, so the other team walked May intentionally, taking the bat out of his hands.

Second, the following batter hadn’t been strong against that pitcher, so Weaver felt he had to send up a pinch hitter to try to drive in the men on base. That left Weaver without bench strength later in the game when he needed it. The problem was, Jackson saw only his relationship to the pitcher and catcher. Weaver was watching the whole game.

We, too, see only so far, but God sees the bigger picture. When he sends us a signal, it’s wise to obey, no matter what we may think we know.

– Marty Masten

Garfield, Washington

SPIRITUAL BATTLE

Recently National Geographic ran an article about the Alaskan bull moose. The males of the species battle for dominance during the fall breeding season, literally going head-to-head with antlers crunching together as they collide. Often the antlers, their only weapon, are broken. That ensures defeat.

The heftiest moose, with the largest and strongest antlers, triumphs. Therefore, the battle fought in the fall is really won during the summer, when the moose eat continually. The one that consumes the best diet for growing antlers and gaining weight will be the heavyweight in the fight. Those that eat inadequately sport weaker antlers and less bulk.

There is a lesson here for us. Spiritual battles await. Satan will choose a season to attack. Will we be victorious, or will we fall? Much depends on what we do now-before the wars begin. The bull-moose principle: Enduring faith, strength, and wisdom for trials are best developed before they’re needed.

– Craig Brian Larson

Arlington Heights, Illinois

COOPERATION

Charles Osgood told the story of two ladies who lived in a convalescent center. Each had suffered an incapacitating stroke. Margaret’s stroke left her left side restricted, while Ruth’s stroke damaged her right side. Both of these ladies were accomplished pianists but had given up hope of ever playing again.

The director of the center sat them down at a piano and encouraged them to play solo pieces together. They did, and a beautiful friendship developed.

What a picture of the church’s needing to work together! What one member cannot do alone, perhaps two or more could do together-in harmony.

– Don Higginbotham

Pleasanton, Texas

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