Temptations of Ministry: Improving Your Reserve

An Interview with Charles Swindoll

Sitting in a congregation listening to Chuck Swindoll preach is like having a heart-to-heart talk with a favorite uncle. There’s never any question that the wisdom warrants serious attention, but neither is there any doubt that it’s delivered with love and warmth.

His open and honest style makes him an ideal candidate to talk about the temptations of ministry.

Since 1971, Swindoll has been pastor of First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, California, where Sunday morning attendance averages 5,000. He preaches five days a week on a half-hour radio program, “Insight for Living,” and has written numerous books, including his recent Improving Your Serve.

At forty-eight, Swindoll has faced the temptations that haunt a young pastor starting out in a tiny church as well as those that attack the high—profile pastor with a large, well-known ministry. He recently shared both kinds of struggles with LEADERSHIP editors Terry Muck and Paul Robbins.

What’s the major temptation you’ve struggled with as a minister of the gospel?

I don’t know if I can pick one particular Achilles’ heel. I have always wanted to be a good preacher, and Satan often tries to use high goals to detour us. Sometimes I’m tempted to try to develop my preaching skills through my own energy and ability rather than through the power of the Spirit.

A preacher’s job is to move black print off white pages into the hearts and minds of men and women. From the strictly human point of view, some manipulative techniques can make that happen better.

I purposely refuse to milk situations where I have people moving in a certain direction, where if I would just illustrate more deeply or probe a little further, I could break them wide open. The few times I’ve done that I’ve felt ill at ease about it.

So I consciously work at not trying to draw tears or use guilt. I want God at the center of the process. Whether it’s a twenty-minute or a forty—minute talk, I want him to be seen and felt and honored through the whole time.

What would happen if you succumbed to that temptation?

I’d be guilty of manipulating an audience. Preaching is a sacred part of my calling, and I’d feel most uneasy about corrupting one of the most significant parts of my contribution to the body. If I succumbed to that on a regular basis, I would begin to rely on it in the regular sweep of my ministry. I’d manipulate counselees, I’d manipulate my staff. It would be incredibly ego-building for a while. But before long, I would lose my authenticity. If there’s one overarching goal I have in my preaching, it’s to be authentic.

What’s another area of struggle for you?

Gluttony. Recently I looked in the full-length mirror and decided I had been fat long enough. Food was a temptation I had yielded to regularly. Fitness is a subject too little mentioned by clergy, because too many of us are fat ourselves. In the last four months, I’ve lost fifty-two pounds. I feel better than I’ve felt since I entered seminary. I’m running daily, eating less, thus thinking more clearly.

Why is food such a strong temptation?

I compensate for being fat by doing a number of things really well, so I don’t face the fact that I’m fat. I compensate for my poor condition by meeting people’s needs. I’m a servant at heart, a people helper. The least of my vices is a bit more food than I ought to eat.

So gluttony is a safe vice?

Yes. At least it’s a more-or-less acceptable one. We do a lot of semantic footwork when it comes to those gluttony passages in Scripture. I did. I was going to put something about gluttony in one of my books, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, because as I was writing, I was looking over fifty-two pounds of ugly fat. Food is a powerful temptation for church leaders. We have many lunch meetings, and you order a dessert because you have a little more to say. Or you get a big meal for lunch and then come home tired, broken, discouraged, and have a big meal for supper. Eating is an emotional lift. It’s a reward for a tough day.

And you have to build some rewards into a life that can be lonely sometimes.

That’s true. The isolated nature of ministry reminds me of another temptation for strong—minded ministers: to do one’s own thing, to set up a kind of ministry where you do what’s fun, enjoyable, and rewarding without the hassle of nit-picking. For example, at certain low points I have been tempted to leave the pastorate for a ministry of radio, writing, and travel. I’d avoid the hassle of shepherding, meetings, committees, and letters of criticism. The temptation is to say, “I don’t need all that.”

My wife and I have a favorite place when we think of escape—Bend, Oregon. I was there for a few days once and just loved it. I came home, and Cynthia was in such a mood she said, “Let’s go now!” It’s a little place where we could ski in the winter, jog in the summer, have a few friends, and just lie back and watch hubcaps rust.

What keeps you from doing it?

I know it’s not best for me. David said, “It was good for me to be so that I might learn your decrees” (Ps. 119271). I need hate letters at times. I need to know not everybody’s applauding. I need to know I have a staff meeting in the morning and must be ready. I need to know that next door to me is someone who asks hard questions, because I invite that. I need associates around me to ask me “Why?”

How would you respond to the statement of one Christian leader who said men and women can’t really minister until their hearts have been broken?

I would agree. It reminds me of Tozer’s words, “It’s doubtful that God can use any man greatly until he’s hurt him deeply.” As Scottish people say, some things are better felt than telt. You can feel if ministers are broken. I long to have a ministry marked by realism. The things from which I’m tempted to run are the very things necessary to make my ministry real.

Was there a pivotal point in your ministry where you grasped this truth of brokenness?

In my first pastorate in Waltham, Massachusetts, I fell on my face before God with an anguished cry, asking, “How do I fit in your ministry plan? I know I’m called, I know I’m trained, but I don’t feel real. I don’t sense that when I communicate, I’m your man.”

You see, I was still trying to copy my professors from seminary—l was a little bit of this teacher, a little bit of that teacher. I was like Daniel’s beast—a conglomerate. But the only thing that really fit me was the clay feet. Cynthia said on more than one occasion, “You know, honey, I think it would be great if you would just be you.”

A terrifying thought! I had the strange idea that being me was not what ministry was about; I needed to be like the great models. A lot of the dreams that had been built upon these collapsed around me. There weren’t great results from my ministry; people weren’t hanging on every word. I was just slugging it out with 200 people—-on a good Sunday 300, on a poor Sunday less than 100. I had a problem, not the church. I had gone to Waltham to set them straight.

How did that feeling of failure affect your ministry?

It created resentment. I resented the people in the church. I resented what I had been told about ministry. I resented the lack of realism in my training. Some profs, like Howard Hendricks, had talked reality, but not too many were like that. Most implied that if you really preach the Word expositorily, they’ll be crawling in the windows to hear you. Well, in Waltham they weren’t. I felt isolated, and when that feeling mixed with my independent spirit, I pushed people further and further away from me.

In the brokenness of it all, my wife proved to be the real friend I needed. She made our home my refuge. Our family took up camping; we bought our first little tent-trailer and pulled it up to Vermont and New Hampshire. I made friends with my children and started to get my priorities straight.

What changed in your thinking?

The turnaround came when I realized that no matter what the result is, I’m God’s man and I answer to him. A university librarian used to sit in front with a grim face every Sunday. I could just see her picking apart this and that. At first it bothered me a great deal, but after a while it didn’t. I could even agree with her that there might be better ways to approach a passage and better people to preach it. I became much less intense. The need to impress started to fade.

Did the need to succeed also fade?

Yes. When I left Massachusetts, I went to a smaller church in Irving, Texas. I’m from Texas originally, and I thought I’d made so many mistakes in Waltham I needed a place to start all over again. So I went to Irving convinced that if this church stayed at 150, that was fine.

My commitment was to be myself, to be real. I was like Moses at the well in Midian—high1y qualified, feeling completely useless. Moses had been driven out of Egypt with broken dreams. He sat down with a box of medals from all his achievements in Egypt and knew everything was down the tubes. I could preach on Moses. I understood what he must have gone through. So can many ministers, but we don’t linger often on Moses at the well. We immediately rush him to the burning bush and on to the Exodus. In real life, we must be willing to stay at the well as long as God wants us to.

At Irving, I discovered what it meant to become more me and less what others expected. I developed three goals for my preaching: accuracy, clarity, practicality. I didn’t want to talk to myself in the pulpit. I wanted to be sure that when I was through, the people saw how the sermon made sense in their lives. I became more and more interested in identifying with their struggles, and I talked less and less about theoretical passages of Scripture. In the process, the teachings of Christ became more real to me.

It sounds like you found contentment.

I really am a contented man. I am not driven. I have more fun than any pastor I know. If my associates weren’t gone today, you would hear more laughter in this hallway than any other sound. We’re relaxed. It’s not that we’re doing anything frivolous. We take our God seriously around here; we just don’t take ourselves that seriously.

Paul says it rather clearly: have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (Phil. 4:11). This goes back to the temptation of restlessness. The problem is, you have to take yourself wherever you go. S0 that wonderful sense of belonging and identifying with your people, feeling a part of their lives, letting them know you enough to feel a part of your life, means you have to accept yourself. Without that contentment, you’re always biting your nails. You’re driven, which leads to an enormous emotional shakeup such as a midlife crisis. Or later, in the fifties, your dreams are broken; you’re not even on the staff of a large church, much less its head pastor.

Everybody’s impressed with size. Everybody but God. The grass-is-greener concept has to be put to bed. But there’s a lot to say for analyzing how green the grass is where 0ne’s life is. After serving in three churches, I realized there was no sine qua non of pastorates, no final resting place in the ministry. There are pros and cons wherever you are, and it takes some maturity to believe that.

Does that mean you could have been content for the rest of your life with a salary of $15,000, which means your children might not have been able to enjoy a private college education? Could you really have stayed in that little two-bedroom house with the carport?

I love to see growth. I love to see lives maturing and multiplying. I couldn’t be content without trying to make growth happen. But how that happens is in God’s hands.

I expected the church in Irving to grow. They had a building large enough for more growth. But I was thinking in terms of multiplying congregations and not having it all right there. I would have been satisfied to see our growth fill the building and then spin off another church.

We did eventually build a larger building, but that wasn’t part of my dream. It’s what the church decided. We ultimately reached about 700.

At the time we built the new building, we were into double services and I was really a satisfied man. This struggling church was now on its feet, and I began to have greater freedom in the pulpit. A number of the programs I suggested became successful. About that time, the Fullerton church and several others got in touch with me, but I was not interested. I had the best of every world. My roots were there, my family was there, and my wife’s family was in Houston.

So your ministry at Irving was a success in terms of growth. What new temptations faced you in that four-year span?

I had some interpersonal struggles that completed the process of my brokenness. A couple of very strong laymen didn’t feel I was God’s gift to the world at the time, and I battled with one especially. Also, I was strained a bit financially, and so on Mondays I became a counselor for a Christian builder’s sales force of ten men. I learned to talk the language of laymen. I was in touch with their world, their brokenness, their divorces, their guilt, their need for Christ.

Where does Satan attack the pastor of a successful church?

When you grow from having someone sit in the front row with a tape recorder to a recording studio in a new building, you’re tempted to start believing your own stuff. Other people believe your voice, and you begin to think, Maybe my voice is really worth hearing.

What helped me most during this period was a very simple thing: my wife and I began to forge out a commitment to ministry together. We talked very seriously and decided our major goal in ministry was ministering to people in need. We wanted to serve people who had needs and really wanted to know what the Bible said to them about their lives.

At that time, several unwed mothers lived with us; then my mother died, and my father moved in with us—all in a little three—bedroom home with a garage converted into living quarters. Now we had to put into action the things I’d been giving from the pulpit. The temptation there was to move into a big arena, to get a big bell to ring and start announcing ourselves. But I held still, and my partnership with my wife helped a great deal.

The other thing that helped was sitting down with the board and saying, “I’d like to have more one-to ones with you guys. I’d like us to spend more time together out of meetings and more with each other as friends.” I began to breakfast with them. We went to weekend conferences together; we even camped with one or two of the families and began to spend quality time with one family especially. They became very close friends with all the Swindolls. That helped break down the temptation of feeling This is all mine.

Talk a little more about drawing your wife into your ministry. Too many church leaders compartmentalize their ministry and their family life.

Cynthia, as I mentioned earlier, began in New England to say some of the best things I needed to hear, so I had to face the fact that she had more to offer than romance. She has a bright mind, good insight, and an intuition about other people that I don’t possess.

Everyone’s spouse is gifted in some way. The trick is to identify how that particular giftedness can be plugged into your mutual ministry. But remember, a great deal of our ministry partnership blossomed after her childbearing years when the kids were in school. For example, she always gave me good insights, but now she has the time to be executive director of our radio ministry, “Insight for Living.”

Do you face financial temptations these days?

No, not really. Financial benefits come along with certain levels of ministry, and they can create ethical problems. People write and ask what I charge to do such-and-such. On only one occasion did I ever state a fee for speaking, and it led to a misunderstanding that took months to clear up. I got burned so badly from that situation I decided I’d never state a fee again. You can print that! It’s just not my style to declare that for $500 I’ll speak on Sunday, or for $1,500 I’ll give you this weekend. It can leave a greedy impression, which bothers me.

I don’t have a speaking agent. I have to have a radio agent to handle legal affairs, but he’s really like a consultant. He’s a professional who knows the world of media and saves me a lot of hassles in areas I don’t know much about.

Did you develop a personal financial plan?

Yes. When my kids reached the teenage years, some men from the church said, you’ve got to look further than next week’s lunch. You’re going to have to do some planning.” An attorney friend was especially helpful. Our kids are pretty close in age—twenty-one, nineteen, fifteen, and twelve—so we’re talking education for the next ten to twelve years. To make that happen, I needed something to supplement my salary. Books help. Outside speaking helps, but not that much. (Anyone who thinks you get rich traveling and speaking is not on my speaking circuit.) I make sure I’m in my own pulpit about forty-five Sundays each year.

Would you encourage other pastors to take an outside interest, like you did with this sales force, to keep them in touch with the commercial world?

Every pastor needs some avenue to the concrete jungle. One of the best things I ever read from a minister was Richard Halverson’s Perspective, which he dedicates to people in the competitive world of sales. I’m lucky to have worked my way through school as a machinist for 4 ½ years. That kind of thing is great background.

When you would clash with a board member, what was the temptation you struggled with in your own mind?

To use the pulpit as a hammer. I would find something he needed to hear, and he would hear it, along with 400 other folks! My dear wife would say, “Were you preaching to one or to 400?” You have the ultimate clout in the church when you have the pulpit.

How many times have you “quit the ministry”?

Several. It seemed like every other week in New England! I thought of so many other things I could do well. When I struggled in Irving, I thought maybe I could go into counseling full-time. But my call to ministry has always been bedrock.

I remember Dr. Don Campbell asking when I went to seminary, “Do you think you’d be happy doing anything else?”

I don’t think so,” I answered. He told me later, “If you had given any other answer, we wouldn’t have admitted you.” Would I be really fulfilled doing anything else? I love to write, I love to minister to a broad section of the body, but I need the accountability of the local church pastorate.

Any temptation to rely on yesterday’s sermons?

Good preaching is hard work, but I’ve taken to heart what Bill Pannell over at Fuller says: “If you’re going to preach, then for God’s sake, preach we11.” That takes constant study. The temptation to lie back and rely on something you discovered several months ago results in poor preaching.

Many of our readers seem to agree that there’s a lot of mediocre preaching around. What’s the key to good preaching?

I don’t think I can tell you. I think I can model it, but one of my hardest assignments is to spend a week with our interns and tell them how I do it. Not because I don’t want to be interrupted, but I can tell them better how to counsel than how to preach, even though I’m not as good a counselor.

I guess if I had to mention one key, it could be relevance. The pulpit of the sixties is not the same as the pulpit of the eighties. For example, the rat-a-tat hot communication of a Walter Winchell in the forties is downright offensive today. I can’t remember the last time I leaned across the pulpit and said, going to tell you this once and you get it straight—I’m not telling you again.” Yet that was Winchel1’s style and people of that day sat in awe.

Have you ever analyzed your own gift and compared it to other preachers?

I try not to.

Let us press you a bit here. Why are you able to paint word pictures in the pulpit, while others struggle their whole lives and can’t do it?

I’m sometimes stunned that others can’t do it. I’ve decided some people naturally think in pictures, others don’t. Good preachers use known terms to make unknown terms clear. Two unknowns, however, result in confusion. I’ve heard preachers try to explain the sovereignty of God using nuclear physics as the illustration. You’ve got to go to everyday things—a cat and mouse, a child, a familiar event in history, the frame around a picture.

Is preaching hard for you?

No, it isn’t. I love to do two things in the skill of communication—preach and write. Of the two, writing is harder.

So Sunday morning when you get up, you can’t wait to get to church?

That’s the delight of my week. Now there are some Sundays … I was in Hebrews 6 last Sunday, and I was hoping for a migraine so I could pass the job on to someone else. But the actual task of saying what I have to say is not difficult. I don’t know how those who find it difficult keep on. I would have to find an associate who could share it with me.

Do you preach expository sermons or topical sermons?

I preach both, but I prefer exposition. I read expositorily; I think that way. I like to see an article that follows a logical progression. So I approach the Bible the same way.

But I’m not ready to say I would want only to go through books of the Bible—Ephesians this year, Philippians next year, 1 Samuel the next. I do a lot of book studies, but I mix other things in.

I like preaching that is real to life. It doesn’t thrill me to know that people left church understanding 1 Samuel 16. It thrills me to know they left knowing what 1 Samuel 16 says about everyday life.

You said earlier the three things you look for in a sermon are accuracy, clarity, and practicality. Why do so many preachers stop after the second one?

In order to jump from clarity to practicality, you have to go beyond normal God-talk. You’ve got to get into the realm of everyday living. You’ve got to start with the first sentence to bring it where the listeners are. I don’t know how a preacher can begin, “Well, we come today to the fifth chapter of Ephesians.” That’s the most uncreative beginning you can have in preaching.

I like the way Haddon Robinson describes this in his book Biblical Preaching. He quotes Paul O’Neil, a writer for Life Magazine: “Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, sink your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.” When I begin my sermons, I dare the person not to listen to me. Not that I’m that great—-it’s just that I’ve got something to say that’s too important to ignore.

How hard do pastors have to work to preach well?

A pastor has to earn the right to be heard every week. S0 if you have a high standard for yourself in preaching, you must work hard. The turn of a phrase has to be worked on. The style of a delivery takes time. Heavily doctrinal passages, such as mans 9 or Hebrews 10, are difficult to bring to life. That’s hard, time-consuming work.

I don’t make the Bible relevant; I show how relevant the Bible is. That takes concentration. I don’t ever have more than twenty hours to give to any one message; usually it’s a little less than that, sometimes a lot less. I could always do it in less; if l didn’t care, I could wing it. I could skip the tough passages, use cute stories here and there, and come up with enough stuff to fill thirty minutes. But I don’t give myself that privilege.

A preacher settles in on a style, and a congregation determines if that’s the level they like. People vote with their feet and their pocketbook. Nobody makes you go to church. The temptation is to think the people will come forever. Some preachers do very well their first four or five years. But then they quit reading and open the barrel too often. I battle that sloth by forcing myself to read. I’ve got a churning desire to keep preaching well.

Actually, my struggle is not with sloth but with balance. On Friday at 5:30, I’m exhausted. I want to be with my family. My sermon could use another three hours, but I choose not to because there’s something else to do besides preach on Sunday. The drive to do well must be balanced with the priorities of life.

You seem to have come to grips with who you are.

The old Greeks weren’t that far off when they said, “Know thyself.” If I ever would have to candidate somewhere else again—and that’s a disgusting thought for me – I’d take this approach: “Let me tell you folks who I am. I am good at this, I am almost great at that, I am poor at this, and I am embarrassingly poor at that. That’s me. And here’s what I think I can do here. Does that match up with what you expect your new pastor to do?”

Can you fill in those blanks of what you’re good, great, and poor at?

I’m good at negotiating conflicts. I’m very good at communicating and knowing what communicates well. I’m quite good with a staff in terms of letting them be who they are and giving them room. I’m not too good at confrontation. I’m not too good at counseling. I’m rather poor with vision. I am embarrassingly poor with regard to money, management of the church, and the business side of the ministry.

In Massachusetts you learned to be yourself. In Texas you began to learn the lessons of accountability. What are the temptations of your great success at Fullerton?

The temptation to isolate myself. It’s a continuation of the accountability lesson in a way. But it’s a deeper problem really, because the give and-take a young pastor gets has ebbed away. A man in my position must almost invite accountability. He must give signals that say, “It’s not only OK, it’s preferred.”

But he must ask the right people, discerning people. They must understand that the ego of a high-profile pastor is, to the surprise of many, rather fragile. S0 they must know when they’ve gone far enough. It’s like your wife criticizing you. She can really put you under if she says too much.

I think the temptation to isolate is the number one threat to the local-church leader today. Psychology day did an article in 1980 called “The Age of Indifference,” in which Philip Zimbardo says: “Isolation is a killer. It has been shown to be a major cause in the ideology of depression, mass suicide, rape, schizophrenia, and several other diseases/states.” I might add that, professionally, nothing is more tempting for the minister than isolation. In the final sense, you answer to God alone, but that can blind you to your human needs to socialize.

How have you avoided the temptation to isolation here at Fullerton?

I came here in fear and trembling. This church was not that much larger than the one we left in Irving, but it was ready to grow. Also, I left the independent-church syndrome to join an association of ministers, the Evangelical Free Church. Independent churches, it seems to me, breed independent pastors. So being with a great staff and understanding denominational personnel has been a great help.

Does isolation increase sexual temptation?

It can. Speakers have overextended privacy. We travel alone, staying in a motel room or an empty house. And who knows what you’re going to do in Montreal or Miami? Many of us work alone at a church where we have prolonged contact with the same female, either a counselee or a secretary. Even though I have a lot of people around me here, I guard against trouble by not seeing any counselees more than three times. During counseling, I position myself behind my desk. Though it isn’t the best for open communication, it helps me discipline myself to look into her eyes and to think why we’re here and what we’re about. I may be able to help her a little, but I don’t intend to go in depth to the sexual side of life. I simply recognize that being a man, temptation is always on the back burner waiting to singe me.

I remember a conference I addressed. I was getting on the hotel elevator—alone as usual—and two women followed me on. I smiled and said “Hi,” punched my floor, six, and said, “What floor would you like?” They said, “six would be fine.” I suddenly felt a little flattered.

But it was remarkable what happened between the first floor and the sixth. I had a momentary fantasy, but then God pulled a shade between the three of us, and on that shade I could read clear as day, not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” If we let God protect us, he will. God pulled that shade right when I really needed it.

Even pastors with large ministries can be severely tested.

Even more so. I praise God I’ve never been tempted to the point of breaking—and Cynthia deserves most of the credit for that—but I’ve been very close to men who had marvelous ministries, yet later events proved that even as I knew them they were fooling around—and I never suspected a thing. You can fake it right down to the final line. I heard a man preach as good a sermon as I had ever heard him preach on 1 Peter 3—the husband/wife relationship—but three weeks later he left his wife and ran off with his secretary.

We need open accountability, regularly. I need friends to look across the desk, lean over, and say, “I love you too much to let you live in an isolated world of dreams and fantasy. You’re not doing that, are you?”

And I need to say, “No, but keep asking me. I don’t want to start doing that.” It’s almost an epidemic.

What are some other antidotes?

Keep the romance in your own marriage. Don’t take your secretary to lunch. Don’t see the opposite sex alone at night. Don’t meet them in their homes. Don’t sit on their beds in the hospital. Don’t hold their hands when you talk. Don’t put your arms around their shoulders. I’m not saying those are standard axioms for everybody in the ministry, but they work for me.

What do you do when a woman really gets aggressive with you, even though you’ve done nothing to encourage her?

First, I share it with my wife. I call her every day when I travel. I don’t say, “Well, I had four encounters today, three of which were really appealing to me,” but I will say something like, “Boy, when one of those aggressive gals makes the moves …”

And she’ll say, “Well, you know how to handle that.”

The secret is to keep out of situations where that can happen. Once someone becomes aggressive, I stop spending any more time with her. I have been told by more than one woman that I seem a little distant, and that’s true. It’s by design.

In twenty-five years of ministry, has the packaging of sexual temptation changed substantively for you?

I suppose the kind of woman that would appeal to me is different now from before. Appealing to me now would be a woman who thinks well, reads widely, who would stimulate me in areas outside of bed. I don’t know if the lacy nightgown style is as attractive to me now as it was when I was twenty five. Still, I do like lacy nightgowns!

Do you get hate mail?

Yes. As Harry Ironside said, “Wherever there’s light, there’s bugs.” Hate mail comes from people who disagree with your position or think you didn’t fairly represent where they’re coming from. Sometimes they have legitimate disagreements; sometimes they misunderstand or distort you. You have to answer them regardless.

This kind of thing works to keep me down to size. It’s never easy to hear. Pastors who say criticism doesn’t bother them and then spend twenty minutes telling why it doesn’t bother them are fooling themselves. Criticism takes its toll on everyone. The secret is to cultivate a tough hide but a sensitive heart.

The key concept you keep mentioning is authenticity—be yourself.

I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge who said, “It’s virtually impossible to present an authentic message through an inauthentic medium.” As I recall, he was talking about television, but it applies to preachers too. Instead of television, we speak live to our audiences. But if we’re not authentic in who we are, then we fail as surely as if we tape-recorded our messages.

How do you remain authentic with your staff?

I meet twice a week, on Tuesday with my three closest associates, and then with all the staff on Wednesday. We evaluate everything. When I’m gone, they preach, but that’s not too often. So we talk about ways to make their ministries known to the church as a whole.

One thing we do is have them lead Sunday worship. All I do is preach; the others rotate with everything else. Sunday evening I occasionally take time to affirm one of the ministries of the church.

I am a great one for promoting the value of a whole staff. The secret of my ministry here has been our staff. We’ve had a couple of heartaches, but not much turnover, because men who come and are strong have a place here. We have altogether eleven full-time staff members plus three interns who are here nine months of the year.

How do you feel about Chuck Swindoll, the humble, no-name kid from El Campo, Texas, who finds himself here in Orange County before thousands of people scrambling to find a parking place for Sunday morning worship?

Well, at least it wasn’t contrived. I’m as surprised as anybody. Whenever I’m asked to describe our “master plan for growth,” I usually smile and say, we’re just a bunch of guys in the back of a pickup truck trying to get our stuff together.”

Becoming big was never my goal. I’d like to believe it is simply the result of God’s working.

I try to stay available, especially Sundays after services. I make it a point to sit down on the steps with an eleven-year—o1d boy or girl for twenty minutes, or a family that brings a child in a wheelchair. I take time to be at the church picnic. I really do love the people part of ministry, and so do the men and women on our staff. I’ve loved another thing about this particular 1ninistry—the freedom to be creative and innovative. I’ve done things in the Communion service that have never been done anywhere else to my knowledge. And I don’t care if they’re ever done anywhere else.

I don’t see myself as a Shell answer man for Christian circles today. I like to talk; I like to be with journalists, writers, concrete-thinking people. When I go into a group, I don’t want them to notice me. I really like anonymity in the sense that if I visit a fellow’s church to hear him, I don’t want him to tell that I’m there. I don’t go visit a college friend thinking the president needs to ask me to speak in chapel.

How do you handle interministerial jealousies, the envy you sense from others because, planned or not, your ministry has grown?

I try to lift myself out of the picture. Their battle is not with me. Their battle is inside themselves. My battle in Waltham, Massachusetts, was not with Harold Ockenga or Park Street Church; my battle was inside Swindoll.

I try and diffuse my fellow ministers’ smoldering jealousy by saying, “What is it that really bothers you? Is it comparison?” I help them see that even if they were at First Presbyterian in Pittsburgh, there’d be some bigger church in the suburbs.

The mental plague of the church is the comparison syndrome. I fight it. I was at the Moody pastors’ conference with Warren Wiersbe, John MacArthur, Howard Hendricks, David Jeremiah, Stephen Olford, and Dave Burnham. I went back to my hotel room thinking, What can I say this afternoon that hasn’t been said nine times this morning? I finally concluded, I’m the only one with my voice, my name, and my style, and I’m going to be me. It worked. I was freed from comparison and able to deliver the goods without internal struggle.

What spiritual disciplines do you exercise to make sure you retain the whole armor of God?

I guard my time with God as jealously as anything. I get up early. I jog, and afterward I spend a few minutes alone just gathering my senses.

I sometimes get a chill at my back when I think about the responsibilities I carry: for the people of this church, not to mention the twelve staff families that really hang on my being what I’m supposed to be. Then I remember there are eleven other ministers in this place. I do not want this to be known as Swindoll’s church. It has never been Swindoll’s church. It’s God’s church. He’ll take care of it.

What’s the Lord teaching you right now?

Patience. I am not very patient with myself, mainly, but also with my two younger children. God is teaching me to wait for some things I’ve been talking to him about and haven’t changed. I’m also facing the fact that I don’t know where all this is going to wind up. It’s not that I need some other world to conquer, but I haven’t written all I want to write. In my preaching, I struggle with the question of good, better, best. I live in that realm. I’m forty-eight years old this year. I don’t think I’m in a mid-life crisis, and I don’t feel the need for some sparkling new something, but it’s always nice to anticipate.

Last Sunday I preached on Hebrews 6. I hammered away at it; I had eighteen commentaries out on my desk. Finally I got to my position and presented it on Sunday. When I got all through, I said, “Now let me tell you something—I don’t want anybody writing me this week and giving me another opinion.” It brought the house down.

That’s the dynamic of Chuck Swindoll, I think. I’d prayed, thought, read, sweated—and when Sunday came, I was really kind of fearful because I didn’t want to be wrong. But it came time to preach it, so I did. I hope there are always Hebrews 6s for me to tackle.

- More from Leadership

Pastors

When the Biggest Church in Town Isn’t Yours

Dean Merrill

Keeping one eye on the first-place team is a perfectly human—and perilous—thing to do.

It is easier to preach encouragement than it is to live it. It is easier to exhort people to be strong in the Lord than it is to recover from a tempestuous board meeting. It is easier to confront a counselee about the sin of envy than it is to deal with personal feelings about the superchurch up the road.

The Tempter of ministers, being well experienced at his work, has learned over the millennia to keep his eye on his goal and not fixate on one technique over another. Adultery and embezzlement are fine tools, but a bit flashy, and if he can disable God's servant through subtle fumes of discouragement and self-pity, mixed with disgruntlement at the success of others, why not?

Who has not inhaled some of his vapors at the end of a long and draining Sunday while turning off the lights and locking the doors and driving home in the rain? Who has not felt inwardly irked as laymen burble about churches they visited on vacation and business trips, or the wonderful blessings across town (exciting youth program, rocketing attendance, great move of the Spirit, whatever)? Who has not struggled to make ends meet, straining to outfit his children for another year of school, while wondering how much the television preachers take home? At such times, one joins Martin Luther in his vendetta against the Book of James, which includes such seemingly outlandish lines as "The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position" (1:9). How so?

To learn firsthand about the lure of discouragement and professional jealousy, and how ministers today are resisting it, LEADERSHlP editors singled out a particularly vulnerable group—pastors of small-to-medium churches in the shadow of very large and famous churches—and went to see them. We tried to match not only geography but theology, so that the essentials would be comparable. "What is it really like to labor in this place?" we asked. "How do you stay 'up' when their choir rehearsal is larger than your morning service? What do you do when you feel like a grasshopper before a son of Anak? How do you keep the sourness out of your spirit?"

As we talked, some pastors took longer than others to get down to their true feelings, but all were helpful. The crunch was best expressed by a pastor in La Habra, California, not more than two miles from First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton. "The truth is that Chuck Swindoll is simply outpreaching me," he said quietly. "He has a tremendous communication gift, and people are naturally drawn to that. I'd estimate that we've lost fifty families to First Free, including at one point the president of this congregation, a good personal friend. That hurts."

As they leave, people often profess their continuing love for this pastor. "But it still feels like rejection," he says. "They're leaving here and going with a winner, a place that has all the momentum." The La Habra church is not shrinking, but neither is it growing; it is simply holding steady.

Other interviews were able to probe more deeply the ways of coping, of maintaining personal momentum in spite of the externals, of not getting sucked under the cascade of another's fame. Here are five profiles.

By the time Charles Laughlin came to pastor Christian Fellowship Church in Hammond, Indiana, the philosophy of Jack Hyles had been the fuse for not only endless debates among the membership but two church splits as well. "CFC," as its people sometimes call it, was founded as an independent fundamental church in the 1930s and was the largest of its kind in the Calumet region by1959, with 1,200 in attendance. Then Hyles arrived from Texas to take the helm of First Baptist, two and a half miles north.

Some of the CFC elders still remember beating First Baptist in Sunday school contests. Those days are long past: Laughlin now preaches to 200, while First Baptist uses almost that many buses. They fan out to the far fringes of metro Chicago, swelling the crowd as high as 31,000 on special Sundays. Laughlin, thirty—two, who came from Florida five years ago, has thought much about his congregation's value in the present as well as the future.

People in the community will sometimes ask me, "Are you like First Baptist?" and I'll say, "In doctrine, yes; we believe the same things. But we do things differently." And from there I try to steer the conversation back to the gospel.

That's the real difference in the two churches: philosophy of ministry. We're committed to teaching and edifying, building up the believers to minister. Not that we avoid evangelism—we don't. I give a public invitation every Sunday morning and sometimes on Sunday night as well, but this isn't the major thrust. We're pushing evangelism in life, and it's happening as people share their faith in the world where they live.

When we go house to house throughout our part of town—south Hammond — we sometimes get doors slammed in our face because people have been offended by too much aggressiveness. But in many homes, we get a good response. The point of our calling is simply to let them know we're here and we want to help.

A church like First Baptist, of course, gives Christian people an interesting option. If the teaching of the Word in their own church is getting too close to home, they can always go downtown and hear an evangelistic sermon. Some people find that more comfortable than dealing with sinful attitudes inside.

Some of our older people are still struggling with bad memories of the splits. Once we did a joint concert with Suburban Bible Church, which had started back in 1962 out of CFC. A lady in our choir declined to participate, and when I asked her why, she said, "I promised myself I'd never set foot inside that church after what they did to us."

Sometime later I preached about bitterness, and she hinted that I'd been preaching at her. I said I hadn't meant it that way at all, but if God was speaking to her about an area of her life, she should listen. The old hurts, however, are hard to erase.

Still, there are good things about pastoring in Hammond. One is the sheer number of Christian people in the community. I took my car into the garage the other day, and out of the blue, the service manager said, "I'll be praying for you, pastor." The students from Hyles-Anderson College are a good spark of life. I spoke at Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago recently, and a busload of students was there that night as well. They really inspired me to do the best I could.

Even though Jack Hyles and I don't have a direct relationship, his presence is good for me. His ministry makes me examine myself and my work, to keep asking, "Should I be doing this like he does it or not?"

For me, it all comes down to two questions:

Am I where God wants me to be?
Is my philosophy of ministry what God wants it to be?

Presently, I can say yes to both of those. So I'm at peace, and I can move ahead. The question of size is secondary.

Calvary United Presbyterian Church in Denver is a backyard knoll surrounded by three mountains and a major foothill. To the north is Montview Presbyterian with some 2,000 members, an established church with prestige and reputation, known for its excellent choir. To the east is Faith Presbyterian, where everything seems to happen with charisma and splash. To the south is Wellshire Presbyterian, very Reformed, very affluent, with a good sprinkling of political and business leaders among its members.

There's also South Evangelical Presbyterian Fellowship to the southeast, a bit smaller than the others—800 or so—but very influential.

When Stewart Congdon came to Calvary in 1977, the membership was down to 105 (from a high of250), and no more than seventy came his first few Sundays. He was the seventh pastor in the church's twenty-five years. The rooms and parking lot were as small as the church's vision and sense of self confidence. Today, about 150 attend worship services.

If I'd known in the beginning how few active members there were, I probably wouldn't have come. The honest truth, I confess, is that I was attracted to the location as much as anything. I wanted to leave Iowa, and when I heard about the opening in Colorado, I sent my dossier on a whim.

Others in the denomination told me the congregation was a dead end, but when I came out for the interview, the people were so warm and so eager to make the church work that I was attracted. "This is our last chance," they said. They knew the presbytery was thinking about closing the church if things didn't improve.

The situation fed my ego. Here was a place where I could pour myself, turn it around, build it up, and make it work.

A year and a half later, I was asking, "Shall I bail out?" None of my noble plans were working. My salary was so small my wife had to work. I was wishing certain people would find another church. I was tired of pettiness and distrust. I dreaded each day. My wheels were spinning—people sensed defeat and took it out on me. Some people choose weak churches because they can wield power in that situation. They enjoy mediocrity.

I was ready to quit my career in the ministry. Then I went on a spiritual renewal weekend and for the first time—as amazing as it sounds—had a real encounter with Jesus Christ. I saw him in a personal way. I repented of my own ego control. "God, this is your church, not mine," I prayed. After that retreat, I was a different man. God was more real somehow. Others in the congregation noticed the difference and began to seek the same experience.

At that point, I decided to stay at Calvary five more years before resurrecting the question of whether to leave. This freed me from continually debating what I should do. It also forced me to my knees.

Wellshire Presbyterian financed us until we got on our feet. But they did something else that meant just as much: they took me on as an adjunct staff pastor. I attended staff meetings and developed a warm relationship with the pastors there. I treasured that fellowship, because when you're the only pastor in a struggling church, you can feel isolated.

I soon learned that trying to match the ministry of the large churches is a sure route to depression. If you're just a poor copy of the larger model, you have no reason to exist.

Our turnaround came when we realized we had a distinct style, that God has us here for a purpose, that we can supplement the ministry of the other churches and do things they aren't doing.

Wellshire, for instance, is a great church, attractive to upper income levels, and offers a reserved, dignified, formal style. Our emphasis, on the other hand, is warmth and relationships. At Calvary we capitalize on our smallness. We're more informal; we share prayer requests in the service, use music from classic hymns to Gaither and Crouch, spend time making Communion personal. We'll spend five minutes during the Lord's Supper with a "passing of the peace," and a lot of hugging and affection will be shared. You can sense that Christ is present. People have said, felt like I was surrounded with love and care." You can't always do that in a larger church.

I'm working harder now than ever, but it's easier. Once I seriously gave my ambitions to God, I saw he was doing something significant here, even if it wasn't as spectacular as some of the bigger churches.

There's enormous hope now. People are looking for something with spiritual depth. We may not be able to provide the breadth of ministry other churches do, but we can provide just as much depth. And we've found that growth was not impossible after all. We've stopped thinking we are permanently a small church. God is still sovereign. He can do with this church whatever he wishes, if we cooperate.

I looked through the Yellow Pages and measured the ads of all the other Presbyterian churches. Then I ordered an ad half an inch larger! It's worked. People have come to church because "we saw your ad in the phone book."

Our church was also hard to find— lost between a sprawling lumber yard and a large Masonic Temple, and hidden behind two huge maple trees. We put a large, attractive sign in front of the maple trees to help people find us.

Basically, we've recognized our smallness, tried to take advantage of it in our personal worship and warmth, but we've also been aggressive in trying to grow. We've acquainted our members with church growth principles. We've planned for growth, enlarging our parking area, classroom space, programs, and adding part—time staff—even though we're still under 200 in attendance. We've stopped thinking of ourselves as a small church. We're a growing church.

Never was L. Crane more minded of his precarious state than last year, when the Fort Worth, Texas, congregation he had built from scratch almost lost its modest building. A cluster of bonds came due all at once, and the Truevine Missionary Baptist Church treasury had nowhere near the $54,000 needed to redeem them. Crane, a gentle father of nine children in his late fifties who walks with a cane, knew that his flock of 200-300 would not be able to amass that much cash, no matter what kind of campaign he tried.

Such problems could have been taken almost in stride by the group just one mile up Miller Avenue. Rising Star Missionary Baptist is a mountain of a church pastored by a mountain of a man, T. H. Davis. Well over six feet three and 240 pounds, Davis leads a vibrant congregation of three to four thousand and is known throughout the city for his preaching and administrative talent.

In the end, Crane and the people of Truevine managed to get a bank loan that replaced the bonds, and so the church goes on. But how does it feel to persevere in the hot glow of a Rising Star?

When I organized the church back in 1967 with only ten members—six of them from my own family—I did it because of a special leading in my heart. I knew it was what God wanted me to do. Others have organized churches around here since I did, and that's all right. I don't see it as competition.

Those God chooses, he qualifies. He gives me what I can handle. I may not be ready to handle as many folk as Rev. Davis! But whenever I seem to forget that and start feeling jealous, the Spirit speaks to me: "Be thou faithful over a few things… ."

The fact is, there are other preachers in this city—good preachers, too—who are still in storefronts. So I say to myself, "Be content. Somebody else has fewer than you do. The Lord will elevate in his time."

Not everyone can relax in this way, though, it seems. A while back I tried to rent a bus from another church in the city so our choir could take a trip of about 100 miles. "Sure, we'll help you," the pastor said. "We always like to help a small church." He didn't need to say that. And the price he quoted was hardly a bargain. We ended up saying no thanks and finding different transportation.

When pastors get their eyes on size, the people do too. In the black community, the well-educated sometimes think that a little church makes them little. So a church like Rising Star tends to attract doctors and teachers. But they don't always work hard once they get there—things like paying their tithes or serving in the organizations of the church.

So I tell people: If you're a Christian, you can do well anywhere. And it's a word I have to tell myself from time to time, too.

First Church of the Nazarene is one of five prominent evangelical churches in the Oregon capital of Salem. But H. B. London, its pastor, has not forgotten South Whittier, California, where he started fresh out of seminary in a struggling, problem-plagued church. The Whittier Nazarene church, by contrast, was a stronghold in the early sixties with over 500 people. "We were at a disadvantage in every way—program, building, and my own abilities as a pastor," says London. "I looked around several times and said, 'Why would anyone come here to church?'

He is forever grateful to the Whittier pastor, Ross Hayslip, who encouraged him and tutored him. "I remember he helped me with my first funeral," says London. "He was a true brother; in fact, he made the difference in keeping me in the ministry when I was ready to quit."

Now, twenty years later, H. B. London has tasted success and growth, but he worries about the isolation that most ministers suffer.

Interpersonal relationships are where the ministry is weakest. Each of us struggles alone with competitive feelings. We don't call it competition, of course, but who can escape the fact that people in Salem commonly look at my church, the Baptist church, the Alliance church, and the two charismatic churches from a view of "Where's the best show in town?" And all five of us know that success or failure depends in large part on people coming through the door.

I'm a sensitive guy, and it still tears my guts apart when someone leaves First Nazarene, especially if I've failed them in some way. This is the most difficult part of the ministry. The Devil can get me centered on the two or three people who've left, and I'm totally despondent until I say, "Lord, help me to see the positive again. Help me appreciate the growth you've given."

I was in Korea not long ago and preached on Sunday morning at a mission church we had helped establish in Seoul. It's a good work; about a hundred people were there that morning. That night I preached at the final worship service—number six—of Full Gospel Central Church, to 15,000 people. What an incredible experience. I sat there thinking, What are we doing wrong?

The Lord had to steer me back to asking, What are we doing right? Sure, there are things I can learn from Yonggi Cho and the great church he has built. But I must not despise the individual lives being changed in the little church across town, and in my own church back home, and in every place where ministry is happening. I must not be comforted when others do badly, nor dismayed when others excel. I am not their opponent, even if thoughtless people sometimes view me in that light. We are Christ's laborers together.

Dennis Hester is right now where H. B. London used to be: his first church. Only he is a Southern Baptist trying to make it thirty-five miles from Lynchburg, Virginia.

The buses of Thomas Road Baptist Church reach out toward the Shenandoah foothills as far as Hester's church at Roseland and even beyond. But Jerry Falwell is not the only old pro on people's minds; Hester's predecessor had served the church for twenty—seven years. He, by contrast, is a rookie preacher—and single.

In the past three years, however, he has carved his own niche, doing things greater luminaries would never have time to do: He serves as an auctioneer in the community, and he also takes his guitar to the front porches or inside benches Of country grocery stores for pickin' and grinnin' when business is slow. "It's amazing how many people you meet that way," he says. He's bringing new life to his rural congregation as well.

I didn't think about Jerry Falwell all that much when I came up here from North Carolina. I just knew I wanted to commit myself to these 150 people and the community where they live.

Since then I've found mixed feelings about him among the congregation. Some don't like the way he handles money, but I've given him credit in some of my sermons for making us all aware of the problems and sins in our society.

Meanwhile, I've been emphasizing that what we do affects Nelson County, but it also affects the world. Obviously we can't do radio or television like Thomas Road does, but we can still have a meaningful outreach. I guess I don't have to see people coming down the aisle every Sunday. The Holy Spirit is doing his work regardless, and I know things are going on behind the scenes.

How do I see myself and my ministry? I'm not a Solomon, building a magnificent temple with thousands and thousands of workers. I'm more like Noah building God's boat with just a few beside me. It's going to take us a while, and the job is often lonely, but God did tell us to do it, and so we keep sawing and nailing. One of these days, the value of our project will shine clear to everyone.

From these and other reflections by those who have fought the downdrafts of discouragement and pessimism in the ministry, the following convictions emerge:

1. Not all God's servants are equally gifted. In one way, we are like pipelines of various diameters. Some of us were made to carry a six-inch flow of petroleum while others measure forty-eight. There is no use bemoaning the fact that our output is less and that our assigned tank fills up more slowly. As Max Ehrmann's well-known credo "Desiderata" puts it, "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

Or, in Paul's words, "God has arranged the parts of the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be." Paul also noted, as a special comfort to many of us, that "those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable" (1 Cor. 12:18, 22).

2. The standouts are good for observing but not for mimicking. The successes of others challenge us to greater vision. We only hurt ourselves and our congregations when we refuse to be stretched by what others are doing. But such models must not be picked up intact; we must put them through the testing of prayer, matching them with our own orders from the Lord of the harvest. Does each idea fit with what God has directed me to do? Otherwise, we stand to repeat the embarrassment of the seven sons of Sceva, who thought techniques were interchangeable.

3. Envy is a sin, even for preachers. God's law about not coveting another man's wife or ox applies also to his new sanctuary and his offerings. Throughout the Scripture, the examples of Cain, Joseph's brothers, Haman, and the Pharisees resound with the warning that wrong attitudes about the success of others will not go unpunished.

4. A spirit of rivalry can be diffused by praying for even greater things at the other church. Praying in one's closet is useful; praying with others is even better. When Sherman Williams started Fremont Community Church in Fremont, California, back in 1973, an Evangelical Free church was only a mile away and was running 300. "They were the most similar to us in doctrine and flavor," says Williams. "The trouble was, I tend to be fairly competitive, and in spite of all my creative efforts in the new work, they continued to be the fastest growing church in town.

"One of the ways I dealt with my problem was to start a local chapter of the NAE" (National Association of Evangelicals). "We began working at getting to know one another as a group of brothers and praying for each other's needs. In our church, every prayer service and every listing of requests included something specific about a sister church in the area."

When Williams left Fremont this past spring, his congregation numbered 500 while the Evangelical Free church was at 800, "but we probably had the closest fellowship with them of any," he says. "It's hard to keep your competitive spirit when you're praying."

5. It's OK to relish your own successes, modest though they be. Several pastors mentioned taking time to notice what went well, not being so self-deprecating as to reject their role in it. Another "Desiderata" passage says, "Enjoy your achievements as well as your p1ans." Many of us are consumed with planning to the exclusion of celebrating after a plan actually works.

6. The Master has enough work to go around. Charles Laughlin in Hammond, Indiana, says, "Too often those of us in smaller churches are a bit like Peter in John 21, asking, 'Lord, what about the other fellow?' Jesus' reply is still appropriate: 'What is that to thee? Follow thou me'" (v. 22).

It is instructive to note that during the reign of King Ahab, the Lord used three other spokesmen besides the legendary Elijah to carry his messages. Two of them (1 Kings 20:13-28 and 35-42) are unnamed, while the third (see chapter 22) was the lowly Micaiah, who at first crumbled to group pressure and only later declared a highly unpopular word from the Lord. He was no giant among the ministerium. He was only a willing servant.

We can be the same.

- More from Dean Merrill

Pastors

Counseling Blended Families

Harold Fickett with Janelle Conaway

How one pastor helps couples ward off second-time failure.

Names and identifications in the case examples have been changed.

Shaping a family with children and adults from previous families is a bit like building a car out of spare parts, only harder. It can be done, but not without a great deal of persistence, creativity, and help. The following article illustrates the obstacles and gives steps couples can take to overcome them.

Mark and Rita Cunningham, both divorcees living in Portland, Oregon, married eight years ago. Between them, they had seven children to think about: she a tenth grader, he a ninth grader, she an eighth grader, he a seventh grader, she a fourth grader, he a third grader, and she a pre-schooler. Mark is an aw-shucks kind of man who loves children and, according to Rita, “could have four blended families and it wouldn’t bother him.”

When he was divorced, his son, Paul, was a freshman in high school, just starting to play football, and very close to his father. So Paul came along with Mark, while the mother kept custody of the two daughters. Mark and Rita, then, became full-time parents to five children and Mark a part-time father to two. With his live-and-let-live attitude and his joy at having custody of Paul, Mark paid an unusual amount of attention to the boy and seemed to expect Rita to do the same.

“I thought Mark was afraid,” Rita says, “that he’d leave and go to his mother. And I was afraid to get mad at Paul because if it came down to it, Mark might choose him over me. I guess I was still insecure from my divorce. I was walking on eggshells.”

Rita’s first husband, by contrast, had virtually ignored the children and now saw them only at Christmas. He sent $100 a month per child, the amount ordered by the court, but did nothing further. Rita had seen in Mark someone who cared for his family, who would take care of the children. She didn’t count on his caring quite so much. For years, he talked to his ex-wife frequently, wanting to know exactly what his daughters were doing. He bought the girls their first cars and sent them to college. Understandably, the ex-wife remained dependent on Mark in many ways.

“She was having problems with her family,” Mark says, “going through lawsuits over money, and I’d just sort of half-listen, not really wanting to know. Then I’d hang up and forget about it.” Mark couldn’t understand why all this bothered Rita, because when she talked to her ex-husband—rarely and perfunctorily—it didn’t bother him at all.

The girls came to visit more often than Rita expected. She got along with them fairly well—although the eldest made her feel uncomfortable because she looked arid talked exactly like her mother—but there were too many people around. Too many doors banging, too many people to fix dinner for, too many children to worry about treating sensitively and fairly. And not enough time by herself or with her husband. Rita felt as if she were at the end of her rope.

Family relationships have become more complicated, not less, through the years. Rita’s ex-husband got angry one Christmas because she hadn’t sent gifts with the children for his new wife’s parents. Even ex-grandparents expect to be visited and written to. Once Rita got a call from her husband’s ex-wife’s second husband.

“Blended families” is the term for such households, and it is frequently a euphemism. The Cunninghams and others like them know that The Brady Bunch hardly tells the whole story of life in a yourkids/my-kids household. Regluing the shards from former fractures into a new composite is not only painstaking but often painful as well.

One pastor who finds more and more people asking for glue these days is Jim Smith, director of family life development at Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas. “This is a city with one of the highest divorce rates in the nation,” he says. “It’s easier to get out of a marriage in Dallas than to get out of Book of the Month Club.”

Eight years ago, when he first came to the 8,000member church, Smith set up a premarital counseling program. He strongly believed the church should not contribute to the divorce rate by marrying couples who were unprepared for marital responsibilities.

But as the program progressed, Smith realized that partners who had previously been married had different and far more complex needs than young people marrying for the first time. Spouses with children were asking their new, previously unmarried partners to become “instant parents.” When both spouses brought children into the marriage, a host of difficulties cropped up. Three years ago, Smith designed a second premarital counseling program for people like the Cunninghams.

Many churches have been reluctant to help remarrying couples, Smith says, because “to counsel divorcees who plan to marry makes it appear that we condone divorce. That’s not necessarily so. First, I always tell people I believe divorce is failure and it needs to be faced as failure. In the sense that it is not living up to God’s plan, his model of husband and wife, it’s sin.

“But given that people are remarrying, and that 40 percent of all second marriages fail in the first four years, the question becomes: Does the church have a responsibility to help people who are determined to remarry in developing secure second marriages?”

Jim Smith’s resounding yes has made him one of the most popular family counselors in Dallas. The waiting list at Highland Park is so long that in January the church will begin a full-fledged counseling center, open to the public as well as parishioners.

Because of Smith’s expertise, Highland Park attracts more than its share of blended families. But such families are not unique to Dallas, if his numerous invitations to speak in churches across the country are any measure. Eventually, Smith says, nontraditional or blended families will outnumber nuclear families in our society.

Yet, the blended family has received little attention even in the literature on counseling. (Exceptions are Suzy Kalter’s Instant Parent, published by Berkley, and Emily and John Vischer’s Step Families, from Brunner Mazel.) Until recently, most people were trying to tailor the new types of families to the model of the nuclear family. It didn’t work.

“Every problem in a nuclear family undergoes a 100-fold multiplication in the blended family,” Smith says. In addition to the marital adjustments that every couple goes through, old and new family ties—children, in-laws, relatives, and friends—create another set of responsibilities to shoulder and issues to negotiate.

Smith’s first step in counseling is to diagram the engaged couple’s old and new family relationships on paper. He shows how complicated the personal dynamics are going to be. Indeed, the potential variety in the relationships within a blended family are astounding. Consider the possible cases for each spouse: the individual may not have been married before; may be divorced; may be divorced without custody of children, with custody of some but not all, or with complete custody; and may have been divorced several times with a different arrangement in each case. Now multiply these cases by two.

Just drawing a diagram of the contemplated family structure revises many couples’ opinions of their future problems.

“The whole task of premarital counseling is to knock any illusions in the head,” says Smith. “I try to be brutally frank. I feel that’s a part of my pastoral duty.”

When one or both partners have been divorced, the second step is to review the impact of the divorce(s) on the couple. Smith sees four basic sub-relationships in each marriage: the husband/wife relationship, the lover relationship, the managerial relationship, and the parenting relationship. “The thing most couples do not realize is that divorce does not sever the last,” Smith says. Because parents continue to interact with their children, it is especially important that the raw emotional edges between the former husband and wife be finished off. “If they have not dealt with forgiveness and put the first marriage behind them, they’ll often use relationships with their children to hurt their former spouse. This creates additional burdens for the new marriage as well.”

Next, Smith discusses the role each partner will play and the expectations associated with it. Certain roles present peculiar problems.

For example, the woman who comes into a marriage that includes her new husband’s children has to overcome the “wicked stepmother” myth. With Cinderella in the back of her mind, she often tries so hard not to be a wicked stepmother that she ends up being one. She attempts the impossible task of being the supermom who brings everyone together and gets everyone to love each other overnight.

This “instant parent” usually meets stubborn resistance from the children. Suddenly overtaken by the inexplicable calamity of their parents’ divorce, they may assume that the cleavage was their fault and try in every way to get Mom and Dad back together, including sabotaging the new marriage. They may also act out of fear that the new family system will not have enough love to go around. Because of the pressure brought on by divided loyalties, their characters may change drastically.

Smith tells about working with one woman who, after a number of years in her career, married a man whose wife had died, leaving four children. Things did not exactly go like The Sound of Music. The problems started on the night back from their honeymoon, when a son walked into their bedroom to get something, without knocking or excusing himself. He did it again fifteen minutes later.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” she whispered in disbelief.

“I don’t know what to say,” her husband answered. He eventually agreed to put a lock on the bedroom door, which only brought accusations from the kids that they were being locked out of their dad’s life.

For years the woman had fended for herself and eaten on the run; now suddenly she was expected to cook three large meals a day, seven days a week. Finally she reminded her husband, “Even a maid gets a day off,” and he agreed that Sunday would be restaurant day.

It soon became apparent that the children had ordered their mother around unhindered. The new woman in the house did not take kindly to such treatment but had difficulty convincing her husband that things ought to change. “It was as if he was saying, ‘I love you, but I can’t come out and fight for you.’ “

The marriage tottered for several months before counseling intervened. Now the wife is working on standing up for herself instead of waiting for outside defense. “I went through a phase of blaming myself for getting into such a complicated situation,” she says. “God is so great, however, he can even make mistakes work for good.”

Just as a woman must contend with the image of the wicked stepmother, a man, according to Smith, is often looked upon as a rescuer. Many women descend two steps on the social and financial ladder when they divorce (e.g., if they are upper-middleclass, they become lower-middle-class). After remarrying and being restored to her former status, a woman may abdicate any responsibility for the family, letting the full weight of keeping it together fall on her husband. He must confront her about what she is doing and demand that she do her part.

In his counseling, Smith also emphasizes the need for couples to take time together, to escape for weekends alone and make the relationship “real solid real quick.” As we have seen, this is anything but easy when there are children around. But, “if the couple gets bonded well, they can usually survive the kids’ attacks on the marriage. The Bible places its emphasis on the relationship of the husband and wife and sees the happiness of the children as dependent upon the stability of the parents’ love for each other. The primary focus in any marriage has to be the relationship of the couple.”

Jack and Diane Halvorsen, with the help of Smith and others, have built a solid second marriage. They both brought children into the marriage, since Jack’s wife was an alcoholic. Diane, a good mother, was naturally awarded custody of her children. The Halvorsens have encountered similar problems to those in the other case studies and worked through them.

They cite the weekends away from their children as a key to the success of the marriage. Hour after hour on these weekends, they talked about the problems, working out solutions they could both live with when they got back to the house. They tried their best never to let one parent go it alone in raising and disciplining the children.

Still, there were many problems. The watershed of the relationship came when they understood that each would never love the other’s children in the way he loved his own. Diane says, “I was naive. I thought I should immediately love his children and vice versa. When I finally could look at him and say, ‘I will never love your children like I love mine, and you will never love my children like you love your own—now where do we go?’ then we knew we would be OK. It’s terribly hard getting there, though.”

They both view their divorces as the lesser of evils. They have each given up leadership roles in the church on the basis that divorce disqualifies them. Jack says, “Certainly the New Testament teaches that a deacon should be married only once, and I’m for that. But when I look at the Bible and see the number of people whose lives were similar to mine—David, and so many others in the Old and New Testaments—people who failed, messed up, and did all the bad things human beings can do, then I’m confident of having been forgiven.”

Each blended family is different and has its own set of problems, many of them totally different than in the nuclear family. Every pastor certainly does not have the gift of counseling, especially for such complex situations, but Smith recommends the following strategies for anyone:

(1) Get the resource books and give them to the people involved. Sometimes just having the problems articulated and knowing that other people have them can ease tensions.

(2) Bring people in similar circumstances together and let them talk and learn from each other.

(3) Take in a seminar on the subject, and try to understand the grief involved in divorce and the forgiveness needed by the couple whose marriage has failed.

“People do not live up to God’s ideals, and in some ways they can’t,” says Smith. “It’s great to proclaim, ‘There is no back door to marriage; you have to make it work no matter what.’ That sounds beautiful, and I believe it, but the idealism of my theology and the practicalities of what I see in this office don’t merge.

“I’m dealing with fallen people, the wounded—some from their childhoods, some through marriages—and they come in here bruised and broken and bleeding. To say, ‘You have to be healthy before you can come in here’ is like going to the hospital and saying, ‘You’re too sick to be in this hospital. Get out.’

“We talk a gospel of hope but don’t always practice it. The fear, I suppose, is that if we do, the floodgates will open. Well, we may think we are the valiant lad with our finger in the dike, but in reality the whole dam has already burst, and the reservoir has moved down into the valley.”

Still, recovery is not impossible. Says one instant mother, “My relationship with God is in a whole new place these days. Before my marriage, it was just he and I. Now it’s he and I and a whole bunch of other folks. I’m learning to wait on him for the help I need to deal with my problems.”

- More from Harold Fickett with Janelle Conaway

Pastors

How to Say No Graciously

Douglas J. Rumford

Saying no at the right times frees us to say yes to God’s calling.

If anything runs against the grain of Christian leaders, it’s saying no. Somehow the call to ministry is interpreted as a surrender of personal choice. The late-date beatitude seems to be “Blessed are those who burn out, for they shall be comforted in heaven.” Yet one skill essential to long-range effectiveness is the ability to say no. As Charles Spurgeon said, “Learn to say no; it will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.” The freedom to say yes to important concerns comes from the discipline of saying no. Productive ministries flourish when a person determines priorities and says no to anything detracting from them. But here’s the rub: How do we say no? How do Christian leaders deal with the deluge of requests and needs they face daily? How do they set their limits? How do they say no graciously, without

offending? To find some answers, I interviewed ten pastors, one seminary president, and two administrative assistants in a variety of denominations. The subject stirred provocative dialogue. Saying no is a significant daily problem. As Roger Fredrickson, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Wichita, Kansas, said, “It’s never easy to say no because of the very factors that brought us into the ministry in the first place: service and sacrifice.” But nearly everyone interviewed provided a rationale for saying no.

To do so graciously, without defensiveness, we must first see the legitimacy of refusal.

It’s OK to Say No

First, we can say no because we serve a gracious God. Our view of God strongly influences our stewardship of time. Keith Brown, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, confessed: “I used to view God as a perfectionist who was never quite satisfied with my achievements. It took me quite a while to learn that God really isn’t happy when we’re working ourselves to death.” George McCausland, a Methodist pastor in Pittsburgh, helped Brown come to this understanding. “The greatest moment in my life,” he told Brown, “was when I resigned as manager of the universe.”

Second, it’s OK to say no because our value comes from who we are in Christ. Over half the pastors interviewed said the primary reason it’s hard to say no is because they want to be liked and respected. Gordon MacDonald, pastor of Grace Chapel, Lexington, Massachusetts, said of this insecurity, “The temptation we face is how we can manage the situation to give a reasonable yes and keep the people liking us.” To say no is to risk rejection, a price many leaders fear paying. They assume that the secret to being liked is ceaseless, selfless activity. But this openended, accept-all-comers policy is a ticket to ineffectiveness and frustration. As one pastor confessed, “There was a time when I said yes to everything and nearly lost it all.”

The ability to say no draws strength from the proper image of ourselves as human partners with God—with the stress on human. We are not adequate to meet every need. Our sense of value is vested in God and his image within us, not in the weight of our achievements. Awareness of our need to overcome insecurity and the deep desire to be liked can free us from bondage to yea-saying.

Third, it’s all right to say no to some things so we can give a wholehearted yes to our calling. Gary Sweeten, minister of discipleship at College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, said: “Our activity cannot be based solely or even primarily on the need, but on the call of God. The needs will always outstrip our time and resources.” Sweeten alluded to Christ’s decision, in the face of great needs for healing, to answer God’s call to move on to another village to preach the gospel. When Christ came to the end of his earthly life, he had not filled every need, but he had fulfilled his calling.

Leaders often fall as easy victims to the “madness of God.” John Fletcher of the Alban Institute describes this as “the most insidious seduction experienced by the clergy—falling into the temptation to assume the role of omnipotent helper, instead of living out the dependence on God they preach about on Sunday mornings.” A clear sense of call sets us free from the delusion. But it takes courage to hold fast to our call. “You cannot last in pastoral ministry,” Keith Brown observed, “until you have the courage to disappoint people. If we cannot say no, the pastoral ministry will become a burden too great

to bear.” Many of the pastors surveyed described their sense of call in terms of an equipping ministry.

T. Garrott Benjamin, pastor of the Second Christian Church, Indianapolis, Indiana, said: ”It used to be easy for me to say yes to many community responsibilities. Then I began to see how this was counterproductive, in the long run, to equipping others in the church for these responsibilities. Don’t say no without an alternative; say no in order to say yes to equipping others. Rather than spread myself too thin, I now want to spread the ministry through others.” Recently, Benjamin was asked to serve on the Affirmative Action Committee of his denomination. He saw an opportunity there to spread this ministry through someone more qualified than himself. He recommended a woman from his congregation who heads the Affirmative Action Program for Indianapolis. “Her gifts are being used, and I’m free to pursue my own call,” he said.

The ease with which we can say no depends a great deal on whether the church is pastor-dependent or lay-centered. Greg Groh, pastor of Glastonbury Community Church in Connecticut, said, “The ultimate goal of church life is not that everything run smoothly, but that the people experience the reality of God working through them, even if things run rough.”

Hot Spots: When It’s Hard to Say No

Although most pastors and leaders agreed that it’s never easy to say no, there are times when it’s particularly difficult. David Hubbard, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, said, ”It’s very hard to say no to deeply committed people whom you trust, especially when their ideas are good, but the resources aren’t available to implement them …. Saying no will help these people in several ways: first, to protect them from being hurt down the line; second, to enable them to direct their energies in more fruitful ways.”

Important, influential people put our nay-saying power to the test. One pastor received a call from a significant leader in his congregation and community asking him to serve on a community service board. Rather than disappoint the man and risk losing respect, he said yes. Consequently for two years he spent three hours of his day off doing something for which he had neither the gifts nor the desire. “Now,” this pastor says, “I am able to say no. When a call comes, I say outright that I appreciate the affirmation of the offer but realize I wouldn’t be the right choice.”

Another hot spot is the choice between flock and family. Ron Rand, associate pastor of College Hill Presbyterian, confessed, “I used to put my family second in the name of ministry and thought it was godly.” Over the last five years, he and most of the other pastors surveyed have made deliberate efforts to say yes to their families, even when that means saying no to the flock. Rand has scheduled weekly “club times” with each of his three boys and a weekly luncheon with his wife. These are inviolable commitments. When someone asks to see him then, he replies, “I’m sorry, I already have a commitment, but is there another time that’s good for you?”

Gordon MacDonald works closely with Gail, his wife, to set the family calendar at least six to eight weeks in advance. “By scheduling my family first,” he said, “it’s much easier to know the commitments I can fulfill.”

What about emergencies? The pastors surveyed said that over the years of ministry, there were few genuine crises that required immediate action. When such did occur, they responded immediately, without hesitation. But rather than encountering full-blown crises, most pastors battled the lure of the urgent. The following experience of one interviewee illustrates the problem.

The phone rang after midnight. When he answered, it was Mary.

“Hello, pastor. I’m sorry to call you so late, but I just can’t sleep.”

“What is it?”

“I wondered if you could go visit my friend in the hospital tomorrow. I know she isn’t a member, but she could use your help.”

“Couldn’t this have waited until morning?”

“But I couldn’t sleep. I’m very concerned.”

“All right, I’ll see what I can do. Good night.”

The next day, he made a special trip to visit Mary’s friend. While there, he learned that Mary hadn’t even visited her friend, though the friend had been in the hospital over a week.

Urgent requests test a leader’s skill and sensitivity. They are perhaps the most difficult to refuse, yet as General Eisenhower often told his soldiers, “The more important an item, the less likely that it is urgent; the more urgent an item, the less likely that it is important.” The task is to discern truly urgent matters from those presented as urgent.

The first step is to know a fact about ourselves: Leaders tend to thrill at the opportunity to be the savior in a desperate situation. Consequently, they may not take time to determine the genuine need. Greg Groh commented, “Sometimes my own need to help may be greater than the person’s need to be helped.” This tendency springs from our shaky self-image.

“A lot of us,” according to MacDonald, “measure our importance by emergencies and the broken calendar—like a doctor.”

A second step concerns the phone.

“I began to experience real progress,” said Keith Brown, “when I realized that every time the phone rang, it wasn’t God on the other end of the line.” Often, phone calls that come at home aren’t urgent; they’re convenient to the caller.

Groh has developed a policy concerning calls at home. “If the person indicates a need to talk about something important, I say right away that I can talk for fifteen minutes. If we need more time, I suggest we schedule an office appointment. This encourages the person to get to the heart of the matter. It also communicates availability at some other time. I’d much rather deal with a person face-to-face; I feel I can minister more effectively.”

Another hot spot is commitment to denominational leadership. Roger Fredrickson spoke of the dilemma facing a pastor: “When we are yearning for renewal, especially in the mainline churches, we may be beguiled by ecclesiastical authority and stretch ourselves too thin.”

Fredrickson served as the national president of his denomination in 1970-71.

“When they asked me recently to serve on the General Board, I felt I could say no because of the present priorities of my ministry and congregation.”

Stretch Points: When Yes is Best

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God … it is part of the discipline of humility … that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.” When does God shatter our schedules and call us to stretch?

The most obvious time to stretch is at times of personal crisis. Gordon MacDonald said ministers must trust the “pastoral gift” to determine response to such needs. “There is a time to go above and beyond the plan,” he observed. “That’s why it’s essential to consecrate our mind and choices at the start of each day. Then we can listen to the Holy Spirit and know when to break the rule of our calendar.”

T. Garrott Benjamin asserted: “Any pastor who won’t make exceptions denies himself the joy of service and sacrifice. Sacrifice your schedule.”

Staff relationships also call for stretching. Those pastors serving in multi-staff situations generally agreed that the staff’s well-being necessitated generous availability. Gary Sweeten said, “It’s important to stretch when the matter concerns the overall welfare of the staff or church, even if it won’t benefit me personally.” Part of servanthood on a staff is the assertive choice of saying no to yourself. Clear, honest, consistent communication nurtures the best stewardship of everyone’s time and gifts.

David Hubbard notes the opportunity for growth as another stretching time. “There’s a certain sense,” says Hubbard, “that all I bring to my work is myself. I don’t bring a hammer or a paintbrush; I bring my gifts and experiences.” Consequently, it’s worth the effort to push in order to seize growth opportunities. But he also offers this word of caution: “We can only stretch like this a few times for short spaces.”

Foundations for Saying No

When it comes to actually saying no, four principles help cultivate proper expectations for ministry. These might be considered preventive medicine.

• Put your own personal and pastoral priorities on the calendar well in advance. When Keith Brown receives the predictable Sunday morning at-the-door request for an appointment, he says, “If you can call Tuesday, I’ll give you an answer.” Monday is the day he devotes to extensive planning. With the planning done, he can give a ready answer to any requests.

This planning has a second benefit of minimizing guilt, especially when taking personal time. William Henson, pastor of First Baptist Church of New Orleans, said, “The first thing I do is say yes or no to myself before the Lord.” He mentioned an incident that at one time could have threatened him. While playing tennis at lunchtime, a lawyer from the community called across the courts, “It must be great to be a pastor and play tennis whenever you want!”

“What he didn’t understand,” Henson said, “was that this time was planned. I could fully enjoy myself because I wasn’t neglecting any responsibilities.”

• Consistently communicate your priorities and time policies to staff, lay leaders, and congregation. Getting a no hurts most when it is unexpected and seems unjust. People need to be educated as to what they can reasonably expect from you. For example, Gary Sweeten’s call is to be an equipper of counselors, not a therapist. When someone asks him for therapy, he replies: “Unfortunately, I just can’t do that. But please don’t take this personally. The elders of the church have called me to equip people for ministry. I cannot do long-term therapy. I will meet with you once with someone else who can carry on from there.” More than once he’s received a note saying: “Thanks for turning me down. I was upset at first, but the Lord put me with someone who has really helped me.”

Many of the pastors preach and teach their congregation and officers the nature of biblical priorities. One pastor said, “Of course, this means I give my lay people permission to say no to me as they get their own lives in order.”

• Make your secretary a partner in guarding your time and sticking to your priorities. She can be an invaluable asset, especially in screening the initial requests. Sarah Blanken, ministry assistant to Jerry Kirk, said: “When a request comes in, I try to get the information Jerry will need to make a decision. Since he has communicated his priorities to me, I can almost tell right away if this is something he could do. If it’s doubtful, I inform the person but assure him that I will discuss it with Jerry and get back to him. I don’t want there to be any false expectations from the start.” She understands her role as being a link between the person and Jerry. “I want to be a channel, not a block. My goal is to make people feel they have gotten to him, even if they don’t speak My goal is to make people feel they have gotten to him, even if they don’t speak with him directly.”

Since, especially in larger churches, the secretary will often communicate the negative answer, it’s important how she relates to the caller. Inez Smith, administrative assistant to David Hubbard, said: “My first priority is to establish rapport and trust with the caller. I want the person to know I will do all I can to be helpful.” She’s learned that often she can provide what the person needs without interrupting Hubbard.

“In order for a secretary to serve effectively in this way, teamwork is critical,” noted Inez Smith. The pastor or leader needs to invest the time to communicate with the secretary. Sarah Blanken also emphasized this point, “Jerry has spent much time with me so that I have a heart for his ministry. His goals are mine. There’s a high price to pay in time, but the benefits are tremendous.”

• Cultivate assertiveness. Realizing it’s all right to say no is half the battle, perhaps the easier half. Then comes application. Assertiveness is saying no in a way that is honest and respectful. David Augsburger, in Anger and Assertiveness in Pastoral Care wrote, “Theologically, the assertive lifestyle recognizes that loveless power violates, powerless love abdicates, but power and love in balance create justice.” Rather than say yes in resentment, we do justice to ourselves and others by saying no when necessary.

Steps to Saying No

With these four foundations in place, the following steps aid in saying no to a specific request.

1. Analyze the request. Gary Sweeten spoke of three factors in the analysis. The first is to get the facts straight.

The second is to consider the personal impact. How will this decision affect my goals, my time, my family? This is a time for growing self-awareness. David Hubbard responded: “I must ask myself why I am saying no. A leader who is honest with his own inner process grows in integrity, objectivity, and trustworthiness.”

The third is to consider the perceived impact on those involved. Where does my no leave them? How should they handle such a situation in the future?

2. Communicate acceptance of the person. Divorce your answer from anything having to do with the personal relationship. By showing empathy, warmth, and respect, we reassure the person that our negative response is based on our perception of God’s will, not on him or her as an individual.

This is especially important in staff and administrative relationships. Hubbard noted that “people develop emotional commitments to their suggestions. Since the renewal of any organization depends on a constant flow of new ideas, you don’t want to squelch suggestions. Affirm their work and encourage them to come back.”

3. Explain as much of your reasoning as possible without breaking confidences. In some situations, an explanation may not be necessary. Several pastors guard their family time by saying, sorry I’m not available; I have a firm commitment.”

In many cases, however, people are better able to accept a no if they’re given the background. They can benefit a great deal by entering into the reasoning process.

4. Invite the other person to respond to your decision. Ask for feedback to be sure the person understands your response and reasoning. This provides further opportunity for clarification and keeps the lines of communication open.

When we say no firmly, we are able to say yes faithfully. Our ministries grow in effectiveness and integrity as we steer our course in obedience to God’s call. We experience the liberation of depending on God to supply the needs we can’t. All in all, good stewardship necessitates saying no. As Ron Rand prayed in closing our telephone conversation, “Lord, keep us from the maybe’s—they’ll kill us.”

- More from Douglas J. Rumford

Pastors

Secrets of Harnessing People Power

Leadership Editors

A conversation with Donald V. Seibert

Pastoring a congregation is sometimes like refereeing a set of Golden Gloves matches. Fighting begins with the preliminary scraps: music committee versus choir, nursery workers versus Sunday school superintendent, Christian education board versus youth pastor. And then the championship bout: elders versus trustees.

You may not see any knockouts; few wild haymakers ever land solidly. But the infighting can be brutal. Participants can be sore for weeks.

How can a pastor stop the hurting and start the healing? How can he prevent internal squabbles from overshadowing ministry to the needs of the community? That’s what leadership requires.

Donald Seibert has seen conflict not only in churches but in high-pressure corporate board rooms. As chairman and chief executive officer at J. C. Penney, he’s gained a reputation as a peacemaker. And in peace, the company has prospered.

In 1981, a year when most retailers were taking their lumps, Penney’s earnings rose 44 percent on a mere 4.5 percent increase in sales. What was the secret? Business Week pointed to a new management style, “keyed to group decision-making … consensus management.”

Seibert, architect of the new atmosphere, is scheduled to retire next August. But for years his approach to management has been to develop a team that can continue without a hitch when key individuals leave.

Seibert was vice-chairman for the White House Council on Families during the Carter years and currently serves on the Advisory Council for Productivity Improvement.

He’s also an active member of Long Hill Chapel in Chatham, New Jersey, where he leads Sunday night congregational singing, teaches Sunday school, lends his voice to various music ministries, and has been an elder and a trustee. For several years, he has also helped lead a small Bible study group of top corporate executives.

Seibert’s pastor, Paul Bubna, and LEADERSHIP Contributing Editor Don Bubna (Paul’s brother) recently interviewed Seibert to find out how his view of biblical management fits the church. Here’s what they discovered.

What leadership tensions are common to both business and the local church?

In business, tensions arise when the chief executive’s objectives somehow differ from those of long-standing workers in the business. In the church, the same tensions arise when the senior pastor wants to do one thing, and some of the church pillars—Sunday school superintendent, chairman of the board of elders, etc.—want to do something else. The tensions are further compounded by misunderstandings about where the business—or the church—is really heading.

Can you give an example of this?

I was involved in a church that had a strong commitment to foreign missions—a high-profile missions conference, large missions budget, and so on. A few years after I joined, the pastor was succeeded by another man who shared the commitment to missions but also felt that our church’s involvement in local ministries was not what it should be. So he tried to motivate us in the direction of local ministries, and his effort was completely misunderstood as a denunciation of foreign missions. The situation grew dramatic—people raising their voices and their opinions. The whole problem could have been avoided if the pastor’s intentions had been communicated successfully to all levels of the church.

So pastors have the obligation to articulate direction clearly—to educate the church on what they’re trying to do and how they want to do it.

Exactly. At J. C. Penney, whenever our management team prepares to issue a statement, whether it’s a press release or an internal memo, we ask ourselves two questions: (1) Is this easily understood? (2) Can this be misunderstood? These questions are quite different, and often our original statement fails the second test and needs to be completely rewritten.

How do you measure effectiveness?

We use a number of techniques: attitude surveys, informal visits by members of the senior management committee, discussions with people at different company levels. If you take time to ask questions, you find out quickly what your people understand and do not understand.

Isn’t all this rather basic?

Yes. Communication skills are based on common sense. But often they’re so simple you ignore them. You see, there’s a distinction between management and leadership. Management is the process of assuring that the programs and objectives we have set are implemented through effective administration. Leadership, on the other hand, has to do with motivating people.

Both are strategic skills, for people like myself and for pastors, too. Every pastor needs to know what he has to work with before any work can get done. This means taking inventory of resources, understanding the congregation’s strengths and weaknesses, reviewing all personnel—the human resources—noting where they’re placed, and eliminating structural impediments. These are basic management tools.

If a pastor or a business person is not strong in motivating, he can enlist key people who have demonstrated over time that they have influence with others. If you can identify these people and get them committed to your objectives, they can help sell your programs and motivate others to put them into effect.

Suppose a pastor communicates to a church that God’s purpose is for them to live holy lives and preach the gospel to the world. They decide to send out X number of missionaries, build new Sunday school facilities, etc. What happens next?

First, as the pastor, I would want to know exactly how equipped I am to handle these ministry goals. If Sunday school facilities are inadequate and need expanding, I put that down as a goal. If my missionary outreach needs expansion, I put that down. I find out how financially able the church is to meet these goals, and if we have the potential to raise the money. I ask specific things like, is labor available in the church? Will we have to hire outside help?

Then I ask some more difficult questions: How many people are committed to these broad ministry objectives? Where is the support going to come from? If I don’t have a lot of people behind me right off the bat, it would be foolish to go ahead with a building program. Instead, the first objective would be to spend a whole year doing nothing but building support and developing understanding for the programs within the church. It’s absolutely critical to know you and your people are together in your goals and objectives! Good sports teams have at least two things in common: a coach or quarterback who calls good plays, and players who understand their assignments. It’s interesting that a team that works together without a highly visible star will usually beat the team that depends solely on the superstar.

Finally, goals need to be kept simple and within reason. To illustrate, I’ve worked with several volunteer choirs. A group of amateur singers may not be able to do justice to some of Handel’s music, but if you select material within their level of competence, they sound magnificent. It may take lots of time and effort, but you can gradually raise their level of competence. Perhaps in a few years, you’ll be able to come back and have these people sing Handel.

Where can pastors learn what they need to know to become better managers?

For one thing, subscribe to LEADERSHIP. I’m not being facetious—that’s a place to start. We all desperately need to keep ourselves current in our fields. Read a lot, listen a lot, go to seminars tailored especially to the ministry.

What important management principles do you feel are missing in the local church?

In the churches I’ve attended, one of the biggest conflicts has been between lay stewardship leaders and lay spiritual leaders—typically the trustees versus the elders. Ideally, trustees raise and manage money and tangible resources; elders provide spiritual leadership These two functions aren’t mutually exclusive, but too often lay people can’t see how their goals and objectives are common. It’s a chronic problem.

Any solutions?

Well, let me tell you what we did at Penney’s. We used to agree on our main objectives and then turn each division loose to plan: the retail division produced a plan, the buyers produced a plan, marketing produced a plan, etc. Even though we were all working from the same objective, we often found that things just didn’t mesh. We weren’t synchronized. And when the results weren’t productive, we had a lot of finger pointing as to whose plan failed.

A few years ago, we moved to a team management approach. We gathered the leaders from each division into a room and said, “Don’t come out until you’ve produced one harmonious plan.” Not only did we start to get good results, but the finger pointing stopped, because each leader was co-author of the plan.

I don’t want to oversimplify, but is there any reason why the same principle can’t work in the church? The boards of elders and trustees, for instance, could put together leaders from both boards and produce one good plan. Of course, for the plan to work, all board members must fully understand the plan and be sold on it. Again, communication must prevent misunderstanding.

Is the pastor the chief executive officer of the church in the same way as in a corporation?

Good question. I think the pastor is the church’s CEO, but the two positions are not parallel. As the CEO of a corporation, everyone reports to me either directly or indirectly. The CEO of a church is more like the CEO of our nation—the President. He leads, but only with our consent.

What do you expect from the pastor in this unique leadership role?

I expect the pastor to be the initiator of clearly defined, easily understood spiritual goals. I don’t expect him to develop all the programs to accomplish these goals, but he has to initiate them.

Over the years, have your various pastors successfully done this?

Not all of them. In some places I was never sure, not only of what I was expected to do in the church, but of where the church was going in general.

In fact, if you asked the members of a typical congregation to write in twenty-five words or less where they think their church is headed, you’d get many different answers.

But if goals have been openly discussed, the answers ought not to be that different.

Exactly.

Would you recommend distributing three-by-five cards in the weekly bulletin and asking members to write down their church’s purpose?

That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? But you’d pay the price of participants wanting to know later how the survey came out. And if the results were not good, you might have to acknowledge publicly that the church is not together in its mission. But if you didn’t reveal the results, people would be cool to later surveys.

An easier way might be to survey a small sample of your most committed people verbally.

What about the oft-repeated line “You can’t run a church like a business”? In what way should business principles not be brought into the church?

Businesses exist to make financial profit; without profit the business dies, and no other objectives can be accomplished. So I would say that in running a church, you should not use business objectives.

If a church sets businesslike objectives—goals for membership or per capita giving or other statistical measurements—then it’s really gotten off the mark. But in administering church programs, you should consider using good business principles.

Among other things, you’re saying we shouldn’t run over people.

Yes. Not only is it questionable morally, but I believe it’s counterproductive to run over people in any kind of situation, church or business. You may produce short gains that way, but you’ll pay the price down the road in alienated and departed parishioners.

In addition to the role as initiator, how does the pastor function as church administrator?

The buck stops with the pastor, who must assume final responsibility for the way the church is administered. That’s not to say every pastor is a good administrator. You have other functions to perform, and you’d probably like to spend more time on sermon preparation and counseling, for instance. But, regardless, you have to be accountable for how the church is run. You can delegate administration, but you can’t delegate accountability. The big danger in delegating administration—if you then walk away from it—is that the wrong administrator can gradually change the whole program of your church.

Does that mean a pastor must supervise each ministry of the church?

Certainly not. I feel I’ve been a more effective leader when others have actually done the work. And I want everyone to know who accomplished what. It’s the same with pastors. The feeling that you can do the job better yourself makes delegation difficult. But delegation is a must in any organization, and I believe people will execute a plan more successfully if it’s their plan too.

Many pastors feel threatened by people in their congregations who have greater expertise in certain skills. What can you say that will help them feel less threatened by capable people?

That’s not easy to answer. I think it’s a given that the pastor will not be the most skilled person in the church at everything. Otherwise he’d be leading the choir, singing the solos, and running the air conditioning. In my company, I can find someone who is better than I am at performing almost every function. Marketing, advertising, writing product specifications-you name it, someone can do it better.

But a symphony conductor is not usually the best French horn player, and he doesn’t feel threatened. His role is to make the whole orchestra function to its potential. You should not feel threatened by an individual with great administrative skills. Use him; help him realize his potential within the church.

But you wouldn’t want the best French horn player in the world if all he wanted to do was solo. Doesn’t participatory leadership encourage that kind of thing?

I suppose in some cases it does. But then you have the other side: When a number of people participate in leadership and administration, they help deal with the would-be soloist. The responsibility doesn’t rest entirely on your shoulders. Furthermore, in my church experience, most problems of this nature spring from deeper spiritual problems within the individual. They weren’t the result of management styles at all.

So you’re democratic as opposed to autocratic?

I am careful not to be autocratic. True, many organizations prosper under an autocratic leader. But in those places, you’ll also find a lot of unhappy people. When they find they just can’t work in that kind of environment, they leave. You don’t want that to happen in your church.

But don’t many churches have autocratic pastors?

Sure, and what happens is that a large part of the congregation becomes so dependent on this type of leader that when he steps down, he’s almost impossible to replace. One of the principal responsibilities of a CEO is to assure his company that an appropriate successor is ready to step in if something happens. There can be no interruption of the company’s growth. This is hard to pull off in companies led by an autocratic leader. In a sense, it is much better if my organization doesn’t depend on me as an individual but rather on my part in the long-range, goal-setting process. And when I leave, this process must go on.

If I sense I don’t have a very good understanding of management skills, can I still have a significant ministry?

Yes, if you recognize that management does need to happen in your church. You can have a great sense of mission, but if you don’t understand how to accomplish it, you’ve failed yourself and God. And just because you’ve never worked with management principles and tools doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Pastors are formally educated people; they have the basic intellect to understand these things. I believe a lot more pastors would surprise themselves by discovering what good administrators and managers they really are.

You’re saying a pastor could have the gift of administration and not even know it?

Absolutely. We all know people who became good golfers past the age of fifty. They never knew they had the talent.

Has your success in administration and leadership come from innate gifts, or have you developed these skills over the years?

My formal education was not in business administration. I know highly successful business people who have degrees in music, English, and philosophy. Administrative skills were picked up along the way.

As readers get ready to take the reins of responsibility in their churches again next week, what parting words can you give them?

It seems presumptuous on my part to give advice to church leaders. But in summarizing our conversation today, I believe their ministries will improve by doing the following:

Understand your own objectives, your own sense of mission and goals.
Clearly articulate those objectives to your lay leaders, and try to get some feedback as to how well they understand them.
Exercise patience, realizing that it will take time before you have enough of your parishioners behind you so you can turn objectives into working programs.
Take an inventory of your personal resources and those available within your congregation.
If you find you’re lacking in personal resources and know-how, resolve to acquire management or leadership skills through continuing education.

- More from Leadership Editors

Pastors

Single Women: Doing the Job in Missions

Tim Stafford

Many of us never discover our full potential until we’re squeezed in the vise of necessity.

MShep2 / iStock

From Mother Teresa to Ruth Carter Stapleton, from Corrie ten Boom to the legions of faithful local church leaders, models of women in ministry abound in today's Christian church. Tim Stafford, until recently editor of Step Magazine in Kenya, paints a picture of women ministering in a different cultural setting. But the challenge of fulfilling God's call crosses cultural and sexual lines.

I had a mental picture of single women missionaries when I came to Kenya. I knew them as faded women wearing faint mustaches and clothes cut for a sawhorse. They muttered to themselves. Quite obviously they had escaped from a country where no one wanted them, to hide harmlessly in a foreign land. Anyone who has attended a missions conference has seen the type. But I now think a missionary at a missions conference is like a fish on a wall. Out of context, and out of action, they have no juice. Of the missionaries I admire most, a large proportion are single women.

Discussions about women in ministry often float above the soil. Learned doctors and amateur theologians tell us the nature of mankind as man and woman, what it means to have authority over another person, what the sacraments are and who should offer them, why men may teach but women should "share." Such theoretical and theological points are essential, of course, but I think their focus is improved by data available about real life—about what happens when women actually minister. In many American churches, we have not seen enough women in leadership to know what they look like.

By a strange twist, the same people who would sputter and spew if their church chose a woman pastor have sent thousands of single women out—and have paid their salaries—to start churches, teach the Bible, and administer programs. Every mission I know of has routinely assigned women to "do a man's job." These women have often worked in lonely circumstances, with few Christian men to check their work or provide leadership. The first result we had better note is success.

Perhaps these women in leadership sparked no controversy because missions has become, at home, a totem. We display it during missions weeks and international conferences, but it has little life. Missionaries are not contemporary heroes. Maybe we have difficulty thinking of foreigners as real people. Possibly in our minds single women missionaries conform to the chain of command, in this way: God speaks to men, men speak to women, and women speak to children and foreigners.

But Christianity's widespread influence in the world today would be virtually unthinkable without missionary success. Western Christians are waking up to a world that outnumbers us, a world whose resources we need. What if Christianity were limited to Europe and America? What if it had shriveled all over the world, like a plant without roots, when the colonial empires broke down? What if we called our world conferences and could summon only a token African, a token Chinese? Would we not find it hard to maintain, before billions of eyes, that we held the hope of the world, rather than a facet of Americanism?

The church is no longer a western church; it is ineradicably international and intercultural. If America crumbles, Christ's body does not. We owe that in large part to single women, who have done a great deal to spread the gospel.

Second, we must note very few problems. Men and women missionaries have worked together with no more than normal tensions. A women-dominated church has not been created. I defy anyone surveying the church in Kenya to tell me which part was planted and nurtured by women and which by men. There is no difference. You will not hear stories about women missionaries out of control, dominating men or falling into cultic or heretical teaching because of the authority they have been given. These male nightmares have proven groundless.

Third, these single women have themselves been helped while helping others. This is what has most struck me in my African experiences.

It is no easy job to be single in our churches. Women in particular, when they reach a certain age, become objects of pity. But once women arrive overseas, no pity is wasted on them. They are given tough work to do.

Arlene, for instance, came to Kenya as a poor candidate for adventure. She was very particular that things be done "just so." She easily dissolved into tears, especially at a word of criticism. Yet she could be critical and perfectionistic with others.

No one who knew her would have chosen to send her to the Turkana region, but the denomination did. Turkana is a desolate sort of hell where people die on your doorstep of starvation, knife wounds, and crocodile bites. No doctor lives within a practical distance, so the few nurses there practice everything short of heart surgery.

The heat, the isolation, the scorpions, the midnight knocks at your door—surely not the atmosphere for Arlene. She went for two months without piped water. When she got it, she noticed a foul taste after a month and discovered one dead, disintegrating lizard and one similarly conditioned bat in the water tank. No transfer was available. Someone had to be there, and qualified nurses were in short supply. So she stuck it out.

A transformation took place. She gained confidence. Tears diminished. Tensions with other staff—often high in such conditions—lessened. She adapted to working in an environment where perfectionism is absurd, and what resulted was a fine drive to get work done but with less nitpicking.

"I've done things I never thought I could do, and that others didn't think I could do," she told me. "I didn't always like it. Some aspects I hate. But now I doubt I would want to work in a tamer environment."

So it often happens when people are pushed to do what they did not think they could. They gain confidence, and they become not only more productive but easier to live with.

Lorna is of an older school. She came to Kenya in 1953, bearing a poor self-image. She was easily hurt. The mission bounced her to various assignments until, after several years, she became intensely interested in the Masai. The Masai are a handsome, much-photographed people who have rejected western development, western education, and western religion. They live (many within a fifteen-minute drive of Nairobi skyscrapers) as nomadic cattle herders, sleeping in chest-high huts made from sticks and cow dung.

They live for their cattle; it is said they support cows and anthropologists. One wastes time feeling sorry for them. They are fiercely proud of their culture, tending to look down on us and our ways. Until very recently the few Masai Christians were those who had put on western clothes, gone to school, learned English, and as much as quit being Masai. Masai Christianity barely clipped the top of the hedge, certainly never reached the grass roots.

Lorna developed a deep concern for these people and started the first Masai girls' boarding school. She slogged at that for quite a number of years and learned the Masai language with fluency.

But there was little or no fruit to her ministry. The girls who went on for more schooling might retain Christian faith, but they were deserting their culture. Those who returned to the village simply could not survi.ve: Christianity was a hothouse plant, taking no root In the village. But all this time Lorna went into the villages every weekend to preach.

Then, about nine years ago, two uneducated village men became Christians. Lorna worked closely with them. Slowly but steadily through their witness, others were converted. Today, largely through the seed Lorna planted, substantial numbers of Masai people are becoming Christians within their own cultural context. They had been targets of missions for perhaps eighty years. But Lorna was a key agent in breaking through.

According to those who knew her, God also broke through to Lorna. She remains a strong-willed woman. But through the struggles in her work and her own identity, she came to terms with God's love. She described what happened in a letter to a friend, comparing herself to a bee trapped behind a window. She had spent, she wrote, many years looking out at the grass and flowers, but only bumping against the glass when she tried to reach them. Then someone opened the window. A beautiful grace and self-acceptance came into her life. Not long after that, those first two Masai men became Christians.

When people struggle, as Lorna did, to accomplish something hard, they can no longer nurse self-pity. It is exposed as an obstacle to ministry and to life. They must either despair or offer themselves to the mercy of God. It happened to Lorna, and she is better off for it. So are the Masai.

Joyce is a different story. She is at the age of fifty what I believe she has always been: vivacious, attractive, and burning with energy. She would have been so whether a missionary or not. But missions work has pulled her hidden talents into action.

With only high school and Bible school training, she was a secretary in South Africa before becoming a missionary. She has been in Kenya for twenty years, and the mission has assigned her to half a dozen different jobs, from selling books to teaching Bible. Now she has gotten the job that really fits: encouraging churches to develop authentic African music that teaches biblical concepts.

Most African hymnology is imported straight from the West. It does not fit African rhythms or melodies, and in most of Kenya, church singing is weak. Somewhere long ago someone became convinced that the exciting clashes of rhythmic sound that make African music—and that Africans most clearly enjoy—were ungodly. Joyce has been assigned by Kenyan church leaders to set the record straight, by training and encouraging composers, by seeing their work recorded and distributed, by developing grass roots interest in this "new" old music.

It suits her, even though she has no formal music training. She wishes she did. But who else will do the work, if not she?

"This is a have-not place," she says. "Many things in which you are peripherally skilled can be used for ministry. Where else would I have been involved in making television shows? I am always amazed when I learn that someone in Kenya has a talent and is not teaching it to someone else. Through the sharing, you form relationships, and that offers opportunity to minister."

Would Joyce have been equally challenged if she had stayed at home? It's not easy to know. She certainly would not have sat quietly. I doubt, however, if anyone would have thought unconventionally enough to throw her at such a job. She might have directed the choir, but she would not have explored a whole new way to minister through music. In Kenya she has been used to her limits, and she is happier for it.

I describe these three women because their lives excite me. They have been pushed close to their full potential. The results for them and for others are obvious.

There is another side of being a single woman missionary. As Joyce told me: "Life here requires more personal security than living at home. You are always a foreigner. Small mistakes that your own culture would forgive hurt the church here. And you can't just go next door and get another job. You go home as a failure, a missionary dropout. You have to love yourself in order to minister without needing to be needed." She told me of a woman nurse who so lacked security that she diagnosed disease in every person she met. She needed to create dependent relationships, and nearly killed people with her large doses of unnecessary drugs. "She's at home now, working in a laboratory and doing fine. Someone checks her there." When you challenge people, they sometimes fail. But the failures do not diminish the successes. Women who would, at home, have been set aside, have been used to accomplish astonishing work. Paul alluded to God's habit of using unlikely vessels when he wrote, "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." We do not know what people are capable of until we try them. They do not know themselves. When discussing women in ministry, I would rather not focus only on the women who clamor for a greater role. Why not think of the many women who have quietly accepted diminished roles? Their quiet may not mean all is well. Some women, like some men, need to be pushed to make the most of their time on earth. Many single women missionaries have been.

- More from Tim Stafford

Pastors

Five Temptations of the Pulpit

Ben Patterson

Preaching is the most visible aspect of ministry—and the most easily misused.

It was years ago, early in my preaching ministry. I made a broad gesture to the right, and every eye swung that direction. Wow! I thought to myself. I can do that to people! That marked the beginning of my acquaintance with the unique temptations of preaching.

Performing While You Preach

The first and greatest temptation is the one I experienced that day—to be a performer in the pulpit. In one sense, that’s exactly what you must do when you preach—perform. Anyone who dares get up in front of a group of people and take twenty-five minutes of their time to deliver a monologue must be something of a ham. If you loathe that kind of exercise, chances are you will not be effective as a preacher.

But there’s the catch. To preach well, you must constantly open yourself up to the deadliest temptation of the preacher: to put on a performance that will draw the applause and appreciation of the audience. There is no problem in all this if the audience, for you, is God. But unfortunately, God is not usually easy to see. What we do see is the crowd of people sitting in the pews. They are very easy to see, and too often the ones whose approval we seek.

Jesus laid his finger on this temptation in the sixth Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” A pure heart is one with unmixed motives. Soren Kierkegaard says a pure heart wills one thing—to do the will of God, seeking his approval. That’s why Jesus looked at the Pharisees, who did their good works to be thought well of by others, and said, “They have their reward.” They were getting just what they were looking for: human approval.

Look for God, and you will see him. Look for people, and you will see them.

John Bunyan once preached an especially powerful sermon. The first person he spoke to afterward told him so. He said, “Yes, I know. The Devil told me that as I walked away from the pulpit.” I cannot count the number of times I have stood outside the door of the sanctuary after I have preached, ravenous for the praise of my congregation. I had worked hard the previous week to be well prepared. I gave the delivery every bit of energy and concentration I could muster. In many ways I brought to the pulpit all the intensity I would bring to racquetball. Now I am even drenched in perspiration underneath my robe. I want to know, did I win?

In moments of clarity, I know only God can make that judgment and hand out the trophy. But it seems that things are rarely very clear to me after I have preached. Bruce Thielemann put it accurately when he wrote, “Preaching is the most public of ministries and, therefore, the most conspicuous in its failure and the most subject to the temptation of hypocrisy.”

Preaching the Words of God

A second temptation for the preacher is to hear the Word of God only as something to be preached. The pressure to produce a sermon, combined with the fact that sermons are to be preached out of the Bible, can render impossible a simple reading of the Bible for its own sake, or for your own sake. Every time I pick up the Bible and begin to get some insight into a particular passage, I immediately start thinking of how I can preach it to my congregation. I almost always bypass its relevance to myself. That is deadly. Paul the apostle alluded to his struggle with this temptation when he expressed his concern that “after preaching to others I myself will not be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:27).

The Book of James uses the metaphor of a mirror to describe the Word of God. The purpose of a mirror is to reveal an image: yourself. In his brilliant essay “For Self-Examination,” Kierkegaard described how people will examine the mirror, measure the mirror, list its properties, write dissertations on the uses of a mirror; in short, do everything and anything but look at the person the mirror would reveal! So it is with preachers who hear God’s Word only as something to preach to someone else.

Preaching that has integrity comes from men and women who have wrestled personally with what they are proclaiming publicly. I fall prey to this temptation so easily that I must discipline myself to study passages devotionally before I attempt to sermonize on them. And I must do this months in advance of the actual preaching.

Turning Stones into Bread

A third temptation for the preacher is to try to turn stones into bread, to give people what they want instead of what they need. Because the preacher is, in one sense, a performer, there is always present in his psyche the desire to be liked and appreciated by those he preaches to. That desire can become so strong that he becomes as sensitive as a seismograph to the audience’s tastes. It is at this point that the preacher can turn into a propagandist.

All propagandists really do is convince you that the thing you want will be furthered by their products, their candidates, or their messages. Whenever the gospel is portrayed as something that will help people get what they want, uncritical of what they want, it is made an instrument of propaganda. “The Bible has to define your needs before it meets them,” says James Daane. “It has to tell you what you need—the nature of your hurts, pains, aches. In other words, the Bible has got to tell you what sin is, because you don’t know.”

A variety of this temptation to give people what they want is the overuse of stories and illustrations. Everyone who preaches knows how effectively a good story or joke gets people’s attention. The problem with stories is that they lend themselves so readily to being interpreted any way the hearer wants. A congregation of widely divergent points of view can hear a sermon filled with a lot of entertaining stories, and everyone will leave the sanctuary feeling edified. The pastor really told it “like it is.” Of course, if everybody’s point was made, no point was made. But the pastor came off sounding good to everyone.

Prophet and Priest

A fourth temptation for the preacher is the opposite of the one just outlined. It is the temptation to fancy oneself something of a prophet to the people, and to do so at the expense of also being their priest. A prophet, as we all learned in school, is one who stands before the people on behalf of God. A priest is one who stands before God on behalf of the people. Prophets are mouthpieces. Priests are intercessors. Prophets confront the people with God’s truth and their lies. Priests hold up the people before God’s grace.

The temptation of being a prophet at the expense of being a priest is that you can blast away at your people from a position of splendid isolation. You don’t have to go through the agony of caring for the ones you wound with the truth. You can sit in your study, do your exegesis, and give them the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But the truth you give might bludgeon someone without leading on to healing.

John tells us that Jesus came with grace and truth. Among other things, that means the Word became flesh and walked among us. It was no disembodied truth, but it came incarnate in one who shared our flesh and walked in our shoes. As the writer to the Hebrews put it, Jesus was a high priest who was not “unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are …” (4:15).

A preacher simply does not have the right to blast away at his people with the truth—especially if it is the kind of truth that wounds—unless that preacher is also himself wounded by that truth and heartbroken over the plight of his people. A very wise old pastor once told me of two equal and opposite errors a preacher can fall into. One was to neglect his study for his people. The other was to neglect his people for his study. Both are tragic. Both are in constant tension and competition with each other. But both must be done.

Making the Bible Relevant

I offer one last temptation of the preacher. It is the temptation to try and make the Bible relevant, to make it come alive. This particular temptation used to be the sole province of the liberal theological tradition. But in the past few years, it has gained a number of victims in the evangelical community.

I succumb to this temptation whenever I feel the Bible needs my help to be believed, that somehow it requires my zinger illustration or my perceptive restatement into thought forms more familiar to my congregation. Most often today those thought forms are the categories and vocabulary of pop psychology.

The sin courted in this temptation is the presumption that it is the Bible that is dead and we who are alive. Of course no preacher would admit to that formal proposition. But many act as though they believed it.

Is the Bible relevant? Dr. Bernard Ramm once remarked, “There is nothing more relevant than the truth.” The longer I preach, the more convinced I become that the best thing I can do is simply get out of Scripture’s way. The soundest homiletical advice I know is not to try to preach it well but just to try not to preach it badly.

This does not mean the preacher should not translate the message of the Bible in words people can understand. But the purpose should always be to help them see the relevance of the Scriptures, not make the Scriptures relevant. In the final analysis, the Word of God authenticates itself through the work of the Holy Spirit, often in spite of, not because of, us preachers.

One might conclude from reading this article that to be a preacher is to walk into a minefield of temptations. It is. I don’t think I have ever preached a sermon with even 30 percent good intentions. And I have despaired as I have looked inside myself and seen the many ways I have fallen before the temptations of the preacher. If the purity of my motivations were the basis of my being in the pulpit, I would have been kicked out long ago. But, thank God, that is not the basis. The basis is the call of God. I am there only because he summoned me many years ago, gave me the necessary gifts, and said, “Start talking about me.”

In our liturgy we confess our sins corporately, before we hear the Word of God through the reading and preaching of the Bible. I must also do so after ward. That is the pattern for me: confess, preach, confess again; and pray Martin Luther’s sacristy prayer:

Lord God, you have made me a pastor in your church. You see how unfit I am to undertake this great and difficult office, and if it were not for your help, I would have ruined it all long ago. Therefore I cry to you for aid. I offer my mouth and my heart to your service. I desire to teach the people—and for myself, I would learn ever more and diligently meditate on your Word. Use me as your instrument, but never forsake me, for if I am left alone I shall easily bring it all to destruction. Amen.

- More from Ben Patterson

Pastors

Using Temptation’s Power

Terry C. Muck

Implications of a Leadership survey

Apparently the subject of temptation makes people uncomfortable. When we sent out 500 questionnaires to our readers asking about their greatest temptation, less than 6 percent responded. Usually 30 percent return our surveys.

For those who did respond, the familiar problems surfaced: sexual temptations headed the list (41 percent), followed by the temptation to quit (30 percent), ambition (22 percent), and money (7 percent).

The small response, however, raised a question—is temptation too painful to discuss? Most agree that morbid attention to weaknesses can be destructive. Someone once said that temptations are like tramps. Treat them kindly and they return, bringing others with them.

Yet the Bible teaches that we should confess our sins one to another. And the advice usually given on how to cope with temptation—to focus more clearly on Jesus—works. As one reader noted on his survey, “My most successful antidote to temptation’s fever has been a regular discipline of prayer and Scripture study.” It’s not as if we’re dealing with an impossible problem—just a very difficult one.

Perhaps we’re reluctant to discuss temptation with each other because we know how to deal with this powerful and universal force but still don’t do it. That makes us feel powerless. Even if we’ve conquered most of the big areas of sin in our lives, tucked away in one corner is an area where we regularly fail. We know we should give it up to the Lord, but we don’t.

One of the things that makes discussion more palatable is to understand the reason for temptation’s strength and universality. Its source, of course, is Satan. But the fact that we can be tempted and that the desire is so strong is because we’re human beings created in God’s image.

Animals aren’t tempted. As Mark Twain once noted, “Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.” The uniqueness of being human rests in our ability to choose between good and evil. Everyone is tempted—God created us with the capacity for moral choice.

But God also created us with a natural desire to fellowship with him. Theologians tell us we all have the imago dei, the image of God in us. Because we’re made in God’s image, we have a very strong desire to know God.

Although this desire is very strong, it’s rarely pure. It is this desire Satan perverts for his own evil ends. Subconsciously at least, we seek God in the beauty of creation, in other human beings, in our religious observances. He is present in each of these things.

But instead of patiently enjoying the beauties of the world, its people, and the Church, waiting for God’s grace to fill our desire, we attempt to possess the eternal. Eve, in a paradigm of all desire turned sour, ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge instead of gazing at it in awe. We have followed in her footsteps. Instead of seeking the image of God in other people, we play power games with them. Our sexual unions, without God as the unifier, are sophisticated exploitations. Wealth accumulated out of insecurity is an attempt to dominate the material world. The wealthy of the world buy nature; St. Francis found God there.

The positive side of temptation is that our powerful desire to sin could be an equally powerful longing for Christ if let God direct it. The tragedy is that our activity-controlled attitudes demand we do something to satisfy our temptations, either by succumbing or mightily waging moral war against them, instead of letting God take control.

Seen in this light, the Bible’s advice to “watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation” (Matt. 26:41) becomes not only intellectually but emotionally satisfying. Suddenly all the advice makes sense:

The cynical Mark Twain: “There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.”

The moral essayist Walter Bagehot: “It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.”

Instead of mere palliatives, these become helpful reminders that tempting desire has a good source and needs not to be squelched but redirected toward God.

Early in his massive systematic theology, Thomas Aquinas says that “the road that stretches before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs.” We must decide our single goal in life is to become more Christlike before God can begin to use the very temptations that fell so many to shape our lives in his image.

Everett Fullman tells the story of the rock collector who polished his treasures in a rotating machine that jumbled the nuggets together until the rough edges were worn smooth. Someone asked the collector, “How do you know when a rock’s been polished enough?” “When I can see my reflection in it,” he answered.

God uses temptation the same way. He lets us be tempted in certain areas of our life until he can see his reflection. Then the testing is complete. We desire God alone.

- More from Terry C. Muck

Pastors

Building the Church Staff

Fred Smith

The secret of any organization’s success is choosing the right people.

The most important part of any organization is how the staff is put together. Great athletic coaches know they must have talent to win. Therefore they take a major hand in the hiring. Staffs that just happen get happenstance results.

Yet staffing is a vexation in the church, partly because it is innately tough to do and partly because church leaders get so little practice. But it remains extremely important. Small organizations such as churches often make the mistake of thinking they can get by with inferior staff members because they are small. The opposite is true.

In a firm of 100 employees, if one is inferior, the loss is only 1 percent. But if a church has a payroll of two, and one is inferior, the loss is 50 percent. The bright side, however, is that it’s much easier to pick one excellent person than a hundred.

Attracting quality people, first of all, means you must enthusiastically sell your organization to quality people. Julian Price, the builder of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company, surprised many by his ability to get outstanding people to join his organization when it was still tiny. He did it with his optimism, telling prospective workers, “We’re going to build a mighty company here; don’t you want to be a part of it?” The challenge of growth has brought many great talents to small organizations.

Church leaders needn’t be timid in going for the most effective people. We believe what we’re doing is the most important of all endeavors.

Perhaps the more difficult part of staffing is recognizing quality people to recruit. Here are six qualities I look for.

Six Qualities

1. The first thing I want is character. I used to put intelligence first, but I changed my mind. I found I could buttress intelligence in a person, but I could not buttress character.

A job applicant with a weak character will do a lot to hide it, of course. Many people have told me they had a lot to learn about the job I was trying to fill, but no one ever admitted to having a weak character and needing help.

Statistically, however, most management failures come from lack of character rather than lack of intelligence. You can do many things to help a person intellectually, but you are completely vulnerable to the person with a weak character. The weakness will show up at the moment of highest stress, at the very time you need the person to stand.

I have found that adults seldom correct their character faults. Personalities change more than character. After doing something wrong, they may be sincerely sorry, but then they trip again over the same stumbling block. If I know the person’s weakness, then I might structure around it, but often it’s too late when I find it. As Christians, we want to help the weak, but the church staff is no halfway house for character problems. I warn new managers against trying to do social reclamation in administration.

Character is not homogeneous, like a quart of milk. It is sectional, like a grapefruit. Everyone has good sections and bad. One person may be strongly loyal to the boss, for example, but irresponsible in the job. Another person may be loyal and responsible—until he gets a chance to enhance his ego. Ego will weaken character as much as anything I know. You can’t say the person has a totally bad character; you can only say that some sections are bad.

Willie Sutton, the bank robber, loved his work but cried when he had to lie to his mother about where he had been. As a manager you must evaluate all the sections, build on the good ones, and avoid the weak ones. If you have trouble evaluating character, get someone with good insight to help you.

2. A person must have enough intelligence to do the job and also be a possibility for promotion. I am never afraid of gathering too much intelligence in any organization. This is particularly true in an organization such as the church, which has no real limit on its possibilities for growth. A business might have capital or territorial limits, but there are few limits on a church that the right staff cannot break through. So pastors should insist on job competence that is above the average.

3. I want a person who is flexible—and who doesn’t confuse flexibility with lack of integrity. Some church staff members accuse one another at times of lacking integrity, when the issue has nothing to do with moral integrity. The only thing at stake is flexibility.

One of the things that indicates a healthy flexibility is optimism. Positive people look upon change as challenge, and they go for it without hesitation.

Some people have a magnetism for iron; no matter who they deal with, they are always attracted to whatever good is in the person. Others have an allergy for clay; they break out in hives over whatever is bad in the people they meet.

Church members, of course, sometimes have a great deal of clay, and people who have the allergy can’t even sit next to them in church. They keep wondering why the pastor doesn’t preach against the clay. The pastor, meanwhile, has a magnetism for iron; he is constantly finding the good in people and encouraging it. The clay hardly bothers him.

Churches need to be staffed with flexible people who go for the iron and aren’t bothered by the clay.

Those with an allergy to clay are perhaps better off in an evangelistic organization, where they can proclaim their faith to large numbers of people they see only once. But those who have to work with the same people fifty-two weeks a year had better be magnetized to iron.

As far as integrity is concerned, I am more anxious that a person be consistent than that he or she always be minutely right. Sometimes a baseball commentator will say, “The pitcher’s establishing the strike zone,” meaning he’s throwing the ball high, low, in, and out, trying to find out what this particular umpire considers the zone to be. What’s important is how this umpire is going to rule throughout the game. Once I establish what a staff member will consistently do, I know how to work with the person and in what areas I can trust him.

4. I like to have people around me who are excited about learning. Their rates of learning change over time, of course, but if they are not oriented to growth, if they prefer instead to protect the status quo, I will have a stagnant organization.

Nothing helps a staff grow more than a leader who wants to grow. I like to watch Leonard Bernstein conduct the symphony. He lets the musicians see what great music does to him. He inspires them while he conducts, and that’s what every executive should do. The orchestra enjoys pleasing Bernstein.

5. As soon as the number of staff members begins to increase, I must pick team players. A true team player does not poach on other people’s responsibility but is available to help at their request. When he sits in a meeting, he is open in his remarks; he does not go around making comments privately, either suggestions or criticisms. He speaks up in the meeting. A team player, however, is not the same as a yes man. Some managers have a hard time knowing the difference. A yes man gets along with the boss, but the other team members ostracize him. And whenever the boss points him out as exemplary, the rest get sick at their stomachs. They lose respect for both the boss and the yes man.

6. Finally, I want a person who is comfortable being reviewed. In business, of course, we do this regularly; we even have departments that specialize in reviewing procedure. Job descriptions tell us what the person should have been doing, and periodically we assess the performance.

But in a Christian setting, many staff members seem to resist review. They feel they have been called by God, and therefore the pastor or the department head is not really their supervisor—God is. If their concept of what God wants them to do (which is usually what they happen to enjoy doing) conflicts with what the organization expects of them, it’s too bad for the organization.

Such an attitude brings havoc into the work of the kingdom. Extending your prayer time in the morning is no excuse for showing up late for work. Good managers have to make these things clear.

I want persons in my organization who are subject to review, who receive it willingly, and who profit from it.

Seeking and Finding

How can we find and hire such people? One of the first things to realize is that we are not hiring friends. We are hiring assistants and associates—capable people who like to do what we do not like or cannot do, and who will do it better than we ever could.

In fact, I do not have to like the person, and he or she does not have to like me. But we must respect each other. A lot of managers make the mistake of hiring people they like rather than people they respect. They end up choosing individuals just like themselves, duplicating their own strengths and weaknesses, and not advancing the overall organization. Hiring is often a disagreeable thing to do, because it comes at a bad time. We are disappointed that someone has just left, we’re short-handed, we’re anxious to fill a vacancy before the roof falls in. So we do not select carefully; we rush things.

Actually, the higher the position to be filled, the more time we should spend filling it. We have a responsibility to the persons we choose, because if they don’t work out, we will have to replace them. I won’t replace myself for making a bad selection; I’ll replace the other person. So since he or she is the one who stands to suffer, I should select very carefully! I can be careless with my own future, but not with someone else’s.

Quick interviews simply do not tell enough. What often happens is that the interviewer is something of a salesman and, instead of making the person prove his ability, he wastes time selling the job. If the person leaves having not accepted, the interviewer feels as if he failed.

The opposite should be happening: the hiring person should be the customer, not the salesman. I refuse to hire a person who does not say something along the way that makes me hire him. I assume this person will not make it until I am convinced otherwise. When it comes to hiring, I am not trying to be benevolent; I am on a search for outstanding qualities.

And the search takes time. The right person may not convince me in the first twenty minutes. That is why, if I am hiring a man, I like to travel with him. You can find out so much on a three-day trip. You gain insight into the person’s physical energy. You find out whether he has a large intellectual cup or a small one. A person with a small intellectual cup is quickly satisfied; he listens to a ten-minute sermon or presentation, and he’s set for the week. No curious questions, no asking for proof of your statements, no ongoing dialogue; his cup is already full.

Such a person may be exactly the one you want—for certain jobs. Some work is very monotonous, and you do not want people with too much curiosity in such a position. But for other jobs, you need an individual with large intellectual thirst.

As I travel, I watch the person read a newspaper. I notice what sections he turns to quickly and what stories he reads. I also watch how he dresses for various occasions. One of the finest Christians I know is entirely too casual about his dress. He does not realize how this creates disrespect for his leadership. He feels it shouldn’t, and perhaps he is right—but it does. This is one of the tests of leadership: that you recognize what affects people, not what should affect people.

On the road, I also notice how courteous a person is. I watch how he treats doormen, taxi drivers, waitresses. How he tips is a big indicator for me. I see how careful the person is about being on time. I simply cannot work with someone who does not respect a schedule. Some are not offended by this, but I am.

Perhaps I learn the most by riding with the person, letting him drive. An automobile magnifies the average person’s sense of power. I find out how this person watches the pattern of events. If he drives in a constant state of emergency, slamming on his brakes, speeding up to get out of somebody’s way, or wandering from lane to lane, I make mental note that this person is not a good planner. He doesn’t look ahead and watch the patterns form in advance.

If he berates other drivers for creating a problem, or if he constantly harps against the city for how it maintains the streets, this tells me something else. It tells me that this person has a hard time accepting problems and circumstances that are beyond his control. Successful people work within the limits of what they can control and don’t waste their energy on other things.

In the car, I also notice the man’s respect for property. The way he treats an automobile tells me how he will treat my company’s typewriters, computers, and other equipment in the future. I’m amazed at the people who will run right over a chuckhole; either they are not watching the roadway, or they don’t want to make the effort to avoid the hole. Again, this is not a good managerial mentality.

Do you think I am being too exacting? I simply want to know what to watch out for. My philosophy is to utilize a person’s strengths and buttress his weaknesses. But until I know his weaknesses, I cannot do anything to buttress them.

Personnel evaluation is not the time for extending Christian tolerance. The whole idea of evaluation is to be objective. Hence, prejudice is out—but so is tolerance. The art of good management is to avoid being surprised. If I do not evaluate people to the best of my ability, I will face constant surprises.

The reason why references are so useless in Christian circles is that they are usually sabotaged by tolerance. No one wants to blow the whistle. I think it is my Christian responsibility to be as objective as I can when giving a reference. This has gotten me into trouble; I’ve been on several different boards where I ended up being the bearer of bad news, simply because the rest of the members knew I would do it. They all rationalized that I must enjoy this kind of thing, and they saved their popularity in the process.

A law firm once told me that they paid almost no attention to references anymore; they could learn everything they wanted to know by studying the person’s history instead. Their belief was that successful people will be successful in the future, and failures will be failures. They also found that most failures are very adept at explaining their failures, and when you start buying failure stories, you are only presenting an opportunity to fail again.

There is a lot of wisdom here. I believe in going all the way back to check school records, because winners start winning very early. They form good habits, they show a sense of responsibility, they respond well to authority, they are able to organize themselves.

A Harvard study of business people showed that, actually, there are very few late bloomers. The things that make for professional success are usually apparent in student days. I also believe in running credit references. I’m very interested in whether a person pays bills promptly or not.

Furthermore, I have learned that I cannot ferret out everything about the person myself. That is why I arrange multiple interviews, using other people who have good intuition. Some people have a knack for asking very clear questions that seem to plumb the depths of a person.

For example, my wife is one of the finest judges of character I’ve ever known. When she says she likes somebody, I have learned to expect good character—a person who is trustworthy, friendly, kind, and has integrity. She’s almost infallible.

I never question her evaluations, and I never make her defend them. That’s one of the worst things you can do to intuitive people. They can no more prove their intuitions than they can prove their faith. But they will still be right most of the time.

I also want the immediate supervisor and colleagues to interview the prospect. Some dictators will disagree with me here, because they don’t want to give the impression that the hiring is being done by a group. But if a person is going to work with certain people, they should help make the decision—and it is good to get them on the line recommending the newcomer. They will accept him or her with a great deal more grace; they will help him along and create a good environment, because they have a stake in his success. When a new person starts having problems, I have been known to challenge those who helped me interview as to why the new person is having problems—and then watch them work very hard to get him out of his problems!

I also remember how a man would come to apply for a machine job in my plant, and I would ask, “Who do you know in this plant?” He would name two or three people on the shop floor, and then I would go see them.

“Your friend came in and wanted a job,” I’d say. “If you were me, would you hire him?”

If something was wrong, the employee would invariably say, let’s not overdo that ‘friend’ business; I know him, but he’s not really what you’d call a friend.” He didn’t want me coming around a month later saying, “Look, you recommended this guy, and he’s no good.”

We must always be careful, and we must not be arrogant about our own ability to choose people. Most of us can be conned. Most of us tend to want to sell the job and make everyone happy. But we are not in the reclamation business. We must force ourselves to be deliberate and objective.

When You Make a Hiring Mistake

No one wants the reputation of a hatchet man. But as a last resort, you must be willing to fire people. It is more important for the staff to know that you will than that you do. It shows you are committed to your mission and are willing to prune those who will not contribute to it.

How should a person be dismissed? It depends on the reason for dismissal:

1. Character problems. In such a case, there is no reason to delay. You may not always need to make the person a public example, but you should move swiftly.

2. Personality conflicts. First of all, consider whether this person might work out in a different spot in the organization. I have moved troublemakers who happened to be very capable people, because it seemed that they would have been fine working alone. So I have talked to them straight, told them exactly what was wrong, and given them another chance in a new assignment.

Some have straightened up; more have not. I had to keep watching the problem and not consider it solved, of course, as time went on. And in many cases, the only final solution was to let them go.

3. Irresponsibility, shoddy work. A manager begins by documenting, gathering enough specific information about errors or bad judgments to support the charge. If I am convinced that a person has gotten into a mental state of going to do as little as I can get by with,” then I try to inject a good, hot spark of fear. There is something in all of us that profits from that occasionally. I need to get scared every once in a while myself. It helps my humility, it boosts my effort, and it focuses my concentration tremendously.

Whenever I am tempted not to act in a difficult personnel situation, I ask myself, “Am I holding back for my personal comfort or for the good of the organization?” If I am doing what makes me comfortable, I am embezzling. If doing what is good for the organization also happens to make me comfortable, that’s wonderful. But if I am treating irresponsibility irresponsibly, I must remember that two wrongs do not make a right.

When Not to Fire

If, however, a staff member is failing because of inadequate training, that is a different story. We must be patient and provide training; that is part of our Christian duty as managers.

The long view will serve us well in all matters of hiring and staffing. Part of leadership is anticipating problems before they fester. We must sit down occasionally and ask, “What is going to be the result of what we’re doing now? How will the relationships among these people look in two years, in five years? Who is growing? Who is not growing? Who is accepting responsibility and doing a good job? Who isn’t?” Pastors would be wise to have a formal or informal review committee with whom they can sit and assess personnel strengths and weaknesses confidentially. From this they can project together what kind of church they will be down the road.

If they want to grow in a certain ministry, and they see the individual in charge of that area cannot carry it where they want to go, they can deal with that problem in a prudent and thoughtful way. Can the person be trained, or must he be replaced?

The well-managed organization is not a place of high drama, with many sudden elevations to power and heartrending lurches into the street. It is a place where people are carefully chosen and guided to work together to fulfill goals that are bigger than all of them.

- More from Fred Smith

Dealing with Depression

Dealing With Depression

Recent studies have shown that at any given time, up to 10 percent of the U.S. population may be experiencing a significant level of depression. A substantial portion of that group is seriously depressed and despairing of life itself.

This is a cause of tremendous concern within the helping professions, for there is no real agreement about the causes and treatment of depression. Millions of dollars are spent annually on research to rectify this situation, to seek the best form of treatment.

Several recent books discuss problems of depression. Depression and the Integrated Life: A Christian Understanding of Sadness and Inner Suffering (Alba House), by Richard Berg and Christine McCartney, represents an interesting attempt to give a Christian perspective on some of the current psychological and medical thinking about depression. In a style suited for a general audience the pair discuss the influence of physical fitness, diet, and neurological state on depression.

When considering psychological theories of depression, Berg and McCartney look at the problem almost exclusively from a behavioral and cognitive perspective. These authors conclude that depression results when a person loses “life satisfaction.”

The authors’ behavioral perspective focuses upon the need for meaningful, satisfying relationships and positive enjoyment of life. The consequences of our inability to obtain these satisfactions initiates a downward spiral of depression, followed by decreased self-confidence and motivation, and then a further loss of satisfaction, and so forth. They discuss briefly how to get out of that downward spiral.

Cognitive perspective focuses upon how self-defeating thoughts keep people depressed. The despairing individual, for example, might consistently overgeneralize (from “I burned the dinner” to “I’m a complete failure at everything”), catastrophize (“I can’t be happy at all if my marriage isn’t perfect”), or have generally negative, pessimistic thoughts about the future and about other people. These ideas can be attacked directly by someone attempting to help the depressed person.

Berg and McCartney also consider the spiritual dimension, discussing briefly whether depression is sinful, and concluding that while it may be the result of unrepented sin, the depression is not of itself sinful. Instead, a depressed life is one that lacks the wholeness and balance God wants us to have. This chapter mainly discusses how depression drains the spiritual life, in part causing a person to have an unhealthy preoccupation with sin and sinfulness. In conclusion, the authors emphasize the need for healthy repentance and reconciliation with God, for total honesty in all relationships, and the need for spiritual, supernatural healing of the disruptive effects that events from the past can have upon people’s lives.

Depression and the Integrated Life is written with compassion and insight, and ably presents some contemporary views of depression. Uneven in places and disappointingly limited in guidelines for the person desiring to overcome depression, the authors instead focus on understanding, not alleviating, depression.

Denis Cronin’s Anxiety, Depression, and Phobias (Prentice-Hall) is a specialized work that attempts to explain various pharmacological treatments of depression. The chapter on understanding depression lacks clear focus, however, and Cronin’s all-too-brief discussion of the theory of depression is so narrowly Freudian that only a patchwork of topics could be covered, and these did not coalesce into an informative presentation.

Although professionals disagree about depression, there is growing awareness that they have concentrated too exclusively on depression in adults and ignored similar experiences among adolescents and children. This oversight probably stems from classical psychoanalytic theory, which denied that children could experience true depression though they could experience mourning.

Childhood and adolescent depression are currently a major concern to health professionals. One reason is that the suicide rate among teen-agers has about quadrupled in the last decade. Even among preteens, suicide is no longer unheard of. A particularly welcome look at this difficult problem is Kathleen McCoy’s Coping with Teenage Depression: A Parent’s Guide (New American Library). Wasting little time on theoretical discussions of depression, McCoy focuses instead on recognizing and dealing with a depressed adolescent. She competently sorts out what sensitive parents are capable of doing, and what may require professional help.

It is extremely difficult to recognize depression in the young, who rarely attach that label to themselves. Most frequently they drift into what for them are unusual patterns of behavior. For example, an outgoing boy may become progressively more withdrawn, or an achieving adolescent girl may slip into doing inferior schoolwork. These youngsters may become irritable, act out, or “smart off.” They may become rebellious and sullen, or extremely self-critical. Alcohol or drug abuse are ever-present dangers, as is promiscuity. These youths may report vague physical complaints that have no valid medical basis.

Adolescents who suddenly lose parents or siblings are at high risk for depression, as are those who have experienced a major move, or have broken up with a boy- or girlfriend. Losses can also accumulate slowly, as, for example, for a child whose parents are struggling with a bad marriage, alcohol abuse, over-commitment at work, or their own emotional problems. These parents may have had little emotional sustenance to give the adolescent over an extended period. A child’s chronic inability to make friends, to do well at school, or similar factors, can produce a parallel effect.

McCoy quotes a psychiatrist who states, “For every difficult problem, there is usually a simple solution that is wrong.” The most common parental response to adolescent depression is denial: “What do you have to be depressed about? These are the best years of your life!” Such parents have forgotten how painful the transition from childhood to adulthood is for most people.

McCoy deals with specific problem areas that may be related to depression. These include substance abuse, running away, truancy, school problems, and promiscuity. Her approach is based on building adequate communication, and she makes many concrete and reasonable suggestions in this area. She complements this with a discussion of fair-handed disciplinary methods and straightforward confronting of problems. This book is refreshingly practical and should be read by youth workers as well as parents of teen-agers who are experiencing problems.

Reviewed by Stanton L. Jones, assistant professor of psychological studies, Wheaton College Graduate School, Wheaton, Illinois.

Reaching Up To Heaven

Breaking the Prayer Barrier, by Michael Baughen (Shaw, 1981, 168 pp., $4.95), and A Treasury of Prayer, by Leonard Ravenhill (Bethany House, 1981, 162 pp., $3.95), are reviewed by Leslie K. Tarr, professor of communications, Central Baptist Seminary, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The mere mention of prayer is sufficient to bring a sense of guilt and inadequacy to most of us activists. It is the more important, then, that we be confronted with the challenge to pray. These two books—one a new volume by a British Anglican rector and the other a compilation and condensation of seven books by E. M. Bounds—deal with that neglected ministry.

The new volume, Breaking the Prayer Barrier, should become a classic on prayer. Indeed, it is one of the most helpful, scriptural, and practical books I have ever read on the subject. One can only hope that it receives a wide circulation.

The opening section on the need for “a God-centered perspective” in prayer should be read and pondered by modern Christians who are bombarded with simplistic “ask and get” prescriptions. “The world revolves around God, not around me,” Baughen reminds readers. “There are more than four billion people in the world and you and I are just two of those; we will begin to see ourselves in perspective when we realize that we are only a tiny part of the human race—a part of God’s creation under his sovereign control.”

Although he stresses five foundation basics—faith in God as God, the character, purposes, ways, and promises of God—he stresses that those do not impose oppressive limits on the believer. Rather, they provide solid ground on which to approach God and understand his response.

I wanted desperately to be enthusiastic about the second book, A Treasury of Prayer. After all, several generations have been blessed by Bounds’s books on prayer. Leonard Ravenhill, the British evangelist and writer, has tried valiantly to condense seven of the books—one chapter per book—but the result seems like seven skeletons. Readers should rather attempt to lay hands on one or more of Bounds’s complete books.

Briefly Noted

Ethics. Students of modern theology are in the debt of Geoffrey Bromiley once again, this time for translating Karl Barth’s massive Ethics (Seabury). It is challenging reading. R.E.O. White has written what could be the best introductory text available on the history of Christian ethical theory in Christian Ethics (John Knox). Wolfhart Pannenberg’s reflections are now available in English in Ethics (Westminster). Brian Hebblethwaite has written a thought-provoking introduction in Christian Ethics in the Modern Age (Westminster).

Specialized aspects of ethical theory are examined in: The Necessity of Ethical Absolutes (Zondervan), by Erwin Lutzer, which argues for absolutes; Morality As a Biological Phenomenon (Univ. of Calif.), edited by Gunther Stent, looks at sociobiology from varying points of view, not all convinced that absolutes exist; Signposts to Freedom (Augsburg), by Jan Milič Lochman, takes the Ten Commandments as absolutes and relates them to Christian ethics; Dorothee Soelle tries to locate ethics Beyond Mere Obedience (Pilgrim); and William Neblett looks at The Role of Feelings in Morals (Univ. Press of America).

Three new books examine ethics and society: Biblical Ethics and Social Change (Oxford), by Stephen Charles Mott; The Human Center (Fortress), by Howard L. Harrod; and A Community of Character (Univ. of Notre Dame), by Stanley Hanerwas. I found Mott’s book especially helpful.

Pornography is analyzed in: Pornography and Silence (Harper & ROW), by Susan Griffin, a thoughtful, painful book and The Porno Plague (Bethany), by Neil Gallagher, which is too graphic for its own good.

Ethics and education is carefully examined in Teaching Faith and Morals (Winston), by Suzanne M. De Benedittis.

What promises to be an epoch-making work is Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Vol. I (Univ. of Chicago), by James M. Gustafson. It breaks with traditional Christian thought at several critical spots. Christians struggling with technology will appreciate Ethics for the Professions: A Christian Perspective (Augsburg), by Darrell Reeck.

World Vision has called it quits in Sweden. It opened an office there two years ago and spent at least $150,000 on publicity. But, according to an interview with Swedish World Vision officials interviewed in the weekly magazine Broderskap, the Swedish mass media had circulated claims of World Vision involvement with the CIA, and receipts had not topped $15,000. World Vision retains a Europe office in London.

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It’s OK to Say No

Hot Spots: When It’s Hard to Say No

Stretch Points: When Yes is Best

Foundations for Saying No

Steps to Saying No

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Performing While You Preach

Preaching the Words of God

Turning Stones into Bread

Prophet and Priest

Making the Bible Relevant

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Six Qualities

Seeking and Finding

When You Make a Hiring Mistake

When Not to Fire

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Dealing With Depression

Reaching Up To Heaven

Briefly Noted

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