Jack was an incredible car mechanic the best that Johnson Ford had ever had in their 35 years of doing business. When the service manager retired, it came as no surprise to anyone that Jack was asked to take his place. He and his wife were ecstatic about the job advancement as well as the pay in crease. The other 20 mechanics at Johnson Ford all respected Jack and were very much in support of him as their new manager.
Three months later, Jack lost his job.
While Jack could make an engine hum, he didn't have the managerial skills necessary to make the shop hum. Jack was spending 90 percent of his time under the hood of automobiles helping his fellow mechanics work through problems that were a little bit too sticky for them to handle. He was doing what he knew how to do best. The only problem was that no one was man aging the garage. Parts were back-ordered; invoices and bills were misplaced; customers would wait for hours before anyone would talk with them; and most days were way overbooked with customers. Complaints flooded the owner of Johnson Ford. Try as he might, Jack was unable to shift from being a skilled mechanic to being a skilled manager.
.........
After seven years of ministry, good old Pastor Humbottom left St. Paul's for another church. Every single member of the church loved him. The members gave him $7,000 as a going-away present. During his tenure, however, Sunday morning worship attendance had dropped from 175 to 115.
After 14 months of work, the search committee proudly presented George Evans to the congregation for approval as their new pastor. Right from the word go, Evans made it clear that he had no intention of doing the Christian ministry for the lay people. On the contrary, his desire was to train and equip the lay people so that they might be God's ministers.
In the excitement of the new relation ship, no one paid much attention to what was going to prove to be a significant difference in the style of ministry be tween Evans and his predecessor.
Within three months of Evans' arrival, worship attendance rose rapidly; the Adult Christian Education Department grew substantially; and a leadership training system initiated a new type of ministry. However, rumblings from the older members were rolling in swiftly and furiously. Humbottom had been a hand-holder, a tear-dryer, and a pastor who regularly got around to visit all the members in the parish. Evans, in contrast, was a teacher, a motivator, an organizer, and a visionary. Humbottom's ministry made no waves, no friction, and no progress. Evans' ministry propelled the church to surge ahead--and raised waves and generated friction. The church found the change in pastoral style and leadership difficult to accept.
.........
Pastor Dexter, utterly exhausted, dropped onto the sofa. He had just returned home from a three-day church growth seminar where he and three other pastors had been pumped up and motivated to muster the troops in order to achieve great things for God. In the course of an average week, Dex busied himself with twenty different ministries at King Road church. Now the church growth experts told him to undertake three new things that would cause his ministry to "explode." Dex felt like he was going to explode. He knew that if King Road church was going to make any progress, he had to turn most of these 20 ministries over to laypeople. But every time he had tried this in the past the ministry simply dried up and died. Dex would retake the reins and continue being a one-man show. There was simply no time left to envision for the church or to train leadership for tomorrow.
However, six years as pastor of King Road church had extracted a heavy toll on Dex and his family. As he lay on the sofa, he felt a mixture of anger, frustration, failure, depression, and aimlessness. His was a case of burnout. Dex turned on the TV. Johnny Carson was introducing his next guest. The fellow was an amazing juggler who proceeded to keep 20 china plates spinning on the end of sticks all at the same time. One after another the juggler started new plates spinning, and when he finally got plate number 20 aloft, plate number 1 was just about ready to crash to the ground. The juggler raced over to it and furiously spun it back into orbit just in time to rescue plates number 2, 3, 4 . . . This went on for about seven minutes until the juggler was exhausted and Carson took a break for a commercial.
Dex stood up and yelled out to his wife, "That's it! That's exactly what I feel like; a plate spinner. I spend all week, every week, trying to keep those 20 ministries from falling apart. I never take time off to look at the larger picture and begin to envision for the future."
Dex had stalled in his ministry be cause he was unable to shift his leader ship style from doing everything himself to being an equipper of God's people.
Three different experiences. Each one illustrates how difficult it is to shift from a maintenance/survival mentality to an envisioning/growth mentality. Jack, the mechanic, could not make the shift. Members of St. Paul's could not make the shift. And Dex, our burned-out pas tor, couldn't make the shift. And yet, if a church is going to grow, the change must take place and without grinding too many gears.
Such a transition involves touching three significant bases.
Pastor's self-image
An effective leader needs to have the heart of a dove and the hide of a rhinoceros. Nothing significant was ever accomplished without a barrage of criticism from onlookers. Learning how to handle that criticism and at the same time maintain sensitivity is no easy task. Most pastors try to avoid any type of criticism because they want everyone to like them. The result is smooth waters, like Pastor Humbottom had, but no progress. The pastor who takes charge and leads will find conflicts and hurdles, and he or she needs to learn to handle them creatively. I have found that I can defuse my critics and antagonists by finding points that we can agree on, by learning to laugh at myself, and by refusing to get defensive no matter what.
Second, a pastor needs to be involved in the constant process of self-discovery and self-evaluation. No pastor, however successful, ever has all the cards sorted out. Life grows in abundance, fruitfulness, and insight as we reshuffle and regroup the cards that God has given to us.
I have experienced one of the most liberating exercises by working through Peter Wagner's Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow. There I dis covered that God had not gifted me in every single area of ministry. For the first time, I felt OK about the fact that I don't really enjoy visiting shut-ins or counseling people or doing judicatory work. I realized that God had not gifted me for these ministries, but that He had gifted me for leading the church. I could now give myself the green light to invest heavily in the areas in which God has in fact gifted me.
This concept of giftedness leads us to the third important area of vision. For years I prided myself on being a jack-of-all-trades inside the church. I could handle every area of ministry, from shoveling the church sidewalks to burying the dead, from calling on new folks to designing confirmation material. I was a one-man band, like our friend Dex. The problem was that the church did not grow in depth or in numbers. I slowly discovered that if I focused my energy in the area of my giftedness, not only did I enjoy my work more, but fruit began to appear. I began to evaluate and sort out my priorities in terms of my gifts and my vision for the church. I delegated to others items that did not directly contribute to my vision/focus or were not in the area of my giftedness. I even dropped some ministries that I enjoyed but was not gifted in. Little by little, my identity, my gifts, my role, and my direction began to shift and come into focus. As all these areas jelled, my self-image strengthened.
Congregational expectations
In spite of Paul's counsel to "equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ" (Eph. 4:12, RSV), pastors generally spend the bulk of their time ministering to people personally rather than equipping them to minister. Most laity expect that from their pastors.
Father Mulcahy, the chaplain on the TV serial MASH, illustrates this point well. Father Mulcahey is a kindhearted, honest man who prays for the sick, baptizes babies, counsels soldiers, and raises money for the local orphan age. What a lovely minister.
However, when it comes to leader ship and direction in the MASH 4077 unit, no one ever thinks of consulting him. His job is to hold hands, not to lead.
Most congregations hire pastors to hold hands, not to lead. Pastors are expected to hatch, match, and dispatch. They are expected to be present at all sorts of meetings, but not to lead. If the pastor were to recruit, train, and engage a group of lay visitors, no one would object until that person was in the hospital and was visited by only a layperson. "The pastor didn't care enough to visit me," he or she would complain. Well, as a matter of fact, the pastor cared enough to train a dozen laypersons to visit and multiply the ministry. (I seem to remember one ancient Rabbi doing something like that.)
One of my mentors in the faith was a workhorse in the area of visitation. When I asked him if he had ever trained laypeople to visit, he said, "Oh, yes, many times. But our laypersons constantly complained, saying, 'It was a nice1 visit, but it's just not the same as when the pastor comes.' " My pastor friend got so tired of trying to explain that his job was to train God's people for ministry rather than to do the ministry for them that he gave up and went back to daily visitation. I'm afraid that decision lowered the ceiling on his ministry more than any other single factor.
If the pastor is going to make this shift from chaplain to leader, it helps to know from the outset that it will be an uphill battle all the way. About one third of the congregation will pull along with you after a few years of training and teaching. This group, a delight of any pastor, will be the powerhouse for tomorrow's church. Another third will allow you to lead, equip, and delegate as long as you are still willing to marry their daughters and bury their parents. In time they will accept the shift in pastoral roles, but they won't help to accomplish it. You can count on the final third to vote no on every issue. It doesn't matter what the issue is--they are against it because anything new means change, and change is the last thing they want. These folks will dig in their heels and disagree with you either to your face (rare) or behind your back (common), or simply wait you out (very common). It takes vision, skill, and confidence to lead the first third; handshakes, smiles, and hugs to lead the second third; and a cast-iron will, guts, and funerals to bring the last third along.
The trust factor
The third and critical element to facilitate the shift from the maintenance/ survival mentality to the envisioning/ growth mentality is trust. Before any lasting changes can be initiated, mutual trust needs to develop between the pas tor and the congregation. Most established congregations are like huge ocean liners, needing a lot of time and a lot of room to turn around. Too much change, too fast, will pull the church apart. The pastor needs to monitor the rate of change, allowing only so much change to take place at any given time.
No congregation that has been together through thick and thin is going to follow a pastor they do not trust. Laypeople will put up with a certain amount of change from a new pastor during the honeymoon period. Unless the pastor wins the trust of the people, the change will be short-lived. In any case, the most productive period of a pastor's tenure does not begin until after his or her fourth or fifth year, and those first years are best spent earning and building people's trust.
I find it helpful to conceptualize trustbuilding in banking terms. Every time a new pastor visits a family in their home, sees a shut-in, marries a couple, baptizes a baby, comforts a widow, or oversees a funeral, that pastor is making a deposit in the "People's Bank of Trust." As the years go by, the trust balance grows and pays dividends. When the time comes for the pastor to introduce change, a large balance has accumulated on which the pastor can draw.
The shift from chaplain to leader is a long and difficult process. The shift will mean saying no to a lot of good things in order to say yes to the best. The shift will demand from the pastor and the people a better understanding of the meaning of ministry--that it is God's equipping the saints "for building up the body of Christ."
