Page 3598 – Christianity Today (2024)

Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with greater eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
Acts 17:11

The skeptic who believes the Bible’s human authors manufactured their God out of psychological need has not read the Scriptures carefully.
Charles Colson

It works in offices, on college campuses, and in local churches. What is it? The evangelistic Bible study. Can you really get non-Christians involved in such a study? It happens all the time, it changes lives, and it’s easier than you may think.

How do you invite people so they say yes instead of slamming doors? Should you study a topic or a book of the Bible? And how do you guide such a study for maximum impact on lives? In this chapter, Marilyn Kunz, one of the leaders of Neighborhood Bible Studies, offers tips for effective evangelistic Bible studies.

Large numbers of people have become Christians through peer group discussions of the Bible. And when unchurched participants become serious about the Christian faith, they normally begin attending church — often the church of their group’s initiator.

Whole churches have been built using this method, and the gospel has penetrated neighborhoods and workplaces that likely would not have opened up to other evangelistic strategies.

What are the keys that make these groups succeed, causing the local church to grow? Here are five:

A “Safe” Invitation

Instead of being asked to “join” a Bible study, people are invited to a home to hear about an idea: a discussion Bible study group for adults who aren’t experts. After dessert and coffee, the host or hostess explains how the group will function, using the method of inductive (investigative) study. A twenty-minute sampler — one incident from the gospel of Mark — gives a taste of what’s ahead. Those interested set a time and place to start studying Mark 1.

The same thing can happen on the job. Meeting on neutral territory is less threatening for newcomers than meeting in a church. Lunch-hour groups currently meet every week among business people on Wall Street, research scientists at a pharmaceutical corporation, and executives and clerical workers at a chemical firm. There’s also an after-work study among garage mechanics with their Christian employer, and breakfast studies (weekday or Saturday) among small-town tradesmen and professionals. Workers who know one another through their jobs but meet in homes range from lobstermen on an island off the Maine coast to astronauts and their spouses in Houston.

Protecting Those New to the Bible

An ideal ratio is six to eight people studying the Bible for the first time with only one or two firm Christians. Groups with too many “experts” do not appeal to raw beginners.

A group of six to ten is large enough to stimulate interaction and new ideas but small enough to let everyone speak and respond to the comments of others. If a group is twelve or larger, the discussion tends to split into two or three competing conversations. The moderator has to exert strong control and may be tempted to lecture. The quiet people and those who know the least sit back. Sometimes they stop coming.

But when everyone has a fair chance, each participant is greatly influenced by what he discovers and shares with the group. What he hears himself saying about Jesus’ claims will be remembered long after he forgets what someone else tells him. We recall only 20 percent of what we hear but 70 percent of what we say. That’s why discussion Bible studies are powerful agents of change.

Studying Whole Books of the Bible

Newcomers to the Bible need to lay a foundation before they can handle studies that skip around. Using selected verses here and there to present the gospel message confuses the person who cannot set them into a meaningful context. They also put the person at risk when approached by a cult using a thematic presentation. If methods are similar, the biblically untaught person has a hard time distinguishing between what is authentic and what is counterfeit.

Those new to Bible study should start with Mark; it’s clear, concise, full of action, and does not require familiarity with the Old Testament. No wonder missionary translators usually begin with Mark.

Well-prepared Questions

Groups function best with questions that help them observe, interpret, and apply what they find in the Bible text. The questions should be forthright enough to allow each person to take a turn as moderator, moving the group paragraph by paragraph through a chapter. The material must not assume that everyone understands Christian jargon or can easily comprehend a religious mind-track.

Operating Guidelines

The following ground rules protect a group against misuse of Scripture:

1. Confine the discussion to the chapter being studied. This keeps the newcomers at equal advantage. As the weeks go by, of course, everyone’s scope of knowledge enlarges, and the group is able to refer back to chapters previously studied.

2. Expect everyone to be responsible for pulling the group back from digressions. The moderator’s job is greatly eased if others in the group help say, “We’ve gotten onto a tangent. Let’s get back to the chapter.”

3. Agree that the document (Mark, for example) will be the authority for the discussion. People should not be coerced into believing the Bible, but they can be encouraged to be honest about what it says and to refrain from rewriting it. As a group continues to study week after week, most members come to recognize the Bible as authoritative.

These guidelines keep a group on the path of orthodoxy. It’s difficult to promote heresy in a group studying a book of the Bible in context.

Not every church member should attempt an outreach Bible study. A wise pastor will not try to get “the whole church” into this approach to evangelism. Some Christians tend to tell others too much too soon. The discussion approach requires patience and a willingness to let the non-Christian build a framework of Bible knowledge and discover Christ’s claims for himself.

But once this has happened, the person is much more likely to hear and believe a gospel presentation from the pulpit or a Christian friend.

For those the church wants to encourage in this kind of outreach, a preparation series of four or five Wednesday nights or an all-day Saturday workshop may be used. Such a training program should include:

• an explanation of inductive study,

• instruction in sensitivity to the non-Christian,

• practice in introducing the idea of a Bible study to friends and colleagues,

• participation in an actual Bible study discussion.

Copies of the study questions for Mark should be available as well. (For a handbook, How to Start a Neighborhood Bible Study, and study guides, write Neighborhood Bible Studies, Box 2221, Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522.)

At one such workshop, two men were role-playing the initial invitation. Jim later reported, “When Charlie asked me how I’d like to ‘join a group and study the Word of God,’ he lost me. I was suddenly aware that a person who had never studied the Bible would not call it ‘the Word of God.’ It would have been better if he’d simply asked me if I’d like to be in a Bible study for nonexperts. I would have said yes to that.”

Outreach can start in a neighborhood with one or two young mothers from the church inviting women on their block. The daytime group becomes so valuable that they want their husbands to share the experience, and an evening couples’ Bible study begins. Next, business men and women start studies at work.

Those who come to Christ through a discussion Bible study are able to reach out to their friends in the same way. Meanwhile, church members mature spiritually and become more effective leaders in the church. Small-group Bible study is a ministry multiplier.

Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today

Witnessing involves all that we are and therefore do; it goes far beyond what we say at certain inspired moments. So the question is not will we witness, but how will we witness?
Paul Little

Let’s face it: small-town evangelism is especially tough. Most of the people in small towns are well established as either saints or sinners. And trying to change individuals even in the second category may be seen as a disruption of the comfortable status quo.

As Kenneth Vetters, pastor of East Columbus United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana, knows from firsthand experience, there are indeed difficult obstacles. But as you read this chapter, you can learn from someone who’s already been there, who identifies the hazards and points the way around them.

Small-town evangelism sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. With no municipal arenas to rent for crusades and precious few new residents to call on, how does a church pursue evangelism? Don’t “revivals” attract only the solidly saved? A few wayward teenagers might be threatened into attending one or two nights, but they usually slip out at half time to smoke in the parking lot.

Most people in the five small Midwestern towns where I’ve pastored have appeared to be either clean-living church members or well-certified nonbelievers. The lines are clearly drawn and memorized, raising a valid question: What does evangelism mean in a place with fewer than three stoplights?

The Needy Are with Us Always

The starting point is to remember that every community has people with needs; some just hide theirs better than others. No village or rural area is without the following three types:

1. Active church members who are not in a right relationship with God. Unless these are evangelized, outreach efforts in a small town will fail, since Christians’ lives are always being scrutinized.

2. Nominal church members. The children of devout parents, the spouse of the church pillar, the friend from work who occasionally attends church events…all these and others have a commitment to the church that is cultural rather than personal.

3. The unchurched. Even in the one-gas-station town, where church membership appears all sewn up, some people hide in the crevices. Maybe they moved into the area years ago but kept their membership in a church a hundred miles away. Maybe they quietly dropped out of church over some problem. They may not be hostile to Christianity, but they’ve never known the difference a joyful, consistent Christian life can make.

I’ve broadened my definition of evangelism to include reaching very nice, conservative people in small towns; they need to make the same life-changing decision as the most colorful jet setter or drug addict. I’ve also tried to emphasize not only dramatic, first-time conversions, but also a call to renewal for people at whatever stage of the Christian journey. The result is typically as many people seeking forgiveness and restoration as making first-time decisions to follow Christ.

Overcoming the Obstacles

Small towns have their own psyche. People are very concerned about what their neighbors think, since they know them by first name and may even be shirt-tail relatives. The idea of radical change is suspicious from the start — and that obviously includes the life-altering change of spiritual repentance.

Thus, a number of problems make evangelism challenging:

• People seem to be pigeonholed. A young person doesn’t move forward at a certain point of Christian growth and is sidelined ever after. People are frozen out when the church doesn’t care about them as much as it does about others. Someone more popular or more outgoing gets asked to sing or teach or organize.

My wife remembers one practice session for the annual Christmas cantata when the pianist, a high school girl, was absent. Only then did someone remember that another high school girl in the alto section could also play the piano. She sat down and played the difficult music perfectly. Why had she never been asked before for any kind of program? No one could answer.

This kind of unintended neglect can discourage a church member to the point of dropping out, and no small amount of fervent preaching or witnessing will win them back. Small-town congregations have to pay conscious attention to the gifts and potential of all their members.

• New people are not always welcome. One church member, a teacher, frequently complained to me privately that we didn’t really need altar calls in the church. He felt they were nothing but emotionalism. Yet he was a staunch supporter of the church and always the first to praise its loving spirit. He couldn’t see the connection between the two.

People are attracted to a church’s love and care but often don’t understand how it got that way. Though they may have come to the church through a series of special meetings, they subsequently question whether the church ought to sponsor such events.

Another area for this tension is the sharing of power. Older members may be eager to place new people as Sunday school teachers or youth leaders but balk at including them on the board of trustees or the finance committee. I frequently remind our nominating committee that everyone needs a position of responsibility. Most leadership positions are on a rotating basis in our church, and I think that has something to do with our growth, even though we’re in a rural area. If new members are not absorbed into the life of the church, the fruits of our evangelism program will quickly shrink.

I remember in a former congregation how a young family became deeply interested in the Christian life. The wife especially got involved in working with children through a weekday club. Mostly unchurched youngsters came for music, crafts, Bible stories, games, and refreshments. This dedicated woman and her helpers were having an effective outreach.

Were the lay leaders overjoyed? Hardly. They complained about “the little street urchins” messing up the bathrooms and wondered if church property was being stolen. Because of the negative attitude, the new family was driven away to another church, which welcomed their dedication and talents.

• Social class counts. Years ago, one of my congregations had just finished a quarterly study on poverty in America and the church’s need to reach out with physical and spiritual aid. The course was now ending with the traditional pitch-in meal and program.

Just as the serving began, there was a knock at the church’s back door. A ragged-looking family stood beside a beat-up station wagon. The father wanted to know if the church had a fund to help transients; the children were hungry.

Many were distraught that this unkempt family would interrupt a church meeting. Others, fortunately, invited them inside and heaped their plates high with food from the ample potluck table. They also invited the family to stay for the program afterward.

I could hardly contain my smile as I opened the program by telling the group that they had already been given a test on the past three months’ study material. I then asked the guests to introduce themselves — a church family from a nearby town who had agreed to play the part of tramps for the evening. It was a memorable moment.

As a small-town pastor, I must continually encourage church members to stretch, to accept all people, even if from a different socioeconomic class or from a family not highly regarded in the community.

• In generally conservative areas, evangelism often sounds like fanaticism. In one church, a teenage daughter of long-time church members made a solid decision for Christ. She began studying her Bible and attending the youth meetings. Her parents became upset. Concerned that she had gone off the deep end, they forbade her to attend all but Sunday morning worship.

She became the only girl in town who had to sneak out of the house for a prayer meeting.

Fear of radical Christian living expresses itself as resistance to any kind of emotional response. Perhaps people have been burned by high-pressure tactics in the past or have seen too many shallow conversions fade. Whatever the reason, we must hold to the goal while maintaining a patient, caring attitude. Confrontation and argument don’t help. Only Christ’s love can free these people from their fears.

• Lack of Christian maturity always hurts. The tiny, rural church I served as a student pastor had three gentlemen who would argue over who was the worst sinner. One fellow grew tobacco but didn’t smoke it. Another didn’t grow it or smoke it but sold it in his store. The third neither grew it nor sold it but did smoke it.

They were joking, but the level of debate says something. In small towns, where everyone knows exactly how everyone else lives, many become enslaved to legalism. They find it easier to follow the prevailing moral codes than to think for themselves how God would have them live. The checklist of do’s and don’ts pre-empts opening up to God’s leading.

One antidote to this, I have found, is to involve people in witnessing. And in a small town, it doesn’t have to be flamboyant. Subtlety goes a long way.

For example, one young father decided to quit playing cards during his lunch break at the local factory and read his Bible instead. The other men, who had known him for years, ridiculed him at first but were intrigued by his discipline. Some were eventually drawn to his church through his unassuming, natural style. Needless to say, his own Christian faith was deepened as he shared his new life with his friends.

Special Meetings: A Modest Defense

A lot of negative things have been written and said about “revivals,” crusades, missions. But in small towns and rural areas, an evangelistic series of meetings can work well. They are still an accepted way for people to be challenged to receive Christ. They are part of a tradition, and tradition is very important in a small community.

In my ministry, special meetings have been a significant element of evangelism. They take work, of course. You can’t just set a date and hope people show up. A lot of planning, prayer, and effort by many church members is required.

Several weeks ahead, I usually preach sermons that create anticipation and heighten a feeling of need. My subjects have included how Jesus can make a difference in daily life, and what salvation is and how it’s obtained. As the people start to desire spiritual awakening, they become open to the impending meeting.

The precise format varies from denomination to denomination, I know. Preaching, music, and morning study sessions each play a part. But the results can be appreciated by all:

bull;The services allow people to lay down their burdens (jealousy, hatred, selfishness, a drug dependency, whatever) at a specific time and place, which helps them remember their decision.

• They give people a chance to reconcile long-standing problems with one another.

• They can unite the family generations at the altar.

• They serve as a focus for the entire church.

New Life in the Byways

It takes a lot of courage for a person in a small community to decide for Christ with all his or her friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers watching intently. Yet the joyful, consistent Christian life that results can touch many, creating ripples in the placidness of rural living.

Evangelism in a small town may never generate the impressive numbers of big-city crusades and programs, but it is both possible and necessary.

It is also downright thrilling as people’s lives are transformed by God’s love.

Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today

The way from God to a human heart is through a human heart.
Samuel Gordon

The world is far more ready to receive the Gospel than Christians are to hand it out.
George W. Peters

“I know I’m supposed to witness, but I tried it once, and I felt like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, trying to sell something nobody really wanted. After that I told myself, Never again.” Most pastors have heard something like that over and over.

Getting people to do personal evangelism is one of the toughest challenges we face. Many parishioners remain plagued by fear, guilt, and negative attitudes in this area, and consequently they don’t reach out to others. How can we get around these walls of inactivity to make effective witnesses out of ordinary Christian lay people?

Becky Pippert, an evangelism specialist with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, has found keys to making personal witness both enjoyable and fruitful. From years of experience in the field, she shows how one-on-one evangelism can be changed from an “ought to” to a “want to.”

I‘ve discovered that most church folk, whatever their denomination, have a similar reaction to evangelism: “That’s just not my cup of tea, thank you.” You can almost hear the iron gates clanging shut in their minds.

When I ask people why they don’t evangelize, I’ve heard:

“I’ve never been fond of imposing something on someone.”

Or, as one Reed College student so succinctly put it, “Evangelism is how many people I’ve offended this week.”

Or one of my favorites, “You know, I would evangelize if I didn’t love people so much.”

Most Christians are so afraid of being labeled part of the lunatic fringe that they say nothing about their faith, save in the friendly confines of the church. Any effective evangelism training begins by realizing people are plagued by guilt, fear, and negative attitudes, which must be identified and exorcised before we can get anywhere.

Where do these negative attitudes come from? No Christian group has as its conscious aim “Let’s totally violate their personhood and mow them over for Jesus.” Yet that’s the stereotype: buttonholing and forcing tracts on people.

I’ve been amazed how consistent church people are in their reasons for not evangelizing. And the reasons are nearly always what evangelism should never be in the first place.

Most Christians intuitively know that evangelism belongs not in the sales department but in the context of loving relationships. Common sense tells us we must both proclaim the Word and live it out among the people our lives naturally intersect. Whenever evangelism majors in technique and strategy and minors in love and respect for individuals, we’ve gotten into trouble.

But some of us have swung too far the other way, majoring in relationships and minoring in a clear proclamation of the gospel and the call to commitment. The result is mere friendship and no evangelism.

How do we avoid the extremes and encourage a biblical evangelism that is sensitive and loving, respectful of the individual? I’d like to suggest three elements that need to be part of our training.

The first two have been suggested by Gabriel Fackre, who says we must get the story straight and get the story out. I’d like to add that we must take the story in, meaning that our training must deepen our spiritual resources as well as build content and communication skills.

Getting the Story Straight

We in the West always have been fairly effective in stating gospel truth through theological propositions or four-point outlines. We are now beginning to discover what our brothers and sisters in the East have known all along — truth is also communicated through storytelling.

I recently read how Lewis Alemen breaks down the verbal message into three parts: (1) telling God’s story — the drama of his deeds, particularly the life, death, and resurrection of Christ; (2) telling my story — which isn’t the gospel message but illustrates its power; and (3) telling their story — how God’s story relates to the person to whom we are witnessing.

Genuine witnessing integrates all three stories. I’ve found, however, that most people need special help in learning how to tell the Lord’s story. We usually can explain the gospel through outlines and diagrams. But can we talk about Jesus in a way that makes him come alive? Can we tell his story and parables in a way that others can see their relevance for daily life?

One of my frequent activities as an Inter-Varsity staff member was giving evangelistic “dorm talks” in which I would speak to skeptical students about Christianity (usually dealing with apologetics) and then would open it up for questions. The atmosphere frequently was stimulating and charged. Often we would have a lively debate into the wee hours.

Then one day I heard a colleague and popular speaker, Gene Thomas, give a “dorm talk” at a college in Washington state. To my surprise, he simply described what Jesus was like as a person and the things Jesus valued — people, in particular. He spoke of the quality of relationships Jesus desired and indeed enabled us to have. As he spoke, my first thought was, But they need to know it’s true and logical. My second thought: If you’re going to talk about Jesus, shouldn’t you discuss the cross?

When it came time for questions, the students spoke on a very personal level: how competitive and insecure they felt, how much they abhorred phoniness and elitism. They voiced their surprise that Jesus was concerned with such things. There also were valid questions about the truth of Jesus’ claims, but the atmosphere was one of beauty and grace.

As we filed out, three seniors went to Gene and said, “In all our years here, being on various committees and going to meetings, we’ve never experienced a meeting like this, where people were so open and there was so much love and acceptance.”

Gene casually said, “Oh, well, that’s because Jesus is here. We feel these qualities because that’s exactly what Jesus is like.”

They looked at Gene with wide-eyed astonishment, and I realized then that more had been accomplished evangelistically than in any of my dorm talks. They hadn’t been converted, they still didn’t understand the whole gospel, they still had lots of unanswered questions, but they had been tremendously attracted to Jesus. It was a vital beginning. Later when we asked if anyone would like to study the person of Jesus in the Gospels, an unusual number signed up. That experience confirmed what I had been growing to suspect: I needed to rediscover Jesus and be able to communicate him in fresh and descriptive ways to make my evangelism more effective.

A few months later, I arrived at Harvard during a one-month speaking tour. Instead of the rather cerebral talk I had planned, I decided to follow Gene’s example and speak about Jesus. I retold one of Jesus’ own stories, in this case the parable of the Prodigal.

The body language of the group was fascinating. I walked into a room jammed with bright, skeptical students, some looking hostile, some looking as if it were great sport. Many were slunk back in their chairs, looking amused and waiting for a chance to attack. As I began telling the parable, I noticed the change. They couldn’t help getting involved in the story. Slouches turned to straight backs, and finally to bodies leaning forward in their chairs. Then I drew theological principles and opened it for questions. While the questions weren’t especially different from those asked in other dorm discussions, the students’ attitude had changed dramatically — from hostility and arrogance to genuine interest, curiosity, and involvement.

What this taught me, first, was the power of a good story. Everybody loves a story, partly because it utilizes both sides of the brain, sparking our creative, imaginative side as well as the conceptual, rational part of us. And the Gospels are full of wonderful stories, packed with profound theological truth about God and ourselves. To a nonbeliever who does not have a theological framework, an isolated Bible verse may not make sense. But if we tell a story out of life — as Jesus’ stories were — and since life is already a shared framework, the meaning of the story may take root.

Again, I’m not suggesting we abandon our gospel outlines or theological propositions or apologetics. I’m merely saying let’s add to our evangelistic repertoire the ability to talk about Jesus in natural and fresh ways and to tell his stories spontaneously and freely.

Getting the Story Out

Jesus always seemed to be doing two things: asking questions and telling stories. Christians always seem to be doing two other things: giving answers and “preaching.”

All four are necessary — at the right time and in the right place. But we tend to forget that the God of the Bible was an extraordinary communicator; we ignore Jesus’ example of how to start a conversation, and we jump in prematurely with answers and sermonettes before the listener’s curiosity is aroused.

I frequently ask people at a conference to tell me where they struggle in witnessing. Their answers fall into three categories: 2 percent say they struggle with intellectual questions they can’t answer; 1 percent say they struggle with mechanics (How do I lead a person to Christ?); and 97 percent say they need help with their communication skills (How do I move from secular conversation to spiritual in a natural way? How do I disagree or not participate in an activity without seeming “holier than thou”? How can I be myself when I feel the world puts me in a Christian box?).

It seems ironic that so much current evangelism training focuses so heavily on content skills when people seem to be saying they need more help with communication skills. Again, it’s not an issue of either/or, but both/and. We certainly need to know what to say, but we also need to know how to say it.

The communication process is so complex and multifaceted that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The key to all good communication is the ability to love as Christ loved. Jesus constantly taught that if we’re to be his followers, our lives must bear the stamp of profound love — to God and to our neighbor. Our lives must be dominated by his love, not merely religious activity. How we treat people will be the clearest signal to them of what God is like. Nobody wants to be someone’s evangelistic project. People want to be loved and taken seriously.

I’ve seen Christians who’ve broken nearly every rule of communication and yet have been effective evangelists because they genuinely loved the person they were talking to. Ultimately, love is everything.

After establishing Christ’s love as the foundation for communication, we can analyze our own communication style, finding our strengths and weaknesses: Are we shy and timid? Is it difficult for us to start a conversation, much less get it around to God? Do we miss detecting people’s needs? Do we listen well?

There is surprisingly little in the Christian market in this area. Certainly, James Engel’s Contemporary Christian Communications: Its Theory and Practice and Em Griffin’s The Mind Changers are good resources. The secular research on information and communication theory is also beneficial.

I’ve found it immensely helpful to devise relational exercises for the specific communication skills I’m trying to teach: listening skills, affirming skills, dealing with hostility, disagreeing without being disagreeable, and so on.

For instance, information theorists tell us that to communicate effectively, we must recognize our own stereotypes of the person to whom we’re speaking. So I developed this exercise: I say, “Turn to the person next to you. Assume this is a Christian friend. I want one of you to say, ‘Hi. How was your weekend?’ Then the other person needs to reply where he or she has been this weekend and one thing he or she learned from the conference.”

After a few minutes, I then say, “Now reverse the roles. This time the other person says, ‘How was your weekend?’ and you answer. But this time you know the person asking the question is not a Christian.”

The contrast in reactions from step one and step two couldn’t be more stark. In step one, everyone chatters, and the atmosphere is relaxed. After step two, there is initial silence, then groans, nervous laughter, and uneasiness. Afterward I ask them to tell me how they felt in going from one to the next. The answer is always the same: “I felt fine and relaxed in the first but very uncomfortable in the second. I just knew they wouldn’t be interested. I knew they would think I was a jerk. I felt very defensive and uneasy.”

Then we examine why, having been told nothing about the person except that he or she wasn’t a believer, they assumed the worst. Was that fair? Why did they do it? How did their assumptions affect their ability to communicate? If that’s their basic attitude toward every nonbeliever they meet, it’s no wonder they feel uncomfortable witnessing.

Then we work on developing different mental attitudes to stop judging others unfairly before we really know them. The helpfulness of these exercises is that it involves people in the learning process. Their minds may have grasped the concept, but it simply takes practice to get our behavior in accord with our minds.

Taking the Story In

Finally, we must be increasingly transformed by the message itself. We don’t simply give the gospel — we are the gospel.

When Wesley was asked, “Why do people seem to be so drawn to you, almost like a magnet?” he answered, “Well, you see, when you set yourself on fire, people just love to come and see you burn.”

That is evangelism: not a program but a fire within.

People will be drawn to the warmth of God’s fire within us even though they may not at first be able to name its source. We must continually stoke and feed the fire as we are transformed by the presence of Christ within us through prayer, Bible reading, deeper sensitivities to the Holy Spirit, and learning to walk in the Spirit and not the flesh. All are a part of the resources that make our witnessing powerful and penetrating.

Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today

A cold church, like butter, will not spread. Growing churches have learned how to regulate the congregational thermostat, and they have set it on friendly.
Herb Miller

No greater love hath anyone than someone who will give up a parking space to visitors.
Lyle Schaller

The best-laid fields of farmers can be turned into mud by a week of constant, heavy rain. Every season’s crop depends on the climate, which is completely out of their control.

Donald Gerig found that churches, too, are dependent on climate, that “atmospheric conditions” have to be right if a church is going to attract new people and grow. Unlike the weather, however, a church’s climate can be shaped favorably by informed leaders.

Now the president of Fort Wayne Bible College, Gerig wrote this chapter out of his experience as pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, Illinois. This church weatherman takes a look at six atmospheric conditions that attract people and thus contribute to growth.

After more than twenty years of pastors’ conferences, I had heard my share of formulas for church growth, revival, and renewal. I had done the “pastoral drool” while listening to stories of skyrocketing attendance. I, too, had visited other churches hoping to find the key to growth. But the only church growth I had ever experienced was the plodding, gradual growth that no one writes books about. It seemed a dream for us to consistently have more than five hundred on Sunday morning.

Then it happened! We started seeing our monthly attendance rates 30 percent ahead of the previous year. Before we could get used to that, we found ourselves with more than seven hundred in worship. How did it happen?

The disconcerting thing was that we really couldn’t put our finger on any single cause. I couldn’t give any glorious stories of personal renewal to account for the growth — God had been good to me throughout my years there. No new programs had been introduced.

Yes, we had moved into a new building, but that was five years before. And yes, some families had transferred in from a troubled church across town, but the significant growth spurt did not start until later.

It began to dawn on me that what attracted these people, more than anything else, was our “climate.” Realizing how intangible that word is, I began to analyze it, and I discovered we had encouraged the components of a growth climate for several years without even realizing it.

In that reverse way, I learned an important lesson. Programs seldom produce the spiritual dynamic necessary for growth; rather, the right spiritual climate produces programs that enhance growth. That’s why you can visit seven growing churches and discover seven different programming emphases. In each case, the right climate already existed and became the fuel for effective programming.

What we need, then, is a clearer understanding of the components of a healthy climate. From our experiences and those of other growing churches, I’ve identified six atmospheric conditions that contribute to growth. These are the elements common to growing churches regardless of their specific programs.

1. A Positive Atmosphere

I risk beginning with an overworked topic, but still it is true: Growing churches emphasize what God can do, not what we cannot do; what is best in people, not what is worst; how we can build each other up, not tear each other down.

This has to begin at a personal level. Every church has an ample supply of negative people. What’s desperately needed to balance these are other individuals who practice a positive faith in their walk with God as well as in their relationships with people.

Walking through our sanctuary one Sunday morning while the choir was rehearsing, I overheard the director say, “I refuse to have a bad performance today. We will get this right!” The choir laughed, rehearsed one more time, and did a magnificent job in the service that day. That happened partly because one person decided to expect the best. He chose to have positive expectations.

The runaway bestseller The One-Minute Manager reminded us to be eager to catch people doing something right rather than always looking for something wrong. That spirit is catching!

When individuals with that attitude relate both to other individuals as well as to God, a climate of expectation can begin to build. The emphasis in a church can begin to shift toward what we can do with God’s help. Challenges can be dreamed and accepted.

At one point we had a special drive to raise $100,000 toward the building debt. The willingness to accept that challenge was simply the logical extension of a positive spirit that had grown in the church over several years. Had the climate not been right, the challenge could not have been accepted.

By the way, on the last day of the campaign, receipts passed $103,000.

2. Trust

The burden in creating a climate of trust rests on the one wanting to be trusted, not the one being asked to trust. You don’t command trust; you earn it. At the risk of sounding trite, it must be said that trust exists when people are trustworthy.

There is no magic to trustworthiness. For church leaders, it means “going by the book.” I’m sure part of the trust I earned came because I never tried to circumvent the established order for operation. That meant presenting proposals to the proper boards or committees before action was begun. It also meant being willing to “lose” graciously on an idea and not seek other means of implementing my plan. It meant living by the budget and not seeking to get what I wanted by “special gifts.”

Once I proposed an organizational change at our church that involved revising the constitution. It went through the appropriate study committee and the church board before going to the congregation. At the congregational meeting, it was increasingly apparent that this revision was being resisted. I could have fought. But I chose to lose gracefully on that issue, and to this day they’re using the old system and making it work. We made no back-door attempts to circumvent the congregation’s wishes. And it paid off with a level of trust among us that made progress possible.

If I were to lock horns with our lay leadership or congregation on an issue I felt could not be compromised, I would either have had to persuade them to my position openly or leave. I would never resort to underhanded means of getting my way. Trust is too important to take that lightly.

3. Excellence

Excellence in ministry is not one arbitrary line that measures all situations. If so, we could paint the perfect church and all seek to imitate it. Instead, excellence is each of us, individually and congregationally, doing our best with the unique resources and limitations we have.

Too often we’ve made peace with mediocrity, rationalizing our substandard efforts. People are not attracted to that. Our goal must always be our best in every part of ministry. This emphasis on excellence is nothing more than being consistent with the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). God deserves our best — whether in the way bulletins are printed or how sermons are preached — and that level of excellence is a key ingredient in a climate of growth.

For several years in a row, our church hosted a concert by the Chicago Staff Band of the Salvation Army. This outstanding brass band is built on excellence, fine music, and clear testimony. It was interesting to watch our crowds grow from year to year. We didn’t increase our advertising, but people came to know this band would always be at its best.

That can happen to an entire church. If people know we will be at our best in ministry, methods, and facilities, they respond.

4. Oriented to Outreach

Ingrown never equals growing. Many churches establish an antigrowth climate without even realizing it by allowing their predominant focus to become the needs of those already in the church. This, I’ll admit, is the easiest path to follow, but it will not produce growth.

The mentality of a growing church is continually one of reaching out to others. Even the personal development of current members will be seen in light of increasing their ability to care genuinely about others and minister to them. The minute we start to plan for others rather than ourselves, we create a climate in which we develop and the church will grow.

This, of course, is easier said than done. Every step we take to facilitate ministry to those outside our congregation causes us to struggle past our own comfort. At one point we went to two worship services and two Sunday school sessions to make it possible to handle more people in our present facilities. Though there is nothing unique about this plan, we had to rethink our commitment to outreach. As long as our growth demanded no change from us, it was comfortable. But the minute we had to attend at different hours, divide classes, get used to new teachers, and face the recruitment of additional lay staff, the “cost” of outreach became apparent. Because of their commitment to outreach, however, our people made the changes.

The same outreach mentality spawned new ministries — ministries that attempted to say we care about others, such as support groups for the divorced and for parents of wayward children.

5. Flexibility

The willingness to experiment, to innovate, and even to fail are part of flexibility. You cannot program this spirit, nor can you command it, but a few people placed in key positions can model it. Both by their own flexibility as well as their ability to allow (even encourage) such flexibility in others, the attitude can spread.

Perhaps a strategic time for instilling this spirit is after someone has taken initiative and flubbed.

I felt we started to see this spirit when a holiday outreach activity ended up going poorly. I’m not proud of that failure, but I was pleased we could fail without its becoming an all-consuming issue. Rather, our attitude was one of appreciation for the willingness of those who planned the program — at least they were doing their best to reach out. We learned some things about outreach events, and more importantly, we demonstrated love in spite of failure. That encourages true flexibility.

Another element is the ability to adapt. Almost no program is so good that it never needs to be changed. We have recently tried to identify whether various evangelistic programs are “sowing, cultivating, or reaping” events. That means we must try to understand the people we’re trying to reach and plan events to reach them where they are. Ten-year-old programs probably will not work, because people have changed in those ten years.

When the climate is right, when risks are allowed and even traditional events can be adapted, it helps develop sensitivity to the changing culture around us, which is essential to effective ministry and church growth.

6. A Serving Spirit

In a sense, the serving spirit is a summary of a growth climate. Where people truly want to serve and minister, they will be positive, trustworthy, devoted to excellence, oriented to outreach, and flexible.

Just about everything in our society, however, militates against this spirit. It takes a conscious effort to serve rather than be served. We are encouraged today to look out for ourselves or be “fulfilled” (whatever that means). Every opportunity ends up being viewed in light of what we can get out of it.

This attitude easily turns around our relationship to God 180 degrees. Instead of asking what we can do for God, we find ourselves wondering what God can do for us. Christians raised on a pop faith that suggests God is little more than a handy, 24-hour, heavenly banking service find it hard to relate to words like service or, worse yet, sacrifice.

Thus in church we catch ourselves asking if people want to serve. Put that way, of course, many choose not to, and so dies the growth climate. A better way is to start with the assumption that God’s people will serve. The question is not if people will serve, but where and how they’ll serve.

Again, these components of a growth climate cannot be programmed. Rather, they can only be practiced and modeled. They won’t begin with action but with attitudes. They will not be limited to certain settings but will be applicable to all situations. Whatever style church growth may take, underneath will be an atmosphere that is positive, trusting and trustworthy, devoted to excellence, oriented to outreach, flexible, and committed to service.

The beauty is that a growth climate doesn’t have to wait for action by the official board. One individual can begin to model the components of this climate and have an incredible influence. Obviously, when church leaders are the models, growth can happen more quickly. But any person can be the first line of influence.

I recall sitting in a restaurant one Christmas Day. I went in expecting the atmosphere to be grim. After all, who wants to work on Christmas? Much to my surprise, however, it was almost like walking in on a party. One waitress had obviously decided that if she was going to have to work, she would make the best of it. She had bells tied on her shoes and was joking with customers. She was having a great time, and thanks to her, so was everyone else in the restaurant.

Perhaps that’s what it takes in each of our churches — one or two people determined to influence the climate of the church. We may not be able to change weather conditions, but when it comes to the church atmosphere, we can not only survive the elements, but also adjust them to help the harvest.

Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today

A leader is a dealer in hope.
Napoleon Bonaparte

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit.… Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.
1 Corinthians 12:4, 7

Who doesn’t look in the mirror and ask, “Am I attractive?” And what pastor doesn’t wonder about his or her church, “Are we attractive? What makes a church appealing to new people? What do the truly effective churches have that mine doesn’t?”

Few people have worked as hard as C. Peter Wagner to discover the characteristics of churches that do a good job of attracting and meeting the needs of new members. A professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, Wagner explains those traits and shows us how we can make them work in our own situations.

Why lead a church?

Experienced church leaders give different answers to this question. Most of the answers are sincere, and few can really be called bad. “To glorify God” should be and usually is the preamble. But more specifically, some lead a church to promote an outstanding Christian worship experience. Some lead to develop meaningful ties among Christians. Some lead to contribute to the social welfare of the surrounding community. Some lead to teach the Bible to believers. The list could go on and on. In most cases, specific goals of leadership combine several of the above in differing proportions.

But let’s focus on yet another purpose of church leadership, namely, church growth. In a broad sense, church growth means improving the quality of the Christian life of the existing members; but it’s also concerned with a regular and sustained increase in the number of those members. I hope to clarify some ways church leadership directly relates to the quality attributed to the early church in Jerusalem, where “every day the Lord added to their group those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47, gnb).

Vital Signs of a Church

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Your Church Can Grow. I had examined as many anglo-American churches as I could that were sustaining a vigorous growth rate. Since I believe church growth (with some exceptions) is a sign of church health, I identified the growth principles they had in common, calling them “vital signs.” They are:

1. A pastor who is a possibility thinker and whose dynamic leadership has been used to catalyze the entire church into action for growth.

2. A well-mobilized laity, which has discovered, has developed, and is using all the spiritual gifts for growth.

3. A church big enough to provide the range of services that meet the expectations of its members.

4. The proper balance of the dynamic relationship between celebration, congregation, and cell.

5. A membership drawn primarily from one hom*ogeneous unit.

6. Evangelistic methods that have been proved to make disciples.

7. Priorities arranged in biblical order.

At least three large tests have been made of the seven vital signs, the latest a computer-based survey of Baptist churches in Great Britain by Paul Beasley-Murray. The feedback has consistently confirmed and strengthened the first two vital signs, those that touch the roles of the pastor and the people in the growth of the church. If I were to write a book now, I would add some things, I would subtract some, and I would say some things differently.

Therefore, I am increasingly convinced that the two indispensible preconditions to vigorous, sustained church growth are a pastor who wants the church to grow and a congregation of people who want the church to grow — and both are willing to pay the price.

What is the price? One price the pastor must pay is a willingness to assume a strong leadership role. One price the people must pay is a willingness to follow growth leadership. How can this happen in a harmonious and dynamic way?

Pastoral Dilemmas

A pastor who conscientiously attempts to serve God in a biblical way is faced with two dilemmas: the relationship of power to humility, and the relationship of leadership to servanthood.

Romans 12:3 teaches humility: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you should.” Jesus relates that humility to power when he says, “Whoever makes himself great will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be made great” (Matt. 23:12). Notice the two active verbs and the two passive verbs. A pastor can either make an effort to be great or make an effort to be humble. If the latter, God will then make the pastor great. All God-given leadership is rooted in humility. But when the process is complete, the pastor must humbly recognize that he is great. Biblically, power and humility go together.

So do leadership and servanthood. Jesus put them together as a result of the tiff caused among the apostles when James and John requested privileged status in the kingdom. In explanation, Jesus contrasted the heathen rulers and their tyrannical style with Christian rulers who are essentially servants. “If one of you wants to be great, he must be the servant of the rest” (Mark 10:43). The Christian leader must be perceived, by those who follow, as a bona fide servant. There is no other way. Jesus washed the disciples’ feet, but while he was doing it, there was no doubt in any of their minds that he was their leader.

Thus, a pastor is a humble servant. But the more humble and the more of a servant, the more leadership and authority is granted by God. And if God grants the authority, it ought to be exercised.

Ranges of Leadership Styles

The way leadership is exercised in a given parish will depend on at least four important sets of factors. Each one of the four will impose outward limits, or ranges, on appropriate leadership styles.

1. Cultural ranges. Built into the fabric of different cultures is a certain range of leadership expectations. In many Latin American situations, for example, a caudillo (politically a “strong man”) type of leadership is well received. This kind of leadership would be highly inappropriate, however, in an African village, where the cultural decision-making pattern is total consensus. In England, the traditional monarchy seems good to the people, so the Anglican church is ruled by bishops and archbishops. Most Americans, on the other hand, prefer democratic leadership where a vote is taken and the majority opinion prevails. In every culture there is both strong and weak leadership, even though the styles may differ greatly.

2. Socio-economic ranges. In America, members of trade unions respond to a different style of leadership than do business executives and professionals. Christian blue-collar workers tend to thrive in their service to God under fairly directive leadership, while professionals are more comfortable with leadership that allows them to participate more in the decision-making process. My church (Lake Avenue Congregational Church, Pasadena, California) happens to be upper middle class socio-economically. As a result, one of our major pieces of equipment is a huge Xerox machine that collates the printed pages. We need a twelve-page report to change the draperies in the nursery! But Xeroxes and twelve-page reports are altogether superfluous in many other churches, even for such major decisions as calling new staff members.

3. Denominational ranges. Presbyterians in Scotland became fed up with bishops, so they developed an organizational system that would forever exclude that form of leadership. Ruling elders and teaching elders form a session, which leads the church. Methodists split off from the Anglicans but kept the bishops. The bishop, not the congregation, has the power to remove or assign pastors. Baptists have room for a wide range of styles, from strictly congregational governments to bishoplike pastoral authority in some churches. Each denomination has developed its own leadership traditions, which place limitations on the options of pastors who happen to be serving them.

4. Personality ranges. Each individual also has certain personality traits that limit leadership styles. Some people by nature are take-charge individuals. Strong leadership comes intuitively, and they have little patience for involving others in the decision-making process. For others, a nondirective style feels better. Church leaders need to be aware of their own personalities and temperaments in a realistic way. Moving outside those boundaries may seem to work for a while, but it will usually break down over the long haul.

Leadership and Growth Potential

What pastoral leadership roles contribute to church growth? I can best describe them using a split-image spectrum (Fig. 1).

Notice, first of all, that as we move toward the left, the pastor does most of the leading, and toward the right, the congregation does most of the leading. Research has indicated that the potential for church growth increases as the leadership role of the pastor increases and the leadership role of the congregation decreases.

Very few cultural, socio-economic, denominational, or personality restrictions will allow a pastor to move clear to the left. But a pastor toward the left end of the range will have a better growth situation than one toward the right, other things being equal.

A growing church that very nearly fits the left end of the model (none will fit it in every respect) is the Crystal Cathedral Community Church in California. For more than ten years I have been observing the growth of that church, which at the time of this writing includes over 5,000 families, or slightly over 10,000 members, with a morning attendance running around 8,000. How did this church, a member of a mainline denomination, the Reformed Church in America, sustain such a dramatic growth rate over twenty-five years?

Quite simply, its pastor, Robert Schuller, functions in the traditional, Reformed Church pastoral role as chairman of the consistory, or board, with all the leadership authority that carries with it. Several years ago, a leadership crisis came at a time when a decision had to be made to purchase the property where the church, with the new Crystal Cathedral, is now located. The two-year struggle ended up with new members of the consistory, who recognized that God had given gifts of faith and leadership to Bob Schuller, and that God’s will could best be done if Schuller functioned as a leader with authority. Although church growth is complex, and Schuller’s leadership is only one of many growth factors active in this church, it is safe to say that if a new pastor instead of a new consistory had been brought in years ago, the growth pattern would have been considerably less.

As you examine your position on the leadership spectrum, keep in mind the several pairs of labels opposite each other, check the trends, and try to formulate a reasonably accurate profile for yourself.

• The church has a higher potential for growth if the pastor is a leader more than he is an administrator. A leader, as the next pair of labels indicates, is a visionary, whereas an administrator is an implementer of someone else’s vision.

• A church growth pastor is a goal-setter; less growth potential is predicted for a pastor with the self-image of an “enabler” who encourages the lay people to set the goals.

• To use an industrial model, the pastor who tends to be more a manager type than a foreman type will enhance the growth possibilities for the church.

Some, at first glance, will object to this, especially pastors who are currently in the thirty- to forty-year age bracket. When they were in seminary in the sixties and early seventies, the “enabler” was set forth as an ideal role for pastors. But as Lyle Schaller points out in his book Effective Church Planning, this frequently turned out to be a counterproductive model. An equipper should not be equated with an enabler if an enabler, by definition, abdicates the responsibility of the top leadership position in the congregation.

Leadership in the New Testament

It seems to me that where the Bible touches on the matter of Christian leadership, it supports the strong leadership role for the pastor. Three Greek words for this role are fairly interchangeable in the New Testament: shepherd or pastor (poimen), elder (presbyteros), and bishop (episkopos). The bishop is an overseer or a guardian. The elder is respected because of the wisdom of age and is a ruler. The relationship of a shepherd to a flock of sheep is one of the biblical metaphors used to describe God-ordained Christian leadership. A pastor, by definition, is related to a flock as its leader.

More specifically, in the several passages where the New Testament deals with the matter of leadership, some highly descriptive and appropriate language is used:

1. John 10:1-5. The pastor shepherds, calls by name, leads, and walks ahead. The people hear his voice, recognize it, and follow him.

2. 1 Thessalonians 5:12-13. The pastor works hard, admonishes, and warns. The people honor, think highly of, and love the pastor.

3. Hebrews 13:17. The pastor has rule, watches over souls, and gives account. The people obey and submit.

4. 1 Peter 5:1-5. The pastor feeds the flock, takes oversight, is an example, and is not a tyrant. The people follow.

Sources of Leadership

If the leadership responsibility of the pastor is so evident in biblical perspective, it might be well to ask where leadership comes from. If a person wants to lead a church, how does this happen? Leadership in the body of Christ is acquired in three major ways:

1. Leadership is earned. The leader must be perceived by the followers as their servant, and this is not accomplished overnight. It takes years for people to develop the love and respect for their pastor necessary to open the door for growth leadership. Lyle Schaller says that the effective years of a pastorate begin between years four and six. The most obvious exception is the founding pastor of a new congregation, where the full leadership role can begin immediately.

2. Leadership is developed. Good training can increase the ability to lead in almost any person motivated to take it. Unfortunately, leadership training has not been a prominent part of ministerial courses in most seminaries and Bible schools, at least until recently. But an increasing number of management seminars are becoming available in continuing education and doctor of ministry programs to help fill this need.

3. Leadership is a gift. Although training can help, it can take a person only so far. I hesitate to mention it, because I would not want to discourage anyone from assuming strong pastoral leadership, but leadership is mentioned as one of the spiritual gifts, the charismata (Rom. 12:8). As I continue to study large, growing churches, I find there are only two of the spiritual gifts common to all superchurch pastors I know: the gifts of leadership and faith. Since faith is the goal-setting gift, they go together.

Lay Ministry Is the Key

The second vital sign of a healthy church is a well-mobilized laity. By that, however, I do not mean that the congregation should attempt to assume the leadership of the church.

I realize that in many churches, especially those with an attendance at worship of 200 and under (about 85 percent of America’s Protestant churches), the congregation, as a matter of fact, does lead the church. Some of them change their pastors so frequently that there is no way a pastor could earn the love and respect of the people as their leader, even if he or she were so inclined. Very few such churches are “adding daily to their number such as should be saved.” One of the problems is that they are led by ecclesiastical amateurs. Good-hearted people, yes; saints of God, yes; intelligent and generous and trustworthy, yes; but professional church leaders, no.

Having said this, let me reiterate that lay people need to be active and enthusiastic and wholehearted in their service to God and the church. But their activity needs to be concentrated on ministry functions rather than leadership functions. This is a crucial point, for little current writing on church leadership makes sufficient distinction between leadership roles and ministry roles. When the two are properly distinguished, strong church leadership can be maintained, avoiding at the same time the ever-present danger of clericalism.

Although Robert Schuller exercises strong, pastoral leadership functions, the people in the church in no way feel tyrannized, oppressed, unfulfilled, or limited in their service to God. In fact, I know of very few churches with a higher level of enthusiastic lay involvement. Schuller has developed a clear philosophy of ministry:

• To reach the unchurched in the area with the message of Jesus Christ.

• To equip those reached to be fully Christian in every aspect of their lives.

• To develop a caring community of believers for spiritual nurture.

• To develop the necessary lay ministry leadership to keep the cycle going.

The first, which is the most directly related to church growth, will not happen without strong programs in the other three.

To accomplish these objectives, Schuller has gathered around him a highly competent, professional staff of ministers. They have broad authority to develop their assigned spheres of ministry. The Lay Ministers Training Center has a Bible-school-level curriculum of 250 classroom hours covering biblical studies, theology, church history, pastoral care, and other courses. As of this writing, 1,280 persons are actively enrolled in this study program, and a total of 72 have graduated from it and are recognized as “credentialed lay ministers.” Few churches have such a reservoir of lay people who have taken that much formal study.

Some 2,000 members of Crystal Cathedral are engaged in active volunteer ministry. There are 700 lay ministers of pastoral care who do the basic shepherding of the believers. Twenty-five have been trained as paraprofessional psychological counselors, who can handle all but the most severe personal needs of the church members. The New Hope Counseling Center, a telephone ministry, employs 350 trained volunteers. There are lay ministers of evangelism and of hospitality, and lay ministers who are ushers, greeters, tour guides, and members of the thirty choirs. Specialized ministries have been developed for the poor, the hungry, prisoners, retarded people, convalescents, the handicapped, child-abuse victims, juvenile delinquents, and the emotionally ill. This is not the only church that has succeeded in maintaining strong pastoral leadership while avoiding clericalism. Many growing churches have done it.

The body of Christ differs in its internal design from any human institution. It is an organism with Christ as the head and every member functioning with one or more spiritual gifts — unearned gifts given by God in his grace and wisdom. “God put every part in the body just as he wanted it to be” (1 Cor. 12:18). To the degree that every member of a given congregation has discovered, developed, and is using his or her spiritual gifts, the congregation can be said to be healthy.

And healthy churches grow. The relationship between spiritual gifts and church growth is made clear in one of the major New Testament passages on the gifts: “So when each separate part works as it should, the whole body grows” (Eph. 4:16). Such growth includes, of course, both quality growth and quantity growth.

Part of the leadership function of a church growth pastor is to match people with their God-given ministry roles. This is illustrated by a split-level spectrum (Fig. 2).

Toward the left of this spectrum, the pastor is the minister. This means the pastor is expected to do just about everything that happens in the church except sit in the pews during the worship service — lead people to Christ, counsel believers who have problems, visit the sick in the hospital and at home, monitor the spiritual life of each believer, say grace at church suppers, publish the bulletin and the newsletter, pay the bills, make a pastoral call to each home every year, write letters to visitors, keep in touch with college students and armed service personnel, distribute food to the needy at Christmas time, and preach forty-eight sermons a year. Failure in any of these is likely to draw the comment, “Well, what are we paying the pastor for, anyhow?” The growth potential for a church on this side of the spectrum is very low.

Growth potential increases as the pastor becomes less of a minister and more of a leader. This takes place if the people in the congregation decide to become ministers through the use of their spiritual gifts — teaching, exhortation, service, mercy, evangelism, hospitality, healing, liberality, administration, and others — and the body becomes alive.

The pastor uses his or her gifts also in this ideal situation; but above all, the pastor leads the others. The pastor is more an equipper for ministry than a doer of ministry. (Some use the word “enabler” to mean equipping the saints for ministry.) Rather than being perceived by the congregation as their employee to do their work, the pastor is seen as a recruiter of others to do the tasks of the church. And as the church grows, particularly past that awkward range of 150-250 members, the pastor must be willing to shift from what Lyle Schaller calls a “shepherd” mode to a “rancher” mode. The rancher no longer cares for the sheep one-on-one as the shepherd does. The rancher recruits and trains a number of shepherds to provide the one-on-one care, and then he monitors the whole operation to see that it is properly done.

Thus, the pastor’s major role for growth is to lead. The congregation’s major role is to minister. Although maintaining the proper relationship between the two will not solve every growth problem for every church, it will help unlock tremendous opportunities for growth in many churches now bogged down in unwieldy pastor-congregation relationships.

Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today

Everything that comes to us like an assault of fate — dread of the future, human disappointments, embroilments in our life, trials and afflictions — all this becomes for him who has faith an element which can no longer swamp and bury him, but mysteriously bears him up, as Noah was borne by the flood.

Helmut Thielicke

The preceding chapters have offered pastors’ insights into staying power — how to build an enduring ministry, how to persevere when discouragement strikes. Many of the allies mentioned have been external — a listening friend, a vacation, a supportive board.

But perhaps the most important secrets of staying power are the ones you can’t see — the internal, hidden resources.

Ultimately, the minister called by God must be sustained by him. There may be periods when the people and things we had counted on for support fail us, turn against us, waste away. As David cried out from the dank recesses of a cave, “Look to my right and see; no one is concerned for me. I have no refuge; no one cares for my life” (Ps. 142:4). But even at that moment we are not alone: “I cry to you, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living'” (v. 5).

There is always one who cares for us.

The ministers who have endured, who have continued through the years without becoming cynical or hardened, have drawn deeply from what I call “God’s TLC” — his truth, his love, and his call.

They are the three great secrets of staying power.

God’s Truth

Arthur Holmes, professor of philosophy at Wheaton (Illinois) College, has written a book entitled All Truth Is God’s Truth. I like that phrase. Truth is one of God’s commodities, whatever the field of study. Whenever we come to grips with what is true in a situation, we come closer to God.

Discouraged pastors told me some of the pernicious untruths they have battled. There were lines of thinking they couldn’t seem to shake during dark days: “I’m no good as a pastor,” “I don’t have what it takes,” “There’s no future for me,” “I missed God’s will in coming to this church.”

Kent Hughes, pastor of College Church in Wheaton, wrestled with this syllogism during a time a church he had planted was declining in attendance: “God has called me to do something he hasn’t given me the gifts to accomplish. Therefore, God is not good. I had been called by God, and now I was the butt of a cruel joke.”

That’s why God’s truth is essential for staying power. During a crisis, it restores to us the correct perspective — his. J. Francis Peak has said, “The major cause of discouragement is a temporary loss of perspective. Restore proper perspective, and you take new heart.”

Here are some fundamental truths that have helped depleted pastors take new heart.

I can expect difficulty both in life and in ministry. At first, that doesn’t sound like uplifting news. You’ll never see it as the inside verse of a card from Hallmark. But in The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck explains why it assists us when we’re troubled: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”1

Pastor Eugene Peterson illustrates the principle. “I’m a runner, but I have arthritic knees, and if the weather is a certain way those knees really hurt,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot I can do about them, and my natural reflex is to avoid the pain, but that only makes it worse — I tighten my muscles, I lose my running rhythm.

“But I’ve found that when I lean into the pain, kind of accept it and enter into it, it becomes less. And then I can continue.

“I think the image works for me when I encounter spiritual and emotional pain. There’s always that struggle at the beginning: Am I going to go on? But when I say, ‘I’m going to accept this,’ I don’t know what happens, but the acceptance starts to change it.”

In short, discouragement will come to every pastor. That’s not something anyone wants to hear. But accepting that discouraging times do hit, paradoxically, helps in overcoming them.

Just because I’m down doesn’t mean I’ll stay down. Everyone falls; the secret to staying power is comeback — getting up again. Abraham Lincoln once said to his Union Army following a defeat, “I am not so much concerned that you have fallen. I am concerned that you arise.”

Lyle Schaller provides an example for pastors: “So your people are resisting relocation? Every church that relocates has resisted it at least once; maybe it will have to wait ten to twenty years. People usually say no the first time around, so leadership is all about dealing with defeat. All of us normal paranoid people will take it personally at first! So be patient and persistent.”2

At times, I may have to do pastoral work strictly out of duty. Steve Harris remembers that one professor told him in seminary, “One of the most important lessons you can learn is that at times you’ll have to minister when you don’t feel like it.” Once his son, Matthew, who suffers from apneic spells, stopped breathing five times in the hour before he had to perform a wedding. “As I dressed for the wedding in the hospital men’s room, the last place I wanted to be was celebrating with a young couple anticipating the joys of married life,” he admits. “But I also knew that I had made a commitment. The wedding went fine, although I’m sure I’ve done better. But the fact that I did it at all was a positive accomplishment for me. The decision to ‘hang in there’ is an important step for any hurting pastor.”

One pastor I interviewed said to me, “I told my wife I was going to be talking to you about staying power, and she said, ‘Oh, staying power is just another word for stubbornness.'”

It’s both possible and rewarding to hang on in ministry. Wrote one pastor on the Leadership survey, “One resource a pastor has for staying power is the example of those who have stayed.” It’s helpful to hear from people who can say, as one did on the survey, “Now in retirement, the more I consider it all, the more amazed I am at the goodness of God and the loving people who have made up the membership of the churches I have served.”

Knowing the potential power and sweetness of a long tenure has kept ministers going. You catch the flavor in the words of Jacob Eppinga, who came to LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1954. “The longer I stay, the better I understand the people,” he says. “I’m now baptizing children whose grandparents I married. I understand the students in my catechism classes better as I see their family roots showing through. Somewhere along the line I’ve acquired a greater freedom just to be myself. New pastors are on their best behavior for a while, but as the years go by, you let down the façade, and people become your family. It’s getting harder and harder to bury people now; they’re my brothers, my sisters.”

A final truth may be the hardest to keep sight of when you’re discouraged: God has used, does use, and will use my ministry. Oswald Chambers recalls that Martin Luther cried out near the end of his life, “I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence.” Another time Luther was dining with the Electress Dowager, and she said to him, “Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to come.”

“Rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise,” Luther replied.

“What produced the misery?” asks Chambers. “He saw the havoc the Reformation had wrought; he did not see the good; he was too near it.”3

Pastors who have weathered discouragement have somehow been able to remind themselves of the good they have accomplished, the times when their ministry has helped people. “The time I was most discouraged in ministry, one thing that kept me going was finding indications that God had been able to use my ministry,” says Ed Bratcher. “I realized there were people who felt that God had been able to use me as a pastor.”

I was buoyed by answers to the question, “At what point did you experience the greatest sense of encouragement about your ministry?” on the Leadership survey. A sampling:

• “I had been working with a young person and his family. He was using drugs and was very rebellious. After a variety of incidents, late-night phone calls from him or his family, and lots of discussions, he entered treatment. Seeing him graduate with honors from that treatment center made me feel as proud as if I were his father. It gave me a sense of being in the right occupation.”

• “We built a new church in a small town when it seemed an impossible though much needed undertaking. The hard work and good spirit of the building committee, the beautiful and functional finished product, and the sense of accomplishment and well-being of the congregation were encouraging.”

• “The church accepted new programs in prayer ministry, family care, and outreach. Follow-through was significant, and all three programs ran with lay leadership in charge. I was encouraged because I felt like a real equipper and not the professional hired to do it all.”

• “Several young people have come to Christ under my ministry and then gone into full-time Christian service. That makes it worth it all.”

Events like these become life preservers, something solid to hold on to. Since God has used our ministry in the past, he will surely do so again.

God’s Love

Pastor Chip Anderson of Shanesville Alliance Church in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, tells this story: “I learned a little about God’s love from a phone conversation I had with my mother during a difficult and painful time in my life. I was hurting all over, and as I told my mom about my struggles, I heard some sniffling. ‘Mom, are you crying?’ I asked. ‘A little,’ she said. At that moment, no one had to tell me my mom loved me.”

A balm for the discouraged pastor is realizing that God feels that hurt as well. In the words of one poet, “There is no place where earth’s sorrows are felt more than up in heaven.”

It’s what the prophet Nahum meant when he said, “The Lord is good, a stronghold to those who are in trouble. He knows those who take refuge in him” (1:7). God knows what hurts us. He knows what discourages us, what brings us down. He cares, and that, countless Christians have testified, is enough.

When we’re in the slough of despond, though, we often feel guilty for being there, for having fallen or waded into it. We feel dirty, unworthy of God’s love. “I tend to forget that God’s love isn’t based on my performance, that it really is based on who I am in Christ,” says Chuck Smalley of Wayzata (Minnesota) Evangelical Free Church. “I preached a sermon on grace a while back because I needed to remind myself that grace is what maintains us. It encouraged me to have to rethink that.”

Says Ed Bratcher: “What helped me stay in ministry at one point was an experience I remember clearly in which Paul Tillich’s phrase ‘You are accepted’ became real to me. I felt a release: I don’t have to prove myself to God to receive his love and his mercy and his presence!”

That fragrant remembrance of God’s love can sustain through the most difficult periods, as Presbyterian pastor Ben Weir found during his eighteen-month captivity in Beirut. His friend Bruce Thielemann, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, describes how Weir endured the fifteen months he was in solitary confinement:

“They took Ben into a room, a small room, and in the room there was a mattress on the floor and a radiator beside it. That was the mattress on which he slept and on which he sat, because one arm was always handcuffed to the radiator. The window had Venetian blinds. There was no other furniture. Interestingly enough there was an old stuffed bird sitting over in one corner, a poor example of the taxidermy art. There were some cracks in the walls, and where there had been a chandelier in the ceiling, it had been taken away and there were three loose wires sticking down. This was all there was in the room.

“Ben said, ‘I began to use what was there to remind myself of the love of God. Those three wires coming down — well, they reminded me of the way God’s hand comes down and touches the hand of Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. You remember how the gift of life is given in such a way? This meant God’s gift of life.’ He counted the various slats in the Venetian blinds, and he used the Venetian blinds to remind himself that he was surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. The bird, though it was very old and dirty, he used to represent the Holy Spirit, sometimes symbolized in Scripture, as you know, by the dove.

“The cracks in the walls, the places in the plaster that were marred — each and every one of them he identified with some promise in Scripture. He would repeat to himself each day passages which he had long ago hidden in his heart: ‘May the peace of God which transcends all understanding guide your heart and your mind into Christ Jesus’; ‘Call upon me and I will do great and wondrous things that you know not of.’

“He remembered all of these things, and out of this he kept hold of himself for fifteen months alone — a long look, a remembering, a focusing upon the love of God.”4

God’s Call

We turn now to the third hidden resource, God’s call. A “call” to ministry is not easily defined, but nothing could be more solid to most pastors. The call of God is what drew them to their work in the first place.

“Just months before I was ordained in my first charge, I was seriously contemplating becoming an academic rather than a preacher,” remembers Robert Norris, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland. “I didn’t see myself as a minister; I loved the life of study. One day I was walking across the beach, deliberating the choice, when I ran across an old roommate of mine whom I hadn’t seen in eleven years. He now lived in Hong Kong and was at that beach simply for the day. We began talking, I spoke with him about Christian things, and he became a believer that morning. He went back to Hong Kong knowing Christ, and I knew that I couldn’t do anything else except preach the gospel for the rest of my life.”

That kind of assurance has kept people in the ministry when all the circ*mstances pushed them to leave. One of the Leadership surveys that most struck me was from a pastor who wrote about his first pastorate. “In my gross inexperience, I just didn’t know what I should do or how to deal with people,” he writes. “And there was a lack of compassion and patience among the church board. They finally threatened to call for a church vote if I didn’t resign, and they said they had the numbers on their side. I saw no need to try to split loyalties in our small church, so I resigned.

“I had such a strong feeling of failure — I’d failed in my job, and I’d failed God. I mean, I had just been ordained one year earlier. I began to send out resumes, thirty of them over the next ninety days, and I didn’t get one response.

“I was strongly tempted to leave the ministry altogether. One of the elders in the church, who was supportive, offered me a partnership in a business of his. My salary would have doubled.

“But I finally had to tell him, ‘I could do the work well, I think, but I could never be happy working any other job than the one God has called me to.'”

Because of God’s call, that pastor hung on. He finally got an invitation to another church, and today both he and his church are doing well.

What happens, though, when a pastor reaches the end, when he or she cannot endure another day in ministry? What does the call of God mean for the pastor who feels, genuinely, “If I don’t get out, I’m going to lose my sanity”?

Ed Bratcher wrestled with the dilemma in a previous church when he was considering leaving the ministry altogether. He’d always had a clear sense of God’s call. Where was it now? What did it mean in these circ*mstances?

“I was forced to examine my understanding of God’s call,” he remembers. “I had been brought up thinking God’s call was a one-time call for all time. Once you were called into a particular field or area, this was where you had to remain. To get out of the pastorate and go into any other vocation would have meant denying God’s leadership.

“But gradually I began to understand that God’s vocational call was not so much once-for-all-time as it was ongoing. I needed to be following his leadership not just once but always, and since he was sovereign, he might lead in different ways at different times in my life.

“That freed me a good bit. I saw that if, at that particular time, I should feel it was God’s leadership to leave the pastorate, then I could do so without tremendous burden and guilt.”

As it turned out, Ed sensed God’s leadership was to go to another church, and he is still in the pastorate today.

For both the person who stays in pastoral ministry and the person who leaves, God’s call means he is leading them and wants to use them to extend his kingdom. To sense God’s leadership and to see that he is using us — that is what gives staying power.

The Once-Hidden Mystery

The apostle Paul talks frequently in Colossians of a mystery that has been hidden for ages and generations. That mystery, he explains, is the Christian’s hope of glory.

What is the mysterious, long-hidden secret?

Christ in you, he says.

Christ actually dwelling within, bringing his truth, love, and call. That’s what will sustain us until glory.

Pastors who’ve persevered have found that after all the various resources for staying power are laid out, there’s still only one. Christ within.

In his second letter to the church in Corinth, Paul explains how that has kept his colleagues and him going in their ministry. “Since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart,” he writes. “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:1, 7-9).

With Christ within, Paul was able to withstand these trials and at the end of his life shout, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith!”

Paul’s secret, our secret — the one secret — of staying power is Christ.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 15.

Cited by Rowland C. Croucher, “Lyle Schaller on the Small Church,” Grid (Autumn 1987).

Oswald Chambers, Workmen of God (Fort Washington, Penn.: Christian Literature Crusade, 1975), 65.

Bruce Thielemann, “Dealing with Discouragement,” Preaching Today (48, August 1987), audiotape.

©1988 Christianity Today

It’s always too soon to quit.
V. Raymond Edman

Is it time to leave my church? Maybe even the ministry?

Those questions, though seldom spoken, are often thought. The Leadership survey showed nearly 40 percent of pastors have “considered leaving” the pastorate and “looked into other types of ministries and/or occupations.” That doesn’t include the nearly 10 percent who did indeed give it up. And the number who have wrestled with “Should I leave this current church?” probably approaches 100 percent.

The question is one of the most difficult a pastor will have to answer, for it is almost always, as one put it, “filled with lingering doubts, self-criticisms, and the pain of unfulfilled dreams.”

Though the question “Should I leave?” occasionally plays in every pastor’s mind, within the discouraged minister it puts on a full-court press. It dogs, it harries, it doesn’t let up. “There have been many times when I’ve questioned, ‘Lord, what are you saying?'” says a Lutheran pastor. “‘Does this mean my ministry is finished here? Or finished period? Are you calling me into something else?’ And sometimes in a fit of frustration I cry out, ‘Lord, I’m finished; I’m done!'”

Exit or Endure?

The question ultimately offers two options: stay or leave. There’s no middle ground. You can’t “halfway” leave.

Yet often emotions stay in the middle zone, attracted first to leaving, then to staying, then back to leaving. Each option holds pros and cons, and neither is easy.

At that moment you long for a direct, strong assurance from God that his will is one option or the other. But when you’re discouraged, that’s not easy to determine. Turning to Scripture for guidance may not clear your mind. On the one hand, Jesus “set his face like flint” to go up to Jerusalem. He didn’t turn away from difficulty; neither should I. But at other times Jesus left Judea and Galilee; he changed ministry sites to the other side of the Jordan to avoid further confrontation with the Jewish authorities. Stay or leave? Each is right — at the right time. But how do you determine what time it is?

Our ultimate goal, of course, is continued faithfulness to God and service of him. But given our current situation, could that be in a different church or even in a setting outside the pastoral ministry? Something has to give — but is that something an attitude within as God teaches us to endure? Or is that something the situation without as God shows us that “a bruised reed he will not break” and “he provides a way of escape”?

Pastors who have grappled with “Is it time to leave?” during their dark periods have learned they can’t answer that question until they first ask themselves several others. Here are ones they pose to themselves.

Questions Worth Asking

Am I free to pursue the essentials of ministry? No setting is without its limitations, of course. Harold Myra, president of Christianity Today, Inc., reminds us of Joe Bayly’s concept that “all of us find ourselves in a box. It may be a big box or a small one … but we all find ourselves in a box of limitations and opportunities. Our task is not to bemoan the limitations or strut because of the size of the box. If we’ve committed ourselves to the situation, we try to understand the box and fill it — every corner and cranny — with all the creativity and energy possible.”1

But sometimes a ministry “box” may have the lids closed and taped shut; soon it becomes difficult even to breathe. A pastor in the East realized that even after several years in a congregation, “I didn’t have any freedom to provide leadership. The board, though not where it should be in terms of spiritual maturity, had a tremendous amount of power and wasn’t about to give it up. I couldn’t see that changing in the future. My relationship was cordial with all of them, but in that situation, I couldn’t lead the church.” If our every move is blocked and it takes all our energy to survive, let alone minister, then it’s probably time to go.

The reason probably is a key word is illustrated in the experience of one Southern pastor. “I came to this church to build a ministry of discipleship. Yet in my early years, every effort in that direction was stymied. Inner pain began to build, and I became desperate to get out. I even had several opportunities to move. But I never had an inner peace about leaving, so I stayed. Now, ten years later, my discipling is growing.” The Lord often works through painful situations.

Overall, though, pastors have found help in candidly considering this question: “Given the inevitable resistance to change (and handful of cranky personalities) in any group, am I generally free to serve?”

Have I already left, internally? A friend of mine got swept up in a management war in his company some years ago. Even though he came out with only minor injuries, the months of rumors, firings, secret meetings, and reprisals made something snap within him. He suddenly realized one day, I can’t work for these people anymore. He had lost his respect for them.

He continued to work for the company for a while after that, but inside, he had already left. That period proved the most difficult in his business career. “When you get to that point of leaving within,” he realized, “there’s no sense prolonging the inevitable. Find another place to go as soon as you can.”

It’s possible as well to leave a church while still preaching every Sunday. But that usually entails, as one pastor put it, “becoming mechanical, going through the motions.” And it usually only makes us cynical or bitter within. For our own sake as well as the church’s, it’s better to leave. But if, despite the current difficulties, we still respect the congregation and hold a dream for our work with it, then staying is indicated.

Has my desire to leave been building for a long time, or is it a sudden response to recent events? “Today I feel as though I’d like to quit, take a leave of absence, resign from the world, or something!” wrote Don Bubna, pastor of Salem (Oregon) Alliance Church, in his journal several years ago. He’d been hit by a boxcar full of discouraging events. “We had just received another turndown from a potential youth pastor. The church seemed to be on a plateau, the elders stuck on dead center.… A young man from our congregation who had recently gone to Africa was killed in an automobile accident. A missionary pilot from our fellowship had been attacked by South Pacific islanders with machetes and almost died. A retired missionary, our esteemed pastor of visitation, passed into the presence of the Lord after a very brief illness.

“During this same period, I received four letters in one day marked Personal. This kind of envelope seldom bears good news. One was a complaint from a long-time attender who felt I had gotten soft on the gospel. The person was leaving the congregation in order ‘to be fed’ elsewhere. Another was the resignation of a staff member with whom I had served for more than two decades.”

When the discouragement comes like a horde of locusts, the natural feeling is to run. But Don stayed; he realized he’d had many great years with the church that the current events couldn’t change. And there was a future beyond these events as well.

Immediate events don’t tell the whole story, so “we need to not make a hasty decision,” counsels Maynard Nelson, pastor of Calvary Lutheran Church near Minneapolis. “With all the clamoring around us, it takes time to quiet ourselves to hear the still, small voice of God.”

Do my gifts and philosophy of ministry generally match my church’s? A California pastor I know went to a small church and found his approach to ministry differed vastly from theirs. They wanted the standard format of midweek services and programs; he wanted to build the fellowship through a decentralized model of home groups. They wanted traditional music; he felt more contemporary music would aid outreach. “But I had been called to be their pastor,” he said, “so I tried to be everything they wanted me to be.” As a result, discouragement set in. When he went their way, he didn’t feel happy; when he didn’t, the congregation let him know it. That kind of incompatibility usually calls for a new start. In the words of one pastor who is involved in his denomination’s placement work, “One of the big secrets of staying power is getting the right person in the right place. Conflict and discouragement inevitably come with a mismatch.”

But in this California pastor’s case, he decided to stay despite his discouragement. Over time he was able to communicate his vision for ministry to the board, and now, seven years later, they have embraced it wholeheartedly. The pastor and congregation now work together well.

Recognizing the studies that show it often takes seven to ten years for a pastor and congregation to fully mesh, it’s also true, as one consultant writes, that “if the friction constantly produces sparks or if adaptation demands a major part of your energy, it may be an indication change is needed.”

What is my normal inclination in tough situations? Andre Bustanoby describes his experience leading a church in California in the early seventies: “I was battered with discouragement because it seemed that nothing I did would stop the guerrilla warfare in the church. About 10 percent of the congregation was determined to get me out. I had 90 percent of the congregation with me and I felt, I ought to win the war. I have the troops to do it. It did not even occur to me to resign. I never give up. That’s just not part of me.

“But then one night we were in a congregational meeting and charges were being thrown back and forth. I remember sitting there watching this when I sensed the Lord saying, ‘Andy, get up in front of that congregation and resign.’ The reason why I knew that was God’s voice is because I never would think anything like that. That was too atypical of my personality. But inside I knew, That’s your problem, Andy: you don’t know when to stop hassling people to win. You’ve got to win regardless. You’ve done it in your marriage; now you’re doing it in the church. When are you going to quit doing this?

“That day marked a great advance in my spiritual growth. I discovered the marvelous truth that when I gave in, I was not destroyed. I had always feared I could never emotionally survive a defeat or even a strategic withdrawal, so I fought tooth and nail. At the time my marriage was in trouble for the same reason — I had to win every confrontation. My wife had stopped talking to me. But God led me against the grain of my personality. I resigned and gradually developed the ability to retreat, to give in, to surrender.

“From that whole experience I learned a principle that has helped me make major decisions. I call it the ‘Bustanoby Rule of Thumb.’ That is, listen extra hard to the idea that goes against your natural inclination, because that may very well be the voice of the Spirit. If you are like I was, a fighter and a never-say-die person, really scrutinize those inner urges to fight on, because you can do that too well by yourself. On the other hand, if your tendency is to walk away quietly, to never make waves, the Rule says, ‘Watch out for that inner voice that is urging you to pull up your stakes, pack your tent, and move on. God’s voice may be saying something very different.'”

Do I have the physical and emotional strength to stay on? Says a pastor in his thirties about his decision to leave, “I had to gauge how much more I could take personally. I decided I could take some more but I probably wouldn’t last until the church turned around.” For the sake of his long-term health and service in the kingdom, he found a much different church and today is feeling strong.

On the other hand, if you feel well physically and emotionally, it’s an indicator for staying.

How much can my family endure? One veteran pastor wrote on the Leadership survey, “Once, when the board was being bossy and difficult, I did resign, but only because my wife was suffering from the conflict. It proved to be a good and wise move.” Spouses and children may need emotional relief from a discouraging ministry situation. But if they’re holding their own, it’s another sign to stay.

Answering these questions may still yield a split decision — some factors that indicate staying, others that say it’s time to leave. But ultimately, as Robert Norris, pastor of Bethesda, Maryland’s, Fourth Presbyterian Church, suggests, “You must rely on your own human spirit.”

Two pastors, both of whom were discouraged and longing to leave, chose entirely different paths. Here they explain their decisions.

One Who Decided to Stay

Eugene Peterson has served more than twenty-five years as pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, northeast of Baltimore. That remarkably long tenure, considering the national average is somewhere in the three-to five-year range, has not exempted him from the time of decision.

“I can think of three times since I’ve been here,” he admits, “when I was ready to leave. I tried my best to get out of here. I thought I had done everything I knew how to do and people were unappreciative. They didn’t know how good they had it, and so I was going to show them. Those times weren’t for just a couple of weeks; they lasted for seven, eight, or nine months.

“But as I’d search out other options, either nothing would open up or nothing would appeal to me. And finally, still in a funk, I’d sort of give up and think, Shoot, if I’ve gotta stay here, I’ll just stay here. And then I’d see changes. I found myself working with the same people, working on the same things, but suddenly it was different — deeper and better. I’d notice significant changes in my life in terms of my understanding of spirituality and pastoral work. I take no credit for it, because I tried my best to leave. I’m so glad that by the grace of God I didn’t. If I had left precipitously, I don’t think I would have gone into these new areas in my life.

“In those times, my wife wasn’t sure that staying was the right thing, because I wasn’t much fun to live with. But now I’m so glad I didn’t move.”

One Who Decided to Leave

Another pastor we’ll call Eric was in his fifth year of ministry with a particular church when he hit bottom. “Pressures kept building in the church and in me,” Eric says. “The board and I couldn’t agree on anything. The only way to get anything done was to go around them, and that didn’t go along with my philosophy of ministry. I was not doing the kind of work I thought I should be doing. And I didn’t have anybody I could share with. No one in the congregation even knew I was having any problems.

“The aloneness was deadly. I tried to talk to my wife about problems in the church. She loved me, but she couldn’t do anything. So when I would tell her what people had done to me, she’d get angry. One night she said, ‘I want to scratch their eyes out!’ That wasn’t a godly thing to instill in her, so I just quit talking about things.”

Eric’s relationship with his wife became strained. “Kelly said I wasn’t the same person anymore, that my personality was changing. It was probably true, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Sexual temptations skyrocketed for me. They were tough feelings to fight. Finally I got a little counseling. I didn’t want to get counseling; I kept thinking, Hey, I give counseling. But I knew an older man who had been a pastor and who had kind of been keeping an eye on me anyway. I invited him over and spilled out everything. He mostly listened, and then he made a few objective statements about what I could and could not do in the situation. ‘You can’t change every situation, Eric,’ he told me. That freed me.

“I had gone into the church thinking, It’s not the kind of situation I enjoy, but I’ll work with it and change it. I can change pretty much anything if I just have enough faith and enough elbow grease. Now I had given them five years of my life, and things hadn’t changed at all. I realized it was going to take years to turn the church around. And I wouldn’t last that long.

“Then I saw a telephone commercial, ‘Reach out and touch someone.’ The commercial gave me the idea to call an old friend, a dear friend. We were atheists together, were converted together, and went to seminary together. He was the best man at my wedding. So I called him and said, ‘I’m not going to survive here, Don. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

“He kidded me, ‘Well, I’m planting this church down here; why don’t you come down, and we could work together?’ We both laughed about it, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. I started pursuing it, and things worked out.

“People in the church had no notion I was having problems. They were sorry to see me go; it was all very nice and nostalgic. But I came here to save my marriage and to see if I could save my ministry. I went from being the senior pastor of the largest church in the district to being an associate pastor in a mission church. Everybody thought it was a step down.

“But here I wasn’t alone. Don and I built a team ministry where there was genuine respect. He left a year ago now, to plant another church, but we talked about everything. We would talk about sermons we were going to preach.

“I found I could have friends in the church. I have people I can talk to. In fact, just the other night I told the board I was getting discouraged about our long-range planning, and we talked it out.

“And the marriage is fantastic. The last years have been tremendously healing. We have become intimate with each other the way it should be. I can talk to Kelly about the church.

“I was kept in the ministry by coming here. There is no question about that. One of the more mature decisions I ever made was to leave.”

Leave the Pastorate Altogether?

It’s one thing to leave a church. It’s quite another to leave the pastorate altogether.

When all strategies and prayers seem to have failed and you stand on the precipice wondering whether to jump and leave it all behind, there’s a terrifying loneliness. Has anyone — ever — faced what I am facing? Do they know my pain? What did they do?

Indeed others have been there — and have survived. Here, briefly, are the true stories of three pastors who stood on the edge and wondered, Should I give up the ministry? They made very different choices.

“I felt like I had been beaten up,” Allen (not his real name) says of his closing days in a New England pastorate. “I used to wake up on Sunday morning and dread going to church. My favorite time of the week was Sunday night because Sunday morning was behind me for another week. I wanted to leave the pastorate — just get out.

“I started looking around and found a good opportunity working with a social-service organization. The position connected several interests and skills I had. At the same time, I was asked to consider a position with a small church in another state. I thought, Why bother? I don’t want to go through all this again. But somehow — and it’s hard to explain this — I felt like I was being swept by a wave back into the church. All my circ*mstances and feelings began to move that direction again. So I did take the church interview. They extended a call, and after more deliberation, I decided to accept it.

“I was ready to leave the pastorate, but now after more than a year here at the new church, I can say there has been such healing. I would never say, ‘I’ve learned how to deal with discouragement; I can forget about that now.’ It’s an ongoing struggle. But I wake up Sunday morning and look forward to going to church. I learned through this that God is watching over our decisions more than we think.”

Don, a minister in Tennessee, came to a new church and found that one elder in the congregation opposed everything he did. After Don had been there three or four months, a bald lie about him began to circulate in the church. Eventually Don was able to trace the source of the lie directly to the troublesome elder. When the other elders confronted him with the facts in an elders’ meeting, he admitted he had spread the lie, and he resigned. But then they rallied around the liar: “You don’t need to resign,” they said. “Stay on.”

Don thought, Is this the kind of elders I have? I don’t have to put up with this. He resigned immediately.

A registered nurse, Don took a position as supervisor of a nearby nursing home. “But in three months I was unhappy,” he says. “I came home one day and told my wife, ‘I’ve just got to go back to preaching.’ I realized that I really did enjoy the ministry and that my decision to leave had been a spur-of-the-moment response when I was disgusted. Well, I guess it had been building: my previous congregation had not given me a salary increase in years, and the conflict in the elders’ meeting touched off all that.”

A nearby church became open, and within a month Don was back in the pastorate. “It’s a smaller church, but very productive in many ways. It’s been a happy ministry here.” Don is now in his thirteenth year with the church. “I haven’t regretted coming back,” he says. “And I really haven’t thought of leaving again.”

Roger Landis, the pastor whose descent into discouragement was told in chapter 1, came to the point of considering suicide. In his desperate pain he cried out, “Lord, I just can’t hack it, physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Lord, get me out of this place.”

“And yet I could never consider leaving the pastorate,” he says. “That summer I was approached about a position as a nursing home chaplain. ‘No way!’ I said.”

Roger began meeting often with Dick Berger, his district superintendent, to try to get a handle on the situation at church. They called a meeting with the church elder and the church chairman. “Both the elder and church chairman were supportive of me,” Roger says, “but they realized the conflict in the church had gotten totally out of hand. For the sake of both the church and me, they thought it would be good if I resigned.” They decided to let Roger stay in the parsonage with full financial support for several months or until he found another position.

Both a board member and administrator from the nursing home approached Roger about the position as chaplain again. Roger was offered the position. “I had until the end of the year to make a decision, and I had gotten a number of inquiries from churches, but somehow I sensed God was in it. God had softened my heart, and my feelings about nursing home chaplaincy had completely changed.”

The position didn’t start for several months. “That gave me months of no responsibility, and after what I’d been through they were heaven-sent. The first month or so I hardly did more than sleep late and go picnicking with my wife — whatever we felt like doing. We went to a church where we didn’t know anybody, and it was a joy to go anonymously, sit together, and worship. I didn’t have to think about any responsibility, even praying in front of anybody. It was grand. Those months were very healing.”

And his new position? “I still feel I’m in the ministry,” he says. “I feel very much at home here; I’ve learned to love these people. I’ve never had a more appreciative and sensitive congregation in my life. We’ve seen two come to know the Lord. We’ve started some programs, and I look forward to work each day. But I look forward to going home at night, too.

“One of the greatest delights about this work is not having to meet with the board of deacons or trustees. I don’t have to juggle one hundred ‘bosses.’ So through it all, I’m so thankful for the hand of God. He kept me from self-destruction, and through that deep depression he showed me his grace in such a wonderful way. He still has use for me; he has fulfilling service for me to render.”

In his own way, each of these three pastors demonstrates remarkable staying power. As F. Scott Fitzgerald has said, “Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.”

None would have chosen the events that led him to the point of considering leaving the pastorate. Each was driven to the decision by a hungry pack of circ*mstances that threatened his well-being. But are there common lessons that can be learned from these pastors’ diverse experiences?

God was still there. Reflecting on his experience, Roger Landis says, “God was there. I praise him for that. I can’t fault the way God has dealt with me. I love Jeremiah 29:11, ‘”For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”‘ Without a sense of hope for the future, life is grim. But God was with me even then.”

Healing from the events that led to the decision takes time. For Allen, it has taken over a year. Roger, now a year and a half from his resignation, says, “I never questioned God’s love and his wisdom through that. But I’ve questioned a lot my own abilities. I saw how weak I was. I feared circ*mstances were going to get to the point where I couldn’t handle them. But I’m beginning to rebuild a fair self-image again now.” As one pastor explained, “If we’re worn out, it’s usually come over a long period of time. If we’re going to be renewed, it takes time for that also.”

God could and did use it for their ultimate good. In a recent study of ministers who had left the pastorate and then returned, one researcher found that two-thirds felt they were more empathetic with people as a result of their time away.

Andre Bustanoby, today a successful psychotherapist, writes that as he began his practice following his leaving pastoral ministry, “it required that I listen, be empathetic, and care about the pain of others, something I lacked in the pastorate. As a pastor, I could be warm and empathetic with people who liked me and whom I liked, but it was a new experience to truly care about people I didn’t know, some of whom were positively unlovely.”2

“Now I can understand someone who’s lost all hope in life and who’s depressed to the point where he wants to end it all,” says Roger Landis. “Before, in my arrogance I might have thought, Hey, come on, straighten up. But now I understand.”

Through God’s grace, many who have left the pastorate do not think of their leaving strictly as an end but also as a beginning. They gradually have come to focus less on the pain than on what resulted from it. They encountered God’s grace in a new way. They found they could serve him effectively in another calling.

The Unmistakable Decision

The decision to leave a church or the ministry will never be painless. But pastors have drawn comfort from a simple, surprising truth that Corrie ten Boom captured in the words, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”

Writes Calvin Ratz, pastor of Abbotsford (British Columbia) Pentecostal Assembly: “Once I had two options to consider. For some time I couldn’t make up my mind. My head said one thing; my heart said another. In talking with my parents, my mother commented, ‘I don’t know what you will do, Cal, but I know you will do the right thing.’

“At first I brushed it off as the confidence any mother would have in her son. But that wasn’t what she meant. She went on to explain, ‘If your motives are right, and you are prayerful in making the decision, God will not let you make a mistake.’

“She was right. If you honestly want to move in God’s will, he won’t let you foul up a decision that affects his church.

“That doesn’t mean all will turn out glowingly. There may be hard times ahead in the church to which we are sure God sent us. Our ministry may even be rejected there after a while. But we will not be outside the larger channel of God’s purpose for our shaping and growth.”

Our decisions, no matter how difficult, can never take us beyond the loving reach of God.

In Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton captures that most assuring of thoughts in a prayer called “The Road Ahead.” It might be the prayer of every pastor who agonizes over the question, “Is it time to leave?”

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.3

Harold Myra, ed., Leaders (Carol Stream, Ill. and Waco, Tex.: Leadership/Word, 1987), 18.

Andre Bustanoby, A Reason for Hope When You Have Failed (San Bernardino, Cal.: Here’s Life Publishers, 1986).

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976).

©1988 Christianity Today

A church that is not reaching out is passing out.
Duke Barron

There I was, settling into my first full-time pastorate and wondering, What have I gotten myself into? With a consistent attendance of less than fifteen and a total church budget of under $14,000, you might say there was nowhere to go but up. But how do you begin the ascent?

The people looked to me for leadership, but I wasn't sure I knew where to start, let alone where to lead.

Although my situation was probably extreme, in principle it illustrates what all small-church pastors face at one time or another. With limited resources, a handful of people, and not infrequently a hint of discouragement or desperation, what can a pastor do to make a difference, especially when the budget restrains experimentation? From my more than ten years in a small church, I have learned three principles that helped keep us growing. The principles are not earth-shattering, but they set the stage for growth.

A Positive Perspective

In smaller churches, I have observed what I call the "attitudes vs. abilities" factor. Organizations that work with churches often offer resources to sharpen leaders' skill levels. Such resources, of course, are both good and needed. Rarely, however, do they address the self-image of the church. It is often that deficient attitude, not just the lack of skills, that hinders a church's development.

The small church knows full well what it can't do, how much money it doesn't have, and all the needs it isn't meeting. (Interestingly, it's a revelation to many small-church leaders that bigger churches often feel exactly the same way but on a larger scale.) Such attitudes often lead to an unhealthy introspection and an apologetic demeanor: "Well, I know it's not much, but we're giving it our best shot." The pastor then complicates the situation by directing sermons at the weak areas, urging greater commitment, greater efforts in evangelism, greater giving.

I've found it better to continually hold before my people the good things the church is accomplishing. Even small things, when lumped together, give a sense of real accomplishment to the people.

For example, as I looked at my church early in my tenure, I realized we were not accomplishing much that I thought we needed to do. But rather than constantly emphasize what we couldn't do, I decided to help the people rejoice in the ministry we were able to accomplish.

The local Youth for Christ group was led largely by people in our church; per capita, we were near the top in giving to our district ministries; our participation in conference camping and church-planting programs contributed to our district's outreach; and in many other ways we were making our mark. Individually, none of these accomplishments appeared all that significant, but taken together, they formed a positive backdrop for ministry and for change. When one of our people accomplished something, we made sure our whole church heard about it and rejoiced!

Pastors are often advised to perform a "strengths vs. weaknesses" study of their churches. When the results are tabulated, frequently there is only a weak nod in the direction of the strengths while the major effort is expended on improving the weaknesses. Perhaps a better starting point would be targeting one or two strengths and working to improve them even more, making them the central thrust of the church's ministry.

In most churches, two or three strengths will naturally bubble to the surface. A strength may be fellowship, a good Bible study program, small groups, the worship on Sunday, or an effective children's program. I encourage smaller churches to take charge of the process rather than just letting strengths develop haphazardly. Churches can identify and improve on their strengths until they become expert in these areas.

Developing a strength accomplishes two things. First, it gives the church an area of expertise. Very likely this strength will establish the church's reputation in the community and become a natural springboard for outreach. "You know, there's just something about First Baptist; you really feel loved when you go there, and it makes you want to go back" or "Bible Fellowship definitely understands the problems of young marrieds. I like it there."

Second, it gives the church a reason for genuine and healthy pride. Nothing helps a small church's esteem so much as to know "We do this well!"

When I got to Faith Baptist, I found a group of people who definitely cared about others, member and visitor alike. So I capitalized on it, underscoring at every possible occasion, "We care about people." Lately I've found it rebounding. I had one counselee tell me, "I'm not a churchgoer, but this is a church I'd like to be a part of because you people really care." He'd been to only one service, but he had picked up on a natural strength of our congregation.

Of course, work still remains to round out the total ministry of the church and strengthen its weaknesses. But now it can be done in a positive and progressive atmosphere of growth, not a negative one of desperation and despair. Even in the worst of situations, such strengths become an anchor point for the rest of the ministry.

Pulling is more effective than pushing, and if the people perceive their role as "rounding out" instead of "desperately hanging on," more is accomplished.

A Clear Purpose

Purpose comes second for a definite reason. Often the smaller church has no clear purpose, and the idea of developing a church purpose can strike fear in the hearts of church leaders. Where do we start? How do we proceed? And how can we convince the church it's even necessary?

Sitting down cold and trying to state on paper their reason for being is often just too big a step for church leaders. To be "spiritual," the church will try to do a little bit of everything. A large church may pull it off, but it becomes difficult, if not impossible, with a small church's limited staff and budget.

If, however, the church has already specialized in one or two areas, grasping the concept of purpose and direction is much simpler. The process then becomes one of understanding the scriptural mandates for churches, seeing where the church is going, and developing a purpose that combines the two by saying: (1) "As we understand the Bible, the church is to do …" (2) "We can fulfill that mandate by …" This way, rather than forcing a purpose on the church, purpose emerges out of the gifts and natural aptitudes of the church.

For example, at Faith Baptist our general purpose statement reflects our desire to keep people, not programs, a central focus of our ministry, and yet to grow at the same time. As we analyzed our ministry, this purpose statement became an indication of both our present direction and our future hopes: "The purpose of our church is to maintain a personal ministry that equips individual believers to successfully live a Christ-like life. We are committed to excellence in (1) preparing the individual, (2) exhibiting a personal touch in ministry, and (3) proclaiming Christ to our world."

I realize that's a pretty broad statement, and we're taught that purposes should be specific. But this was the first time our church had been able to put down in writing our reason for existing. We can now begin to measure all we do against this standard. "Does this activity help us accomplish either number 1, 2, or 3? Are we doing this with excellence? If not, perhaps we should rethink it."

After this first step is taken, further refinement of specific goals comes more easily. For instance, we can take a three-year approach, emphasizing one point each year. Once the original hurdle is overcome, the possibilities are endless.

I admit my entire congregation may not understand completely the purpose and goals of the church—that's the ideal to work toward, but in the interim, I consider it crucial that the leaders do. For a small church like mine to be effective, the leaders must be "owners" of the ministry, not simply administrators. Here I, as pastor, am important: I must encourage, lift, build, help, and show that I value my leaders. They must feel they are colaborers in Christ. And though at this time they may not be able to spell out exactly the goals and direction of the church, they must at least sense a target on the horizon. Remember, the definition of a fanatic is "one who redoubles his efforts when he loses sight of his goal."

All this presupposes that I as pastor have a clear understanding of that target; if I cannot decide what I want the church to become, there will be no dynamic to the church's ministry. I need to be able to say, "In one year, five years, ten years, twenty years I want my church to be …" Vision is more caught than taught, and woe unto the pastor who has no vision to spread.

When I arrived at this church, I decided to first dream dreams without worrying about how to make them happen. For the initial year, my goal was simple survival. Within five years I wanted to help the church iron out its problems, stabilize the budget, and move toward an attendance of forty. By ten years I wanted to see a self-supporting congregation on firm footings, one I could leave without its falling apart. After getting the dreams in place, we have worked hard to make them happen, and we are about two years ahead of the plan.

Now I'm beginning to revise the picture. As of this writing, we're looking toward adding a second pastor in a year, buying property and erecting a building in the next three years, and reaching 250 in attendance by five years. Then we'll start a daughter church. This may have seemed impossible when I began with 15 people and practically no resources, but by now it isn't just my vision; others share the dreams with me.

A Thoughtful Presentation

I'm an amateur radio operator, and two stores in my area cater to ham radio needs. One, about fifty miles away, has a prominently displayed sign that reads: This is not a radio club—no loitering. The other, almost twice the distance, greets you with a pot of coffee and donuts. I drive the extra distance because I feel welcome there.

Similarly, visitors gauge how friendly a church is by the way it presents itself. Smaller churches may unknowingly project a negative image. Buildings are sometimes old, and there's not always money for proper upkeep. Bulletins and church literature may look decidedly amateuristic. The people of the church don't often see these things because the church is so familiar. Perhaps they have never known any other standard. However, these clues do not escape the notice of the first-time visitor. The physical plant and public image communicate the personality of the church.

Beyond the material considerations stand the people themselves: how they react to visitors and how they treat each other. No matter how much the church wants to reach out, growth will not happen if the building and the people fail to say "Welcome!"

One technique I've found helpful in building this awareness is to walk church members through their building as if they were first-time visitors. I take a small group a block or so away from the church, give them pencils and note cards, and try to create a "first-time visitor" mindset for them. Then we "visit" our church. What does the general appearance of the building and grounds communicate about the congregation? How at home do they feel? For example, can they find the rest rooms without having to ask the embarrassing question? Is the foyer cluttered and messy? Are minor repairs left undone? Do the walls and posters tell them anything? If one is not a Christian and has seldom been to church, what would this building say? Would they have any idea where to go or what they were supposed to do? The unwritten "signs" around the building may say a lot more than any welcoming committee ever does.

When the group "visited" our building, they found the exterior in sad shape. It looked as if we were telling the community we weren't a viable church; if the building were any indication, we might not be around much longer. However, on the interior we scored better. Our friendly bulletin boards and displays and the inviting coffee pot in the foyer made up for the undumped trash and the woeful lack of signs indicating rest rooms.

Since then we've spruced up our exterior, made sure the trash is dumped regularly, and posted clear signs to the lavatories. These simple efforts may not win any souls, but they tell people we are committed to our church and care about them. And that, combined with our strength of friendliness, may bring them back to hear the gospel.

I apply the same technique to the Sunday activities. Is any effort made to create a good impression? Or is too much taken for granted? How many people talk to visitors? How much time elapses before someone greets newcomers? Does the church give any impression that it even expects someone new to come? For one new church I know, meeting in a community center, it took twenty minutes of deliberate search inside the building for a visitor to find the meeting location! The church had no signs posted, no ushers at the outside doors—and no visitors.

I try to extend image-oriented thinking to all the public images our church projects. What does the Sunday bulletin look like? Although it did cost our church a bit of money (at a time when we had little to spare), we custom designed our bulletins. Since bulletins generally go home with people, we wanted them to carry away a good impression, so we bore the expense. We've had T-shirts professionally designed with our church logo. We use them for sports, youth activities, vacation Bible school, and other occasions, and it's exciting to see them dot the town.

I've found that whatever we decide to do—even as a small church—we need to maintain a sharp image before the community, one that says, "We know what we're doing, and we intend to do it well." People are, after all, bombarded by TV and print media of the highest quality, and it hits a responsive chord if the church is professional in its presentation. Would people feel comfortable visiting a doctor whose office is kept with the carelessness with which many churches keep their foyers?

This, of course, is not to negate the church's spiritual ministry role. But with a little attention to detail and, yes, just a little money, much "pre-evangelism" can be accomplished with first-time visitors before any words are spoken or any visits made. And the members themselves begin to take pride in their church as well.

The determination of salmon swimming upstream to spawn impresses me. I feel tired just watching them. However, there is no spiritual blessing to be received by churches fighting their way upstream against feelings of insignificance and defeat. Effective ministry is difficult enough even in the best of situations.

I've discovered these three principles are neither costly nor difficult to implement, yet they can help churches overcome self-image deficits.

My father used to tell me, "Work smart, not just hard." I believe our Father honors the same concept. By taking a good look at our churches and making sure some basic principles are at work, we can set the stage for growth and service in the smaller church that could make even big churches envious.

Gary Harrison is pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Delevan, Wisconsin.

After a spirit of discernment, the next rarest things in the world are diamonds and pearls.
Bruyere

I never know how much of my discouragement is just low metabolism, how much of it is the attack of the Enemy, and how much of it is the sheer toughness of the job,” a pastor admitted to me recently.

Are down times caused by our makeup, by the influence of evil, or by God’s shaping hand? Is discouragement mostly spiritual, emotional, or physical in origin? Is it a sin we should feel bad about, or a normal human response, like grief? Is it something we need to repent of, rebuke, or just rest from?

The way we answer these questions makes an Atlanticsized difference. The answer determines whether we will feel guilty for being discouraged — and whether that guilt is accurate. It determines whether we will seek help — and if so, where and how. It even helps determine how long we will feel discouraged, for applying the wrong treatment can be worse than doing nothing at all.

These questions don’t take easy answers. Discouragement and depression, its unpleasant cousin, usually involve a complex of factors — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social. Discouraged pastors report sheer fatigue, waking up tired. They also talk of not wanting to be around people, of withdrawing socially. Many lose interest in spiritual disciplines such as prayer and Bible study. A pastor feels discouragement at all levels.

But what about pinpointing the cause? H. B. London, pastor of First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, California, knows the importance of “trying to retrace how I’m feeling and why. If it’s fatigue, then it makes sense. If it’s failure, then it makes sense. Knowing the cause doesn’t make the discouragement go away, but there’s help in being able to say, ‘Hey, I’m really tired,’ or ‘I blew it. That was a lousy sermon and I know it; it doesn’t matter what anybody else says, I know it was a lousy sermon.’ Or if I can trace my feelings to family problems or finances, then I at least have a reason for what’s bothering me and can work on it.”

Diagnosing Discouragement

One way pastors have tried to analyze their discouragement is to determine whether it’s primarily physical, emotional, or spiritual in nature.

Physical. “I can see a pattern in the things that bring me down,” one minister says, “and it’s this: Physical tiredness relates directly to discouragement in ministry.”

For spiritual leaders trained in the ways of prayer and spiritual vitality, it’s easy to chalk up much if not all of the discouragement we feel to spiritual problems — I haven’t prayed enough; I’m growing cold; the Lord is dealing with me.

But more often than we suspect, as Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote in Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, “Physical conditions play their part. Certain physical ailments tend to promote depression.… Take that great preacher who preached in London for nearly forty years in the last century, Charles Spurgeon. He was subject to spiritual depression, and the main explanation in his case was undoubtedly the fact that he suffered from a gouty condition which finally killed him. He had to face this problem of spiritual depression often in a most acute form. A tendency to acute depression is an unfailing accompaniment of the gout he inherited from his forebears.”1

Many of the physical connections to discouragement are not yet known, but plenty are, and most of these can be controlled. For example, pastors generally work long hours, get little rest, and have trouble finding time to exercise. Unchecked, that pattern will almost surely lead to discouragement.

Experienced ministers have learned that it pays to not neglect their rest, relaxation, exercise, and proper diet. The body is probably the most easily overlooked source of discouragement — but often it’s a significant one.

Emotional and social causes may be easiest to pinpoint as causes of discouragement. Most of the cries discussed in chapters 4-8, for example, center in these areas. I can’t use my gifts, I need affirmation — these reflect emotional and social needs that, when unmet, can bring discouragement.

In addition, though, the pastorate tends to promote loneliness, as any leadership position does. Ironically pastors may be constantly contacting people, yet face, as Calvin Miller wrote, “lonely nights that follow the hectic days when it seems that, for all my acquaintances, I haven’t got a friend in the world.” The problem is not the number of contacts but the nature of them. Unless some are the refreshing personal kind, where a pastor can truly express his or her feelings, loneliness may dog even the most people-oriented pastor.

When social and emotional pressures build, the temptation may be to cloister yourself, to pray and study, to stay where it’s safe. But “it is a psychological fact that one cannot resolve conflicts or clarify issues simply by thinking about them,” says Arch Hart in his helpful book Coping with Depression in the Ministry and Other Helping Professions. “Self-talk and introspective rumination with no outside input leads inevitably to distortion and irrationality, whereas talking things over with someone else can help to clarify issues and remove distortions.”2

When discouraged by emotional or social conflicts or difficulties, the natural response is withdrawal. Yet unless there’s some social interaction, the problem becomes nearly impossible to trace.

Spiritual. Most pastors have sensitive antennae to the spiritual causes of their discouragement. As an Illinois pastor described it: “My discouragement is directly linked to my spiritual life. If I don’t have a strong spiritual life, if my prayer life is inconsistent, it’s easy for me to get down. I know that burnout and discouragement can happen even with a strong spiritual life, but I do think that encompasses a big part of it.”

During down times, many ministers feel as Spurgeon felt: “I fear I am not so full of love to God as I used to be. I lament my sad decline in spiritual things.… What is it to be popular, to be successful, to have abundance — if I should be left of God to fall, and to depart from his ways?”

But the temptation during times of discouragement is to place the blame wholly there. Then we either withdraw further from the Lord, out of guilt, or throw ourselves utterly into spiritual disciplines. While prayer is always helpful, too much seclusion for the discouraged person can bring on further heaviness of heart. Teresa of Avila spoke of the potential danger: “Let not your soul coop itself up in a corner. In attaining to great sanctity in … seclusion, the devil will keep you company there. And so he will do your sequestered soul much mischief.”

Here many pastors stressed the importance of a spiritual confidant to help them stay spiritually vital and discern more accurately the spiritual causes, if any, of their discouragement. Delbert Rossin, pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Geneva, Illinois, is one who has experienced the benefit of such a person. “It is pretty hard sometimes all by yourself. I think we all need pastors, spiritual advisers. I’m on the phone to my pastor in Minneapolis once a month, and I ask him to hold me accountable — am I growing in the Lord? He holds me accountable in a loving way; it’s not legalistic. I was going through a time when my Bible reading and prayer time was less than it ought to be — not that we ever arrive. My pastor said to me, ‘Del, why don’t you try this: no Bible, no breakfast.’ That little routine has helped keep me more faithful and disciplined in this area. On my own, it wouldn’t do any good. But knowing he supports me, is praying for me, and that he wonders how it’s going keeps me motivated.”

Mapping Spiritual Pain

Even when we accurately trace our discouragement to the spiritual area of life, we may not yet have pinpointed the precise cause. For within the spiritual realm — a complex and invisible one — several things may cause discouragement, according to pastors.

Basic weariness of the human spirit. One leader described discouragement this way: “It goes deeper than stress or burnout. It’s when the whole spirit just sags.” Counselor G. Keith Olson has pointed out that “the greatest enemy of parents is discouragement,” and the same holds true for spiritual parents. There is great agony in bringing flawed human beings into the image of Christ. It was for good reason that Paul wrote, “I’m in labor again until Christ is formed in you!” One pastor wrote on the Leadership survey, “My greatest sense of discouragement comes from dealing with the marital and emotional and spiritual problems of new converts.” When you’ve invested yourself heavily in a person, especially a young believer, you are going to feel some spiritual tiredness. Just as physical labor causes sore muscles, so spiritual labor can cause a spiritual weariness. That’s why Jesus withdrew often for prayer and rest.

God’s shaping hand. The mystery is great, but the unanimous testimony of church leaders through the ages is that God sometimes withdraws a sense of his presence — brings spiritual dryness — to bring growth and maturity in Christ. (Indeed, Jesus himself was “led by the Spirit” into the wilderness of temptation, Mark tells us.) Bartholomew Gottemoller, a contemporary churchman, described such a period: “For six or seven years … I did not know where I was spiritually since everything seemed to be going wrong.… All my dreams of achieving holiness looked like mere folly. Prayer became dry and difficult. Because of all this, I felt that God was displeased with me, that he had given up on me because of my many faults and failings. The best word I can find to express what I was experiencing is ‘aimlessness.’ I wanted to live for God because I knew he was the only real good, but I did not know how to go about it.”

But then Gottemoller went on a retreat and heard expounded the “I am the vine, you are the branches” passage from John 15. He saw that “every branch that bears fruit he prunes,” and something broke loose within him. “I clearly saw that it was his work and not my doing. What I had thought was actually destroying my spiritual life I now saw he had been using to bring me to a goal I could never have imagined.”3

Spiritual discouragement may be God’s tool to make us more like Christ. Oswald Chambers spoke of it in these words: “If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a big personal enlargement ahead.”4

Satan. C. S. Lewis wrote of the “two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with equal delight.”5

Finding that balance isn’t always easy. On the one hand, as an Evangelical Free Church pastor put it, “Satan gets way too much credit for discouragement, I think. Most of the discouragement I’ve gone through came from my own poor performance. Here in the middle of summer, for example, I’m probably going to have to work all day tomorrow, my day off. I’m also going to have to work all afternoon and evening on Sunday. I look at that and say, ‘That’s discouraging.’ But I recognize that’s no one’s fault but my own; I just didn’t plan very well.”

It’s no less true, however, as Dallas Seminary professor Howard Hendricks says, that “when you are doing what Jesus Christ has called you to do, you can count on two things: you will possess spiritual power because you have the presence of Christ, and you’ll experience opposition.”

In Shadow of the Almighty, Elisabeth Elliot writes of the time shortly before her husband, Jim, set out to bring the gospel to the Aucas, a hostile South American Indian tribe. “But the Enemy of Souls is not easily persuaded to relinquish his hold in any territory. Seeing that his authority in the Auca region was going to be challenged, he soon launched an attack on the challengers. Jim was beset with temptations such as had never before assailed him, and that master-weapon, discouragement, which to my knowledge had held no power over him since his arrival in Ecuador, met him at every turn. A gloom seemed to settle over his spirit in December, and it seemed that battles were being fought which I could not share.”6

Ben Haden, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, describes the same opposition this way: “The ministry is a life-and-death, heaven-or-hell matter. It’s a spiritual battle every day — if you’re faithful.

“I find my struggle with Satan usually occurs when I’ve made the gospel clear but individuals can’t bring themselves to respond. They understand what I’m saying and know what is required, but as they weigh their willingness to make the commitment, it becomes obvious there’s spiritual opposition. That’s what I mean by spiritual warfare, and it’s a draining experience.”

Sifting and Sorting

“When it’s happening, when you’re down or discouraged, you often don’t know why,” admitted a Lutheran pastor. Indeed, one characteristic of discouragement is the inability to think clearly. You see the entire world through “gray-colored lenses.” Gaining an objective view of the situation is difficult.

What’s needed is to find out, one pastor explained, “what is the truth of the situation. Is it true, for example, that nobody likes me? You have many voices speaking to you — your own inside you, other people’s, and the Devil’s. But you need to hear the truth, which is God’s voice.”

Pastors do have some substantial resources to gain a more objective view of their situations.

One is time. During discouragement the present seems insurmountable. Even a few days down the road can help us see things more clearly. “I’ll get out and run in the morning, and say to myself, Give it seventy-two hours and then evaluate the problem,” explains Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

Another pastoral ally is rest. A day away for relaxation often puts things into perspective.

The biggest resource is often talking out the situation. Some pastors do that with a journal. Robert Frederich, pastor of Denver’s Galilee Baptist Church, says, “One of the most helpful tools for me is my journal in which I begin each day by answering the question, ‘Where am I?’ Am I tired? Depressed? Worried? By putting it down, I can define the nebulous feelings and relate them to the resources of God.”

Often it’s wise to go to someone outside the situation, someone who can remind us we’re loved and accepted, and who can reorient our sights. Many leaders’ spouses, though not completely removed from the situation, serve that purpose. “The major problem in my life and ministry has been depression,” confesses Howard Hendricks. “That will surprise even some of my closest friends, because I’ve tried hard to be a positive, confident person. I’ve come home from a week of ministry where I’ve been so far beyond myself it was pitiful, where God did things far beyond my own spiritual capabilities, and as soon as I hit Dallas, I was in trouble. I’d crash. I would tell my wife, ‘Honey, I’ve had it.’

“She would say, ‘Well, Hon, why don’t we pray together?’

“‘No, I don’t want to pray.’

“‘Why don’t we read the Word together?’

“‘No, I don’t want to read the Word.’

“And she just kept right on loving me and accepting me. What can you do in the face of that? You change.”

Is Discouragement Sin?

You can’t talk about the causes of discouragement for very long before you have to deal with a tough question head-on: Is discouragement sin?

The case for discouragement being a sin usually runs like this: Whatever is not of faith is sin, and discouragement is not of faith; instead it’s a sign of unbelief. In addition, the Lord commanded Joshua (1:10) to not be discouraged, and Paul said that he did not lose heart (2 Cor. 4:1). Further, discouragement may have negative effects in our lives, such as causing us to withdraw from others or God. Thus, discouragement is sin.

One minister expressed his belief this way: “Treat discouragement as a sin and shun it.”

Pastors find this line of reasoning difficult when they become discouraged from circ*mstances beyond their control. When a staff member resigns, pointing the finger at you, it’s hard to make sin the culprit.

And yet we all know cases where people’s discouragement was in some way tied to sin.

Arch Hart makes a helpful distinction “between the causes of depression and the experience of depression. The experience of depression is always legitimate. It is a natural and normal response to something happening either in our environment or in our bodies. The cause of depression may not be.”7

It’s a (Self-)Pity

In addition, though feelings of discouragement are themselves a normal response (to something out of kilter in our lives), we may sin in the way we handle those feelings once we have them. For example, rather than seek out appropriate help, we may fall into self-pity.

One Methodist minister confessed, “It’s embarrassing to admit, but sometimes I actually want to feel sorry for myself, to feel down. I don’t want help from God, my wife, or anyone else.”

“Self-pity is absolutely devastating,” Howard Hendricks says. “I think I’ve set a new record for resigning from the institution. One day my wife said, ‘Honey, why don’t you just write out the resignation and put it in the drawer? It will save you a lot of trouble.'”

Oswald Chambers, in his characteristically piercing prose, explains why self-pity is so destructive in the Christian life: “We think it a sign of real modesty to say at the end of a day, ‘Oh, well, I have just gotten through, but it has been a severe tussle.’ And all the Almighty God is ours in the Lord Jesus! And he will tax the last grain of sand and the remotest star to bless us if we will obey him. What does it matter if external circ*mstances are hard? Why should they not be! If we give way to self-pity and indulge in the luxury of misery, we banish God’s riches from our own lives and hinder others from entering into his provision. No sin is worse than the sin of self-pity, because it obliterates God and puts self-interest upon the throne. It opens our mouths to spit out murmurings, and our lives become craving spiritual sponges; there is nothing lovely or generous about them.”8

Pastors are unanimous in their assessment of the dangers of self-pity. It keeps us from seeking help, it keeps us from shaking off our discouragement when that’s possible, and it keeps us from responding to God during the time of trouble.

Nothing could be more normal at certain times than to feel discouraged. But nothing could be more destructive than to allow that discouragement to breed self-pity.

One thing that helps us not to let that happen is to realize the purpose for discouragement.

Discouragement’s Valuable Purpose

Discouragement warns us that something is wrong, and in that sense, serves a valuable purpose. Says Steve Harris, “I like to think of discouragement as Philip Yancey describes pain: it’s useful in that it tells us something is not right, something is out of order. I shouldn’t be happy about apathy and lethargy in a congregation. If that didn’t discourage me, I wouldn’t be normal.” So feeling discouraged is normal in a world where very many things are “out of order.” Maybe our body has been overtaxed; the discouragement signals us to slow down, to get some rest. Or perhaps we’re in conflict with a troublesome family in the church; discouragement causes us to withdraw, to pull away until we can gain strength and perspective.

That view of discouragement doesn’t come naturally to us. The experience hits us too painfully, and we feel bad about it, as though we’d done something wrong to feel this way. But there is benefit in identifying the cause, for then we are able to work on it. Eugene Peterson says, “I try to identify the sense of discouragement. At times, mine has been really symptomatic of a vocational hunger for something better, deeper, more authentic. If my discernment is right, if my interpretation is right, then that sense of discouragement is really a hopeful thing, because it shows that there’s something alive there that longs for something different.” In Eugene’s case, the discouragement that led him to the Session to say “I quit,” some seventeen years ago, also led him to discover he wasn’t doing the job he felt called to be doing. He and the Session made adjustments, and today he is able to focus more of his energies on the pastoral tasks of prayer and study, which he loves. Discouragement, oddly, became the impetus for something better and more fulfilling.

Discouragement also drove a Midwest pastor we’ll call Larry toward a higher goal. When Larry came to his church nine years ago, he braced himself. “The congregation had gone through squabbles and painful splits,” he says, “and I didn’t think healing would come for a long, long time.

“But God worked faster than I thought possible. In about five years we saw the attendance return, the facility fill up. We went to two worship services and two Sunday schools, and we completely redecorated and refurbished the sanctuary.” Though some of the early years were difficult, it seemed that every dream of Larry’s was coming true.

But then discouragement set in.

“I never had what you would call a midlife crisis in my forties,” Larry recalls, “because there was always so much that needed to be done and that I wanted to do. In a way I was too busy to have one. But then all of a sudden, there was no major challenge in front of me. I’d done everything I’d wanted to do, and I couldn’t see anything else worth working toward. All I had left was going into a maintenance mode, and the thought of that killed me.

“I sank into the most difficult period of my life psychologically. I felt aimless, stuck. I was ready to leave; if somebody would have offered me a good-paying job selling garages, I probably would have taken it.

“As I was groping around for a new challenge, I realized our own county was going to experience good growth over the next decade. If the church was willing to ‘lengthen the cords and strengthen the stakes’ and really accept the challenge for growth — even if that meant relocation — there’d be plenty of exciting things ahead.

“But as I put out feelers in the church, all the readings were for keeping the status quo, complacency. People were beefing about the irritation of having to hold back-to-back services and two Sunday schools; they would never stand still for something larger than that. I thought, How can any church that claims to be a New Testament church settle down to maintain its ministry when all around it are people who need to be reached? I got angry about that. I internalized it, and soon it turned into depression, as it usually does.”

This second wave of discouragement proved too much for Larry. He spent a good portion of that year looking for an opportunity to leave. Most of the positions he made contact with, though, didn’t hold out any challenge for him. “I would simply have been leaving a maintenance ministry to go to a maintenance ministry,” he says. “What was the sense in that?”

Then Larry received correspondence from a large church in a nearby state. The position looked exciting. As the interview process progressed smoothly, Larry’s heart began to lift. The call committee narrowed the choices to Larry and one other. It looked likely that he would get the call, and then a frontier would open before him.

But the committee went with the other candidate.

“I felt trapped,” he says. “I was in such a dilemma. I didn’t want to leave just to be leaving. But I knew God had called and gifted me to do more than keep people happy and maintain things. And now the one option that looked promising fell through. I felt more discouraged than ever.”

It was then that Larry, intuitively perhaps, began to channel that overwhelming sense of frustration toward something he wanted most of all. “I couldn’t see clearly for a long while what my discouragement was coming from. But as I pinpointed it to my need for a new challenge, I thought, What could be a bigger challenge than trying to lead this congregation into the growth I can see for it? I knew these people, and by now I’d built a level of trust with them. If anybody was going to do it, it would be me.

“But at the same time, I didn’t see how I possibly could convince them to try something so radical — to buy land, build a new facility, relocate. A consultant told me I was crazy for thinking a church in this staid community would ever go for something like that. Somehow, though, that in itself spurred me on. I began to dream again.”

When I talked with Larry not long ago, he showed me a brand-new long-range plan for the church. “I envision a developing campus,” he said excitedly. “We have the potential to develop the finest preschool in our state. On Sunday night we had our first congregational meeting to present the plan, and the first sampling showed 75 percent support. We’ve got a long way to go yet; nothing’s for sure at this point. But I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. This is what God had for me.”

As Larry learned, a pastor’s discouragement, when its source is accurately determined, can drive him or her to something better. It can serve a good and useful purpose.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973).

Archibald D. Hart, Coping with Depression in the Ministry and Other Helping Professions (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1984), 18.

Bartholomew Gottemoller, Why Good People Suffer (New York: Vantage Press, 1987), 2 – 4.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1935), 287.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters in The Best of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House), preface.

Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).

Hart, 11.

Chambers, 137.

©1988 Christianity Today

If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready.
Jesus (Matthew 24:43-44a)

They say pro football quarterbacks fear one thing almost more than anything else: being blindsided.

When you take the snap and drop back into the pocket, you become a tasty morsel dangling in front of hungry defensive ends and blitzing middle linebackers. These wolves weigh 265 pounds apiece and can sprint the distance between the line and your tender body in two seconds flat. Their trip to the Pro Bowl depends on how many times they can slam you to the Astroturf.

But as long as you can see them coming, you’re pretty safe. You can dodge; you can duck, scramble, get a pass off, or head for the sidelines. Roger Staubach, the former Dallas Cowboys great, describes the dynamic in a play against the Los Angeles Rams in the early seventies: “I took the snap, dropping back to pass. A defensive lineman broke loose on my left. I ducked and he went over me. I rolled to my left and Mike Montgomery, sensing that I might run, knocked down the linebacker on that side, Isiah Robertson. I took off for the first down.”1

It’s when you can’t see them coming that there’s trouble. You co*ck your arm to throw, you’re concentrating only on that tight end cutting across midfield, and WHAM! Your head snaps back, and the wind’s knocked out of you. Then you crunch the turf.

The situation’s not too different for pastors trying to dodge discouragement. If only you could learn to read when discouragement might come at you, you could keep from getting blindsided.

Reading the Blitz

I asked veteran pastors who have learned to “read the blitz” when discouragement and down times were most likely to come.

The first key time, oddly, is following a big event, a major victory. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the brilliant preacher at London’s Westminster Chapel earlier this century, explains: “Another frequent cause of spiritual depression is what we may describe as a reaction — a reaction after a great blessing, a reaction after some unusual and exceptional experience. Consder the case of Elijah under the juniper tree. There is no doubt in my mind that his main trouble was he was suffering from a reaction after what had happened on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19).”2 The great prophet had called down fire from heaven to display dramatically that Jehovah, not Baal, is the one true God; yet scant verses later he is in the throes of depression and self-pity. Valley follows mountaintop.

What happened to Elijah happens also to spiritual leaders today. “One time when I’m vulnerable to discouragement,” reflects a Baptist pastor, “is following big events such as weddings and funerals. After a week of being up I’ve found I crash, sometimes for three days. I try to think about why I’m discouraged, and there’s no apparent reason. Then I look at my previous week’s schedule, and I think, Of course you’re discouraged. Look what you’ve been through.“

Says another church leader, “I’ve learned simply to look at my schedule when I’m down. Blue days invariably follow my periods of most intense activity. Now I try to plan days of rest to recuperate.”

But many ministers say they struggle to accept the fact that they have good reason to be discouraged. Confesses one: “I don’t consciously think that way. Instead I think, What’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t be down. I just had a great week — a top-of-the-mountain challenge. Besides, I’m a leader. I should be able to forge ahead.“

But the fact is, following a big event most people experience a drop of adrenalin. An emotional drop is the natural accompaniment.

This principle helps us to interpret down times not solely as indictments of our own spirituality or character. It helps us put them in perspective. These down times following a major success or goal reached may be the most normal possible reaction. That knowledge brings some comfort; it keeps us, as Presbyterian minister Bruce Thielemann put it, from “adding to the weight of discouragement the burden of blame.”

Weak During the Week

Discouragement also comes at predictable moments during the week, according to many pastors. “After Sunday’s service is the worst time,” says Robert Norris. “You begin to say to yourself, Everything I’ve done is in vain. Who was helped?” So much emotional energy has been expended in the preparation and delivery of a message that following this high point, optimism and energy drop off.

Often the emotions fully bottom out on Monday. “In my first pastorate, I would be really irritable and grumpy every Monday,” says Glen Parkinson, minister at Severna Park (Maryland) Presbyterian Church. “That was my day off, so it ended up being the day when my wife and I would have our fights. It would be just terrible.

“After four years of that somebody told me, ‘That’s no big surprise. Look at what you do on Sunday. It isn’t the amount of work; it’s what you put into it. And preaching is a very emotional thing. Of course you are going to drop!’

“Well, the next week I got up on Monday morning, and I felt terrible. But it wasn’t so bad because I thought, Of course I feel terrible. That’s okay. I don’t have to get mad at anybody. It was wonderful.”

Recognizing this, some ministers have switched their day off to some day other than Monday so their spouses and family don’t get them at their worst. They use Monday to catch up on light office work. As one minister quipped, “Hey, if you’re going to have an off day, do it on company time.” One who made the switch was Steve Harris. His evaluation: “I take Thursdays off now, and though it seems like a small thing, it has made the rhythm of the week much better. Sunday used to be the end of the week, and I’d think, If I can just get through the day, I’ll be off tomorrow. But when I take Thursday off, I hit my peak around Sunday.”

But again, a low period during the week signals nothing more than normalcy. Recognizing that has given Phil Sackett, pastor of Excelsior (Minnesota) Bible Church, staying power. “I’ve made a deal with the Lord,” he says, “never to quit on a Monday or the day after a board meeting. Anything I do has to be thought out longer than that.”

Weathering the Year

With that kind of weekly cycle, pastors can expect, in the words of veteran Methodist minister Phil Hinerman, “some mornings each month when I feel like nobody loves me and nobody cares about me. So I just get up and go to work and believe the feeling will pass.”

Lows cycle through the year as well, usually following the “right after highs” pattern. “A couple of weeks before Labor Day you really start cranking,” says Chuck Smalley, associate pastor of Wayzata (Minnesota) Evangelical Free Church. “You start all the new small groups, hold a couple of conferences or retreats — from Labor Day to Thanksgiving you run full blast.

“Then in November you usually bottom out emotionally because you’ve gone through that intense period. And here in Minnesota, November is the pits for weather — brown, cold, muddy, yuck. All the leaves are gone, but the snow hasn’t come yet.

“The other time I tend to get low during the year is right after all the activities leading up to, and around, Easter. Now that I’ve identified the cycle, I just plan to take a couple of days off at those points.”

Chuck’s description raises another factor in the yearly cycle: the weather. There’s good reason why people often describe times of discouragement as gray, cold, or rainy. A real estate agent once told me, “If you can love a house in November or February, you really love it.” And the same applies to churches: If you can feel positive about your ministry in November or February, that’s a good sign. In the last few years researchers have documented an intriguing depression they call sad (Seasonal Affective Disorder), which strikes certain people only during the winter months. Not that cold, short days are the major factor in pastoral discouragement, but it helps to keep in mind the counsel of Bruce Chapman, pastor of First Evangelical Free Church in Minneapolis: “I had a denominational leader tell me, ‘In Minnesota, never make a decision in February.’ He wasn’t being sarcastic. And I agree. Don’t make a major decision when you’re feeling down.”

Career Culverts

Even more helpful is asking the long-range question: Across my entire ministry, when am I most likely to get discouraged? What ages and stages in ministry make me prone to it?

Church consultant Robert Dale identified three times in the pastor’s life when difficulties may become insurmountable:

• three to five years out of seminary

• around age forty

• near retirement.

These three career culverts bear a closer look.

Three to five years into ministry. The feeling of fading ideals was captured by one fifth-year pastor in a letter to a friend at the same point in ministry: “Early in my first pastorate, I remember my wife and me visiting our hometown and going to the church pastored by the man who married us. After the service, we greeted him and said how great it was to be in the ministry. I expected him to agree it was a great calling and that he was enjoying it just as much after twenty years in the pastorate.

“He shocked us both by saying he was glad we were enjoying it, but for him the ministry was full of heartache and pain. I quickly chalked it up to his carnality and obvious disregard for the calling he had received.

“But now, five years later, I know what he was talking about. I’ve come face to face with the pain of pastoring. I’ve watched myself become depressive, moody, impatient with my children, impatient with my church. It doesn’t take much to put me in a tailspin over some real or imagined slight. I know I’m not God’s gift to the church, but some people in the congregation seem to feel it’s their duty before God to question everything I do.”

A Leadership Journal study a few years ago isolated the factors that increase the chances of emotional problems for pastors. One of the top factors was shortness of time in the pastorate. First churches often aren’t everything a pastor hoped for. Then, a young pastor faces each problem for the first time ever. It’s no wonder seminary-bred ideals soon get pricked on the barbed-wire realities of a local church.

But another troubling factor, the study found, was shortness of time in the current position. The “at-three-to-five-years” discouragement, according to many pastors, comes not only in your first church, but in each church. Lynn Anderson, who has ministered at the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas for the past sixteen years, sketches the period this way:

“The first two years you can do nothing wrong.

“The second two years you can do nothing right.

“The fifth and sixth years of a ministry, either you leave or the people who think you can do nothing right leave. Or you change, or they change, or you both change.

“Productive ministry emerges somewhere in the seventh year or beyond.”

What’s behind the three-to-five-year problem?

“By then,” explains veteran pastor Ivan York of the Wheaton (Illinois) Evangelical Free Church, “you start to realize idiosyncrasies of your church that you couldn’t see when you first arrived. They are starting to see some of the imperfections in you. They knew all along you weren’t a superhero, yet they were daring to hope — until now.”

A pastor from the East who survived such a period described it this way: “When I came, they said they wanted renewal, outreach, evangelism, and all this stuff. But their understanding of what that meant and mine weren’t the same. In the first three or four years, I kept having encounters with people who had been close to the former pastor, people who in my opinion had deep insecurities and personal problems. They were not people I would ever bring into the inner circle of my ministry. I guess they sensed that and resented it.

“As a result, they accused me of being anti-intellectual, on an ego trip — that I was building my own kingdom. One man, who was an elected member of our leadership, finally resigned and wrote a four-page, single-spaced letter questioning my motives and competence. That was a discouraging time.”

Carl George, director of the Charles E. Fuller Institute of Church Growth, pinpoints the sociological factors that troubled these, and many other, pastors. The first is that usually at about four years in a new ministry, the new guard — those members who have come since the pastor, and largely because of him or her — “nears equality with the old guard in voting power, and the old guard often feels threatened.

“Second, some time after four years, a congregation begins to realize the minister’s agenda for the future may contradict some of the long-established members’ agendas. This period of delicate balance commonly takes place between the fourth and sixth years of a given pastorate.

“The pastor enjoys little security through this period. In fact, the pastor fatality rate at this time is so high that whole denominations have that ‘about four years’ pattern for pastorates.”

Recognizing that may not make the difficulties easier, but it does provide the comfort that the problems are not unusual, not an indication of lack of ministerial gifts.

Midlife adds a new element to a pastor’s outlook on ministry: there’s not all that much time left. Earlier lifetime goals may suddenly, and painfully, have to be revised. Many middle-aged pastors feel they’d like to try something new, take on a new church, give one more great push in their lives before time runs out. But the realistic options may be few. Lamented one pastor on the Leadership survey: “I have feelings of futility, but I’m financially trapped. Middle-aged expositors are not in great demand.”

Early in ministry, they could try new things, tackle challenges, and if the thing blew up — well, they’d just start over. There was plenty of time to learn and give it another shot.

But not so now. Psychiatrist Louis McBurney, who counsels many pastors, capsulizes the pressured feeling: “They’re no longer able to bounce back from disappointments.”

When discouragement hits at midlife, it often comes as a complex tangle of situations and feelings. Because of that, it may well require new coping strategies, ones a pastor had not considered seriously before, as Ed Bratcher found. “Without question, the period in my ministry when I felt the greatest discouragement was right around age forty. The despondency over my ministry coincided with some personal factors. My father died. My mother came to live with us and brought the new dynamic of three generations under one roof.

“I began to feel, because of my age, that I was trapped. I wondered if my mobility had stopped, if there was no place to go. My discouragement sank into a clinically discernible depression, and when I saw a physician, he asked me, ‘You wouldn’t consider getting professional help, would you?’ My stance at the time was a firm no, but I was depressed enough that I really did need some professional help.”

Ed eventually overcame his apprehension that parishioners might find out and react negatively to the fact their pastor had sought psychiatric help. His experience? “I can testify to both the fears and the benefits of receiving psychiatric help. Even though I still find it difficult to admit to members of my parish that my wife and I have had psychiatric care, I can acknowledge the value of such care. My ministry through interpersonal relationships has become more sensitive and of greater benefit to everyone involved as a result of the psychiatric help I’ve received.”3

Knowing when and how to get help is one of the great secrets of staying power for the discouraged pastor, and that may be especially true for the pastor wrestling with midlife questions of self-worth, achievement, and the future.

Nearing retirement. Later in life people hit a psycho-social stage that noted researcher Erik Erikson characterized as “Integrity versus Despair.” The pastor headed toward retirement takes stock of his ministry and wonders, Did I do well? Can I rejoice that I accomplished things, that my life and work had a wholeness and integrity? Or do I look back and only despair?

The turning point in the decision is often whether a pastor can see progress. Did people really change? Were new leaders developed? Did the church grow? Were buildings added? Where there is a sense of progress made, there is usually a sense of integrity as well. One minister, now in retirement, wrote: “It seems to me that the whole of my life as a pastor has offered the kind of affirmation that made me want to stay in ministry. Really, it has been a joy with few down moments, even when dealing with a bishop who seemed to me unreasonable and plain ornery. I enjoy reflecting on my years in ministry.” This pastor adds that he is “still at it, even in retirement.”

For others, though, who see primarily blocked progress and unrealized dreams as they look back, discouragement can hit hard. “The older I get in ministry, the easier it is to feel discouraged,” admits one minister. “You see the same thing coming time upon time, and there doesn’t seem to be any change.”

Preparation for Protection

Knowing that at these times the tide of discouragement will be coming in and the waves may be high, can pastors prepare themselves? Are there ways to brace yourself for the waves? Ministers I talked with described two ways they prepare themselves.

Take a firm footing in God. “The way I prepare myself for dark times,” says Dave Dorpat, pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Geneva, Illinois, “is to get my relationship with the Lord in order. When that’s solid, I know I’m on the Rock, and like the Psalmist says, ‘Ten thousand may fall at my right or left, but the Lord is with me.'”

“You can prepare yourself by building spiritual disciplines,” adds Frank Mercadante, youth minister at a large church in nearby St. Charles, Illinois. “When I’ve been spending time with the Lord and the tough times come, they’re still tough, but I have a foundation of my relationship with him, and I can rely on that rather than on myself.”

Frank discovered this once after a program he’d long dreamed of didn’t gain the necessary approval and funding. “That really hurt,” he says, “but as I prayed about it the Lord said to me, ‘Frank, there’s nothing that can hold back my will. You’re disappointed now, but I’m God and you’re the servant. Don’t worry; I’m in control.’ And that gave me the strength to go on.”

Find firm friends. The second thing pastors have found helpful is “gathering a group who will care for you amidst discouragement,” as one put it. “You have to assemble those people who will gather around you, support you, maintain you.”

“I can’t overemphasize my need to have leaders whom I relate to and spend time with, people who will pray with me and support me,” adds Dave Dorpat.

“Recently, for instance, I have been helping take care of my father-in-law, who has a broken hip, at nights, so my mother-in-law can get some sleep. Being there every night for the last two weeks and having my sleep interrupted has really been wearing on me. By last Sunday when I came to church, I was wiped out. I was really empty. I didn’t have a conclusion for the message; I just didn’t know what I was going to say.

“We have prayer at 7:15 before the services, and one of our elders, Dean Kroning, came bounding in all joyous and praising the Lord. So I said, ‘You know, I feel really tired this morning. Wiped out. Empty. Could you pray for me?’ And Dean and the four or five other elders who were there gathered around, laid hands on me, and prayed for me. And the message that morning — well, I think the Lord really blessed it. Several people told me it was powerful.”

These people lift your sights. They remind you of the things you easily forget when you’re down — that God is in control, that he loves you, that he’s working in your life. Right now, to use the football metaphor, discouragement may be blitzing, but friends block for you. They keep you playing toward your ultimate goal.

In his autobiography, Roger Staubach tells of the time he was asked by a reporter, “What’s your ultimate goal in life?”

“My ultimate goal is beyond this life,” Staubach told him. “It’s going to heaven.” Then he added, “All your passes are completed in heaven.”

“What about defensive backs?” the reporter came back.

“There are no defensive backs up there.”4

Roger Staubach with Sam Blair and Bob St.John, Staubach: First Down, Lifetime to Go (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1974), 250.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973).

Edward B. Bratcher, The Walk-on-Water Syndrome (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1984), 114.

Staubach, 238.

©1988 Christianity Today