# Churchgoer to pastor after the service: ‘Some Sunday, just for a change, could you please give us a word or two on what, if anything, we’re doing right?’

My calling is to collect the classical and modern wisdom about churches and pastors. Churches today are mostly static or declining, numerically. And when organizations are losing customers there’s a tendency towards despair or blaming or gimmicks or ‘hardening of the oughteries’ (where exhortation is high and effectiveness is low). And so we live out Oscar Wilde’s sad comment: we kill the thing we love.

Here’s a pot-pourri of ‘received wisdom’ – ancient and modern:

What does a healthy church look like? What does a healthy ‘minister’ look like? In the past month or so I have spoken in two churches (among others) I ‘d call healthy. One is the Waverly Christian Fellowship in Melbourne: 3,000 worshippers each weekend, and growing. The other: a once-a-month home-church in a Victorian country town. The commitment of people to the Lord in both places is unquestioned. At the home-church we stood around a piano and sang old worship-songs; at Waverly we sang new ones; the pianist at the home-church struggled to hit the right notes; the music at Waverly was first-class. For the teaching-time at the home group we sat in a circle and listened to an exposition then exchanged ideas, questions and stories. At WCF Jan and I spoke at a merriage enrichment seminar, helped by whiz-bang Powerpoint slides on the screens.

The health of a church has little to do with size. Some healthy churches are growing; some aren’t. The only common denominator in all healthy churches: the palpable commitment of those people to the Lord of the Church. They are not mere consumers-of-evangelical-religion, but want to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. They pursue excellence, rather than church-as-usual. They carry an everlastingly-unchangeable gospel, but let the world write the agenda. (Don’t react too quickly to that: think about it. It’s the way Jesus and the apostles did their thing). In a pluralistic culture churches will be different from one another, and that’s O.K.

Similarly for a healthy ministry. First, let us be clear all followers of Jesus are ministers, servants of the Lord of the Church. All are ordained to ministry, in the church and in the world. Some are ordained to a ministry of pastoral leadership, and this article is mostly addressed to them.

First, let’s list a few ways in which church and ministry are changing, in fairly random order:

1. Clerical Malpractice litigation. Since the highly publicized 1985 case of the Grace Community Church in Los Angeles being taken to court by the parents of Ken Nally, who committed suicide following counseling by pastors; and a few years’ later the U.S. Supreme Court’s upholding a State legislature fining the Episcopal Church $1m for a priest’s misdemeanours with a woman (the fine was not for the priest’s adultery but because he was counseling without supervision), clergy and denominations are becoming very wary – as are most professionals. One point: psychologists and psychiatrists are accountable re supervision; why shouldn’t clergy?

2. We live in a consumer culture, driven by the media (particularly TV, radio and the Internet). The old days when people meekly ‘prayed, paid, and obeyed’ have long gone.

1. Call. The call to the vocation of pastoral leadership is both similar and dissimilar to other callings. Some pastors (not many) hear God calling through a burning bush or a Damascus-Road experience; for some it is a very ordinary choice, and the call is a process rather than a climactic event. With Paul, we can say we are ‘made a minister’ (1 Timothy 1:12). It is something God does: and the fact of the call is more important than the method. Some of us are reluctant, like Moses or Jonah. Some are willing, like Isaiah: ‘Here am I; send me.’ We come to ministry from mixed motives. In the retreats I do with pastors one of the questions addresses the issue of non-altruistic motives for entering pastoral ministry. (See http://jmm.org.au/articles/8053.htm). But however the message gets through to us, it is a calling to follow Jesus in a life of servanthood, to faithfulness, if not necessarily to ‘success’, however that is supposed to be measured. The pastoral call is to prayer (Acts 6:4), ministry of the Word (Acts 6:4), and evangelism (2 Timothy 4:5). Classically, another way to put this: we are called to a ministry of Word, Sacrament, and Pastoral Care. But above all to communicate ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’ (unsearchable, not because they are inaccessible, but because they are inexhaustible, and far beyond human comprehension).

2. Discipline. Robert Frost said ‘Life is tons of discipline.’ He’s right. A pastor’s work utilizes every interest and talent he or she possesses. Parish ministry ought never to be dull or unimaginative. Certainly it has its frustrations and anxieties. Often we are out of our depth. And our people need to be encouraged to a life of discipline too. Sometimes the church seems to be little more than a club, with a bit of religion added once a week. But the standards of the church are lower than those of Service clubs, for example. In some of these, if you miss four times you are out. If you don’t show up for work you’re fired, but this is not true in the church.

3. Character. There are three sources of humility: devotion to a cause larger than one’s self; the frank recognition of one’s own limitations; and the contemplation of the extravagant grace of God.

4. Ministry-as-empowerment is more important than ministry-as-enabling or even ministry-as-encouragement. (See http://jmm.org.au/articles/8109.htm). John Wimber told a story about a young man to came up to him, visibly upset. He said, ‘I’ve tried to contact you for two weeks, to get help for this guy I found sitting on the side of the road. He was wet, cold, hungry. I fed him, clothed him and took him in for the night. I thought the church could take over the next day. But when I called your staff said they couldn’t take him in! So I’ve had him for two weeks. You say the church should care for the poor, but why isn’t the church caring for this man?’ Wimber’s response: ‘The church is caring for this man.’ He stared at Wimber for a moment and said, ‘Ah, but I wanted you to do it.’ Response: ‘Yes, but Jesus wanted you to do it. And you did.’

We do in our world what Jesus did in his: training people to do what we’re doing; modeling ministry for/with them: even to offering healing to those on the margins, or even in the very depths of hell, as the Creed symbolically affirms.

3. Preaching. Karl Barth used to stress the importance of preaching as a key task of the ‘theologian-in-residence’: ‘I sought to find my way between the problem of human life on the one hand and the content of the Bible on the other. As a minister I wanted to speak to the people in the infinite contradiction of their life, but to speak the no less infinite message of the Bible which was as much of a riddle as life.’ I think it’s good to preach from the lectionary, or in some other way to preach through the Bible systematically – this saves us from being locked in to our pet theologies. But begin each sermon where people are. As Fosdick said, they do not come to church wondering what happened to the Amalekites! Fosdick also said we should spend one hour in the study for every minute in the pulpit: not a bad idea (so some of us will have to take down the sign ‘Office’ and replace it with ‘Study’).

4. Administry vs. mission. Some churches and denominations are badly infected with meetingitis. Peter Drucker, the management guru, says churches spend ten times more time in committees than they ought. Most decisions can be delegated to one or two or three people, with proper briefing and lines of accountability. Why don’t we do it that way? Often we fill up our time with meetings as an escape from more important aspects of our community and servanthood: studying the Scriptures and praying together; encouraging one another; ministering to the ‘lost’ in our community. Structurally, most parishes find mission a difficult, often impossible and sometimes unwelcome enterprise. Think about this: church-as-consumers may be incompatible with church-as-mission.

5. It has been said of the English that they act on the axiom that nothing should be tried once. That’s a bit unfair, really. But resistance to change in the church is the reason for the greying of our congregations. Pastors: read books to stretch your thinking and fire up your faith (both!) (See our list of the 100 books every pastor should have read.

6. Some wise insights/habits: * Take a Sunday off every 3-4 months (say whenever there’s a fifth Sunday in the month) and attend a couple of other churches, for ideas, for refreshment. * Get a regular group together of fellow-pastors and share in depth with them. Partly because clergy’s lives are a series of uprootings, and because of well-understood role conflict factors, there’s little chance most of us will find firm friends among our congregants. * Know when to leave. (As an old saying has it, ‘It is a maxim of the wise to leave things before things leave them’). * Work with a leadership team – and expect your fellow-leaders to be empowerers of people too (so training in various aspects of evangelism, leadership, pastoral care etc. is vital). * The congregation did not hire your spouse and children; your spouse does not have to be an officer of any group or even a member of it; does not have to teach Sunday School or sing in the choir. A pastor’s children ought to be treated as any other children in the congregation are treated, with neither more nor less deference, no more critical an attitude. The privacy of a pastor’s personal life ought to be respected. How they order their home or spend their family-time, or where they go on holidays or how much it costs is their business.

And remember: the Exodus promise, was just that. God says: ‘You shall come to know who I am as you travel faithfully – and who you are in the process, – my chosen and loved ones. Jesus promised we would never be alone in his mission: he will be with us through the ages to the end of time. Alleluia!

Rowland Croucher

(Sometime in the 1990s)