Pastors
Johnny V. Miller
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There’s a pastor I know across town. His church is not growing, so he envies me. I know that because he told me.
I know this man well, and I’d say he’s more godly than I am. He prays more, studies harder, and preaches more enthusiastically. He visits more, counsels more, and even makes evangelistic cold calls. Yet I make three times as much money, get invited to speak at other churches, and enjoy the highest ecclesiastical accolade of this age: “He pastors a growing church.”
Please don’t give me the managerial platitudes that say I must work smarter while he works harder. Honestly, in every way that counts before God, I believe he’s a better man than I.
So I would like to propose a toast-er, a blessing: “God bless the pastor of the nongrowing church.” He may be much more like the Lord Jesus than I am.
Some folks may not like that statement. They’ll argue that it’s God’s will for each church to grow, and I agree. They’ll argue that growth should be numerical, the fruit of evangelism, and I agree.
Yet that is not the way it was much of the time in our Lord’s ministry. He wasn’t always (maybe not even usually) “the pastor of a growing church.” When the crowds did flock to him, it was sometimes (maybe usually) for the wrong reasons (for example, in John 6:26, where it was for food). And when he got down to real business, they were quick to disappear John 6:66). An attendance chart of Christ’s ministry might have revealed statistical decline over time.
Was he discouraged? Possibly. Did he quit? Not until death. Was he a failure? Absolutely not!
Nor was Paul a failure when all abandoned him and his churches shrank while cults and false apostles mushroomed. The total fruit of Paul’s ministry may not have equaled the numbers in my medium-sized church.
We are all aware that it isn’t just good churches that grow. Cults grow, too. Of course, we assume the Holy Spirit and proper techniques produce our growth while false promises lead to cultic growth. However, the corollary of that assumption is that it’s justice when they decline but failure when we do. The failure of a church to grow is thus taken as an indictment of the pastor, evidence of spiritual rejection, a reason to quit.
So let me say it again: “May God bless the pastor of the nongrowing church”-the kind of faithful, diligent servant who sticks to his post with no accolades; the one who is never asked to speak at Founders’ Day, whose name never appears in his seminary’s brag rag, whose statistics never raise the eyebrows of denominational leaders; the person who writes but is never published, who will move but never be promoted; the minister with the resilient spirit who keeps plugging away for the Lord.
I envy that kind of faithful spirit, and I honor it. I am already wondering if I’ll feel like a failure as soon as my church plateaus. I’m defensively praying that God will still bless me then, and that my church will, too.
Johnny V. Miller
Cypress Bible Church
Cypress, Texas
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Pastors
Paul Anderson
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Trying to convince computer-age people to practice spiritual disciplines such as regular prayer, Bible study, and giving is like trying to sell hair restorer to a bald man. He might accept that he needs the stuff, but he’s not convinced your product can deliver. In response to an article I’d written on fasting, a lady wrote, “You don’t really believe we’re supposed to do that in the twentieth century, do you?”
Yes. The trick, for us who are pastors, is finding ways to minimize the obstacles and give people the joy of discipline. Here are some ways our congregation has found to do that.
Present disciplines as normal
Most Christians wish they were more disciplined. They know they should pray consistently, read their Bibles more regularly, and give generously-just as they should exercise more faithfully and spend their time more wisely. But their guilt about their lack in these areas causes them to dismiss the disciplines, considering them only for the spiritually elite. After all, how many people-besides Martin Luther and John Wesley-get up early for an hour of prayer? As a result, many people accept the notion, “I’m just not a disciplined person,” and leave it at that.
So at Trinity we talk about Christian disciplines as a normal part of the believer’s life, not an add-on for the spiritually elite. In the Sermon on the Mount, we point out, Jesus spoke about prayer, fasting, and giving as if he expected all people to practice them.
We introduce the spiritual disciplines in the pastor’s class so members hear about them right from the beginning. We stress that we don’t have one set of principles for normal folk and another for the all-stars. We expect, for instance, that all our people will tithe. We couldn’t say for sure who is and who isn’t tithing, but we invite testimonies from brothers and sisters who were convinced by the Word of God and their experience to give it a try.
Model them through leadership
As we all know, the Christian life is more caught than taught. Parishioners follow our lives more than our words. So the leaders of our congregation are constantly reminded that they set a standard for the people.
I was in the home of a former member who is now a pastor. He said that when he was a member of our congregation, he knew the leaders were giving quality and quantity time to prayer. It made him want to do the same thing. One young father told me recently, “As I saw leaders applying various disciplines to their lives, I desired to grow in Christ with them.”
Move in slow motion
On the other hand, the commitment of leaders can, for some people, be too intimidating a model. My predecessor, for instance, rose at 4 A.M., jogged eight miles while praying for the church, worked on memorizing books of the Bible, had his personal prayer time, made entries into his journal, and daily met for prayer with a group of men-all before family devotions at 7:15 sharp! He was careful not to make his program normative, but his example brought challenge to some and groans to others.
We’ve learned to go slow. Before we called the congregation to a fast a year ago, we discussed it among the elders for several weeks. I then taught on the subject for several weeks. Then we issued the invitation to join us in fasting.
People appreciate moving deliberately. Moving slowly and steadily gives our members a sense of peace and security. They know we aren’t going to pull any fast ones on them.
Start young
Our through-the-Bible confirmation program starts in fourth grade and teaches children prayer, Bible study, and memory work. We now have teachers who went through the program as children.
We also encourage parents to start their children in personal and family devotions. A young man on our church council attributes his interest in regular Bible study and prayer to his father’s persistence. “We were sometimes grumpy when he called us together early in the morning for devotions,” he says, “but he kept on doing it. His consistency made it a major priority for me now.”
Avoid the dual dangers
Two dangers confront us in encouraging spiritual disciplines. One is giving people the impression it’s all up to them. They were saved by grace, but now they had better roll up their sleeves and get to work.
One woman in our congregation, for example, returned from a teaching seminar and made six life-changing commitments, including one to meditate daily. I rejoiced in her enthusiasm but cautioned her to be easy on herself. Her five children weren’t knocking at her knees when she made her commitments. The challenge of stepping into spiritual disciplines must be tempered with realism.
On the other side are those who believe God does everything. They’re content to relax, not wishing to disturb grace by their works. Having walked with the Lord for twenty years, they’re still giving the Lord only five quick minutes before falling off at night. Such people may need a kick in the pants rather than a pat on the back.
I called George, a member of our congregation, to tell him I expected him at the men’s prayer group at 6 the following morning. He wasn’t home, so I left the message with his wife. I told her that if he wasn’t at the breakfast, I would come over and throw him out of bed.
My wife, who heard me, wondered why I’d spoken so insensitively. The reason could be seen the next morning. When George’s alarm went off, he struggled to decide whether to get up. However, when his wife remembered my call and passed on the message, he decided to come. During the prayer meeting, George thanked the Lord for the “encouragement” he’d received from a brother “who cared whether I came.”
As I explained to my wife, some people need toughness and can handle it. George is a coach who knows both how to give and how to receive a challenge.
Growing as a pastoral leader involves discerning whether a person needs a kick or a pat. I’ve had church members who responded best to a challenge that demanded everything of them. Those who don’t have that kind of motivation may need encouragement bit by bit.
Paul struck the balance when he urged believers, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” adding that “God is at work within you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
-Paul Anderson
Trinity Lutheran Church
San Pedro, California
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Pastors
Jim Berkley
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For survey participants, the CTi research department used a random sample of a thousand LEADERSHIP subscribers. Each was mailed a survey and, two weeks later, a reminder post card. Some 49 percent responded. Since CTi survey responses are typically 26 percent, this survey apparently touched a nerve.
Respondents were 87 percent clergy and 13 percent lay. Of the clergy respondents:
-98 percent are male
-97 percent are married
-67 percent have children at home (households average 3.6 members, compared to 2.7 nationally)
-94 percent have finished college, 78 percent have a graduate degree, and 18 percent have a doctorate (19 percent of U.S. adults are college graduates)
-average age is about 43
-18 percent serve urban churches, 39 percent suburban, 32 percent small-town, and 11 percent rural
-average Sunday worship attendance is 301; 49 percent have between 50 and 200, 6 percent fewer than 50; and 45 percent greater than 200
-average number of years in ministry is 16.5
-43 percent are solo pastors, 41 percent head a staff, 15 percent serve on staffs, and 1 percent are retired
As we began to analyze the survey results, we discovered something pastors, denominations, and the IRS have found: pastors’ compensation is hard to compare.
Problem 1: Some pastors live in a parsonage; some own their homes and receive a housing allowance. Some receive neither a parsonage nor an allowance. Is it fair to compare cash salaries apart from housing considerations? And how does one arrive at the value to a pastor of rent-free parsonage living?
To equalize the two situations for the sake of comparison, we chose to add $750 a month to the cash salary of pastors living in parsonages. This figure, approximating the average rental value, is, unfortunately, highly subjective. Each parsonage, depending on size, location, and condition, would be different. The average selling price for homes nationwide the first four months of 1988 was $109,725. By real estate rule of thumb, rental on those homes would be around $1000 a month. Fair-market rent for three-bedroom apartments is around $700 a month. So we set a conservative value of $750 a month, or $9000 a year, as the average equivalent value of a parsonage. This somewhat arbitrary figure allows us, however, to compute a benchmark compensation figure for both homeowners and parsonage dwellers.
Problem 2: Fringe benefit packages differ widely. Some pastors get none. Others have ample packages. So how do we arrive at a fair average?
We decided to total the various perks each pastor received and find the average amount for the whole pool-those who receive benefits and those who get none. When added to the average salary and housing allowance (or parsonage value), that gives a better average compensation figure. It could be misleading to average the benefits of only those who receive them and then add that total into the compensation package.
Problem 3: The concepts of remuneration and reimbursement merge in many minds. Should a book allowance be listed in the budget with salaries and benefits or with such items as office utility bills and stationery expenses? Is a car allowance part of a pastor’s compensation or an operating expense for the church?
For purposes of this study, we chose not to consider reimbursements for professional expenses a part of the remuneration package. Allowances for such items as transportation (car), books and magazines, continuing education, entertainment, memberships, and conferences merely reimburse the pastor for out-of-pocket expenses incurred while doing the work of the church.
Since such reimbursements are important-and sometimes forgotten at budget time-we sought reimbursement information on the survey. But adding these numbers to salary and benefits to determine “what the pastor makes” would cause the total to appear incorrectly high.
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Pastors
James D. Berkley
A nationwide study reveals what pastors make–and how they feel about it.
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In 1825, about the time Abraham Lincoln was splitting rails, 18-year-old frontier preacher Elijah Goodwin wrote, “I did not think it was right to preach for money; still, I thought a little money was very convenient when it came to paying ferriage at the rivers. In traveling and holding protracted meetings with others, I learned that preachers who said the most against paying preachers received the most money for their labors. Perhaps this was because, in preaching this way, the attention of the brethren was directed to the subject. I never took any part in this kind of preaching, and therefore got but little money.”
Once, when Goodwin was to travel several days from extreme southern Indiana to northwestern Illinois to preach at a camp meeting, someone asked him how much money he had for the trip. “I told him that I had just twenty-five cents,” Goodwin replied. “To this sum he added another quarter. … About dark [on the first day] I stopped at a public house and got my horse fed, but did not take supper myself, lest I should exhaust my little treasury and not be able to buy food for my horse. After my horse had eaten, I mounted and went on my way, traveling all night. … At noon I halted to feed my horse (not myself). This exhausted my funds. I rode all the way, eating nothing but grapes and hazelnuts. … The next day I reached my destination about 2 P.M., having eaten but two meals in three days.”
So it was for many preachers a century and a half ago, and some of those memories linger. A salary of a bag of corn and a couple of chickens left on the back porch is well within many pastors’ memories. But what is the state of pastoral compensation today?
Almost eight years ago, LEADERSHIP surveyed its readers. The results were published in “Clergy Compensation: A Survey of LEADERSHIP Readers” in the spring 1981 LEADERSHIP Journal. The news: mostly good. Pastors were, for the most part, not muzzled on the threshing floor.
But that was seven years ago. What’s happened since? Our 1988 LEADERSHIP clergy compensation survey has some answers.
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Where Pastors Stand
In the following analysis, we’ll often compare the 1988 findings with those from 1981. To streamline the reporting, the numbers and percentages given in brackets [ ] will refer to the 1981 figures.
Compensation. Now for the news you’ve all been waiting for: compensation is up. Nationwide, the average pastor’s salary/housing payment (the financial equivalent of a lay person’s cash salary) is $28,775 [20,969]. Attach a benefits package averaging $4,320 [$2,303], and salary plus benefits equals $33,095 [$23,263]. This figure includes cash salary, housing allowance (or average value of receiving a parsonage), utilities allowance, insurance premiums, pension contributions, and Self-employment Tax (Social Security) allowance.
Reimbursements for expenses add another $2,404 [$2,167] to the package pastors receive. These professional expense repayments include transportation, continuing education, book, and other allowances.
The bottom-line church expense for paying and reimbursing a pastor averages $35,499 [$25,430], up 39.6 percent from 1981. Table 1 breaks down the various payment categories for three kinds of pastors: those in a parsonage, those receiving a housing allowance, and those with neither a parsonage nor a housing allowance.
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Table 2 lists the average amount of each compensation item for the group that receives such compensation. Not every pastor receives pension payments, for instance, but among those who do, the average pension payment is $2,252 annually.
Comparisons. Compared to 1981, salary/housing payments are up 37.2 percent. Since the Cost of Living Index has risen 33.7 percent from 1981, pastoral salaries have gained about 3.5 percentage points.
The benefits package has improved more substantially, climbing 88 percent. A greater percentage of pastors are receiving each of the benefits since 1981. Today 35 percent [26 percent] receive Self-employment Tax benefits, and those getting the benefit average 27 percent more. Because of the rapidly escalating tax rate (1981 rate was 4.3 percent; 1988 rate is 13.02 percent), perhaps some churches are stepping in to soften the shock.
Three-quarters of the respondents receive health and/or life insurance coverage with paid premiums averaging $2,339 [$1,145], which reflect the spiraling cost of medical care. Pension contributions are received by 69 percent [64 percent] of pastors, who average $2,252 [$1,670], 8.7 percent of their salary/housing package.
The salary/housing and benefits package has risen 42.3 percent from 1981. If you subtract the 3.7 percentage points that higher Self-employment Tax has taken off the top and the 33.7 percent rise in the cost of living, pastors have a real gain of 4.9 percent in salary and benefits.
The category of professional reimbursements is up 11 percent since our first survey. Transportation expenses are now reimbursed for 75 percent of pastors [79 percent] at an annual average of $2,104, up only $62 from 1981. Half the pastors now receive continuing education support that averages $479, compared to two-fifths receiving an average of $375 in 1981. A book allowance is enjoyed by only 27 percent [42 percent], and the amount averages $219, down $161. As these reimbursements shrink or fail to keep up with actual costs, pastors pay for more of their professional expenses out of family coffers.
A catch-all salary category, “other,” contains the evidence of miscellaneous but substantial reimbursements received by 15 percent of our respondents. The average amount was $1,585 [$575].
Other income. About a third of the pastors supplement their income through ministerial activities such as weddings, guest sermons, speaking engagements, and funerals. These activities add an additional $2,603 on the average. Of the lay persons surveyed, about three-quarters feel pastors should be free to accept such paid assignments.
A far smaller number of pastors, 11 percent, supplement ministry income with nonministry enterprises and earn an additional $7,909. They aren’t getting rich, however. The ministry income of these pastors is about 30 percent below average, so what they make outside just about brings them in line with the average clergy income.
According to USA Today, the current median household income in the United States is $29,458. The median household income (including all sources of income) for our clergy respondents’ families is $33,414.
As a 33-year-old family man preaching thirty-five sermons a month on an eighteen-point, three-state circuit, Elijah Goodwin wrote about the “pitch-in plan” for support: “My family expenses from January 1, 1840, to October first amounted to $409.13; and my traveling expenses to $25.19, making, in all, $434.32. While the whole amount of contributions received was only $59.68, which fell short of my expenses $374.64, which may be regarded as my contribution to the cause of Christ during the ten months past. So much for the ‘pitch-in no-plan’ arrangement. … “
Pastoral income today is at least in the ballpark with the rest of contemporary society. Elijah Goodwin didn’t even make it into the bleachers.
What Affects Compensation
Several factors appear to help determine compensation levels. Let’s look at five (the following figures are totals of salary/housing and benefits):
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Church size. As might be expected, the average number of worship attenders greatly affects the payment package. Churches with fewer than fifty on Sunday pay their pastors $18,745, 43 percent below average. Not until attendance reaches more than a hundred do churches pay what’s average. Churches with five hundred or more in attendance pay $41,460, which is more than twice what pastors of the smallest churches receive.
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Position. Heads of staff lead the pack. They average $39,417, 19 percent above the average. Pastoral staff members earn $29,329, about 11 percent less than the average. Solo pastors are paid $28,855.
Among those surveyed, pay for heads of staff ranged mostly from $15,000 to $55,000, but several earned in excess of $65,000, and one over $90,000.
Staff pastors earned as much as $68,000, but few were paid over $50,000, and a few as little as $5,000.
Few solo pastors earned over $40,000, but a couple earned between $50,000 and $65,000. Compared to the other groups, solo pastors were found in more abundance in the $10,000 to $20,000 range.
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Community. Urban pastors (with probably the highest cost of living) are best paid, averaging $35,845, which is 8 percent above the average. But their suburban colleagues, paid $35,634, are close. Small-town and rural pastors, making $31,070 and $26,776 respectively, receive below-average pay. Housing appears to be a factor. Only one-fourth of urban pastors live in a parsonage, compared to one-third of suburban, one-half of small-town, and two thirds of rural pastors.
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Years in ministry. Pastors can generally expect their income to rise for the first twenty-five years in ministry and then tail off slowly. Those with twenty-one to twenty-five years’ experience earn the most: $40,477 (22 percent above average). Those with one to five years in ministry get an average of $23,840 (28 percent below average). Veterans with twenty-six or more years characteristically outearn those with fewer than twenty.
Housing. We found 46 percent receive a housing allowance; 42 percent are given a parsonage to live in. (The rest, for some reason, didn’t designate any of their pay package as housing allowance, thus increasing their income tax liability.)
Homeowners and nonhomeowners make roughly equivalent wages. By using an arbitrary parsonage value of $9000 a year (see accompanying story, “The Figures Behind the Survey”), the salary/housing package for parsonage dwellers is a few hundred dollars greater than the package of homeowners. However, homeowners can deduct interest expenses from income and reap tax benefits unavailable to those in parsonages. Also, homeowners most often benefit from real estate appreciation that adds to their net worth.
How Pastors Feel
At age twenty, Elijah Goodwin was called to preach a circuit that took him six hundred miles every eight weeks. “I was promised no salary,” he wrote, “only the brethren said that I should not want.” When his horse gave out on the first round, he was advanced $20 to buy another. “I, according to my promise, paid over all I had every time I came round,” Goodwin recalled, “but was never able to lift the note till my last round, which left me without a dollar in my pocket!”
The situation of pastors today, as we have seen, is somewhat different, but how do they feel about their level of compensation?
The good news: Two-thirds of pastors are satisfied with their present level of compensation, and another 15 percent are neutral. In fact, 30 percent consider themselves “very satisfied,” and only 2 percent are “very dissatisfied.”
The spirit of a hireling did not appear among survey respondents. A Lutheran pastor from Wisconsin voiced a common sentiment: “Financial gifts aren’t that important to me. What affects my ministry more is the constant loving, caring attitudes expressed by my members in response to the proclamation of the gospel.”
A pastor of a small Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Oregon wrote, “I’m not in the ministry to get rich. I find it a privilege to serve and feel fortunate that I’m compensated for doing something I enjoy so much.”
And a Baptist commented, “I never depend on the church for funds. I will pay the people to let me share the gospel with them.”
The not-so-good news: About one in five (19 percent), however, expressed a degree of current compensation dissatisfaction. Several realities factor into this feeling:
1. Compensation level. It’s no surprise that dissatisfaction grows as salary level drops. The “very satisfied” enjoy compensation 20 percent above average. The “somewhat satisfied” are close to average. Interestingly, the “neutral” pastors are about 17 percent below average in compensation. Their quiescence is commendable. Those registering dissatisfaction average 19 percent below the norm.
2. Cost of living. The sense of falling behind the cost of living also provides irritation. As pastors sense inflation eating at their pay, dissatisfaction follows. Of those registering dissatisfaction with their compensation, a full 86 percent feel they’re losing ground to the cost of living, compared to 21 percent for the very satisfied.
“Since 1983 I’ve had no pay increase,” wrote a Baptist pastor from a small church, “yet Social Security rose from 9.35 to over 13 percent in that time, and utility costs increased. Am I missing a message?”
3. Exploitation. When asked, “Do you feel you are now, or ever have been, deprived, mistreated, or exploited by a ministry situation?”-a wide-open question-57 percent answered no.
Of those who answered yes, only 21 percent think they’re currently exploited, which computes to fewer than one in ten currently mistreated. Half the ones who have felt abused said the problem occurred in their first pastorate.
What are these situations of discord? Here’s a sample:
“The leaders wanted to keep me humble. The salary was the last item on the budget, and if a raise was to be given, it would be ‘taken’ from one of the church ministries” (Baptist, Tennessee).
“I was disappointed in the fact they were treating me as an operating expense. That attitude finally caused me to move” (Southern Baptist, Virginia).
“It’s ‘all in fun’ when the elder jokes about how much I make, or is it? There’s no joking about how much he makes” (Church of Christ, Kansas).
“Instead of a raise, I was offered a $1,000 bonus if I could raise worship attendance and giving levels a certain percentage over a given time. That taints with suspicion every act a pastor does. After I got them to rescind the bonus offer, it was suggested that if we didn’t meet the goals, I could have the amount withheld from my salary” (Lutheran, Kansas).
4. The future. Several pastors, especially those in parsonages, registered concern about their financial futures. Pastors owning their own homes have built up an average of $36,500 [$34,720] of equity, and their homes have an average market value of $93,865 [$73,750]. (The increase in market value coupled with a small increase in equity indicates greater mortgage indebtedness for pastors in 1988.)
Pastors in parsonages eye this nest egg with a tinge of envy. Said a Methodist from Ohio wistfully, “I wish I were getting started on a home for retirement.”
5. Secular peer comparisons. When asked to place themselves on a ten-point scale in relation to the compensation received by similarly educated and experienced professionals in their community, pastors ranked themselves 3.9, somewhat lower. When asked the same questions about their pastors, however, lay persons placed their pastors at 5.5, indicating they think pastors do slightly better than their professional peers.
How a pastor’s salary compares with secular peers:
Much worse Much better
1 2 *3 4 5 * 6 7 8 9 10
Pastors Lay Leaders
Obviously, pastors and lay people see this situation from different perspectives. But pastors also differ among themselves: “I don’t expect to be paid equal to doctors and lawyers” was the explanation of a North Dakota Lutheran.
“This is UAW country,” volunteered a Michigan pastor feeling the inequity. “Even blue-collar types can earn $50,000 per year.”
6. Congregational comparisons. Perhaps the most difficult comparison is with the perceived average prosperity of fellow church members. On another ten-point scale comparing pastoral compensation with average household income in the congregation, pastors listed themselves at 4.9, or almost average. Lay respondents perceived pastors as better off-5.9. Who’s right? It’s hard to tell.
How the pastor’s income compares with the congregational average:
Much worse Much better
1 2 3 4 *5 *6 7 8 9 10
Pastors Lay Leaders
It’s commonly felt by pastors that lay persons often look at the bottom-line cost of having a pastor (salary/housing, benefits, and reimbursements) and compare that with their own take-home pay: Hmmm. He makes $32,000 a year. My pay’s only-let’s see, twelve times $2000-$24,000 a year. Why, he makes a bundle! Of course, such calculations forget to add benefits and withheld taxes to the parishioner’s take-home, and to subtract reimbursements from the pastor’s package. A Baptist pastor in Massachusetts wishes his church would “separate salary from retirement and professional expenses. People see the package amount and think it’s adequate, when that’s far from the truth.”
Whatever the reality, pastors feel the comparison and dislike the perceived discrepancy. Some sample comments:
“No one else in our church with as much required of him has so little to show for his efforts” (Presbyterian, Pennsylvania).
“We need more open discussion on the financial needs of living in a high-income community” (Methodist, California).
And then there’s the sometimes-embarrassing public aspect of the pastor’s salary: everybody knows, and has an opinion on, what the pastor makes. The pastor of a Reformed church in Michigan offered this remedy: “We should publish the salaries of all the members at budget time.”
Said a Lutheran in California about the process of setting the pastor’s compensation, “I’d like less of a public spectacle.”
7. Inability to change. Here’s a place where clergy and laity differ. A solid majority (60 percent) of clergy with subpar salaries consider it unrealistic to expect to change the situation. Yet 57 percent of the laity who rated their pastor’s salary below average among fellow professionals or the congregation feel it can be remedied.
The laity are matter-of-fact with solutions:
“Someone other than the pastor needs to research the comparable data and present it to the decision-making groups” (Mennonite, Oregon).
“We could share with the congregation the median income of the families compared to the pastor’s income” (Nazarene, Illinois).
Pastors are more mixed:
“Someone told me that people like to look up to pastors morally, through them politically, and down on them financially. This seems to be generally true of the older generation on my board,” quipped a Presbyterian in New York.
“How can we vacuum more money from the pockets of our inactive members?” asked a Methodist from Illinois.
From a small church in Oregon came the prediction: “Until our congregation grows, we will be unable to increase my salary.”
The slight sense of inability to change in 1988 differs from the 1981 findings. In that survey, 55 percent of the clergy and an even stronger majority of the laity thought it possible to remedy low compensation. Now they’re less sure.
Back to good news:
Pastors don’t feel overly restricted by their income. Nearly three-quarters of pastors don’t consider their children’s educational opportunities severely restricted. Only 32 percent think their vacation options have been limited, 28 percent their car choices, and 22 percent their housing selections.
Only 3 percent believe their retirement will be restricted by their financial situation. Given that 49 percent aren’t buying houses and 31 percent have no current pension contributions, that’s a sign of either great faith or magnificent oversight.
Given people’s general desire to have more than their income allows, these figures for pastors are remarkable. Two pastors did have interesting comments, however. One’s solution for money shortages is to “do more funerals.” (How do you drum up business?) Another said simply: “Damnable credit cards!”
Pastors aren’t about to quit. Among pastors surveyed, only 3 percent have seriously considered leaving the ministry for financial reasons, and 83 percent have never considered it. They’re in for the duration. The pastor of a large church in Indiana perhaps summarized this group’s inclinations: “I am not one to base my feelings on the amount of money in my pocket.”
This decision to stay is in light of pastors’ perception that they could earn more in secular labors. When asked “How do you think your personal financial situation would be affected if you left the ministry for other employment in the job market?” they thought they could do somewhat better-6.3 on a ten-point scale. (The laity placed them at 5.3, indicating only marginal confidence in pastors’ ability to improve their pay packages in the marketplace.)
Pastor’s income if in the secular job market:
Much worse Much better
1 2 3 4 5 * 6 * 7 8 9 10
Lay Leaders Pastors
We could find no statistical correlation between the pastors’ financial situation and their attitude toward ministry. This is truly remarkable. In the light of various real and perceived inequities, pastors consistently keep a positive overall view of their calling. They may be discouraged about their particular situation-“passive acceptance,” “mild resentment,” and “frustration” seem to be the most common responses to their plight-but their desire to minister remains intact.
Deep hurts do exist-for instance, the Southern Baptist from Texas who wrote, “I ought to be able to divorce my feelings from my performance, but it seriously impairs my attitude when bills pile up and I know I can’t increase my income,” or the Lutheran in California who penned, “Lack of money will prevent us from seeing our parents for the first time in seventeen years. I simply wish I could get more pay so I could joyfully go about my job.”
Yet a Wisconsin pastor has the final word: “It is frustrating not to be adequately compensated for a sincere and competent ministry, but I have been committed to ministry above financial considerations.”
Observations and Implications
What do we make of this information? Here are a few observations.
The task of setting pastoral salaries is crucial. In many churches, the process of setting or changing pastoral compensation is Byzantine. Some pastors have no idea how to go about it. As one lamented, “They don’t know how to compensate a pastor. They pull the figure for the raise out of a hat.”
If a businesslike procedure is to be followed, probably the starting place would be a job description. Only 53 percent [36 percent] of the surveyed pastors have job descriptions, and of these, half have no review procedure. However, nine out of ten pastors have their salaries reviewed at least annually.
When we asked pastors and lay people to rank how important various factors ought to be in evaluating a pastor’s level of compensation, we found close correspondence with the 1981 responses. Table 3 lists the factors by how pastors and lay people ranked them in 1981 and 1988.
“Amount of responsibility” and “ability to relate to a wide range of problems” rank one and two on all four lists, and “pulpit ministry” is consistently high. Considered relatively unimportant are “size of professional staff’ and “compensation of fellow clergy in denomination.” “Age” is dead last on each list, but, interestingly, the survey shows compensation to increase with every successive age group.
The ranking of “length of service” points out a discrepancy between clergy and lay perceptions. Pastors consider it third most important, but lay people rank it eleventh. We suspect it has something to do with laity’s penchant for results (ranked fourth compared to pastors’ seventh) over longevity. Pastors know what it takes to stay put and face problems, but lay people want something positive to happen.
Pastors also put more stock in educational achievement. Perhaps, having passed the trials of university and seminary, they overrate the importance of degrees. Again, lay people appear more practical; they value the size of the budget-their ability to pay the pastor-much greater than does a pastor.
Just as in a marriage it’s good to discuss role expectations, so it would be helpful for pastors and their boards to rank this list and discuss their expectations-apart from the salary-review process. Through open discussion, each will better understand the factors the other values for setting compensation at a later date.
Working spouses need consideration. Seventy-eight percent of lay respondents think a pastor’s spouse should feel free to work outside the home to supplement family income, and 55 percent of pastoral spouses do just that. They contribute an average of $10,500 to the family budget.
We analyzed their motivation for working. Overall, 38 percent are at it only because of financial need, 19 percent choose to work for career purposes, and 43 percent list a combination of need and career. Not surprisingly, among the pastors dissatisfied with their compensation, a greater proportion attributed to financial need their spouse’s reason for working.
This created frustration. From Indiana, a Christian Church minister protested: “My income requires that my wife work to meet our financial needs. This is deeply frustrating and infuriating since it strikes at our home situation directly.”
The suggestion: Churches and pastors need to work out and make plain what is expected of spouses. Does the church expect the spouse to contribute to family support? If so, the reasons for that expectation should be spread before the pastor as clearly as possible.
For the most part, pastors are doing okay. It’s the rare pastor who’s paid what he or she is worth, but the vast majority of pastors aren’t headed for the poor house, either. They’re holding their own, perhaps even getting a little ahead. They’re making it-some by hiding the credit cards, others by talking with the trustees.
Some bleak drawings, however, do remain at the edges of the picture, such as the plight of a pastor who wrote: “I have a sick child, and the only way to resolve our financial strain is for my wife to work. But who will take care of the child? Many people in the church feel the wife should not work so the parsonage family can ‘keep up appearances.'” We hurt with those who are hurting.
Yet, gladly, for the most part the scene is pleasant, although not spectacular.
Remember Brother Goodwin, the frontier circuit rider? One dark November night he lost his way in a dense forest. Unable to rouse dog or man by “hallooing,” he decided to wait for morning. He wrote: “I made a bed of my saddle blanket, a pillow of my saddle, and a covering of my overcoat. I tied my horse, by the bridle, to my arm, so that if a bear or a panther should approach, my horse would become afrightened, and, by pulling at the rein, would arouse me. It was a pretty cold night. The first snow of the season fell during the night. I was near the Patoka [River] and could hear the rippling water as it rushed against the bank and over the drift-wood near me. As I lay there, I thought it was a great pity that all that sweet music was being wasted on the air, without an ear to hear it, or a human heart to enjoy it.”
Lost in the woods, sleeping on the ground, covered with snow, underpaid, overworked-and content.
Paul wrote, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (Phil. 4:11b). Elijah Goodwin knew such contentment. May we experience it, too.
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Harry L. Poe
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My ear still scorched after Mrs. Daley hung up on me. Few people had her talent for telling off a preacher. I would comply with her wishes or else, because she belonged to a leading family: three deacons, the church treasurer, and a Sunday school teacher.
The conflict arose because the youth leader would not let Mrs. Daley’s daughter spend the night at the church camp, ten miles away, with the other teens.
During the day, the youth led our children’s program. At night they had their own Bible study. To stay at camp, teens had to have gone through several weeks of training. Mrs. Daley’s daughter had not gone through the training and wasn’t helping with the children, but she still wanted to spend the night at camp.
The youth leader stood her ground, saying it wouldn’t be fair to all the ones who had worked so hard. Nonetheless, she said she would put it to a vote of the youth group, and if the other kids didn’t mind, the girl could spend the night. The kids minded, and the girl took it personally. At that point, Mrs. Daley appealed to me. When I stood by the original rules, she insisted the church wasn’t treating her family right.
Most pastors could tell similar stories. We constantly face people making special requests. Usually we have no difficulty complying, but sometimes we must refuse. The reason for refusing, however, is not always clear-even to us.
I’ve found it’s vital to understand why I’m saying no. Usually it’s for one of three reasons.
The person asking
Sometimes we find ourselves wanting to say no because past dealings with the person have produced so much frustration and anger. Those feelings, if not dealt with, may build until the person becomes the issue. He or she may bring a request that would be perfectly acceptable if brought by someone else, but we veto the person behind the request.
It may be the deacon who tells me everything wrong with the order of worship last Sunday. It may be the lady who moved to another church several years ago but who still tries to arrange special programs, soloists, and singing groups for the church. It may be the person who attends conferences and wants to know why our little church doesn’t implement all the programs the big churches have. All pastors have a few of these folks supervising them.
My conflict with Mrs. Daley began a two-year cold war. In a revival service, however, we both realized the sinfulness of our attitudes. We confessed our sin to each other and began a six-month period of reconciliation. I recognize now that when I refuse a request simply because of who’s making it, I’m grieving God and need to correct my attitude through prayer and acts of reconciliation.
The request itself
Some requests a minister will always refuse. Sometimes church policy proscribes fulfilling the request. Most churches, for example, have policies for admission to the Lord’s Supper and baptism. The question isn’t left to the minister’s discretion.
Ministers do, however, set other restrictions. Some years ago I established the policy that I would not perform a marriage unless the couple participated in premarital counseling.
Sometimes I say no to a request to safeguard my reputation. Alarmed by the frequency of sexual scandal in the ministry, my wife and I decided I would not call on women in their homes unless someone was with me. I counsel them at my office when my secretary is there, or at home when my wife is present. The policy helps avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
Other times I say no in order to refer a person to someone who will do a better job. In most cases when a woman comes for counseling, for example, I refer her to my wife, who is a seminary graduate trained in counseling. Sometimes, I refer to the person who handles the appropriate area. It seems only proper to many people that I should know if the bus has gas in it, if we have enough paper cups for the youth fellowship, or what the children’s choir will be practicing next week. After all, I’m the pastor. When I say “I’m not the person to handle that,” it may sound like laziness or lack of interest.
I’ve learned to take a few moments to clarify why I’m saying no.
The way the person asks
With some requests the primary problem is the way the person makes it. Some of the oldest and dearest saints in the churches I’ve served have used their age and health like clubs to try to beat me into submission. When I deny their requests, they pour on the guilt.
Confronting these folks is difficult, but it’s no favor to them or the church to allow them to continue using their influence like a bargaining chip.
I made a mistake when I avoided confronting Mrs. Daley’s manipulations and addressed only the law we had laid down. While this approach seemed easiest, she needed to hear that her attitude and style had to change. Without that, how was she to grow? Besides, dealing at the outset with her manipulation might have avoided two years of turmoil.
Dealing with the issues
Saying no, even when intended for the spiritual growth of a person, may be counterproductive, if we fail to clarify the reason for the negative response. If we don’t understand our motivation in refusing a request, or if we avoid addressing it squarely, the person may be confused or may fortify the destructive attitude.
In Mrs. Daley’s case, people had different perceptions of the issue. For the youth leader, the denial of her request was simply a matter of following the rules. To the mother and daughter, however, the negative response felt like a personal affront. And to me, manipulation was the major issue, but I never said anything about it. Because we never clarified the issue, these dynamics affected programs and relationships for several years. Understanding why we say no and communicating that effectively will help reduce this kind of conflict.
When the person is the issue, we need to repent of our sin in order to function responsibly. When the request is the issue, the church member needs to know there’s nothing personal in the rejection. When the style of relating is the issue, the person needs to know that style will not be encouraged.
But in every case, I must first understand why I’m saying no.
-Harry L. Poe
assistant professor of evangelism
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Eugene H. Peterson
Does spiritual development depend on my effort? A reflection on the interplay of God’s will and ours.
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The people with whom I grew up talked a lot about "breaking the will." The task of every devout parent was to "break the will" of the child. I don't remember ever hearing it used by adults on one another, but that may be a more or less willful defect in my memory.
The assumption underlying this linchpin in the program for Christian development in our church was, apparently, that the will, especially a child's will, is contrary to God's will. A broken will left one open to the free play of God's will.
Fifty years later, I recall my now-grown-up friends who were enrolled in this school of childhood spirituality and along with me got their wills broken with regularity. By my observations, we all seem to have passed through the decades every bit as pigheaded and stiff-necked as any of our uncircumcised Philistine chums who never went to church, or at least not to churches that specialized in breaking the wills of little kids. Apparently a broken will mends the same way a broken arm or leg does-stronger at the line of fracture.
At the same time, I also recall a lot of emphasis in our church on "making a decision for the Lord" and exercising my willpower in saying no to the temptations that surrounded me in school and neighborhood. I had many occasions to do that, making repeated decisions for Christ as evangelists and pastors took turns sowing doubts about the validity of my last decision and urging me to do it again. My schoolmates provided daily practice in exercising my nay-saying willpower as they offered up the attractions of world, flesh, and devil.
Hung on the wall of my room at home was a framed picture of a three-masted ship with wind-filled sails on a blue background. Under the picture was a verse:
Ships sail East, and ships sail West,
while the selfsame breezes blow.
It's the set of the sail, and not the gale
that determines the way they go.
I could see the picture and verse as I lay in bed. The doggerel embedded itself in me. The picture became a kind of mandala that gathered the energies of will-my childhood yea-saying at the altar calls and nay-saying on the playgrounds-into visual form. Together, picture and verse confirmed with the force of Scripture the capacity of my will to determine the direction of my life, which I never doubted was a life following Christ.
These two approaches to the will, breaking it and exercising it, existed alongside each other through my childhood and youth. It never occurred to me to see them in contradiction, canceling each other out. Nor does it now. But in adulthood I did become puzzled by their apparent dissonance. I set off in search of counsel that had more wisdom than the simplistic slogan (break the will) and doggerel verse (It's the set of the sail) that seemed to serve well enough as I grew up.
Our Will and God's
I found, early in my search, that I was not the first to be puzzled. I found a large company of men and women scratching their heads over these matters. I found myself, in fact, in the middle of a centuries-long discussion that is still in progress: To will or not to will?
In a gospel of divine grace, what place does the human will play? In a world in which God's will initiates everything, does our will only get in the way? In a creation brought into being by God's will and in a salvation executed by Christ's will, what is left for a human will?
On the positive side, willing is the core of my being. If my will is broken, am I myself? Am I complete? Am I not a cripple, limping along on a crutch? The capacity to direct life, to exercise freedom is the very thing that needs developing if I am to make a decision for Christ-which I grew up believing to be the most important act of will there is. I still believe that.
Without an exercised will, I am a dishrag, limp in a dirty sink. If I am anemic in will, the imperatives that are staccato stabs throughout the gospel message (come, follow, rise, love) sink into marshmallow piety without drawing one drop of red blood.
But the moment I begin exercising my will, I find that I have put a fox in charge of the chicken coop. That is the negative side. The poor Rhode Island Reds that had been laying so well-humility, trust, mercy, patience, hope-are doomed. It is a heady experience to find that I am in charge of my life and, although I wouldn't think of dismissing God, no longer have the need to depend wimpily upon him.
My will is my glory; it is also what gives me the most trouble. There is something deeply flawed in me that separates me from the God who wills my salvation; that "something" seems to be located in and around my will. I ponder St. Paul: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Rom. 7:15), and I pray with my Lord, "Not as I will but as thou wilt" (Matt. 26:39).
To will or not to will, that is the question.
Searching the Intersection
I prayed and pondered. I asked questions and read books. I looked around. It wasn't long before I realized I had set up shop at heavily trafficked crossroads.
Not only were God and my consequent spirituality at issue, but also nearly everything that was distinctively human about me-the way I worked, the way I talked, the way I loved. Standing in the presence of these mysteries-work, language, love-I found insights developing and experiences occurring that were convergent with the greatest mystery: God and my relationship to him in prayer and belief and obedience.
The question at the heart of the intersection of God's will and human wills is apparently at the heart of everything. The relation of God's will and my will is not a specialized religious question; it is the question. The way we answer it shapes our humanity in every dimension.
Whenever I paid attention to what was happening in my life that was beyond biology-beyond, that is, getting fed and clothed-this strange issue of will was involved, and in a way not at all obvious or simple. Always other wills were involved in ways that defied simple alternatives of either asserting my will or acquiescing to another will.
The three areas of experience where I have paid particular attention are common to all: we all work; we all use language; we all love and are loved (even if only intermittently).
Work: Negative Capability
I entered the world of work at an early age in my father's butcher shop. This was a privileged world, this adult world of work, and when I was working in it I was, in my own mind anyway, an adult. When I was five years old my mother made me a white butcher's apron. Every year, as I grew, she made another to size. To this day, I picture the linen ephod that Hannah made for the boy Samuel cut on the pattern of, and from similar material as, my butcher's apron.
I was started out on easy jobs of sweeping and cleaning display windows. I graduated to grinding hamburger. One of the men would pick me up and stand me on an upended orange crate before the big, red Hobart meat grinder, and I in my linen ephod would push the chunks of beef into its maw. The day I was trusted with a knife and taught to respect it and keep it sharp, I knew adulthood was just around the corner.
"That knife has a will of its own," old Eddie Nordham, one of my dad's butchers, used to say to me. "Get to know your knife." If I cut myself, he would blame me not for carelessness but for ignorance-I didn't "know" my knife.
I also learned that a beef carcass has a will of its own-it is not just an inert mass of meat and gristle and bone, but has character and joints, texture and grain. Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter, but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material.
"Hackers" was my father's contemptuous label for butchers who ignorantly imposed their wills on the meat. They didn't take into account the subtle differences between pork and beef. They used knives and cleavers inappropriately and didn't keep them sharp. They were bullies forcing their wills on slabs of bacon and hind quarters of beef. The results were unattractive and uneconomical. They commonly left a mess behind that the rest of us had to clean up.
Real work always includes a respect for the material at hand. The material can be a pork loin, or a mahogany plank, or a lump of clay, or the will of God, but when the work is done well, there is a kind of submission of will to the conditions at hand, a cultivation of humility. It is a noticeable feature in all skilled workers-woodworkers, potters, poets, and pray-ers. I learned it in the butcher shop.
"Negative capability" is the phrase the poet John Keats coined to refer to this experience in work. He was impressed by William Shakespeare's work in making such a variety of characters in his plays, none of which seemed to be a projection of Shakespeare's ego. Each had an independent life of his or her own. Keats wrote, "A poet has no Identity . . . he is continually . . . filling some other Body." He believed that the only way real creative will matured was in a person who was not hell-bent on imposing his or her will on another person or thing but "was capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable searching after fact and reason." Interesting: Shakespeare, the poet from whom we know the most about people, is the poet about whom we know next to nothing.
Adolescents are workers bent on self-expression. The results are maudlin. Simpering songs. Sprawling poems. Banal letters. Bombastic reforms. Bursts of energy that run out of gas (the self tank doesn't hold that much fuel) and litter house and neighborhood with unfinished models, friendships, and projects. The adolescent, excited at finding the wonderful Self, supposes that life now consists in expressing it for the edification of all others. Most of us are bored.
Real work, whether it involves making babies or poems, hamburger or holiness, is not self-expression, but its very opposite. Real workers, skilled workers, practice negative capability-the suppression of self so that the work can take place on its own. St. John the Baptist's "I must decrease, but he must increase" is embedded in all good work. When we work well, our tastes, experiences, and values are held in check so that the nature of the material or the person, or the process, or our God is as little adulterated or compromised by our ego as possible. The worker in the work is a self-effacing servant. If the worker shows off in his or her work, the work is ruined and becomes bad work-a projection of ego, an indulgence of self.
St. Paul's description of Jesus, "emptied himself" (Phil. 2:7), is often cited as the center point in the work of Incarnation, the making of our salvation. Kenosis. Emptying is prelude to filling. The Son of God empties himself of prerogative, of divine rights, of status and reputation in order to be the one whom God uses to fill up creation and creatures with the glory of salvation. A bucket, no matter what wonderful things it contains, is of no use for the next task at hand until it is emptied. Negative capability.
I now see that all the jobs I have ever been given have been apprenticeships in the work of God. What I experience in kitchen, bedroom, workshop, athletic arena, studio, and sanctuary trains me in the subtleties of negative capability. I will to not will what I am already good at in order that what is more than me and beyond me, the will of God, can come into existence in my willing work.
Language: The Middle Voice
Five hundred miles farther west and ten years later, another strand of experience entered my life, sat alongside the butcher's knife for a few years, and then converged with it to provide insight into the nature of the praying will.
For four years, minus vacations, I made a daily descent into a basement room in MacMillan Hall at the foot of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. Light came uncertainly through Venetian blinds from shallow windows high in the walls. I was learning Greek. I puzzled over many strange things those years under the soft-spoken patience of my professor, Winifred Weter.
I puzzled longest over the middle voice. It was a small class, five of us I think, and I was the last to get it. In a class that size slowness is conspicuous, and I was unhappy with my growing reputation as the class tortoise. Then one day, a winter afternoon of Seattle drizzle, the room filled with light, or at least my corner of it did. We were about two-thirds of the way through Xenophon's Anabasis when I got the hang of the mysterious middle voice.
When I speak in the active voice I initiate an action that goes someplace else: "I counsel my friend." When I speak in the passive voice I receive the action that another initiates: "I am counseled by my friend."
When I speak in the middle voice, I actively participate in the results of an action that another initiates: "I take counsel."
Most of our speech is divided between active and passive: either I act or I am acted upon. But there are moments, and they are those in which we are most distinctively human, when such a contrast is not satisfactory: two wills operate, neither to the exclusion of the other, neither canceling out the other, each respecting the other.
At the time I thought only that I had nailed down an illusive piece of Greek grammar. Years later I realized that I had grasped a large dimension of being and a way of prayer. I was the slowest in my class but by no means the only person to have difficulty coming to terms with the middle voice.
My grammar book said, "The middle voice is that use of the verb which describes the subject as participating in the results of the action." I read that now, and it reads like a description of Christian prayer-"the subject as participating in the results of the action." I do not control the action; that is a pagan concept of prayer, putting the gods to work by my incantations or rituals. I am not controlled by the action; that is a Hindu concept of prayer in which I slump passively into the impersonal and fated will of gods and goddesses. I enter into the action which was begun by another, my creating and saving Lord, and find myself participating in the results of the action. I neither do it nor have it done to me; I will to participate in what is willed.
True spirituality features participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God's operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) or are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice).
Prayer takes place in the middle voice.
Now comes a most fascinating sentence in my grammar: "Nothing is more certain than that the parent language of our family possessed no passive, but only active and middle, the latter originally equal with the former in prominence, though unrepresented now in any language, save by forms which have lost all distinction of meaning." No passive! Think of it: back at the origins of our language, there was no way to express an action in which I was not somehow, in some way, involved as a participant.
But the farther we travel from Eden, the less use we have for the middle voice, until it finally atrophies for lack of use. Eden pride and disobedience reduce us to two voices, active and passive. We end up taking sides. We either take charge of our own destinies (active voice) or let others take charge and slip into animal passivity before forces too great for us (passive voice). The gospel restores the middle voice.
We don't have enough (or any!) verbal experience in this third voice. But no friendship, no love affair, no marriage can exist with only active and passive voices. Something else is required-a willingness that radiates into a thousand subtleties of participation and intimacy, trust and forgiveness and grace.
At our human and Christian best, we are not fascists barking our orders to God and his creatures. At our best, we are not quietists dumbly submissive before fate. At our best, we pray in the middle voice at the center between active and passive, drawing from them as we have need and occasion but always uniquely and artistically ourselves, creatures adoring God and being graced by him, "participating in the results of the action."
And to think I got my start in learning this during that long winter of Seattle rain while reading Xenophon!
Love: Willed Passivity
After another decade and a few years into marriage, I was surprised to find myself at the center of what has turned out to be the richest experience yet in my will and God's will. I had supposed when I entered marriage that it was mostly about sexuality, domesticity, companionship, and children. The surprise was that I was in a graduate school for spirituality-prayer and God-with daily assignments and frequent exams in matters of the will.
(What I have learned in marriage can be just as well, maybe better, learned in friendship. The unmarried have just as much experience to work with as the married. But since my primary experience has been in marriage, I will write of it.)
In marriage two wills are in operation at the same time. Sometimes, and especially in the early months of marriage, the two wills are spontaneously congruent and experienced as one. But as time goes by and early ecstasies are succeeded by routines and demands, what was experienced as a gift must be developed as an art.
The art is "willed passivity." The phrase sounds self-contradictory, but it is not. It converges with what I started out learning in my father's butcher shop and continued in Professor Weter's Greek class.
Willed passivity begins with appreciating the large and creative place that passivity plays in our lives. By far the largest part of our life is experienced in passivity. Life is undergone. We receive. We enter into what is already there. Our genetic system, the atmosphere, the food chain, our parents, the dog-they are there, in place, before we exercise our will.
"Eighty percent of life" says Woody Allen, "is just showing up." Nothing we do by the exercise of our wills will ever come close to approximating what is done to us by other wills. Most of life is not what we do but what is done to us. If we deny or avoid these passivities, we live in a very small world. The world of our activities is a puny enterprise; the world of our passivities is a vast cosmos. We experience as happening to us weather, our bodies, much of our government, the landscape, much of our education.
But there are different ways of being passive: there is an indolent, inattentive passivity that approximates the existence of a slug, and there is a willed and attentive passivity that is something more like worship.
Paul's famous "Wives be subject to your husbands. Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (Eph. 5:22-25) sets down the parallel operations of willed passivity.
An earlier sentence establishes the necessary context, apart from which the dual instructions can only be misunderstood. The sentence is: "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Eph. 5:21).
Reverence-en phobo Christou-is the operative word: awed, worshipful attentiveness, ready to respond in love and adoration. We do not learn our relationship with God out of a cocksure knowledge of exactly what God wants (which then launches us into a vigorous clean-up campaign of the world on his behalf, in the course of which we shout orders up at him, bossing him around so that he can assist us in accomplishing his will).
Nor do we cower before him in a scrupulous anxiety that fears offending him, only venturing a word or an action when explicitly commanded and at all other times worrying endlessly of what we might have done to offend him.
No, gospel reverence, Christ reverence, spouse reverence is a vigorous (but by no means presumptuous) bold freedom, full of spontaneous energy. This is the atmosphere in which we find ourselves loved and loving before God. Willed passivity.
Paul teaches husbands and wives how their wills can become the means for love and not the weapons of war. He counsels willed passivity in both marriage partners as an analogy of Christ's willingness to be sacrificed. Love is defined by a willingness to give up my will ("not my will but thine be done"), a voluntary crucifixion.
Marriage provides extensive experience in the possibilities of willed passivity. We find ourselves in daily relationship with a complex reality that we did not make-this person with functioning heart and kidneys, with glorious (and not so glorious) emotions, capable of interesting us profoundly one minute and then boring us insufferably the next, and most mysterious of all, with a will, the freedom to choose and direct and intend a shared life intimacy.
And all the time I am also all those things, also with a will. When we are doing it right, and not always knowing how we are doing it right, the two wills enhance and glorify each other. We learn soon that love does not develop when we impose our will on the other, but only when we enter into sensitive responsiveness to the will of the other, what I am calling willed passivity.
If the operation is mutual, which it sometimes is, a great love is the consequence. The high failure rate in marriage is the sad statistical witness to the difficulties involved. We would rather operate as activists in our love, commanding our beloved in actions that please us, which reduces our partner's options to indolent passivity or rebellion. No ambiguities in either case. But also no love-and no faith.
"I no longer call you servants; I call you friends," said Jesus (John 15:15). This is the model by which we understand our growing intimacy with God. Not as abject, puppy-dog submission, and certainly not as manipulative priest-craft, but as willed passivity, in imitation of and matched by the willed passivity of him who "did not count equality of God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, being born in the likeness of men" (Phil. 2:6-7).
Willfulness or Willingness?
Gerald May, in his book Will and Spirit, distinguishes between willfulness and willingness. Every act of intimacy, whether in work or language or marriage or prayer, suppresses willfulness and cultivates willingness. There is a deep sense of being involved in something more than the ego, better than the self. The "more" and the "better" among Christians has a personal name, God.
One of the qualities of will in its freedom is knowing the nature and extent of the necessities in which it works. Unmindful of necessities, the will becomes arrogant and liable to hubris (which the Greeks saw as inevitably punished with tragedy) or timidly declines to couch-potato lethargy indistinguishable from vegetation.
Humble boldness (or, bold humility) enters into a sane, robust willing-free willing-and finds its most expressive and satisfying experience in prayer to Jesus Christ, who wills our salvation.
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Pastors
Calvin Miller
In a day when privacy is prized, how can a church reach its insulated neighbors?
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Suburbia: the push-button Zion of those who have made it and therefore have it made. There, amid the water sprinkling systems and lava rock landscapes, rises the new Eden with little need for God: Paradise Found, where churches ulcerate themselves trying to sell self-denial to the pampered.
Can the urgency of the Cross ever be made real to those who cocoon in front of an entertainment center and insist on defining hell as dandelions and heaven as the proper side of town?
Two women from our church once made a church visitation call to a new suburbanite. They were fearful but brave and wanted to extend the gospel to someone in need of Christ. They were convinced their “prayed up” status would deliver them from the mouth of the lion. They walked up to a door, rang the Westminster chime doorbell, and waited beneath a plywood-goose wreath that said WELCOME. It seemed a good omen. But all too soon they were met by a swaggering young muscle man-body by Nautilus-clutching a can of beer in one hand and a remote TV control in the other. Clad only in bikini briefs, the suburban chieftain spoke brusque Swahili. “Yeah?”
“We’re from the church,” the tentative women offered. They had intended to say something more evangelistic, but as they observed privately to me later, “It’s hard to witness to the nearly naked.”
The young Adonis, framed in his own middle-class doorway, blurted out a string of profanity, telling them that he wasn’t interested in “the church.” His profanity and near nudity crushed their spirits. There seemed nothing to do but mumble a “thank you” and say good-bye as the door slammed shut. The plywood-goose wreath lied! They returned to their car, sat down, shuddered, and shed tears over the crushing encounter.
As they told me of the experience, I felt a bit hurt and responsible. After all, as their pastor, I had encouraged them to go into the community and “share the gospel.” And for most of us, sharing the gospel is the important part of reaching the unchurched. We want to see the unchurched commit themselves to Christ and become a part of the church. These women hadn’t “shared” much of the gospel they had worked to learn in our evangelistic training class. They had found little joy in an event that I had promised would likely be joyous.
I was reminded that the word witness and the word martyr were originally one, and while their martyrdom was not as terminal as St. Stephen’s, I could see that it was likely to be terminal in terms of their ever being coaxed into “sharing” again.
This exhibitionist, loin-cloth secularian has remained for me a symbol: handsome, self-confident, complete in himself-living between the TV control and suburban good times. His needs, as he would likely define them, are more Dow Jones than spiritual. Jesus is not even a remote part of his imagined necessities.
What Doesn’t Work
Reaching the unreached can be done in many ways, but outreach usually falls into two categories. The first is confrontational evangelism. Both the church and the community quail before this kind of evangelism. The reason we so fear this “confrontational” approach is because the confronted secularian sometimes “confronts back.” We are thus intimidated by the rude treatment we shall receive, or (more truthfully) the treatment we imagine we shall receive. The intimidation is so strong that many pastors have given up altogether on the idea of such direct neighborhood encounters.
Perhaps because of fear, many Christians have created their own ghetto in today’s society. They have their own language-with clichs well understood and oft used by those who worship in the new temples that ring our growing cities. Temple language, full of “Praise the Lord” and “Bless you, brother,” seems alien to the Wall Street Journalites, who live in places like Wedgewood, Leawood, Applewood, and Pepperwood. And people who speak a strange language are often feared. Thus the fear extends both directions.
But it’s more than the language of Zion that frightens suburbanites. Evangelicals have their own concert artists, radio and television networks, and publishing empires. They have their own subculture heroes, few of whom are well known by the world at large. To those outside the church, all this makes these Christians seem to live in another world.
So what happens when these opposite worlds meet on a Thursday-night evangelism call? Inner terror-on both sides of the door. The worlds have so little in common that bridging becomes a matter of near panic. The suburbanite who lays down his Forbes magazine (or his Playboy) to answer the door and finds literature-armed churchgoers on his stoop is terrified! These evangelists may be gentle in their confrontation, but the terror of the event is nonetheless great.
The second category of outreach is more relational than confrontive. This bridge-building method still emphasizes reaching out, but replaces confrontation with initial friendship. This gentle approach says we must wed the spiritual needs of suburbanites to their sociological needs, giving the first emphasis to sociology. We reach them best by bringing up the eternal issues only after we have talked about softball, barbecues, and committee slots. In other words, we must socialize before we evangelize.
But perhaps you, like I, have seen what can happen to churches using this softer approach. As pastor, you find yourself on a treadmill of a thousand “new ghetto” activities. To the brotherhood, you become the fry cook; to the Cub Scouts, umpire; to the ladies, bazaar auctioneer. Without a strong sense of personal spiritual discipline, you can become the bishop of the busy, and “busianity” may replace Christianity altogether.
The church that leaves off the nasty business of urgency may wind up “many but not much.”
Different Strokes
We’ve wrestled with the challenge of reaching out to suburbia in a way that maintains the urgency without mounting a campaign that’s too terrifying for both the church and the neighborhood.
We started by realizing that while suburbanites may seem to be alike and have a single system of values, they are as different as those already in church, and so they respond to different methods of being reached.
Some of those who never go to church may be reached by the church’s annual Christmas pageant or Easter musical. The athletically inclined are more likely to respond to the church’s softball league than its junior choir program. And, yes, we’ve discovered that some people still respond well to a knock on the door.
So we still do visitation (while trying to eliminate as much of the fear factor as we can). And we offer a variety of ministries (while trying not to fall into a pointless busianity).
One observation: whichever route a person takes to faith, he or she tends to stay in that pattern. People who come to Christ through confrontational means seem to make more earnest visitors than those who gradually come to faith through “sociological absorption.”
Rick, for instance, became a Christian through Evangelism Explosion, and now that he’s a deacon, he remains a firm believer in structured evangelism and is immensely involved in outreach.
Peter came through the subtle and sociological relationships of the church softball team. Now his temptation is more toward busy Christianity.
My challenge as pastor is to help both see the full scope of the Christian life.
Community Care
Community concern sells, even in suburbia. Whatever programs the church may offer, the community needs to be led gradually, across the months or years, to see that the church cares. This means public relations, or, to put it biblically, “letting your light shine.”
I’ve been interested to see in recent years that major corporations, from AT&T to Exxon to Hallmark Cards, have built empires around advertising slogans that say “We care.” Our task is similar-to get the local unchurched to associate our congregation with an image of people who care for one another and the community.
Care has two sides. One is the informal, low-profile, and personal kind of care. A young man, who with his family had just moved into town and visited our church once or twice, had to have emergency gall bladder surgery. One of the Bible classes in our church heard about it. Class members took casseroles to the family and cared for the children so the wife could visit her husband. As a result, this couple joined our church and quickly became part of the ministry.
The other kind of caring is structured, open, and public. Our youth group went through two neighborhoods of West Omaha a few weeks ago to collect food for the downtown mission and gathered more than a thousand cans. They not only helped the mission, but they also made our community aware that our church cares about the needy.
We also advertise. We have on our signs: “We’re there; we care.” Sometimes a disgruntled member will say, “Either give me more attention or take that off your sign!” But the message is essential.
We’re producing a 30-second television commercial that shows me in front of Methodist Hospital, reminding the community that the staff of our church enters that hospital several times a week in a genuine effort to care about those who hurt. While I admit TV and radio can lead to caring that’s flamboyant and proud, we feel it’s a legitimate way to remind our community of our calling.
Some time ago I got a call from an elderly woman who had just been told by her doctors that she was dying and possibly would not survive the night. Through the media, she had heard Westside’s “humble boast” that we care. She told me I was the only pastor she knew and asked if I could come to the hospital to see her.
I went. We talked, and I read Scripture and prayed.
She survived the crisis and eventually fully recovered. She is now a faithful member of our church and a close friend.
Family Focus
Whether or not suburban marriages are harmonious and the children are adjusting, all couples want their families to work better. They are looking for ways to help maintain the family unit.
The gospel offers a lot to people who crave family togetherness. Much of what the church offers is met with warm interest by individuals who believe that families are still a good idea in the world where homes are often falling apart.
This has two implications in our setting.
The first touches the pastor’s own family. I realized my family needed to be an example, to be seen reaching out. So my wife, Barbara, and I work together on visitation night. Every Monday evening, Barbara and her co-workers prepare a meal that will allow other members to come directly from their offices to eat before they receive the classroom instruction and assignment cards. Without this meal, many would not have time to go home and eat and make it back in time.
In addition, we practice hospitality, not just with long-time members of the church, but also with those who are new.
But there’s a second implication, with the families being reached. I’ve made it a practice (and I teach this to others) to speak with the man of the family. In a day when sexism is a possible criticism, I do this not because I believe either parent is more significant than the other, but because I believe that in most homes, the man is the key in reaching the entire family. Perhaps it’s because he’s often the most reluctant; perhaps because he often has more influence on the choice of activities for the whole family.
When I do visitation, I ask if I can meet the whole family. I work at including both the husband and the wife in the conversation, but when it comes to asking for commitment (whether praying for salvation or simply indicating their willingness to visit the church), I ask the man for his commitment first. If he agrees, it’s easier for the rest of the family to make the same commitment.
As a result, on most Sundays as many men as women attend our church (and Bible study hour).
The Wait of Glory
Waiting on the secular family to be interested in the church’s message demands patience. Sometimes it’s directly related to need. At seasons of great need, most people are interested in God. If the pastor can lay down the church’s availability through advertising or general reputation, when those needs come, the families who thought they were not interested suddenly are.
This posture is not a lazy waiting but an eager a waiting to help those who find themselves crying out for help.
We discovered this with the Willington family. I visited them several times over the years, and the husband, an Air Force officer, was quite willing for his family to go to church but never saw a need for it himself.
Then he received a year-long “remote assignment” overseas and had to go without his family. When I stopped by, he said, “It’d be nice, Reverend, if the church could stop around and see how my wife and kids are doing every once in a while. I’d be grateful.”
While he was gone, church members helped in a variety of ways. When the automatic washer broke down, we arranged for its repair. Some of the members helped out with home maintenance.
When the year was up and the husband returned, he came to church! One Sunday morning, his face streaked with gratitude, he made his commitment to Christ.
Caring and waiting eventually paved the way to faith. He went on to become a strong member of our congregation.
What Fuels Our Effort
Love is the fuel of our evangelism. Pastors cannot, without loving Christ, find a desire to witness. Without loving people, none of us would long stay at the job.
But pastoral love, whenever it occurs, can prompt the most rigorous sort of action: Love reaches for the hurt and takes bold steps without self-interest. It can accomplish unbelievable things merely because it is so void of self-interest.
Some time ago, a teenager, Arthur Hinkley, lifted a 3,000-pound tractor with bare hands. He wasn’t a weight lifter, but his friend, Lloyd Bachelder, 18, was pinned under a tractor on a farm near Rome, Maine. Hearing Lloyd scream, Arthur somehow lifted the tractor enough for Lloyd to wriggle out.
Love was the real motivation.
We become the most like Christ when our motivation is distilled love. And that agape works-even in the suburbs.
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
- More fromCalvin Miller
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- Evangelism
- Fellowship and Community
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- Pastoral Care
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- Salvation
- Spiritual Formation
- Visitation
Pastors
Graham R. Hodges
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When I was a boy milking several cows each morning and night, I dreaded the cocklebur season. In late summer this prolific weed turned brown, and its seed pods, each armed with dozens of sharp spines, caught in the cows’ tails until the animals’ fly switchers were transformed into mean whips. One hard switch of such a tail in the milker’s face made him lose considerable religion.
So I learned to hate the cocklebur.
Later, comfortably removed from the dairy industry, I learned a remarkable fact about the cocklebur: its sticky seed pod contains several seeds, not just one. And these seeds germinate in different years. Thus, if seed A fails to sprout next year because of a drought, seed B will be there waiting for year after next, and seed C the year after that, waiting until the right conditions for germination arrive.
I realized this delayed response is similar to the way the Word of God operates. Ministers may preach “Oh, why not tonight?”-certainly a good question. But some people may not respond tonight or tomorrow night. Certainly our theme should be “Now Is the Hour,” but we shouldn’t forget that people respond in different ways and at different times to the same appeal. Circumstances may not be right for an immediate decision. Perhaps the hearer hasn’t been sufficiently chastened by life. Maybe something else prevents a response. At times like these, I remember the cocklebur seed.
This delayed response is a frustration to any serious preacher. Yet we must also remember that many of us waited years before heeding the call to preach. Some went into business. Some took other indirect routes into the ministry. Some were not called until middle life. Many of us, too, took our time.
Faith in the power of the Word honestly delivered tides us over the dry seasons. If we sow with confidence, God will provide the harvest, sometimes even after the sower is gone.
One woman told me her daughter and son-in-law were attending church regularly in another state six hundred miles away. For two years I had worked with this couple and their two small children, visiting their unpretentious home many times. When they moved away without any spiritual commitment, I figured my efforts had been wasted. But once they settled, they evidently connected my efforts with their present churchgoing-at least they wanted me to know about their change in attitude. It gave me faith to keep on with similarly unresponsive families.
In 1819 Parson David Elkin, an itinerant Methodist preacher, stood above a simple grave in the Indiana wilderness. He made a brief, heartfelt statement about the good character of the person buried there-Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Who knows what seeds of faith were sown there, later to sprout in the greatness of Abraham Lincoln? Though never a church member, he was a church attender and faithful to the church’s teachings. Something must have been planted in the lonely, hungry heart of that scrawny boy by backwoods preacher Elkin.
An English nurse, looked down upon by her lord and lady, sat teaching a small boy the Bible and its truths. His parents were too busy in society to pay him any notice. The only reason we know about this nurse is that she was teaching the future Lord Shaftesbury, England’s great nineteenth-century reformer, the man who got the children out of the coal mines. We have no reason to believe he would have been anything but a privileged wastrel had this Christian nurse not planted the right seeds.
Our modern impatience for immediate results has achieved wonders in science and industry. But human beings are not coal and steel. They react, not according to formula, but by inner spiritual winds we cannot discern. Hence, we patiently plant the seed. With tireless persistence we sow by word and deed, always believing in the potency of the seed, never overlooking a plot of barren soil.
Some years ago a lotus seed was germinated after lying dormant for several thousand years in a peat bog. Human beings don’t live that long-at least not here. But they do have a remarkable power to respond to seeds of spiritual life sown years before.
Isaiah states far better than I the power of the Word to spring to life after long periods: “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10-11).
-Graham R. Hodges, interim pastor
First Congregational Church
Fulton, New York
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Pastors
Chuck Smith, Sr.
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Twenty years ago, singing, clapping, Bible-studying youth regularly packed out Calvary Chapel’s enormous tent in Costa Mesa, California. Chuck Smith, their pastor, helped give birth to the Jesus People movement that redirected thousands of lives, young and old, and changed the face of American Christianity. But after years of nurturing a church-cum-denomination, Chuck felt the need for some personal refreshment. He found it right where he had begun.
In the sixties and early seventies, the most successful and rewarding part of my ministry was my Monday-evening classes for young people. I’d sit and talk with them from the Word of God, and kids started getting excited about Jesus and about serving the Lord. We’d have an amateur-hour kind of concert in which the kids shared their music. Out of it came the talent we eventually showcased through Maranatha! Music.
The ministry grew, and other agendas pushed at my time. I got so busy I eventually dropped the Monday-night studies, letting others handle them. I was essentially out of that ministry.
A couple of years ago, however, I looked around and realized many of the “kids” I had nurtured in the first wave had teen-age kids of their own. I’d been so busy developing their parents that I had neglected the young people.
So I decided to become involved again with the Monday-night studies. I patterned the evenings as I had in the sixties, and the ministry has caught on once more. We have from fifteen to eighteen hundred kids on Monday evenings. It’s exciting; a whole new generation is getting turned on.
A while back, a couple of high school boys came up to me and said, “We’re interested in going into the ministry. Can you talk with us about it?”
“I’d love to,” I said, and I set up an appointment. When they arrived for the appointment, I invited them into my office.
“Well, uh, I think you’d better come out,” one replied.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think everyone will fit into your office.”
I followed them into the auditorium, and there I found more than a hundred young guys interested in the ministry-a whole new batch of kids wanting to devote their lives to serving the Lord! These kids aren’t waiting for formal education, either; they’re already witnessing on the streets and in the parks.
These kids are talented. God didn’t cut off the talent with the first batch in the sixties. Who’s to say what this new wave will do-the songs they’ll write, the churches they’ll begin, the lives that will be turned around?
From that contact, I started a Saturday-night training class for the ministry, more or less like Spurgeon’s lectures to his students. I’ve had a lot of fun encouraging them to use their talents for the Lord. To see great things happening in them revitalizes my own sense of ministry. I’ve been helping to run what has become a big organization, but this is a chance to do again what I really enjoy.
I’ve returned to my first love in ministry.
-Chuck Smith, Sr.
Calvary Chapel
Costa Mesa, California
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
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Pastors
Marshall Shelley and Larry Weeden
An interview with Roberta Hestenes
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In this series: Helping People Grow in Maturity
Jesus told his followers, Go and make disciples of all nations. Pastors know well that no two people under their care are in the same place spiritually. Making and growing disciples involves taking peoples spiritual temperature, helping them confront and address sin, guiding them to develop a love for Scripture, and much more. This Common Challenge covers ways you can introduce, initiate, and instruct the entire congregation into the life of allegiance to Christ.
Why Your Church Needs Group Mentoring
Interview with Natasha Sistrunk Robinson
One Scale of Spiritual Maturity
Marshall Shelley
The Coaching Approach to Care
Chris Blumhofer
Can Spiritual Maturity Be Taught?
Marshall Shelley and Larry Weeden
In sports, the winning team is usually one that's been together a few years. The rookie or two who crack the starting lineup are more than balanced by the solid core of veterans. Those players have a developed as a unit. They work together; they share common goals; they can depend on one another. In a word, the team has maturity.
For those of us leading churches, how do we attain such maturity for our congregations and ourselves? Sports teams develop through hours of practice and game experience. But isn't growth in godliness something God produces, the fruit of the Spirit? Can we, as church leaders, help create maturity? If so, how?
To address these issues, LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Larry Weeden went to St. Davids, Pennsylvania, to interview Roberta Hestenes, president of Eastern College and before that the founder of the Christian Formation and Discipleship program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. She has been interested in spiritual growth ever since she became a Christian while a college student. Shortly after her conversion, she attended a conference on leading a dormitory Bible study, and within two weeks, she was guiding a study in her own dorm.
From her experience as a pastor, professor, and spiritual director, Roberta describes what can be done to stimulate spiritual maturity and vitality.
What sparked your interest in spiritual formation?
I first recognized the challenge when I joined the staff of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle. We had 3,800 members, and about 200 were involved in adult education. Under Pastor Bob Munger, I had the opportunity to develop something churchwide to stimulate spiritual growth.
While in Seattle, I also began a Bible study with some faculty members at the University of Washington, and they encouraged me to pursue a doctorate in communications. So I did and eventually went to Fuller Seminary to teach communications.
Over the years at Fuller, I sensed a major void in the seminary curriculum. While we taught many of the skills of leading a church, we allowed no space for intentionally developing the spiritual character of these students-these present and future pastors.
The assumption seemed to be, Well, they learn their spirituality in the church. But who leads the church in developing spiritual maturity? Presumably the pastor. And where does the pastor learn it? The church figured it was taught at seminary; the seminaries assumed it was caught at church. I was convinced pastors couldn't help others develop spiritual maturity if they hadn't set aside space to learn it.
So I eventually moved from teaching communications and started the program in spiritual formation and discipleship.
What exactly is spiritual maturity? What does it look like?
There are two definitions.
In the King James Version, maturity is often translated "perfect." In that sense, maturity is engaging in behavior appropriate to the stage in which you are. A 4-year-old is mature when he or she does everything it's reasonable for a 4-year-old to do. We don't consider a 4-year-old immature because he can't do what a 12-year-old does. But if he doesn't do the things 4-year-olds are capable of, then he's immature. So one definition of maturity is living up to the capacities God has made possible for you.
The other definition has to do with qualities like those listed in Ephesians 4. A mature person is one who is using his or her spiritual gifts, who is building the body, who is discerning truth from error, who is speaking the truth in love, who is in God-honoring relationships with people.
We're not talking here about a status, a goal that can be reached once and for all. Paul talked about having not yet attained, about pressing on toward the mark. We tend to think of maturity as a status-young Christians are immature, while older Christians are mature. That's not completely illegitimate, but I don't think it's the best biblical understanding of maturity.
Maturity is pressing toward the mark; immaturity is complacency and self-satisfaction.
How can we evaluate the maturity of a congregation?
It's difficult, because the church is made up of individuals, and only God knows the heart. But I think we can look at whether the people, as a whole, care about the things God cares about.
For me, that would mean, first, a genuine concern for the lost, both near and far.
Second, is there a concern for the poor?
Third, are they speaking the truth in love? Most congregations need to grow in this area.
Fourth, is there discernment? In the German church in the 1930s, Christians followed Hitler because he quoted the Bible and talked about Jesus. When I look at the maturity of a congregation, I ask whether the people could detect someone who knows how to use religious language but is really an enemy of the gospel.
Fifth, a mature church is a praying church.
I would sum it up by saying you look at the quality of a church's corporate life and the quality of its mission.
With that understanding, is spiritual maturity something that can be taught?
Yes, it can, to a certain extent, and it begins with how pastors perceive their role.
In recent decades, the pastor has been seen as therapist, social activist, and facilitator. Today the image of the pastor as CEO is widely held. But I don't see any of these images as biblically complete. Looking at Ephesians 4:11, we find the role described as one of pastor-teacher. Another way of saying this is that the pastor is to be a spiritual director for the congregation-the person with intentional responsibility to nourish the congregation in its growth and spirituality.
In teaching, I found many pastors who have not thought of themselves as spiritual directors but who, when I begin to talk about spiritual direction, say, "Oh, yeah! That's who I am! That's what I want to do." It gives them a sense of their vocation again. Preaching isn't enough of a vocation; it's a means to an end.
If pastors are spiritual directors, how does their work complement the Holy Spirit's?
A basic issue in Christian formation is whether we're talking about techniques and management strategies that produce maturity. One of the verses that gives the proper perspective is Galatians 4:19, where Paul said, "My little children, with whom I am in travail until Christ be formed in you." There you have immaturity; they were caught in legalism. But Paul said "with whom I am in travail," and there is the agony and the work of the pastor. Then he continued, "until Christ be formed in you." We are being re-created in the image of God, and it's a work God does. Here, as in Philippians 2, Paul brought the two together.
The pastor works hard at things that can make a difference. Paul wrote letters, prayed, straightened out misunderstandings, and tried to reconcile relationships. But he never said, "I am making you mature." Rather, it's "Christ being formed in you." That's the work of the Holy Spirit. We are co-laborers with God.
How does this work out in practical situations?
Let's separate the pieces. Part of a pastor's task is to create a context within which growth is possible. If, for instance, the church is riven with conflict, and people are dominated by that conflict, a spiritual emphasis may not be possible. Somehow you've got to clear the ground.
Then you have the basic means of nourishment, such as worship and pastoral care. The teaching of Scripture is critical; if our people are biblically illiterate, they are not going to mature.
Pastors can also promote small groups. They're no guarantee of growth, but within them you have relationships where love can be learned, you have a context for prayer and for learning, and you have great opportunity for service.
If you were a pastor, what would you do to promote growth in a specific area like prayer?
Prayer is definitely taught. The disciples said, "Teach us to pray," and Jesus taught them. We can do the same for our people.
I'd start by asking to what extent prayer is a significant reality in the lives of my parishioners. Like any church, I'm sure we would pray on Sundays and maybe have a midweek prayer meeting. But prayer might be relatively meaningless to the people on a daily basis if they don't know how to do it. I would need a realistic assessment of their prayer lives, because only then could I set meaningful goals for teaching.
With my goals in place, I would begin to teach, confident growth was going to occur. I've worked with many pastors who realized their churches had the rhetoric but not the reality of prayer. They have preached sermons and designed things people could do to learn by experience. The key was to answer the questions people really had and to talk about the real barriers to prayer.
For example, how does prayer fit into the daily life of the woman who has three children and can be alone only if she locks herself in the bathroom? (Laughter) A pastor has to remember there are people in those circumstances. But these pastors have seen their congregations mature in prayer.
Besides prayer, what other practices can a pastor teach that will promote spiritual growth?
Two I'll mention briefly are meditation on Scripture and the spiritual retreat. Our people don't know how to reflect interactively with the Bible, yet it's vital to having Scripture actually change your life. Likewise the American Christian knows nothing about taking a day for retreat, whereas Korean Christians do it regularly. This knowledge didn't drop out of heaven; someone taught them.
One spiritual discipline that's been present from the first centuries is journaling, which is a private dialogue between you and God. Augustine's Confessions is a journal. John Wesley kept one, as did Jim Elliot. But Christians today don't realize this is a resource to help them reflect on faith, to make space for God in their lives.
I rediscovered journaling when I had cancer and needed to reflect on the meaning of that experience. I had spontaneously kept a journal as a young Christian. I don't remember that anyone taught me, though all of us in our parachurch movement were taught to keep a prayer list, which is a form of it.
But when I was struggling with cancer, I found journaling an enormously beneficial aid to prayer, a time to quiet the noise externally and internally and pour everything out before God.
After that experience I started to teach journaling, finding that the inability to keep a journal often would be a window into rebelliousness or a lack of discipline in one's personal life. A few people would object on theological grounds: the idea of a discipline like journaling is foreign to some Protestants. So in the name of freedom we do not submit ourselves voluntarily to disciplines that could help us to grow, and thereby we become our own worst enemies.
How would you help skeptical people see the value in a practice like journaling?
I would first explain how helpful journaling has been to me and other Christians through the centuries. Then I would say, "No one can force you to journal. It's a tool we're asking you to try. If you do, there's a high likelihood it will help you grow." We can't create a hunger for God, but we can stimulate the hunger he has placed in people's hearts.
What about the person who's willing to try it but lacks the discipline to stay with it?
The key in helping people develop any kind of discipline is to help them be voluntarily accountable to someone else. I'm not talking about the submission movement, where things are forced on people. I simply let people know, "You don't have to do this alone."
Journaling is one of those disciplines where if you tell another person you're going to do it, and then you report on how you're doing, that accountability is helpful in maintaining the practice. No one is making you do it, but knowing you're going to report to the other person helps you stick to your own intention. Pastors and other church leaders can help people overcome their individualistic isolation and get them into supportive relationships.
You mentioned earlier setting realistic goals for growth. What's realistic?
We tend to make the mistake of assuming that when we begin a new emphasis like learning to pray, we can get everybody excited about it and keep them excited. Thus, if only half the people, or fewer, get involved, we're disappointed.
You never get 100 percent participation-if you do, it's only for short periods and only out of compulsion. I worked with a pastor who made all his people get in small groups by persuasive preaching and by saying, in effect, "You owe this to me." He put all his personal weight behind the program. But within six months, all but two of those groups had died. People had joined out of loyalty to the pastor, not because they sensed their own need and were ready to make the necessary commitment.
We have to remember that people are on different spiritual journeys and have different needs and circumstances and temperaments. Therefore, not everyone should do the same spiritual disciplines in the same ways. We want to respect that God-given diversity.
If you promote a program of concentrated Bible reading to the church and only 10 percent read through the Bible in a month, that's all gain and no loss. You have that many people doing something spiritually nourishing who weren't doing it before. And that 10 percent can provide a tremendous dynamic for growth, a nucleus that can carry the church.
We have to get away from the all-or-nothing mentality.
How far ahead of the congregation do you need to be in those areas of growth you're teaching?
Generally speaking, it's a fallacy to say you can't lead people until you get your whole act together. If that were true, no one would ever lead. You don't have to be nine steps in front of your people, just one. We don't teach these things because we've got them all mastered, but because we're obedient to Scripture and to what we think God is calling us to do.
But if I were a pastor and felt we needed to be more of a praying people, I would have to decide whether I'm willing to do what I'm going to ask them to do. If I'm not going to take prayer seriously in my own life, there won't be any power when I call the congregation to pray.
Being spiritual director to a whole congregation sounds like a bigger job than one person can handle.
It is. Even though a pastor can lead from the pulpit, people also need help on a more personal level, and a director usually can't handle more than two or three people at a time. The answer is to look for those in this church God has gifted in this area.
If you look around in a local church, you'll invariably find people already exercising this ministry. Everyone knows Renee is a woman who prays and has a lot of wisdom, so you'll find people going to her. And George over there is respected and frequently sought out. We just haven't labeled these things as spiritual direction or taught people how to make that gift more available to the body. Consequently, a lot of people are lining up outside the pastor's office. It doesn't have to be that way.
What can pastors do to foster their own spiritual growth?
For one thing, they need to be in community. It's easy to become isolated trying to be the church's supersaint, having no one with whom you can honestly discuss your struggles, but that's a dangerous situation. Pastors need spiritual directors, covenant fellowship groups, and spiritual friendships. They need desperately to avoid the temptation to think they can be holy men or women of God without anybody else's help.
You're in a situation similar to a pastor's: in a leadership position and having to present a consistent public image. You also moved from one coast to the other not long ago. What have you done to avoid the potential isolation?
That's a situation that doesn't just take care of itself. It requires effort. Here's how I'm trying to deal with it.
I'm part of a national covenant group that's been together eleven or twelve years now. We meet once a year for a week of sharing and prayer, and then we form prayer partners for the rest of the year. My prayer partner and I call each other every week, and we've adopted certain disciplines we think God wants us to be working on; right now we're encouraging one another in the area of exercise.
In the past I've also had a local covenant group, but I lost that when I moved from Fuller and have not gotten that reestablished. Finding a new group locally is high on my agenda. For my whole Christian life, with few exceptions, I have been involved in a covenant group weekly.
Do you find this covenant group needs to be people of similar station in life?
Yes. I used to teach that the pedestal effect is easily overcome. And for the first ten years of my public ministry, I was in wonderful groups with lay people in my church, and there was no problem. The more well-known I've become, however, the more I've experienced what the senior pastor of a large congregation would. The pedestal effect is more and more difficult to overcome, and peers are more difficult to find in a local area. But the danger is in deciding that being a peer depends on title or status, which isn't true in the Lord. It is difficult, though, to find someone who can understand your responsibilities and with whom you can talk honestly.
The extra issue for me is being a woman, since there are few women doing what I'm doing. Thus, most of my peer covenant groups have consisted of men. So I've always worked to keep a group of women friends with whom I can be vulnerable and with whom I can listen and pray. I don't particularly discuss professional things with them, but I do discuss my spiritual disciplines and what it means to be a person. Those things can be talked about with anybody.
The person I had looked to as my own spiritual director died a couple of years ago, and I have not replaced that person.
When people get together in a covenant group or one-to-one, what should be on the agenda?
A basic ingredient is a commitment to honest and personal sharing, though the group needs to decide what areas they will share, because some are too threatening. A group of pastors might want a place where they can discuss honestly what's happening in their ministries. If we're going to come together just to tell each other success stories, let's not bother.
An associate pastor, for example, might need a place to talk about how his senior pastor is driving him bonkers. If he talks about that to the wrong people, he could be seen as disloyal or subverting the ministry. He doesn't want to do that, but he honestly needs a mature person to help sort things out to determine if he's interpreting things right or has a blind spot.
Second, of course, these groups should be places of prayer for one another's concerns.
A third element, which is optional, is accountability. This immediately raises the stakes, and usually you wouldn't do this unless you've known the people long enough to trust them. You might say, "I've gotten sloppy in my prayer disciplines" or "I'm not studying; I'm preaching out of the barrel" or "I feel stale, and I believe God wants me to be doing something in my ministry that I'm not doing" or "My time is getting away from me"-or whatever the case might be. "I would like you to hold me accountable."
The fourth element, which is trickier still, is to bring your marriages and families into this relationship. This again requires a great deal of trust, but it can be extremely important. One of the reasons pastors have so many affairs is there aren't accountability groups where it's safe enough to say, "I'm being tempted, and I want you to help me stay faithful in my marriage." Once you say that out loud, you're going to stay faithful in your marriage. I have known marriages that were saved by covenant groups where people could be honest without being rejected.
Actually, when you get right down to it, the agenda of any covenant group or one-to-one accountability relationship is really simple: You. Me. God.
That's pretty basic. (Laughter) But it's amazing how many groups we attend where that's not the agenda.
Rural and small-town pastors might have more difficulty finding such a covenant group of peers. What can you suggest for them?
I believe everyone can have a meaningful covenant group. Let me tell you about Floyd. He's a pastor in a little town in Oklahoma. He took my D.Min. class on small groups a few years ago, and he wrote me a letter a year and a half later.
"I thought it was impossible to find peer fellowship," he said, "but ten of us drive an average of 200 miles apiece to meet once a month in the middle of our area. We stay overnight and then spend a whole day together. That group is nourishing me."
These contacts may be from within a pastor's own denomination, or they may be interdenominational. They may be people you meet at conferences or fellow students in D.Min. programs where you find kindred spirits that happen to live in your same general area.
We've been encouraging renewal groups, as we call them, in presbyteries all over the country. The people have to come together for presbytery meetings anyway, so they just piggyback onto the formal agenda this kind of covenant group, and it has worked.
Another source of contacts is the local ministerial association. Within that group, you'll find two or three or four people with whom you have a special affinity, and you can ask if they're interested in such a support group.
When groups like this form, they typically make an initial commitment for six months, agreeing to meet however often is realistic-every two weeks, once a month, or whatever. If it doesn't work, it's over, and the people didn't lose anything.
Do you think pastors' spouses should be part of the answer to this need for spiritual development?
Of course they should, but too often it doesn't happen. I have been asking pastors year after year, "Do you pray together with your spouse?" and the overwhelming answer is no. Why? Because they feel very awkward, nobody ever taught them, they feel guilty, they had no models, and they have different approaches to the spiritual life.
Often the pastor thinks he has to be the spiritual leader in the home, which means he prays and she listens. And yet they'll say things like, "My spouse is more spiritual than I am." It's a mess.
Conversely, some pastors' spouses feel uncomfortable praying aloud in the presence of "the professional" because they're not as fluent theologically. Being able to relate spiritually is a challenge.
How can that problem be resolved?
We have to start with realistic expectations, and it's probably not realistic to think you're going to have a lovey-dovey prayer meeting every night. When your expectations are unrealistic, you get guilt, and guilt keeps you from moving toward each other.
You can help each other, however, by giving one another opportunity to develop spiritual disciplines. This means watching the children while your spouse has a time of prayer and Scripture, and vice versa. Then you need to find ways to really be together spiritually.
One is honest conversation; it's amazing how often our husband-wife talks never get beyond the superficial.
The second is to get both partners involved, on equal footing, by sometimes using a prayer book or a book of devotions. With our extemporaneous tradition, we get hung up in prayer, thinking we have to perform. But if you use a prayer book or book of devotions and take turns reading, not expecting rockets to explode but just being faithful-maybe just being silent before the Lord together and then saying amen-God will receive it.
Then I'd say start with once a week. Don't even try to do it every day. Let it develop slowly as your schedules allow and as you see how much good it does you.
Another approach you mentioned earlier was the one-day retreat.
Such a retreat is a great way to make space for God in your life. If you can spend a day at a Catholic retreat house that has a spiritual director who understands a broad range of Christian traditions, it can be an enormous help. As Protestants, we tend not to be aware of these places, but they're everywhere, and the average pastor is within driving distance of at least one.
How would you go about finding such a place?
I would start by calling the local archdiocese office and asking if there's a retreat center in the area. If the answer is yes, I'd call the retreat center and ask the following questions: (1) Do you allow non-Catholics to make retreat there? (2) Is there a spiritual director with whom I could talk? (3) Is there a worship service during the day that I could attend, recognizing I couldn't take part in the Eucharist but just wanting to worship? These elements, I've found, are helpful in structuring a one-day retreat.
There's also a growing number of Protestant retreat or counseling centers for pastors, and a good source of information about these is the Wellspring ministry of Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C.
What would you say to a pastor who's trying to be the congregation's spiritual director but is discouraged because not much seems to be happening?
The key, I think, is to look for gradual rather than spectacular change in people. This applies to congregations as well as ourselves. God is surely transforming us into the image of Christ, and that's our hope. But spiritual children, just like natural children, don't turn into mature adults overnight.
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