Restoring Kingdom Builders

After working for more than a year, I am getting closer to finishing the book I’m writing about what happened in my last ministry.  Because I need to spend much of today on the book, I thought I’d share with you an excerpt from a chapter I’m calling “What I Did Wrong.”  In that chapter, I expound upon some mistakes I made that contributed to our eventual departure.  Please pray for me that I will finish the book soon.  A perfectionist is never finished!

My third mistake is that I wasn’t a tough enough leader.  God gave me both an analytical mind and a tender heart.  As a leader, I chose to use persuasion instead of coercion.  For example, whenever a staff member made a mistake, I would sit down with him or her and address the issue as soon as possible, but if they didn’t cooperate, I didn’t know what to do after that.  Part of the reason for this is that I did not have the authority to hire and fire staff, and the staff knew it.  Years ago, a well-known consultant was working with a church I was leading and zeroed in on my inability to make staff members always do what I expected them to do.  He asked me, “Jim, are you a responsible person?”  My answer was, “Yes, I’m very
responsible.”  He asked again, “Does someone only have to ask you to do something once before you’ll do it?”  I told him, “Yes, you only have to tell me to do something once.”  He then concluded, “But Jim, not everyone is like that.”  He helped me to see that I was doing a great job supervising staff members that were just like me but doing an inadequate job of supervising those who were different from me.  I addressed every issue.  I said everything that needed to be said.  But without the authority to hire and fire, certain staff knew they didn’t have to take me seriously.  They could just form an alliance with key individuals or groups in the church as a way of gaining ecclesiastical immunity.

For example, in some churches, a staff member will complain to a board member about the senior pastor and the two will form an unofficial alliance.  So if the senior pastor ever comes to the board to complain about that staff member, or recommends that staff member be fired, the staff member has a built-in advocate.  This happened to me years ago in the second church that I served as pastor.  The church secretary was consistently late to work, and no matter how many times I spoke with her about it, her behavior didn’t change.  When I went to the board to ask for their assistance in the matter, one of the board members circled back and told the secretary that I had talked about her in the board meeting.  This made my working relationship with both parties nearly impossible.

It is my contention that most mega church pastors in America are tough as nails behind-the-scenes.  They may appear to be approachable and vulnerable when they speak from the pulpit or meet people in the patio, but when it comes to the way the church operates, their word is law.  They are the leader and everybody knows it.  Young pastors watch a popular preacher on television or hear him speak at a conference and assume that pastor’s church grew numerically because he’s such a great communicator.  While that may be so, I believe there are many great preachers in small and medium-sized churches as well.  (They have to be good because they are often the only reason that people attend that church.)  But it’s how a pastor organizes the leadership of his church throughout the week that really makes the place go – and most of us never get to see that pastor in action behind-the-scenes on his home campus.  While I can’t prove this, I believe that ninety percent of all pastors are primarily tender people while ten percent are tough guys.  It’s the tough guys that pastor the big churches.  They also know just what to do when they’re attacked from within.

Is it a pastor’s personality that causes him to be tender rather than tough, or is this the way pastors are trained in seminary?  In his book Clergy Killers, Rediger observes that “… the church today is not training pastors to handle conflict, to support themselves in survival situations, to be disciplined spiritually, nor to be toughminded when their leadership is sabotaged.” Years after graduation, I had dinner at the home of a prominent professor from my seminary and I asked him why pastors weren’t taught “street smarts” in school.  He told me that the accreditation committee was interested in academics for core classes and that many practical ministry matters could only be addressed through electives.  Although I did take an elective class on managing conflict in seminary, there were only eight students in the class.  While I believe that the lack of focused seminary training has something to do with the way pastors wilt in conflict situations, the truth is that most pastors are attracted to church ministry because of their tender hearts which are easily broken when they sense they’re being abused or rejected.  As Marshall Shelley wrote in Mastering Conflict and Controversy, “Politicians are satisfied with 51 percent of the constituency behind them.  Pastors, however, feel the pain when even one critic in a hundred raises his voice.”  This is why I believe it’s imperative for the lay people of the church to be trained and empowered in conflict management.  The pastor just can’t do it all either from a physical or an emotional perspective, especially when he’s the target of an all-out attack.