Welcome to Ministry. What Exactly Did You Expect?

26 01 2012

When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”  Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Matthew 8:18-20

It seems to me that the scene has by now played out for me at least a hundred times.  I am counseling with a pastor who has been put through the wringer by his congregation and has been maligned and injured and his family has been as well.  He has fallen victim to the church at its very worst and he now has the scars to show for it.  He expresses to me his utter dismay and surprise and talks about how seminary simply did not prepare him for this.  His wife expresses shock that God’s own people could behave so badly and that this was NOT what she signed on for when she agreed to marry a pastor.  I listen, and I weep with them, and I grieve for them…and then I think to myself, “Welcome to the ministry.  This is it.  Welcome.”

Jesus was always pretty clear about the downside to following Him…the cost would be great, the sacrifice extraordinary.  He never sugar-coated that.  He was completely unapologetic about it throughout his entire ministry.  So, I suppose my thinking has always been, “If that is true for every follower of Jesus, how much more so for those called out to shepherd other followers of Jesus?”  Vocational ministry, in short, is simply not about comfort.  It is about ministering to a bunch of poorly-behaved, stinky sheep who bite and who hurt you and who get it all wrong at least as much as they get it right.  On top of all that, if you happen to be of certain Christian persuasions, you have to add poverty and celibacy to that list of sacrifices!

This is about the point in my counsel where many younger pastors might interject, “Wow, Blake.  We’ve got to work on your bedside manner.”  Believe me, I know well that this sounds grim.  I know that it is depressing, especially if you are already down for the count.  And I know that it is not necessarily helpful counsel in some circumstances.  But seriously, there is a reality about ministry which I am not certain our seminaries and Bible colleges are getting right…I am not convinced we are really painting a realistic picture of life among God’s people when we send our young men and women out onto the field with visions of large churches, large salaries, large influence, and large prestige.  Jesus would cringe at that picture!

Ministry among God’s people was never intended to be easy.  It is hard.  And the rewards are few.  But my, my…they are rich, are they not?

© Blake Coffee
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.  Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com

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Categories : conflict, Everyone's a Minister, leadership

Transparency for an Older Generation

20 12 2011

Tuesday Re-mix -

“The peace of mind one experiences on one’s own, one’s certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship.” Muriel Barbery

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” Oscar Wilde

One of the trends I believe we will see in the church over the next 20 years is its people growing increasingly comfortable with genuine transparency in their relationships…knowing each other more fully and having fewer and fewer deep dark secrets. I believe this because our younger generations (generation X and millennials) just seem to hold genuine community as a much higher value than those of us who are baby boomers and older. If you don’t believe this, spend about 30 minutes on your college student’s social media pages. OMG…LOL! On the other hand, go to their respective grandparents’ facebook pages (if they have a page at all) and you’ll find an utter vacuum of any personal information. These older generations, after all, are the generations who brought us firewalls and the right to privacy and LifeLock and gated communities. For our generation, the walls are up and the shades are drawn! Transparency, it seems, is just difficult for those of us over 40.

If I am right about this trend, then that means we still have about 20 years or so of having to teach the importance of being transparent…the significance of truly knowing each other and of being truly known. Being the New Testament church demands that we live in relationships of accountability and that we learn to be involved in one another’s lives. I suspect I will spend the rest of my ministry life finding creative ways to teach this to my generation of church leaders. Then, by the time my work in this world is done, a new generation of church leaders will be in place and they will have a whole other set of issues to complicate their lives!

The protests I hear from my generation of leaders sound something like this:

  • It’s just not safe for a leader, especially a pastor, to share too much personal information with his congregation…it will always lead to his undoing.
  • There have to be limits…you have to be careful to whom you show your faults and flaws.
  • My people don’t want to think of me with flaws…that is not the leader they want to follow.
  • My accountability is to God and God alone. He is the only one with whom I can be that transparent.

And by the way, it’s not just the leaders who feel this way. It is two entire adult generations of church members.

Here is what I say to those of us over 40 and struggling with all those troubling scriptures about confessing our sins one to another and holding one another accountable and being transparent with one another: everything in moderation… including transparency (with apologies to Oscar Wilde).

You see, scripture does not demand that every member of my church know every sordid detail of my life. Surely, the vast majority of my acquaintances at church would never want to know those details. So, while I may show only a measured degree of transparency in the larger congregation, I might be a little more transparent in my Sunday School class, and a little more transparent yet in my home Bible study group, and even more transparent yet in my addiction support group, etc. The bottom line to transparency in our Christian relationships is simply that we have somebody (i.e., some small circle of friends) who know our deepest struggles and who carry those burdens with us. In effect, we have “levels” of transparency, depending on the group and the circumstances. And for me, that squares quite nicely with scripture.

So, to my baby boomer friends, take a deep breath and find a support group ministry you can plug into in order to learn what genuine Christian relationships look like. And for my daughters and all their friends…quit laughing at us. We’re trying!

© Blake Coffee

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.  Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com

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Categories : Christian Accountability, Church Unity, Genuine Community, leadership

The Multiple-Choice Pastor Search

29 11 2011

Tuesday Re-mix -

I always preferred essay tests when I was in school (duh, I became a writer).  I didn’t like the “objective” tests, because I felt like they weren’t as accurate in measuring how well I knew the material, at least for material that is thick in concepts and not-so-thick in memorizable facts.  In law school, I became even more opposed to objective tests…we called them “multiple guess” tests…it seemed always about finding the “least wrong answer”.  Give me an essay test, please!

I feel that same way when it comes to eliciting information from a person or a group of people.  If learning what is on their minds is important to me, I would much rather sit down and have a conversation with them than give them an objective survey.  And I especially feel that same way when it comes to discerning God’s will as a church…my concept of God’s will just does not lend itself to a series of multiple-choice questions.

And yet, the conventional wisdom (and literature) for Pastor Search efforts is to do just such a written survey to your church in order to develop a profile for your pastoral candidates.  The problem with asking your church objective, demographic questions like “Place a check next to the age range you think our next pastor should be?” is that, invariably, once all the results are tabulated, what your church ends up telling you is that they want a 40-year-old pastor with 30 years of pastoral experience…and a big, red “S” on his chest would be nice as well!  Good luck with that.

Objective surveys may be mildly effective (not greatly effective, but mildly so) at figuring out what the people want, but not so much at figuring out what God wants. For that, if you don’t have the time and resources to personally interview every church member, then I suggest an essay survey.  Because when it comes right down to it, there are only a couple of questions which matter:

1.  Describe how you believe God has been working in recent years in this church, and how you see Him working right now in the life of our church?

2.  In light of how you answered question #1, describe some qualities or characteristics of the person you believe God would have pastor this church?

When we used this simple, two-question survey with my own church body 16 years ago for our last pastor search effort, we got hundreds of responses, ranging from one paragraph to multiple pages.  It was a lot to assimilate!  But as we began poring over the responses, we began to see certain words and phrases and concepts over and over again.  We began to see a few characteristics which had the consensus of the congregation…five characteristics, to be exact.  These are not the five most important characteristics for any other church’s pastor.  But they became the defining characteristics of our own search committee’s profile:

1.  Humility

2.  A man of prayer

3.  Impartial; not a “respecter of titles or positions”

4. Good communicator

5.  Not political (this was a reference to denominational politics)

Those characteristics may seem broad and vague to you, but that would only be because they aren’t intended to describe your pastor.  They represent God’s will for my pastor, and anyone who knows my pastor even moderately well would immediately put his picture next to this profile.  Before we ever knew him, we knew his profile.  But most importantly, it was NOT because we asked our congregation to fill out an objective survey.  It was because we asked them to help us discern God’s will.  This profile helped us sift through scores of resumes and candidates.  It literally eventually took us right to our pastor, because it was a right reflection of what God wanted for us.

So, as your church works to discern God’s will together, may I suggest that you not try to relegate that process to an objective, multiple-choice test?  Give them the opportunity to share testimony of what they see God doing among you.  You may just be surprised at what God does with that.


© Blake Coffee
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.  Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com

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Categories : Discerning God's Will Together, Pastor Search

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