Page 3580 – Christianity Today (2024)

There’s no problem with the Scriptures. They’re relevant. But I have to do my part to make the sermon as relevant as the Scriptures, because I want people to leave saying, “I see!” and not “So what?”
— Stuart Briscoe

Gerald Griffith, a pastor and Bible teacher in Toronto and my good friend, one day said to me, “Every week God gives me bread for his people.”

I looked him straight in the eye and replied, “That’s true, but you spend a lot of time in the kitchen!”

He had to agree. Those hours “in the kitchen” are among the most important of my week. Why? Because in the kitchen I prepare what God gives me to feed his people. And they can be picky eaters.

People are distracted by all kinds of things—legitimate things, for the most part, but sometimes not.

Pain fills a lot of hearts. People are unhappy at work. Or their homes are less than ideal. Or they feel great economic stress. Or they strain under the demands of a job. When troubled people come to church, their thoughts suppress the appetite for God’s menu. My job as a preacher is to overwhelm the careworn with the aroma of the gospel.

So when I preach, I’m continually thinking. How am I going to hold and use the attention so tenuously lent me? I don’t have it long. When I listen in on conversations in the church foyer any Sunday, I’m amazed at how quickly thoughts skirt from divine worship to talk about the Bucks and the Brewers, or making a buck and what’s brewing in politics. So one of my major responsibilities of the week is to grab their attention with the sermon.

Consequently, I pass my sermon material through what I call the “So what?” test for relevance. There’s no problem with the Scriptures. They’re relevant. But I have to do my part to make the sermon as relevant as the Scriptures, because I want people to leave saying, “I see!” and not “So what?”

The way to do that, I’ve found, is to preach to the mind, the will, and the emotions. Donald English once said: “When I leave a church service, I ask myself the question: Which part of me need I not have brought here today?” That’s why I try to touch every part of the person through the material I use in the sermon. If I’m preaching to mind, will, and emotions, people won’t go away saying, “So what?”

Preaching to the Mind

Theology challenges the mind. I admit not many people think in theological terms. Perhaps that’s the problem: they haven’t looked at the world view—the philosophy of life—behind their lifestyles. So I intend to keep them thinking about it when I preach.

For instance, I often point out the flip side of a proposition or belief. Most issues have at least two sides, so when I make a strong point about something, I’m anxious to point out that others believe differently. Often I’ll spell out the opposing beliefs. I’m not being wishy-washy, but getting people to think. Those with tunnel vision need someone to open up for them a broader view.

Once I was preaching a series on the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty …” To get at the opening phrase fully, I stepped back and tried to help my congregation understand why the concept of God as Father disturbs many in our society. How does the radical feminist feel? I’d done my reading on the matter, so I quoted some feminists. I also mentioned those people who have been abused by their fathers. For them, unlike many of us, father does not have good connotations.

If we have a high view of Scripture and God, I continued, we have to beware of inflating images of our fathers to explain God, otherwise we will be left with a heavenly Father with ballooned faults. When we say “God the Father,” I concluded, we surely mean something more figurative and less literal than a polished up version of our dads. I wanted people to accept the transcendent concept of God that Scripture communicates by the term Father.

I try to stretch people through my preaching. I did that in the Apostles’ Creed series when I preached on “Maker of heaven and earth.” Most people in our society view the universe as a closed system operating on set laws that are empirically discernible. So where does a “Maker of heaven and earth” tit in? Because materialists and naturalists populate our society, I found it necessary to explore an alternative to a closed system. By preaching good, hard science and theoretical physics along with sound theology, I was able to capture their attention.

Our access to people’s minds is a terrible thing to waste, so I try to engage the mind. When I snag their thinking and broaden their understanding, I’ve wrested their attention for the gospel.

Preaching to the Will

When I preach to the will, I’m looking for response. I want people to act on what is said. As a pastor, I’m apt to be gentler and less demanding than I might be as an itinerant preacher, because I’m going to be with the people for many years. I don’t need to get all or nothing in one shot.

I’m usually looking for minor movement in the right direction, rather than a gargantuan step. It seems that people’s wills move incrementally. So I try to choose words and illustrations that encourage movement, even if slight, in the right direction.

I use the word encourage purposefully. Usually people respond better to encouragement than to “challenge.” Most people need inspiration and courage more than a kick in the pants. So I try to give people bite-sized and good-tasting pieces to chew on.

For instance, when I preached on “By this shall all men know that you’re my disciples, that you love one another,” I didn’t instruct people to go out and swamp their world with love. Instead, I said, “Think of one person close to you. How well do you love that person in light of what we’ve talked about today? If agape love is concerned primarily with the well-being of others, irrespective of their reaction, then practice that love this week. See if your love makes any difference.”

When I preach an evangelistic sermon to the will, I want people to understand that repentance might be a simple step rather than a big leap, but it nonetheless needs to be ventured.

A woman wanted her pastor to pray with her because she no longer felt Christ’s presence. When he asked about her problem, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Just pray for me. That’s all I want of you.”

He probed gently anyway, and eventually she began to cry: “I’m living with my boyfriend, and I really have no intention of moving out.” She wanted to sense Christ’s presence while she lived in disobedience. She needed to repent, of course, and end the disobedience if she were to feel close to God again. Without that step of the will, her spiritual life would remain stale.

The will is a wily creature. Sometimes it needs to be encouraged, sometimes challenged. The trick to preaching to the will is to find which kind of stimulation best works for the people to whom you’re preaching.

Preaching to the Emotions

A while back, I was preaching about Christ being rejected. Such a familiar theme is prime material for a yawner of a sermon. So how did I add interest? Emotions.

I told the story of Winston Churchill’s post-war experiences. I’m a Churchill fan, and I recalled his tremendous impact during the Second World War. I said as a little boy I listened on a crackling radio to his famous speech—”We will fight them on the beaches.… We will never surrender!” All the time bombs were dropping, and the sound of anti-aircraft guns and the glare of search lights split the night. His bulldog-like determination got us through that dreadful period.

Churchill was the man of the hour during the war. But at the end of the war, an election was held, and, surprisingly, Churchill lost. After all he had done, he was turned out of office by the British people.

The congregation looked shocked when I reminded them of that bit of history. Then, very quietly, I said, “He was a broken man.” I just left it there for a moment. While that thought stirred within them, they felt deeply what rejection means.

I’d engaged their emotions. Churchill’s rejection really bothered them. From there it was a short step to move those feelings to the rejection of Jesus Christ.

Some rightly object that we can address the emotions at the expense of the mind, but that’s not my problem. I’m not as prone to manipulate people’s emotions as I am to forget them. Purely intellectual matter can get extraordinarily dry, but emotions add life. Emotions move people to response. People identify with them.

Humor, because it elicits emotion, plays an important part in my preaching. Humor can be a wonderful servant or a dreadful master. But if Philip Brooks’s definition of preaching is right—that preaching is truth communicated through personality—then I need to communicate through humor, because I enjoy humor.

A fellow once said to me, “I’ve been listening to you for quite a long time now, and sometimes when I go home from church, I find a knife stuck in my ribs. I always wonder. How did he do that? So today I decided to watch you closely, and I found out how you did it. You got me laughing, and while I was laughing, you slipped the point home.”

He wasn’t suggesting that I was manipulative. Instead, it was a warm-hearted compliment. He was saying that humor puts us off guard, and at those times we are highly receptive to penetration by the Word.

Once in a sermon I spoke about a purported memo written to Jesus by a management consultant. It evaluated the aptitude of the various disciples. Predictably, it panned the qualifications of most of the disciples—too unrefined, no credentials—but it lauded the great potential of one: Judas. People laughed. They could feel the irony. In a humorous way, I made my point: the unrefined and ill-qualified disciples were transformed into sterling men of character by the Resurrection.

Humor also allows the mental equivalent of a seventh-inning stretch in a sermon. People’s minds need a break now and then, and humor can supply it in a way that enhances the sermon. After momentary laughter, people are ready for more content. Or when something disturbs the sermon—such as a loud sneeze—a good-humored retort can bring attention back to the preacher.

Fear also can be used for good or bad. I hesitate to motivate people with fear. I would rather love be their motivation. Fear, however, can be used to bring interest to well-worn passages, for fear grabs people.

When preaching about the security that the presence of the Friend brings, I recalled an invitation to speak at pastors’ conferences in Poland. When I arrived at the Warsaw airport, nobody came forward to greet me. I had no names to contact, no addresses, no phone numbers, no Polish money. So I just stood in the middle of the airport while people collected their bags and the lobby emptied. Soon workers began to close down the area, and I was left standing there very alone.

My loneliness turned to fear when I heard a voice behind me say “Briscoe.” I turned to see a fellow in a long, leather coat, the type I’d seen in too many pot boilers about the Second World War. I thought. Hey, don’t look at me! I didn’t want to come here in the first place! But before my panic was unleashed, he came over, grabbed me, kissed me, and said warmly, “Brother Briscoe!” Then he leaned over and said, “Quickly, we must get on the tram car,” and we rushed to catch it.

On the tram he told me, “Speak loudly of Jesus. You can use English and any German you know. They’ll understand.” And so as we hung on the straps in that tram, I began to broadcast my love of Jesus, and everybody started to listen. Suddenly I was enjoying myself. The difference between being lonely and afraid a few minutes before and being comfortable on the tram was this: a friend was with me. I used fear that was transformed into fun to illustrate Jesus’ words: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” As people felt my fear, they hooked into the relief Jesus brings.

If I don’t preach to the emotions, I’m missing a good part of the person sitting in the pew. Since people bring that part of themselves to church, the least I can do is address it with my sermon.

Being an Interesting Preacher

There is far more Bible to preach than I ever can cover in one lifetime, so I’ve never felt preached out. But I do hit dry spots in my preaching. Sometimes when I’ve been in a series for a while, I think, Boy, this is pretty dry. Let’s get out of here quickly and keep the damage to the minimum!

At such times I ask myself. Is there something wrong with me personally? Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I need refreshment. Maybe other things are on my mind. Often I find a half-hour nap can solve my short-term problem.

I also ask myself. Am I not grappling with the biblical material? Have I, perhaps, written it off subconsciously as uninteresting? Maybe I haven’t taken my subject seriously. That is bound to make it dull, to both preacher and listener. If so, I need to work harder to find a refreshing, unique angle. When I discover a provocative aspect of a text, then I find it easier to interest people in what I have to say. In terms of the bigger picture, if I expect to fill my sermons with interest year after year, I need to keep my mind interesting. And that’s a continuing task for any preacher.

Ideas stimulate me. I love to talk to people when I start to become stale. I may discuss deep theology with fellow staff members or sit down with a Green Bay Packer linebacker and talk about how long it takes him to recover physically after a game or a season. I find it all interesting and stimulating.

Conversations keep me excited about people and life and faith. They also provide ways to add interest to sermons, because they keep me current. About once a month on a Sunday evening, Jill and I invite a dozen or so people to our home for a quiet evening of coffee, dessert, and conversation. I simply draw people out and let them talk about what interests them. I love to hear where they are coming from, what excites them, what they are talking about.

Often the conversations cross-fertilize. One time when a judge and a professor of medical ethics sat beside each other, the conversation turned to abortion. The professor had done some research on those who ran the abortion clinics in Milwaukee. He was concerned about medical ethics. The judge came at it from his long experience dealing with welfare families. The ensuing conversation enriched us all.

What I find interesting doesn’t always get the same vote from my congregation. For instance, my taste in music doesn’t mirror the congregation’s, and although I’m greatly interested in European history, most people couldn’t care less about it. In addition, I’m a man with not untypical masculine tastes, and, naturally, many of my parishioners are female. So I simply can’t assume my tastes, my interests, are the norm.

Therefore, I must think about what interests others. That prospect doesn’t intimidate me as it might when I consider that over the years I’ve been able to understand the tastes of my wife and children. I just have to keep my ears open to learn what’s interesting to people who aren’t exactly like me.

Or keep my eyes open. When I’m on an airplane, I confess, I often thumb through a copy of Glamour or Ms. Sometimes I find powerful and well-written articles that give me a window into the secular mind. I often take notes. Part of staying in touch with interesting material is exposing myself to secular thinking and trying to see what the world considers interesting. Just being interested in life produces most of the illustrations I use.

In short, I’m prepared to be interested in what other people find interesting. I don’t have to agree. I don’t have to buy it wholesale. But it’s to my advantage to understand people’s interests and speak their language. I need to know what’s going on in others if I am to say anything interesting to them.

When you get right down to it, preaching is like farming. I often say, “Lord, here I am. As far as I can tell, I’ve tried to fill my sack with good seed. I’ve done my homework, I think my attitude is right, and it’s the best, most interesting seed I’ve got. I’m going to scatter it now, Lord, so here goes. We’ll see what comes up in the field.” Then, once I’ve sown the seed, I do what farmers do: I go home and rest.

Over time, I get to watch that seed sprout and grow. A lot depends on the soil. God has to give the seed life. But eventually, I see the results of the good seed I’ve sown.

Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today

Life-changing preaching does not talk to the people about the Bible. Instead, it talks to the people about themselves—their questions, hurts, fears, and struggles—from the Bible.
—Haddon Robinson

It was a disastrous sermon.

A church in Dallas invited me to preach on John 14. That’s not an easy passage. It is filled with exegetical questions about death and the Second Coming. How do you explain, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself?” How is Jesus preparing that place? Does Jesus mean we won’t go to be with him until he comes back? What about soul sleep? I spent most of my week studying the text and reading the commentaries to answer questions like these.

When I got up to preach, I knew I had done my homework. Though the issues were tough, I had worked through them and was confident I was ready to deliver solid biblical teaching on the assigned passage.

Five minutes into the sermon, though, I knew I was in trouble. The people weren’t with me. At the ten-minute mark, people were falling asleep. One man sitting near the front began to snore. Worse, he didn’t disturb anyone! No one was listening.

Even today, whenever I talk about that morning, I still get an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.

What went wrong? The problem was that I spent the whole sermon wrestling with the tough theological issues, issues that intrigued me. Everything I said was valid. It might have been strong stuff in a seminary classroom. But in that church, in that pulpit, it was a disaster.

What happened? I didn’t speak to the life questions of my audience. I answered my questions, not theirs. Some of the men and women I spoke to that day were close to going home to be with the Lord. What they wanted to know was, “Will he toss me into some ditch of a grave, or will he take me safely home to the other side? When I get to heaven, what’s there?”

They wanted to hear me say: “You know, Jesus said he was going to prepare a place for us. The Creator of the universe has been spending 2,000 years preparing a home for you. God only spent six days creating the world, and look at its beauty! Imagine, then, what the home he has been preparing for you must be like. When you come to the end of this life, that’s what he’ll have waiting for you.”

That’s what I should have preached. At least I should have started with their questions. But I didn’t.

It’s also possible to make the opposite error—to spend a whole sermon making practical applications without rooting them in Scripture. I don’t want to minimize Scripture. It’s possible to preach a skyscraper sermon—one story after another with nothing in between. Such sermons hold people’s interest but give them no sense of the eternal. Talking about “mansions over the hilltop” comes from country-western music, not the Bible. A sermon full of nonbiblical speculations is ultimately unsatisfying.

Some of the work I did in my study, then, could have helped the people answer their questions. The job is to combine both biblical content and life application in an effective way.

How Much Content Is Enough?

How then can we strike the right balance in our preaching between biblical content and life application?

The basic principle is to give as much biblical information as the people need to understand the passage, and no more. Then move on to your application.

The distinction between exegesis and exposition is helpful here. Exegesis is the process of getting meaning from the text, often through noting the verb tense or where the word emphasis falls in the original languages. That’s what you do in your study as you prepare. But it’s seldom appropriate in a sermon on Sunday morning. In fact, an overuse of Greek or Hebrew can make us snobs. Using the jargon of my profession can come across as a putdown, a way of saying, “I know something you don’t know.” There’s an arrogance about that that can create distance between me and the audience.

I served for ten years as a general director of Christian Medical and Dental Society. Sometimes physicians would use technical medical terms when they talked with me, and I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Once I said to one of my friends, “I hope you don’t talk to your patients as you do me, because I don’t know the jargon. I’m an educated person. I just don’t happen to be as educated in medicine as you are.”

Do you know what he said to me? He replied, “Preachers do that in the pulpit all the time.”

I did a lot of that when I first got out of seminary. I used my knowledge of Greek and Hebrew in the study and in the pulpit. One day a woman wounded me with a compliment: “I just love to hear you preach. In fact, when I see the insights you get from the original languages, I realize that my English Bible is hardly worth reading.”

I went home asking myself. What have I done? I’m trying to get people into their Bibles, but I’ve taken this lady out of hers.

Spurgeon was right: the people in the marketplace cannot learn the language of the academy, so the people in the academy must learn the language of the marketplace. It’s the pastor’s job to translate.

While raw exegesis doesn’t belong in a Sunday morning sermon, what does belong there is exposition. Exposition is drawing from your exegesis to give the people what they need to understand the passage. They don’t need all you’ve done in exegesis, but they do need to see the framework, the flow of the passage. They should be able to come back to the passage a few weeks after you’ve preached on it, read it, and say, “Oh, I understand what it says.”

Does this mean there is no place in the church for exegesis? Of course not. As you study, you may dig out all kinds of material that would help certain people who enjoy detailed Bible study. While including these tidbits in a sermon resembles distracting footnotes, this kind of technical teaching is appropriate for a classroom.

Some pastors I know preach on a passage on Sunday and then follow up with a detailed exegetical study with a smaller group of interested people on Wednesday night.

Donald Gray Barnhouse had an interesting way of handling this. He commented as he did the Scripture reading. He would pause as he read to talk briefly about the tense of a verb or what some expression meant. He’d take ten minutes just reading the Scripture. His Bible reading was based on his exegesis.

Even then Barnhouse did not show off. He didn’t give his congregation lessons in ancient languages. He simply took time to amplify the passage based on his study so that his people could appreciate the flow and nuances of the thought of the biblical writer. Some folks attending Tenth Presbyterian Church for the first time heard the Bible reading and thought they had heard the sermon!

When Barnhouse got to his sermon he was able to concentrate on the message of that passage, its implications, its application, which is what makes a sermon a sermon.

The “So What?” of Preaching

All preaching involves a “so what?” A lecture on the archaeology of Egypt, as interesting as it might be, isn’t a sermon. A sermon touches life. It demands practical application.

That practical application, though, need not always be spelled out. Imagine, for example, that you borrow my car and it has a flat. You call me up and say, “I’ve never changed a tire on a car like this. What do I do?”

I tell you how to find the spare, how to use the jack, where to find the key that unlocks the wire rim. Once I give you all the instructions, then do I say, “Now, I exhort you: change the tire”? No, you already want to get the car going. Because you already sense the need, you don’t need exhortation. You simply need a clear explanation.

Some sermons are like that. Your people are wrestling with a certain passage of Scripture. They want to know what it means. Unless they understand the text, it’s useless to apply it. They don’t need exhortation; they need explanation. Their questions about the text must be answered.

You may not need to spell out practical application when you are dealing with basic theological issues—how we see God and ourselves and each other. For example, you might preach on Genesis 1, showing that it’s not addressing issues of science so much as questions of theology: What is God like? You might spend time looking at the three groups of days—the first day is light, the fourth day is lights; the second day is sea and sky, the fifth day is fish and birds. Each day is followed by God’s evaluation: “It was good.” But after the creation of man. God observes, “It was very good.”

Then you ask, “What do we learn about God?” We learn that God is good, that God has a purpose in creation. We learn that while every other living thing is made “after its own kind,” man and woman are created in God’s image. What does that say about people—the people we pray with and play with, the people we work with or who sleep on the streets?

The whole sermon may be an explanation with little direct application built into it. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s no application. If at the close of this sermon someone realizes. That’s a significant statement about who we are. There are no ordinary people. Every man and woman has special worth—when that really sinks in—it can make tremendous practical differences as it shapes how a person sees himself and other people.

Or take Romans 3. You might begin by raising in some practical way the question, “How does a person stand right before God?” Then you could lead your listeners through Paul’s rather complex discussion of what it means to be justified by faith. If you do it well, when you are finished, people should say, “So that’s how God remains righteous when he declares us righteous.”

Obviously, this passage has great application. But it’s so complex you probably couldn’t go through Paul’s argument and spell out in any detail many practical applications, too, in the same sermon. And that’s okay. If they really understood the problem of lostness, the solution of salvation serves as a strong application.

We need to trust people to make some of their own practical applications. Some of the best growing I’ve done has taken place when a concept gripped me and I found myself constantly thinking: How could this apply in my life?

Of course, you do have knowledge your people don’t possess, knowledge they expect you to have and share with them. But you can share that knowledge in a manner that doesn’t talk down to a congregation, in a way that says, “If you were in my situation, you’d have access to the same information.” If you feel you must make all the practical applications for your hearers, do their thinking for them, you underestimate their intelligence. You can dishonor your congregation if you tell them in effect, “You folks couldn’t have figured out for yourselves how this applies.”

For me, though, the greater danger lies in the opposite direction—in spending too much time on explanation and not going far enough into application. After preaching I’ve often come away feeling, I should have shown them in a more specific way how to do this. It is difficult for our listeners to live by what they believe unless we answer the question “How?”

Real-Life Examples: Necessary but Dangerous

To make a principle come to life—to show how it can be applied—we need to give specific real-life examples, illustrations that say, “Here is how someone faced this problem, and this is what happened with her.” But as necessary as real-life examples are, they carry a danger.

Suppose, for example, that someone preaches on the principle of modesty. Should a Christian dress with modesty? The answer is yes. But how do you apply that? One preacher may say, “Well, any skirt that’s above the knee is immodest.” So, he ends up with a church full of knee-length people. In that church, one application of a principle has assumed all the force of the principle itself. That is the essence of legalism: giving to a specific application the force of the principle.

I have a friend who keeps a journal, and it works for him. But when he preaches about it, he makes it sound as though Christians who are not journaling can’t be growing. Whenever you say, “If you’re not doing this particular act, then you’re not following this principle,” that’s legalism.

How, then, can you preach for practical application if every time you say, “This is how to apply this truth,” you run the risk of promoting legalism? Let me answer with a couple of examples.

When my father was in his eighties, he came to live with us. After a while he grew senile, and his behavior became such that we could no longer keep him in our home. Because his erratic behavior endangered himself and our children, we had to put him in a nursing home. It cost me half my salary each month to keep him there. For eight years, until he died, I visited my dad almost every day. In eight years I never left that rest home without feeling somewhat guilty about his being there. I would have preferred to have had him in our home, but we could not care for him properly.

A few years later, my mother-in-law, who was dying of cancer, came to live with us in our home in Denver. It was a tough period in our marriage. I was trying to get settled as president of Denver Seminary. My wife, Bonnie, was up with her mother day and night. She somehow changed her mother’s soiled bed six or seven times a day. For eighteen months, Bonnie took care of her in our home. When Mrs. Vick died, we had no regrets. We knew Bonnie had done everything she could to make her last months comfortable.

How should Christians care for their aging parents? Do you keep them in your home or do you place them in a nursing facility? There is no single Christian answer. It depends on your situation, your children, your resources, and your parents.

There is, though, a single guiding principle: we must honor our parents and act in love toward them. To make a Christian decision, you can’t start with a selfish premise; you start by asking what is best for everyone involved. How you apply that principle in a given situation depends on a complex set of variables.

The way to avoid the trap of legalism, then, is to distinguish dearly between the biblical principle and its specific applications. One way to do this in preaching is to illustrate a principle with two or three varying examples, not just one, so you don’t equate the principle with one particular way of applying it.

When our children were young, I lived under the idea that if we didn’t have daily devotions with our children—a family altar—somehow we were failing God. The problem was, family devotions worked for other people, but although we tried all kinds of approaches, they never worked for us. Our children sat still for them on the outside but ran away from them on the inside. Yet we kept at them because I felt that a family altar was at the heart of a Christian family.

Then I realized that family devotions wasn’t the principle but the application of a principle. The principle was that I needed to bring up my children to know and love God. I had mistakenly been giving to our family devotions the same imperative that belonged to the principle behind it.

We then came up with a different approach, one that worked for us. Our two children left for school at different times. Each morning before Vicki left, I would pray with her about the day, about what was coming up. A little later, Torrey and one of his friends came into my study, and we’d sit and pray for five minutes about what their day held.

That may not sound as satisfying in a sermon as saying we had devotions as a family at the breakfast table every morning, but for us it was an effective way to honor the principle. A preacher must make a clear distinction between the principle and its applications.

This is not to say, however, that a biblical principle must sound abstract and vague. Sometimes a preacher merely translates the principle into terms that a congregation understands.

In our American frontier days, there was a settlement in the west whose citizens were engaged in the lumber business. The town felt they wanted a church. They built a building and called a minister. The preacher moved into the settlement and initially was well received. Then one afternoon he happened to see some of his parishioners dragging some logs, which had been floated down the river from another village upstream, onto the bank. Each log was marked with the owner’s stamp on one end. To his great distress, the minister saw his members pulling in the logs and sawing off the end where the telltale stamp appeared. The following Sunday he preached a strong sermon on the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” At the close of the service, his people lined up and offered enthusiastic congratulations. “Wonderful message, Pastor.” “Mighty fine preaching.” The response bothered him a great deal. So he went home to prepare his sermon for the following Sunday. He preached the same sermon but gave it a different ending: “And thou shalt not cut off the end of thy neighbor’s logs.” When he got through, the congregation ran him out of town.

It’s possible to state the principle in terms the audience clearly understands.

“We” Preaching and “You” Preaching

Another way to view the relationship between explanation and application is to look at the pronouns each calls for. Good preachers identify with their hearers when they preach. All of MS stand before God to hear what God’s Word says to us. The Letter to the Hebrews says that the high priest was taken from among men to minister in the things pertaining to man. The high priest knew what it was to sin and to need forgiveness. With the people, he stood before God in need of cleansing. In identifying with the people, he represented the people to God.

But that same priest, by offering a sacrifice, could minister God’s cleansing to the people. Not only did he represent the people to God, he also represented God to the people. Somehow, that’s also what preaching does.

When I’m listening to a good sermon, there comes a point when I lose track of all the people around me. As the preacher speaks, I experience God talking to me about me. The time for explanation has passed; the time for application has come.

At that point, it’s appropriate for the preacher to leave behind “we” in favor of “you.” No longer is the preacher representing the people to God; he is representing God to the people. “We’ve seen the biblical principle; we’ve seen two or three ways others have applied it. Now, what does this say to you?”

“You’ve got to decide how you’re going to spend your money.”

“You’ve got to decide whether you’re going to take your marriage vows seriously.”

It’s you—not you plural, but you singular—you personally who must decide what you will do with the truth you’ve heard.

For the preacher to say “you” at that point isn’t arrogant; he’s not standing apart from the congregation. He’s simply challenging each listener to make personal application.

In the final analysis, effective application does not rely on techniques. It is more a stance than a method. Life-changing preaching does not talk to the people about the Bible. Instead, it talks to the people about themselves—their questions, hurts, fears and struggles—from the Bible. When we approach the sermon with that philosophy, flint strikes steel. The flint of someone’s problem strikes the steel of the Word of God, and a spark emerges that can set that person on fire for God.

Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today

Sitting in my congregation on any given Sunday are a multitude of needs and expectations, levels of maturity and orientations. And I’m supposed to offer a preaching menu to nourish every one of them. That means I’ve got to be an intentional biblical nutritionist.
— Stuart Briscoe

Once I preached a series on the fruit of the Spirit. Following the final sermon, a woman approached me in the narthex and asked, “When are you going to preach on something relevant?” (She wasn’t the world’s greatest diplomat.)

Taken aback, I stammered, “Relevant to whom?”

“To most of us,” she replied. “We’re sitting in the congregation with problems in our families and our marriages and our homes. We need help. When are you going to say something relevant?”

Ah, I think I understand, I said to myself. “Let me ask you some questions. About those problems of families—is there a lack of love there?”

“Yes, there is.”

“And there’s probably little joy in such situations,” I continued.

“Absolutely! People are miserable.”

“I suspect there’s really no peace in those households.”

“You’ve got it!” she assured me. I baited her shamelessly as I continued through the list of the fruit of the Spirit, each one getting her hearty endorsem*nt. When I finished, she looked at me bewildered and pleaded, “So why can’t we hear sermons that help us with these real needs?”

I explained that when the fruit of the Spirit are being evidenced, they’ll show up in marriages, in families, in every aspect of life. I had been addressing these very needs, but I had come at it from the side of God’s provision rather than our need. I had offered a spiritual dynamic. She wanted ten snappy hints to help her raise her kids or cope with her husband. As far as she was concerned, I got an F on that series.

That experience underscored the importance of thinking through my preaching plans. Sitting in my congregation on any given Sunday are a multitude of needs and expectations, levels of maturity and orientations. And I’m supposed to offer a preaching menu to nourish every one of them. That means I’ve got to be an intentional biblical nutritionist.

The Heart of the Plan

Menu planning must recognize the purpose of the meal. Preaching is, first of all, proclamation — an announcement of who God is and what he has done and intends to do. So any menu I prepare will be God-centered, aiming to make all of life God-centered. I would rather my preaching magnify God than offer quick answers to specific life dilemmas. I’d rather nourish solid spirituality than knock the edge off spiritual hunger with homiletical junk food. And so I plan my sermon series accordingly.

Consequently, my starting point is not so much “What do these people want to hear?” as it is “I’m going to give these people the Bread of Life.” Basically, people need to know God in the midst of their particular situations. So I relate every need to these fundamentals: acknowledging Christ as Lord, being his disciples, operating as his people in the unique institution of the church, focusing on his Word in the Scriptures. I can’t go wrong if I start with the Scriptures and expose people’s hearts to what they say.

Why Plan?

Nevertheless, I do find great merit in teaching and preaching systematically. So I plan carefully, and do so for several reasons.

First, planning makes preaching easier because I don’t have to spend half the week scratching my head about a subject. The task of finding a new topic each week can tyrannize a preacher, and the “Saturday-night specials” that often result can victimize a congregation. When I plan, I know on Sunday afternoon the topic and text for the following week.

Second, planning helps me avoid repeating myself. When I lay out a sermon series, I see immediately that I’ll be covering a number of texts and ideas. Such planning prevents me from dipping into the same old well week after week. And that, I trust, keeps my preaching fresh and helps me provide my congregation with the whole counsel of God.

Third, many in my congregation schedule in other areas of life, so they expect some kind of strategy to my preaching. Young businessmen, in particular, plan a great deal, and they ask me specifically what’s coming next. I like to be able to point them in a known direction.

Finally, planning allows me to preach sermons in series, whose momentum often builds as the theme develops. People get interested in the series and come back to hear more. I’ve had a number of people say, “Could you map out the series for us? We’d like to be reading ahead.” That’s what I like to hear.

Although I try to make each message a self-contained unit, so that people can miss a week and still comprehend any sermon, the sermons do build throughout a series. People benefit from hearing the series one week to the next. Audiences used to love the old Saturday serials at the cinema. If I can put that “Come back next week for more exciting adventure!” feeling into a series, the interest in my sermons mounts.

In our congregation, although some people come practically every week, many (I suspect about a third) miss services on any given Sunday. Because of this fact, some preachers object that many people will miss the progression of a series.

Frankly, I don’t worry much about those who aren’t there. I target my preaching for those who are, and I’ll hit the moving targets as best I can without being overly concerned about them. I cannot govern my planning by the casual attenders.

Getting a Plan

I never could be labeled a hyper-organizer. At any given point, I usually can tell you three things about my preaching schedule: where I am going with my present series, when I intend to preach three or four topical sermons as breathers between series, and what my next series will be. Beyond that, I cannot say. Some pastors know a year or two in advance what each Sunday will bring, but I find I do best concentrating on one series at a time; it takes most of my mental energy just to get through my present series.

Ideas for my series come from many sources. I’m blessed with fellow staff members who come up with great ideas from their ministry contacts. Sometimes I’ll get an idea from my general reading or study. Other times, ideas come as suggestions from the congregation.

One of my recent series examined the Apostles’ Creed. It was conceived when a member wrote me of her concern about the New Age movement and asked if I had considered preaching a series on its dangers. She sent some material I found provocative and helpful. As I considered her suggestion, I thought. She’s got a point. On the other hand, I felt a series on the New Age might have limited interest.

Then I remembered something from my days in England as a bank examiner. One of my responsibilities was to identify counterfeit currency. As a young examiner, I felt a little inept, so I asked an older inspector for some clues on how to recognize counterfeits.

“Spend hours and hours handling the real thing,” he advised. “The more familiar you are with the genuine article, the more automatically you will recognize the counterfeit.”

That made me think. Probably the best way to encourage church members to distinguish counterfeit religion is to make sure they are aware of the real thing. So rather than preach on the New Age movement, I prepared a series on the Apostles’ Creed. I plotted out sixteen sermons that took the articles of the creed and contrasted them with counter positions. That series, “Christian Belief in the Modern World,” helped anchor people’s belief in orthodox Christianity so they could reject the bogus.

Occasionally I systematically poll the congregation to find what people most want to hear. I keep it simple—a card asking for their ideas. This provides a wealth of topics. Some I may turn into a series, but even the discards give me a better understanding of people’s interests.

Most often ideas for series come from a combination of resources. One week as I went about my pastoral duties, I ran into an unusual number of grim people. We’re taking ourselves so seriously! I thought to myself. And then the thought struck me, I wonder how seriously we take God?

The phrase “taking God seriously” stuck in my mind. It seemed we in America were becoming a church full of self-centered people. We needed to become more God-centered. So I went off with a title in search of a series—not my typical tactic.

At the time I was reading through the Minor Prophets and realized the twelve would make a great twelve-part series under my orphaned title. Actually, in that series I was chewing more than I could swallow, trying to devote only one sermon per book. But “Taking God Seriously” turned into a constructive series that received an enthusiastic response from the congregation.

My longest series was on 1 Corinthians and ran about sixty messages. Genesis took about fifty—one sermon per chapter. But I no longer preach series that long. I found the ideal length is about twelve weeks—long enough to develop a theme and produce momentum, but not so long that people tire.

I also plan breaks in my series. First, I break between series, allowing the congregation a breather before we plunge into another string. It also gives me the opportunity to preach sermons about timely and specific topics.

However, I also break within a series if it is necessary. Special events from the sublime (Christmas, for instance) to the ridiculous (preaching on “World Serious” when the Milwaukee Brewers were in the World Series) dictate a hiatus in a series. Sometimes I can work a series to coincide with special days, like dovetailing the Apostles’ Creed messages to have “crucified, dead, and buried” and “on the third day he rose again from the dead” to fit on Palm Sunday and Easter, respectively. Other times I just stop and preach a special sermon. It would offend some people if I were to plow through my planned series, taking no note of Christmas.

Types of Series

Of the two kinds of series I typically preach, the book series is the most straightforward. I choose a book of the Bible and preach through it, breaking it into preachable segments. As I preach the parts, week by week, I try to keep people aware of the whole.

For instance, I recently did a series on Deuteronomy, called “Enjoying the Good Life.” Most weeks I would start off by saying something like “When Moses led the children of Israel into the Promised Land, he said it was a good land full of good things, and God wanted them to enjoy it. That puts the children of Israel right where most of us are today. We’ve been looking at what this good life is all about in recent weeks, and today we’d like to look at this aspect.”

I try to integrate the overall message of the book into a contemporary theme. I want to make each message topical in the sense that I apply the biblical material to a specific contemporary topic.

In a way, this blurs the distinction between the book study and a topical series, which is the second kind of series I preach. My messages on the Apostles’ Creed, Christ’s “I am” statements, the churches of Revelation, or the Lord’s Prayer would fall into this category. If you pin me down, I’d call myself a “topical expositor”—one who exposits a text whenever I preach, whether the series derives from a book of the Bible or a group of related topics.

Balancing Preaching Fare

When planning my preaching, I constantly try to keep a number of twin emphases in balance.

• Old Testament and New Testament. I find people generally don’t know the Old Testament all that well. To correct that, I subscribe to this rule of thumb: follow an Old Testament series with one from the New Testament. When I preached on the life of David, using mostly material from Kings and Chronicles, my next series, “Discipleship,” derived from John and had a New Testament flavor.

• Doctrinal and relational. I see a great need for solid doctrinal preaching. Without sound doctrine, people are out to sea in the midst of their problems. At the same time, they want and need sermons on the family, marriage, and communication. Sometimes, in fact, they become so wrapped up in their problems that “dry doctrine” falls on deaf ears. Nevertheless, we need to balance the relational and the doctrinal. More to the point: we need to apply the doctrine in ways people understand and relate to.

• Masculine and feminine. Talking with a Green Bay Packer and his wife about team Bible studies awhile back, I realized again how different are the agendas of men and women. The woman said, “We wives are studying ‘How to Be a Woman of Excellence,’ and the guys are studying ‘War among the Angels’!” We laughed, but it underscored the differences.

Women tend to gravitate toward subjects that strike the heart strings or deal with their homes, families, or roles. Men, on the other hand, would rather wrestle with concepts. I try to bear both needs in mind as I plan series, prepare topics, and illustrate sermons.

While speaking once at an engagement with Karen Mains, Becky Pippert, and my wife, Jill, I started listening to the different illustrations the women used. I’m big on sports. I talk a lot about the Marines, the business world—macho things. The women, however, illustrated from the family and marriage. They tended to be much more open about themselves and their own failings. Those are emphases I need to include if I intend to preach to more than 50 percent of my congregation.

• Inward growth and outward ministry. I’ve known some preachers so outreach oriented that they wear everybody out. Others can be so inner oriented that they fail to notice anybody outside their sphere. We have to take root with the Lord so we can bear fruit, so I try to balance exhorting my people into personal growth with getting them out into the world to make a difference.

Both individual sermons and sermon series can be heavy on one aspect or the other. If that’s the case, the next one I preach ought to tip the balance in the other direction.

Plans Change

Naturally, I sometimes change my plans. Following the first service one Easter, Jill remarked, “That was a graphic description of death you gave, but I think it needed personalizing a bit.”

She was right, so in the next service, I revised the sermon to devote no more than two minutes describing my father’s death. The congregation was totally still, absolutely not a person moving. It was an electric moment, what I call a “loud silence.”

I don’t often open up like that, part of the British reserve, I suppose. And such personal material can become worn out so easily. But I did it that time, even though it wasn’t part of my original plan. That’s okay. People heard and felt and responded to God’s Word that morning. And that was my plan.

Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today

Time has changed the way people view pastors. Perhaps we’re not lumped with scam artists or manipulative fundraisers, but we face an Olympic challenge to earn respect, credibility, and authority.
— Haddon Robinson

I attend a Bible study with business executives, and recently one man commented that in all the years he had been in business his pastor had never visited him at his office.

“It’s just as well,” said another. “A minister would feel out of place in my office.” Since I consider myself a minister, I pressed him to explain.

“Most ministers I know come across best visiting the hospital or working in the church environs. That’s their turf.” He went on to say that he saw the world of the pastor and the world of business people as very different. “The pastor is used to working alone or with a small staff, and his interest is relationships. The world of business is a more impersonal atmosphere dominated by people who put an emphasis on the bottom line.

“Pastors do pretty well with issues of grief and loneliness and interpersonal ethics—not stealing, coveting, fornicating, and so on,” he said. “But I don’t know too many pastors who address the problems of the individual’s conflicting loyalties in groups and organizations.”

Another man, who helps run a large construction corporation, agreed and offered an example: “A fellow owed us $500,000 when he died. He and his wife owned a house that was worth $150,000. The question is, do we sue the estate for the money we’re due, even if it costs the woman her house as part of the payment for her husband’s debt?”

He continued, “If you own the company, you can make a compassionate decision if you want to. But when you’re responsible to stockholders, and your job is to collect bad debts, where is your higher loyalty? Now, you might argue, ‘$150,000 isn’t worth it.’ But suppose the house is worth $500,000? Now do you go after it? Or a million? Is it ethical to go after a $500,000 house, but unethical to go after a $150,000 house?”

The businessmen agreed—rarely in church do they hear anybody even mention these kinds of issues. And yet that’s the common stuff of life. Those tough, morally ambiguous issues are where some business people have to live out their faith.

“While the preacher talks about absolutes, right and wrong,” one man said, “most of us deal with gray situations.”

Another said, “My pastor talks about ‘the good being an enemy of God’s best,’ but people in my world aren’t dealing with first or second moral choices. They’re down to the twelfth or thirteenth choices.

“As much as I appreciate my pastor and enjoy his sermons,” the businessman concluded, “it’s not often that he speaks about my world.”

I was dismayed by the conversation. Not everyone would agree with these businessmen; some people attend church expecting their minister to say something that will help them understand the broad issues of life a little better. But not many expect the preacher to be able to speak with insight to the particular world in which many of them live.

Changing Times

Time has changed the way people view pastors. The average preacher today is not going to make it on the basis of the dignity of his position.

A century ago, the pastor was looked to as the person of wisdom and integrity in the community. Authority lay in the office of pastor. The minister was the parson, often the best educated person in town, and the one to whom people looked for help in interpreting the outside world. He had the unique opportunity to read and study, and often was the principal voice in deciding how the community should react in any moral or religious situation.

But today, the average citizen takes a different view of pastors and preachers. Perhaps we’re not lumped with scam artists or manipulative fundraisers, but we face an Olympic challenge to earn respect, credibility, and authority.

In the face of society’s scorn—or being relegated to a box labeled private and spiritual—many preachers struggle with the issue of authority. Why should anyone pay attention to us? What is the source of our credibility? In such a climate, how can we regain the legitimate authority our preaching needs to communicate the gospel with power and effect?

Let me identify five guidelines that have assisted me.

Articulate Unexpressed Feelings

One way to build credibility with today’s congregations is to let people see that you understand their situation. Many people in the pew suspect that preachers inhabit another world. Folks in the pew nay listen politely to a reporter of the distant, biblical past, but they won’t be gripped unless they believe this speaker speaks to their condition.

This is why, in a sermon, I try to speak for the people before I speak to them. Have you ever listened to a speaker and found yourself saying, Yeah, that’s right; that’s my reaction, too? The speaker gave words to your feelings—perhaps better than you could have expressed them yourself. You sensed the preacher knew you. He explained you to you.

We capture the attention of people when we show that our experience overlaps theirs. For instance, a preacher might say, “There’s no good place for a .150 hitter in a championship lineup. No matter where you put him, he’s out of place.” If listeners know sports, they know that’s true. The preacher’s speaking their language.

Or the minister may take a punchline from a comic strip, or use material from Business Week or Advertising Age or The Wall Street Journal. A business executive will resonate with that. Obviously this pastor knows a bit more about the bottom line than playing Monopoly. Through illustrations, the preacher has revealed something about his reading, his thinking, and his awareness of life. When some areas of a speaker’s life overlap with the listeners’, they are more likely to listen. He’s gained some credibility. An ingredient in effective preaching is using specific material that connects with lives in the congregation.

The Invisible Congregation

Another way effective preachers connect with the audience is mentally to sit six or seven specific people around their desks as they prepare. I have assembled such a committee in my mind as real to me as if they were there.

In that group sits a friend who is an outspoken cynic. As I think through my material, I sometimes can hear him sigh, “You’ve got to be kidding, Robinson. That’s pious junk food. What world are you living in?”

Another is an older woman who is a simple believer, who takes preachers and preaching very seriously. While I prepare sermons, I ask, “Am I raising questions that will trouble her? Will my sermon help her?”

A teenager sprawls in the circle, wondering how long I’m going to preach. I can make the sermon seem shorter if I can keep him interested.

A divorced mother takes her place feeling alone and overwhelmed by her situation. What do I say to her?

Those are four of my seven. Another is an unbeliever who doesn’t understand religious jargon and yet has come to church, but doesn’t quite know why. Another makes his living as a dock worker. He has a strong allegiance to his union, thinks management is a rip-off, curses if he gets upset, and enjoys bowling on Thursday night.

The last is a black teacher who would rather attend a black church but comes to a white church because her husband thinks it’s good for their kids. She is a believer, but she’s angry about life. She’s very sensitive about racist remarks and putdowns of women, and will let me know if my sermon centers on white, middle-class values dressed up as biblical absolutes.

I change the group from time to time. But all of them are people I know. They have names, faces, and voices. I could prepare a vita on each of them. While they do not know it, each of them contributes significantly to my sermon preparation.

Admit Complexity

Let’s face it. Life is complex. But we sometimes preach as though it were not.

One time after I’d preached a sermon on love, a man came up and said, “You said that love means always seeking other people’s highest good.”

“Yes.”

“That’s fine, but my business puts me in competition with another man in this congregation. I run an efficient operation that lets me sell my product cheaper than his. What’s the loving thing to do—underprice him and take some of his customers? Or should I keep my prices roughly equal?”

Before I could respond, he went on.

“But that’s not the toughest part. A large corporation has just moved into town selling the same product. I’m going to have to scramble to stay in business, myself. I may have to cut prices so drastically it will drive my fellow church member into bankruptcy.

“I want to love this man. We’re in the same Sunday school class. I coach his kids in Little League. I want to do what’s best for him. But the name of the game out there is survival,” he said. “Why don’t preachers talk about these kinds of things when they talk about love?”

For us to communicate with authority, we’ve got to step into the slices of those Christians who are in the home and marketplace. No in alter how gray the issues, we’ve got to be willing to say, “As a pastor, I must talk about the hard questions.” In our preaching, we must recognize the complexity of the issues. How do we do that?

First, it’s helpful simply to admit the tension and point it out. All truth exists in tension. God’s love exists in tension with his holiness. Skillfully applying love and justice is not easy.

I believe God honors an honest try. People need to know that. Sometimes I’ll point out that we will make a wrong decision with the right motive, which is very different from making a right decision out of a wrong motive. As far as I know, the Bible never calls any action, in itself, right. No action is right apart from its motive. Obviously, there are some acts the Bible calls wrong: murder, lying, adultery. But it’s not as easy to classify right behavior.

Jesus talks about two men who went to the temple to pray—which sounds like a good religious act—except one is justified, and the o) her is not. Jesus talks about people giving—and that’s a good thing—except some give to be seen by others. That’s not good.

So in God’s economy, motive is a key factor. One of the things we preachers can say to people, with authority, is: “In these situations, it’s important to handle life skillfully, to make the right decisions. But the prior and more important decision is What’s motivating you? Are you willing to be God’s representative in this situation? Are you seeking what’s best in the lives of the people involved? Sometimes those decisions are confusing. We need wisdom. That’s what Christian friends and Christian counsel give you.”

Speak with Authority

Preachers, of course, have to be more than “fellow strugglers.” No one is helped by “You’re a loser; I’m a loser; let’s keep losing together.”

People want to believe you have taken your own advice and, while you’ve not arrived, you’re on the way. You’ll never learn to be a .300 hitter by watching three .100 hitters. You study a .325 hitter. Although he will occasionally strike out, he knows how to hit.

Likewise, people want to listen to somebody who knows what the struggle is, but who has taken the Bible’s message seriously and knows how to hit.

Of course, we identify with the needs and experiences of our people; we’re every bit as human as they are. But our task is to speak a word that is qualitatively different from normal conversation. Effective preaching combines the two and gives people hope that they can be better than they are.

When the combination is right, we preach with authority, which is different from being an authoritarian. Preaching with authority means you’ve done your homework. You know your people’s struggles and hurts. But you also know the Bible and theology. You can explain the Bible clearly. Preachers aren’t being authoritarian when they point people to the Bible. When Billy Graham explains, “The Bible says …” he’s relying not on his own authority but another—God’s Word—and he shows how that authority makes sense. We help our credibility when we practice biblical preaching.

The authoritarian, on the other hand, is someone who speaks about biblical and nonbiblical things in the same tone of voice. Whether the subject is the Super Bowl or the Second Coming, the verdict is delivered with the same certainty and conviction.

I realized the distinction one night when my wife, Bonnie, said to me, “You’ve been around the Bible too much. Any opinion from politics to sports has the same ring as your sermon on Galatians.” It’s easy to fall into that. An authoritative tone without genuine biblical authority is sound and fury signifying nothing.

When we speak with authority, we preach the Bible’s message without embarrassment, but we also communicate that we don’t always know how to tailor faith to life.

Be Precise in Descriptions

Authority also comes from a track record of being truthful and not distorting the facts. It’s especially important to be precise in our definitions and descriptions, whether we’re defining the historical background of the text or delivering an apt illustration. Accuracy builds credibility.

I once used an illustration about snakes and referred to them as “slimy, poisonous creatures.” A woman came up afterward and said, “Snakes aren’t slimy; they are dry. And most snakes aren’t poisonous.” She worked in a zoo, so she spotted that I was careless in my description. As a result, I had given her reason for suspecting the rest of what I had to say.

The need for precision is particularly acute with an antagonistic or less-than-supportive audience. They’ll focus on your minor error as a reason for not listening to the rest of what you have to say.

With the high stakes involved, what do we say when we need to use an illustration from an area outside our expertise? The answer lies in a recent sermon I heard. The preacher was from Britain, and he was trying to identify with his American audience by talking about baseball. He referred to a “four-base hit.” Baseball fans know you don’t get a four-base hit; it’s a homer. That didn’t turn me off to the sermon, but I remember thinking. He doesn’t know baseball. It distanced us. His credibility was diminished.

But, he could have sidestepped the difficulty had he simply admitted, “Look, I’m a stranger to baseball, but I enjoyed watching it. As I saw the game, here’s what happened.” Then people understand the speaker isn’t trying to speak with authority on this issue, and they grant him or her the license to speak in less-than-precise terms.

Years ago when I first began to teach at Dallas Seminary, I asked Charles Ryrie, another professor on the faculty, if he had any advice to help a young professor. He replied, “Whenever you state the case of someone disagreeing with you, imagine that your opponent is sitting in the front row of the class. State his position in such a way that he would say, ‘Yes, that is what I believe.’ And then you can take issue with the position.”

The advice for the classroom is good advice for the pulpit. It is dishonest to characterize someone else’s position in a way that person would disavow. Being precise and fair, even with differing viewpoints, also adds to our credibility.

Display Character

For church leaders, perhaps no factor contributes more to legitimate authority and credibility than authentic Christian character. It’s what Aristotle called ethos; in New Testament terms, it’s being me hire, upright. It’s what you are, which is always more important than what you do. These days, if we want credibility in the pulpit, genuine character has to come through.

The difficulty, however, is that credibility comes from the way people perceive a pastor’s character, and this may or may not align with what the pastor really is. Some pastors, dedicated to Christ and to the ministry, present themselves in a way that disguises their true character. A male pastor may be courageous but be perceived as effeminate. Another may have deep convictions but come across as slovenly or boring. How people perceive our character, spiritual life, intellectual life, and family life has much to do with how they respond to our ministry.

Part of effective preaching is the ability to make the presentation match the internal conviction. The image we project will influence our credibility. Appearance in the pulpit will affect the way people respond. I’m convinced inwardly, for example, of the importance of discipline and order in the Christian life. How can I present myself in a way that matches the conviction? In the first thirty seconds, people are deciding whether they’re going to listen. God looks on the heart, but people in our culture look on the outside. Am I disheveled? Do my shoes need to be shined? If I’m fifty pounds overweight, they may perceive that I’m not disciplined or that I’ m careless about myself.

Obviously one advantage of a lengthy ministry is that the pastor has a better chance to bring perception and reality together. The long-term pastor is judged more on his pattern of behavior than on a specific appearance. People are more likely to say, “The pastor not only talks love; he gives love. He was there in our family crisis when we needed him.” A pattern of care can cover a multitude of less-than-stellar sermons.

Of course, the flip side is that we may have things to live down, and that also takes time. A pastor I know lost his temper in a board meeting and spoke some harsh words in anger. Now, months later, when he stands in the pulpit, some people play that record mentally. Another pastor in a similar situation confessed his misuse of anger and publicly asked for forgiveness. He got it. In his case, people learned that the fellow they saw in the pulpit was real and had integrity.

Ethos comes from authentic ministry—praying for individuals, remembering people’s names, caring for them in times of crisis. And it comes from recognizing and articulating the struggles people face and offering an appropriate word from God. All this shapes our character, and this character is vital as we preachers strive for our rightful authority among those we serve.

Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today

Unchurched people today are the ultimate consumers. We may not like it, but for every sermon we preach, they’re asking, “Am I interested in that subject or not?” If they aren’t, it doesn’t matter how effective our delivery is; their minds will check out.
—Bill Hybels

Driving home from church the other day, I pulled behind a guy on his Harley-Davidson. I noticed a bumper sticker on the rear fender of his motorcycle, so I pulled closer. It read: screw guilt.

After the shock wore off, I was struck by how different his world was from the one I’d just left —and even from the world a generation ago. In my day, we felt guilty, I thought. Now, it’s not only “I don’t feel guilty,” but “Screw guilt.” I find that the unchurched people today, whom we’re called to reach, are increasingly secular.

There was a time when your word was a guarantee, when marriage was permanent, when ethics were assumed. Not so very long ago, heaven and hell were unquestioned, and caring for the poor was an obvious part of what it meant to be a decent person. Conspicuous consumption was frowned upon because it was conspicuous. The label “self-centered” was to be avoided at all costs, because it said something horrendous about your character.

Today, all of that has changed. Not only is it different, but people can hardly remember what the former days were like.

Why We Need a New Approach

Many churches, however, still operate with the understanding that non-Christians are going to come through the doors, feel pretty much at home, understand the sovereignty of God and the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, and in one morning make a complete transition from a secular world view.

Even twenty years ago, that was a reasonable hope. The secular world view wasn’t that disconnected from God’s agenda. A guy would hear the claims of Christ and say, “Well, that makes sense. I know I’m a sinner” or “I know I shouldn’t drink so much” or “I really should be faithful to my wife.”

Today, even though we’re asking for the same thing—a commitment to Christ—in the perception of the secular person, we’re asking for far more. The implications of becoming a Christian today are not just sobering; they’re staggering.

Recently I preached on telling the truth, and afterward, a man came up and said, “You don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“What don’t I understand?” I asked him.

“You’re just up there doing what pastors, are supposed to do—talk about truth. But my job requires my violating about five of the things you just talked about. It’s part of the job description; I can’t be ‘on the level’ and keep the position. You’re not asking me to adopt some value system; you’re asking me to give up my salary and abandon my career.”

We preachers, I was reminded that day, have our work cut out for us. The topics we choose, the way we present Scripture, the illustrations we use, the responses we ask for, all need to contribute to our goal of effectively presenting Christ to non-Christians.

For the past thirteen years, we’ve geared our ministry at Willow Creek to reach non-Christians, and during that time I’ve learned a lot, sometimes the hard way, about what kind of preaching attracts them, keeps them coming back, and most important, leads them to take the momentous step of following Jesus Christ. Let me share some of those principles.

Developing Sensitivity

If we’re going to speak with integrity to secular men and women, we need to work through two critical areas before we step into the pulpit.

The first is to understand the way they think. For most of us pastors, though, that’s a challenge. The majority of my colleagues went to a Bible school or Christian college and on to seminary, and have worked in the church ever since. As a result, most have never been close friends with a non-Christian. They want to make their preaching connect with unchurched people, but they’ve never been close enough to them to gain an intimate understanding of how their minds work.

If we’re serious about reaching the non-Christian, most of us are going to have to take some giant steps. I have suggested for many years that our pastors at Willow Creek find authentic interest areas in their lives—tennis, golf, jogging, sailing, mechanical work, whatever—and pursue these in a totally secular realm. Instead of joining a church league softball team, why not join a park district team? Instead of working out in the church gym, shoot baskets at the YMCA. On vacation, don’t go to a Bible conference but to some state park where the guy in the next campsite is going to bring over his six-pack and sit at your picnic table.

When I bring this up with fellow ministers, I often sense resistance. It cuts against everything we feel comfortable doing. And yet not knowing how non-Christians think undercuts our attempts to reach them. If we’re going to stand on Sunday and accurately say, “Some of you may be questioning what I’ve just said. I can understand that, because just this week I talked with someone about it,” then on the Tuesday before, we’ve got to drive to the Y and lift weights and run with non-Christians. We can’t win them if we don’t know how they think, and we can’t know how they think if we don’t ever enter their world.

The second prerequisite to effective preaching to non-Christians is that we like them. If we don’t, it’s going to bleed through our preaching. Listen closely to sermons on the radio or on television, and often you’ll hear remarks about “those worldly secular people.” Unintentionally, these speakers distance themselves from the non-Christian listener; it’s us against them. I find myself wondering whether these preachers are convinced that lost people matter to God. It’s not a merciful, “Let’s tell them we love them,” but a ticked off, “They’re going to get what’s coming to them.” These preachers forfeit their opportunity to speak to non-Christians, because the unchurched person immediately senses. They don’t like me.

What helps many pastors genuinely like non-Christians is the gift or evangelism. When you have that spiritual gift, it’s easier for you to have a heart for non-Christians. Not every pastor claims evangelism as a gift. But I’ve seen many develop a heartfelt compassion for non-Christians by focusing on their needs. That takes away any intimidation they might feel around non-Christians; it frees them to minister.

When I was in youth ministry in the early seventies, kids wore their emotions on their sleeve. They’d come up crying, or mad, but I could readily recognize their need. When I started ministering to suburban adults, everybody was smooth. Everyone dressed nicely and had a nice-looking spouse, two nice-looking kids, a nice car, a nice home. I thought, What do these people need church for? Everybody’s getting along fine.

The longer I worked with them, though, the more I realized, These people have gaping holes in their lives. That pretty wife hasn’t slept with her husband in three months. Those kids, if you could ever get close to them, are so mad at their dad they’d fill your ears. That home is mortgaged to the hilt, and that job that looks so sweet isn’t all that secure. That guy who looks so confident is scared stiff inside.

That appearance of sufficiency is a thin veneer, and underneath is a boatload of need that we, as pastors and teachers, are equipped and called to address in the power of the Holy Spirit. As we learn the way non-Christians think and develop a genuine love for them, we can speak the words of Christ in a way they’ll hear.

Topics and Titles They’d Choose

Unchurched people today are the ultimate consumers. We may not like it, but for every sermon we preach, they’re asking. Am I interested in that subject or not? If they aren’t, it doesn’t matter how effective our delivery is; their minds will check out.

A few years ago the book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche came out, and immediately sales took off. Everyone was talking about it. As I was thinking about the amazing success of that book, I decided to preach a series entitled, “What Makes a Man a Man? What Makes a Woman a Woman?” Unchurched people heard the titles, and they came; attendance climbed 20 percent in just four weeks. The elders were saying, “This is incredible!”

When that series ended, I began one titled “A Portrait of Jesus.” We lost most of those newcomers. Interestingly, the elders said to me after that series, “Bill, those messages on the person and work of Christ related to unchurched people as well as any messages we’ve heard.” In this case, the problem wasn’t the content; the people who needed to hear this series most didn’t come because of the title.

Since then, I’ve put everything I can into creating effective titles. I’m not particularly clever, so sometimes I’ll work for hours on the title alone. I do it because I know nonchurched people won’t come, or come back, unless they can say, “Now that’s something I want to hear about.” The title can’t be just cute or catchy; it has to touch a genuine need or interest.

Here are some series titles I’ve had good response to:

• “God Has Feelings, Too.” People said,, “What? God has emotions?” And they came to find out what and how he feels.
• “Turning Houses into Homes.” When I announced the series (in church the week before it started), I said, “Our area is setting national records for housing starts. As you drive around and see one of the hundreds of houses going up, ask yourself, What’s going to turn this house into a home? That’s what we’re going to talk about in the next four weeks.” I could have used a thousand other titles,, but this one seemed to touch a nerve.
• “Telling the Truth to Each Other.”
• “Fanning the Flames of Marriage.”
• “Endangered Character Qualities.”
• “Alternatives to Christianity.” I always begin a new series the Sunday after Christmas and Easter to try to bring back the first-time visitors. Last Christmas Eve we announced, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Christianity is the right way,’ or ‘The New Age Movement is the right way,’ or ‘Something else is the right way.’ We’re going to talk about the alternatives to Christianity, showcase the competition, and let you decide. We’ll make an honest comparison, and if it’s not honest, you tell us.”

That was an A+ title, as long as we dealt fairly with the opposing points of view. I could have called the series “The Danger of the Cults” or “Why Christianity Is the Only Sensible Religion,” but those titles would have attracted only people who were already convinced. From the very first words people hear about our message, we need to communicate, “This is for you. This is something you’ll want to hear.”

Sometimes people who haven’t heard me preach misunderstand this and say, “Yeah, it’s easy to attract people if you tiptoe around tough biblical issues and don’t get prophetic on areas of discipleship.” My experience, though, has been that you can be absolutely prophetic with unchurched people. We all should be like Paul when he said in Acts 20, “I didn’t shrink back from giving you the whole counsel of God. I didn’t shrink back in terms of the content or the intensity.” But to do that with any group, we need to preach in a way they can understand. We need to start where they are and then bring them along.

For example, we have a lot of people attend who can’t conceive of a God who would ever punish anybody. That wouldn’t be loving. They need to understand God’s holiness. So I’ve used the old illustration, “If I backed into the door of your new car out in the parking lot after the service, and we went to court, and the judge said, ‘That’s no problem; Bill didn’t mean it,’ you’d be up in arms. You’d want justice.

“If you went to a Cubs game, and Sutcliffe threw a strike down the middle of the plate, and the ump said, ‘Ball four,’ and walked in a run, you’d be out there killing the ump, because you want justice.”

A person hears that and says, “I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t want a God who wasn’t just.”

Then I can go on to say, “Now before you say, ‘Rah, rah for a just God,’ let me tell you some of the implications. That means he metes out justice to you.”

You can be utterly biblical in every way, but to reach non-Christians, every topic has to start where they are and then bring them to a fuller Christian understanding.

I’ve also found it helpful, as many pastors have, to preach messages in a series. With the non-Christian, you want to break the pattern of absenteeism. Over the course of the series, he or she gets in the habit of coming to church and says, “This isn’t so bad; it only takes an hour.” You’re trying to show him or her that this is not a painful experience; it’s educational and sometimes even a little inspirational. Sometimes it’s convicting, but in a thought-provoking rather than heavy-handed way. Pretty soon, a guy says, “Why don’t I come, bring my wife, and stop for brunch afterward?”

I’ve found I can’t stretch a series longer than four or five weeks, though, before people start saying, “Is there anything else you’re ever thinking about?” And obviously, if I’m going to talk about money or other highly sensitive issues, the series may run only two weeks.

Explaining the Wisdom of the Bible

Unchurched people don’t give the Bible a fraction of the weight we believers do. They look at it as an occasionally useful collection of helpful suggestions, something like the Farmer’s Almanac. They tend to think. The Bible has some neat things to say once in a while, but we all know it’s not the kind of thing I’m going to change my life radically to obey.

If we simply quote the Bible and say, “That settles it. Now obey that,” they’re going to say, “What? I’m supposed to rebuild my life on some book that’s thousands of years old? I don’t do that for any other respected literary work of antiquity.” It just doesn’t make sense to them.

So almost every time I preach, I’m trying to build up the reliability of Scripture and increase their respect for it. I do that by explaining the wisdom of God behind it. When you show them how reasonable God is, that captivates the secular mind.

Most of them have written off Christians as people who believe in floods and angels and strange miracles. My goal is to explain, in a reasonably intelligent fashion, some matters that touch their lives. I hope when they leave they’ll say, “Maybe there is something to the Bible and to the Christian life.”

Consider 2 Corinthians 6:14, the verse that instructs us, “Don’t be unequally yoked.” Some teachers speaking on that passage will say, “The implications are obvious: Don’t marry a nonbeliever. The Bible says it, and we need to obey it.” For the already-convinced person, who puts great value on the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, that might be enough. I don’t think most church people buy it as much as we hope they will, but let’s say they give us the indication that they do.

The secular guy, on the other hand, sits there and thinks, That is about the most stupid and discriminatory thing I have ever heard. Why should I refuse to marry someone I love simply because her religion is a little different? So one Sunday morning, I started by saying, “I’m going to read to you the most disliked sentence in all of Scripture for single people who are anxious to get married.” Then I read 2 Corinthians 6:14.

“This is that awful verse,” I said, “in which, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul cuts down the field from hundreds of thousands of marriageable candidates to really only a handful. And almost every single person I know, upon first hearing it, hates that verse. What I want to do is spend the next thirty minutes telling you why I think God would write such an outrageous prescription.”

During the rest of that message, I tried to show, using logic and their experience, that this command makes terrific sense. We were in a construction program at the time, so I used this illustration: “What if I went out to the construction site, and I found one contractor, with his fifteen workers, busily constructing our building from one set of plans, and then I went to the other side of the building, and here’s another contractor building his part of the building from a totally different set of blueprints? There’d be total chaos.

“Friends,” I continued, “what happens in a marriage when you’ve got a husband who says, ‘I’m going to build this marriage on this blueprint,’ and a wife who says, ‘I’m going to build it on this blueprint’? They collide, and usually the strongest person wins—for a time. But then there’s destruction.

“God wants his children to build solid, permanent relationships, and he knows it’s going to take a single set of plans. In order to build a solid building or a sound marriage, you need one set of blueprints.”

Over time, I want gradually to increase their respect for Scripture, so that some day they won’t have to ask all the why questions but will be able to say to themselves, Because it’s in the Book; that’s why.

Current Illustrations

I’ve found that the unchurched person thinks most Christians, and especially pastors, are woefully out of touch with reality. They don’t have a clue as to what’s going on in the world, he thinks. An unchurched person who does venture into a church assumes whatever is spoken will not be relevant to his life.

That’s why I select 60 to 70 percent of my illustrations from current events. I read Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, fortes, and usually. Business Week. Every day I read the Chicago Tribune (USA Today when I travel), watch at least two TV news programs, and listen to an all-news radio station when I’m in the car.

Why? Because when I can use a contemporary illustration, I build credibility. The unchurched person says, “He’s in the same world I’m in. He’s aware that Sean Connery and Roger Moore no longer play 007. He’s not talking about something years ago; he’s talking about something I care about today.”

I sometimes joke that one of my goals in ministry is to complete however many years God gives me without ever using a Spurgeon illustration. Non-Christians (even most Christians today) don’t know who Spurgeon was. And once unchurched people find out, they wonder why I’m wasting my time with him. They think, These are the 1990s, and we’ve got a massive drug problem, a teetering savings-and-loan industry, and political turmoil, and he’s spending time reading some dead Englishman? If he’s got the time to do that, he’s not living in the same world I am.

The second thing an up-to-date illustration does is put me and the listener on an even footing. He heard the same news report I did; he saw the same show. When I quote Augustine, he feels like I’m not playing in the same ball park. But when I say, “On ‘Nightline’ two nights ago, Ted Koppel was talking with …” the guy says to himself, I saw that! I wonder if he felt the same way about that as I did, and he stays with me. An illustration from current events includes the non-Christian listener; it puts him on an equal footing with everyone else in the audience.

I learned this principle from studying the parables of Jesus. I noticed him saying things like, “You all heard about those eighteen people killed in Siloam when the tower fell on them …” (Luke 13:4). As I charted Jesus’ parables, I saw quickly that these “illustrations weren’t quotes from rabbinic authorities but stories of things average people saw every day.

When people feel that somebody’s in their world, and has been real with them, that’s powerful. That’s why I’ll continue to use illustrations that are current.

Responses That Give Freedom and Time

When people walk into church these days, often they’re thinking they’ll get the party line again: Pray more, love more, serve more, give more. They just want something more out of me, they think. I wonder what it’ll be today that I’m not doing enough of.

It’s easy for us pastors to unintentionally foster that understanding. One pastor asked me for help with his preaching, and we talked about what responses he was asking for. I suggested, “List the messages you’ve preached in the last year, and write either pray more, love more, serve more, or give more next to any message where that was the main thrust of the sermon.”

He came back and said, “Bill, one of those was the thrust of every single sermon last year.” He recognized the implications. If every time my son comes into the living room, I say, “Do this more; do that more,” pretty soon he won’t want to come into the living room. But if he comes in knowing there is going to be some warmth, acceptance, a little humor, and encouragement, then on the occasions I need to say, “We’ve got to straighten out something here,” he can accept that.

Often the goal of a message can be Understand this reality about God or Enjoy this thing God has done. Recently my Wednesday night message was taken from Romans 12:3-8, a passage about using spiritual gifts. I could have pushed people to serve more, I suppose, but that evening I said, “This is the most serving church I have ever seen. You people are using spiritual gifts beautifully. What Paul is telling the church at Rome to get on the stick and do, you people have gotten on the stick and done.” Then I gave fifteen or twenty illustrations of ways people in the church are serving, selflessly, for God’s glory.

I closed, “I want to say I respect you as a church. You’re an unbelievable group of servants whom God is pleased with. Let’s stand for closing prayer.” Parishioners are people, too, and sometimes people need to be commended for what they are doing already. In the case of the non-Christian, we may commend them for honestly considering the claims of Christ, for being willing to listen to what we have to say and not immediately writing it off.

With the unchurched, though, our primary goal has been determined for us: We want them to accept the lordship of Jesus Christ. Let me suggest two key principles in asking non-Christians for a commitment.

1. Give them freedom of choice. I’ve been surprised to learn you really can challenge unchurched people as much as you would anybody else—as long as at the moment of truth you give them absolute freedom of choice. At the end of an evangelistic message, I often say something like: “You’ve got a choice to make. I’m not going to make it for you. I’m not going to tell you that you have to make it in the next thirty seconds. But eventually you’ve got to make some decisions about the things we’ve talked about. As for me and my house, it’s been decided, and we’re glad we’ve made the decision. But you need to make that decision as God leads you.” I’m taking the ball and tossing it in their court. Then it’s theirs to do some thing with.

During one message recently, I made a strong, biblical case for team leadership. At the end I said, “I know many of you own businesses, and you’re accountable to nobody. I think from what we’ve read in the Scriptures today, you would be the primary beneficiaries of following God’s plan of team leadership so your blind spots don’t cause your downfall.

“But,” I said, “it’s your life; it’s your business; it’s your family; it’s your future. I trust that over time you’ll give this thought and make the right decision. As for me, I’ve got elders, I’ve got board members, I’ve got an accountability group. I feel glad I have a team to accomplish what God has called me to do. Let’s stand for prayer.”

When you give a person complete freedom of choice, he goes away saying, “Doggone it, I wish he would have laid a trip on me, because then I could have gotten mad at him and written off the whole thing. But now I have to deal with it.” Rather than letting people get away, giving them freedom of choice urges them to make that choice.

2. Give them time to make a decision. Suppose a guy came into my office and said, “I have a Mercedes-Benz in the parking lot. I’ll sell it to you for $500 if you write me a check in the next fifteen seconds.” I wouldn’t do it. By most counts, I’d be a fool not to buy a Mercedes-Benz for $500. But if you make me decide in fifteen seconds, I’d refuse because I haven’t had enough time to check it out. I have some natural questions: Is there really one in the lot? Do you have a title to it? Does it have a motor?

But on Sunday we’re tempted to tell people who’ve been living for twenty, thirty, or forty years under a totally secular world view, “You’ve got just a couple of minutes at the end of this service to make a decision that’s going to determine your eternity. It’s going to change your life, and you might lose your job, but come on down.” The non-Christian is thinking. Whoa! This is a big decision, and I’ve been thinking about this for only twenty minutes.

When I ask today’s non-Christians for a commitment, I’m trying to persuade them about something that’s going to alter radically everything they are. They say things like, “You mean marriage is permanent? You gotta be kidding—like I have to get serious about child rearing and not just hire somebody to do it?” Everywhere the non-Christian turns, he’s finding I’m asking for far more than he was first interested in. He senses a spiritual need —that’s what brought him to church—but he’s going to need a lot of time to consider the implications.

Most of the conversions that happen at Willow Creek come after people have attended the church for six months or more. The secular person has to attend consistently for half a year and have the person who brought him witness to him the whole time. He needs that much time simply to kick the tires, look at the interior, and check the title before he finally can say, “I’ll buy it.”

It’s interesting: I get criticized for this as much as for anything else in my ministry. People protest, “Bill, you had them in the palm of your hand, and you let them get away!”

I’ve heard this enough times that now I usually respond with some questions. “Do you think people heard the truth while they were here?” I ask.

“Yes, they heard the truth.”

“Do you think the Holy Spirit is alive and well?”

“Of course I believe that.”

“Do you think Bill Hybels ever saved anybody?”

They quickly say, “Oh, no, no.”

I say, “I think we’re okay then. If they heard the truth, and the Holy Spirit is alive and active. God will continue to work in their lives,, and Bill Hybels isn’t the only way he can accomplish his will for them.”

Having said that, however, there is a time to close the sale. Not all the time, but sometimes, people need to be challenged. And when I do challenge people, I challenge them hard. Periodically I’ll say, “Some of you are on the outside looking in. You’ve been around here for a long time and have enough information. I’d like to ask you, what is it that’s holding you back from repenting of your sins and trusting Christ right now? Sometimes a delay can be catastrophic. It’s time to deal with this.”

But—and this is critical—when I do that, I always make a qualification for the people who aren’t to that point. I’ll say, “Now for many of you, this is your first time here or you’ve been here only a few weeks. You don’t have enough answers yet, so I’ m not talking to you. You’re in an investigation phase, and that’s legitimate and needs to go on until you have the kind of information the rest of the people I’m talking to have already gathered.”

Trying to reach non-Christians isn’t easy, and it’s not getting easier. But what keeps me preaching are the times when after many months, I do get through.

Not long ago a man said to me, “I came to your church, and nobody knew what really was going on in my life, because I had ’em all fooled. But I knew, and when you started saying that in spite of all my sin I still mattered to God, something clicked in me. I committed myself to Christ, and I tell you, I’m different. My son and I haven’t been getting along at all, but I decided to take two weeks off and take him to a baseball camp out west. He started opening up to me while we were out there. Thanks, Bill, for telling me about Jesus.”

For a preacher, such a joy far surpasses the ongoing challenge.

Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today

When there have been harrowing storms to weather in ministry, the remembrance of God’s original call to me — to preach — is one thing that has helped me stick to it.
— Ed Dobson

The week after Easter, I received this letter:

“This was [written] after considerable prayer. My husband and I are submitting to the will of God and the urging of other Christians by walking away from your church.

“While we could easily slip out unnoticed and certainly never be missed, which is definitely one of the problems here, I feel that our reasons for leaving are important enough to share with you.

“From the pulpit recently we heard you comment that there’s not enough unity between our church and other denominations. This, Pastor Dobson, is ecumenism, and ecumenism is of the anti-Christ.…

“With which of these apostates would you suggest we unite? Our church in one broad sweep is trampling the grace of God and mocking the gospel. The church is the body of Christ, Pastor Dobson, not the unsaved masses of humanity you’re trying to attract. Our church offers a program for every aspect of society that sets its foot in its walls — single moms, single dads, fatherless children, divorced women, substance abusers, but virtually nothing for believers.

“Although the church may be growing, you are losing the true saints of God. If this has been your goal, you are to be congratulated because you’re achieving it. If not, there’s still time to turn away.”

It was signed, “In Christ, a saint.”

At the bottom of the page, it read, “And thou, Capernaum, which are exalted in the heaven shall be brought down to hell. For if the mighty works which had been done in thee had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say to you it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for thee.”

The same week I received another letter, a response to my sermon, “Smile; It’s Easter and God Loves You.”

The letter said, “Greetings. Visits to your church have left the following impressions.… [There was] a vapid, soft, and comfortable presentation on Easter with the emphasis on smile rather than our sinfulness driving the Suffering Servant to the Cross. This was so irreverent and out of place as to make one ashamed, not of the gospel, but of its hapless, harmless, one-sided view.… God help us. Whatever happened to the offense of the Cross?”

It was signed, “An Unhappy Camper.”

After the high of Easter Sunday, this was not pleasant reading. Unfortunately, criticism is a regular part of Christian ministry. Sometimes it makes us wonder, “Is this job worth it?”

Add to those times in ministry when nothing seems to be happening, and we’re sure it isn’t worth it!

Now add to that our culture’s presentation of clergy on TV, movies, and in magazines — meek, mild, irrelevant, and out of touch with the “real” problems of the world — and one’s very calling can be thrown into sudden and wrenching doubt: “Is ministry something I should be investing my life in?”

Yes, sometimes it’s hard to remember why we’re in ministry, or whether it’s worth it. So periodically, we need to think about our call afresh.

Reviewing Your Sacred History

“My spirit grows faint within me,” wrote David. “My heart within me is dismayed.” So what does he do? “I remember the days of long ago, I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done” (Ps. 143:4-5).

This is how David renewed his own sense of call. It’s not a bad idea for pastors to do the same from time to time — to remember what God has done in their lives and ministries.

I find it especially helpful to remember the origin of my call to ministry. I grew up in a pastor’s home, so there were some subliminal expectations from church people that I would follow my father. Though my parents never pushed that agenda on me, others did, and I reacted to it. As far as I was concerned, it was none of their business what I did with my life.

I was 16 when I went away to a Bible college with the understanding that, after two years, I would transfer to a state university and pursue medical school. I had my sights set on being a surgeon.

But at college I was continually confronted with the question “What does God want you to do?” I had never really given the notion much thought. Then passages of Scripture that dealt with preaching and ministry began to stand out during my devotional times. When individuals spoke in chapel on the subject of ministry, something would stir in my heart.

Halfway through my sophom*ore year, my struggle became more intense. It reached a crisis point one evening when I attended a little church outside of my own denominational background. The pastor spoke on Jonah. His thesis was simple: Jonah was called to preach, but he ran away from God. The message seemed to point straight at my life.

He then invited those who believed God might be calling them into ministry to come forward. I disliked public invitations so I didn’t budge. But later that night, I met the pastor in the basem*nt of the church. By then I had made my decision. I said to him, “If the Lord wants me to preach, I’ll preach. In fact, whatever he wants me to do, I’ll do.”

Though the shape and nature of that call has changed over the years, this remains my call: to preach. And when there have been some harrowing storms to weather, the remembrance of this original call is one of the things that has helped me stick to it.

Busting the Four Myths of Ministry

Another tactic when the call to ministry seems in doubt is to remember the four myth-busters of ministry. The first three I heard from Truman Dollar; the last I added from my own experience.

1. It is never as bad as you think it is. Even when things seem darkest, circ*mstances are usually not as hopeless or awful as they first appear. For example, after one particularly tough committee meeting in which I was left with the impression people didn’t trust me, I received a call from my wife.

“You won’t believe it, Ed, but you just received a beautiful bouquet of flowers,” she said. “Let me read the card to you. ‘To Ed Dobson, Pastor of the Year.'”

The flowers had been sent by a couple who had been separated for nearly two years. Through the church’s ministry, they had been won to Christ and had decided to be reconciled. I had conducted their marriage renewal service. The flowers were a way of saying thanks.

The bouquet was a dramatic reminder that I should never let church politics or conflicts obscure my vision of the bigger things God may be doing in the church.

2. It’s never as good as you think it is. There are times in church ministry when everything seems to be going marvelously. That’s when you need to be careful. It’s only an illusion. As Jerry Falwell used to say, “In ministry I’ve never had two good days back to back.”

As I mentioned, the letters I shared at the beginning of the chapter were written the same week I was riding high from our tremendous Easter Sunday experience. They were sullen and dramatic reminders that not everyone saw the service as I did.

3. It’s never completely fixed. Ministry is a process; it’s people. To say, “I’ve taken care of this problem. It won’t recur,” is to live in a fool’s paradise. Problems can come back to plague you long after you thought they were resolved.

4. It’s never completely broken. Not long ago, a pastor from Kenya spoke in our morning worship service. He pointed out that during the first thirty years of missionary efforts in Kenya, more missionaries died than the number of converts who were won. In the remote inland regions of the country, missionaries sometimes arrived with their belongings stored in coffins. They were resigned to the fact that they would never make it back to the coast.

In spite of the difficulties and slowness of progress, these men and women were still convinced that Kenya wasn’t completely broken. And so they kept at their callings, knowing that someday their work would bear fruit.

They were right. Thanks to their efforts, today 82 percent of Kenya is at least nominally Christian. Evangelicals alone number nearly 9 million.

Handling Criticism

When I was younger, rather than using my call as a pillar to lean on during times of criticism, I used it as a baseball bat to confront my critics.

Part of that was due to my training. It had been drilled into me during college that regardless of the cost, you have to take a stand. If the whole world is against you, take a stand. So during my first pastorate, I interpreted that to mean I should stand up to my critics.

When I encountered conflict in board meetings, I would bring up the issue in my sermon the next Sunday.

“God called me to start this church,” I would remind the congregation. “If you don’t like it, there are a number of other churches in this town you can attend.” I declared the authority of the pastor and expected that to end the issue.

As I look back, that was stupid. While we ought to stand for what we believe, Paul says we are to teach and admonish others in a spirit of patience and gentleness.

Many pastors don’t run aground in ministry because they lack legitimate calls. Rather it’s because they haven’t been adequately prepared to work with people. They may have been trained to handle the Greek and Hebrew text, but they aren’t equipped to deal with imperfect people in an imperfect world. Sometimes, opposition isn’t a sign you don’t belong in the ministry, it’s simply part of the call to “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.”

I believe I’ve grown in this regard. Here are three ways I handle criticism today.

• Accept it as part of the package. Some people are attracted to ministry because it seems to be a place of power, influence, and authority. Others think that if they become pastors, “I can read the Bible and pray all day.”

Paul was much more realistic in his description of the ministry, and his description is something I need to read from time to time: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8-9).

The ministry is sometimes pressure, discouragement, disappointment, heartache, criticism, and conflict. I try to communicate that to all who are considering the job. If they don’t believe me, I just show them my mail.

• Don’t believe everything you hear. Recently a woman shook my hand after one service and said, “Good grief, Pastor! Your hand is soft. I bet you haven’t seen a good day’s work in your entire life.”

She grinned, turned, and walked off. She obviously didn’t know how such a statement can hit pastors. I just stood there thinking to myself, Thank you very much. Good day to you as well!

A lot of criticism people throw our way is based on ignorance or misconceptions. When it’s appropriate, I try to educate people. But when it’s not, I find it best just to forget the comment.

• Ask God about it. When I encounter tough opposition or a stinging criticism, I ask myself, “Is God trying to show me something in this? Is this a process of character development in my own life?”

So I sometimes take these criticisms to the Lord in prayer: “This is what they’ve said about me Lord. Is it true? Help me to be honest with myself and determine what truth, if any, lies behind their comment.”

I will actually read to God the letters critical of me. Sometimes I discover God is trying to say something to me. Other times, he reassures me that I’m on the right track and not to become discouraged.

Listen for God’s New Leading

Sometimes when we’re doubting the call, we’re merely doubting the call to a specific ministry. And sometimes the doubt is justified: God wants us to move on to another ministry.

How we know that, of course, is no simple process. Here are the steps I take to discover if God is leading me to a new ministry.

First, I listen to my journal. I’ve found that journaling has helped me hear the voice of God for my life. For years, I’ve taken time to write out, several times a week, what I’m learning from my study of Scripture, my circ*mstances, and my ministry experiences.

As I was considering Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, I had also been contacted by a church in New York City. New York looked like an attractive option. I would be downtown, in the midst of several million unchurched people.

During that period, I spent a lot of time reviewing my journals. I would notice, for instance, that I would jot down something like, “I’m going to delay Grand Rapids. New York is really where I want to go. Logically, it seems the right place.” Then I’d go home that night and get a call from the board chairman in Grand Rapids, inviting me to fly in the next day. Being caught off guard, I would say, “Okay. I think I can do that.”

In fact, I noticed that every time I decided to close a door to Grand Rapids, something unusual like this would happen, which would open it up even wider. At the same time, the church in New York would ask me to jump through one more hoop: get another reference, send another sermon, whatever.

As I reviewed my journal, the pattern became obvious, and eventually I followed God’s leading to Grand Rapids.

In addition, I think it’s appropriate to “lay out the fleece,” not in the sense of testing God but only to assure myself that, in fact, God is leading.

For example, before coming to Grand Rapids, I decided I needed to have 95 percent of the congregational vote if I were to come.

“We don’t vote unanimously for anything,” a board member had warned me. Nonetheless, that was the precentage I needed to feel secure in accepting the call.

I ended up with unanimous calls from the committee and the board and a 99.7 percent vote from the congregation. I’ve never seen that happen again in this church, even when we have voted on mission candidates or ordaining someone to the ministry.

I’ve also begun praying with my wife about such decisions. That’s not the way the previous generation often went about it. My father operated much more on a priestly model of leadership. God speaks to the priest (the man), and he leads the family, with or without the spouse’s consent.

Dad, much to his credit, went from a large church in Ireland “downhill” to smaller and smaller churches. By the time he reached his last church, it had approximately eighty people. While he was always confident of these moves, it usually took my mother approximately a year and a half to adjust to the change.

At the beginning of our life together, Lorna and I agreed that wherever God called me, we would go together. But through the years, I have felt it important to bring her more and more into the decision-making process. I’m grateful I have done that. When the moment of truth arrived regarding ptl or Grand Rapids, she said, “Ed, there’s no need to even pray any further about this. Calvary Church is where you belong.”

Finally, sometimes we just have to go out on faith, and if we’ve misread God’s will, then that too can lead us to the real calling he has for us.

When I was first starting in ministry, I believed God had called me to become the heir apparent to Billy Graham. I honestly believed I was going to one day take over for him. So right out of college, I set up the Eddy Dobson Evangelistic Association. My wife and I sent out hundreds of letters advertising our availability. If I could summarize the general response, it was, “Paul we know. Jesus we know. But who are you?”

The end result was that we moved into a one-bedroom apartment, and I took a job digging graves. My wife went to work for a temporary employment agency. I was severely disillusioned by the response to what I perceived to be my call.

But this turn of events eventually led to my being offered a position at Liberty College working with Jerry Falwell, and that, in turn, led to my becoming the pastor of a small, mountain church in West Virginia, my first full-time pastoral experience.

When It’s Time to Set Aside the Call

Though most of the time the call to ministry is intended for life, there are situations when the call must be set aside, either temporarily or permanently.

• A breach of trust. When serious violations of trust occur, involving moral default, dishonesty, or some other significant compromise of personal integrity, it creates a situation where the person, at least for the immediate future, is disqualified from continuing to serve.

Why? Because he can no longer exercise spiritual leadership. That’s one of the unique aspects of our calling. A surgeon can be a good surgeon without being a moral individual. A pilot can be a good pilot and lead a reprehensible personal life. But a pastor can’t be a good pastor without living a consistent walk of purity and moral integrity.

At the same time, I’m committed to the principle of restoration. It doesn’t happen immediately, or without cost. It requires a process of slowly rebuilding integrity and trust. It occurs in progressive fashion, building from one level to the next. Those steps are: restoration to God, restoration to your family, restoration to the community of believers, restoration of the exercise of your spiritual gift, and finally, restoration to leadership.

The first four levels are always possible. But the final level, restoration to leadership, is something left to God and the group of people considering the person for a leadership position.

In recent years, several prominent Christian figures have been restored to their previous ministries. In some cases, they have even gone back to serve in the churches they left following their moral lapse. Still, once trust has been betrayed and your reputation is no longer without reproach, it’s difficult to regain the same personal influence you once had.

• A pause for refreshment. At any given time, we have sitting in our congregation at least half a dozen pastors recovering from burnout. They are all in various stages of healing. Some just need a place to come and find anonymity. Others need friends and counselors to walk with them through their hurt. They all have one thing in common: ministry has temporarily overwhelmed them.

I always encourage hurting and tired pastors to find the healing and renewal they need inside a church. The first steps are to seek out the leadership of a church, admit your need, and ask to come under the church’s care. After a period of healing and renewal, you need this group’s affirmation that you’re spiritually and emotionally ready to reenter pastoral ministry.

• A new calling. Sometimes God wants a person in pastoral ministry for only one period of life. One man I know was happily serving as a pastor of a congregation in California. He had been writing on the side for a few years, when suddenly one journal he had written for asked him to become an associate editor.

The first time the journal offered the position, he turned it down. He felt he was called to church ministry, and that was that. But when the editor of the journal called six months later with the same offer, he felt a pull to do it. Still he debated: he was happy in ministry, but he thought he could be happy in journalism. Finally what determined his choice was that mysterious inner leading that God sometimes gives us.

Since going into Christian journalism, he has lost his passion to pastor, but he has been given more and more passion to see God’s truths communicated in the printed word. A couple of years after the move, he decided to forsake his ordination, partly because he had always believed that ordination implied ministry in the local church, partly because he felt God had opened a new calling for him.

Preventive Medicine

Pastors sometimes are frustrated in their callings because they’re waiting for someone to intervene and help them out. They honestly believe that the board will one day approach them and say, “Pastor, you need to take some time off with your family for personal and spiritual renewal.”

It won’t happen.

Fortunately, I was given this blunt but life-saving advice when I first arrived in Grand Rapids. Our city has a strong Dutch community, so my first year a member of my board met with me on a weekly basis. His goal was to help me understand the Dutch people and the peculiar culture of our church.

“One of the things you need to know, Pastor,” he said, “is that we will sit in the board meetings and discuss the tremendous pressures you face, how hard you work, how you are away from your family too much, how you need to slow down, and how important it is you take regular days off and get away for your full vacation each year. Then we’ll go home saying to ourselves, ‘My, aren’t we taking wonderful care of Ed Dobson!'”

Then he leaned forward and said, “The truth is, Pastor, despite our pious lectures and good intentions, we will cheer you right into your grave. We will bury you, and then get someone else to replace you, just as we always have.”

He was not being cynical. He was simply warning me that if I didn’t take care of my own physical, spiritual, and emotional health, no one else would.

In particular, I need to monitor my physical health and emotional stability. While we may carry the treasure of the gospel with us, we need to remember it’s stored in clay vessels. I need to be in touch with the limitations of my clay body.

First, that means proper exercise and diet. I run between three and seven miles a day, for instance, and that leaves me refreshed and pumped up for preaching or teaching, particularly midweek when my energy can lapse.

Furthermore, I know I need a minimum of seven or eight hours of sleep each night to function well. When I traveled with Jerry Falwell, I noticed he rarely needed more than three or four hours of sleep a night. Though he did all the interviews and speaking, I came back from those road trips dead tired. If I tried to keep that same schedule, I’d get sick.

As Bill Hybels has suggested, I also watch my emotional gauges. I work hard to keep my schedule in balance so that I don’t go from one emotionally draining situation to another. For example, I sometimes plan golf games between stressful meetings. I also accept the fact that on Mondays I’m drained from the day before. So I don’t accept any appointments other than lunch. I read and avoid seeing people or dealing with tough issues. It’s a day I use to study and begin preparations for the next Sunday.

Part of emotional monitoring means staying in touch with my spiritual limitations. That means I try and operate primarily in the realm of my giftedness. My limitations are in the area of counseling and administration. As much as my board would love to see me be more assertive in administrative matters, I’ve told them, “If you want to make me miserable, make me an administrator.” They understand my limitations.

Finally, a great way to renew my own sense of calling is to help train others in their callings to ministry. I give to young people materials that will help them sort out whether God is calling them to ministry. I correspond with many seminary students, and I make it a priority to meet with young people who are planning to enter seminary or are home on break from seminary. I also try to give the pulpit to our potential pastors, because I want our high school kids to see this is an option for their lives.

I was struck by a recent interview with Billy Graham in which he said he felt like a failure. I’ve always admired his simplicity and single focus, so it was disconcerting to hear him express disappointment in himself. He said if he had it to do all over again, he would travel less, study more, and spend more time with his family.

Oh, rats, I thought to myself. There’s no hope for me. Even my greatest hero thinks he has fallen short.

That was a good reminder. No matter how hard I work at ministry, I will always feel as if there is something more I could or should be doing for God. That is an ongoing frustration of our unique call.

But Billy Graham said one other thing: he believes he did the one thing God called him to do — preach the gospel.

My hope is that forty years from now I can look back and say the same thing.

Copyright ©1994 by Christianity Today

Intimacy is a feeling. Though we can’t base our assurance of salvation on emotions, feeling close to God is important.
— Wayne Gordon

Our church had met in a storefront for five years when we decided we needed more room. For several years, we had eyed the property across the street, a building that needed major remodeling. We offered $25,000 and finally settled on a price of $35,000.

Any mortgage would seriously tax our church budget, and the cost of remodeling still lay ahead. We needed to paint inside and out, erect walls for office space and classrooms, fix the roof, and lay new carpet. To save money I served as general contractor and carpenter. We were anxious to move in, so the remodeling was a high priority for the church and my daily schedule. After a quick morning devotion — a fast reading of a psalm and a “Bless me today, Lord!” — I rushed to the job site, where I hammered nails, called subcontractors, took estimates, and directed volunteers, often until eight o’clock at night.

Only after that, when I was done with the building project for the day, did I start my pastoral work: writing sermons, visiting in homes and at the hospital, and phoning leaders to plan services.

After a few weeks of this schedule, I paid the price. I wasn’t just tired; my body screamed for rest. I felt emotionally distant from my wife and children, and they were obviously unhappy about not getting more of my time. Worst of all, I felt as though God was a star system away.

But I felt I had to finish the project soon. To reach the neighborhood as we had envisioned, with a medical clinic, gym, and larger facilities for Sunday services, we had to sacrifice. I kept telling myself, I have to pay the price. So I kept pushing.

Around that time, I bought Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald. (I didn’t have the time to read, but I knew I needed help!) The book stopped me in my tracks. As I read one page in his book, I was sure MacDonald had been looking over my shoulder for the past several months:

“A driven person is usually caught in the uncontrolled pursuit of expansion. Driven people like to be a part of something that is getting bigger and more successful.… They rarely have any time to appreciate the achievements to date.…

“Driven people are usually abnormally busy. They are usually too busy for the pursuit of ordinary relationships in marriage, family, or friendship … not to speak of one with God.”

The scales fell from my eyes. I had pursued the building project like someone who was driven not called. But that was only the symptom of a deeper problem.

I realized that I knew a lot about God — I had graduated from Wheaton College with a master’s degree in Bible — but I didn’t know God intimately. Like stars and planets in the night sky that I only occasionally lifted my head to wonder at, God was distant. I wasn’t content with that. So in 1985, I launched out on a journey, a journey toward a deeper walk with God.

The Ways to Intimacy

Elder Christian statesmen like John Stott and John Perkins inspire me because they show that intimacy with God can keep growing throughout our lives, that greater intimacy is indeed a journey. Since that fall of 1985, I have gradually discovered a deepening sense of closeness with the Lord. Perhaps some of what I have learned can help you.

• Follow your feelings. Of course, pastors often must tell Christians not to follow their emotions (they are the caboose, and all that). But intimacy is a feeling. Though we can’t base our assurance of salvation on emotions, feeling close to God is important. It makes our relationship with God fulfilling, and our faith, contagious.

What helps me feel closer to God? For years the mainstay of my daily devotions was Bible study. Although vital to true knowledge of God, Bible study doesn’t normally foster intimacy for me. The key for me is waiting quietly on God until I sense his presence.

• Get born again. Bill Leslie, pastor of LaSalle Street Church in Chicago for several decades, felt burned out at one point in his ministry, so he went to a Catholic retreat center. He talked to a nun about how he felt. She listened patiently, and then she said, “What you need is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Ouch! Bill was a card-carrying evangelical. That experience jarred him and convinced him he needed to deepen his relationship with the Savior.

Ministry is more than constructing buildings and leading people to Christ. It is knowing God and being the person he wants me to be. Out of that flows ministry. When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus didn’t begin, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Rather, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” I wasn’t exempt from this command just because I was doing ministry. I needed to make first things first.

• Follow the cycle of intimacy. Knowing God is a process that can no more be exhausted than the exploration of the universe. There is always another blazing, star-saturated galaxy to discover in God.

John 14:21 describes the stages in the cycle: “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.” Stage one: if we love God, we obey his commands. Stage two: if we obey his commands, he reveals himself to us. Stage three: when he reveals himself to us, we know him better and love him more. Then the cycle repeats itself, with our love and knowledge of God growing ever deeper and stronger.

Unless accompanied by obedience, prayer and Bible reading cannot bring intimacy. At one point in their history, the Israelites rigorously practiced spiritual disciplines. They were fasting, worshiping in the Temple, seeking the Lord. But God told them, in Isaiah 58, that he had another kind of fasting in mind. They needed to follow the spiritual discipline of obedience: to stop oppressing their workers, to feed the hungry and set prisoners free. God promised to come near those who obeyed him.

Of course, no one obeys perfectly, but deliberate, ongoing disobedience breaks the cycle of intimacy as surely as eating the apple sent Adam and Eve packing from the garden of Eden.

• Journal first thoughts of the morning. I am not a natural writer. Journaling is the last spiritual discipline I naturally gravitate toward. But a number of writers I had been reading recommended the practice, so I decided to try it.

I’ve never stopped. Ten years later I’m still journaling nearly every day. While the street lights are still shining bright on Ogden Avenue, I wake up, walk the cracked and vaulted sidewalks to church, crank up the footrest on my easy chair, and sloppily write in a spiral notebook things (unlike John Wesley) I never want anyone to read.

The thoughts I have when I wake, shower, and shave are the first thing I record in my journal. Early morning thoughts are significant. Worries, anger, new ideas, plans — they cluster at dawn, before the press of daily events, and in my journal I process them. My journal is the one place where I can be completely honest with God.

Where I journal, pray, and read Scripture is important. On Saturdays I have tried to wake up early and journal at home, but even though I’m up before my family, it doesn’t work. I don’t get the same settled feeling in my spirit. I’m restless. Just as seeing a deep-space supernova is more likely if an astronomer is 7,200 feet above sea level at the Cerro Tololo observatory in Chile, so my best times with God come when I’m at my right place: my office.

• Think twice about spiritual disciplines that upset family rhythms. For one six-month period, I fasted one day a week. My family eats together every night, and so on fasting days I sat at the table and talked, but that was awkward. So I tried cloistering myself in the bedroom to read and pray during meals. “For a while I’m not going to eat with everyone on Mondays,” I explained to the kids (trying not to sound super-spiritual). “While you’re eating, I’m going to be alone with God because I want to know God better.” My spiritual quarantine upset everyone. My wife was frustrated at having to handle the meal and children alone, and the kids wanted to see me.

After six months the fasting hadn’t helped me feel significantly closer to God, but it had increased family stress. That spiritual discipline finally went out the window.

I still believe in the benefits of fasting (which I have since concluded benefits me most when I fast in three-to five-day stretches). Fasting over important decisions helps me stay focused. I have never come down from Mount Sinai with tablets in my hands, but I usually get a deep, settled peace.

I also fast about specific needs. When I taught high school, I met with another coach in the athletic equipment room during lunch hour; instead of eating, we prayed for the troubled marriage of a friend. After nine months, that marriage recovered.

My most refreshing spiritual discipline is keeping an agreement made with my wife years ago. We have promised each other to take a week away together every year with no children, no agenda; we want to simply enjoy each other. We pray and read the Bible together, rest, and play tennis. It is the highlight of our marriage and my spiritual life.

• Get quiet and make time. To have intimacy with God in my quiet time, I can’t do without two things: (1) quiet, and (2) time.

As a student at Wheaton College, I was a fellowship fanatic. I love being with people. One year I went on a wilderness retreat. Retreat organizers told us to bring only three things beside our clothes and toiletries: a Bible, a notebook, and a pen. For three days they required that participants spend their time alone with God. I had never spent half a day away from people and alone with God! I quickly learned how dependent my relationship with God was on others. I also learned that spending quantity time with God enhances intimacy, and that I could enjoy the quiet and the luxury of time with God alone.

There is no substitute for time. I can’t rush intimacy. When I have been away from my wife for several days, five minutes of conversation at the dinner table does not restore our sense of closeness. We need one or two hours together. What we discuss isn’t as important as spending the time with each other.

I have a friend who talks about how much he enjoys “wasting time” with God, that is, spending unstructured, unhurried periods with the Lord. Although I often use a prayer list, I also like following no agenda, just as one of my favorite activities with family and friends is just hanging out together. Fellowship with God isn’t rocket science. It has to be led by the Spirit and by the concerns and feelings on my heart at the moment.

In some of the most intimate moments my wife and I have shared, we haven’t said anything; we sit or lie together holding hands or arm in arm, enjoying each other’s presence. So it is with the Lord. “Be still, and know that I am God” is a verse that shapes my time with God as much as any other. Such stillness energizes me. Along with journaling, my greatest sense of closeness to God comes when sitting in silence before him until I feel his presence.

A Pastor’s Disciplines Are Different

Bringing up the subject of “spiritual disciplines” usually brings up guilt in people. We all feel we could do more in this area. In addition, pastors are often troubled because they feel that the pressures of pastoral life encourage them to cheat God.

I believe, however, that we need to accept that our practice of spiritual disciplines will be different than the practice of our parishioners. In particular, there are three areas that trouble us, but here’s how I deal with them.

First, I’ve come to accept that pastoral life is a ride on the Screaming Eagle. One day I’m ministering to a young man in prison for murdering a storekeeper; the next day I perform a wedding; the next day, a funeral. We can talk about balance and order, but pastoral life isn’t balanced or ordered!

That means I’ve decided I’m not going to feel guilty when I have to miss a day of devotions. If I don’t do them before 7 a.m., they don’t happen, or at least they don’t have the same benefit. When I can’t fit in my quiet time, I feel cheated. I miss my time with the Lord. But if I am legalistic about spiritual disciplines, they no longer are spiritual disciplines for me, just mere duty.

Second, I merge daily devotions with sermon preparation. I know some consider that a problem, but it works well for me. I often read and meditate daily on my preaching text for the coming Sunday. My best preaching is a reflection of how I’m growing and what God shows me in my times with him.

Third, I allow myself to think about church during my quiet time. For some, this becomes a temptation to refuse to get personal with God, to keep playing pastor even in his presence. But I am a pastor, and so much of what I do is pastoral. Often as I wait in God’s presence, ideas come like a meteor shower in my mind, and many are from the Lord: program ideas, insights into church problems, people to call. I write them down in full when the inspirations come and sometimes act on them immediately.

Recently as I was praying, the name of one woman in our church came to me. I wasn’t sure why, but I sensed I was supposed to call her. When I did phone, she told me she had been struggling for several days. She desperately needed someone to talk to. She was shocked that I called just when I did.

Locking the Door

It’s no surprise that my spiritual lows come when I’m busy, preoccupied, focusing my attention on everything but God, and my spiritual highs come on “sabbath” days of rest and relaxation. God instituted sabbath not only because the human body needs physical rest, but more so because human activity frustrates intimacy with the Creator.

That means that at times I’ve had to take forceful steps to make this happen.

As a people-person and activist, I’ve prided myself on having an open-door policy. So for years, people regularly interrupted my devotions, but it didn’t bother me much. When I started my journey of knowing God, I knew something had to change; I had to find uninterrupted time with God. So I started coming to church earlier for my morning devotions.

Then people who wanted to see me learned a good time to catch me was early in the morning. Still, I kept my door open and kept coming in earlier and earlier to be alone.

One early morning as I was in my office praying, a drug addict named John, to whom I had been ministering for months, came to my door and said, “I don’t have any money for the train. Can you give me a ride to work?”

“I’ll give you some money,” I said.

“I’ll be late for work. I need you to give me a ride.”

He pressed his plea, and so finally I drove him. When I returned to the office, I never was able to resume my devotions.

I woke early the next morning looking forward to my devotions. I settled into my chair at the office and began reading the Bible. Minutes later John showed up again at my door. Same request. Again I refused. He begged me, and once again I grudgingly interrupted my time with the Lord to drive him to work. Once again I couldn’t resume my devotions later in the day.

The next morning, John reappeared at my open door. “I’m not driving you to work,” I said firmly. “I have a commitment.”

“Coach, you have to! I’ll be fired if I don’t get there on time.”

“That’s too bad. I have a commitment.”

John pleaded and pleaded with me. Finally I said, “Okay, okay, I’ll drive you to work, but if you come to my door tomorrow, I’m not driving you. You’ll just have to lose your job.”

The next morning I was not surprised when John stuck his head in my office (with that kind of persistence how could he not succeed in life!). But this time I held firm. Angrily he rushed out to take the train, and he didn’t lose his job.

That experience seven years ago was a turning point for me. Though contrary to my nature, I started saying no to people to guard my time with the Lord. I now close and lock my outer office door during devotions. When someone knocks, I don’t answer, nor do I answer my phone. I have told the congregation, “If you come knocking on my door early in the morning, I’m not going to answer. I need to be alone with God. I don’t want to know about God, I want to know God.”

Just a couple of years ago, I found myself deeply discouraged about the work at the church. Frankly, I debated quitting ministry at Lawndale. So, feeling like the despondent Elijah when Jezebel had designs on his prophetic skin, I went off by myself to a retreat. I fasted, prayed, and waited for three days to hear from God.

There were no temblors or bolts of lightning, but when the three days were up, the tide had come back in. I sensed God saying, Be still. Know that I am God. You don’t have to solve all of Lawndale’s problems or save everyone you meet. Love me, and we’ll work together. Just keep going.

Returning home, I talked it over with my wife, and we decided to stay. We are now in our twentieth year of ministry at Lawndale Community Church. My eight-year journey in pursuit of intimacy with God is what enabled me to work through that dark night of my ministry. Often it is difficult to find time for God in the midst of church life, but closeness with God is the basis for lasting ministry.

Copyright ©1994 by Christianity Today

Few people work under higher expectations to be nice than pastors, yet few occupations nurture as much anger.
— Ed Dobson

My father pastored in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for seven years. Every Sunday he preached and then walked to the door to shake parishioners’ hands. And every Sunday one man said on his way out, “Well, you got it off your chest again, didn’t you?”

I never heard my father complain about that man’s disrespect for his preaching (he only recently told me about it). He was able to forbear.

If the same thing happened to me, I would probably go to that man, ask him what his problem is, and suggest there are 480 Protestant churches in town, one of which should be able to please him!

Pastoral life is ripe soil for rage. Criticism comes often and unfairly. Hard work may return small tangible results. Members resist leadership and change. Conflicts among church workers are endemic. Volunteers don’t show up for promised work. We’re pulled between giving our best to our families or to the church. There is never enough money, never enough time, never enough help. The work is never done.

Few people work under higher expectations to be nice than pastors, yet few occupations nurture as much anger. The result: many pastors are like a wide spot in a swiftly flowing river. On the surface, the water is fairly placid, but underneath is a dangerous undercurrent.

What should we do about this undertow of frustration, hurts, aggravation?

Recognizing the Anger

In our culture, many people think of the pastor as the nicest person in town, always smiling as benignly as a funeral director, never offended by even the unkindest cut. Consciously or unconsciously, most pastors try to live up to the omni-nice image.

That is as it should be; we are to be forbearing. The problem comes when we’re so afraid of getting angry that we cannot recognize when we are. And that seems to be the case with many pastors; they just don’t recognize how angry they are.

Many deny it or cloak it with euphemisms, but anger shows up: break downs in communication (not returning phone calls, for example), withdrawal from relationships (cocooning in the office), depression, even heightened sexual temptation. Three signs in particular seem most common:

• Sarcasm. What we fear to say in seriousness we sometimes joke about. A pastor who is resentful of the power of the women’s group might during announcements say, with a smile, “This Friday night, there will be a meeting of the real board in our church — the women’s group!” Everyone laughs, but this is not good-natured humor. It is sarcasm, and sarcasm cuts.

• Impatience at home. A pastor is hurt and angry at the members of the board, but he doesn’t say anything. Week after week at church, even as he speaks with members of the board, he keeps a warm smile on his face. At board meetings, he calmly accepts criticisms. Church members comment about their sweet, godly pastor.

But at the pastor’s home, it’s another story. When his wife serves dinner late, this pastor explodes. He rarely plays with his children, and when he does, he snaps at them repeatedly. He slams doors and is rude to telephone salespeople.

At home he feels out of control, and he wonders why he can’t be more patient. Or he explains it away: “I’ve just had a hard day.” But the fact that this behavior repeats itself signals that something deeper is going on.

• Preaching about “them.” I pity sinners in the hands of an angry preacher.

One pastor I know was preaching through the Book of Philippians at a time when a faction in the church was causing him a lot of problems. One Sunday the text in Philippians spoke directly to what the pastor saw as the attitude problems of his opposition. In his sermon, when he spoke to those verses, he couldn’t resist talking about the “people in churches who are like this” and how they destroy churches.

He didn’t name names, and he was careful not to look at any of the dissenters, but at that point in the sermon, he spoke with extraordinary fervor — what he now sees as anger. He spoke about “these people” with apocalyptic tones and without grace, as if they were demons. Everyone aware of the problems knew whom the pastor was talking about.

Of course, this veiled attack only strengthened the dissenters’ opposition. Months later, when they handed him a four-page letter chronicling their complaints, one item was his “using the pulpit to attack people in the church.”

Because anger is so difficult to recognize, I have asked my wife and other church leaders to be warning lights for me. I have given them permission to tell me when they suspect I’m chronically angry or to ask, “Ed, are you angry about this?”

If you drive by a waste dump, you will likely see several pipes sticking from the ground with a large flame burning at the top. As buried garbage decomposes, it emits methane gas. Pipes are buried throughout a waste dump to siphon off the methane and burn it safely. Otherwise, periodically, as the methane gases build up, the dump could explode in flames.

Burying anger and pretending it’s not there is similarly dangerous. Recognizing it is discomforting, but it’s the first step in healing.

Putting a Nice Face on Rage

If we don’t directly deny the anger, we may try to put a nice face on it. We recognize the powerful emotion, but we call it something good.

I can, for instance, describe myself as “a person of conviction” outraged by sin around me. I have listened to many sermons by angry preachers. Usually they call people ugly names, generalize, and overstate their case.

But prophets are not exempt from the calling to express the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The angry-prophet model, which you will have a hard time finding even in the Old Testament, is clearly not the pattern for New Testament pastors: “The Lord’s servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 2:24-25).

Some people point to Jesus to justify preaching out of anger. But when Christ rebuked people, as he does in Matthew 23 in a series of woes, it was usually against hypocritical religious leaders and self-righteous legalists. I don’t often have an opportunity to preach to such people; mostly I’m speaking to lay people, people trapped in their sins. So usually “prophetic anger” doesn’t have much of a place in the pulpit.

We may rationalize anger by saying we are identifying with the poor and oppressed; we are giving voice to the victim’s rage, showing we understand the pain of the exploited.

Fortunately, there are better ways to identify with the oppressed. Prayer is perhaps the most effective. On Mother’s Day, for example, people are seated before me who grew up in broken homes or who were abused by their mothers. There are singles who were abandoned or divorced by their spouses and are struggling to provide for their children.

On such a day, a lot of hurt and anger resides in the congregation. So I try to express that yet without anger. In my pastoral prayer, I’ll say, “Lord, you know the pain and anger these people feel. I cannot honestly say that I know how they feel; I have never gone through what they have endured. But you know, and I ask you to extend special grace and comfort to them this day.”

Some pastors say, “I’m angry because that’s who I am. I’m being real. Not to express my anger is to pretend to be something I’m not.”

Then again, there is more to life than being genuine. Sometimes kindness and maturity demands that we put aside anger for the time being.

Finally, some pastors rationalize their anger by claiming it enables them to lead a group effectively. “If you’re going to be the leader,” it is argued, “once in a while you better stand up and let the board have it.”

Such outbursts keep people at a distance, and in one sense earn respect, but it’s the wrong kind of respect. People avoid crossing angry pastors because they fear their temper, not because they respect their leadership. In the long run, you are much better served by putting your foot down only on weighty issues and doing so with gentleness.

Calming the Storm

When Scripture encourages us not to let the sun go down on our anger, it implies that we can do something healthy with it. Here are three ways I deal with anger.

1. Talk about it. When I first came to Grand Rapids, I asked one of the staff members to take care of an issue. Several days later, I asked if he had followed through on it.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t think it was a good idea.”

I was so angry, I didn’t say anything. For weeks, rather than ask him to do things I felt were his responsibility, I took care of them myself.

Finally, I went to him and told him I was shocked that he hadn’t done what I had asked. I told him that if he thought my ideas were not good to tell me rather than ignoring me. Today, we laugh about the incident.

Most of us hate confrontation. I know I do, and anyone who does not probably wouldn’t make a good pastor. But if someone is violating biblical principles, we will have to say something.

The injunction of Matthew 18 to go to those who sin against us just makes good sense. As poet William Blake put it,

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

Of course, we can’t confront people over every little offense. Pettiness and defensiveness are wearisome. We need time to process what has happened so we don’t confront others under the sway of pain and emotion or over a matter that was simply a misunderstanding. We need time to think through what the issue is and how and when we are going to deal with it.

I confront someone only when my feelings are under control. Anger is unsettling and frightening to others. So I prefer to say they “hurt” or “disappointed” me. But in general I try to talk about the issue, not my emotions.

• Count to a million. Much of the time, we are called to forbear what angers us.

I now and then catch wind of an uncomplimentary comment made about me. My tendency is to assume the worst. If it seems serious enough, I call individuals about what they have said. When we talk it out, I usually discover that things have been blown out of proportion, and that clears things up.

Several years ago, as I preached in a southern church, I read from the niv Bible; I had forgotten that this congregation was a strong supporter of the kjv. Weeks later I heard that the pastor of that church was angry with me. He reportedly had told several staff members that I was arrogant, insensitive, and foolish, and that I would never preach in his pulpit again. I got the impression this man was furious with me.

So I called him and then went to visit him. He had been bothered by what I had done, but he said he was hardly furious. We managed to resolve the issue.

Such experiences have taught me to take negative comments with a grain of salt, being patient as much as possible. I do admire the forbearance of my father, who pastored in the generation when ministers believed they should always accept abuse as lambs mutely going to slaughter. Although I never heard him say anything negative about people in church or about ministry, I now know that he was misrepresented, abused, and taken advantage of. He was hurt many times, but he never struck back.

While there are times we need to confront those who seriously hurt us — as much for their sakes and the church’s sake as for our own — I think my father’s example has a lot going for it. More often than not, I want to bear the nicks and cuts that are part of the pastoral terrain, to be “slow to anger,” “not resentful.”

Healthy forbearance (versus denial of anger) involves adopting an attitude of forgiveness, willingly embracing, for Christ’s sake, the pain that others mete out to us.

• Keep your balance. A balanced life — including exercise, family time, and fun — helps me keep life’s hurts in perspective. I run three to seven miles daily; after running four or five miles, my anger is often exercised right out of me.

I also try to get a good night’s rest; for me that means at least seven-and-a-half hours. This regimen is essential for both my physical and emotional health. When I become tired or emotionally strung out, even small offenses become critical wounds.

Not Even the Appearance

If people perceive I’m angry, then the effect is about the same as if I were angry. So I’ve learned to be cautious in a couple of areas.

The first is flippant remarks. In my first year at this church, I preached a series on women in ministry. A few weeks before, I announced from the pulpit my plans to preach that series and then jokingly added, “Of course, it may be a two-minute series.”

The following week I received a scathing letter from a female attorney in our congregation: “Every day in the marketplace, I struggle with what it means to be a woman, to be perceived as second class. Last Sunday a person I respect as godly made light of the problem.”

I knew I had made a huge mistake. As far as I knew, I didn’t have any anger toward women, and the purpose of my sermon series was to affirm women in ministry, but my hearers didn’t know that. I knew I had to apologize to her.

Another area concerns preaching. One Sunday while preaching in Romans 1, I was talking about the sin of hom*osexual conduct. I noticed a man who had not been in church for several months. He was a hom*osexual, a married businessman living a double lifestyle. He had the hiv virus and had recently been so ill the doctors thought he would die.

I came to verse 27: “Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.” I thought, Maybe I should skip this part today. It is this man’s first day back in church. He’s going to think I’m preaching at him. But I quickly decided, No, I’m obligated to preach the whole truth.

At the same time, I knew I needed to speak the truth in love, otherwise this man might view me as just an angry moralist. So I made sure that I spent as much time on God’s forgiveness as on his judgment.

Curing the Long Madness

“Anger is a short madness,” said Horace. I would add that anger not dealt with biblically becomes a long madness. However we rationalize our wrath, the fact is anger “does not achieve the righteousness of God.” That is true for several reasons.

First, anger is wedded to hostility. As lust is to adultery, anger is to murder. When we are angry, we usually have a desire to hurt.

Second, ironically, anger is impotent. Unleashing it doesn’t solve anything but almost always adds fuel to destructive flames.

Third, anger cripples us. It limits our ability to model a Christlike life, which is the source of all long-term and effective ministry.

Fourth, anger is the mark of spiritual failure. In 1 Timothy and in Titus, most of the qualifications for ministry have something to do with self-control.

Instead, spiritual leadership requires that, as much as is possible, we short-circuit anger. And the only biblical way to do that is to forgive and to ask for forgiveness.

In one recent board meeting, I had some conflict with an individual. At the close of the meeting, I said, “Before we go, I need to apologize to Phil in front of everyone. I was abrupt and defensive in what I said. I don’t want us to leave this meeting with that unresolved. Phil, I’m asking you to forgive me.”

Phil forgave me on the spot. Asking forgiveness may not be the way it’s done in the world, but it is Christ’s way. It is one way we show the life-changing power of the gospel.

Copyright ©1994 by Christianity Today

No one escapes the grip of personal insecurity. It’s part and parcel of life after the Fall. The problem comes when our personal insecurities significantly affect our behavior.
— Louis McBurney

Over twenty years ago, I pulled out of mainstream psychiatry to start a counseling retreat for pastors. I still attend psychiatry seminars, and invariably someone will ask, “What do you do?” When I attempt to describe my present calling, I receive a puzzled look. Then an awkward silence.

“Mmm,” the person says. “How nice.”

Other psychiatrists’ respect shouldn’t matter to me. But it does. I yearn for the approval of my peers. Intellectually I know my self-worth is established by God through what Christ did on the cross, that I’ve been created and redeemed by him. Yet it’s difficult resting in God’s unconditional love while holding down a job many people I admire don’t respect.

In working with pastors, I’ve learned this is a common feeling among them. There are lots of reasons for this.

The social fragmenting of our culture has heightened their insecurity. More and more I hear pastors say, “I don’t feel trained to cope with the things that confront me daily.” These things include the complications of blended families, sexual abuse, and marital breakup. It’s hard to feel good about what you do when you’re not sure what you’re supposed to be doing.

Furthermore, the media portray the average pastor as a balding fiftysomething with a reversed collar and a paunch; sometimes the reverend is benignly kind; sometimes he’s a hypocrite, but in any case, he’s hopelessly out of touch with the “real world.”

Nor do pastors get an emotional boost by comparing their work to other jobs requiring comparable education and having similar demands. Salaries seem painfully higher in law, in educational administration, and in business.

Finally, while our culture gives increasing status to specialists — pediatric ophthalmologists, nuclear medicine technicians, and bioelectrical engineers — pastors remain generalists. Like the family doctor, they seem to be a thing of the past. This is particularly unnerving for generalist pastors as they watch some churches become staffed with specialists.

Take Frank, for example, a “utility” pastor loaded with talent. He entered the playing field of Trinity Church. During his fifteen years there, he bounced from responsibility to responsibility, plugging in where needed. He was a generalist, and the church needed a generalist then.

His last five years at Trinity, however, the church exploded numerically. Increasingly the board was filled with leaders of industry, and Trinity was rapidly becoming a multi-staff church of specialists: a junior high pastor, a children’s pastor, a small group pastor. Suddenly, Frank was a dinosaur, a low-tech pastor in a high-tech church. An outside consultant hired by the board said Frank had to go, so Frank was terminated. In his place were hired four specialists.

A Tough Place to Work

Sometimes it’s not broad social forces that aggravate our selfdoubts but specific pastoral experiences. Unfortunately, the church can be a cruel place to work.

Dan, a pastor, felt good when he was courted by Long Valley Community Church for the second time. Nothing like a church approaching you to make you feel important. Though he had turned down the first offer, he was ready when the second came his way. He looked forward to pastoring a church that seemed to like him so much.

Soon after he arrived, however, dark clouds began clustering on the horizon. None of the church’s power brokers was on the search committee, and they were not happy with Dan’s innovative style (the reason the committee so vigorously pursued him). His attempt to rearrange the order of worship, for example, was met with stiff resistance. The typical grumbling turned into a roar: he was openly criticized at board meetings and in letters from members of the congregation.

Naturally, Dan began to doubt himself and his abilities. But rather than dealing with the criticism or facing his self-doubts, he simply withdrew. His office became a sanctuary. There he spent most of his days, studying for Sundays and programming the church computer. His relationships with the congregation grew colder and colder.

Determined to be heard, the opposition grew louder and louder. The disenfranchised part of the church elected to the elder board their turn-around man: a hard-nosed businessman “who would let the axe fall if needed.” The first item on his agenda: send Dan to Marble Retreat to “get fixed.”

When Dan arrived, his self-esteem sagged badly. As I alluded to in another chapter, when I learned of the dynamics surrounding his coming, I phoned the church chairman to satisfy myself that this wasn’t merely a prelude to Dan’s being fired, which is often the case. “If you expect Dan to get fixed instantly and come back a different person, you’ll be disappointed. If sending him here is only a token stab at resolving the issues so you can say you’ve done everything you could before you fire him, I need to know. Then we’ll spend the rest of his time here helping him work through the transition of leaving the church.”

“No, no,” the chairman replied. “All we want to do is help. He’s our main concern; he’s valuable to us. We wouldn’t make any decision about his leaving for at least another year.”

Two weeks after returning to his church, though, Dan was fired. If that wasn’t enough, the chairman then warned him that if Dan so much as breathed a word of his termination, never again would he pastor in that denomination.

You can imagine Dan’s psychological state at that point. Certainly, his is a worst-case scenario. But many pastors are treated cruelly by their churches, and that can have a devastating effect on their sense of self-respect.

The Face in the Mirror

Although the pummeling of the world and the church aggravate the problem of a pastor’s self-respect, I believe the main issues lie deeper. Our doubts about our calling and our feelings of inadequacy are rooted in a poor self-image.

But let’s face it: no one escapes the grip of personal insecurity. It’s part and parcel of life after the Fall. The problem comes when our personal insecurities significantly affect our behavior. Here are several indications of insecurity gone haywire.

1. Compromised integrity. Each of us holds to convictions that shape who we are. From time to time, we question those convictions. That’s all part of growing morally. But when we find ourselves wrestling time and again with basic issues, when we’re not sure what is right and what is wrong, when we’re afraid of making an ethical blunder but don’t know what exactly we should do — that’s when we should take a look at the issue of self-esteem.

For example, the male pastor who thinks he should caress the lonely divorcé to give her comfort is a confused pastor. He probably is lonely and unappreciated himself, and he has lost some ethical judgment in trying to compensate.

2. Inflexibility. When people don’t respect us, we’re tempted to make them respect us. So some pastors try to command respect by becoming more demanding. They overload their associates with work and then criticize them severely for not meeting deadlines. And they justify it by saying, “I’m no harder on others than I am on myself.”

At board meetings, they refuse to budge on issues, even minor ones. “I can’t let them push me around. If they won’t let me purchase a new word-processing program to prepare my sermons, they won’t respect me on vital issues.” Such pastors end up making major issues out of minor ones, which all become “symptomatic of deeper issues.”

3. Physical symptoms. When self-esteem sags deeply, it can show itself physically: panic attacks, insomnia, lack of appetite, depression. Almost any body system can be affected.

4. Drivenness. This is probably the most common symptom, the others often being aspects of this one.

For men in particular, the need to achieve, to invest tremendous energy into their work, is at least one part biological. Males are endowed with large amounts of testosterone, an anabolic chemical. The male body turns out large amounts of energy, which naturally gets channeled into work.

Striving to achieve outward success can be — but is not always — a symptom of deep-seated insecurity. A workaholic pastor may be attempting, say, to gain approval from his dead father who never affirmed him. Or he might be bolstering his weak self-image by being outwardly successful.

The driven person, rather than finding satisfaction in the work itself, needs a scorecard. He constantly compares himself with others. Rather than feeling satisfied and celebrating reaching a goal, he feels empty and guilty at what he has yet to accomplish.

A model for the way we should feel about our work comes from children. In his book Your Pastor’s Problems (Augsburg, 1966), William Hulme says, “Jesus pointed to a child as the expression of human greatness.… The light touch of the child is an expression of his childlike faith. His enjoyment of his father’s world is inseparable from his security in his father’s world.

“Childhood, therefore, is not only something we go from but something we go toward. Enjoyment is probably closer to whatever we mean by human perfection than accomplishment. And anxiety over accomplishment may be the most telltale symptom of idolatry.”

While learning to walk, our granddaughter would pull herself up and stand alone on wobbly legs. Seeing our smiles, she would shake her head and squeal with delight. Her grandparents squealed along with her. Her freedom and joy as she explored her new mobility, as she discovered her ever-expanding world, was as pristine as a blanket of new snow.

Driven people know little of this joy, the pleasure of expending oneself in God’s creation, the satisfaction of discovering new worlds. They know only the ravenous need to achieve. And it all comes back to a basic need: to know one is already esteemed.

Realigning the Image

Whether a pastor’s self-esteem is radically shaken or just in need of fine-tuning, his or her self-view needs to be regularly aligned with Christ’s view. Here are three suggestions that may help.

• Examine your calling. Some pastors choose to go into ministry for the prestige or power that church leadership promises. Others see local church ministry as a safe place to have a career: “The pay may not be great but at least there people will like me.” Still others, because of guilt, are hoping to work out their salvation: they feel they’ve never measured up, so they think, Perhaps I can serve enough to compensate for what I’ve done or be significant by doing something that really matters.

Unfortunately, the church is not a warm, safe place to acquire power, be liked, or atone for sin. If you’ve been called into ministry by such motives, instead of by Christ, ministry is bound to undermine your self-confidence. It will constantly disappoint you and make you feel like a failure, when in fact you’re just not in the right calling.

• Go back to the roots. Our childhood environment figures into our adult internal struggles. Some people survive childhood believing they’re okay no matter what they do. The majority of us, however, enter adulthood attempting to compensate for feeling negatively about ourselves. A major factor influencing our adult self-worth is our childhood family and peers.

I’ve counseled several pastors with learning disabilities. Growing up they weren’t able to learn at the pace of their classmates. They were mocked and called derogatory names. One pastor told how in junior high school one of her teachers openly ridiculed her because she wasn’t able to pronounce a word.

These incidents attach easily to our fragile psyche. Gather enough of them and soon we come to believe we’re inferior, a nogood loser. Pinpointing the origin of our poor self-image goes a long way toward making changes. But it’s not enough.

• Reprogram your thinking. This does not come naturally. What we’ve come to believe about ourselves over time is not easily erased. Yet it is possible.

In an earlier chapter, I told about the pastor who came to Marble feeling threatened about who he was. We talked at length about his childhood problems of acceptance and identity. The messages he had received from his parents growing up were mostly negative. His adult conversion had turned his life around, but he still agonized over his adequacy.

His two weeks at Marble were life changing. Besides him and his wife, three other couples there were working on their struggles as well. For two weeks, the four couples functioned as a support group. Each day the group met to talk about the common pressures of ministry and their effect on their lives. One of the discussion questions the group was asked to answer was simply “What’s new?” By the end of that week, this pastor would reply, “What’s new is me.” Finally he had begun to soak in the truth of his infinite worth in Christ.

Upon his return to the trenches, this pastor regularly used this question to reprogram his thinking about himself. When he caught himself saying, “I’m a failure,” he would say, “What’s new is me. I’m loved by God, who delights in me.” He is still in process, but the change in him is real.

There is no magic wand for becoming more secure in Christ. It takes hard work, and even then, attacks of low self-esteem will likely hound us to the grave. But learning to rest in God’s love is worth the journey. It instills in us a confidence to give to others even while feeling insecure.

Two Key Habits for Tough Settings

The root of our lack of confidence may be low self-esteem, but as I mentioned, this often gets aggravated by the environment in which we work. I give pastors who work in self-image-challenging settings a couple of habits to develop.

First, stick up for yourself. No one respects a doormat. If, for example, you feel pressured to produce beyond what you can physically handle, go to your elder board and say, “For me to continue to be effective as a pastor, I need to set limits on the number of things I’m responsible for around here. I’m finding I just can’t get everything done. Let me give you some of my suggestions for dealing with this, and then I’d like to hear yours. I’d like us to come to a new agreement.”

Instead of withdrawing into his office, if Dan had confronted those who complained about his changes in the worship service, explaining why he did what he did, enlisting their help in forming a vision for the church, he might have been able to short-circuit his eventual firing.

Second, work to be heard, not to be right. Truth can be presented one of two ways: with horsepower, which puts everyone on the defensive, or with tact and gentleness. Too often, especially in the church, truth is presented in a combative way. As a result, the messenger draws unnecessary fire, and the message is dismissed.

You don’t have to shout or even be angry. Just a calm, simple, steady explanation is all that is usually necessary. Happily enough, once you respect yourself well enough to speak up for yourself, others gain greater respect for you as well.

In recent years, I’ve found myself concerned enough about several social issues to write letters to the local newspaper editor and to make public statements that were unpopular. This has taught me that even tough subjects can be handled peaceably. My community may not agree with what I say, but they heard my message. When I’m faced with delivering an unpopular opinion, I’ve learned to be more concerned about communication than conversion.

Ministry Goes On

I think it’s fair to say Jesus encountered his share of disrespect. His troubles wound up getting him crucified. Yet while despised, put down by the media elite of his time, and even betrayed by his friends, he continued to serve. That’s easy for him, we might think, he never had the doubts and fears that I do.

Maybe, maybe not. But I know that you don’t have to wait for your self-image to be completely renewed before you minister to others. Otherwise we would never get around to ministry! Instead, even while grappling with these issues, you can be an effective pastor.

Years ago a pastor who attended Marble because of marital problems got divorced. It was his second. In his denomination, divorce didn’t disqualify one from ministry, but after two failures, no church was knocking his door down to be their pastor.

The urban church that finally hired him was desperate; they were about to shut the place down. A few years earlier, they had built a new facility, saddling themselves with a large mortgage. Instead of growing, the church began losing members and consequently couldn’t service the debt. Surveying the hopeless situation, the denomination essentially said to this pastor, “Give it a shot. See what you can do.”

Though dogged by self-doubt and feeling like an outcast, this man went to pastor this dying church. His plan was simple: love the people. He did this by visiting everyone in the community who needed a pastor. When he learned a family had lost a child or a grandparent, or that someone was having problems, he would drop by the house and say, “I pastor one of the churches in the community. I know you must be going through some tough times. Is there anything I can do to help?” Because of his own doubts and struggles, he was able to empathize with others. Instead of the cheap answers he might have suggested earlier in his ministry, he simply offered only his presence and his ears.

Slowly the church began to awaken. Eventually it paid off its debt and even added an educational wing. Today the church is a thriving fellowship. Their pastor still has periodic battles with selfdoubt, but in the meantime, while he is working to integrate Christ’s love into his own life, he is loving his people as best he can.

And it seems to be enough.

Copyright ©1994 by Christianity Today

When it comes to people’s expectations of the pastor, it’s better to promise less and deliver more.
— Ed Dobson

I knew a pastor of a large church who tried to control all aspects of his church. He worked seventy and eighty hours a week: he preached, did all the visitation, oversaw the staff, and micromanaged virtually every detail of the church’s ministry.

I met with him from time to time over the course of a year and a half. He always had the same complaint, “I’m tired. I’m worn out. There is something flawed about ministry in a megachurch setting. It shouldn’t be like this.” I was saddened, but not surprised, when I learned that he had fallen into serious sin that cost him his ministry.

In spite of his fatigue, his impatience with others, his constantly being behind, his feeling of distance from God, he had been insistent on remaining in control of all aspects of the church’s ministry. Why? Part of it, no doubt, was a result of his own psychological needs.

But a large part of it was due to modern church culture, the same culture that pressures all pastors. Over the last few decades, the expectations of congregations have been raised enormously. Whereas earlier we were expected to study, preach, and visit, now we’re supposed to administer a variety of programs, raise enormous funds for larger and larger facilities, and counsel people with problems a previous generation never even heard of — all the while preaching as good as the latest televangelist.

Most pastors go into the pastorate with dreams of being able to do it all. That dream matches perfectly with the increasing demands of the congregation. The pastor, though, discovers quickly that he or she can’t do it all. The expectations to keep up the image of the omni-competent pastor are so strong, it seems impossible to lower the expectations to reasonable levels, at least without appearing lazy.

But if you don’t figure out a way to minister with realistic expectations, you will burn out, or worse. So how shall we minister in this situation?

Getting Off on the Right Foot

If you are starting ministry, or beginning a new ministry, you are in the best position to do something about it. Though expectations can be changed later, it’s easiest to set things right in the beginning. Here are some steps I found helpful as I took on the pastorate at Grand Rapids.

• Learn what the people expect. It’s not too early, even during the search process, to begin the work of negotiating expectations.

That is why, against the search committee’s advice, I insisted on a two-hour, open-and-free-wheeling, question-and-answer session during my candidating weekend. The leadership feared it would open a can of worms.

“Who cares?” was my response. “Let’s go ahead and open it and take a good look at the worms.” I wanted to know what the hot buttons were and let the congregation see how I would handle sensitive and potentially divisive issues.

The session turned out to be wonderfully informative. I was asked about such issues as women in ministry, my position on divorce, and even what I thought about eating in a restaurant on Sundays (the so-called “Dutch laws” of the region look down on this).

Soon we were discussing people’s expectations of their pastor. I was asked about my pastoral strengths and weaknesses, and my willingness to work with a strong board. Someone even wanted to know if I intended to start a Moral Majority chapter at the church.

This is not the only time or the only format available to us to discover what people expect of us. That we seek to discover what, in fact, people expect is the important thing. We don’t want to be guessing.

• Know what the board expects. I had just begun my ministry at Calvary Church when a group approached me and asked that I become heavily involved in their particular program. When I met with the board, I told them of the request and said, “I’m uneasy about getting drawn into this, but I don’t want to disappoint these people.”

The chairman of the board immediately spoke up: “Pastor, the only people you have to worry about disappointing is us.” We all laughed, yet he was making a serious point. Various factions in the congregation will attempt to place different expectations on your time and involvement, but what really matters is knowing what the board expects of you. They are the group you are answerable to month by month, even in a congregational polity.

That board member’s remark led to a lengthy discussion regarding the use of my time. At the end, the board unanimously directed me to spend at least two-and-a-half days a week in study. I later announced that decision to the congregation, and from time to time I remind them of that board directive. That is one way of letting people know I can’t be involved in everything.

• Watch those promises. The temptation begins in the interview process, but we never really shake it. We enter ministry because we want to help people. So we are regularly tempted to promise them more help than we can humanly deliver. Better to promise what we’ll not do.

For example, early on in my ministry at Grand Rapids, I mentioned that I had never been a particularly good counselor: “I hope I’m a compassionate and sympathetic person. And if you come to see me, I’ll listen and cry with you. But then I’ll tell you to go home and read fifty chapters of the Bible and let God straighten out your problem! That is the limit of my understanding of counseling.”

When it comes to people’s expectations of the pastor, it’s better to promise less and deliver more.

• Set up a regular review. Even though the board and I may have reached a mutual understanding regarding expectations, I still meet regularly with my chairman. It’s part of an ongoing effort to remain on the same page with my leaders.

I also go through an annual review process with the board chairman, vice-chairman, and chairman of the deacon board. We look at the past year and discuss issues they feel I should pay attention to. If conflicts and differences are stirring, this gives us the opportunity to bring them out in the open and resolve them.

That can be a threatening process. If not handled with love and mutual respect, it can leave a pastor deeply wounded. My father pastored a church where the entire congregation voted yearly whether to retain him or let him go. It was a difficult, humiliating process to be subjected to.

But this has worked in my situation, and it has fostered regular communication about what people expect of me and what I can realistically do.

Getting Chips for Doing Your Thing

Leith Anderson once compared the ministry to a poker game. When you first arrive at a church, you’re given a stack of chips. If you preach well, love the people, and see some successes, you’re given more chips.

If you do something poorly or irresponsibly, you lose chips in a hurry. If you lose too many, you’re thrown out of the game completely. But as you build trust with your board, they will over time give you more and more latitude in the exercise of ministry.

During my last review, after seven-and-a-half years of ministry, the board let me know it was unnecessary to check with each committee and board before I made a significant decision.

“You have the freedom to make choices on your own,” they said. “All we ask is that you keep us informed.”

The same trust works in regard to the congregation’s expectations of the pastor. If year by year they see I’ve been a faithful pastor with my main responsibilities, they will be forgiving of areas they wish I could cover but cannot.

So, regardless of how many years you minister in a place, it’s vital to work on the trust factor. There are many ways to establish or re-establish trust, but here are five that have worked for me.

First, I let people know I work hard. I once received this piece of advice from an old mountain preacher: “Son, whatever else you do, make sure people see you working. Park your car in front of the church so people can see it on their way to work in the morning. Then, if you like, go fishing for the day. But just make sure your car is parked in front of the church by the time people head for home!”

That humorous advice should be taken seriously. People have no idea how we spend our time, so we need to let them know that we do put in more than a few hours on the weekend. Once they recognize that, they are less apt to pile more expectations on our already busy schedules.

That’s why one of my first edicts as senior pastor was to establish regular office hours for the staff and me. I let people know we would be in the office, putting in a full week’s work. Because it’s common knowledge that, in addition to holding regular office hours, I preach on Saturday night, three times on Sunday morning, and once on Sunday evening, people understand I don’t have much time left to take on new obligations.

Second, I’ve also learned how to get things done without doing them myself. When I planted a church in the mountains of Virginia, I had to do everything. I opened the doors, cleaned the church, answered the phone, ran the mimeograph machine, worked with the Sunday school teachers, helped lead the choir, and in my spare time, did all the preaching and visitation. All those things needed doing, and those were the things a pastor of a small church did.

I soon realized, though, that I shouldn’t do all those things. So I found people to unlock the doors. I called on people to lead music and work with the Sunday school. I discovered that in a lot of cases, people don’t care who does the job as long as it gets done. And when things get done, even if not done by me, people tend to give me more trust and leeway to do the things I think I should be doing.

Third, I have to be willing to meet some expectations that lie outside my areas of specialty. Though I’m not a natural counselor, as a pastor I still have to meet with people going through a divorce and with those struggling with substance abuse. Counseling comes with the pastoral territory. The congregation is right to expect me to fulfill this function at least to some degree. If I completely shirk the essential pastoral functions, I can be sure people will start questioning how I spend my time.

Fourth, when it comes to functions I think are essential to my ministry, it’s imperative I do whatever it takes to do them with excellence. I can’t rest on my laurels.

For example, even though preaching is one of my strengths, I devoted one year recently to read and study everything I could find about preaching. If a congregation sees me constantly growing in an area I say is important, they will give me more leeway to work in that area.

Finally, I’ve learned the art of symbolic gestures. For example, Calvary Church has always had a strong missions emphasis. Though I’m committed to missions, we have other pastors on staff who are called to give more attention to it. Still, I knew I needed to show the congregation that I thought this was a vital ministry.

So I decided that once a year I would visit mission fields, meeting with the men and women our church supports, in places like Haiti and Poland. Once I began doing that, people saw in a dramatic way that, although I wasn’t on the front lines of administration and fund raising for missions, I did care about them.

Other pastors periodically visit each of the committees of the church, even though they don’t plan to attend them regularly. Such a gesture communicates the pastor thinks each committee’s ministry is important. And that alone often satisfies people’s expectations in terms of your involvement.

Just Say, “No!”

No matter how much trust building you do in ministry, sometimes you simply have to refuse to meet people’s unreasonable expectations.

Ray Ortlund once observed that every three or four years, regardless of how long you’ve been the pastor, some person or group in the church will inevitably challenge your leadership. It may come from the board, a staff member, or an element of the congregation. But someone is going to launch a direct attack concerning what is expected of you. Ortlund advises we dare not ignore it.

I faced such a challenge when we decided to begin another building program. Up until then, we had agreed that I was not expected to be the chief fund raiser in the church. In fact, when I first arrived, people were deeply concerned I would be too aggressive in raising money (they knew I had been mentored by Jerry Falwell).

My conviction has always been that if you preach the Bible and win people to Christ, God will take care of money. So that was the way I operated at Calvary. That worked fine until we entered a $5 million building program.

We agreed to ask people to make three-year pledges to the building fund. We decided that if we didn’t receive the pledge amounts we needed, we wouldn’t build.

Little by little as the campaign proceeded, and as anxiety rose about whether we would meet the goal, I began to feel the subtle pressure to become more assertive in fund raising. I knew several people were quietly thinking, How could Dobson have spent all those years with Falwell and be so lousy at asking for money?

At the end of the pledge drive, we had raised only half the target goal.

That is when I felt the pressure more than ever. Several members of the board thought I should go back to the congregation and make a pitch for the remaining money.

“I won’t do that,” I told the board. “We agreed that if we didn’t raise the money we expected, we would stop there. Perhaps God is trying to tell us something. I suggest we put the project on hold for six months.”

My position disturbed many people. I probably aggravated them further when I confessed to the congregation that we as a board didn’t know just what to do next! I suggested that as a body we should wait and pray for direction.

Six months later the project was approved again by the congregation. This time the needed funds flowed in and eventually the first cement was poured.

And I never had to become a fund raiser.

Certainly the most important trait to nurture in working with a congregation is a submissive spirit. That has not always been easy for me. But sometimes I have to be submissive to people’s reasonable expectations, even if I don’t feel gifted or interested in a particular ministry. And sometimes I have to be submissive to God and pointedly inform the congregation that I can’t do what they ask.

In either case, when I’m able to have a submissive spirit, my motive is love and a desire to serve. And few congregations expect more than that.

Copyright ©1994 by Christianity Today