Of Mouse and Church: Leadership and Discipleship, Part 3

I met this church leader while doing a consultation on youth ministry with their church. Their history of religious affiliation was “hopscotch.” They worshipped and worked with a congregation for a few years at most. Citing the Spirit’s guidance, they moved on quickly to their next destination. Now, they felt called to stay with this new ministry for some time, to raise their children in the congregation, and connect with the wider church. The conversations with them sounded like this:

• “The pastor is a great leader, and helps folks put their passions into good works. But when I bring an idea to make things better, I don’t feel that the idea gets shared.

• “I love their passion for Christ’s Way. But I think they need to read their scriptures more.”

• “Kids from this church sure know that they are cared for. But there are a lot of kids in this community that don’t come every week.”

As part of the consultation, we did a map-out of “The Things We Do Well,” partnered with a “You say, but I say” analysis. Typically, this exercise raises up a bunch of low-hanging “good-feeling” outcomes that can be implemented in the short term. And while they are adding joy to the community, harder-to-implement ideas can be mapped out and tested. For example, this exercise might produce the statement: 1) We are very welcoming, but 2) people don’t know how to get from the door to the sanctuary/meeting spaces. So the easy outcome would be for the Deacons to add Greeters as an additional layer of welcome for guests. Meanwhile, the Property Team starts investigating better signage.

Our friend the church leader sat and listened as the first list was created, nodding along but not verbally participating. When we began the second list, they broke their silence. And they never stopped. Ten fixes to every idea, and no space given for others to share (including the pastor and staff). What made it more awkwardly challenging: the fixes came from this person’s experience at other churches – the communities they had left. And because of denominational or situational differences in values of the communities, many of the ideas simply didn’t fit.

Because they were newer to the faith community, they had not yet embodied its values. They sought a deeper relationship without knowing the values and vision of the congregation. After some tense months, yes, they moved on to another church.

The parable of the Rich One and Jesus must have been important to the First-century church. It’s retold in the synoptic Gospels, each with their own twist (Matthew 19:16-30, Mark 10:17-31, Luke 18:18-30). “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds, “Keep the commandments.” Follow your values. That’s enough. But that’s not enough for the Rich One. There’s got to be more! So Jesus said:

“There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
Luke 18:22

By his report, the Rich One had kept the commandments. Yet they did not feel satisfied or fulfilled. They needed to do more than was commanded, or was absolutely necessary. In other words, they needed to reach a higher state of perfection. They weren’t aligned with the tradition, or the vision Jesus was casting.

The act of seeking that perfection – to be more fully in control of the relationship – separated the Rich One from their path, and our Leader from their church. Disney Institute says this on alignment:

Leaders must intentionally align and integrate their personal values with the organization’s values.

One of the tenets of the Interim Ministry Network’s Fundamentals of Transitional Ministry training echoes this:

Join the System

While being “outsider” specialists, interim ministers also need to be “insider” supporters. Attempting values-change in a functioning system can be done (and sometimes needs to be done). But only with a lot of planning and a great risk once you know the system you’re in, and are authentically aligned with its values. A leader intentionally aligning their values with the organization helps name conflicting priorities and helps resolve them before the risky times start.

A close friend of mine contacted me to be a reference in a pastoral search. The thing was: I just was a reference in their pastoral search. They were serving a pretty-good-sized congregation as an Associate Pastor (with a pretty denominationally well-connected Senior Pastor). They had been in the position for about eighteen months (just long enough for the guild to fall off the lily). So, I asked what was up. They said:

I was working with our Social Activism group on a project to support marriage equality (NB: this was before 2015). We got all of the way through the committee work, set up a four-part speaker series, and invited a pretty well-known attorney/activist to teach us how to use our social and peer networks to advance the cause.

We brought the whole plan to the Mission & Outreach Ministry (who oversees the group), and presented what had been planned. At the end of the presentation, the pastor - who knew all about the efforts - pulled back from the table and said, "No, I don't support this. My faith tells me that it's not Christian."

The group was dumbstruck, but continued on. They shared about the polling they had done with the congregation, and the high percentage of support within the church and the wider community. The committee nodded along. It seemed like we had their buy-in. 

The bottom line came at the end of the session, "This isn't an egalitarian ministry. I said 'No,' and I mean 'No.'" And that's where it stopped. 
The next week, the pastor and I sat down, and was reprimanded for not doing what they instructed me to do (even though they never voiced their opinion prior. So, benign neglect became active derision. I'm out.

The team was in agreement that this was within the congregation’s values. The overseeing committee was in agreement. The congregation was in agreement to implement this vision. But there was a stumbling point: The pastor did not agree that this was a value, or part of the vision.

Going to stretch a bit into the conflict between the Pharisees and Jesus, specifically Mark 8:14-21 and the “Yeast of the Pharisees:”

And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out—beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.”
Mark 8:15

The pastor was the “yeast keeper” of the congregation’s vision. And they empowered the church to thrive in its planning. But when it came down to engaging the vision, the pastor didn’t let it rise (bad bread reference), and engage in the Spirit-discerned vision. And it created a lot of tensions.

After my friend left (to the shock of many), the pastor tried to pull back from the more progressive aspects of the congregation’s values and identity. Their tenure lasted about a year more, and they announced that they would be leaving “because of unreconcilable theological differences.”

This story was told to me something like this:

All things have beginnings, middles, and endings. There was a church that was witnessing a changing of its population. There was a pastor who was witnessing a changing sense of call. Both were considering endings, with little vision for their future.

Their Conference Minister was concerned for both. Each had a good history. The church had served its community for 135 years. The pastor had guided four congregations in over 40 years of service. Too often, this Shepherd of Shepherds had seen doors close for good and stoles boxed for the attic. Each had their own story to tell, too. The church was “old mainline,” in a community that had seen changes in the its ethnic origins and cultural connections. The pastor had grown up in the South, served on the East and West Coasts, and was now in the Midwest’s Rust Belt.

When the congregation’s long-time pastor left for health reasons, the Church Council called a special meeting to discern their future. This wasn’t a “middle” meeting; it was to be a closure vote. Almost at the same time, the pastor contacted the Conference Minister that they were going to leave their current call and wanted to have a conversation about the future. This wasn’t a “middle meeting; it was a retirement.

Fearing for both the church and the pastor, the Conference Minister had an idea. If the congregation didn’t continue to meet before the vote, the outcome was sure. And if the pastor stepped out without direction, their health – body, mind, and spirit – was at risk. So the Conference Minister organized a “pulpit supply” relationship between the two.

But this temporary shepherd arrangement had a twist. It began when the Conference Minister gave each of them a short history of the other. They challenged the pastor and the church to get to know each other, and understand the gifts for ministry that were at their disposal.

Here’s what the church found they had:

• A building that was too big and too costly for them to maintain;
• A history of community service that could not meet their current expectations;
• A passion for racial and social justice (though they were of a population with historic privilege); and
• A sizable endowment that would “keep the place open” for another ten years.

And here’s what the pastor brought:

• A love for worship and contemplative spirituality;
• A history with leading racial and social justice organizations;
• A “blank slate” about the community, since they were new to the city; and
• A short timeline.

They sat down together, the pastor and the church, and started discerning what God was calling them to be and to do. And yes, they asked the third question: Who was their neighbor. To that third question, they realized that they no longer lived in the community – none of them. They commuted in on Sundays and complained about the lack of parking. This realization brought up another issue: their community partnerships didn’t serve the current community resident’s needs. So if they were to close and divest their assets to support the old neighborhood, they were going to need to discover who was best positioned to help. They postponed the vote, and set out a nine-month timeline to contemplate their calling.

This decision landed right in the pastor’s strengths and history. The pastor gathered a select team to organize the data. They took on the task of gathering the names of the community organizations around the church’s building. They found a rubric to judge mission impact and financial stability. And they met with every executive director that they could to know who they were personally and what the organization needed professionally. Here’s what they found:

• There were a LOT of smaller high-impact organizations serving the community. And a lot of them duplicated services of others;
• The community was changing, and rent costs were going up beyond typical annual inflation;
• The number of at-risk youth was staggering, largely due to the reduction of services through the local school district (who was also suffering); and
• Government funding was going to the larger, better organized agencies who did not serve the community directly.

The pastor and the team called a meeting of the congregation and a dozen of the executive directors. The Council President started the meeting with this sentence: “You are all doing good work in and for our community. We are not. There is no place with reasonable rent for you to house your work. We have a place. The grants and funding for programs isn’t forthcoming. We have an idea on where to get that.”

Over the rest of the nine months, this group gathered every other week think things out. The church would still be a church, but the building would house the organizations at a fair cost. The organizations would work to streamline and combine services to better serve the community. The church established a building trust that would take over managing the building; and a charitable trust that would manage inside donations and outside grants for the partner groups. A new organization would be created to accomplish the new vision with a board of directors would be established between church members and community elders. And this group would include the Conference Minister for their guidance to ensure a future that honored the intent and values that brought the venture into being.

So, the ending became a beginning. The church still meets monthly for worship on the first Sunday. And they meet on the third Sunday to organize the mission plan for the next month. They have leveraged their building into an “incubator” for social justice and community-based organizations. They recently added a music conservatory program (with the help of a local college) to serve the unmet needs of the area youth. Every once and awhile a new member joins the church, and they welcome them with joy. But that wasn’t the heart of their mission. Being a church for their community was.

In two of the Gospels, Jesus gives fishing advice to his fishers-of-people Disciples “Cast your nets on the other side/the right side…” (Luke 5:1–6; John 21:1–8).

It’s not like Simon, Thomas, Nathaniel, and James and John (who worked in their father’s fishing business) didn’t know how to fish. Something about how they were going about it just wasn’t working that day:

Simon said, “Master, we’ve been fishing hard all night and haven’t caught even a minnow. But if you say so, I’ll let out the nets.” (Luke 5:5, MSG)

It wasn’t what they were doing, but how they put the vision into effort. With a renewed vision and excitement to see it thrive into the future, an ending becomes a beginning, and like the Disciples “They filled both boats, nearly swamping them with the catch (Luke 5:7, MSG).