Page 5469 – Christianity Today (2024)

The country road was hilly and winding as Idrove to candidate at two rural churches/ The scenery was beautiful, with only an occasional house to break up the pastoral landscape. There were no shopping malls, no closely built housing developments. On this quiet Sunday morning I passed only one other car.

I did however expect to see some indication that I was re-entering civilization before I got to the first church. But there were no gas stations, no stores, no side streets. Suddenly the church appeared. It sat off by itself, surrounded by tall trees and a spacious lawn. Cars were parked around the dirt driveway. The building was quaint and small, very different from any church I had attended.

The service went well, and eventually I accepted the call to pastor this country church and its yoked neighbor five miles away. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. But I was not overly concerned, since I had a varied church background. I had actively participated in a large multi-staff city church. I had worked in a medium sized small town church. So I thought two small rural churches would not present any problems I had not already encountered.

“Who’s in Charge?”

A year after I arrived, as the honeymoon period drew to a close, the first major conflict arose. The church that owned the manse received some inheritance money, and decided to put it toward renovating the manse. Besides a new kitchen, bathroom, and carpet, the possibility of installing a wood-coal stove in the useless fireplace was discussed. Since the church was responsible for paying the heating bills, it seemed to be a simple and prudent way to cut down on rising fuel costs. The idea was especially attractive because of the abundant supply of wood and coal in the area.

The various improvements were presented well ahead of the congregational meeting, and no one voiced any opposition. At the meeting, each improvement was explained. There was little discussion, just a few questions about the budget figures. The entire list of improvements was unanimously approved.

The next week, however, I received a phone call from a member. Could I please come over and talk? When I arrived, she sat me down and politely explained that some women in the church thought it would be a shame to ruin a carpet with a wood-coal stove. Would I please cancel the stove and prevent any unnecessary commotion?

I was a bit taken back by this request and explained that a congregational vote had been taken, no dissent had been registered, and I had neither the authority nor the desire to alter a congregational decision.

I continued to receive phone calls from other members throughout the week. Each one had heard that Mrs. So-and-So was very upset about the stove. I offered to meet with anyone who wanted to discuss the matter after church the next Sunday. I explained again, to the seven who stayed, that I could not change anything. Proper church channels would have to be used to reverse the decision. Still, they repeated their objections to the stove. When I asked them why they had been silent at the congregational meeting, they replied, “No one likes to get up in front of everyone and make a fuss.”

The phone calls continued after this meeting, and the pressure increased. Finally, the session decided to put the money for the stove into additional kitchen improvements, and a crisis was averted.

The furor over the wood-coal stove initiated me into the way decisions are often made in a small rural church. The majority of members have belonged to the church for most of their lives; consequently they have a strong sense of ownership. Members who do not approve of something feel free to take matters into their own hands. In a larger church, the vocal minority is not as powerful. Three vocal members are less noticeable in a congregation of 200 than in a congregation of 50.

I was familiar from my other church situations with chronic questioners. But I was not prepared for the effect they can have in a small church. In two or three phone calls, the church government can be brought to a standstill. The issue of who controls the church—the dissenters or the pastor and the church board—becomes a tug of war.

The war becomes intensified because rural churches simply cannot afford to lose members. I discovered this when the sessions of both my churches decided, at my suggestion, to use a modern version of the Lord’s Prayer. Many people commented favorably on the change. One member, however, suddenly refused to come to church. He let it be known that he would not return until the traditional version was restored. I received the usual phone calls informing me of the member’s disapproval, urging me to change the prayer. The session then took a preference poll to gauge congregational opinion. Several people told me they preferred the modem version but voted for the traditional version because the member had threatened to leave. The traditional version was reinstated, and the next Sunday the delinquent member was back in church.

At another time I approached the church about trimming the rolls. The idea met great resistance. Mr. Smith might never come to church or contribute in any way, they reasoned, but if the church was in a real pinch he might help out if he were still a member. The limited resources of a yoked church can make otherwise efficient plans of action unthinkable. Even replacing an old church sign was resisted for fear of creating hard feelings in the people who built it thirty years ago.

“That Won’t Work Here.”

When a rural, yoked church looks in the mirror, it sees a church that is always struggling to meet the budget, frequently without a pastor, and perennially worried about declining membership. From this picture crippling feelings of low self-worth can arise, sometimes strangling inherent strengths. At these low points the church fears it will never amount to anything. Consequently, low expectations take the place of dreams and goals. The difficulty of finding and keeping a good minister underscores this fear, and the constant shortage of money gives further evidence. “We barely meet our yearly budget now. How could we ever afford a part-time secretary, or a dependable organist, or a vital youth program?”

After I had been at the two churches for a month, one elder’s relatives came for a visit and attended church. The elder mentioned during the next session meeting that one relative had commented, “That new minister won’t last long here. He’s too good.”

That remark was made by an outsider, but a year later at my ordination, a member presented me with a gift in front of both congregations. “We know you won’t stay here long,” he said, “but when you move on, remember us.” In one way these comments are very flattering to hear, but the attitude behind them hinders my ministry. If the church believes that I will not stay for more than two or three years, then it is a waste of time to start a new program, because I won’t be around to help see it through.

On top of this, I realized I was going through culture shock. Without being overseas, I was reaching across my middle-class suburban boundaries into another culture. Instead of station wagons and sports cars, people drove vans and pickup trucks. Instead of tennis and symphonies, they enjoyed hunting and country music. Instead of businessmen and lawyers, I was dealing with farmers and steelworkers. I was the only jogger in town. I dressed differently, and I talked differently.

These distinctions are not necessarily major stumbling blocks. But they can contribute to the quiet politeness of “You just don’t understand.” Being perceived as an outsider can bog down the process of building trust between the pastor and the people. It can increase resistance to new ideas. It can prevent an open relationship between the church board and the minister.

Another difference I had to cope with was the rate of change. A static rural community does not have the rapid change often experienced in the suburbs or city. The roots of people run deep, interlaced with those of their families, neighbors, and friends. Through marriage, everyone is related to someone, whether as a sister, cousin, or brother-in-law. If you were to make a genealogical chart of a small-town family, you’d end up with a briar patch instead of a tree.

It is common in a rural area to be born, get married, and die in the same town. Many church members have known each other since childhood. They have grown up and grown old together. The tradition and permanence people experience in their personal lives is naturally transferred onto the church. They expect the church to stay the same, just as other parts of their lives have.

I became aware of how deep the roots in a person’s life can be when I went to visit a farmer and his family. As we sat in his living room, he proudly related that the house had been built by his greatgrandfather before the Civil War. This farmer also worked the family farm that had been passed down from generation to generation. I was struck by the contrast with my own life. I had moved three times before graduating from high school and every year for the next ten years. I had experienced change of locale, of friends, of interests. For the farmer, change was much slower, much less obvious, like the growth of the large oak tree in the front yard.

In a transient urban culture, change is accepted, for the most part, as a way of life. In the rural community, change is basically distrusted. It is human to prefer things to stay the same, but in a rural church this tendency is accentuated because things have remained the same. Traditions are the anchors of church life. People depend on them. They know they can count on a community-wide Thanksgiving service. They can trust that at six o’clock on Easter morning there will be a sunrise service.

When I began preaching at the two churches, I emphasized the need each Christian has to grow in Christ. I expected them to come and ask how they could begin to change. Instead, the challenge sank like the proverbial lead balloon. People told me they liked my biblical sermons, and they appreciated my focus on Christ. But their comments baffled me when I did not see any desire for spiritual growth.

In reflecting upon it, I realized that they did not feel the need for inward change when their outward lives had remained so constant. The college students with whom I had worked in the city were confronted with a changing world. They were more apt to respond to the call for spiritual change.

Other topics, such as loneliness, alienation, and lack of purpose, met with little response because they did not address the felt needs of the people in church. The agonizing struggle by members of the rat race to find meaning in life is absent. People in a rural community have a calm acceptance about the purpose of their life.

“Why Don’t They Just Merge?”

A small town means a small church, a church that often cannot afford a full-time pastor. When I tell people I pastor two churches that are five miles apart, their response is usually, “Well, for heaven’s sake, why don’t they just merge?” I confess this is exactly what I thought until I saw how different two rural churches can be. In one sermon, I mentioned the difficulties of being a servant when it came to changing my daughter’s diaper. The first church interrupted me, breaking into laughter. At the next church, I said the same thing and paused, waiting for the laughter. There was hardly a smile to be found. A bit flustered, I continued.

From that point on, I began to understand the uniqueness of each church. One is warm and spontaneous, the other is reserved and formal. One is close-knit, the other is casual. One church is open to new ideas, the other church is convinced any idea will fail. Ministering to these two distinct churches means that I cannot totally meet the needs of either church.

With time to prepare only one sermon, I have to aim somewhere in the middle. I cannot tailor the sermon to the needs and problems of one church. I was not fully aware of this drawback until, one Sunday, I had to preach only at the first church. What a sense of freedom to address the particular strengths and weaknesses of that church!

Preaching is not the only area that is limited in a yoked-church situation. Though one church pays two-thirds of my salary, both churches expect the same amount of concern and time. The churches also try to give me identical treatment. Our first Christmas, one church gave us a dinner and presented us with a cash gift. Two weeks later, after hearing about the gift, the other church handed me a check.

Twice as many meetings and twice as many programs mean less time and decreased effectiveness. Every minister struggles with having enough time. Serving a yoked parish, however, is like having twins. The demands on the pastor’s schedule are doubled. I thought combining the churches for special programs would solve part of this problem—until I tried it. At a combined church picnic, 95 percent of the people were from one church.

The result of an overcrowded schedule is the frustration of doing a little bit of everything, but nothing very well. A yoked ministry works best when one church is much larger than the other. Then, the smaller church does not expect much attention. A minister I know has this kind of situation. At the smaller church he preaches and does nothing else. During the week he is free to concentrate fully on the large church.

What To Do?

• I slowly developed some ways of dealing with these unique problems. I’m learning, for instance, to distinguish between significant and insignificant control issues. Conflicts that do not have deep theological implications, like what color should the new sanctuary carpet be, are not worth fighting over. When I suggested cutting down some unwieldy bushes around the church, one member was adamantly opposed to the idea. Rather than create a conflict over such a trivial matter, I quietly let the suggestion drop.

But on important issues, the pastor needs to be firm if he is going to be a strong leader. When I discussed trimming the church rolls with the session, several members were against the idea. This was in spite of the fact that a sizable number of “active” members had not come to any church activity for five or six years. Because I believe church membership must be taken seriously, I persisted. Eventually the rolls were trimmed.

Distinguishing between what is worth fighting for and what is not conserves emotional strength. And now people know that when I do take a stand, it is not because of a personal whim but because of conviction.

• Counteracting the crippling effects of the rural church’s self-image takes more than the wave of a magic wand. A pat on the back is not enough to change an attitude that has not only been present for twenty years but also reinforced by other people. While looking for a minister, the pulpit committee of one yoked church encountered a church official who suggested they give up the search and close the doors. Simply telling that church once that it does have something to offer is not going to erase the belief that it doesn’t.

Over and over, I tell my churches in sermons, in committee meetings, and in individual conversations that I am glad to be their pastor. I take every opportunity to emphasize the potential of the church. I do not hide my enjoyment of the positive aspects of rural living-the close friendships, the deep loyalty to the church, the down-to-earth people. By taking an active part in family celebrations and community activities, I let them know I don’t feel as if I’ve been sentenced to Siberia.

I’ve tried to build their sense of self-worth by encouraging them to take risks. One church needed to put siding on their building immediately. They were used to spending only the cash they had on hand, partly because of a nagging fear they wouldn’t be able to meet the budget. Since they didn’t have enough to cover the expense of siding, they assumed they would have to let the woodpeckers continue their job of destroying the wood frame.

The presbytery offered a loan, and I urged them to accept it. After several heated debates, they finally agreed. Without much effort, the church paid off the loan within the interest-free year. This was amazing, because the sum represented 60 percent of their normal operating budget. This experience, more than verbal compliments, has begun to convince them they have a strong church.

• Taking community involvement seriously is another key to a successful rural pastorate. In a small town, the pastor who does nothing but church work excludes himself from some excellent opportunities to be with people. My ministry has been enlarged by joining the local emergency squad. One of the benefits of this has been meeting people in the community who don’t go to church. It has also given me a chance to work with church members in a nonreligious situation. I’ve gotten to understand the concerns of the town, which has helped me be accepted by the people as one of them. Our family has also taken advantage of an honorary membership at a nearby sports club. Home visitation cannot build the friendships that result from mingling with people on a casual and informal basis.

As for sharing the gospel, incarnational evangelism has proven more effective than a shotgun approach. People who have lived all their lives in one place are skeptical of someone coming in and “dumping” a message on them. But they do respond to a patient example. To do this, I’ve helped renovate a house, assisted a neighbor in stocking his woodpile, and enlisted another man to go jogging with me. While working together, I can communicate to them by actions, rather than just words, that the Christian faith makes a difference in daily life. One person was taken aback by my offer to help him paint his house. “No minister has ever volunteered to help me work before,” he commented.

The hardest thing for a rural pastor can be changing his expectations for church growth. I had been programmed to expect the rapid numerical and spiritual growth often found in suburban churches. I discovered through painful frustration that an eager response to evangelism and discipleship is not as likely to take place in a rural setting. I am slowly learning to accept the churches and their needs for what they are, instead of what I wish they were.

A swedish ivy grows rapidly; you can see it rise month by month. A rubber plant, on the other hand, grows steadily but much more slowly. Ministering in a slow-growing congregation can be difficult because the fruit of the ministry is not immediately visible.

Tact and Patience

Pastoring a yoked church requires the tact and sensitivity of a diplomat. To avoid jealousy and resentment, I’ve tried to care for both churches in the same way. When I plan a special fellowship dinner at one church, I plan one for the other church. I make sure I spend appropriate amounts of time with both churches and don’t play favorites. This does not mean that everything is identical. But outside of normal church routine, the programs for each church are equivalent.

I wasn’t sure if the churches noticed this, or really cared, until one Sunday I preached a particularly exhortative sermon. Afterwards, a member came up and asked, “Did you preach this sermon at the other church?” I could see the wheels turning in her mind like a sibling who hopes her piece of the cake is the same size as her sister’s.

The rural pastor also needs patience. Don’t give up. Ministering in a different culture to two separate churches is a learning experience. Weeding out the workable programs from the duds can only be done through trial and error. If one program doesn’t work, try another way to accomplish the same thing. A weekly Bible study did not work in my churches. The idea of a midweek Sunday school was discouraged by the session. Now I’m going to the women’s group and leading a bimonthly Bible study. It’s the same idea in a different form—but this one works here.

Finding the right ideas takes time. And the impact of one’s ministry may not be visible for several years. I’ve learned that some impatience is inevitable, but prayer helps me deal with that. In this regard, small-church pastors are no different from anyone else engaged in the work of the Kingdom. We pray for revival, for insight, for God’s will. And we pray that the rural church will continue to reach people for Christ.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

It’s ironic that Raymond Bakke, who grew up in the remote timber country north of Seattle, should find his ministry home in the boiling inner city of Chicago. But his educational journey from a rural high school to Moody Bible Institute to Seattle Pacific University to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to McCormick Theological Seminary to inner-city ministry taught him some important lessons about the effects of culture on leadership style.

From 1969 to 1979 he pastored Fairfield Avenue Baptist Church, an old Swedish church that found itself surrounded by Spanish and Polish groups struggling for identity. He realized that in order for this church to minister to its community, he had to learn all he could about the people in the neighborhood and retool his pastoral style to fit their needs.

In the process he helped start a Spanish radio program, a Spanish-language seminary, and, with Bill Leslie and Bill Ipema, the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE), which currently draws students from ten seminaries. In 1979 he left to teach urban ministries at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He’s a man full of energy and ideas for leading churches. As LEADERSHIP editors Dean Merrill and Terry Muck spoke to Ray, they could feel in every sentence the commitment to making local church ministry work.

In order to minister, what does a person need to know besides the gospel?

A person has to know a call to ministry. And a person needs to know how to preach the gospel. But a person also needs to understand the environment in which he’s called to preach the Word. We teach young ministers how to exegete the Word quite well, but we don’t teach them how to exegete the world. The pastor is called to preach in many different environments, some of them unique to modern society.

Can you give us an example?

We call Chicago an urban place. But urbanization as a process has pushed everywhere. For example, a student of mine took a church in Warrenville, Illinois, a town of 7,000 people. It’s about forty miles from Chicago and was founded in the same year—1834. Warrenville was planted, like many prairie towns, where the river and the railroad track met. My student wanted to know how to minister to these people.

So we exegeted the environment. We went to the cemetery. We checked the names, found the oldest graves, and followed families since 1834. Those families still live in Warrenville and form a core of traditionalists. But all around Warrenville these days are redeveloped corn fields; developers have transformed them into housing units, from tidy-tacky townhouses to quarter-million-dollar mansions. If you analyze these newcomers, you’ll notice that they are not incorporated—they’re atomized. They are not identified with old families but more by vocations. They are on a vocational fast track, so their identity is professional. Ask them “Who are you?” and they tell you what they do, not who they are. They are future-oriented rather than past-oriented. So urbanization has come to Warrenville. It’s happening everywhere. But the rural element is still there, too. The pastor has to exegete this. He has to understand that his task is to pastor a town in which the memory tradition and the family networks are the meaning systems for some of the people while, at the same time, vocational networks are the meaning system for others.

What are the hazards if you don’t take time to understand the environment of your ministry?

The danger is franchising. Too many seminaries today have bought into the McDonald’s philosophy. We learn how to make one kind of hamburger and then seek out the market that will buy that hamburger. The rest of the people go hungry—or make do with whatever they can devise. We teach programs at seminary that certain people will buy (usually people like us). But we don’t have anything for the rest. We need to teach pastors how to custom-build ministry; that is, how to move into a community, exegete the context, exegete the Scripture, and scratch where people itch.

You sound like you’re recommending a kind of pastoral choreography.

Yes. Do you remember John Wooden, the basketball coach at UCLA for many years? I admired him for many reasons. When he began his “ministry” of coaching, if I may use that analogy, he won a national championship with a team whose tallest member was only 6′ 5″. He had a fast-guard offense, a high post, and a lot of backdoor plays and quick screens, with players all over the court. Then he was fortunate enough to recruit a couple of seven-foot centers, so he totally changed his system. He went to a lowpost and strong forward system. And he kept winning championships. The goal was to win, not to run a particular offense. Wooden changed to incorporate the gifts of his players.

That is an example of a person who has pastoral skills. He doesn’t insist on preaching the same way everywhere. He doesn’t try to run the same church program in every context.

Can you teach that kind of flexibility?

I think it can be taught. Some personal skills are required. But if pastors feel good about themselves and their call, then they can let ministry happen. They can become aware that their role is not to do ministry but enable ministry to be done.

You pastored ten years in inner-city Chicago. Tell us how you exegeted Humboldt Park.

The first thing I did was get to know the loyal core that had kept that church alive over the years. Their urban church was now declining. It was losing touch with its community and was heavily programmatic, priding itself on programs that ran every night whether anybody needed them or not. Meanwhile, houses on the block were burning and the neighborhood was up for grabs. .

So I turned away from programs. That wasn’t easy for me to do. I had been an associate pastor in three churches during college and seminary and had been a master of programming. I was even given the Christian education director-of-the-year award by the local Sunday school association. I knew how to run programs. But if you’re going to catch fish, you have to change the bait and go where the fish are.

So although you object to franchising in the local church context, you like the idea of market analysis?

The thing that really taught me this lesson was reading the story of Henry Ford in Amitai Etzioni’s book Modern Organizations. He made a perfect car, the Model T, that ended the need for any other car. He was totally product-oriented. He wanted to fill the world with Model T cars. But when people started coming to him and saying, “Mr. Ford, we’d like a different color car,” he remarked, “You can have any color you want as long as it’s black.” And that’s when the decline started.

Back in Humboldt Park, I saw churches doing the same thing. Seminaries cranked out students with M.Div. degrees programmed to program the same thing everywhere. We have gotten into program franchising rather than the opposite skill: teaching people to go in and do what an anthropologist does in the jungle—learn the language, listen to people talk, and begin to communicate Jesus with concepts people already understand.

Did you try to run unsuccessful programs at Fairfield Avenue Baptist before you learned what would work?

I tried to run youth retreats at out-of-town camps. But I found out that when I invited some Spanish kids and black kids from the neighborhood to go, some white parents resisted. The camp retreat program didn’t work here.

So I went back to the basics. Eleven people ran the Fairfield church, the youngest of whom was fiftyfour. They provided 90 percent of the funds. I spent an evening with each one. I asked them three questions: “How did you become a Christian? What is your history with this church? If you could wave a magic wand and bring about a future for the church, what would it look like?” On the way home, I dictated my responses to those interviews and studied the transcriptions.

I was profoundly moved by those eleven people and their commitment to this church. At the same time, I realized they didn’t really want to change. Because the world outside their doors was fluctuating so dramatically, they wanted to grab the church and say, “I dare you to change it!” It wasn’t because they were inflexible people—as young people they had gone through a dramatic Swedish-to-English language change. But now, because they were proud of what their church had been, they were resisting another major change to make their church more relevant to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. They had come full circle; now they were the group resisting the change.

So their expectations of what the church should be were different from yours.

Yes. They wanted a shepherd to feed the sheep. I was up there saying, “Onward, Christian soldiers!” That’s what you call a conflict of images, of expectations. Both are biblical—in fact, there are almost a hundred different images of the church in the New Testament. The context a church finds itself in decides which models are appropriate. I decided that if the church was going to survive, I was going to commit myself to discipling one new board member per year to replace the ones who would be moving away. It would take at least five years before the board was convinced and committed to change. And that’s what it took.

So you were in effect replacing backward-looking people with forward-looking ones?

To some extent. But you need both. Robert Gordis says that much of the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament is written for the meantime. The meantime is the period between the great acts of God in the past and the great acts of God in the future. The task of the preacher is remembering that until Christ comes, the past is a present memory and the future is a present possibility. In terms of practical pastoral work, this means taking the ethos of a group of people—the great memories and traditions of the church—and showing how they can be translated into present-day deeds that best serve the future.

One way we did this at Fairfield Church was to hold monthly memory dinners, during which we could remember how God had blessed us. I began to lift up their memory. I had an old Swedish lady tell me stories by the hour of the great acts of God in the church’s past. Then when I was preaching about something contemporary, I could say, “Now, of course what I’m asking you to do is not new; this church did this back in 1902.” I became a broker of their memory, rather than somebody who was trying to take away the church and make them do things they didn’t want to do.

How did you draw in the neighborhood?

I spent one day a week “networking.” I went to all the pastors in the neighborhood, introduced myself, and asked them, “What is the most important lesson you have learned about being a pastor in this neighborhood?” Some of them took me by the hand and showed me the community—where kids hang out, where drugs get dropped, where things happen.

I also visited all the agencies in the community. At the police station, I asked, “What kinds of arrests do you make in this neighborhood?” I went to the schools and asked the principals, “What kinds of school problems do you have?” I went to the publicaid office and the legal-aid clinic. I went to forty-four agencies the first year.

I also visited businesses. I met presidents and personnel managers. They told me the history of their businesses, the way they related to the community, the problems they had doing business here. The barber, the gas station attendant, the person who runs the fruit market—these people can tell you better than anyone what makes the neighborhood tick.

Besides giving you a good feel for the neighborhood, did this networking lead to any other contacts with people?

In one case, the owner of a little factory with eighty employees told me he needed people who could run machines. Over the years, I sent him a number of people. In another case, someone walked in the office in desperate financial trouble because his social security checks weren’t coming. Well, I had been to the social security office and knew who to call there. So I cut through a lot of red tape very quickly.

Networking also made me street-wise to the con games people try to play on churches, especially young ministers. Because I understood that, I could say to a public-aid mother playing a rip-off game, “You know, I really admire you. You’re like a mother in the Bible, Moses’ mother. During a hard time, she let her baby son float down the river to a princess who eventually hired her to mother her own child. I have a feeling you’re a little like that.” There’s always a way to affirm a person without getting conned.

How else did you educate yourself about the people you were pastoring?

I studied ethnic backgrounds and cultural units. I was a country boy surrounded by strange people. I identified at least five groups I needed to study: youth gangs, Swedes, Appalachians, Puerto Ricans, and Poles.

The youth in the neighborhood all belonged to gangs, so I studied gang structure and how you should work with them. I learned these groups miss certain things in the mainline culture, such as a feeling of belonging to something. But when they try to create these things on their own they sometimes exaggerate them—and the gang becomes deviant.

I came to a church pastored by old Swedes, so I studied Viking history. I learned that it took 1,000 years for German missionaries to make Swedish Baptists out of violent Vikings. I studied the missions strategy used to bring about that conversion. And I preached about that on a day after two Puerto Rican kids were killed in our neighborhood and we had a riot. I said, “Who better than a Swedish Baptist church should be in the middle of this violent community? We’ve been through this before—on the other side. Maybe it will only take 500 years for us to convert Puerto Ricans.” That’s how I used people’s history in my preaching.

I also studied the Appalachians. I had a problem with them: If their kids got too involved in the church, very often the parents would pull them out. I couldn’t understand what was happening until I learned about clan structure. In the hills of Kentucky, the patriarch of a clan is very powerful. But in the inner city, he loses much of his power. I began to realize that as pastor I was competing with the father, who was feeling emasculated. So I changed the way I dealt with them.

When you pastor a clan culture, the significant events are weddings, funerals, fires, and fishing seasons—these get the clan together. I stopped seeing people as individuals and began ministering to a whole clan as much as possible.

So instead of picking off an occasional clan member, you hoped to bring the whole group into the church.

Yes. Our missionary strategy shouldn’t be to look around the fringes of a group for some disaffected person who is being disciplined by the tribe. If we set up house in the disaffected substructure of a cultural group, we never will touch the core of the people. We need to properly exegete the meaning system in the context of each people group so we can reach them all.

I studied the Puerto Ricans and began to understand their feelings of being used. Five European nations conquered Puerto Rico in a period of 300 years, using it as a military colony while they plundered South American gold. In the first year of their independence in 1898, we became the sixth outside power to occupy them. Now there are more Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland than in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico itself is about 65 percent public aid. No wonder the Puerto Rican culture is schizophrenic. Learning all this made me far more sensitive to their feelings of disenfranchisem*nt.

Learning the formal side of their history really affirmed them, when I could tell the great stories of Puerto Rico from the pulpit. The same with the Polish and the Irish. It built a great sense of identification with the church.

You don’t sound like you worry too much about hom*ogeneous units.

No, I don’t although in some cases it’s a useful principle. I had a student last year named Craig Burton who started a church in Chicago’s Loop. Before he started, he asked, “Who is unreached in the Loop?” He profiled a twenty-five-to forty-year-old bar-hopping, wine-and-cheese party, vocationally identified professional. After getting a feel for these people, he asked himself, “What would a church have to look like to reach them, and how would I have to pastor it?”

That’s using the hom*ogeneous principle to good advantage. I have trouble, however, when the principle is misused to resegregate the body of Christ. I’ve seen pastors work in just the opposite way Craig did. They say, “I’m going to find out what I’m comfortable with and then build a church out of those people.” That cuts the nerve of any sense of mission into the world. This country is internationalizing, and our churches have to deal with that. At such a time we can’t afford to cater to a seige mentality.

This has become especially real to me since we adopted a black son. One of my other sons brought him home one day, and Brian stayed. Eventually we went to court and made it legal. It was electric in the Fairfield Avenue church for the pastor to have a son who was not white. It affirmed a lot of things about our ministry. A church with a racially mixed membership roll can model care in a world of prejudice.

How would you translate the ministry model you used at Fairfield Avenue Baptist to the Loop church Craig Burton started?

I might take a group of them on a retreat and lead them through an exercise of designing a logo for their church. I’d give them four ground rules: First, the logo must be biblically and theologically sound. We’d see who they were spiritually, what they considered central to their beliefs. Second, the logo must have some sense of history. As I mentioned before, these people see themselves not as cultural or ethnic groups but as vocational groups. But even then, they bring their own historical baggage to any situation, and that will show up in various subtle ways. They may have been the protesters of the sixties, or involved with the Jesus people. Those experiences still affect their lives. Third, the logo must communicate God’s concern for people, the pastoral dimension. Fourth, it must be intelligible to the unchurched as well as to members.

After agreeing on a logo, we would discuss it. “Does this capture who we are? Is this really us?” If the answer is yes, then I would suggest using the logo to identify Loop Church in the future.

So exegeting the culture in this case means studying the tradition not of an ethnic group but a cultural one. A big part of the task seems to be making members aware of what they are.

People’s expectations are the givens of any ministry.

You must discover them for two reasons: so you can effectively speak to them and so you can make the people aware of them, if they aren’t already. You study the church’s history, read the annual reports, find out where they spent their money—all of which may or may not contradict what they say they want to do. You don’t even have to be in total agreement with them. In the hard churches, you might not be. But that’s where you have to start.

I want to train ministers who will pick the hard church, the unwanted church, the old church, the church that, without intervention, is going to die. This means we need to specialize on diagnostic skills—not prescriptions, but diagnosis, which is an art, not a science. I’m looking for students who will learn two skills: how to start churches where they don’t exist, and how to renew churches that nobody else wants.

Are some pastors better suited for this than others?

I don’t think so; you need to understand that you bring your own baggage with you. Very quickly you discover which of your values are cultural. It’s a struggle to discover that, but I assume it’s a good one.

Every pastor needs a support system, and for many young pastors, the support system they’ve grown accustomed to is impossible , to maintain. They must construct a new one. I’m part of a support group of ten people that meets every month for many hours, and about three times a year we go on an overnight retreat. We do an inward journey, pray with each other, talk, share intimately, and strategize for each of our ministries. That support group has helped me tremendously. I’m accountable to them, and they to me. I wouldn’t move from Chicago without discussing it thoroughly with them; we’re like family.

What if you are ministering in a place that is totally different from anything you’ve ever known; you’re called to Poplar Creek, Missouri, for example, and you’re from Boston. You’ve done your cultural exegesis, you understand the people and what they need. How much of a chameleon should you be? Should you buy a pickup truck and listen to country music?

It’s a missionary problem, isn’t it? You have clearly crossed a culture to minister, and you’re doing just what a missionary is doing. You’re stammering in a new language, trying to understand how people think, and trying to keep from thinking that your culture is superior. Yes, you may want to buy a pickup. Try out the culture. You may come to love it.

But what if you don’t come to love it? What if you hate it? Is something wrong?

Maybe the ability to be bicultural is a gift. So if you don’t have it, that’s God’s will. But I think it’s a more widely distributed gift than people allow for. It’s one I covet for myself and others. As Americans we need to be freed up from our monolingual style. We are a very parochial people. Pastors need to really give a church a good shot before they decide it’s not for them.

It must be difficult for a pastor to know when enough is enough, that he or she isn’t in sync with the church. What were some of the things you personally fought before resigning?

The success syndrome was one. I spent ten years at Fairfield Avenue, and the neighborhood looked worse when I left than when I came. I found that I needed a meaning system bigger than my experience. I came out of seminary with a very pragmatic, local-church theology, but I did not have the feeling that I was part of the worldwide kingdom of God. One day I read in James Glasse’s Putting It Together in the Parish: “I have learned how to exegete global significance out of the trivia of daily pastoral existence.” That helped me. I began to see a larger meaning system in my work. I saw that if I reached a mother through her son, and five years later he married a Christian, I had broken the cycle of a non-Christian family. That delivered me from needing to see immediate gratification and large numbers. It enabled me to work with integrity with a person, knowing that just one person discipled is extremely significant.

Every year we had some problems, so there were other struggles. It wasn’t the struggles that made me leave after ten years. I just felt God was telling me to move on.

Describe Fairfield Church in 1969 and 1979.

In 1969 we had about 100 members on the roll, mostly poor families. We had a fairly significant youth group but no middle class and no middle age. It was traditional Swedish Baptist. Sunday attendance averaged between 110 and 120. The neighborhood was just starting to change; we had a turnover rate of 70 percent on the block that first year. Many of the white people moved away, so the bottom dropped out of our traditional “market.”

Still we managed to survive, even grow a little. When I left, we had about 140 members. We had helped spawn seven Spanish daughter churches. If you added up all the ministry of Fairfield Church, we were touching at least 200 families a week. We had many ways of reaching out and touching people but never tried to pull it all into one building. Our theory was that in a diverse neighborhood like ours, smaller, multiple churches were the way to go.

In your chapter in Metro-Ministry, you wrote, “The cultural heterogeneity is so great that one must think small rather than big if one is going to reach the big city.” How should a pastor think small?

In one sense, every Christian needs to be part of a Billy Graham rally and join a whole stadium of folk in singing “How Great Thou Art.” I love it. But there’s also a familyness about Christianity that I strongly affirm. People desperately need to dialogue and talk back. So I would say thinking small is a way of becoming more human. Bible studies, prayer circles, support groups, and service organizations are very important today. Rather than becoming single issue preachers, we need to organize and minister to targeted groups of people doing specific tasks.

A pastor can’t meet all the needs in a church; a pastor can organize smaller special-interest groups to meet those needs. The way up for the church is to affirm a whole range of leadership styles and to allow smallness to create the intimacy where ministry can happen.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

It was early Sunday morning, and the furthest thing from my mind was what waited for me in my office. Two parents sat looking at me. “What are you doing with our teens?” It was an accusation, not a question. “What do you mean?”

“We’re talking about the two boys drunk at the young people’s picnic Saturday afternoon who got arrested!” “What? There wasn’t anybody drunk at that picnic.”

“You might as well begin packing, because after the board meeting tonight you won’t have a job here!”

And with that they both walked out. Talk about being astounded. A little checking in the high school department produced a different story. After we had split up, two of the senior high students went into another area of the state park and began throwing rocks at beer bottles. A park ranger came by and made them pick up the bottles and put them in his pickup. Then he escorted the boys out of the park. Somewhere in all of this, a parent saw the boys with beer bottles in their hands and the ranger “arresting” them.

Armed with this information, I faced the board meeting confident that all I had to do was explain things and be on my way. Was I ever surprised.

One parent in particular repeatedly attacked me and the youth program. With a shock I realized this guy wanted me fired. It was all the more unbelievable because his daughter had run away from home some time before, and I had spent hours talking her into going back. What was the matter with him?

Didn’t he know I was trying to help his daughter and his family?

Finally when the board decided I had somehow acted unwisely but didn’t need to be fired, he announced he was resigning, then walked out.

That was my first serious conflict as a youth minister. This year a young colleague called me late on a Saturday night and wondered if I had time for coffee.

He had been working at Grace Church about five months in youth and music. That evening had been his dress rehearsal for an hour-long Sunday morning presentation by his youth choir prior to leaving on a tour.

One of the more popular boys who had several important parts had arrived thirty-five minutes late. During the ensuing discussion, my friend told the teen he had wasted everybody else’s time by being late. “In fact,” he stated, “you have just cost us about fifteen hours of practice.”

The teen’s reply was less than reticent: “How would you like to lose fifteen more?”

There was a confrontation on the platform, and verbal abuse turned into a nose-to-nose stare. The youth minister was pushed, and he pushed back. Then he physically escorted the teen out of the church. When he walked back in moments later, his youth choir had picked up their things and walked by him without so much as a word. Several of the girls were crying.

A serious conflict in the youth group can evolve over a number of things, but the potential cost of the crisis is always about the same: one’s job and future seem suddenly on the line.

During this crisis a division arises about what should be done. Several parents and some teens feel the youth minister needs to be replaced. Several families think about quitting the church. And some strongly support the youth minister’s actions and program.

I call this kind of conflict a fracturing crisis. The issue fractures the youth group into segments and damages it to the extent that the future life of the group and the career of the youth minister appear to hang on just this one issue.

Fracturing crises are usually generated over three main areas:

1. Conflict over goals.
2. Conflict over programs.
3. Conflict over leadership.

Positive Aspects of the Crisis

Fracturing crises are not abnormal in youth ministry. While I was working on this article, several youth ministers told me about early flare-ups.

One had sent a teenage girl home to dress more appropriately for an all-day outing. He felt her blouse was too revealing. Her board-member father did not. The youth minister lost.

During an all-night lock-in, two boys had a fight over an insult to one boy’s girlfriend. Before the youth minister even knew what was going on, he had to rush a teen to the hospital for emergency stitches. The church lost one family and a youth group member who showed real promise.

The crisis does not mean that the group is bad, nor does it mean that the youth minister has failed. Sooner or later a crisis comes to everyone, and the youth minister does not need to feel that he or she is unqualified to lead young people.

In fact, the resistance, the hours of discussion, and the debate about “The Problem” can actually be a strategy for self-organization by the youth group. On a deep level the group is growing up and learning how to deal realistically with its problems. Unless it can learn to work together and resolve conflict, it will never develop an effective ministry. What play does for children, conflict seems to do for teens.

The long-term fruit of weathering a fracturing crisis is not a near-defeat but something to build upon. The youth group has proven that it will now be able to accommodate itself to unusual stresses it might face on the way to some of its ultimate goals.

The best aspects of crisis are summed up by this statement: Every crisis has within it the seed of spiritual growth and maturity. An experimental attitude and good leadership can bring fruit out of the conflict.

Anticipating the Crisis

If fracturing crisis is a normal part of youth ministry, then there should be some signs that announce its coming.

Perhaps it was a feeling or an intuition, but when I walked into my office and saw those parents, I was not surprised that it was those two. The youth leader who took his teen to the hospital after the fight told me the two boys had been vying for leadership positions at school and in the youth group. The teen who walked out of the choir had just broken up with a girl he was supposed to sing a duet with.

Although the intensiveness of the fracturing crisis may make it appear sudden and unpredictable, there are usually some warnings.

• One of the early indicators is unexpected sarcasm or passive disobedience on the part of a teen. Later there is a selective withdrawal from youth activities. I have had teens attempt to get others not to come and go so far as to plan an alternate activity to draw a portion of the youth away from the church activity.

• A troubled teen may seek out other staff members. Without revealing confidences, these colleagues can then alert you to potential trouble. Open lines of communication with other leaders in the church, both professional and lay, are important.

• The youth group may begin to take sides on an issue, and more and more time will be devoted to dealing with it. Several teens, parents, and the pastor will want to discuss it with the youth minister. People who have no contact with the teens whatsoever will be upset and concerned. Some of their comments are the ones I have found hardest to take.

• And for those who need a two-by-four over the head (which I occasionally do), the group life and program might become centered around one problem. Communication becomes issue-oriented, and discussion is charged with emotion. Sometimes that emotion seems aimed right between the eyes or just a little left of center in the middle of the back.

It is at this point of the conflict that many youth ministers consider resigning in an effort to resolve a conflict that does not seem Christian. They may hope that if they leave, the church will resolve the issue and get back to being a church. This is a false hope. The conflict and its intensiveness is nervewracking, but it needs to run full course for the youth group to profit from it. Quitting (or being fired) during the first serious conflict short-circuits the growth process.

Leadership in a Crisis

The youth minister may be tempted to do two things to reduce conflict:

Approach One: place the planning of youth activities into the hands of the hostile clique, hoping to appease them.

Approach Two: retreat, taking what remains of the youth group and freezing the hostile clique out of activities.

Both approaches will usually fail. The first is not what the teens and any hostile parents really want or need. No matter how loud they have complained about the program or its leadership, sudden responsibility for the success or failure of the youth program will immobilize them. The loss of face through failure to get anything going in a hostile environment will probably terminate future participation—and the youth suffer.

The second approach is also destructive. All teens need to share responsibility for the youth program. When teens have no way to meet such psychological drives as the need to be liked, the need to do something important, or the need to win, the result is anxiety.

The anxiety of teens being left out of youth activities will express itself destructively at the youth leader. A teen who appears to be the instigator of the fracturing crisis needs to be loved and wanted in spite of what he or she has said or done.

When we were leaving our second youth position in Missouri, I had spent most of a day packing the truck and thinking about various teens. I had made very little progress with one in particular and, as near as I could tell, had failed to impress him at all. He had been a constant source of irritation.

Just as I finished packing, he called.

“Rick, this is Steve. I want you to know that I’m sorry I was so much trouble to you. You’ve been more help to me than you know. I’ll miss you.” CLICK.

That call made me vow never to give up on a teen. I must go out of my way to communicate about youth activities that are open to him or her, keeping the doors open.

Obviously, it is never smart to discuss one teen’s problem with another teen. Any negative comments that a youth leader makes “in confidence” to a teen are invariably repeated throughout the youth group. A label such as “troublemaker” will find its way into the next board meeting, and the youth minister may be called on to explain it

Sources of Potential Conflict-and How to Deal with Them

1. Parents. Fathers and mothers need to be constantly informed about what the youth group is doing. They want to know how much the activity will cost, how it helps the family unit, and when their teens will be home.

Don’t depend on your teens to tell their parents this information. They’ll forget or just not do it. If parents don’t know when an event ends, for example, you’ll get the blame when the teens aren’t home. I have been called twice in the early morning hours by parents wanting to know why their teen was not home from the church activity. In each case the activity had been over for hours and I thought their teen was at home. Since then I clearly communicate to parents when things will wrap up.

2. New members. A new teen introduces new problems and new relationships into the social structure of the youth group. Sudden infatuation by a member of the opposite sex may break up two friends, leaving one out in the cold. The new teen may present a leadership threat to someone insecure in his or her position. When new teens walk into a group in conflict, they are forced to choose a side or else withdraw from the group almost without knowing what is going on. Carefully integrate new members into your group and be especially alert for relational problems.

3. Prejudice. The best way I know to reduce prejudice within a youth group is to stress the value system expressed by Christ in racial and social areas.

4. Budget. Youth programs should not become so expensive that they set up artificial barriers. Any program that requires a series of fund raisers should be structured so that every teen who is going participates in the fund raising. When it becomes evident that an elite group can afford anything without having to work for it, the lines have been drawn for a future fracturing crisis between the haves and the have-nots.

5. Courtship. When couples break up, the ripple effect lasts several weeks. Parents tend to stay out of this sort of conflict, but the youth minister finds that impossible. Both sides want to tell their side of the breakup, and if it is over a third party, they want you to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. Remain supportive but neutral.

Achieving Group Unity

Unity within the youth group is an outgrowth of the decision to do fun and spiritually rewarding activities together. A warm atmosphere can be promoted by group-centered and goal-oriented leadership. Group leadership results in more involvement by all members of the group and a greater chance of common consent in ultimate matters. Moving away from an authoritarian position also reduces the potential for fracturing crisis.

An overnight or three-day retreat can be used to build the bonds of fellowship. Structure activities with this goal in mind. Choir trips and mission service trips are less likely to help a youth group resolve a fracturing crisis. In fact, the trip can become a center stage for the crisis to be reviewed and intensified. Wouldn’t you just die if you and your group were at another church to sing, and one of the teens stood up to preface a song with something like “Some of the kids in this choir have really never liked me,” (insert long look at one particular teen) “but this song really helped me ….”

Here are the seven golden steps to group unity:

1. Be willing to listen to the other side—and compromise.
2. Eliminate, or at least reduce, status differences.
3. Avoid excessive leadership control.
4. Clearly define group goals.
5. Praise, thank, and take notice of contributions and work.
6. Be positive.
7. Be dependable.

The Youth Leader’s Devotional Life

The devotional life must be maintained. Youth leaders who find themselves involved in fracturing crises suddenly find out a lot about what their faith really means to them and to how they live. Prayer and Bible study become supportive, uplifting experiences. Christ is a rich example of how to live with pressure and stress. The leader who remains faithful and teachable finds Christ meeting personal needs.

Conflict is written into the message of Christ. In church history, the call for total commitment has always brought the deepening of Christians and the departure of those who turn away and follow him no more. In my front desk drawer is a three-by-five card with a pair of quotations. One side says, “When it gets dark, the stars come out.” On the other side is a quote from Norman Vincent Peale: “It is the individual who has a deep faith and gut courage who comes through life’s tough battles with a victory instead of a defeat.” Youth leaders who abide in the Word experience personal spiritual growth during their own times of crisis.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

The senior minister of a large church asserted that the most trying, heated conflict he had experienced in more than two decades as that church's pastor was about changing the light fixtures in the sanctuary.

That large, vital congregation was not known to be quarrelsome. It was comprised of people considerably above average in educational background, breadth of experience, and economic status who often relied on their outstanding staff and lay leadership in decision making. However, they would not allow changes in their traditional décor.

Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, wrote: Be not the first by whom the new are tried. Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

In your church you will likely have those who seem determined to be the last to lay the old aside. On the other hand, there may be some who, although not avant-garde, are out front in their willingness to change when they feel change is for the better. The issue at which these two groups find themselves at odds may be no more crucial than moving a picture on the wall of the narthex or slightly altering the order of worship; yet such trivia may produce serious discord and strife and may even result in alienation and schism if left unchecked.

Difficult Changes

To be sure, some changes are extremely difficult to bring about in almost any setting. Church leaders should be conscious of the magnitude and ramifications of such changes before attempting them, however essential and justified they may be.

Moving a church from one location to another. Many members will be attached to the old building and site, regardless of the rationale for moving. Memorials, stained-glass windows, and other objects about which people are particularly sentimental only compound the problem. Members sentimentally attached to an edifice have been known to stick with the building even though their own congregation had moved out and a congregation affiliated with a radically different denomination had occupied the old building.

Merging with another congregation. A merger is difficult to accomplish even if it involves two congregations of the same denomination; it is particularly intricate and exacting if congregations of different denominations are considering union. Mergers may involve radical changes in name, location, building, organizational structure, leadership, and program.

A building program. Any building program by a congregation requires consummate management skill to avoid disruptive conflicts. The decision to build, the method of financing, the choice of the architect and the architecture, the letting of contracts, and the selection of furnishings and colors are just some of the decisions that may cause serious problems if not handled skillfully.

Redecorating or refurbishing the sanctuary. Redecorating an existing sanctuary may pose as many problems as building a new church. The acceptance of a change in the color of the walls may be trying enough, but the rearrangement of chancel furniture or changes in the pews can be traumatic for many.

One church changed the color of the walls in spite of strenuous objections; later when they changed the walls back to the original color, the same people objected again. Such objectors may simply find it difficult to accept change in almost any form.

Displacing a volunteer who has served in one spot for many years. Removing from office a volunteer of long standing can be a perilous action. The worker may be a greeter, a Sunday school superintendent, or a Sunday school teacher. One dare not assume that a volunteer worker, particularly of long tenure, wants to be replaced, even if she or he volunteers to step aside.

Changing the schedule of the worship services or the Sunday school hour. Any change in the Sunday morning schedule will prove disruptive for some. One proposed change may be advantageous for parents and disadvantageous for couples without children, or vice versa. Another proposed change may be attractive for those interested only in worship on Sunday morning. Some families may prefer Sunday school and worship scheduled simultaneously so that the parents can be in church while their children are in Sunday school, but others may find such a schedule objectionable because the parents want to attend Sunday school as well as worship, and they want their children to do both.

Revising the liturgy of the worship service. People grow accustomed to an order of worship. One church in my city hasn't made a perceptible change in its liturgy for twenty-five years. Another congregation, seeking to "get with it" a few years ago, decided to overhaul its order of worship to achieve freshness and make it more appealing, but after a short time it went back to the old way because the congregation felt uncomfortable with the changes. Innovative happenings can make worship more exciting. Nevertheless, worshipers tend to feel more secure when surrounded by the familiar, and changes in liturgy are usually hard to bring about without unrest and strenuous opposition.

Replacing any items that have been given by particular families in the church. Items such as an organ, piano, cross, picture, communion trays, or paraments are difficult to replace without destructive conflict if they have been donated by particular church members or families, even if replacement is badly needed. The donors, their families, and their friends are likely to oppose any change that would replace any article with which they are historically or emotionally identified.

The list could be almost endless, but the above changes are among those most difficult to make. I list them not to discourage you from seeking change if change is needed, but to emphasize how difficult such changes are to bring about. If you try, do it with your eyes wide open and with every skill you can command.

Here are several things you can do that might help facilitate change:

Know the Local Tradition

Whenever a new minister is called to a pulpit, traditions are inevitably upset. Even if the new minister resolves to make no changes in the church for some time, members may sense the uprooting of tradition because the new leader differs from previous ministers. For this reason it is vitally important for a minister to be informed about his or her predecessors.

A minister may find out what style of leadership has been embraced and employed in the church. Did any predecessors have a personality cult, relying largely upon charisma and charm? Were they guardians of traditions and preservers of the status quo? Were they autocratic, insistent upon calling the signals and "running" the church? Did they involve staff and laypeople in the decision-making process?

Of course a new minister can give too much attention to a church's history. One should not evaluate people on the basis of how they related to previous ministers. The vigorous opponents of one minister may be staunch supporters of another. The peripheral members of one administration may become a part of the church's nucleus under different leadership. One should never allow oneself to be victimized into inaction by old feuds, old scars, and old problems.

Because traditions are difficult to break without stubborn resistance and travail, ministers and laypersons are sometimes attracted to embryonic congregations in order to avoid the idolatry of sacred cows and the stifling words "We've never done it that way before." It is true that starting from scratch can more likely satisfy the itch of pioneer spirits to be daring and innovative. But even though churches with virtually no history are not as bound by the past as old ones, the new churches are far from entirely free from the restraints of tradition. Members can bring prejudices and traditions into the newly created fellowship. Some will want to do it the way it was done in their old home church, however inept that church may have been.

Evaluate the Congregation

Make the church aware through an educational process that other churches do it differently (if this is the case) and that a change, therefore, would not be as radical as some might surmise. To accomplish this, one might survey other churches by means of a questionnaire. Or one might suggest that members visit other churches to see for themselves how well new approaches have worked. The educational approach will not work in every instance. Sometimes the reluctance to change has such an emotional basis that members will not even be open to an educational process. Nevertheless, it can prove helpful in some circ*mstances or in concert with other strategies.

Change in Stages

If possible, make the change slowly or on a temporary basis at first. For example, if a church has been accustomed to having business suits in the pulpit, and the new minister prefers to wear a robe, the minister is likely to provoke substantial opposition if he or she simply begins wearing a robe at each worship service. However, if the minister begins wearing a robe at weddings and funerals held in the church's chapel, and then wears it in the sanctuary only at the worship service on Higher Education Sunday, the changes may produce little opposition or controversy. The minister may be able to make the transition so gradually that the congregation is scarcely aware. Business firms under new management often use such a strategy. The old name of the firm gets smaller and smaller as time passes while the new name looms ever larger. The public may be scarcely aware that a change in ownership and name is being made until it is a fait accompli. By then the public may have thoroughly accepted the new name.

Cultivate the Traditionalists

Be sure to give special attention to those whose egos are wrapped up in the status quo or who are particularly resistant to change. If your church has an old organ that needs to be replaced, don't assume that the donation of a new organ by some generous family or group will cause all the faithful to rise and sing the doxology as one. Some may be offended, even if changing from a small electronic organ to a four-manual pipe organ. They would be offended because they gave some or all of the money that bought the old organ in honor of their late husband.

If someone in your church wants to give a large sum of money for a cross to be designed by an outstanding artist to replace a wooden cross made by a retired carpenter, don't assume that the congregation will welcome that change. The retired carpenter may be much beloved, and many may have grown accustomed to the simplicity and starkness of that wooden cross.

A thoughtful visit may cause those who would otherwise oppose a change to be cooperative and supportive because their feelings were considered and heard prior to a decision. At the least such a visit may prevent their vigorous opposition; it may even elicit their enthusiastic support by involving them in the process for change.

If those who are likely to object to a change are persuaded in advance of the vote to support it, who then will block or oppose the change?

A minister became convinced that additional educational space was essential to the continued growth of the church he was serving. He felt that the congregation would for the most part enthusiastically support the program. He could think of only two board members who would be likely to oppose the building project. He did not foresee their opposition as hard-line or intransigent, but he did believe that the immediate reaction of these two conservatives in board meeting, when the building committee made its report, would be "I'm against it; we can't afford it. "

The minister decided to call on the two men to brief them on developments to that point. The two viewed the plans with keen interest. When the board meeting was held to vote on the question of erecting additional educational space, these two men vied for the floor to make a motion to approve the building project.

The longer a church goes without making any changes in policy, program, facilities, accouterments, or tradition, the more difficult it is to make changes. It's like creasing a hat. When a hat is relatively new, it is easy to change the location of the crease, but after that crease has been in place for months, it is difficult to create a new one.

If you are in a church that has not been innovative, concentrate at first on changes that are least likely to provoke heated opposition. Don't make changes just for change's sake, but recognize that the more you are able to change, the more you are likely to be able to change.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Where Is Wisdom To Be Found?

Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction, by James L. Crenshaw (John Knox, 1981, 285 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Robert K. Johnston, associate professor of religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

There has been wide scholarly interest shown in Israel’s wisdom literature in the last 20 years. A number of significant studies have been produced (von Rad, Brueggemann, Murphy, Scott, for example), but no generally accepted introduction has surfaced. James Crenshaw, a professor of Old Testament at Vanderbilt and one of America’s leading wisdom scholars, has attempted to fill the gap with this volume. But despite its usefulness, the book has sufficient problems to make unlikely its widescale adoption as a textbook, particularly among evangelicals.

Crenshaw begins by tackling the difficult problems of definition. How is wisdom’s multifaceted nature to be characterized? For Crenshaw, wisdom distinguishes itself in its “conviction that men and woman possess the means of securing their well-being—that they do not need and cannot expect divine assistance” (p. 24). Instead, “the Creator [has] left human survival to its own devices” (p. 19).

This secular characterization of wisdom leads Crenshaw to adopt several questionable conclusions. First, rather than creation theology being understood as basic to wisdom’s posture, the perceived focus on the Creator within wisdom literature is viewed as an intrusion upon wisdom’s self-sufficiency. That intrusion increases until Yahwism and wisdom are finally joined.

Second, having understood wisdom as the search for order that would assure well-being, Crenshaw sees skepticism as an inevitable result wherever reality is faced honestly and the limits of human reason recognized. Such skepticism arose early in Israel’s history, according to Crenshaw, and became a viable alternative to Yahwism, particularly among “those who failed to discern evidence that God actually controlled history” (p. 208). But surely the questioning of God in Old Testament wisdom literature is far from the skepticism that Crenshaw posits. Goethe and Rousseau, rather than Job and Qoheleth, seem ultimately to be Crenshaw’s sources.

Third, the biblical traditions about Solomon’s wisdom are judged by Crenshaw to be “fantasy” (p. 44): “Every account teems with material typical of popular legend and folklore” (p. 49). Aside from raising important issues concerning biblical authority and inspiration, such a conclusion seems unwarranted given the data. The description of Solomon’s nature wisdom, for example, is consistent with an early date, as is the linking of wisdom and riches. Furthermore, the text’s clear intention seems historical.

Finally, in an effort to divorce wisdom from Yahwism, Crenshaw downplays any influence by wisdom on the law and prophets. While correct in doubting whether Isaiah and Amos were formerly sages, he fails to deal adequately with the clear interaction that does exist.

Although Crenshaw’s skeptical conclusions seem unwarranted by the biblical texts, his discussion nevertheless has much to offer the discerning reader. Particularly helpful are his discussions of the individual wisdom books (although Song of Songs is omitted). Proverbs is understood as enabling the Israelites to cope with life; Job and Ecclesiastes as empowering them to face sickness and death; Sirach as integrating sacred history and worship into sapiential discourse; and Wisdom of Solomon as preserving the wisdom heritage by transmitting it in a new Hellenistic world view.

Crenshaw’s notes are extensive and his selected bibliography extremely useful. This book will challenge your thinking. Even when you disagree you will find yourself being stretched.

The Modern Cop-Out

The Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism and the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness, by Carl A. Raschke (Nelson-Hall, 1980, 271 pp., $18.95), is reviewed by George W. Jones, director, religious programs, and professor of higher education, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.

Gnosticism, that heresy against which the ancient church struggled and largely triumphed, has been reincarnated in the new religions of our day. Carl Raschke, professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, argues this thesis comprehensively and persuasively by applying philosophical and theological analysis in order to understand Eastern-oriented and psychotherapeutic cults.

Taking seriously the content of the new religions, as well as their function in human society and personality, Raschke holds that Westerners “are all becoming Gnostics of a sort” (p. 243). Especially does he see Gnosticism as a very attractive alternative for the intellectual community with its declining faith in rationality, historical progress, a benevolent and understandable universe, and a perfectable world society. Even among mainline liberal churches, Gnosticism seems to have a special appeal, probably for the same reasons. Idealism, certainty, and a kind of spirituality can, thereby, be maintained apart from a return to Christian orthodoxy.

Raschke identifies the common Gnostic threads in some 50 philosophical/religious thinkers and movements over the last two millennia. These are as varied as alchemy, Christian Science, kabbalism, nazism, and the new narcissism. He finds in each at least one of the common threads or basic presuppositions that make up the skein of his Gnostic hypothesis. (1) They have “a preference for ‘cosmic insight’ over empirical caution and scrutiny.” (2) They follow a “recourse to elitist notions of self-salvation.” (3) They look “to the occult wisdom of the past for inspiration.” (4) They have “a prepossession with the evil of the existing order, with the fatality of life in the present” (p. 24). Thus, saving oneself from a doomed order through a hidden wisdom into a new state marked by timelessness and changelessness becomes Raschke’s working definition of Gnosticism.

Raschke is better at diagnosis than at prescribing solution. However, he closes his book by sounding an alarm: the Gnostic trends in our day are dangerous. A retreat from “the ambiguities, contingencies and incalculable factors of human existence” (p. 243) are not only a Christian heresy but also social treason. He calls on people of faith to correct the Gnostic mistranslation, “the Kingdom of God is in you,” to the textually accurate one, “the Kingdom of God is in your midst.”

Raschke is writing for a scholarly audience, albeit one that needs not share his disciplinary specialties. Many ministers and faculty, who are trying to understand the significance of the cults and the occult in this latter quarter of the twentieth century, will find this book a valuable tool. To be aware of an opponent is the first step in preparing to engage him.

The Reality Of Reconciliation

The Ministry of Reconciliation: A Study of Two Corinthians, by French L. Arrington (Baker, 1980, 1978 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Paul Elbert, postgraduate student in New Testament in the University of London, King’s College.

At the beginning of this century the British theologian James Denney described 2 Corinthians 5:14–21 as the locus classicus on the death of Christ in Paul’s writing. Denney was sure that wherever one began in the gospel story, he would inevitably be led to the Cross.

He thought substitutionary atonement was the most obvious teaching of the New Testament, believing that God’s offer of assurance of salvation to sinners was an assurance rooted in experience and the best constraint to discipleship.

In his last book Denney noted, “Just because the experience of reconciliation is the central and fundamental experience of the Christian religion, the doctrine of reconciliation is not so much one doctrine as the inspiration and focus of all.”

In citing this quotation as a key to the church’s life and witness (p. 27), French Arrington, the gifted American New Testament scholar who teaches at the new Church of God School of Theology, takes up the theme of reconciliation in a popular and practical exposition of II Corinthians. The concept of reunion of the separated is applied to every level of our personal relationships, displaying a deep understanding of Paul’s pastoral agony as he attempted to restore genuine fellowship in that most spiritual of his letters.

Those reconciled to God are themselves to be reconcilers in that faith does not keep silent. But this testimony should be strictly honest and free of exaggeration. Truthful speech is one of God’s graces (6:6–7a). Any superficial testimony that disregards the real nature of sin and minimizes the Cross is not the gospel of Jesus and Paul. Since Christianity then is a religion of relationships, Paul’s feelings for the Corinthians can serve as a model for us when alienating experiences arise.

The sympathy with which the author handles the motif of power in weakness is a tonic for faith. Paul’s hardships and sufferings did not at all indicate a lack of ministerial success. In fact, he boasted in weakness. How strange that is to our modern values! “God cannot help or use self-sufficient people but only those who have a deep dependence on Him. Where there is weakness and openness to divine grace His mighty power comes clearly in view” (p. 167).

Yet more deference could have been given to the painful physical ailment or thorn (12:1–10) as the means of making God’s power evident in weakness. It would have been helpful to state explicitly that it can be God’s will for a believer to experience physical illness. Resignation and obedience can then set one free to love God and others.

This is a serious book for serious times, but it is vibrant and alive. Its short, clear sentences are penetrating and easy to read. I believe it is the best lay person’s commentary on II Corinthians in print. In its contemporary relevance, it may even surpass the older (1958) entry in the Tyndale series. The attractive topical format holds the reader’s attention, and the bonus of its numerous grammatical insights strengthens the discussion. Pastors looking for study material for Sunday schools or house groups will certainly be well served.

What Is Christian Art?

Signs of Our Times, by George S. Heyer (Eerdmans, 1980, $5.95, 98 pp.), is reviewed by Calvin Seerveld, senior member in philosophical aesthetics, Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

This book contains the Gunning Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh in 1975; each lecture takes about 10 modest pages of print. The style is engaging, and Heyer selects specific artists for comment. He makes limited points, and does not pontificate through easy generalizations.

Humans are created by God to need images as well as ideas (p. 9), but modern man has turned images into idols to satisfy his senses (p. 4), or to have art serve as a religion that has no creed but the secular salvation of our technological society (p. 21). However, when the premillennial ideology of the Russian constructivists and U.S. artists of the 1930s ran amuck (p. 25), says Heyer, the exhibitionist art of “action paints” and the gnostic culture of happenings and “conceptual art” became the introverted, substitute rationale. “Consequently, our culture has bred an elite, a cadre of gnostic priests, the elect, who dispense to the masses the arcane wisdom embodied in art. Most of the wisdom is foolishness, of course, in perfect fidelity to its subject matter, but it is spoken and heard in an awesome aura of authority” (pp. 31–2).

Heyer wishes to correct the Protestant tradition that usually has disfavored art (pp. 3, 60), by developing John Calvin’s passing comment that “sculpture and painting are gifts of God” (Institutes, I, xi, 12). His basic thesis is that “beauty always gleams in the creation, and we can find it” (p. 41).

Heyer calls himself a Calvinist, but the fabric of his reflection is basically structured, it seems to me, by the Beauty theology of Thomas Aquinas, with an updated bow to Maritain, and especially to Gilson. The positive half of the book, as I understand it, is an apology for secular modern artists who have used “the resources that their Maker has provided … ‘fittingly’ in their efforts to add to our world objects whose beauty I, at any rate, see no need to defend” (p. 54). In spite of their ideology, Heyer means, when Léger or the cubists produce beautiful art, they are crypto-servants of God. “The beautiful objects that men make bear their own testimony to Jesus Christ” (pp. 53, 42).

I think this position and line of argument will find favor with many evangelicals who are reassessing the stance of the (Protestant) church toward art.

Since Heyer says his statement is tentative, perhaps the following problems could engage us all in discussion:

1. Can aesthetic theory resting on the traditional concept of beauty (which, incidentially, inclines one to be partial to classical Greek statuary as the artistic norm [pp. 43–4]) ever escape a natural theology of sorts, where art and artists by nature witness to the beauty of God (p. 46)?

If one adopts a covert natural theology, certainly his Calvinism is gone. But more important, I think, one misleads people in their understanding of what is going on historically in modern art.

2. Can we Christians find ways to recognize that Matisse and other gifted artists have been used, perhaps, as God used Cyrus (cf. Isaiah 45) to face Christ believers and disbelievers with ways God would have us know, without making Matisse and Picasso naturaliter Christians, whom Heyer says prefigure the new earth in their art (p. 58)?

Heyer’s indictment of mainline modern art as a gnostic idolatry may be largely correct. But if that is true, then his conversation with it is curiously uncritical and congenial.

Thomas says correctly somewhere, I recall, that bad arguments for a good thesis really undercut the truth. For us to have a sound base and perspective from which to assess secular art, and to motivate and understand art that will be truly sensitive to the lordship of Jesus Christ we will need, I believe, not theological essays on modern art (which speculate on Jesus’ beauty), but a down-to-creaturely-earth, Christian philosophical aesthetic theory.

Muddle In The Middle

The Forty to Sixty-Year-Old Male, by Michael E. McGill (Simon and Schuster, 1980, 298 pp., $11.95), is reviewed by Creath Davis, executive director, Christian Concern Foundation, Dallas, Texas.

Michael E. McGill’s book is based on the results of a four-year major research effort focusing on middle-aged men and their crises. Male midlife crisis literally means changes in a man’s personality in midlife. These are substantive and occur rapidly, giving them a dramatic and even traumatic character. Such personality changes alter the way a man views his world and the way he behaves toward it and the people in it—wife, children, friends, employer, employees. Powerful spin-off consequences affect everyone related to the male in midlife crisis, and the author deals with these in excellent fashion.

Out of his research, McGill describes the shortcomings he sees in many contemporary treatments of the subject. He then attempts to present the current knowledge and information about midlife crisis and its causes and effects, both positive and negative. There are firsthand reports in each chapter of men who experienced a midlife crisis. The stories of the people who were affected by the changes these men underwent are told. McGill then discusses what someone going through a crisis period should do, and what steps can be taken to prevent a midlife crisis. The author also describes the kind of supportive action that can be taken by individuals involved in one form or another with a man undergoing a midlife change.

An example of the practicality of McGill’s book are the five steps found in every case where resolution of the crisis was successful: (1) recognition; (2) acknowledgement; (3) consideration of the consequences; (4) choosing to change; and (5) integration of the change.

Interestingly enough, the author states that it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of all men between the ages of 40 and 60 will never experience a midlife crisis. A common characteristic of these men is that their identity is not threatened by the events of midlife. They have multiple sources of identity and are therefore less vulnerable to loss of identity in midlife. The author suggests that to help prevent a serious midlife crisis, a man should find multiple ways to define who he is.

Briefly Noted

The following is a pot pourri of church history, drawn mainly from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. These centuries yet speak for those who have ears to hear.

The Continent. Forerunners of the Reformation (Fortress), by Heiko Oberman, illustrates the shape of late medieval thought from key documents. Helpful introductions begin each section. An excellent treatise, certain to be discussed, is The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (John Knox), by Paul D. L. Avis. Three Luther studies are: Martin Luther (John Knox), a standard work by James Atkinson, with a new introduction and now in paperback; Luther: On Ministerial Office & Congregational Function (Fortress), by Gert Haendler; and Luther & His Mother (Fortress), by Ian Siggins. The Best of John Calvin (Baker), compiled by Samuel Duran, is a topical survey of Calvin’s ideas, finally in paperback.

A sadly encouraging, yet highly instructive, book is The French Huguenots: Anatomy of Courage (Baker), by Janet Glenn Gray. Challenging in a different way is The Autobiography of Madame Guyon (Keats), edited by Warner A. Hutchinson. Puritans and Libertines (Univ. of Calif.), by Hugh M. Richmond, looks at Anglo-French literary relations during the Reformation. It is a learned and very interesting book. On the Glaubenslehre (Scholars Press) is F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s two important letters, newly translated, analyzed, and explained by James Duke and Francis Fiorenza.

Great Britain. A massive and definitive study is Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Univ. of Minn.), by Richard L. Greaves. It is hard to imagine how this book could be improved on. The Banner of Truth continues its Works of Richard Sibbes with Volume 3 on 2 Corinthians 1. Martin Lloyd-Jones said of this author, “I shall never cease to be grateful to Sibbes who was a balm to my soul.” The Call of God (Cowley), by Robert B. Shaw, looks at the theme of vocation in the poetry of Donne and Herbert, and provides a nice introduction to these poets. Two helpful reprints are Out of the Depths: The Autobiography of John Newton and The Heart of Wesley’s Journal, both by Keats Publishing.

Introduction to Puritan Theology (Baker) edited by Edward Hindson, a valuable reader of mainly British writers, is now in paperback. Scottish Methodism in the Early Victorian Period (Edinburgh Univ./Columbia Univ.), edited by A. J. Hayes and D. A. Gowland, is the correspondence of the Rev. Jabez Bunting (1800–57). Here is firsthand insight on a neglected subject.

The United States. An absolutely fascinating study is Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard (Univ. of N.C.), by Norman Fiering; it is a penetrating look at Puritan thought. Jonathan Edwards to Aaron Burr, Jr. (Edwin Mellen), by Suzanne Geissler, traces the development of thought from the Great Awakening to Burr, providing the religious and intellectual context needed to understand the enigmatic Burr. Samuel Hopkins & the New Divinity Movement (Christian Univ./Eerdmans), by Joseph A. Conforti, is a first-rate study of a complex phenomenon.

The apostle Paul will not allow a pact of peace with sin.

Recently i reread the first chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. I was increasingly disturbed to discover how far theology has moved away from the teachings of the apostle. This became obvious first in Paul’s proposal of the primary subject of his letter: the justification of the sinner (1:17). Theology today seems to be in the process of replacing sin and grace with rich and poor as the basic polarity of biblical thought.

In its exclusiveness, this new hermeneutical grid also represents a reduction of the basic antithesis of good and evil, an organic part of the doctrine of justification. Evangelicals, too, have recently begun to interpret the whole of Scripture from the viewpoint of this new hermeneutical principle. With a time lag of some 15 years, they repeat, as it were, that development in the World Council of Churches: we seem to be saying again that political and economic liberation must come first, worship later—a sequence allegedly established by the Book of Exodus.

Saint Paul is no longer in favor. However, in my view, Christ does not create the impression in the Gospels that he is reducing his message to the rich/poor polarity. His call to repentance, in fact, is addressed to everyone, though for the rich it may mean something different than it does for the poor. In the passages on property and riches, the primary concern is the relationship to God. Possessions often become the object of idolatry; therefore, it is God who is robbed of loyalty in the first place, not the poor.

Nevertheless, today we tend to adopt as motto: “At a time of global social crisis the God question should be put on ice for a while.” From a biblical point of view, this is a terribly perverted perspective. Scripture holds that whenever justice is done to God’s concerns, then the poor will find justice also. God is the solution to the social problem. Whenever the rich man finds God, the slave finds freedom (Philemon!), and the poor his means of sustainment (Lev. 25). The betterment of social life is not achieved without God.

Today we see God made practically redundant in theology and the church. He becomes the “forgotten factor.” This forgetting of God in our generation is the reverse side of our overall worship of man. Our day and age resemble Paul’s indictment exactly: “although they knew God they did not know him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom. 1:21). We did receive the truth. We were shown the divinity of God; but we perverted it and established the deity of man, of nature, of the visible. In this process we came to deify and worship possessions, sex, nation, power, and so on. God is being replaced everywhere in human thinking. Forgetfulness concerning God is the signature of our time.

In view of this, we as Christians are faced with the task to re-present God: to throw up the question of God everywhere, and to look concretely for the honor and service of God. In short, we have to restate and reapply the first commandment. We need to reintroduce the question, “What does God say in our situation?”

If we fail to call humanity to repentance before the presence of God, we too will be reckoned among those who are accused: “No one understands, no one seeks for God” (Rom. 3:11). One of the great services Karl Barth rendered to the church was when he insisted in 1933 on theology’s task to keep the God question first, even in view of the demand of “national resurrection of Germany” for attention and assent.

Another critical area where today’s theology seems at odds with Paul’s teaching is the assessment of the present state of humanity. In Romans 3, Paul continues, “All have turned aside … no one does good, not even one” (v. 12). That all are sinners is a judgment Protestant theology will no longer pronounce over humanity. We have learned to speak instead of “solidarity” with all men. Today, the predicate “sinful” is altogether rejected as a manner of moralizing that is unworthy of Christian theology.

Paul, however, does not think in terms of theological or merely platonic predicates. He describes the reality of man. He certainly operates on the presupposition (Rom. 2:12) that “All who have sinned … will perish,” and he insists that there will be “a day of wrath” and “a day of judgment” (2:5, 16). Again this is something to which most modern theology does not hold. We did away with the concept of the wrath of God 150 years ago when Schleiermacher decreed: There is no such thing as God’s displeasure over a sinner. The idea that a person might “perish” or be “lost” is thought of today as fundamentalist and in bad taste. Theologians are either silent about God’s judgment or replace it by a theory of the universal grace in Christ. That Paul should even think (Rom. 2:16) of Christ as sometime judging the secrets of men, and that this warning of judgment should be part of the gospel, is taken as a strange and unheard-of paradox by theology today. The best one will do with this passage is immediately to interpret judgment as equal to forgiveness.

Theology relegates the announcement of God’s judgment to obscurity and fails to see that by so doing it actively buries the source of that central ethical concept of human responsibility. If, however, we are no longer responsible to God, it is very doubtful whether as individuals we will ever seriously accept a responsibility before society. In abolishing the concept of judgment we also abolish the Christian idea of human responsibility.

A third point is that Paul and the modern theological consensus are largely at odds with each other over his stark formula of “those who by patience in good works seek for … eternal life” (Rom. 2:7). “To seek for eternal life” is really lost in Christian ethics. The horizon of eternity has become almost totally irrelevant. We even claim that orientation to eternity might create a mindset of other-worldliness, and we would then be oblivious to the needs of people around us or forgetful of the task to do good works. The horizon of eternity certainly does not produce that result for Paul. As did Jesus before him, he startlingly relates doing works of mercy to eternal life. We would do well to allow them to teach us again instead of regulating revelation by our own concepts of pure doctrine, symmetry, or contradiction!

Moreover, in this context we might also let Paul remind us of the relevance of “good works.” Some Protestant theologians immediately become suspicious of the term because it might impinge on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. They need to rediscover the balance in Paul himself, from whom they received that doctrine. Others deprecate “good works” because for them, nothing short of social revolution will do. They, too, alienate Christians from their own viable basis, Scripture itself. All kinds of Christians would be helped if we recovered what it means that our behavior should be characterized as “seeking eternal life by patience and good works.”

These are just a few examples of the growing alienation between theology and Scripture. That silent process of deterioration of theology, of the teaching of the church, must not go unchecked. It is not a matter of one school of theology, or of one party in the church, versus another. The whole of Christian teaching is too important: theology can make or break a nation. Also, with Hannah More we believe it is not good to cast odors upon a stream when the source has been polluted.

But it would be the cleverest trick and the direct poisoning of the well if atheism and human fantasy were allowed to run theology and to determine the teaching of God. Then everything would be turned upside-down. It would be the master lie whereby suspicion of corruption would be the least feasible, and by which the “Prince of this world,” who still parades his pretensions, might best rule over humanity.

Against this nightmare the prayer, “Hallowed be your name,” must include the petition for a re-Christianization of theology in our generation.

Dr. Bockmühl is professor of theology and ethics at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Most believe that sermon preparation and delivery are the most rewarding aspects of their profession.

A survey conducted among Protestant ministers from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North and South Dakota included this question: “How important do you consider the weekly sermon? How much time do you spend in its preparation? Do you feel free to discuss controversial subjects in the pulpit?”

All who answered this question considered the sermon to be of utmost importance. Some placed it second only to handling personal crises in the congregation. Most pastors agreed that preaching the weekly sermon was their opportunity to strengthen, renew, and enable the believer. They also saw it as the time to arouse the unconverted and those who lack spirituality and faith in Christ.

“My most important duty in speaking,” one pastor wrote, “is to equip the saints, giving them a feeling for life, lifting them up.” Another said it was the chance to proclaim, to teach, to motivate, to give hope, and “to build a fire under people.”

“The sermon is my one opportunity to give a logical presentation of the faith without interruption,” said one pastor. “It may contain the only ideas and insights people hear about their faith.” What is the basis on which sermons are prepared? Showing how theology and the teaching of the Bible can change and improve everyday living is the method most pastors use in sermon preparation. “It must be more than theological; it must be practical,” several said.

But the pastors were divided over whether controversial subjects should be discussed in the sermon. “The sermon should basically be God’s Word and not controversial issues,” one pastor wrote. “Lay people need time to grow spiritually according to their needs, not to deal with controversy,” was the opinion of several.

Some pastors use controversial subjects only if they can relate the subject to the Word of God and their congregation. “I would rarely talk directly about abortion,” one wrote, “but I would talk a good deal about the high regard a Christian must have for life.”

Some pastors, when they find themselves boxed in over discussion of controversial matters important to their community, present both sides only when they can relate the issue to the Scriptures. Most pastors felt that politics and personal controversy should never be discussed. The church’s need for money should seldom be discussed. Sex, if the subject is discussed at all, has to be “handled very carefully.”

Those who felt free to use the pulpit to discuss any subject did so because “the Old Testament prophets never backed off from controversial subjects.” However, these pastors did say there were certain topics from which they backed away because of specific prejudices within their communities or churches.

One pastor felt that because the sermon is a monologue, controversial topics should be saved for fellowship or teaching sessions where lay people could have an opportunity to participate and give their views.

Choosing the sermon topic and then deciding how to go about delivering it is a risk-taking venture for every pastor: it is the Sunday morning worship service that exposes him to the most people in the shortest time. Sadly, many lay people use the sermon during this “prime time” to judge the total effectiveness of their pastor. Probably this is the reason that for some pastors, preparing and preaching the sermon is the most frustrating and difficult part of their job.

“One has to be so careful these days to use the right gender, the right ethnic vocabulary, the right—you name it. The free spirit of enthusiasm has been stymied because everyone is looking out for Number One, and that is contrary to the teaching of our Christian faith,” one pastor wrote.

Another advised those who were uninspired or found it difficult to prepare sermons to do more reading. “You can’t pick up a newspaper or the Bible without knowing that the world, the community, the church, the families, the youth, the races, the nations, the sexes, the economy—ad infinitum—are problems that involve persons. Where there is a right or a wrong, a good or a better way, God (and therefore every religious person) has a concern.”

Most of the pastors agreed with this view and considered preaching the sermon the most enjoyable part of their job. “There is an excitement in giving a good sermon,” one said. “In part, at least, I am an actor; I am disturbed by babies crying and any other noise, by lack of eye contact with the congregation, and obvious apathy.”

Some pastors were bothered because people did not seem to listen “as well as they used to.”

How long does it take to prepare a good sermon? Ideally, “one hour of study should be spent for every minute in the pulpit,” said several. Some could prepare a sermon in fewer than 10 hours, but most needed from 15 to 20 hours a week to do this. One said, “The ideal sermon would probably take 40 hours to prepare; I usually spend about 6.” Another said it took from five hours to forever to prepare a sermon. Only one pastor said he always used (someone else’s) prepared sermons.

Most pastors try to plan their sermon topics in advance. Everything they study, read, do, see, and think as they go about their daily and weekly work then feeds into these sermons, which may be many weeks, even months, away. One man said, “I am a verbalizer, always talking to myself. It seems I am in constant rehearsal for the next sermon.”

It is usually the younger ministers in their first parishes who spend the most hours in sermon preparation. But with experience, the time spent is less. “After 20 years or so,” one pastor said, “I have come more and more to trust that the Holy Spirit will help. He has. My time of preparation has decreased and I believe the quality of my sermons has improved.”

GLORIA SWANSON AND JEANNE WARD

Mrs. Swanson is a free-lance writer living in Hallock, Minnesota; Mrs. Ward is a former teacher of English and Latin, who lives in International Falls, Minnesota.

Tom Key is wholly at the disposal of his many roles.

on the surface of it, a “cotton patch” rendering of the gospel might appear to be an unlikely business. After all, the gospel is surely a simple enough affair for us all to understand, and it is no harder for us to shift our imaginations over to first-century Palestine than into Oz, or Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. We are the sort of creature who likes to be beckoned away to some other time and place. Otherwise, what is the attraction of “Once upon a time in a far off land”?

However, there is another element at work in the gospel. How shall we say it? We might attempt it thus: even though all stories are in one sense or another “the story of my life,” yet the gospel really is that story. The places (Bethlehem, Bethany, Caesarea Philippi, Golgotha, Olivet) are there in Palestine, but they are also real points in the experience of the Christian soul. The geography of the gospel is at one and the same time the geography of the heart. And this is true of the events that occur in the story: the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Epiphany, the presentation in the temple, the fasting in the desert, the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension—they are all events in the pilgrimage of the Christian soul.

If this is true, then there is no end to the ways in which this story may be translated into local and personal situations. There is a paradox here, of course. An Eskimo or a Saxon peasant or a Bantu or a Young Life kid may be helped by having the story told in familiar pictures that touch on his own life. But on the other hand, he must also be told what a sheepfold is, or what a cross is. Those elements must always be there, one way or another. So we may say that the story is infinitely “translatable,” but also infinitely intractable. We may change the imagery for the moment; but we must also keep all the old imagery. (For modern people, for example, there might be some proximate sense in which we might speak of God as “chairperson”—heaven help us. But sooner or later he must be known as Father and King, even though those are notions alien to modern imagination.)

This is a long way of leading up to a drama review. But it is germane. Cotton Patch Gospel is now playing in New York at the Lamb’s Theatre. Starring Tom Key (well known to thousands of people for his one-man show on C. S. Lewis), and based on Clarence Jordan’s cotton-patch version of the Gospels, the show is a winner.

You tramp around rural Georgia, through Valdosta, Malone, and Two Egg en route to Atlanta (read Jerusalem), with the narrator (Saint Matthew/Tom Key) and Jesus (Tom Key also—he plays more than two dozen roles), accompanied by the four “Cotton Pickers,” a country/western/bluegrass group who play fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, and bass fiddle, and act as crowds, disciples, and other extras.

If you are like this reviewer, you might think you prefer the lofty imagery of the abbey at Cluny or some such place when you indulge your reveries on Christian topics. You might tell yourself that country and western is not your scene. If you are like this, then drop everything and go to the Lamb’s Theatre in New York. You will be regaled. Your feet will be tapping and your fingers will be snapping. And then maybe even your tears will be starting, over the late Harry Chapin’s music, sung and played with irresistible ebullience by Scott Ainslie, Pete Corum, Michael Mark, and Jim Lauderdale. If you do not see the whole rural South incarnate in Pete Corum as he hunches lovingly over that bass fiddle, and if you do not love it, then something is wrong with you.

Tom Key is an actor to watch. His portrayal of C. S. Lewis was fascinating and powerful, but there were some small elements in it that seemed a bit more Key than Lewis. He seems now to be moving in the direction that all real actors must aspire to, namely to be wholly at the disposal of the role itself. It is a bravura performance. He must be at one point John the Baptist railing on the sinners, with the veins standing out in his neck; at another, Christ raising the dead girl and asking her if she’d like some breakfast; and at yet another, a cynical Georgia politician (read petty official in Jerusalem). He does it all, with vigor, suppleness, and authority.

Dr. Howard, author of numerous books, is professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Profits are tithed; no bargain loans, though.

The well-known saying, “There’s nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come,” expresses the enthusiasm that has greeted this country’s first Christian bank, located just east of Portland, Oregon.

Stewardship Bank of Oregon, a state-chartered, full-service commercial bank whose stockholders all confess Jesus Christ as Lord, is nearing its first anniversary. It opened Friday, March 13, 1981, with a capitalization of $1.6 million. Although banks take up to three years to break even and start making a profit, Stewardship Bank is breaking even now, according to its president, Richard Wells.

What separates this bank from the rest of the crowd is that it gives 10 percent of its profits to Christian schools and organizations. Furthermore, its 350 stockholders tithe their dividends, sending more money into Christian work. The idea has caught on, say bank officials, and not only has the bank attracted depositors from around the world, it has received a shower of press coverage from the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine to the Sidney (Australia) Morning Herald.

When the bank organized, the first $10 share of stock was set aside in the name of Jesus Christ. It took some time for the bank to grow from an idea among Christian businessmen to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) member with one thousand accounts. “A lot of groups think we just got together, formed a bank and away we went,” says Wells, “but there were a lot of organizing necessities.”

The incentive for the bank began in August 1977. Bob Laughlin, the owner of Western Food Equipment Company in Portland, was in serious trouble when a major Portland bank that had extended $300,000 in credit to his company told him to find another bank in 30 days. Western eventually picked up financing elsewhere, but Laughlin saw the need for a bank more sympathetic to smaller businesses.

At the same time, Laughlin, a member of the development committee for Judson Baptist College, an evangelical school in The Dalles, Oregon, was aware of the problems the school was having in raising money without the cooperation of a commercial bank. A Western employee asked him why Christian banks did not exist, and Laughlin had no answer.

With the help of like-minded businessmen, Laughlin and a group of Christians, many of them small business owners, began working toward developing a bank operated by Christian principles. His wife, Milli, who now handles new accounts, did most of the research and writing needed to obtain a charter and zoning clearances, and the interior decorating for the new, $500,000, 9,400-square-foot building. The bank, with its tastefully decorated, glassed-in, blue-and-red Colonial-style interior is situated next door to Western’s offices.

Stewardship Bank’s name is derived from Webster’s dictionary definition of stewardship as business management. Scripture exhorts believers to be good stewards or managers of what God has given them, and according to bank officials, to give away 10 percent of the bank’s profits is good management. The bank’s symbol, a sheaf of wheat, is carved on the door bars. Its motto is “In God We Trust.”

The bank’s last major hurdle before opening was obtaining FDIC approval. This came after weeks of delay over controversy surrounding the bank’s requirement that stockholders sign a covenant confessing Christ as Lord and agreeing with the bank’s purpose “to further the work of Jesus Christ.” FDIC directors refused to approve such a covenant until they were shown the range of religious inclinations of the prospective stockholders, and state banking commission officials said the covenant was legal.

The stockholders come from 20 different denominations and 200 churches, including Catholic and Seventh-day Adventist. Five pastors are stockholders, one of whom serves on the 11-member board of directors. As for the clients, they do not have to be Christians to bank there.

“The question is never asked,” says Wells. Yet, the message of Christ comes across. Customers have been known to confide personal problems to the tellers, who sometimes pass out religious tracts; there are copies of a Christian newspaper in a news rack in the lobby; and the staff meets before office hours once a week to pray for 15 to 20 minutes.

“A lot of people come in and just want to talk,” says Wells, a Baptist and former chief lending officer of the Bank of California in Portland. “As for some individuals with financial problems, we can spend more time with them than at a usual bank—not meaning that we’ll be an easy mark, but we can offer some advice.”

As the bank was being formed, the question of Old Testament prohibitions against usury came up. “We have no plans for low-income financing,” says Wells. “We need a proper yield for our loans. We’ve been very competitive, but usually our rates have been lower than our competition.”

“During our organization, we questioned whether Christians should be involved in banking at all,” says Laughlin. “Unlike secular banks, we funnel profits to Christian organizations. We don’t see any problem with the Old Testament usury law, as long as we are sharing profits with Christian schools.”

One of those schools is Judson Baptist College, which will get the largest share of the bank’s tithed profits. A number of bank stockholders graduated from Judson; Laughlin is on the college’s finance committee and a retired Judson vice-president manages Stewardship’s marketing.

Other recipients of Stewardship’s bounty include Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland, Campus Crusade for Christ, a local television ministry, Young Life, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, the National Association of Evangelicals, and three private Christian schools in Oregon.

The idea does appear to be catching. Similiar banks are organizing in Wheaton, Illinois; Billings, Montana; and in the Los Angeles area. While traveling on behalf of Western Foods, Laughlin spends his free time meeting with contacts across the country who want to see a stewardship bank in their city.

They try to counter liberal churches that finance socialism overseas.

People in Washington are sitting up and taking note of a new organization, the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), founded just last spring, but already making waves in church and government circles. Recently it was the object of a secret controversial investigation paid for jointly by agencies of the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ.

Scores of luminaries representing church, government, and private agencies, along with dozens of reporters, gathered at a luncheon in Washington last month to meet and listen to the recipient of the institute’s first “Freedom and Democracy” award: Nicaragua’s embattled Catholic primate, Archbishop Obando y Bravo of Managua.

The prelate was chosen, say IRD officials, because he has courageously resisted totalitarianism on both the Right and the Left, striving to achieve democratic ideals in his country.

The institute is basically the brainchild of itinerant evangelist Edmund W. Robb, 55, of Marshall, Texas, a leader of evangelical causes in the 9.7-million-member United Methodist Church (UMC). Yet its executive committee includes such heavyweights as Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus, not usually associated with evangelicals, and Catholic scholar Michael Novak. Other top IRD backers range from Lutheran sociologist Peter Berger of Boston College and Jesuit James V. Schall of Georgetown University to evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry and historian Richard Lovelace of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Some are Democrats, others are Republicans. Political neo-conservatives and liberals alike belong.

“Religious allegiance is critical,” says Novak. “The IRD is a religious organization of Christian clergy and laity concerned about the extension of democracy everywhere in the world—and about efforts by some church bureaucracies to funnel church funds and ideological support to nondemocratic movements.”

It is this latter aspect of accountability that apparently led some alarmed United Methodist and United Church of Christ officials to commission a $6,000 investigation of the IRD by Eric Hochstein and Ronald O’Rourke, two independent Washington researchers with congressional staff experience.

Curiously, the pair produced a 50-page report on the IRD’S history, membership, and aims without interviewing any of the principals. Their paper, circulated at the National Council of Churches’ general board meeting in Cleveland last fall, and now known in IRD circles as “the Snoop Report,” focuses on past political activities of a few of the IRD’S leaders. It erroneously describes the institute as a “special project” of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” founded in 1973 by moderate Democrats following the landslide defeat of George McGovern. (Novak and others on the IRD’S board in fact campaigned for McGovern. The pair’s error is apparently linked in part to the institute’s temporary shelter under the tax-exempt umbrella of the Washington-based Foundation for Democratic Education, whose president, lobbyist Penn Kemble, serves on the IRD’S executive committee.)

The institute’s roots go back to the so-called Jessup Report, a “preliminary inquiry” of United Methodist financing of controversial organizations and projects. It was drawn up in April 1980 by United Methodist layman, David Jessup, a Washington researcher with the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) and a socialist activist during his student days in Berkeley. His 26-page report gives details of United Methodist funding tilted in favor of alleged nondemocratic totalitarian-inclined groups.

Jessup issued the paper to buttress two reform petitions he wanted to see enacted by the 1980 UMC General Conference. At that conference, he met Robb and other members of Good News (an evangelical movement in the UMC), who helped obtain passage of parts of the two petitions. For months afterward, UMC officials and editors heaped criticism on Jessup, charging that he failed to take into account political realities with which the church must work, and insisting that church-agency spending is done according to open democratic procedures.

Robb kept in touch with Jessup, and last April called a meeting in Washington of leading religious figures who shared his and Jessup’s basic concern about church financing of groups opposed to democratic ideals. Out of this meeting came the IRD. Its funds initially came mostly from two grants: $65,000 from the Smith Richardson Foundation, and $50,000 from the Scaife Foundation, a source of much New Right financing.

The IRD has a Washington office and staff, and has produced booklets on the church in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It has also published a landmark statement on “Christianity and Democracy,” drafted by Neuhaus.

Robb, the IRD’S acting executive director, is active on other fronts. In 1976, following a Good News conference on “The Crisis in Theological Education” in the UMC, he founded the Foundation for Theological Education. His aim is to finance (up to $8,000 or so per year per student) the doctoral studies of promising evangelical scholars in the UMC who might help bring about theological renewal along evangelical lines in the UMC. So far, 19 scholars have taken part, including Chip Hayes, who earned a Ph.D. at Emory University and now teaches New Testament at Yale.

At first, the UMC theological establishment, led by the widely respected Albert Outler, opposed Robb, who ironically does not possess a seminary degree himself. But Robb persuaded Outler of the validity of his cause, and the eminent theologian now serves on Robb’s board of directors (as do UMC bishops Earl Hunt of Lakeland, Florida, and Finis Crutchfield of Houston).

Robb’s foundation also sponsors a triennial colloquy at Notre Dame designed to “expose liberals to first-rate evangelical scholarship.”

If liberals in the UMC are nervously looking over their shoulders these days, people like Robb and his colleagues may be to blame.

Denied U.S. Visa, Paisley Storms Into Canada

Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland’s colorful minister-politician, brought his volatile mix of Orange Lodge politics and fundamentalism to North America last month. Denied entrance to the United States, the irrepressible preacher simply came to Toronto—80 miles north of the American border—where he was besieged by American television networks clamoring for interviews.

Ostensibly in Canada to preach at his Toronto Free Presbyterian Church, he did speak there twice on Sunday and once at a midweek meeting. The presence of many eager news media people and anti-Paisley demonstrators, however, made even those church meetings into “media events,” which gave him a wider public platform from which to blast the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Pope, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and those who urge moderation (compromise, according to Paisley).

“We have seen souls saved and been informed on the situation in Northern Ireland,” the congregation’s spokesman told the closing meeting on Wednesday night. According to reports, 10 or 12 people responded on Sunday evening to Paisley’s evangelistic invitation at the close of the service.

Much of the five-day period in Toronto, however, was devoted to a press conference, newspaper interviews, and Canadian and American national television interviews.

The major purpose of the visit, Paisley told the press and his church audiences, was to counter “IRA propaganda and lies” and to alert North Americans to the danger of bankrolling violence and death through financial support of IRA terrorists. He promoted and distributed a book, Ulster: The Facts, originally printed expressly for his American visit that was vetoed by the State Department.

Meetings at the church and at the Tuesday night rally in the Orange hall featured gospel songs, militant hymns, Scripture reading, and a revivalist atmosphere.

“Protestants we started, Protestants we continue, and Protestants we are going to stay,” Paisley told his Orange audience. “There will be no change.” His address was frequently interrupted by enthusiastic applause. As he spoke, about 200 demonstrators paraded outside with placards denouncing Paisley and the Fascists. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cameraman was stabbed in the hand with a flagpole during a scuffle.

In press interviews, the outspoken preacher condemned the appointment of a British ambassador to the Vatican as unconstitutional and “a black day for England.” He also lambasted the Pope’s planned visit to England.

He criticized the North American news media for preoccupation with concern over armed Protestant groups (which he defended) and a glossing over of IRA atrocities, which, he said, made defensive measures necessary.

Paisley told his Wednesday night church audience that a conspiracy had been under way for years to eliminate Protestants and Protestantism from Ireland. The papacy, ecumenists (“deluded Protestants and IRA apologists”), and ecumenical evangelism were witting or unwitting participants in the plot, he told the 350 who packed into the suburban church.

Two IRA supporters, Danny Morrison (the group’s director of public relations) and Owen Carron (elected to succeed IRA guerrilla Bobby Sands as a member of the British Parliament), followed Paisley to Toronto to counter his arguments. The protagonists never met, and a proposed debate never materialized. The two IRA spokesmen were arrested at the U.S. border, where they attempted to enter the country illegally and under false pretenses.

The Toronto news media, Paisley told his church audience, had been “by and large, a fair and reasonable press.” On his departure, however, the influential Globe and Mail editorialized concerning the recent visitor: “It might fairly be noted that the violent men of the Irish Republican Army have helped make him what he is today, just as his intractably partisan posture immeasurably aids their cause. Reprisal matches reprisal and malediction echoes malediction in awful symmetry. In any serious discussion of the troubles of Northern Ireland, Mr. Paisley’s name is sure to come up. He is one of them.”

LESLIE K. TARR

Wildmon’S Tv Boycott Is On Again

Last spring the Coalition for Better Television, headed by Donald Wildmon, a Methodist minister from Tupelo, Mississippi, threatened to organize a nationwide boycott of advertisers whose products were advertised on television programs deemed morally unfit by the coalition.

Wildmon was noticed, and network executives grew concerned—especially when television’s largest buyer of commercial advertising time, Procter and Gamble, announced that it would no longer advertise on more than 50 objectionable shows. Satisfied that progress was being made, Wildmon’s organization canceled the boycott.

Now, however, concerned that the events of last spring did not result in appreciably better programs during the autumn viewing season, Wildmon’s organization voted last month to proceed with the boycott this year. He plans to make the announcement at a full-dress press conference in Washington, D.C., on March 2, when he will also announce which advertisers are to be targets.

Although network executives publicly disdained Wildmon and his group (which claims to speak for 1,200 individual organizations—even Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority belongs to it), they were privately worried the last time around simply because advertisers tend to worry about any sort of “hit list.”

In an interview last winter, a spokesman for one of the country’s largest advertising agencies said, “It only takes a percentage point or two of shift in the retail sales of washing machines or K-cars to make a tremendous difference in profits.”