Dig in

Gospel ministry is not about "winning" or gaining a following. But under God we rightly want to have as much positive influence over a lifetime as we can. We want, to use a horrible phrase, to be "strategic".

I have sometimes thought that going somewhere not especially strategic and staying there might be the most strategic thing to do.

Dick Lucas' ministry has been massively influential and I guess a visionary could see the potential at St Helen's Bishopsgate, but I understand that when he first went there the congregation was pretty tiny and elderly and he was his only parishoner? Perhaps that's not quite right, but you get the idea. It was a long term ministry.

If the minister is to be something of a father to his people, as Paul was to his converts, then it seems strange that the minister should abandon his family if an apparently better offer comes into view.

There is great value in having buried people's parents and baptised their children.

People want to know that their pastor loves them and is committed to them. That means being there.

If there are people in a church who oppose a gospel ministry, it is no bad thing if they know the minister will be carried out of there in a box, feet first. They probably don't want to fight for the next 20 years.

So all things being equal, how about 30 years in some little market town?


These thoughts were stirred up again by this, from Mr North to which Dr Field pointed:

The average American Protestant pastor stays at one congregation for about 5 years. Then he moves on. He never builds up what the Communists called a cadre. The members know that he will move on if he is successful, or if he gets bored, or if he confronts problems that don’t go away rapidly.

A congregation’s lay leaders dig in and wait out the pastor, who come and go. Pastors find that they face roadblocks in their ministries because the laymen in the boards know that they hold the hammer, long-term.

A pastor who sticks for a decade begins to get his way. He wears out the laymen. If the pastor is both patient and prudent, he can outlast the opponents. He has the pulpit. They don’t.

Liberals in the mainline denominations figured this out over a century ago. If they could gain control the denomination’s national boards, which were full-time paid positions, they could outlast the laymen and pastors at the General Assemblies. What they forgot was attrition. When old members died, they were not replaced by young members. Because the liberals made the church seem more like the world, outsiders figured that they could keep their tithes and offerings for themselves, and use their Sunday mornings for amusement. The mainline denominations wound up with too many chiefs and not enough braves: leaders with a declining number of followers. But this took a century. The liberals dug in; their opponents came and went. The liberals had a long-term plan. The conservatives didn’t.

Pick a geographical location and dig in. Don’t leave. Don’t answer the call of more money elsewhere. Become a fixture in the community. Become reliable people who are called on, year after year, to show up at meetings. Most people will not show up. Those who do will wind up in the positions of leadership. Woody Allen once said that 80% of success is just showing up. He was right.

A familiar face is a trusted face. A person can get away with almost anything if he is one of the town’s good old boys. The smaller the town, the truer this is. As Hyde’s book shows, a person who has shown up for years can slowly move an organization in almost any direction he chooses unless there is someone else on the other side who is equally faithful organizationally and equally self-conscious. There rarely is.