Transforming Church

Lots of pastors see their primary role to walk with us, hold our hands, visit us in the hospital, counsel us, and comfort us in crisis - but not to lead us. Lots of churches coast along year after year stagnantly doing the same thing over and over - and often seeing a numerical decline. Part of the reason is they have pastors who are good chaplains, but not leaders.

Most Lutheran pastors get through seminary without a single course on leadership. Until recently many Lutheran Seminaries did not even offer a course in Leadership. Worse yet, some offered a management or administration course that masquerades as a Leadership course. Leaders help focus resources so that God’s vision for the local church becomes reality. Leaders help vision become reality. The church needs leaders. Author Lyle Schaller once said that the Lutheran Church is poised for explosive growth . . . if 1950 ever comes again.

In the last 40 years, Lutheran Church membership has declined, while this country’s population has increased by nearly one hundred million people. The church is not well. To be honest, my concern about pastors serving as chaplains is not only rooted in the fact that it is not effective - but worse yet, the pastor serving as chaplain is not a biblical picture.

In the biblical picture, the pastor equips the people of the church to do the ministry. The Pastor is not here to care for us - we are called to care for each other. The word "pastor" is only recorded in the Bible only one time. That is in Ephesians 4 where it says, pastors are here "to equip saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ." St. Paul says that Pastors are not supposed to hands-on do the ministry, but rather equip others to do the ministry. According to the Bible, we are all called to love one another, counsel one another, care for one another, visit one another, encourage one another, admonish one another, and teach one another. These are the jobs of the body, NOT the job of the pastor!

Often, we give the responsibility to the pastor and say, "We want you to do all these things." This negates the biblical design where the people minister to one another. The Pastor should be leading, and the people should be the ministers. But what we have is the people not ministering to one another, rather the people seeing themselves as recipients of the ministry performed by the pastor. In that model, the pastor doesn't have time to lead, because he or she is consumed by doing the ministry.

So instead a body of Christ where 100, 200 or 300 people are mobilized to love and serve and teach and give counsel, admonish, and visit; what we have is one person who does that and a lot of people who watch and receive. Church is not a spectator sport. When Jesus starts sending people out to do hands-on ministry, he seems less concerned about their seminary education, and more concerned about their spiritual gifts, some brief period of training, and then spirit-filled empowerment and sending. In our congregations it is not uncommon for someone to ask, “Why hasn't the pastor visited me?” We might (biblically) ask, "Why don't you learn to visit one another and have the pastor be the leader?"

I lead a team-building workshop where I address the reasons for resistance to teams. The number one reason; it's easier to do it by myself. Many pastors are good at doing Chaplain work. They get identity and meaning from Chaplain work. I can remember when I did all the hospital calls. The patient felt ministered to and cared for - and as pastor I felt gratified by providing high quality pastoral care. I was doing my job.

When we decided to train people to do this work, I knew that it was going to involve a lot of work. It would have been easier (initially) to just do it all by myself. The only problem is it makes the pastor responsible to make every hospital call into eternity. There is no biblical support for the pastor making all the hospital calls. The problem is that we have all cooperated in the leadership conspiracy. It's not the pastor's job, but we let the pastor do it. Pastor's complain about people being uninvolved, while we perpetuate the system that keeps lay people in the back seat. Many who do empower lay people, continue to "share" the ministry with them, which perpetuates an understanding that these people are "helping" the pastor. Lay people are not called to help the pastor, they are called to do ministry.

One source of resistance is that pastors have always cared for our people and they have come to expect that the pastor is the only (or at least the primary) source of comfort and care. A word picture might be helpful. I always get hot water from the left faucet handle. Years ago, I went to a church camp where the hot and cold pipes had been reversed. The hot water was on the right. I was at camp for a week and I turned on the wrong faucet every morning. I consider myself a fairly bright guy - but I am also a creature of habit. When someone changes things around in the church - I am one of the first to announce the seven last words of the church, “We have never done it that way before.” If I have always been cared for by the pastor - when you tell me you want to change that - I assume I will not be cared for by anyone else in the same way I have always been cared for by the pastor. Change is resisted. Automatically. It does not matter that it’s unbiblical. It does matter that it’s an ineffective use of the pastor’s time. It may mean that a pastor does not have the time to be a leader - since they are so busy doing pastoral care - but I still want to be cared for by the pastor. It’s a new paradigm. I don’t like new paradigms.

True story - researchers started with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, they hung a banana on a string and placed a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, researchers sprayed all of the other monkeys with very cold, high-pressure water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result -- all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will work to prevent it.

Lessons about the dangers of the banana steps have been learned.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, when he moves in on the banana steps, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted. Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.

None of the monkeys that are beating him have any idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. It doesn’t take long to perpetuate the "learning". After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been done.

Let me tell you about another way to do things. The pastor becomes an equipper in accordance with Ephesians 4. The pastor also decides to become a leader and cast a vision for a new, more effective, and more biblical future. A few years ago, I was overworked and finally admitted that I no longer had the time or energy to keep doing everything myself. We had to develop a system that equipped some of our lay leaders to handle some of the hands on ministry at King of kings. I decided to first focus on the hospital calling at King of kings. Let me give you a brief overview on what it took to train our lay people to do hospital call work.

First, we had to select people based on their spiritual gifts. There are lots of Spiritual Gift Inventories on the market. We don’t find that one inventory is that much better than the other - we just need a process to float people with gifts to the top of the list so that recruiting potential ministers is made easy. In the long run, having a system of spiritual gifts identification and ministry placement based on gifts and passions is the key to ministry success. It prevents burnout. It maximizes effectiveness. The process of identifying spiritual gifts is a topic we're not covering in detail in this article. For details, see the article, Gift-Oriented Ministry.

We identified people who were gifted for hospital calling (mostly gifts of mercy and encouragement). We invited them to come together so we could share our vision of how we are called to care for one another. We explained how in scripture it states we are to care for one another, visit one another, and love and minister to one another. This is work to be performed by the body; and we invited them to get on board and learn how to make hospital visits in the name of the church and in place of, the pastor. The pastor would equip you but it actually is you who makes the visits and cares for the sick. If you would like to be a part of God's vision we think He has put into the word, we would like you to do that. Casting this vision first to the group is an essential step.

At the same time, we began to cast the vision to the congregational leaders and members. We tried to faithfully preach the Word of God with regard to the pastor’s proper role and the proper role of the members of the Body of Christ. Our web site has a document called "Body Language" that lists the role of the pastor - and describes the role of the members of the Body (what we call the "one another" passages). Casting this vision clearly and often - is critical. Most people in church audiences today can finish the jingle, "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz . ." They know the next words are ". . . oh, what a relief it is". That television commercial for an antacid has been off the air for 25 years. How can people possible remember that song? In the average US market, those commercials were broadcast 1800 times over a two-year period. People heard it over and over again. The average pastor announces the new vision for something one time in a church newsletter article and thinks we have cast the vision.

We next had to develop some resources. Again on our website there are hospital visitor training resources. You can't just say, "Hey, you're a minister" and send them out. It's like sending them into a pool of sharks...doomed to fail before they try. They had to be trained how to get past hospital security after hours to make a hospital call. They needed to be trained and equipped. We did that in evening classes that were held over six weeks. We taught them how to get past the security guard and how to introduce themselves when walking into a patient's room, and how to begin a call and what is appropriate when asking questions about the medical condition. We taught them how to make their visit a spiritual visit and not just a social visit and where to include prayer and scripture. We provided them with prayer and scripture resources to best equip them for the ministry. All of those initial resources are on our website in the "Hospital Caller’s Handbook".

Then we took the next step and actually sent them on visits with our pastor. We set up a four-step model. The first step was for the lay leader to accompany the pastor to observe. In the beginning Pastor did the work and the lay leader watched. The second step was to accompany pastor and participate some. Pastor would do most of the work while they watched but may ask them to close the visit with a prayer. That was usually arranged with the lay leader. Pastor would look at them and ask them to close in prayer, this way they felt prepared to participate. The next step shifted the role when Pastor would mostly watch while the lay leader conducted the prayer and maybe they would ask pastor to close the visit in prayer. In summary, the on the job training sequence was:
- I do and you watch
- I do and you help
- You do and I help
- You do and I watch

The fourth visit was where they did the work and pastor watched. The important training feature here would be the feedback and debriefing as they drove home together after the hospital visit. We wanted to make sure they were comfortable and felt completely equipped to make hospital visits on their own. There were times when people had not yet reached that comfort level and would continue to accompany the pastor on calls until they felt equipped. Some callers completed 6-7 visits with the pastor or another visitor. Initially, we also had a reporting system where the visitors contacted pastor after the visit to let him know how the visits went and had an opportunity to talk about anything new that come up where additional coaching may have been needed. We wanted to make sure they felt equipped.

How long did that process take? Two years to gather them, teach and train them, and coach them to do the hospital calls. Pastor had to coordinate all his visits with those lay leaders in training. Yes, it would have been much easier to just do it himself, working calls around the lay people's schedules and secular jobs was painfully hard work. A lot of times, the reason people do not hand off ministry work is because initially it is easier to just keep doing it.

For an organist to teach other people how to select hymns for worship involves much extra work. It's easier to keep picking the hymns by yourself. Some of you are probably one of those faithful servants who have done a ministry for ten or fifteen or twenty years without every training someone else to hand the ministry off to. The bottom line is it is easier to do it yourself.

Probably the most important step of the process was yet to come. Remember that paradigm thing - people thinking only the pastor can make effective visits? We found a couple of things happened almost immediately. Visitors began to gain confidence and a keen sense that good ministry was taking place. As a transition step, people often said, "Pastor has asked me to step in and see you - I’m one of the new hospital callers that he has trained to assist him in this important ministry." After a while, that was not needed.

The other thing that happened is that people who were visited immediately began to report back some positive results. There were a handful who came to me to complain - I simply asked "Tell me about the visit." Without exception, I heard glowingly positive results. "They came in and were very caring, they asked how I was doing, prayed with me, read me a great scripture passage" - sometimes they even added the words, "You know, all the stuff you used to do - but it wasn’t you." The problem was not the level of care they received, it was their paradigm. Biblically they knew it was right - they just wanted to whine a little bit. We needed to shift their paradigm. We did it by allowing visitors and those being visited to tell their story. We used newsletters, worship folder inserts, and a few other avenues – but the most effective method by far for shifting people’s expectations and giving them a different picture of their future was what we refer to as Temple Talks. In more evangelical circles, they call it testimony.

I remember one particular weekend that one person who had reported a particularly good visit went in front of the congregation. It went something like this, "I just wanted to come before you today and tell you about the visit I just received from one of those new hospital callers. We’ve all heard pastor talk about it and we all know the Bible says we’re supposed to care for one another - but I for one was pretty skeptical. I went in the hospital and sure enough - every day I was in the hospital - my visitor came to see me. They listened to me, prayed with me, cared for me, checked up on me when I got home. Truth be told, the quality of care was better than what I’ve gotten from pastor in the past. I almost lost a breast to cancer - my visitor had already lost a breast to cancer. She understood what I was feeling." Then she directed a humorous, but truthful comment straight to me, in front of the congregation, and said, "Pastor - she did for me what you could have never done - you’re not a girl and you can’t possibly know what it’s like." She did.

Tears were flowing and then she aimed a comment at her visitor, who was present and said, "I will never forget what you have done for me." The visitor got up and came to the pulpit and finished the talk. She said, "Here she is thanking me - and I want to thank her. I’ve wondered for 20 years about that verse that God can bring good from any situation for those who love the Lord. I’ve always wondered what good God was ever going to bring out of me losing a breast to cancer - now I know. I can walk with my sister through her valley - and love her all the way through. Thank you for letting me be a hospital caller." Everyone saw a glimpse of the new vision. Gifted, trained, lay people making hospital calls and doing a better job than I ever could. People could see it.

Remember the role of the leader - to help vision become reality? The vision of a Body of Christ loving one another - is now reality here. A few people sharing stories like the one I just described over the first year cemented the vision - everyone knows it is our job to care for each other. The vision is a reality. I serve as a leader as opposed to a chaplain. A dozen folks serve as hospital callers. We assign them based on matching medical diagnosis when we are able, especially for serious illnesses. Several of our hospital callers take time off work to make calls during the day. Some make calls on the way home.

We have an office manager who intercepts information about hospital stays. She calls the lead caller. He makes the assignments. Reports now go back to him. I am completely out of the loop. I do pray through the congregation’s prayer list and when I see someone back in worship after a hospital stay, I usually try to ask them how things are going. My personal mercy gifts score pretty low on the Spiritual Gift Inventory - but they do exist - so I try to do my part as one piece of a caring community.

We have BeFrienders who do longer term follow up care. We have some folks who specialize in grief follow up and a handful of folks who have specialties - they minister in special situations: pediatric cardiac cases, childhood cancers, heart attack and bypass, cancer survivors. We encourage small group members to make hospital calls when someone in their small group is in the hospital. We've had hospital callers run into small group members in a hospital room. That's the church. We have about 80 people involved in various prayer ministries here and about 60 ministers and small group leaders involved in the hands-on delivery of pastoral care. That's the church. People get the new paradigm. People get the biblical vision.

There are a handful of laggards who say, I still want the pastor - and to be honest - I honor their request (quietly and privately) and they are coded in my data banks as OPP - an Old Paradigm Person. I visit them - but over the years I’ve brought visitors along and slowly but surely, I have whittled the list from a couple of dozen down to about six or so. Some monkeys remember the cold water a long time.