Page 5350 – Christianity Today (2024)

Bruce Larson is back in the pastorate now, after twenty-one years of traveling, speaking, writing, and serving as president of Faith at Work. He has thus put himself on the receiving end of his own exhortations about fellowship and community in the church. Seattle’s well-established, block-long University Presbyterian Church is the scene where Larson is working out what he urged in such books as No Longer Strangers, The One and Only You, and The Relational Revolution.

LEADERSHIP wondered how the man who invented the phrase relational theology would view the current state of church fellowship. How far have we come? Have we made progress over the past three decades? Are we closer to one another, more honest, more caring? Senior Editor Dean Merrill went to Seattle to ask.

You grew up in a solid church in Chicago. When did it first dawn on you that Christians were missing something in the area of fellowship or intimacy?

I was a student minister at a little church up on the Hudson River-I’d go up every weekend from Princeton, where I was in seminary. I met my wife in that church, in fact. “Fellowship” consisted of a monthly meeting of the women’s association and an occasional men’s breakfast, where you had a baseball or football player come in and give his testimony.

Then one weekend, I found out some shocking news: a teenage girl in the congregation had left town to go to her older brother’s. She was pregnant. I said to the dear woman who told me, “Could I go and see her?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “You’re the last person she wants to know what’s happened.”

Suddenly it hit me: That’s what’s wrong with the church in our time. It’s the place you go when you put on your best clothes; you sit in Sunday school, you worship, you have a potluck dinner together-but you don’t bring your life! You leave behind all your pain, your brokenness, your hopes, even your joys.

How much have we changed since then? Have we made progress?

I think in almost any church of any size there are now at least some people trying to be real, asking, “What does it mean for me to belong to Jesus Christ and also to belong to his family?”

You see, God asks us three questions when we try to get close to him. They are not true-or-false questions; they are yes-or-no. Lots of people say “True” to the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, but that’s like saying, “True, I believe in marriage.” Not until you say “Yes” to a person are you actually married.

So God’s first question is not “Do you believe in the concept of discipleship?” It is rather this:

1. “Will you trust me with your life, yes or no?” That’s what he said to Abram: “Will you leave the familiar, sell your house, pack up your goods, and move out?”

He didn’t ask Mary whether she assented to the doctrine of the Incarnation; he said, “Will you be the unwed mother of the Messiah, even though you’ll probably never be able to convince your parents, your neighbors, or the rabbi that you didn’t have an affair? Will you trust me?”

As a church boy growing up, I said “True” a lot of times. But it wasn’t until one night in 1945, while standing guard duty in a bombed-out building in Stuttgart, thinking very hard about my life and what I’d be going home to, that I finally said “Yes” to God.

2. Next God asks, “Will you entrust yourself to a part of my family, yes or no?”

I was in seminary when I sensed God saying, “You know, you’ve never told anybody what your inner struggle is like. Only I know.”

“I’m looking for somebody good enough,” I said.

And God seemed to reply, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t just trust my secrets to somebody like me. I’m a gossip, I’m irresponsible, judgmental, critical. If I could find somebody really good, I’d open my life.”

I remember God saying, “Well, Bruce, you’re about average. A few people may be a bit better than you, and a few a bit worse. But the deal is this: Will you, as an act of faith in me, entrust yourself to somebody like you?”

I said, “You’re kidding.”

But eventually I said, “OK, I will.” And when I did, it was like Pentecost for me. The power of God was suddenly released when I gave up being invulnerable.

To whom did you reveal your inner self?

Another fellow in seminary. He now teaches New Testament at Drew.

When I came here to Seattle, I said to this church, “Let me describe myself. I have an extraordinary measure of the gift of faith; I believe anything is possible with God. I also have a great gift of hope; I really believe tomorrow is going to be the dawn of the Christian era. But where I got shortchanged is in the area of love. I’m insecure, I’m touchy, I’m critical, I’m fault-finding-help me! I’m not a very good lover at all.”

That, incidentally, is why I write so much about love relationships-because I’m so poor at them. My life is strewn with broken and painful relationships. That’s why I’ve become a specialist, I guess, in these things! I’m basically selfish, a hermit. Before I came here, I lived six years on an island in the Gulf of Mexico; that tells you who I am. I preach intimacy and community because I need it so badly.

What’s the third yes?

Finally God says, “Will you get out and be involved someplace in the world? Will you try to walk my love, my Word, my character to somebody? Will you lose your life? Yes or no?”

Years ago Johannes C. Hoekendijk wrote much the same thing when he portrayed the kingdom of God with three New Testament words: kerygma, the proclamation that Jesus is lord; koinonia, the family fellowship; and diakonia, our service to the world. When people say “Yes” to all three, we have an alive church.

Why is church still a lonely place for some people?

First of all, I need to explain something: Loneliness is really a gift. It’s like pain. If we didn’t have physical pain, I’d take my wife to the beach for a picnic, step on a rusty nail, and say, Oh, I don’t want to interrupt the fun, so I’ll keep quiet. I’d soon be dead of lockjaw.

Loneliness is the psychic pain that drives us to do something about our isolation. God has made us for intimacy. It’s not our idea. He put within us a desire to belong to other people, whether we’re Christians or not. That’s just the way people are made. And Jesus Christ has defined the way to fulfill this deep need.

I would never risk sharing myself with somebody else unless I was driven to it by my pain. I can’t bear to be cut off anymore, so I finally open up in a small group or to an individual. Loneliness becomes the very ground of intimacy.

What are the reasons church people sometimes feel stymied with their loneliness?

The church, unfortunately, has become a museum to display the victorious life. We keep spotlighting people who say, “I’ve got it made. I used to be terrible, but then I met Jesus, got zapped by the Spirit, got into a small group, got the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit . . .” and the implication is that they are sinners emeritus. That’s just not true.

What we need in the church are models who fail, because most of us fail more than we succeed. We find success once in a while, and we praise God. But much of what we do is a flop. Every parent knows that. So does every spouse. We all fail our cities, our world.

We need to admit that. Even the biblical heroes failed. Abraham had only one puny kid; where was the great nation he dreamed of? Moses never entered the Promised Land. Jesus died saying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Neither Peter nor Paul saw the full flowering of the church.

In the East African revival of the past forty years, the church has flourished because people have freely confessed their failures and sin. When we pretend that we once sinned but don’t now, we produce a church where loneliness is rampant, a place where I know I’m not making it but I assume everyone else is.

The church is not a museum for finished products. It is a hospital for the sick.

What are some of the quick fixes for loneliness being heralded today?

Christians think that if they read their Bibles enough or go to enough meetings and groups, they can be “cured” of loneliness. The Devil uses lots of cultural myths in this regard-for example, the idea that life is hard and cruel, but when the right guy with the glass slipper comes along in his Camaro, you’ll live happily ever after. So kids say, “Ah, marriage is the cure for loneliness,” and figure all the married people in church are problem-free. But when that doesn’t do the trick, they say they must have gotten the lemon in the grab bag of life.

The Playboy Philosophy says if you have sex with enough people, you won’t be lonely. The business world says success will do it. If I can become the president of AT&T or IBM, I won’t be lonely. In reality, the people at the top of any field are the loneliest of all.

Even Jesus on his last night in Gethsemane-he’s excruciatingly lonely. Has he taken the wrong road? If this is the right road, can he endure the crucifixion? He has only two choices: he can hide his loneliness or share it. He chooses to share it with three trusted friends . . . and they keep going to sleep on him.

Now we know Jesus is the model for the church. He is our supreme example. How many churches would welcome a pastor who, once in a while on a Saturday night, would call three elders or deacons and say, “Would you mind coming over to the parsonage?” They’d come, and then the pastor would say, “It’s been a tough couple of weeks. I haven’t prayed in ten days. I’m in the dark night of the soul. My wife and I aren’t speaking, I’m full of self-hate, and tomorrow is Sunday. I have to stand up and bring good news to the people, and I don’t have any good news. So I’m going to wrestle all night tonight, and I believe God can change me and deliver me-although he may not. I’m so terrified. I thought if you three came along and just kept me company while I prayed-the coffee pot’s on-you know, I really want to make it somehow. … “

A real New Testament church would say, “This pastor is just like Jesus.”

But we’re more prone to say, “No, you’ve got to have it all together. Smile a lot. Be successful.”

Our culture forces that kind of expectation, doesn’t it?

Certainly. We have two particular problems in this regard.

One, we are a nation built by people who kept moving on. They started on the East Coast and kept heading westward whenever a problem arose. Ellen Goodman, the columnist, says that now, with no more geographical frontiers to move to, we’ve begun moving away from each other. The frontier is within, and we move away from our spouse or our family whenever we don’t know how to solve something.

I urge premarital intimacy with every couple who comes to me for a wedding. I didn’t say premarital sex; I said intimacy. I tell them, “I hope you’re sharing deeply about whatever is happening in your lives. If you do, you’ll have a super sex life after you’re married. The physical will be an expression of the spiritual. But if you try to be intimate through the physical only, it will soon become very boring.”

Our other problem is our consumer mentality. We go to a school and say, “I’ll give you money; educate me.” That’s impossible. All the school can do is provide stimulus and resource. We go to a doctor and say, “Make me well. Here’s the money; give me the pills, the surgery.”

We come to the church and say, “Give me faith; give me God. Here’s my money.” Faith and wholeness and intimacy are not so easily purchased. You have to take risks, to come out of the shell and let God have you. Here are the three yeses again.

Is the whole desire for intimacy insatiable? Will there always be church members crying, “Nobody loves me,” no matter how hard the leadership tries?

Yes! This is the trick God has played on us. If my needs could be solved by human intimacy, I wouldn’t need God. My marriage and my small group would be enough. But God says, “No, you’re going to need me. Your wonderful spouse and church are never enough.”

Then some church leaders would say, “Why worry about it? The lonely you have with you always. … “

Yes, but it will kill you. The new word from the medical community is that loneliness is the number one killer in America. James Lynch, the Johns Hopkins researcher who wrote The Broken Heart, has ten years of charts to back him up on this.

What’s your answer to someone who says mission/outreach is what’s really important, and Christians need to focus on the urgent tasks rather than their own feelings?

That is like a person saying, “I don’t need to eat-just work.”

It is true that we are to be productive people. Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. But the branches must have nourishment through connection.

I think one of the failures of those who espoused great causes in the 1960s was that while their causes were just, the persons themselves kept breaking down, and so did their followers. They were unnourished. They became brittle and hard, and eventually cracked.

Christians, to be productive, need to be nourished, and we do this in community. We have no choice-God made us this way.

Jesus said in one place, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” What is he talking about? What is this power to bind and loose?

Well, if all of us fail and none of us are sinners emeritus, we must be forgiven-Jesus says here that my release comes at the hands of another. That is one purpose of a small group: to loose crippled people from the sins that restrict them, to call forth gifts, to set people free, to deploy them in the world.

How have you implemented this nourishment at University Presbyterian?

When I came, I said to the thirty-six elders at the first Session retreat, “Now I plan to leave here someday in my right mind, full of love for God and myself and all of you, not diminished but expanded. I want to be everything God meant me to be. To do that, I need a few of you to hold me accountable.

“I want to meet with a few of you once a week for an hour and a half to pray, read the Bible, and share our lives. If you’re interested, let me know.”

Well, six of the men-none of the women, interestingly-came up one by one and said, “Count me in.” For almost four years now, we seven have met here every Tuesday morning at seven o’clock. We don’t talk church business; we talk about our lives, our marriages, our kids, our jobs, health, sex, money . . . we read the Bible, and we pray for each other. I ask them to help me be the man I’m supposed to be.

If I didn’t have a group like that, I couldn’t survive in this very busy church. I’d become plastic. Here is the “binding and loosing” Jesus spoke about. I am loosed every week by these men.

In my appointment calendar for every Tuesday, my secretary writes “The Seven Dwarfs.” (She gave us that name, we say, because she thinks she’s Snow White.)

Now I’ve never advertised what we do, but you can believe this congregation knows its pastor meets for an hour and a half every week with some men to pray and share their lives. I’m sure that’s one reason why we now have four to five hundred small groups going in this church. People don’t do what a pastor tells them to do; they watch what you do and then copy it.

Do you lead your Tuesday morning group?

Oh, no, no! The leader is whoever brings the doughnuts. That person comes prepared to guide us in the next section of whatever book of the Bible we’re studying.

When it comes time to share needs, we pass around a little three-minute hourglass, and that’s how long you get to talk. After all, we have jobs to get to, so we can’t talk forever. Then we pray.

Last summer, after spending three years together, we said, “Let’s have a day-long retreat.” So we went up to Whidbey Island. We started around the circle that morning with the question “What is a fate worse than death?”

By learning what my brothers were really terrified of, I came to know more about who they were. The seven of us had seven very different fears.

Then we said, “What are your dreams? What do you hope to accomplish if you live ten more years?” Again, the variety was great, because two of the men are young, two are middle-aged, and two are retired. See, when I was with Faith at Work, pastors always used to ask me, “How do you get small groups going in a church?” There is only one infallible way. You start one group because you need it. You don’t whip up a program. You don’t say, “This will be good for our church.” You say, “I have said yes to Jesus and yes to the family of God. Therefore I need to be in a group.”

Most churches fail to have groups because the pastor either doesn’t belong to one or else has started them for an ulterior reason: to increase membership, for example. If you want a tithing church, you’d better tithe. If you want a praying church, you’d better pray. If you want a fellowshipping church, you’d better be in a group.

What about your other thirty elders?

We spend the first forty-five minutes to an hour of every Session meeting sharing and praying in small groups. I said, “Some of you may be in a small group outside of this, but your leadership in this church will be felt more by how we live together and model authentic life than by the decisions we make about budget and staff and program. We’re not just a board of directors. We’re here as the elected, ordained leaders of this church, and they trust us to be something together.”

The result has been that Session meetings now get done around ten o’clock whereas they used to go on till midnight. We took an hour we couldn’t spare-and we get our work done earlier.

How are the rest of the people organized into groups? Do you assign?

Not at all. We simply model the importance of this experience and let people sort themselves out.

For example, two of our members, Jean and Les McMillan, picked up on something I’d preached about in Acts 5:12-16, where it tells about the early Christians meeting in a place called Solomon’s Porch, and whole crowds came there for healing. This was a public place, not a church building. So they said, “Why couldn’t there be a place for people to just drop in and be with Christians?” They settled on a Burger Chef, and every Friday noon this group gets together to laugh, cry, share, and set one another free.

The only organizing we do is in the fall each year, when we say on a Sunday, “If you’re not now in a small group and would like to be, come to such-and-such a place.”

Two or three hundred people usually show up-those who are new to the church or have gotten bypassed along the way. Old people, middle-aged people, young people, singles, marrieds-they all come. Then we say, “All right, when are you available? Who’d like to be in a group on Tuesday night? Wednesday noon? Saturday morning?” They match up right there on the spot.

As you can tell, this cuts across all the barriers. We don’t say a group is for marrieds, or career people, or whatever. They’re just Christians together.

Maggie Kuhn of the Grey Panthers, a great friend of mine, says, “The only place people can have an intergenerational experience these days is in the church.” We’re the one place to be a family together.

Are you swimming upstream in this regard? Don’t people prefer “their own kind”?

Perhaps a few do, but more of them are hungry for the chance to be with different age groups. Some of our groups span three generations. We’re even integrating our summer deputation teams now. This church has sent teams all over the world for twenty-five years, but last year we sent a team to East Germany that was a college student, a middle-aged couple, and an older couple. This month we’re sending an intergenerational medical team to Haiti.

A week from Sunday we’re having a “Winter Picnic” on Sunday afternoon, where all ages can come-kind of like an old camp meeting-for food and fun.

What’s the average size of your small groups?

Under twelve. Beyond that, you’re not a group; you’re a meeting.

Do husbands and wives generally stick together in your groups?

Some do, some don’t. It’s up to the couple.

How do you prevent groups from becoming ingrown?

Getting together just to have sweet fellowship is no good. The goal is to produce whole people. A group is where we are loved and forgiven and encouraged and affirmed and sent forth into the world. We have spelled out three kinds of mission very clearly: ministry, evangelism, and prophecy.

Ministry is Christian-to-Christian. We are all ministers when we unbind our brothers and sisters, listening, caring, loving.

Evangelism is Christian-to-unbeliever. Here we introduce someone to a Person: “Want to meet somebody?” In order to do this, we may go across the street or around the world.

Prophecy is speaking for God about the structures of society. Every member is called to be a prophet in his school, his hospital, her shop, her business, her factory, Boeing, wherever. We are to be God’s creative change agent in that situation, letting the Spirit of God say through us, “This isn’t good enough; we can do better. Here’s a new way. … “

If we don’t move toward these purposes, then the small group becomes a sterile pocket. It is meant to be a deploying center.

How often do you become frustrated in this whole area?

About once a week! I say, “What am I doing here? It’s not working.” And then I discover God is working after all.

It’s like skiing, which is something my kids finally got me to try only about fifteen years ago. When you’re just starting, you look down that slope and think Oh, no, and so you try to hug the hill as you go down. What happens? Your skis go out from under you every time. You eventually learn to lean out where it’s dangerous, and the farther you lean, the more your skis bite into the snow, and the safer you are. But it means unlearning all your normal survival instincts.

All of us in the church have been taught to play our cards close to the chest-don’t tell people what you’re really like, because they’ll use it against you. And they will! But if you do that, you die. As Jesus said, the more you lay down your life, the more you find it. The more vulnerable you become, the safer you are.

What about the small-town or rural congregation? Does relationship building need any encouragement there, or do things just happen naturally? In other words, are they automatically ahead of city and suburban churches?

I’ve served churches in three small towns. Yes, everyone knows each other-in fact, they’re often related to each other. But that doesn’t keep those towns from being some of the loneliest places on earth. Everybody knows so much that people are terrified. There’s a conspiracy of silence: “I know your secrets and you know mine, but we’re never going to talk about them.”

In a large city like Seattle, you can hide-or you can choose intimacy within a church community. In a small town, it almost takes more of the grace of God to have a breakthrough. It can happen; I’ve seen it. But it’s more terrifying.

How does it come about?

The same as anywhere else: when people can’t stand the fa‡ade anymore. See, it doesn’t do any good to know someone’s secrets unless he tells them to you. That’s why we confess to God. He doesn’t need the information; he already knows our sins. But the forgiveness and healing can’t start until we say, “Here is my problem.”

It doesn’t work for me to say to you, “I know what your problem is.” That just destroys relationship. You have to come out with it first, and then I can minister to you.

In a small community, even though the hiding places are few, there’s no release until the person voluntarily says, “You know, I’ve been unfaithful, or I’ve defrauded someone, or I’m a closet hom*osexual,” or whatever.

It’s like when Jesus said to the man in the tombs, “What’s your name?”

The fellow said, “Well, I’ve got a lot of them. My name is Legion.”

Only then could Jesus start helping him. God doesn’t barge into a person’s life, and neither can we.

A church in whatever size town is to be a hospital where people can get well by the power of God. In order for that to happen, real community is a necessity. And you have to work at it.

Is it possible that small groups are just another fad? Will we remember them in the year 2000?

Certainly small groups are a fad, even a gimmick. They are an artificial step toward making the family of God a reality. But community is not a gimmick.

I hope the small-group movement dies out.

Seriously? What do you mean?

I hope we can make the whole church a place for God to heal people, to bind up their wounds and set them free. This requires a shared ministry, which requires intimacy, confession, openness, and the calling forth of gifts.

That’s what the Wesleys did with their class meetings. No more than twenty or thirty thousand Methodists changed the face of England by meeting in small groups and asking one another, “What is God telling you to change in your life?” They had deep koinonia, but from there they went out in deep diakonia as evangelists, ministers, missionaries, and prophets. Child labor laws were written, prisons were reformed, and slavery was abolished in the wake of these groups.

How many people change a nation, for better or worse? Maybe one percent. That’s all the Wesleys had. That’s also all Hitler had in the beginning.

As the pastor of a large church, you are now on the other side of the desk; you’re no longer the itinerant speaker/author encouraging small groups. Do you ever worry about what’s going on in all those living rooms without you? Do small groups erode authority?

A good question. (Pause)

If you are called by God to be a pastor, your authority is that he called you, not your perfection or brilliance. If your authority comes from pretending to be more than you are, that is the source of stress.

I am not adequate to be the pastor here or anywhere else. But I’ve been called by God to be here, and these people have called me here, so I go on.

I believe in proclaiming the Word of God with power. I believe that on Sunday morning I’m shooting with real bullets. So I declare what I think is God’s news for this part of his people in Seattle in 1984: “Here is what we should be and do and believe and act.”

But then I come down from the pulpit and say to them, “How in the world can we do that? How can I be that kind of father or husband or citizen? Help me! I’ve preached the blueprint, but we’re pilgrims in this together.”

If you pretend you’re doing everything you preach, people know you’re not, and you lose your authority. But if you let them help you, I think they respect you more.

Do small groups sometimes become power blocs?

Yes, if they want to.

How do you prevent that?

You can’t.

And that’s why some church leaders say it’s better not to have groups.

Or they say, “People have very serious needs, and if you turn them loose without a pastor in the circle, all kinds of weird things may happen.”

I respond by saying: What choice do you have, if you really mean to pastor them? Imagine a church of three hundred members. If you see all the people you can, spending an hour with five different people every day, that’s only twenty-five people a week. There’s no way you can tend to all their marriages and jobs and job changes and kids and . . .

Let’s face it: we’re in a situation like China under Mao, when they had to admit they lacked adequate health care for all those millions. The people were suffering, and the government had neither the time or the money to train enough doctors. So they invented the “barefoot doctor,” who, they said, could probably take care of 90 percent of people’s problems. The 10 percent would have to come into the city hospitals.

Was that the best way?

There wasn’t any alternative.

I believe with Paul Tournier that 90 percent of people’s problems are best dealt with by fellow strugglers, not psychiatrists, doctors, or clergy. Only about 10 percent need professional help. So we train people and turn them loose to pastor each other, saying, “If you hit a real stickler, come to one of the pastoral staff. Otherwise, you’re the barefoot doctor.”

How do you train group leaders?

Kind of ad hoc. To start with, all our applicants for church membership go through a ten-hour course that includes being part of a small group with a facilitator. In other words, you don’t just sit down and listen to left-brain presentations of the gospel; you also receive guidance and a chance to share your life. If the assignment is to read a certain book, you come back and tell how you’ve applied this in your office, your neighborhood, your home. So you can’t join this church without spending two months with five or six other people on a weekly basis.

Then there are other occasions for modeling and training. For example, we’re going to the Opera House for our two Easter services this year. That way we can accommodate around six thousand people. But the main reason is to have room for ministry to people between services.

In preparation for that, we’ll have a Saturday class on conversational counseling. We’ll train our people to walk up to a stranger and say something besides “Are you saved?” We’ll show how to move from chatting about the service to getting down to deep needs.

But we don’t have a course that turns out certified small-group leaders. This is not like acquiring a computer skill.

In the past four years, have any of your groups gotten seriously off track?

Not that I know of. We have individuals who’ve done some strange things in groups, and people have come to us saying, “What do we do with so-and-so?” But nothing bizarre.

Do you control the study content of your groups?

I suppose so, in that most of our groups use things like The Edge of Adventure, Living the Adventure, or The Passionate People, materials developed by Keith Miller, my wife, and me. These courses make leaders out of anyone who knows how to turn on the tape recorder, since they include cassette instructions. But there is still much room for leadership skills to come forth, and that is what I want to see happen.

In the life of the church worldwide, what work is still to be done regarding community? What do you hope happens during your remaining years in the ministry?

I really believe the whole frontier of medicine has to do with belonging and intimacy. That’s why I wrote the book There’s a Lot More to Health Than Not Being Sick. General practitioners say if they could spend an hour a week with each of their patients just talking-“How’s your job? How are you treating your mother-in-law?” and so forth-most of them would get well.

That tells me the church ought to be at the forefront of healing, with the medical world as an adjunct.

Like any pastor, I get a parade of people coming through my office every year saying things like “I’ve just been dumped by my wife of fifteen years. She doesn’t want me anymore; she’s moved out.” That person doesn’t need a professional nearly as much as somebody who was dumped two years ago and has been a survivor. The same holds true for cancer victims, the bereaved, parents with kids in jail, the jobless-they’re all needing the touch of an ordinary person in whom the Spirit of God has been loosed.

If we would claim our birthright, we would be that kind of church. The medical world is looking for somewhere to refer people, but they think our business is religion. Our business is life.

I am not saying our primary task is healing. Our primary task is to proclaim and model a kingdom. As we do so, we deploy whole people to introduce others to the King, and healing results.

Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

I have always had a strange desire to be different than other people. I probably do not differ in this desire from other people. Thinking about this desire and how it has functioned in my life, I am more and more aware of the way my life-style became part of our contemporary desire for “stardom.” I wanted to say, write or do something “different” or “special” that would be noticed and talked about. For a person with a rich fantasy life, this is not too difficult and easily leads to the desired “success.” You can teach in such a way that it differs enough from the traditional way to be noticed; you can write sentences, pages, and even books that are considered original and new; you can even preach the Gospel in such a way that people are made to believe that nobody had thought of that before. In all these situations you end up with applause because you did something sensational, because you were “different.”

In recent years I have become increasingly aware of the dangerous possibility of making the Word of God sensational. Just as people can watch spellbound a circus artist tumbling through the air in a phosphorized costume, so they can listen to a preacher who uses the Word of God to draw attention to himself. But a sensational preacher stimulates the senses and leaves the spirit untouched. Instead of being the way to God, his “being different” gets in the way.

-Henri Nouwen

in The Genesee Diary

Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Blake Reynolds / Lightstock

I admit, a professional career devoted to people with leprosy, whose main defect is an absence of pain, has biased me on the subject. And yet numbness, too, is a form of suffering. In the case of leprosy patients it can lead to a life of acute suffering.

When I reflect on pain I prefer not to think in a detached way of a hypothetical sum of the world's suffering; instead I focus on one individual with a face and body. At such moments my mind often flashes back to the refined, upper-caste features of my friend Sadagopan, whom we called Sadan. Readers of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made know him as the forbearing subject of my early experiments with proper footwear for leprosy patients.

When Sadan first came to Vellore, his feet had shrunk to half their normal length and his fingers were shortened and paralyzed. It took us nearly two years of unflagging effort to stop the pattern of destruction in his feet. Meanwhile we began reconstructing his hands, a finger at a time, attaching the most useful tendons to the most useful digits and retraining his mind to control the new set of connections. In all, Sadan spent four years with me in rehabilitation. He personified the soft-spoken, gentle Indian spirit. Together, we wept at our failures and rejoiced at the gradual successes. I came to love Sadan as a dear friend.

At last Sadan decided he should return home to his family in Madras for a trial weekend. He had come to us with badly ulcerated hands and feet. Now his hands were more flexible, and with a specially designed rocker type shoe he could walk without damage. "I want to go back to where I was rejected before," he said proudly, referring to the cafes that had turned him away and the buses that had denied him service. "Now that I am not so deformed I want to try my way in the great city of Madras."

Before Sadan left, we reviewed all the dangers he might encounter. Since he had no warning system of pain, any sharp or hot object could harm him. Having learned to care for himself in our hospital and workshop, he felt confident. He boarded a train to Madras.

On Saturday night, after an exuberant reunion dinner with his family, Sadan went to his old room where he had not slept for four years. He lay down on the woven pallet on the floor and drifted off to sleep in great peace and contentment. At last he was home, fully accepted once again.

The next morning when Sadan awoke and examined himself, as he had been trained to do at the hospital, he recoiled in horror. Part of the back of his left index finger was mangled. He knew the culprit because he had seen many such injuries on other patients. Evidence was clear: telltale drops of blood, marks in the dust, and, of course, the decimated clump of tendon and flesh that had been so carefully reconstructed some months before. A rat had visited him during the night and gnawed his finger.

Immediately he thought, What will Dr. Brand say? All that day he agonized. He considered coming back to Vellore early, but finally decided he must keep his promise to stay the weekend. He looked in vain for a rat trap to protect him that last night at home-shops were closed for a festival. He concluded he must stay awake to guard against further injury.

(To prevent such tragedies, we later tried to maintain a rule at the hospital: all released patients must take a cat home to protect them from rats during the night.)

All Sunday night Sadan sat cross-legged on his pallet, his back against the wall, studying an accounting book by the light of a kerosene lantern. About four o'clock in the morning the subject grew dull and his eyes felt heavy and he could no longer fight off sleep. The book fell forward onto his knees and his hand slid over to one side against the hot glass of the hurricane lamp.

When Sadan awoke the next morning he saw instantly that a large patch of skin had burned off the back of his right hand. He sat trembling in bed, despair growing like a tumor inside him, and stared at his two hands-one gnawed by a rat, the other melted down to the tendons. He had learned the dangers and difficulties of leprosy, in fact had taught them to others. Now he was devastated by the sight of his two damaged hands. Again he thought, How can I face Dr. Brand, who worked so hard on these hands?

Sadan returned to Vellore that day with both hands swathed in bandages. When he met me and I began to unroll the bandages, he wept. I must confess that I wept with him. As he poured out his misery to me, he said, "I feel as if I've lost all my freedom." And then, a question that has stayed with me, "How can I be free without pain?"

As I turn from the network of pain in biology to its analogy in the Body of Christ, comprising all believers, again I am struck by the importance of such a communicative system. Pain serves as vital a role in protecting and uniting that corporate membership as it does in guarding the cells of my own body.

Deep emotional connections link human beings as certainly as dendrites link cells in our bodies, evident even in such relative trivialities as sporting events. Watch the face of a wife sitting in the stands at Wimbledon as her husband plays in the championship tennis match. Strands of concern and affection unite them so intensely that every on-court success or failure can be read on the wife's face. She winces at every missed shot and smiles at each minor triumph. What affects him affects her. Or, visit a Jewish household in Miami, San Francisco, or Chicago around election time in Israel. Many Jews know more about the campaign ten thousand miles away than about their local elections. An invisible web, a plexus of human connections, links them with a tiny nation of strangers far away.

Or, recall the effect on a nation when a great leader dies. I experienced the unifying effect of pain most profoundly in 1963 when I came to the United States to address the student chapel at Stanford University. As it happened, the chapel service occurred just two days after the assassination of President John Kennedy. I spoke on pain that day, for I could read nothing but pain on the faces of hundreds of students jammed into that building. I described for them scenes from around the world, where I knew clusters of people would be gathering together in prayer and mourning to share the pain of a grieving nation. I have never felt such unity of spirit in a worship service.

Something like those sympathetic connections should link us to members of Christ's Body all over the globe. When South Africa jails courageous black Christians, when a government systematically destroys the church in Cambodia, when Central American death squads murder Christians, when Muslims drive a person from town for the crime of converting, when more of my neighbors lose their jobs, a part of my Body suffers and I should sense the loss. Pain also comes to our attention in whispered signals of loneliness, despair, discrimination, physical suffering, self-hatred.

"How can a man who is warm understand one who is cold?" asks Alexander Solzhenitsyn as he tries to fathom the apathy toward millions of Gulag inmates. In response, he has devoted his life to perform the work of a "nerve cell," alerting us to pain we may have overlooked. In a Body composed of millions of cells, the comfortable ones must consciously attend to the messages of pain. We must develop a lower threshold of pain by listening, truly listening, to those who suffer. The word compassion itself comes from Latin words cum and pati, together meaning "to suffer with."

Today our world has shrunk, and as a Body we live in awareness of all cells: persecuted Russian believers, starving Africans, oppressed South Africans and Indochinese and Central Americans . . . the litany fills our newspapers. Do we fully attend? Do we hear their cries as unmistakably as our brains hear the complaints of a strained back or broken arm? Or do we instead turn down the volume, filtering out annoying sounds of distress?

And closer, within the confines of our own local membership of Christ's Body-how do we respond? Tragically, the divorced, the alcoholics, the introverted, the rebellious, the unemployed often report that the church is the last body to show them compassion. Like a person who takes aspirin at the first sign of headache, we want to silence them, to "cure" them without addressing the underlying causes.

Someone once asked John Wesley's mother, "Which one of your eleven children do you love the most?" Her answer was as wise as the question foolish: "I love the one who's sick until he's well, and the one who's away until he comes home." That, I believe, is God's attitude toward our suffering planet. He feels the pain of the suffering; do we?

God gave this succinct summary of the life of King Josiah: "He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well." And then this profound postscript: "Is that not what it means to know me?" (Jer. 22:16).

I hear many cries for unity in the church today; a watching world sees divisiveness as our greatest failure. Calls go out exhorting one denomination to merge with another, or for many denominations to join hands in a national or worldwide campaign. Out of my experience with the nervous system in the human body I would propose another kind of unity: one based on pain.

I can read the health of a physical body by noting how well it "listens" to pain-most of the diagnostic tools we use, after all (fever, pulse, blood cell count), measure the body's healing response. Analogously, the corporate Body's health depends on how the stronger parts attend to the weaker.

Some cries of pain in the Body come to us loudly and persistently. We cannot help but acknowledge them. I am more concerned with the distant outposts of pain, the extremities of limb in His Body that we have somehow silenced. I have performed many amputations in my life, most of them because the hand or foot has gone silent and no longer reports pain. There are members of Christ's Body, too, whose pain we never sense, for we have denervated or cut whatever link would carry an awareness of them to us. They suffer, but silently, unnoticed by the rest of the Body.

I think of my Lebanese friends, for example. In Beirut, children have grown up knowing nothing but war. They carry submachine guns as nonchalantly as American children carry water pistols. They play, not in parks, but in crumbling skyscrapers gutted by bombs. Christians in Lebanon, especially the Armenians, feel utterly abandoned by the church in the West, which focuses so much attention on Israel and assumes all non-Israelis in the Middle East to be Arab and Muslim. Spokesmen for Christians in Lebanon eloquently plead for compassion or some token of understanding by their brothers and sisters in the West, but we act as though the neural connections have been cut, the synapses blocked. Few hear their pain and respond with Christian love.

Or I think of the hom*osexual population scattered throughout our churches and colleges. Some surveys show that as many as 20 percent of males in Christian colleges struggle with hom*osexual tendencies. The reality is so abhorrent to Christian leaders, though, that the church may simply pretend they do not exist. They are left to flounder, cut off from the balance and diversity of the larger Body and the compassion that might help them.

Or I think of the elderly, often put away out of sight behind institutional walls that hold in all sounds of loneliness and mourning. Or of battered children who grow up troubled, unwelcomed into foster homes. Or of races who feel cut off from participation in the Body. Or of prisoners sealed off behind huge fences. Or of foreign students who live tucked away in cheap lodging, isolated and afraid. Even those within the church judged for some minor doctrinal disagreement can feel cut off, severed.

In modern society we tend to isolate these problems by forming organizations and appointing social workers to deal with them. If we are not careful, a form of institutionalized charity will grow up that effectively isolates hurting members from close personal contact with healthy ones. In such an event, both groups atrophy: the charity recipients who are cut off from human touch and compassion and the charity donors who think of love as a kind of material transaction.

In the human body, when an area loses sensory contact with the rest of the body, even when its nourishment system remains intact, that part begins to wither and atrophy. In the vast majority of cases-95 of 100 insensitive hands I have examined-severe injury or deformation results. The body poorly protects what it does not feel. In the spiritual Body, also, loss of feeling inevitably leads to atrophy and inner deterioration. So much of the sorrow in the world is due to the selfishness of one living organism that simply does not care when another suffers. In Christ's Body we suffer because we do not suffer enough.

I must also mention one further service that members of Christ's Body perform by embracing others' suffering. I say this carefully: we can show love when God seems not to.

The great accounts of Christians who have suffered, beginning with the Book of Job and the Psalms and continuing through the writings of and about the saints, speak of a "dark night of the soul" when God seems strangely absent. When we need Him most, He is most inaccessible. At this moment of apparent abandonment, the Body can rise to perhaps its highest calling; we become in fact Christ's Body, the enfleshment of His reality in the world.

When God seems unreal, we can demonstrate His reality to others by modeling His love and character. Some may see this as God's failure to respond to our deepest needs: "My God, why have You forsaken me?" I see it as a calling for the rest of the Body to push through loneliness and isolation and to embody physically the love of God.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same suffering we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort (2 Cor. 1:3-7).

As I reflect on the need to develop greater sensitivity to pain, I think of one of my favorite patients at Carville, a man named Pedro. For fifteen years he had lived without pain sensation in his left hand, yet somehow the hand had suffered no damage. Of all the patients we monitored, only Pedro showed no signs of scarring or loss of fingertip. My associate went over Pedro's hand with great care and came up with a surprise. One tiny spot on the edge of his palm still had normal sensitivity so that he could feel the lightest touch of a pin, even a stiff hair. Elsewhere on the hand he could feel nothing. We also found on a thermograph that the sensitive spot was at least six degrees hotter than the rest of Pedro's hand (which supported our theory, still being formulated, that warm areas of the body resist nerve damage from leprosy).

Pedro's hand became for us an object of great curiosity, and he graciously obliged without protest as we conducted our tests and observed his activities. We noticed that he approached things with the edge of his hand, much as a dog approaches an object with a searching nose. He picked up a cup of coffee only after testing its temperature with his feeling spot.

Finally Pedro tired of our endless fascination with his hand. He said, "You know, I was born with a birthmark on my hand. The doctors said it was a hemangioma and froze it with dry ice. But they never fully got rid of it, because I can still feel it pulsing." Somewhat embarrassed that we had not considered that option, we verified that indeed the arteries in his hand were abnormal. A tangle of arteries brought an extra amount of blood and short-circuited some of it straight back to the veins without sending it through all the fine capillaries. As a result, the blood flowed very swiftly through that part of his hand, keeping its temperature close to that of the heart, too warm for the leprosy bacilli to flourish.

That single warm spot, the size of a nickel, which Pedro had previously viewed as a defect, had become a wonderful advantage to him when he contracted leprosy. That one remaining patch of sensitivity protected his entire hand.

In a church that has grown large and institutional, I pray for similar small patches of sensitivity. We must look to prophets, whether in speech, sermon, or art form, who will call attention to the needy by eloquently voicing their pain.

"Since my people are crushed, I am crushed," cried Jeremiah (8:21). And elsewhere, "Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain. Oh, the agony of my heart! My heart pounds within me, I cannot keep silent" (4:19). Prophets like Jeremiah and Micah stand in great contrast to an insensitive one like Jonah, who cared more about his comfort than about an entire city's destruction.

The prophets of Israel tried to warn an entire nation of social and spiritual numbness. We need to encourage modern Jeremiahs and Micahs and to value our compassionate, pain-sensitive members as much as Pedro valued his tiny spot of sensitivity. By shutting off sensitivity to pain, we risk forfeiting the wonderful privileges of being part of a Body. A living organism is only as strong as its weakest part.

Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

I walked into the Santa Fe restaurant at 6:35 Wednesday morning looking forward to breakfast with friends. Gordon, Bob, Ron, and John were already seated around the table by the window. They were laughing about how I’d only order orange juice and then eat the bacon and hash browns off Gordon’s plate. I grinned and slipped comfortably into my chair thinking, This is a close-knit group.

What makes a group close? It’s a crucial question for Christians. Others can afford to see closeness as a luxury-a nice add-on, but secondary to the main task at hand. For the church, however, intimacy isn’t an option. Jesus commanded his followers to love one another. Call it what you will-closeness, fellowship, cohesiveness, koinonia-that’s what the family of God is about. But it’s easier to extol the virtues of fellowship than to clarify what it is.

Justice Potter Stewart once said of p*rnography, “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it.” That vague legal standard hasn’t proven particularly helpful in combating obscenity. Likewise, many Christians have only a shadowy understanding of what real fellowship is. It’s more than one fellow’s definition: “Closeness is a feeling you feel you’re feeling when you feel you’re feeling a feeling.”

I’d like to use our Wednesday morning men’s group to illustrate fellowship. What specifics demonstrate that mystical quality of closeness?

For starters, attendance. People vote with their presence. “If you care, you’ll be there” is one standard of commitment. None of the men would think of skipping a meeting unless he was out of town. I’ve even shifted travel schedules so I wouldn’t have to miss. It’s painful to be elsewhere on Wednesday morning when I know the group is together.

I mentioned the group meets at 6:35 A.M. Even the fact that everyone was there on time reflects our special chemistry.

We share lots of common ground. We’re all members of the same Presbyterian church. Each man is successful in his particular field. We include a corporate vice-president, the editor of a daily newspaper, and the owner/manager of a string of restaurants. All of us struggle to integrate fast-track vocations with the need and desire to spend lots of time with our families.

Our waitress says we laugh a lot. It may be that each of us views the world on a twenty degree off-center tilt, but lots of things strike us funny-including us. We think God wants us to take him seriously, but not ourselves.

Our overriding similarity is that we are trying to be open to the truth of Scripture and have become convinced that God has a special concern for the poor. The group first came together a year and a half ago, after I gave a sermon on “The Struggles of a Bruised Camel” based on Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler. Each man self-selected himself for the group because he wanted to investigate the responsible use of wealth.

You can see how this focus guarantees a certain oneness of spirit. In our church it is probably easier to talk about sex than to reveal income, net worth, and expenditures. A voluntary decision to openly discuss these private details gives us a powerful internal glue.

But do similar backgrounds, personalities, and values guarantee closeness? No. My work as a communications professor and my experience with Christian small groups convinces me that the crucial determiner of koinonia is not the original make-up of the group but what is said between its members. Jesus said it’s not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of his mouth (Matt. 15:11). In like manner, it’s not who the people are that makes or breaks closeness, but what comes out of their mouths as they interact.

I’ve discovered a tool for analyzing conversation that is a good barometer for the quality of closeness. It’s called the Hill Interaction Matrix-HIM for short. The system was developed by a secular psychologist for use with therapy groups (William F. Hill, Hill Interaction Matrix Monograph). It’s not only diagnostic-describing the level of interpersonal closeness-but I’ve found that a modified version is also a prescription to help people draw closer.

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The HIM is a grid that allows you to categorize any statement according to how well it promotes closeness. Since the equation says that communication equals content plus relationship, the grid slices an utterance two ways-into what is said and how it’s said. There are twenty options. Some reflect individuals maintaining their splendid isolation. Others reveal a unified body that is “one-in-the-spirit.”

Most groups will cover the whole range over a period of time. But group closeness increases as the flow of communication moves toward the bottom right corner of the diagram.

Here’s how the matrix interpreted our “Bruised Camel” group’s conversation.

Topic Statements

The first of four content labels is topic: when members talk about people or things that are not part of the group. Our Camel group does lots of this. We talk about the church, the poor, the weather, the family, the Bible, the buck. As long as the focus is on something or someone outside, and not on our reactions, it would fall in the topic column. Of course, the speaker can set up lots of different moods with his listeners when making a topic statement. That’s what the vertical dimension of the matrix is all about. Here are some real examples from our group as we discussed God’s attitude toward the poor.

Topic-Nonresponsive. John had assigned 2 Corinthians 8, and he asked if anyone was surprised at what Paul said there. After thirty seconds of uncomfortable silence, I said, “Uh-uh.” In terms of fostering closeness, my contribution was zilch. It’s the bare minimum.

Topic-Conventional. Another time Ron quoted Jeremiah’s statement about King Josiah-” ‘He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?’ declares the Lord.” This plain vanilla recitation is still a topic statement, but the manner in which it was given is a cut above the noncommittal and nonresponsive grunt that had to be dragged out of me. Ron’s statement is topic-conventional, but also note that it doesn’t carry a great deal of personal commitment, which is what moves a statement to the assertive category.

Topic-Assertive. “God has a special concern for the poor!” Gordon stated it as a definite, unassailable fact. His proclamation screamed with certainty. Assertive is the “thus saith the Lord” line in the matrix. Unlike nonresponsive and conventional contributions, assertive words leave no doubt where the speaker stands. Because of this transparency, the HIM says assertive pronouncements foster slightly more cohesiveness. The group at least has some real meat to chew on.

But there’s still a problem. None of these first three gives any indication that the speaker is open to change. In that sense they are all nonrisky. Change of any kind is threatening. When it means reordering cherished beliefs or altering our self-image, it can be downright painful.

Nothing is so emotionally risky as being vulnerable in the presence of others. Yet it’s precisely that willingness to risk that leapfrogs us into the possibility of intimacy. That’s why the HIM makes a big jump from the nonresponsive, conventional, and assertive mindsets to the speculative and tentative ways of saying things. In the ascending order of intimacy, the staircase looks like this:

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Topic-Speculative. “What do you think Jesus meant when he said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven?” Bob asked in a way that showed he really wanted to know. He was ready to hear what others thought and was willing to adjust his worldview based on what he heard. Topic-speculative reflects an attitude that promotes true fellowship. It avoids the “I shall not be moved” intransigence of the assertive style. On the other hand, it loses the positive commitment that assertiveness puts forth.

Topic-Tentative. The tentative way of saying things picks up the best of the assertive and speculative without their drawbacks. “As I read Scripture, I get the impression God has a special identification with those on the margin of society-the hungry, the poor, the prisoners, the oppressed, the widows, the orphans, those who are emotionally strung out.” Hearing John, we were not left in the dark about what he thought, but neither was he dogmatic. The same openness to change that surfaces in the speculative statement is apparent here. John let us know his conclusions, but the slight hesitancy in word and tone of voice also revealed his willingness to adjust that view if confronted with additional wisdom.

You may smile at the seeming paradox of “flexible convictions.” But whatever label we use, the HIM suggests that “riding light in the saddle” is the best way to draw people together rather than drive them apart. This is true not only when talking about topics beyond the group but also speaking about the group itself, personal matters, or relations between members.

Group Statements

Many groups never depart from topic statements. That’s too bad. Holding the conversation to external matters is an excellent way to avoid intimacy. Talking about the group itself is an improvement. The focus comes much closer to home.

Our Camel group has discovered that periodic corporate introspection can strengthen the bonds that hold us together. This is true even when we’re discussing topics.

We originally thought of forming a nonprofit foundation through which to channel funds to alleviate poverty. After much discussion, we decided to keep it an informal fellowship wherein we all anonymously commit funds to a common pot and then jointly decide where to allocate those dollars. We drew closer in the process. The following group type statements may explain why.

Group-Nonresponsive. We were discussing what name we should call our group. “I don’t care,” said John. His brusk reply was understandable. He’d been up most of the night counseling a suicidal teenager. Still, it didn’t do a lot for group unity.

Group-Conventional. “Go ahead and write the article, Em. One of our purposes for existence is to be a possible model for others.” Bob wasn’t just giving me permission to submit this piece to LEADERSHIP. He was making a straightforward statement-about the group, which clarified our reason for being. Helpful.

Group-Assertive. “None of us wants to expose himself to the loss of privacy that 501(c)3 nonprofit status would require!” Ron was adamant. He was also wrong. A few of the men weren’t worried about anonymity. But the strong feelings he attributed to the group carried a lot of weight as we struggled to find the right vehicle to channel the funds.

Group-Speculative. “Do you think we’ll be able to agree on some projects without being at each other’s throat?” This was my question, which probably reflects a desire to avoid conflict. But I was up for hearing their response, and the group quickly laid to rest my fears of a bloodbath. My willingness to accept their assurances is a sign of a true speculative question.

Some folks use questions to nail home a point. Suppose I had said, “None of us is crazy enough to think we’re going to have harmony in selecting projects, are we?” That would be an assertive pronouncement only thinly veiled as a question. No one would be fooled into thinking I’d honestly consider a differing point of view. To be speculative, a group member has to communicate his openness to change.

Group-Tentative. “It seems to me one of the reasons we’re a close-knit group is that we have a common commitment to changing how we spend our bucks.” Gordon’s observation came after a great deal of group soul-searching. We all credited the sincerity of his interpretation, but his “It seems to me” qualification and tone of voice left some “wiggle room” for those who might like to offer an alternative explanation. In this case nobody did. But the fact that we had the option made for a warmer group climate.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you may be scratching your head in amazement at the idea of me sitting in the Camel group saying, “Gee, I just heard a group-tentative statement.” Do I really do that? No. At least not usually. But there are times when I feel vaguely uneasy with the group atmosphere and try to figure out what’s going wrong. Then I realize we’re talking about topics- important topics, but issues still external to the group. Or else I detect nonresponsive, conventional, or assertive tones coming through.

This knowledge gives me options. I can choose to let the discussion continue in this natural vein, or I can choose to intervene with a statement designed to bridge interpersonal distance. We’ve already seen that group references do this better than topic ones. But just as there was a giant step from the assertive manner to the speculative style, so the personal category accomplishes a great deal more closeness than group-oriented words.

Personal Statements

Personal comments are those a member makes about himself. He could be talking about past history, present feelings, or future dreams. But when self-disclosure begins, we’re no longer referring to absentees or abstractions; we’re dealing with warm bodies having an immediate impact on each other. Fellowship flourishes.

But there are still five ways of presenting personal content.

Personal-Nonresponsive. All of the Camel group are married. Four of us have teenage children. We’ve usually been as transparent concerning our family relations as we have been about money. Once someone in the group asked me how my daughter was.

“Fine,” I answered. That was about as helpful as “No comment” at a press conference. The nonresponsive is the bare minimum of communication without being a social Neanderthal.

Personal-Conventional. “You should have seen me squirm last night when my wife asked me what we were going to talk about this morning,” Ron said. We laughed, because the main item on the agenda was our marital relations vis- … -vis money. The fact that he put a humorous cast on the feeling is typical of a conventional style.

Personal-Assertive. “No way can I go on our weekend retreat. I don’t spend enough time with my family as it is.” Gordon announced his feelings in such a firm way that no one tried to get him to reconsider. Unless other members are feeling combative, personal-assertive words are conversation stoppers. But we did know how he felt.

Personal-Speculative. “I wonder if I’m expecting too much from my kids?” Bob’s question opened a floodgate of doubts that we all have about our effectiveness as fathers. By probing his own adequacy, he created an atmosphere in which we could examine ours. The circle became closer.

Personal-Tentative. “Have you noticed that I’m usually the last one to share what’s happening at home?” Although John’s words had the form of a question, they zeroed in on a truth. He thought he had noticed a trend in his participation and laid it before the group for confirmation or denial. In this John was like a researcher who states a tentative hypothesis and then lets the empirical findings support or refute his hunch. In either case, the statement is benign.

Relationship Statements

Groups don’t have fellowship, people have fellowship. That’s why the HIM regards an exchange between two individuals about their relationship as having the highest potential for generating koinonia.

It means a lot more to me if someone says, “I like your smile, Em,” than if he says, “I’m sure glad everybody’s optimistic.” A relationship statement can draw two people together much more than a generic group reference. But for those listening in, there’s also a vicarious payoff. Everybody benefits. Since group cohesiveness is the sum of the attraction between individuals, feedback is essential to increase the magnetism.

Our Camel group has a structured way of stimulating relational feedback in the area of money. Once a year we take turns presenting our overall financial picture-what we make, what we spend, what we give. Hopefully this is done in a personal-tentative manner. The discloser then opens up for feedback. This is a relational test that can make or break a group. In our case, it’s had the effect of superglue.

Relationship-Nonresponsive. This is almost a contradiction in terms. But it can happen in the closest of groups. After opening my financial books to the group, I asked for specific feedback concerning the purchase of an ultralight airplane. Did they think the expenditure of a few thousand dollars for the sheer fun of flying was selfish on my part? John’s answer, when pressed, was “Maybe.”

John has a sophisticated theological mind and is deep into the question of social justice. He also loves flying. I assume he had all sorts of reactions-pro and con-to my intended purchase. Perhaps he held back because he didn’t want to shoot down my dream. But for some reason I never got the benefit of his reaction. Score it as relationship-nonresponsive. Note that the content designation is relationship because the issue at hand is whether or not John thinks I’m selfish.

Relationship-Conventional. In the same session, I presented a list of charities and the dollar amounts I’ve contributed over the past year. I pointed out that my intent was to support a blend of emergency relief, development, evangelism, and educational efforts. Bob comments, “I like your mix of giving. It’s like a balanced portfolio.” Bob’s affirmation was delivered in a warm, straightforward fashion. I felt good.

It would still be a relationship-conventional response even if he expressed disapproval rather than praise in the same manner. The key is the objective, declarative tone.

Relationship-Assertive. “Your sacrificial giving is pleasing to God!” Note the exclamation point. In written communication punctuation tells us how we are to interpret the words. In face-to-face communication nonverbal signals accomplish the same task. Gordon’s tone of voice, definitive sweep of the arm, and intense gaze seemed to say God himself wouldn’t dare to disagree. Gordon hath spake.

Relationship-Speculative. At the same meeting Ron raised the question of beggars. The previous day he’d been approached by a panhandler. “Do you think I’m foolish for giving him a dollar?” At root, this wasn’t a question of abstract morality or charitable strategy. Ron wanted to know what we thought of him. His openness fostered a time of sharing about our own embarrassment and self-doubts when faced with the same situation. It’s rare to hear someone ask a relationship-speculative question in a sincere quest for feedback. It’s risky. But when someone takes the plunge, the mood becomes deeper, softer, warmer.

In the movie David and Lisa, there comes a point where the schizophrenic girl, Lisa, turns to her equally disturbed friend and pleads, “David, look at me and what do you see?” Wondering out loud is vintage relationship-speculative. It’s also the beginning of togetherness within and without.

Relationship-Tentative. The attempt to state honest perceptions while recognizing that all the polls aren’t in yet is a delicate balancing act in all four content categories, but it’s toughest in the relationship area. Our feelings are so close to the surface.

I attempted to steer this course when one of our members revealed that 75 percent of his generous contributions went to the United Way. See if you think I pulled it off. My response was, “I don’t work in a corporate situation where there’s pressure to contribute a percentage of my salary, so I may not really understand the situation. But my initial reaction is that you might get more bang for the buck if you targeted more of your giving to a few openly Christian organizations that care about the whole person.”

How did I do? When I first heard of the proportion, I was bothered by the thought of all that money going mostly to secular organizations. I tried to temper my reaction while honestly voicing my reservation. I used qualifiers like “might,” “maybe,” and “initially,” which I hoped would keep things open for further input. It worked. He valued my opinion, but I also learned some of the redeeming features in community-chest type giving. I know we drew closer as a result of the interaction.

Drawing a Group Together

So how close is your group? The thrust of the HIM system is simple. You can tell how close a group is by the amount of personal and relationship statements that are voiced in a speculative and tentative way. It’s unrealistic to expect all conversation to be in those four lower right cells. The going would be too heavy. But lots of Christian fellowship gives lie to the name by never getting past topic statements delivered in a nonresponsive, conventional, or assertive style. Many Bible studies get stuck in a sterile topic-assertive mode. That’s sad.

What do you do if your group is trapped in these upper left cells? Understanding where you are and where you want to go is half the battle. The next step is to put the Golden Rule into practice. Model the verbal behavior you’d like to see others use toward you. Personal self-disclosure and relational feedback tend to be returned in kind. Honest speculation and sincere tentativeness are usually reciprocated.

Don’t be afraid to set up artificial means for stimulating this kind of communication. What is normal or “natural” is not necessarily healthy. If it takes playing The Ungame to get people to talk about their feelings, so be it. If it takes prefacing your comments with the phrase “It seems to me . . .” to combat a tendency toward certainty where Scripture is silent, do it.

Above all, see if you can get your group to share the same perceptions you now have. If others see the desirability of relating personal and relationship concerns in a speculative and tentative way, you’re home free.

Enjoy! As you can tell, the Camel group does.

Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

The following resources deal with the church as a caring community. Some deal with care for individuals or specific needs, while others concern the ideals of true fellowship.

Augsburger, David. Caring Enough to Confront. Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 1973. A fine resource for encouraging accountability.

Augsburger, David. When Caring Is Not Enough. Ventura: Regal, 1983. Others in this series are also excellent in fellowship building: Caring Enough to Forgive/Not Forgive and Caring Enough To Hear and Be Heard.

Baker, Don. Pain’s Hidden Purpose. Portland, Oreg.: Multnomah, 1984. Good for building compassion as well as for counseling the suffering.

Bergmann, Mark and Elmer Otte. Engaging the Aging in Ministry. St. Louis: Concordia, 1981. Understanding the older members and incorporating them into fellowship and service.

Bolt, Martin and David G. Myers. The Human Connection. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1984. How people change people.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A look at a committed community. Useful in helping set high standards for the fellowship.

Claerbaut, David. Liberation from Loneliness. Wheaton, III.: Tyndale, 1984. Examines causes and cures. Helpful both for counselors and the lonely.

Colston, Lowell G. Pastoral Care with Handicapped Persons. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978. Guidelines from a pastor who is also a handicapped person.

Drakeford, Jack. The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear. Waco, Tex.: Word, 1967. The skills required for effective listening. A good training tool. Author has also written The Awesome Power of the Listening Heart (Zondervan, 1982).

Getz, Gene A. The Measure of a Church. Ventura: Regal, 1975. Measures Christian fellowship using biblical standards of love, hope, and faith.

Gish, Arthur G. Living in Christian Community. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 1979. Evaluates the church’s fellowship and mission by such standards as discipleship, discernment, sharing, and worship.

LeFever, Marlene. Creative Hospitality. Wheaton: Tyndale, 1980. Ways to use the home as an environment for caring and service to others.

Mace, David and Vera. Marriage Enrichment in the Church. Nashville: Broadman, 1976. Help on structuring the church to build marriages in strength and intimacy.

Mains, Karen Burton. Open Heart, Open Home. Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1976. Using the home and natural contacts to communicate care and concern.

Menking, Stanley J. Helping Laity Help Others. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984. Teaching church members, by practical instruction and personal example, to care for one another.

Rupprecht, David and Ruth. Radical Hospitality. Philipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1983. Ways to care for others, particularly the needy, troubled, and homeless.

Schaller, Lyle E. Assimilating New Members. Nashville: Abingdon, 1978. Good ways for incorporating newcomers into the body.

Sell, Charles M. Family Ministry. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981. How to enrich family life through the church.

Stone, Howard W. The Caring Church. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983. A guide to getting laity involved in active pastoral care.

Tournier, Paul. Escape from Loneliness. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962. A good resource for the lonely.

Ver Straten, Charles A. How to Start Lay-Shepherding Ministries. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983. Ways to equip lay people to do pastoral care.

Wilke, Harold H. Creating the Caring Congregation. Nashville: Abingdon, 1980. Guidelines for ministering to the handicapped.

Wilson, Earl D. Loving Enough to Care. Portland: Multnomah, 1984. A useful resource in training others in deepening the love of a fellowship.

Worthington, Everett L. When Someone Asks for Help. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1982. Practical teaching on reaching out to peers in need.

Wright, Norman. An Answer to Loneliness. Irvine, Calif.: Harvest House, 1977. A brief tool best used as follow-up to personal counseling with the lonely person.

Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

I find that continuing education provokes controversy in some quarters. Some congregations wonder why we pastors need it, and some of us fail to use it productively. Still, the same church member who disapproves of our two weeks “away at some institution” would not accept a physician who uses the cancer cures he learned in medical school in the fifties.

The treasurer who questions writing the check for the pastor’s journal subscription would never do business with a banker unaware of interest-bearing checking accounts.

The parent who misses the youth director “off playing around at some youth workers’ convention” would not want a physics teacher for her daughter who never felt the need to study after getting his degree from old A&T in ’43.

In this changing world, practitioners of any sort must have continuing education. That includes us pastors.

Types of necessary education

Many of us need remedial education. As surprising as it is to some lay people (and as obvious as it is to others!), we have not learned everything by the time the ink dries on our diplomas. I attended a fine seminary, for instance, yet I learned almost nothing about management. My curriculum simply didn’t contain that one subject which so consumes my time. Other pastors gravely feel the effects of missed classes in homiletics, counseling, Christian education, New Testament, or any number of other subjects. Seminary alone cannot adequately equip us for a lifetime of ministry.

Even the classes I took were not completely retained. During my intensive Hebrew class, I also happened to be courting and becoming engaged to my wife. Oddly enough I have retained her strikingly longer than Hebrew syntax.

We simply do not remember everything we once learned. Some things must be learned again.

Nor did I adequately appreciate certain classes. I used systematic theology texts as a sure cure for insomnia. It all seemed so detached from “real ministry.” Now when people ask about infant baptism or the Trinity, I realize that I need remedial work on systematics, which I now consider interesting.

We also must retool regularly. I find that new ideas come along-often good ideas-and I need to update my technique.

In seminary I purposely avoided church growth theory, but I came to greatly appreciate it later.

Reading some of that material revolutionized my ministry approach. New trends in society demand new responses from the church. I had to learn how to minister in a “rurban” town, a sociological setting unheard of twenty years ago.

Shifting marriage patterns, sociological phenomena, revised new church development techniques, and many other rapidly changing situations and ideas demand pastors who have given them recent thought. We periodically need to be retooled.

Personal renewal, spiritually and mentally, is a third reason for continuing study. Pastors can run dry. Challenges become problems, and problems can look insurmountable. Along with the need for continuing spiritual input, we need a fresh flow of ideas. When your bag of tricks is empty, ministry is a dreary prospect. Have you ever felt all alone in a particular situation, and later discovered nearly every pastor faces it? You can feel stuck with an “unsolvable” problem that others have already remedied.

Very little is new under the sun, but we must read to know where the resources are found. I know I need stimulation and encouragement. Many a pastor has found renewed interest in ministry by sharpening pastoral skills. It can save your life.

Education costs everybody

You soon find that this continuing study has considerable cost in both time and materials. The time I spend reading could be spent at hospital bedsides or church activities. I could use it to prepare for a class or polish my sermon or enjoy some exercise. How many sets of tennis equal one good book? My decision to spend the time precedes any study. Since it does not demand urgent attention, it requires conscious priority.

Your church won’t automatically appreciate the time you spend studying. It makes you inaccessible. They see little direct evidence of its effect. It doesn’t appear “people-centered.” When was the last time you were praised because you “spend a day a week in study”? Still the church must learn that you need exactly such time to continue the process of education.

Even churches that understand the time commitment sometimes fail to fathom the considerable expense of materials. Book prices have soared, with magazines and journals following close behind. Subscriptions to basic journals and magazines easily run me $50 a year. One hundred dollars more might add only a half dozen books to my shelf. We need these materials, yet they cost us dearly. Without considering continuing education classes, seminars, and events, which entail registration and transportation costs, you can easily go through $200 a year for written materials. If you are not spending close to that, you are either a great borrower or a nonreader. Education bears an increasing price tag.

Who bears the cost?

If continuing education is needed and if it is expensive, who, logically, should foot the bill? Often the expenses have come right out of the pastor’s pocket. We order the journals and buy the books. We benefit from the reading and stimulation. It is our education, our career. By default, we not only budget the time to continue our education, but also stretch our financial budgets to buy the materials. Left unexamined, I suspect this is how the arrangement will remain.

On examination, however, this is not the most equitable arrangement. Continuing education is a professional expense, not a personal expense. The secretary doesn’t purchase the manual for the new word processor. The office picks it up as a professional expense. The stockbroker attends seminars on company time and company money. The military officer is sent to schools at government expense. The office, the firm, the military service ultimately benefits from each of these expenses. And your church receives the fruits of your continuing education.

The church supplies the pulpit you preach from and the telephone in the office. They buy the paper for church correspondence. Nobody expects you to spend your salary for such professional necessities. Since study is also a necessity, shouldn’t the church also provide your needed reading materials?

Your church budget is probably as strained as mine, yet even a $50 line item for journal subscriptions or books will signal both you and the congregation that continuing education is important. A reasonable request for an initial $50 to $100 per pastor can eventually grow to a more realistic $200 or more in a few years. Such financial backing, along with a message from the church that the time will also be given ungrudgingly, will add tools to your tool box and competence to your practice. The church will benefit from a more capable and confident pastor equipped with the latest tools and training. You will be freed to use your time, but not your family’s resources, to continue your education for everyone’s benefit.

I appreciate the specified amount, built into my salary package, that my church gives me yearly to further equip myself for ministry. I am convinced that the reading I do has made me a better pastor, and I am encouraged in my study habits by the understanding of my congregation. We all gain by the arrangement.

-James Berkley

Dixon California

Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

“For seven years I was pastor of a 500-member congregation, and we had two dozen high schoolers in our youth program,” reflected a minister who now serves a 1,200-member church. “Now, with over a hundred on the youth group rolls, we have only 30 to 35 involved. I guess we should make youth ministries the top priority for our new associate minister.”

“We have nine circles in our women’s organization,” complained Molly Adams, “but attendance at our monthly general meetings is 35 to 45. Once in a while, for a special program, as many as 70 may turn out, but that’s not many considering we have over 200 active members.”

“When we moved into our new building, we had a huge room available for a new adult class,” said the director of Christian education in an 1,100-member church. “We decided that since none of our other adult classes averaged more than 35 attenders, we needed one big class with an excellent teacher to be an easy entry point for newcomers. Six weeks after it started, the class had grown to 50. We were delighted. The room accommodates at least 90, and we foresaw this class growing to at least 75. Now, after a year, the class averages only 35 or 40. We can’t understand why it declined rather than continuing to grow.”

“This is the fourth church choir I’ve been in,” observed a tenor at Trinity Church. “Each of them had between 30 and 40 regular members. What’s curious is that the membership of these four congregations varied from 600 to 1,700, but all the choirs were the same size. How do you explain that?”

The Rule of Forty

These four observations illustrate one of the most neglected rules of church administration. I call it the Rule of Forty.

In general, whenever human beings gather in a voluntary association that emphasizes relationships with one another, there is a natural tendency to limit the size to fewer than 40 persons. Illustrations are numerous. Throughout history, all military organizations have limited the basic unit to fewer than 40. Major league baseball teams limit a team’s roster to 40 in the winter and 25 after the season begins. The Lion’s Club that wins the regional attendance award usually has fewer than 40 members. One-fourth of all Protestant congregations in North America average fewer than 35 in Sunday worship. Very few adult Sunday school classes, regardless of their enrollment, average more than 40 in attendance.

Basic sizes

Groups have four basic sizes. One is the small face-to-face group. Nearly every researcher on small-group dynamics reports that when a group grows beyond seven members, the benefits of the small group begin to erode. Seven is the point of diminishing returns. That is one reason why most committees naturally consist of five to seven persons.

The next size can be described as the “overgrown” small group. If members are well acquainted with one another and see each other at least once or twice a week, this group, which may range between 8 and 17 members, can still enjoy many of the small-group dynamics. This is the common size for the basic unit in military organization, the most common size for a church choir, a circle of the women’s organization, the typical youth group, and the church council, vestry, or session.

For most of us, 17 people is the most we can “keep track of” in our head, recall names without hesitation, and relate to continually. Beyond 17, it is easy for someone to be absent without being noticed, and it is difficult for everyone to take an active role in the discussion.

The third of these groups, a “middle-sized group,” is where the Rule of Forty begins to apply. Thirty-five or forty is about as large as a group can become with the relationships of members as the basic organizing principle. As a group grows toward 40, most of the techniques and principles for strengthening cohesion in a small group lose their value. These include using a circle as the basic seating arrangement, asking the participants to take a minute or two each to introduce themselves to the entire group, encouraging everyone to share actively in the discussion, expecting each member to relate to all of the other members of the group, and assuming that each member will develop a strong loyalty to the group.

The middle-sized group is the transitional size between the overgrown small group and the large group. It is rare for the middle-sized group to be able to include more than 40 active participants on a continuing basis.

The large group consists of more than 40. The focal point tends to be the leader and/or the task, not the relationships of the members to one another. When the attendance passes 40, three basic changes usually occur: (1) absenteeism or dropping out tends to increase, (2) many of the methods effective with smaller groups become counterproductive, and (3) it usually is appropriate to replace small-group techniques with large-group management tools.

Implications

If the Rule of Forty is a natural and predictable phenomenon, it can have several useful implications for church leaders.

First, as a diagnostic tool, it helps explain each of the issues raised in the introductory paragraphs.

Second, in congregations where groups, classes, or choirs have leveled off with two to three dozen regular participants, leaders have three basic choices: (1) they can be content with the status quo; (2) they can expand the number of small and middle-sized groups, with the expectation that some will stabilize in the 8-to-17-member range while others will plateau in the middle-sized group category; (3) they may introduce large-group procedures to enable some of the middle-sized groups to grow into large groups.

A third implication can be seen by looking at those groups that fluctuate in size between 35 and 45. A common example in larger churches is the chancel choir. Very few adult choirs include more than 50 voices, but many include 40 or 45 and appear to violate the Rule of Forty. Closer examination usually reveals the choir director is using some large-group techniques, such as (a) requiring a commitment from each member to the common task, i.e. the special Easter anthem, (b) a strong leadership role for the director, and (c) a longer time-frame for planning.

Without a shift to a greater reliance on large-group techniques, a choir probably will continue to fluctuate between 40 and 45 voices on Sunday morning.

Fourth, for larger congregations with more than a couple hundred Sunday morning worshipers, the Rule of Forty suggests it may be useful to have someone on the staff trained in the care and feeding of large groups.

Finally, awareness of this rule can be useful when a congregation is interviewing candidates for youth director or program director, when a smaller congregation finds itself in a cycle of rapid growth, when the church is contemplating a building program, or when the leaders are preparing a church-growth strategy. In each case, the time has come to consider the value of large groups in the church and the need for large-group techniques.

-Lyle E. Schaller

Naperville, Illinois

Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

INTEGRITY

Integrity is more than not being deceitful or slipshod. It means doing everything “heartily as unto the Lord” (Col. 3:23). In his book Lyrics, Oscar Hammerstein II points out one reason why, a reason Christians have always known:

A year or so ago, on the cover of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine, I saw a picture of the Statue of Liberty . . . taken from a helicopter and it showed the top of the statue’s head. I was amazed at the detail there. The sculptor had done a painstaking job with the lady’s coiffure, and yet he must have been pretty sure that the only eyes that would ever see this detail would be the uncritical eyes of sea gulls. He could not have dreamt that any man would ever fly over this head. He was artist enough, however, to finish off this part of the statue with as much care as he had devoted to her face and her arms and the torch and everything that people can see as they sail up the bay. . . . When you are creating a work of art, or any other kind of work, finish the job off perfectly. You never know when a helicopter, or some other instrument not at the moment invented, may come along and find you out.

LOVE OF MONEY

Many people think money is security, but 1 Timothy 6:9 warns that it can be just the opposite. A few years ago, columnist Jim Bishop reported what happened to people who won the state lottery:

Rosa Grayson of Washington won $400 a week for life. She hides in her apartment. For the first time in her life, she has “nerves.” Everyone tries to put the touch on her. “People are so mean,” she said. “I hope you win the lottery and see what happens to you.”

When the McGugarts of New York won the Irish Sweepstakes, they were happy. Pop was a steamfitter. Johnny, twenty-six, loaded crates on docks. Tim was going to night school. Pop split the million with his sons. They all said the money wouldn’t change their plans.

A year later, the million wasn’t gone; it was bent. The boys weren’t speaking to Pop, or each other. Johnny was chasing expensive race horses; Tim was catching up with expensive girls. Mom accused Pop of hiding his poke from her. Within two years, all of them were in court for nonpayment of income taxes. “It’s the Devil’s own money,” Mom said. Both boys were studying hard to become alcoholics.

All these people hoped and prayed for sudden wealth. All had their prayers answered. All were wrecked on a dollar sign.

– Chuck Rasmussen

Pinckney, Michigan

WHEN GOD SPEAKS

Any of us more than twenty-five years old can probably remember where we were when we first heard of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

British novelist David Lodge, in the introduction to one of his books, tells where he was-in a theater watching the performance of a satirical revue he had helped write. In one sketch, a character demonstrated his nonchalance in an interview by holding a transistor radio to his ear. The actor playing the part always tuned in to a real broadcast.

Suddenly came the announcement that President Kennedy had been shot. The actor quickly switched it off, but it was too late. Reality had interrupted stage comedy.

For many believers, worship, prayer, and Scripture are a nonchalant charade. They don’t expect anything significant to happen, but suddenly God’s reality breaks through, and they’re shocked.

– Brian Powley

Ipswich, England

GRACE

Watching a trapeze show is breathtaking. We wonder at the dexterity and timing. We gasp at near-misses. In most cases, there is a net underneath. When they fall, they jump up and bounce back to the trapeze.

In Christ, we live on the trapeze. The whole world should be able to watch and say, “Look how they live, how they love one another. Look how well the husbands treat their wives. And aren’t they the best workers in the factories and offices, the best neighbors, the best students?” That is to live on the trapeze, being a show to the world.

What happens when we slip? The net is surely there. The blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, has provided forgiveness for all our trespasses. Both the net and the ability to stay on the trapeze are works of God’s grace.

Of course, we cannot be continually sleeping on the net. If that is the case, I doubt whether that person is a trapezist.

– Juan Carlos Ortiz

in As I Have Loved You

FORGIVENESS

In his book, Lee: The Last Years, Charles Bracelen Flood reports that after the Civil War, Robert E. Lee visited a Kentucky lady who took him to the remains of a grand old tree in front of her house. There she bitterly cried that its limbs and trunk had been destroyed by Federal artillery fire. She looked to Lee for a word condemning the North or at least sympathizing with her loss.

After a brief silence, Lee said, “Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it.”

It is better to forgive the injustices of the past than to allow them to remain, let bitterness take root and poison the rest of our life.

– Michael Williams

Morganfield, Kentucky

STRUGGLE

A man found a cocoon of the emperor moth and took it home to watch it emerge. One day a small opening appeared, and for several hours the moth struggled but couldn’t seem to force its body past a certain point.

Deciding something was wrong, the man took scissors and snipped the remaining bit of cocoon. The moth emerged easily, its body large and swollen, the wings small and shriveled.

He expected that in a few hours the wings would spread out in their natural beauty, but they did not. Instead of developing into a creature free to fly, the moth spent its life dragging around a swollen body and shriveled wings.

The constricting cocoon and the struggle necessary to pass through the tiny opening are God’s way of forcing fluid from the body into the wings. The “merciful” snip was, in reality, cruel. Sometimes the struggle is exactly what we need.

– Beth Landers

Waterloo, Ontario

BEGINNINGS

On a plaque marking Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace near Hodgenville, Kentucky, is recorded this scrap of conversation:

“Any news down t’ the village, Ezry?”

“Well, Squire McLains’s gone t’ Washington t’ see Madison swore in, and ol’ Spellman tells me this Bonaparte fella has captured most o’ Spain. What’s new out here, neighbor?”

“Nuthin’, nuthin’ a’tall, ‘cept fer a new baby born t’ Tom Lincoln’s. Nothin’ ever happens out here.”

Some events, whether birthdays in Hodgenville (or Bethlehem) or spiritual rebirth in a person’s life, may not create much earthly splash, but those of lasting importance will eventually get the notice they deserve.

SPECKS AND PLANKS

At the turn of the century, the world’s most distinguished astronomer was certain there were canals on Mars. Sir Percival Lowell, esteemed for his study of the solar system, had a particular fascination with the Red Planet.

When he heard, in 1877, that an Italian astronomer had seen straight lines crisscrossing the Martian surface, Lowell spent the rest of his years squinting into the eyepiece of his giant telescope in Arizona, mapping the channels and canals he saw. He was convinced the canals were proof of intelligent life on Mars, possibly an older but wiser race than humanity.

Lowell’s observations gained wide acceptance. So eminent was he, none dared contradict him.

Now, of course, things are different. Space probes have orbited Mars and landed on its surface. The entire planet has been mapped, and no one has seen a canal. How could Lowell have “seen” so much that wasn’t there?

Two possibilities: (1) he so wanted to see canals that he did, over and over again, and (2) we know now that he suffered from a rare eye disease that made him see the blood vessels in his own eyes. The Martian “canals” he saw were nothing more than the bulging veins of his eyeballs. Today the malady is known as “Lowell’s syndrome.”

When Jesus (Matt. 7:1-3) warns that “in the same way you judge others, you will be judged” and warns of seeing “the speck of sawdust” in another’s eye while missing the plank in our own, could he not be referring to the spiritual equivalent of Lowell’s syndrome? Over and over, we “see” faults in others because we don’t want to believe anything better about them. And so often we think we have a firsthand view of their shortcomings, when in fact our vision is distorted by our own disease.

– Glenn W. McDonald

Zionsville, Indiana

FAITHFULNESS

Fred Craddock, in an address to ministers, caught the practical implications of consecration. “To give my life for Christ appears glorious,” he said. “To pour myself out for others … to pay the ultimate price of martyrdom-I’ll do it. I’m ready. Lord, to go out in a blaze of glory.

“We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking a $1,000 bill and laying it on the table-‘Here’s my life, Lord. I’m giving it all.’

“But the reality for most of us is that he sends us to the bank and has us cash in the $1,000 for quarters. We go through life putting out 25› here and 50› there. Listen to the neighbor kid’s troubles instead of saying, ‘Get lost.’ Go to a committee meeting. Give a cup of water to a shaky old man in a nursing home.

“Usually giving our life to Christ isn’t glorious. It’s done in all those little acts of love, 25› at a time. It would be easy to go out in a flash of glory; it’s harder to live the Christian life little by little over the long haul.”

– Darryl Bell

Maple Grove, Minnesota

What are the most effective illustrations you’ve come across? We want to share them with other pastors and teachers who need material that communicates with clarity and impact. For items used, LEADERSHIP will pay $15. If the material has been previously published, please include the source.

Stories, analogies, and word pictures should be sent to:

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Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

These people mean well, but they drive the pastor crazy.

Dragons, of course, are fictional beasts—monstrous reptiles with lion’s claws, a serpent’s tail, bat wings, and scaly skin. They exist only in the imagination.

But there are dragons of a different sort, decidedly real, within the church. Often sincere, well-meaning saints, they nevertheless leave ulcers, strained relationships, and hard feelings in their wake. They don’t sit up nights thinking of ways to be nasty, but somehow they undermine the pastor’s ministry, driving him crazy or out of the church.

Where are dragons most likely to emerge? After interviewing survivors of the dragon wars, some observations about their habitation seemed to recur.

Among strong initial supporters. Often the opposition develops from among those responsible for calling the pastor.

One pastor, now in his fifth church, says, “A wise old minister told me the person most likely to become your severest critic is the person who picks you up at the airport on your candidating visit. So far he’s been right three out of five.”

While not always members of the search committee, dragons do seem to emerge from among those influential in calling the pastor. Why? Perhaps their expectations are greater. Perhaps they are more emotionally tied to the church and feel more ownership. Or perhaps they are merely the strong personalities.

Among the comparers. Dragons have invariably had previous church experience, either elsewhere or with previous pastors. Dragons are virtually nonexistent among those for whom you are the first pastor.

One small-town pastor, who counts among his congregation the widow of the former pastor, was confronted by her one Sunday morning.

“I tried to call you this week, and your wife told me it was your day off,” she sniffed. “I’ll have you know my husband never took a day off in 23 years of ministry.” The pastor stifled an urge to point out her husband had also died at age 45.

Unless the congregation has been without a minister for a long time, the spirit of the former pastor is very much present. In a successor, some will want a clone; others will want a sharp contrast.

Just because people praise former pastors does not mean they are going to be dragons. In fact, they are probably not as dangerous as those with a habit of criticizing past ministers.

Where formal authority and informal power don’t match. Whenever the church office holders, elected or appointed, are different from the unofficial but widely recognized power brokers, dragons seem to multiply.

One Minneapolis pastor who teaches a seminary course in practical theology asked his students to draw a chart of the lines of authority in their home churches. The lines and boxes were neatly arranged. Then he asked them to diagram the real decision-making process. One student turned in a sheet that showed lots of small circles around the edge that were connected to one large egg-shaped circle that filled the center of the page. The large circle was labeled “Ralph.”

No polity is perfect. Dominant personalities may not be spiritually qualified for church leadership. And no system can ever perfectly fit the changing human relationships within a congregation. But stress will be in proportion to the mismatch between formal and informal leadership.

In counseling. Those you have counseled, or their family members, frequently become either eternally grateful for your help or infernally resentful because you know too much.

“The wife of one of my deacons came to see me about their marriage difficulties. Her husband refused to admit there was a problem, and his relationship with me broke down because he knew what his wife was telling me. Eventually he was instrumental in forcing my resignation,” says the pastor, who is now in another church.

Among those who once sensed a call to the ministry. Most pastors indicate they do not have as many problems with those currently in Christian work as they do with those who should be in ministry and aren’t.

“It’s the frustrated, armchair pastors who want to run the church,” says one pastor.

Another reports his dragon is a former missionary who took a fund-raising job in the home office and is suddenly away from direct people ministry.

The only solution? Finding a place for these people to minister directly to needy people.

“We had a young couple who’d committed themselves to going overseas during a missions conference, but they never went,” says an Illinois pastor. “They were a source of dissension until we identified what they were feeling and put them in charge of tutoring some inner-city kids. Now they feel great about the church.”

These are by no means all the situations conducive to dragons. Nor do these conditions mean dragons will necessarily appear. Many pastors minister effectively in all these situations without begetting enemies. It does help, however, to understand the factors that are at work.

Ministry is a commitment to care for all members of the body, even those whose breath is tainted with dragon smoke.

Mr. Shelley, associate editor of LEADERSHIP, is the author of Well-Intentioned Dragons: Ministering to Problem People in the Church (LEADERSHIP/Word, 1984).

Oberammergau’s drama not only survives, it thrives.

In 1632 and 1633, bubonic plague raged through Europe. Village after village was attacked by the deadly sickness, their populations decimated. One small Bavarian village, its inhabitants numbering fewer than 1,600, watched some 350 citizens succumb to the disease. Finally, the town leaders reached a unanimous decision: asking God to deliver their village from the appalling sickness, they vowed that from that time forward, every ten years the town would perform a devout representation of the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ.

According to legend, from the very hour the vow was made, no other villager died of the plague. Oberammergau’s first Passion Play was performed in 1634, a “genuine and humble act of homage before God in a childlike, unspeakable demonstration of thankfulness,” according to the official Oberammergau Guidebook.

Since that time, Oberammergau’s people have fulfilled the vow made by their now-ancient ancestors. Even with the passing of centuries, the play remains a remarkable act of devotion. From a population numbering a mere 4,500, a professional-scale troupe mounts some 100 performances in the years it is presented, from May through September. (This year a special off-decade production marked the play’s three-hundred-fiftieth anniversary.) Critics may observe that Oberammergau’s drama could not survive long on Broadway. But here, high in the Bavarian Alps, it not only survives, it thrives.

Watching the dramatic reenactment of our Lord’s final days and hours in this Alpine setting, one cannot help but be enormously impressed by the seriousness with which these West German villagers take their commitment to Jesus Christ. It is telling that from only 4,500 people come 1,000 actors, 125 of them with speaking parts, and 500 people who assist the massive production in other ways. The actor who portrays Jesus must memorize over 7,000 words. In addition, he undergoes a torturous physical ordeal when he is affixed to the cross—something for which he must prepare by spending months engaged in special exercises to build up bodily stamina. His financial reward: $30 a night. Other participants receive less, yet they, too, spend months in preparation. (Since 1980 the play has used two sets of players for the principal roles in order to make the physical and mental strain more bearable.) The play action takes place on a stage open to the elements, even in the most inclement weather, though the audience hall is roofed. All of the participants must have been born in Oberammergau, or have lived in the town for at least 20 years, and those chosen for major roles must have unblemished reputations.

Originally, the Passion Play was performed in a meadow, and at first only once in the year of performance. In 1710 it grew to two performances, and in 1810 to four. From 1820 on, the number of performances slowly but steadily increased. By 1980 the number had grown to a hundred. The play itself is a revelation. The script has gone through its own metamorphosis over the years, including recent deletions because of perceived anti-Semitism (for example, the cry, “His blood be on us and upon our children,” recorded in Matt. 27:25, no longer appears). But one of the most meaningful developments was the insertion of some 25 dazzling tableaux, each an Old Testament prefigure of some aspect of Christ’s passion. Some are predictable, such as Abraham offering Isaac on the altar and Joseph being sold into slavery. Others are less expected, including Naboth being accused falsely, and Joab stabbing Amasa under the pretext of giving the kiss of friendship.

Action moves realistically among the immense stage’s built-in settings of the narrow streets of Jerusalem, palace and temple façades and courtyards, and a center stage that doubles as tableaux backdrop. It is difficult not to be swept up in the emotion of the drama—in fact, it is difficult to be merely a spectator. That the play is performed in German poses no barrier to total immersion in the action. Translations are available for a modest fee, and so well laid out that it is easy to follow the action, and nearly line by line.

The Passion music was composed in 1820 by Rochus Dedler (actually a third score; he reworked the original score to fit an altered script, then watched it consumed by flames in 1817 in a fire that destroyed 34 houses). Though unremarkable, the music beautifully conveys the spirit of the drama it both describes and comments upon. Dedler’s score was totally reworked for the 1950 performances by one Eugen Papst who freed the original from all its accretions and distortions and superfluities. Papst took particular care to ensure the music could be played by nonprofessional musicians.

To see Oberammergau’s Passion Play is to experience a strong sense of reality. To the Christian, it is not mere drama, it is a reenactment. And observing it thus, it is all but impossible to walk out of the huge hall unmoved.

The importance the hardy residents of Oberammergau place on their vows and commitments to God serves as an ongoing example. Here, in a tiny village in Western Germany, God is real. And it is that reality that powers one of the world’s most famous theaters.