THE PASTOR AS SURVIVALIST
How to make do when your church has less than enough.
Craig Brian Larson
January 1, 1990
March 1988. Arlington Heights, Illinois. After eight and a half years in a home-missions church in Chicago, I am three months into a new ministry with a church of forty. It is night, and my wife is asleep. As my bare feet pace the bedroom floor, worries wear a path in my mind: With $600 of monthly support from another church, we're still going in the hole. In three months that support drops to $200. At the end of the year, zip. We hit the wall in four months unless we grow! I am not praying. This is hard-core anxiety. I dread the thought of packing and moving again. Although, we could stop renting in the school, maybe move the office to my basement; and if Nancy found a job, or if we sold equipment . . . Survival. For half of my thirteen years in the ministry, that has been the issue. Occasionally I have felt desperate, at times doomed, up to my ears in quicksand. Talking to other pastors, I often find them concerned not with lofty goals and expansion, but with outliving a vote of confidence, paying next month's mortgage, holding family together, overcoming crippling depression. Ministry presents a Pilgrim's Progress landscape of menacing crises. How do we survive? How can we sidestep the bog of despair? What attitudes and strengths will enable us to overcome, and then move on to progress and fruitfulness? Lately, I find myself again relying on survival tactics learned at my first church. Like a recruit dropped into the desert for survival training, I had to learn new skills and attitudes there. Here are the tactics that have helped me-so far anyway. Lean into the Pain
Survival situations arc racked with pain: emotional trauma over conflict, stress from unpaid bills, even anxiety over one's reputation. The natural reaction is ...
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