Heart & Soul
Kevin A. Miller is editor-at-large of LEADERSHIP.
October 1, 1999
Scan the brochures that hit a pastor's desk, and you'd assume the greatest challenge facing pastors today is providing leadership. Many conferences pledge to help with casting vision so you can, to paraphrase Star Trek, "boldly lead where no pastor has led before."
But as difficult as leadership is, pastors face a greater challenge: to love the ordinary church.
It's hard to lead; it's even harder to love. And to love an ordinary church requires a lifetime of spiritual growth.
On blue Mondays, we may wistfully long to pastor the extraordinary church—the kind that's growing, that boasts great lay leaders and spiritual intensity and power, that offers PowerPoint presentations, a cool Web site, and conferences to help ordinary churches become extraordinary.
But in our saner moments we remember that even the high-visibility congregation is an odd-lots assortment of messed-up people who found Jesus. A cutting-edge worship band does not eliminate parishioners' Original Sin. Every pastor faces that most difficult of tasks: to love the ordinary, and often unlovely, church.
An ordinary church has at least one ineffective but entrenched worker. It lacks vision (or more commonly, has enough vision but no idea how to achieve it). In the ordinary church, miscommunications and misunderstandings arise from pride or from people simply not reading the bulletin. Traditions have outlived their usefulness, but people feel attached to them, and there are never enough Sunday school teachers. Did I mention that there's not enough money, too little parking, and the facility needs work?
Professor and church consultant Gary L. McIntosh often asks pastors at his seminars, "If you weren't the pastor, would you attend your church?" The overwhelming response: ...
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