[DEBORAH] POTTER: Joe Stewart-Sicking is an Episcopal priest who teaches pastoral counseling and studies why clergy are more stressed than most of us.
STEWART-SICKING: What makes the clergy vocation and occupation really different is that you work for God ultimately. If that work environment isn’t meaningful to you, you’re doing a lot of things like, you know, doing budgets or checking spelling on a bulletin, or office management, that’s going to really hit home, because you think your job should be about God.
POTTER: Add to that a new source of stress for many pastors in mainline Protestant denominations: as church membership dwindles they feel pressured to reverse the trend.
STEWART-SICKING: And a lot of pastors think that church growth is really the measure of their success, you know, and a lot of people are having to learn to deal with shrinking numbers, shrinking budgets, even closing churches.
“And a lot of pastors think that church growth is really the measure of their success”. Well it certainly is one of them and a rather important one at that if you believe in the Great Commission of Christ.
It is also one measure that churches fail miserably at more often than not [even if you subtract out doctrinal clashes like Biblical authority].
Could we take a note from the business world to improve things? It is a fundemental axiom in business that if an organization is not aligned around a goal, that goal probably won’t be met. A second axiom is to incent the organization to reach the goal.
How might this look in an ecclesiastical enterprise [ie, a church]?
1. Incent the Rector’s or Pastor’s pay with a formula tied to increased numbers and giving from the new numbers
2. Devote a fixed percentage of the church’s budget to growth programs.
Obviously it could get a lot more complicated than this and you need to guard against churning numbers (ala Fannie and Freddie), but it would make obvious to everyone what is important when priorities have to be set.
True, goal-setting is quite helpful. But what’s the goal of the great commission?
Great Commission churches aren’t necessarily larger churches. They’re healthy churches. And yes, healthy churches tend to grow (yet, vitamins are different from steroids).
Great Commission churches are churches whose members are students of Jesus, people who are being taught to obey the commandments of Christ. Now these disciples will learn, or should learn if they’re good students with good teachers, to develop Christian character free from anger, contempt, lust, and greed (just to name a few).
In addition, on the basis of including Luke 17:1-4 into this morning’s sermon, I speculated that churches where stumbling blocks are minimized (or at least seen as woeful) and with disciples trained well enough to correct their brothers and sisters–disciples who also possess character that can forgive the penitent without reservation–those would seem to be healthy churches that would grow in ways appropriate to their neighborhood and region. I’m sure attempting to shape a parish church where we’re soaked in Scripture well enough know right from wrong, and can allow the penitent the grace start over seven times a day. What clarity and what freedom!
But the transformation of character into conformity with the teaching of Jesus is the primary goal and the precondition for making numerical growth desirable.
I mean, why try to get larger and larger groups of impenitent people with debauched character? Yuck. In any event, Dallas Willard’s copious and salutary writing on the great omission from the great commission and the necessity of obedience to Jesus’ teaching for Christian discipleship is what I’ve found helpful and am attempting to summarize here.
And the growth, in character and in numbers, is God’s work (1 Cor 3:7) which is a reminder that should help alleviate clergy stress as well.