In the Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown said there is no heavier burden than great potential.

Young pastors know the feeling. You arrive on the field, move into the parsonage, meet with the leaders and begin your ministry. You are feeling your way through each day, trying to find the handle for everything, hoping to get a sense of who this church is and how you can best minister to it. Meantime, you’re still trying to find out who you are and what the Living God had in mind by fingering you of all people to turn into a pastor. And some well-meaning member comes up to you.

I just want you to know, pastor–we are expecting big things from you. We waited a long time for you. This church is sitting on ready. All we need is a leader to point us in the right direction.

That sounds so good on the surface. They believe in you. They want you to succeed. They’re on your team.

Maybe.

Hope so.

But those words carry a great burden. They imply that if great things do not begin to happen soon, the pastor is at fault. All the other parts of the machinery were in place. If the pastor is “God’s man,” then we will move forward and have great success. If success does not come, then he is not “God’s man.”

Sound familiar? Bear in mind, this is never stated in so many words. But it sums up the consensus of the leaders of many a good church as they welcome the new preacher.

A great opportunity. A heavy burden.

Woe to the preacher who does not meet the expectations of those who called him and who convinced the congregation he was the greatest thing since Billy Graham.

I have known pastors who were relieved of their employment because (ahem) they did not live up to their potential. According to the leaders, the pastor did not deliver on the expectations they had been led to believe would follow his ministry.

Did the pastor over-promise or did the committee over-expect? Or is something else going on here?

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Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that You are God in Israel and that I am your servant…. (I Kings 18:36)

Elijah was confronting the prophets of Baal when he prayed that brief but potent prayer. But he was not trying to win these renegades over. His target audience was the multitudes of Israel who in their shallow affection were going with the God (or “god”) who could produce the most dramatic fireworks that day.

I have prayed that prayer.

Many a time as I entered the sanctuary for the Sunday morning service, I sent up this plea. “Lord, there are a few people in this church who are roadblocks to us doing anything. They fight me on every proposal. And they do it in Your Name. Father, please–let them know that You are God and that I am your servant.”

Now, you would think it was the second part of that prayer that occupied my attention, that what I wanted most of all was for this bunch of nay-sayers to get clear on the fact that God in Heaven had sent me as His ambassador. But you’d be wrong.

Before anything else, I wanted the same thing Elijah wanted for God’s people that day: for them to settle once and for all that the Living God is Lord and in charge and in this place. That He is “God in Israel.”

I am personally convinced that the trouble-makers in most churches do not really believe in God. Oh, they do, theoretically. If you press them, they can tell you when they professed faith in Jesus and were baptized. Call on them to pray in the service and they will render up an invocation or offertory prayer with the best of them. It’s just that they don’t really believe God is on the premises.

The proof of that is how they play fast and loose with the Bride of Christ and the Body of Christ. The way they mistreat the family of God shows beyond a doubt that the “God” they serve is some kind of absentee landlord who is not around to defend Himself and they can do as they please.

These people need to know two things: The Lord is present and He is on the job; and that man standing behind the pulpit is on assignment for Him.

One is just as critical as the other. As essential. As vital.

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The problem in writing a blog is that you are putting your opinions and convictions out there–exposing them to the world–where they can be shot down, vilified, criticized, and dissected. Yes, and also praised, lauded, reprinted, reposted, and remembered.

That’s what keeps us blogging, I suppose, the knowledge that someone somewhere reads it and is blessed or helped, encouraged or instructed.

The trick is to think seriously about what you’re writing and not post anything you’re not prepared to go to the mat for. Nor do you want to take a position on something sure to enrage a lot of your readers, particularly if the payoff is poor. That is, you will not see me attacking President Obama’s position on almost anything on this website. The issues are far more complex than most of of my friends think them to be, I’m not smart enough to know all I should on the subjects, and most importantly, I have something far more important in mind than who’s in the White House at the moment.

I’m working for eternity here.

This is a God thing for me.

You’ll not find me opening up an article here announcing that “this morning God told me to tell you” anything. Even so, I know the inner voice of the Lord. As all believers, I know what it is to hear God speaking to my heart, guiding me toward this and away from that. (See John 10:27 and Psalm 23:3b)

Still, it’s a precarious business, writing a blog, particularly if your ego is fragile and constantly in need of a booster shot. (Instead of “ego,” however, I prefer to call it a reasonable self-confidence. I am well aware of Paul’s admonition “not to think more highly” of oneself than we ought to.–Romans 12:3)

So with preaching.

A man–and sometimes, but less frequently, a woman–stands in front of a handful or a multitude, opens the Word and declares “Thus saith the Lord.”

He’s putting himself at risk.

In a typical congregation there are people sitting before him who are offended he would:

–be so presumptuous as to speak for God.

–call himself a holy man with the right to address them on celestial matters.

–overlook the flaws in his own life and counsel them as to theirs.

–speak to them about death and the afterlife, make claims about Jesus and God, when we know so little.

Welcome to the ministry, young pastor. The antagonism you are picking up from a few members of your congregation is normal, widespread, and probably good for you.

If you can’t handle that, you had no business accepting the call to represent Jesus Christ before mankind. This, incidentally, is what your call into the ministry amounts to. I hope you are clear on that.

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A recent phone call from an embattled pastor reminded me of an important point about these strong church laymen who enjoy running the show and running a bluff on pastors: Preacher-eaters can be nice people much of the time.

A layman who gave me the biggest headaches in one church I pastored owned a lovely vacation home in the mountains. On several occasions, my family enjoyed the use of that home. The owner and his wife were the definition of gracious.

It was only when it came to my being the pastor (meaning the sermons I preached, the leadership I tried to exert) that we had conflicts.

The young pastor who called told how the church boss had died not long ago. I said, “The Lord saved you from many a headache.” He agreed, but noted that after the man’s death they saw how many good things he had done for the church, also.

So, it’s not all black and white. This is a complicated issue, and if I made it seem otherwise in my earlier article, an apology is in order.

Case in point.

After a large online ministers’ service picked up that article and forwarded to 100,000 of their subscribers, my mailbox was filled with notes from pastors. Almost all thanked me. Some were in the midst of battles with what we called Sons of Diotrephes (from III John), while other told tales of their struggles with the SODs.

But one man who identified himself as a “pastor-eater” wrote. That letter stood out from all the others.

I’ve not asked for his permission to quote from the letter, so will paraphrase it and print my response. He answered my response, and I’ll tell you what he said. He makes some good points. We’ll call him Doug.

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I remember it like it was last week.

My older brother came home from a meeting all psyched up. He had attended a sales promotional meeting in the days before Amway, Avon, Shaklee, and a host of others had developed that layered-sales-technique into the world class system it became.

Ron must have been 25 years old, and his enthusiasm was understandable. The marketers told of a food supplement that would soon make vegetables and fruits and meats irrelevant. This would take the country by storm. To make sure they were not missing out on nutrients, everyone in America would be buying this product.

But that was not the big attraction.

By signing on early as a partner (or associate or who-knows-what-they-called it back then), you could enlist others who would work under you. You would make a percentage off all their sales. But even more remarkably, every time they lined up people to work under them, you raked in a percentage from their sales, too.

You could get rich in a hurry. (As, no doubt a lot of Amway and Avon partners eventually did. But alas, not all. But that’s another story.)

I recall Ron saying that Hollywood superstar Robert Cummings was a partner in this great undertaking. It had to be all right!

All you had to do was present the sales plan to your friends and family and start signing them up. Everyone was going to be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

There was one little hitch to the plan, as far as this 20-year-old skeptic could see: Sooner or later, someone had to sell the product to the consumer. Success would depend on meeting an actual customer and convincing him or her to purchase the supplement. Without that, it mattered little how many hundreds of underlings one lined up from which to skim off a portion of their earnings.

That early marketing blitz which Ron was so enthusiastic about came to nothing. Within a few weeks, it disappeared from the scene.

I’m tempted to tease my wonderful brother (who reads this blog) with something like: But Ron found another way to get rich quick; he became a preacher. The joke would be funny only to the two of us, however. Ron and I have preached for nearly 100 years altogether, but we’re both a long way away from wealthy. Which is as it should be.

Frequently over these years in the Lord’s work, I’ve seen pastors frustrated because their congregations do not respond to their pulpit pleadings to get into the community with the gospel.

I have an opinion as to why they’re not responding.

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“We’re being silly, aren’t we, Grandpa?”

I fell on the grass I was laughing so hard at that. Out of the mouths of babes!

No pastor or other minister of church leader enjoys being the butt of criticism. No one likes personal attacks, no one is blessed by the murmuring of the masses that undercuts faith, saps energies, and douses enthusiasm.

No leader in any realm–political, academic, religious, commercial–feels affirmed and encouraged by the constant bickering of those he/she is supposed to be leading.

However.

It’s what people do. It’s a human trait. And in the church, pastors, it’s a family tradition.

To bear this out, I suggest you take a quick gander at the constant carping and harassment to which Moses was subject.

Scriptures tells of at least nine incidents where the Israelis tried Moses’ soul with their bellyaching.

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It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

It’s not just that we don’t want dissent in the church when we call for unity. It’s not that we hate division, although we do that.

Unity is far more than the nay-sayers being gagged or rebellion put down. The old joke goes, “You can tie two cats’ tails together and throw them over the clothesline and you’ll have union. But you will not have unity.”

Unity is a positive quality.

When the oaring team refers to perfect moments in their boat, they do not mean the time they won a race. A perfect moment is when they feel all eight oars in the water together, working in perfect harmony.

At such moments, we’re told, the boat seems to lift right out of the water. Oarsmen call this the moment of swing.

In an old Readers Digest article, Olympic oarsman John Biglow says what he likes most about that perfect moment is it allows one to trust the other rowers. A boat does not have “swing,” he says, unless everyone is exerting equal effort, and only because of that was there the possibility of true trust among oarsmen.

We can put it in the form of a formula:

Equal Effort + Synchronization + Lift = Trust.

Now, if we apply this to the body of Christ–a local congregation is usually a lot more than eight people, but regardless of the number–we will see what lessons of harmony and unity it yields.

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