Today, I had coffee with a friend of many years whom I served on staff with a long time ago.  At one point, he mentioned a pastor he served under after I departed.  “As fine a preacher as he was,” said my friend, “he so hated conflict he would do anything to avoid it.”

At one point, said he, the pastor arranged to be out of town when my friend the staffer was going to be needing him to take a strong stand.

That pastor impressed a lot of people by his preaching and disappointed quite a few who had needed him to show some courage and take a stand.

Let’s talk about that.

Perhaps the nicest guy ever to occupy the White House lived there only six months. After his March 1881 inauguration, James A. Garfield, our 20th president, was assassinated by Charles Guiteau, described in history books as a disappointed office seeker. Garfield died in September of that year. As for Guiteau, what he was, in the words of Andy Taylor referring to Barney Fife, was a nut.

In Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield, Kenneth D. Ackerman penned the most readable account of an historical event you will ever find. Now, I’m a history student (history major in both college and seminary), so I’m accustomed to slogging through the most boring books in order to learn about someone from the distant past. This book, however, is a page turner, and I recommend it highly.

Garfield’s nemesis was Roscoe Conkling, an egotistical senator from New York. He was a dandy dresser who worked out to keep his body looking sharp in a day when to be stout was proof of a man’s success. Conkling was a ladies’ man who broke his marriage vows regularly, his wife’s heart deeply, and other people’s marriages thoughtlessly. The power behind the political machine controlling New York politics, nothing happened without Conkling’s say-so.

In those days, one of the most powerful appointments a president could make was the head of the U. S. Customs House in New York harbor. Almost all foreign shipments arrived in this country through that port, meaning this office collected untold millions of dollars in federal taxes. Thousands of people worked under the authority of the director, and in the days before civil service, New York City political bosses took care of their people by filling those lucrative positions.

Until Garfield, the head of that government bureau was always approved by the boss of New York politics, in this case Roscoe Conkling. This was the price the president paid for receiving the support of Conkling’s machine. In our day, this would be like the governor of Virginia being allowed to select the head of the CIA or the Secretary of Defense since their headquarters are located inside that state. Presidents regularly caved in to Conkling’s bullying tactics.

Repeatedly, Garfield’s attempted to get along with Conkling, to give him what he asked for, to satisfy his demands which seemed limitless, anything to avoid a showdown with the man. Reading this account, one keeps waiting for the president to show some backbone and stand up to this tyrant.

Eventually Garfield did.

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There’s something about us preachers. Maybe it’s in the DNA. It’s one more indication of our fallen nature, as though we need more of those. Here’s what we do.

In order to make myself look good, in order to impress you with my situation, in order to show you what a great job I’ve done at this church, I put someone else down.

The first time I saw it to know its true character, a preacher acquaintance had gone to pastor a downtown church in a huge city. He was always a let’s-think-outside-the-box type, before anyone had ever thought to put it that way. He was an innovator, a motivator, a let’s-get-‘er-done type. And that’s what he did at that church.

Within a year, he had that church packed to the rafters with people he had attracted by his unorthodox ways, captivating preaching, and bright personality. He was baptizing a thousand people a year when no one else on the planet was doing that. And he led that church to relocate, to get out of the concrete jungle where they owned no parking and to erect a great campus on the interstate where they would be visible to the world. He was a natural born fund-raiser and inspired his people to contribute millions of dollars–not one or two, but many millions–to pay for that vast acreage and the spacious state-of-the-art buildings. Everything he did was the biggest, the best, the brightest.

Most of us were understandably in awe of him.

When the invitations to speak in other places began to pour in, opportunities to tell the story of his church and how God had used him there, he saw this as an open door to help other pastors and churches to reach their communities. That’s when most of the pastors of my generation learned about him. And it is fair to say that along with most everyone else who ever heard him, we sat in awe of his preaching and fell in love with his personality. He became a genuine star.

“When I arrived,” he would tell his audiences, “that church was dead, dead, dead. There might have been 300 souls sitting in that cavern of a building, all of them waiting for the undertaker. They had not done anything for years.”

Prior to his coming, the previous pastors had been status-quo types who could not see the vast opportunity God had placed before them. He didn’t use the actual word, but we all knew those guys had been real losers.

He went on, “One day I asked the treasurer, ‘What is this $60,000 doing in a savings account?’ He said, ‘It’s for a rainy day.’ I told him, ‘Good lord, man! It’s been raining for years!!'”

We all laughed. Great fun, good entertainment for the preacher crowd, sharp put-downs for the sightless leadership many of us in the audience were saddled with in our churches. It felt good to see someone go in to a dead church, weed out the do-nothings, and establish a mighty work of faith.

One day something occurred to me. With the nation-wide publicity this preacher brother is getting for the phenomenal work God has done through him in that city, with the acclaim that comes through resurrecting a dead church and building one that is attacking the very gates of hell, with all of us bowing before this preacher in our best “we’re not worthy” manner, I wonder.

I wonder about his predecessor. Who is the pastor who served that church before him, back when it was “dead, dead, dead.” And how is he feeling along about now? Is he still pastoring, or I found myself hoping, was he in his grave so he doesn’t have to listen to this?

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My friend John was a flockless shepherd, a pastor lacking a congregation. It’s an awkward place in life for a preacher to find himself. Like being a lover without a sweetheart, a physician with no one to help, a teacher with no pupils.

“I have to preach,” he said to me. “Preaching is everything to me! Preaching is my passion.”

I said, “That’s not good, John. Preaching was never meant to be your passion. Jesus Christ is supposed to be your passion.”

Give John credit; he heard that. “Wow,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been hit in the face with a bucket of ice water. Thank you for bringing me back to reality.”

Personally, I’m not sure the Lord calls anyone to preach, as the expression goes. He calls us into His service to do whatever He commands. That may indeed be to preach the gospel in pastoring or evangelism, but as with my situation, often the specifics change. After 42 years of pulpit ministry, I moved into administration and the pastoral care of pastors. I still preach, but irregularly and in churches everywhere. Yet, I’m still in the ministry, still wearing the uniform, still heeding the Master’s commands.

We’re supposed to love the Lord our God supremely, first of all and most of all. Everything else comes next. Including a deep love for His church.

Now, just as my friend John focused too intently on preaching and possibly put it ahead of his loyalty to Christ, some do that with the church.

I was listening on my car radio to Wallace, another pastor friend, who was making an evangelistic appeal. He said something like, “If you are lost, if you are seeking direction in life, you are carrying guilt over a life of rebellion and neglect, you want to find new meaning and forgiveness and purpose in life, my friend, you need a new relationship….” At this point, I knew what was coming. He would tell the listeners about Jesus Christ and salvation.

But I was wrong.

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If we define leadership as “influencing others toward a certain goal,” then the field is as wide as the universe and about as diverse and varied as the people in it.

New books on leadership come off the press at an alarming rate. Whatever else that indicates, it surely means people are trying to learn how to accomplish the assignments life has handed them. Pastors, if anyone on the planet, are called to be leaders. Pastors–and by that I mean all ministers, not just the preacher–stand out in front of small or large clusters of the Lord’s people saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” (Isaiah 30:21)

Let’s admit the obvious here: no one can read all those books, not and have a life. Don’t even try. But from time to time, I encourage pastors to check a book out of the public (or church) library on this subject and read it. As with every other kind of book, he should read some of it to decide if he wants to read a lot of it. There’s no point in wasting his time. Every book on leadership can teach something, even if it’s how not to lead.

Lately, I have come to realize that what the Lord was doing in instructing His disciples over His three-year ministry was training leaders. He may have called them sheep, but He most certainly was not training them to be followers of anyone except Himself.

Scripture uses all kinds of metaphors and terminology to convey the idea that we are to be leaders of people in this world, for Jesus’ sake. God told the Old Testament Jews that if they would obey Him, He would place them on top and not the bottom, He would make them the head and not the tail, and they would be the lenders and not borrowers. (Deuteronomy 28:13)

What could be clearer than that?

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