Team members need a mechanism for telling you what they have found. Your co-workers must be allowed to tell you what’s not working. Unless you arrange a method by which they can voice their gripes and get their suggestions before the proper personnel, the entire system is in jeopardy.

Without such a system, they will still gripe and belly-ache and criticize, but not to you. They’ll do it behind your back and you will feel threatened and be tempted to respond harshly and it’s all downhill from then on.

You can spare yourself a lot of grief by working out a system by which your church members, your employees, your team members can talk back to you.

The design engineers need to hear from the salesmen on the road who can tell them the customers’ experience with the new gadget–what’s working and what isn’t.

At the end of one play and before the next one, the wide receiver must be able to tell the quarterback that he thinks he can beat the cornerback, that he’s noticed something that fellow does which will allow him to outplay him. On the next play, the quarterback throws deep to the receiver who beats his man and scores.

The employees need a method for giving feedback to the foreman or the office supervisor.

The pastor needs to hear from his team members–the ministerial staff, the office staff, the custodial staff, everyone–as well as from the church members.

Make no mistake, if members of the team see something that isn’t working, they’re going to talk about it among themselves. But it does no good, and may even undermine what good they are doing, unless they are allowed to bring the criticism to the person who needs that information and can act on it.

I said to the church, “We’ve put a blank sheet of paper inside your bulletin handout today. Write down any question you have about how things are being done around here, or any suggestion you’d like to make. Next Sunday night, I’m going to take a half-hour in the evening service and respond to as many of your points as possible.”

A deacon friend said, “Are you sure that was wise? You’re going to get a lot of negative stuff.” I said, “That’s what I’m looking for. I need to know what they’re concerned about. They’re telling everyone except me. This way, they’ll be telling me in a way that allows me to respond to it. But when they meet in little groups before or after the service and complain only to one another, it breeds unrest in the congregation.”

The next Sunday night, he became a believer. Afterwards, he said, “Those were some great questions. Of course, I liked your answers, but the questions were excellent too. That was pretty smart.”

I pulled him aside and whispered, “Some of those questions were ringers.” He said, “You made them up?”

I said, “I knew people wanted information on those areas, but no one had the courage to ask about it. So, I made up the question and then answered it.”

No pastor is neutral on this subject. Some want no criticism and some of us seem to go out of our way to find it.

I said to a neighboring pastor, “When people leave my church and join another one in town, I wish we could debrief them. I’d like to sit down in their living room and pick their brain. Did we fail you in some way? Did you find something in the new church that we ought to be doing?”

He said, “Not me. I can’t take it. If they want to leave, let them go!” We laughed at that. What made it poignant was that his church was one of the largest in town, much bigger than mine. I knew he had done a number of courageous moves in leading his church, even to the point of a complete relocation and erecting a massive, expensive plant. He had taken plenty of criticism in his time, but the point was, I gathered, he received enough without having to go looking for more!

I have actually sought it out more than once.

After five years in one pastorate, I asked the chairman of deacons to consider doing an evaluation of my ministry. I’m not sure I’d have done that had I known how seriously he was going to take the suggestion.

He ended up making a project for the entire body of deacons. They compiled a three page questionnaire, then chose every seventh name on the church membership rolls and interviewed them in their homes. When they finished that month-long project, they had interviewed 75 or 100 adults which resulted in a huge stack of completed forms. A couple of the men collated the information onto two pages which they put on transparencies–this was before the age of powerpoint–and projected onto a screen for the entire church leadership to see at the same time I was seeing it. Talk about your scary scenario!

The good news is the evaluation turned out positive and there was nothing in it to embarrass me. The bad news is they ended up giving me the entire stack of completed evaluations, which was a mistake. Some people had signed their names and when they found out that I had read their comments, they felt betrayed, at least in a minor way.

One funny thing occurred. I noticed that a large number of people had written “NO” in response to some questions. They were asked, “What do you think of Joe’s weddings?” and they had written, “NO.” “What is your opinion about his counseling technique?” “NO.” It had happened throughout these reports.

I began feeling depressed about this, as though the members were giving me a negative report. Then I decided to go back and read the original instructions: “Where you have no opinion, write ‘NO.'” Whew. That felt better.

Later, I wrote an article for “Church Administration” in which I described our experience and recommended such periodic evaluations. I invited our staff to have the deacons evaluate them in a similar manner, but no one went for it. They were either too insecure or too smart!

I’ve met pastors who do annual evaluations of their staff, sometimes involving church leadership, and then in return, they evaluate him. Every church that does this seems to have its own twists on the theme.

Looking back, I don’t know whether such evaluations perform a service or not. They seem to imply that the congregation’s job is to rate the preacher up or down and his job is to make them happy, and if everyone is pleased, he’s doing a great job. Anyone searching his Bible for guidance on these matters will quickly find the fallacy in that reasoning.

The pastor’s job is not to make the church happy. God sent him to make the church healthy and Him happy.

Perhaps the best thing such evaluations accomplish is they give the congregation a way to vent, to register their frustrations or their approval in a safe manner.

The feedback mechanism I’m calling for is not to rate the preacher, but to strengthen the church in making good use of everyone in the congregation. The preacher is all-too-human and does not have wisdom enough to know everything about every situation. He will either make a way for his members and staff to bring comments and suggestions and findings to his attention, or the entire program will suffer.

The simplest method may simply be to give the blank sheet of paper at least once a year and invite church members to write their questions or comments. What you do with them after that is up to you.