Survivor: The Story of a Pastor and a Church
By Glen Schmucker, Dallas, TX
Occasionally, life offers us the rare opportunity of standing at a crossroads and actually knowing it at the same time. On Sunday, April 6, 2008, I found myself standing at one of those moments of departure. I was preaching my final sermon as pastor of Cliff Temple Baptist Church, the church I had served for just shy of ten years. Just a few weeks before, I had survived a vote of confidence by a two-thirds majority. Survived, but barely.
Though I could have kept my job and though I had no place else to work, I genuinely feared that staying in that place would have involved sacrificing my calling, my health, and my family. Sometimes, it’s best to just let go. Letting go meant accepting the fact that being faithful to the call of God to ministry does not involve keeping any one particular job, no matter what the cost.
While I had not been forced to resign or been terminated, by that Sunday two weeks after Easter, I had arrived at a place where I knew that local church and I could no longer walk the same path together. Without doubt, it was one the most significant, gut-wrenching and soul-stirring decisions I have ever made. What brought us to that moment? The complete answer to that question will only come with many more moments of time.
My story is not unique. Several of my colleagues had either faced forced termination or votes of confidence at virtually the same time. The common denominators in our stories were frighteningly similar. There was a direct correlation between the mission to which the church had committed itself and the conflict following that mission had created within our fellowship.
Like many churches, our inner-city congregation had struggled with its commitment to fulfill the Great Commission in a radically changing neighborhood. Since the 1950s, our predominately Anglo congregation found itself in a neighborhood transitioning from one made up of people “like us” to one populated by eighty-five percent, first-generation, poverty-level Hispanic families.
The church made the strategic decision in the 1980s not to follow the white flight by relocating to the suburbs. It had chosen to break the mold by not abandoning the very community in which it believed itself called to be the presence of Christ. On the surface, it appeared to be a decision based on more than just self-preservation.
The church had engaged in many effective ministries to the community over the years. Yet, with each passing year, it also found itself increasingly disconnected from those it sought to serve by overwhelming socio-economic, racial, linguistic, and even religious barriers. Regardless, a church that is not vitally connected to its community has no future in that community. Christ-like ministry takes place in the daily rub of one life up against another.
To choose to stay located in a community is one thing. Making that decision work is something else altogether. The needs of the community had long ago outstripped the resources any one congregation could supply. Knowing that, our church made what I believed to be a reasoned, Spirit-led commitment to devote some of its resources to partnerships that would empower us to stay connected to our community.
No one does a better job of empowering local churches to stay community-connected than does Buckner International. In the spring of 2005, Cliff Temple entered into a collaboration with Buckner. The future looked brighter than ever for what otherwise seemed to be an impossible situation. Little did I know that, in the making of that decision, conflict was brooding in our fellowship.
Like the dry underbrush on the forest floor, all the fuel needed for a firestorm was growing by the day. All that was needed was a spark. The spark that created the firestorm for our church was just that, the electric spark of one simple email. Once I hit the send button, all that was left were the ashes of what might have been.
The Perfect Storm
On December 26, 2004, a 100-foot tsunami swept hundreds of thousands Southeast Asians to their deaths. Many died because they’d been caught off guard by waves generated by forces at work hundreds of miles away. Two plates of the earth’s crust had been competing against each other to occupy the same space, perhaps for hundreds of years. The pressure finally caused them to snap. The very face of the earth’s surface was permanently altered. No one will ever know the total cost in human life and property.
In our world, cultures are clashing along socio-economic, racial, geographical, and even religious lines, perhaps as never before in recorded history. Because the church is located in the world, it will not escape the tsunami-sized waves of change that are coming.
Cliff Temple’s world had been caught at one of the most visible flash points of that cultural change. It had chosen to stay put at the point of conflict, to be the presence of Christ there. The church’s leadership acknowledged that staying put in and connected to the inner city would demand that the church adapt (read: change) itself to the changing culture in order to reach it with the gospel. None of us could possibly appreciate how demanding that change would be.
Though Cliff Temple had historically ministered to its most immediate community for generations, the church’s survival would now require integrating the church into the community before there was any hope of the community integrating itself into the church. Cliff Temple asked Buckner to come alongside, train, empower, and equip the church for that integration.
Change, however, even if it is acknowledged and chosen, is always painful. Some welcome the pain of change as the sign of new life. Others can only see that pain as personal loss. For a leader, the challenge is to keep the conversation open between those who view change so differently. Too often, especially in churches, that conversation degrades into competition. Good people start talking about each other instead of to each other.
Competition grows for budget dollars, for worship styles, and even for physical space. When the conversation degrades into competition, the competition-conversation is only versed in the language of us-vs.-them. The stage is set for everyone to lose, no matter who wins.
One day, in processing my feelings about the conversation-turned-competition, I sent an email to Ken Hall [Buckner’s CEO]. In that email, I candidly expressed my growing frustration. My frustration was not at any one person or group of people. I was simply jammed up, as on an overcrowded freeway at rush hour. I felt trapped between the call of the church, as I understood it, to help it find a new way in a radically changing world and the need to be responsive to some who apparently felt it was their call to protect the church from the change that leadership would eventually create.
Nonetheless, if it is not dealt with in healthy ways, pressure builds like steam in a pressure cooker. I was letting off some steam when I hit the send button, not realizing until it was too late that I had inadvertently sent the email to the church’s leadership team. In the minds of some, I had chosen sides and the race was on. Having later been made aware of my error, I spent that evening retching into our master-bath toilet. My mistake made me physically ill. I had no idea how sick I was yet to feel. Sometimes, change really does hurt. Wait and see.
Fear
Anyone who has been to seminary knows that Arthur Flake was the father of the modern Sunday School. One of Flake’s principles for growing a church’s Sunday School could be summarized in the words “build it and they will come.” Flake assumed that Sunday School would always be the primary means of outreach for churches. For decades, he was right, especially in the post-World War II baby boom years. In growing suburbs across America, virtually all you had to do was build a church, throw open the doors, and find yourself in need of even more space very shortly. Whole generations of pastors and educators were trained in that paradigm of church growth.
Flake’s formula failed to take two major factors into consideration. For one, a day was coming in the post-modern world where, in many places, Sunday School would cease to be the most effective way of reaching people. The major flaw in Flake’s paradigm was that church growth was too narrowly defined by how many people you could get into the church building on Sunday morning, a standard most Baptist churches still use to define the success of their professional leadership.
Another factor overlooked by Flake’s formula was the natural tendency of church people to become territorial. After a few weeks in the same room, that room becomes the exclusive domain of the people who meet there for one hour a week.
The result was that billions of square feet at a cost of uncountable billions of dollars have been built since WWII that sit empty for seven days a week, except for one hour on Sunday. The back-hook of territorial thinking is that, before long, the building owns the church, literally defining and driving the church’s mission.
One of the constant struggles the good people of Cliff Temple faced was mission-definition and territorialism both defined and driven by the building. We were successful in helping our folks open the doors of the church to multiple community-based ministries. By the time I left, we had an expanded Day Care Center, an independent African-American congregation, an Hispanic congregation, and a church for the mentally disabled—all worshipping and serving alongside our predominately white congregation and all under the same roof. The children in two Charter Schools that leased space from us during the week began to integrate into our church’s many programs and ministries. Additionally, Buckner had begun funding and overseeing an After-School ministry for latch-key kids and a Day Center that provided food, clothing, and other essentials to some 30,000 souls per year.
Yet, in all of that, the competition for the square footage continued. Though the majority of Cliff Temple was thrilled to see the new rainbow of humanity touching down in our facility, there were some who complained that Buckner was taking over our church or that we were “outsourcing” our ministry through Buckner. There were those who complained that we weren’t doing enough for “our people,” even though the structure of both our budget and staff gave solid proof otherwise.
In time, I found ways not to take the complaints personally. I came to see them as expressions of fear. Fear that their church was changing. Fear that the world was changing. Fear that things would never be the same again. The fear was real, if fear is one’s choices of responses to change.
Being a pastor who leads people to change means stopping now and then to talk about fear. Or, better yet, stopping to at least listen to the fears of others. Most church fear is not based on logic; it’s based on emotion. You can’t respond to fear with logic; it only makes people angrier. You better listen, nonetheless, or you will soon find yourself a very lonely leader with no one following.
Letting Go
When I first slapped on a pair of water skis years ago, the first lesson I was given was how to fall down. The instructions were simple and terse. When you are water skiing and you start to fall, let go of the rope. Letting go of the rope is hard at first because it’s counterintuitive. Letting go feels like surrendering security when the opposite is actually true. The only people who ever get hurt are those who hold on when they should have let go. It doesn’t take much creativity to imagine the rest.
Letting go of Cliff Temple was one of the single most painful and difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. Some of the finest people and servants of God I’ve ever known, I met because of Cliff Temple. I let go only because it became apparent to me that holding on would drag both the church and myself places neither wanted to go. It was so hard to let go because it also meant letting go of a dream that I would never see fulfilled. Nonetheless, it takes a pretty enormous ego to assume that Providence is limited to any one person’s presence to fulfill God’s redemptive purposes in any church or community.
Could I have done things differently? Absolutely. I have a whole list of things I’ve learned. However, nothing rates higher as something learned than this: if we want to see the face of Jesus, all we need do is look into the faces of “the least of these.” It takes more than a glance. It takes a compassionate and fixed stare that only months and years of caring make possible.
It is in the eyes of those who are hungry, broken by life, homeless, out of a job, dispirited by personal defeat, mentally disabled, unkempt, orphaned and widowed that the face of Jesus is very, very visible, if we will only take time to look. Sometimes, it takes siding up close to someone, like the folks at Buckner, who are skilled at helping people refocus their vision to see the eyes of Jesus in the faces of human beings close by. In too many churches, the language of the redeemed still contains too many references to “those people” and “our people.” Jesus never spoke such condescending profanity.
All children are God’s children, and should be treated like the royalty they are in the house of God. My biggest dream at Cliff Temple was to lead a church to change the conversation from “What has the church done for me lately?” to “What can I do for the kingdom of God today in this place where I live every day?” We actually succeeded with many. With others, the work may never be done.
I was able to finally let go because I believe, with all my heart, that if I helped one person change the conversation by letting go of old stereotypes and embracing the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, then ten years of ministry was not wasted.
Things Learned
People have asked me multiple times what I have learned from all of this. I’ve decided, for my last blog, to list what I think I am learning. Maybe ten years from now, I’ll know for sure what I’ve learned. Until then, here is what I’m learning, in no particular order.
Thanks again to Ken Hall for this wonderful opportunity.
Note: This article was originally a series of email blogs written by the author, who may be contacted at http://www.pastorsmucker.blogspot.com/. He has recently accepted the call to be pastor of Grace Fellowship Baptist Church (CBF) in Fair Oaks, TX.
