Becoming a church that works begins with the pastor. He must live the model before he can lead and expect people to follow. He must submit to the authority God has designed for him and earn trust with love and faithful service. He needs to teach at every level so the people drive change with their own grasp of the biblical process. For the church to work, the pastor and the people have to focus on the lost.
Living the model starts with the pastor putting himself clearly under the authority of an apostolic body. This means someone sent from God to hold him accountable for his life and ministry. Theocracy never is without cover. Abraham, father of nations⁴⁶ and the friend⁴⁷ of God, paid tithes to Melchizedek. He submitted to a person as a representative of God. ⁴⁸
Absolute power does corrupt, and aligning with God’s flow of authority does not give anyone the right to do as he or she pleases. This book is not about empowering pastors. It is about bringing Christ’s will to His Church and His work to the world.
Pastor, if you do not have an apostolic covering, ask God to show you whom He has chosen for that function. Often, it is an obvious lineage or spiritual family tree within the group in which you came to know Christ. Sometimes it is not. God led Abraham away from his family because He was doing something new in him. God will help you as you seek to follow His process. When you know the proper authority, you must submit as unto the Lord.
When the church sees their pastor in submission to authority, they have an example to follow. If they see a self-serving doing-his-own-thing leader, they will follow that example. The pastor must practice what he wants to reproduce.
The next prerequisite for building the church that works is trust. People believe those whom they respect and trust. Whatever they believe, true or not, they hold because they learned it from someone they trusted, or because a leader they trusted took advantage of them. Either way, the pastor will not be able to lead people into truth until he proves trustworthy.
How can he do that? He should live up to their legitimate expectations. The people rightly expect their pastor to be a man of prayer. He should be faithful to daily times of meeting with God, talking to God, and hearing from God in the secret place. Public change and lasting results in his ministry result from private prayer.
Similarly, the people expect their pastor to study, prepare, and faithfully preach and teach the Bible, the whole will of God.⁴⁹ To merit their trust, he will be diligent in preparation and in every presentation of the Word.⁵⁰ The fire of God will burn in his spirit. The Word of God will be in his mouth, and the love of God will flow from his heart.
The people also expect their shepherd to be available to them in times of need, to keep office hours, and to care when they are hurting. The trustworthy pastor will surpass their hopes.
Being a pastor in a small community may call for less time in the office but not less time at work. The rural pastor serves the whole community and each day includes a circuit of ministry and cultivating relationships. After daily prayer and study times, he goes to where the people are, downtown or in the fields, to connect both with church folks and the unchurched to help meet needs.
The people of any church expect their pastor to be an integral part of their lives in good times and bad. He performs weddings, dedicates their children and grandchildren, baptizes family members, and celebrates with them the happy events in their lives. He also goes to them when they are hurting. This means hospital visits, waiting room vigils, funerals, and times of praying and weeping together for God’s comfort and peace.
If the people find their pastor dependable when and where they think he should be, then they will transfer that trust to other areas. They will be convinced he cares about them.
Trust comes as people know their pastor loves them and wants only what is good. If they test that love and he fails, he will not be able to lead. Building trust takes time, and there is no shortcut to a long time.
Whatever it takes, the people must be convinced of the pastor’s love. He cannot come in and announce changes just because he knows they need to be made. The primary concern of many members is that he has an ulterior motive for tampering with what they have been doing for years. He has to form a trusting relationship by taking time to love them.
He builds credibility by pouring his life into them and pouring himself out for them. Alton Garrison, assistant general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, tells pastors that people will not do new or different things “until you have invested more in them than it will cost them to change.”⁵¹
The congregation may love and respect their pastor from day one, and they should. He can enjoy a productive pastorate from the very beginning. Still, it takes years to experience enough of life together for the preacher to become “Pastor” in their hearts. Members will not open to him the deepest areas of their lives until he proves worthy of their confidence.
After more than three years with a wonderful congregation, I was both taken aback and blessed by the comment of a charter member. The church had treated us royally, good things had happened, and she always had been one of our strongest supporters. So I was surprised when she told me I finally had become their pastor. She said, “You’ve always been good, but now I can see your pastor’s heart unfolding.”
When the pastor knows that the people know he loves them, he can begin to announce change. In the context of love and trust, they are more likely to respond with, “We know he cares about us. That makes what he’s doing worth following.”
A common mistake young or new pastors make is to start changing things the day they arrive. They assume they can because they hold the pastor’s position. They learn all too quickly, sometimes painfully, that they are in no position to lead transition until they have trust. The people may not be hostile to them personally so much as wary of unwarranted change. The wise pastor will take time to lead in love. He will deal with what is there until he builds the credibility to change it.
As the pastor models submission and earns trust with love and service, he also must fill the process for change with teaching. The people must understand the reasons for change, that God has set in place a flow of authority and that He has called each of them to minister.
As pastor in Sachse, I taught a lot on ministry gifts from the Father. I tried my best to empower people and keep them focused on ministry for their sakes and for the Kingdom. We developed a lot of ministries, a lot of outreaches, because the people were much more concerned about winning souls than who was in charge at the church. This also allowed us to focus on missions. The church became a leader in our denomination in giving to world ministries because we weren’t wrapped up in ourselves.
If the pastor teaches correctly in every proper setting and at all levels, the people eventually will embrace it and become advocates for change. He teaches, teaches, and teaches some more—on Sunday mornings, in small groups, in leadership meetings, and one-to-one in fellowship—until the people begin to call for change. Not everyone will get on board, but enough will take hold of the concepts that change can begin in response to their calls and not out of the blue.
When they say, “Pastor, we believe it should be this way,” they are parroting the truths he is pouring into them. Then he can agree. When they say, “That’s not how we do it,” he can ask, “Why don’t we fix it?” Because he teaches consistently and lovingly over a long enough period, these believers actually will bring about the necessary change.
This is successful change. If the pastor attempts it without teaching, then the people will not grasp the reasons and will find it very hard to do anything different. Knowing the need and being motivated by it is more important for the people than the mechanism or procedure by which change takes place.
Becoming a church that works does not start with the constitution and bylaws. It is changing attitudes, opinions, and understanding. When that happens, the documents will fall into place. If the pastor attempts to change the bylaws too fast, the church may change pastors even faster. In other words, do not ask people to vote on giving up their vote
A final but overriding principle for becoming the church that works is that the pastor and the people must focus on the lost. The church exists to deliver the message of Jesus Christ to everyone everywhere.
This is one of the greatest lessons we learned at Sachse Assembly. When you make and maintain the focus on lost people, never the people who already are there, it keeps the church healthy. The people did not try to run the church but devoted themselves to being servants and witnesses. As a result, the church multiplied. The people stayed in ministry and leadership stayed leadership. (For more about this point and others, read Appendix 1, Lessons from the Sachse Experience)
We did not have money so everyone had to have a job, and church was all about ministry. Each person got involved in mowing, cleaning, keeping kids, keeping the books, leading worship, or something. We had more job opportunities, more things that needed to be done, than we had people. So, everyone took part in ministry.
This book is designed to help pastors, leaders, and individual believers take hold of the principles and experience the power of doing church God’s way. The video supported training course and study guide offer practical tools for becoming The Church that Works! Getting it right really does release the people of God into ministry, and it unleashes the power of God to work with them.