Church & Ministry

Republished, with permission, from Voice magazine, Mar/Apr 2013.

(Earl Brubaker continues sharing some of the people-skills lessons he learned during his years of ministry as a pastor. Read Part 1.)

A third lesson

On another occasion, in what could have been a major church crisis, Ray and Goff taught me to respond with compassion and understanding to the negative reactions we sometimes face. Ray, one of the church trustees, taught in our Christian Day School. Goff, the church treasurer, was a retired Los Angeles County fireman.

I sat in my study that Monday morning with a heavy heart reflecting on a Sunday evening congregational meeting that turned ugly. No violence, no overt threats, just ugly. Midway through a building expansion, we discovered that an additional piece of property was available. Most folks saw it as a great opportunity to complete the block of property already owned by the church. Others thought adding that final corner to our property was a merely cosmetic, large, unnecessary expense. The discussion got heated, voices raised. Charges of waste, deceit, and trying to control the church through private negotiations were all aired in the tense exchange. In the end, calm prevailed and the congregation voted by a large majority to complete the purchase.

Read the series so far.

People naturally gravitate toward others who share their interests. As C. S. Lewis once noted, friendships are built among people who are looking at the same things. In general, the more interests we share with one another, the more profound our friendships are likely to be. In a certain sense, friendships are communities of interest. Friendships that are formed around specific interests also tend to spill over into other areas of life, leading to the discovery of other shared interests and closer levels of friendship.

This principle holds as true for church members as it does for unbelievers. Christians are naturally drawn together by their interest in Christianity. They are further drawn together by their interest in and agreement upon specific aspects of Christianity: we rally not only around the gospel, but around theological ideals. More than that, Christians are also drawn together by human interests that are not specifically Christian (though, as Christians, we hold them to be under the lordship of Christ).

Not surprisingly, churches find that their members cluster around varied interests, many of which are not even specific to Christianity. A church may see groups of members being drawn together by their stations in life (age, sex, locality, family situations, careers, etc.). Adolescents are drawn to each other, and so are retirees. Women talk to other women in ways that they do not talk to men, and vice versa. Parents of preschoolers take an interest in each other’s challenges. Farmers talk farming with other farmers.

Republished, with permission, from Voice magazine, Mar/Apr 2013.

During the afternoon of an IFCA Regional Conference, several Regional leaders interviewed two young men who were preparing for ordination. Since I knew the young men and had recently been through that same process, I asked Dick how the interview went. Dick Schwab was a man twenty-five years my senior, a long-time IFCA member, and a member of the founding board of Northwest Independent Church Extension (NICE) with which I served. He loved details and ardently, but graciously, defended the faith. He chose his words carefully.

“I have observed,” he began in answer to my question, “That many more men fail in ministry for lack of people skills than for lack of theological training.”

I have long since forgotten the remainder of Dick’s comments in that conversation, but I often recall his assessment of the importance of people skills. Over a period of years I observed Dick defending his convictions about such often debated issues as cessationism, eschatology, and dispensationalism. I appreciated his scholarship as well as his commitment to the truth. It was his defense of those views without alienating those who disagreed, however, for which I most remember him.