Whenever people ask me when things changed for me as pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church, I tell them it was after a particularly difficult time during my early years as pastor. After dealing with an intense crisis, I took off several days for a spiritual retreat. As is customary in my experiences when seeking some word from God, there are several days of terrifying silence — when God doesn’t seem to want to say anything to me — and then, He’ll give me one or two sentences that change everything. The first sentence was to me personally. “Why don’t you relax and be who I made you to be?” Besides my salvation moment, I have never heard a more freeing word from Jesus.
The second sentence was about the church. “Why don’t you let the church relax and be who I made them to be?” While also freeing, the words were discomforting. For one thing, I didn’t know who God had made Brentwood Baptist Church to be. I thought one church was like every other church. After all, every church conference I had ever attended always presented a plan for church growth that had worked in one place and the assumption was it would work every place. What worked in California would work in Tennessee. What worked in Texas would work in Tennessee. No, that’s not right.
What works in one place may or may not work in another place. I assumed, of course, the lack of success was my fault. I further assumed if I just worked harder, the imported plans would work. So, I doubled down. I worked harder and the only thing I did was alienate my team, my congregation and even my own family. I came no closer to any kind of success. I just doubled the frustration of the church. Like them, I too was frustrated and couldn’t understand why what worked everywhere else wasn’t working here. After all, isn’t a church a church?
I should have known better. The God who introduces Himself as the Artist who created the universe in the opening chapters of Genesis never duplicates Himself. No two fingerprints are alike. No two snowflakes are alike.
And no two churches are alike. There is no one size fits all for church leadership and church health. The first thing new pastors must do is to get to know their congregations the same way a parent understands their child. Why did God put this people at this place at this time? How has God revealed Himself to this congregation in the past? What are those moments when “God showed up” the congregation talks about and celebrates? What was the original dream for the church by those who founded it? How has this dream changed or been confirmed.
The pastor does this by listening to the stories of their congregations. How has God shown up here in the past? What are those “God moments” that everyone in the church talks about? If we can draw circles on the timeline of those moments when God has shown up in this local congregation, we can then continue that line into the future to anticipate how God will work in the future of the church. For instance, Brentwood Baptist Church was planted by Woodmont Baptist Church. Our first pastor, Bill Wilson, was a church planter. When Bill retired, I asked him what he wish he’d done more of. His answer was, “We should have planted more churches.” When I brought up the idea about starting campuses, the church just shrugged and said, “Sure. We’ve always been about planting churches. Bill talked about that all the time.”
Because the future we described was consistent with our past, our people didn’t fight it. We never had to deal with the pain of the change curve because the congregation recognized themselves in their baby pictures. This is who we were. This is who we are and then, this is what we are becoming. It all lined up.
Once the pastor has determined the character and identity of their congregation, they have two major roles. First, keep all the “experts” and “consultants” out of the church. Every day, we were contacted by someone who wanted to bring their magic box over and put our church through another “transformative process”. These things never worked for us. They probably won’t work for you either. The second calling of the pastor is to keep the church’s future aligned within the DNA of the church’s past. The adult can always be found in the child. This is true for humans and for churches.
No two churches are just alike. Each congregation has its own personality and calling. That’s the challenge of leading a local congregation. That’s also the privilege.
