Who Wants to Be a Leader?
Dr. Tony Hopkins; Pastor FBC Greenwood, SC; CBF of SC Coordinating Council Member
October 29, 2006
Who Wants to Be a Leader?
Exodus 3:1-10; Philippians 3:15-17
I have a friend who has a poster which shows a cowboy on his horse, driving a herd of cattle. It is pouring down rain, and you can see that the cowboy is drenched and cold and tired and miserable; and the caption at the bottom of the poster says, “This is not what I signed on for.” Since I surrendered to ministry more than twenty-five years ago, not once have I said, “I got into the ministry in the hopes that one day I would get to lead a capital campaign.” For that matter, I did not get into the ministry to lead anything– I don’t think of my calling primarily in those terms. I have never thought of myself as particularly gifted in the area of leadership; and though I have never spoken about it from the pulpit, there have been times when I said to God, “I don’t want to be the leader.”
For one thing, you know that you are not going to please all of the people whom you are trying to lead. If you are a minister, you have as many bosses as your church has members, and many of them are happy to give you a job performance evaluation anytime you do something which they do not like or agree with. Garrison Keillor, the wonderful storyteller, talks about a time he thought perhaps God was calling him to be preacher, or a prophet. He said: “Who wants that job? A prophet’s task is to confront people with the truth which they have been so carefully avoiding, so prophets have an approval rating of about four percent. [He said,] Look at the prophets in the Bible: they put them in jail and threw rocks at them and made them sit for very long times on very sharp objects.” Fairness compels me to say that the congregations I have served have never persecuted me. They have sometimes ignored me. To adapt a line from my friend Ben Davis: sometimes being a pastor is like being the guy who is in charge of the cemetery; there are a lot of people under you, but nobody really listens to what you say.
One of the good things about being a seminary graduate is that when you want to get out of doing something, you can usually find a scripture passage to help you rationalize that. When I was trying to avoid leadership, I always pointed to our Old Testament lesson. Moses is shepherding his flock when quite unexpectedly God says, “Moses, I want to go to Egypt and lead my people to freedom.” Immediately Moses says, “Who am I to do that?” Read: “I don’t want to be the leader.” Moses suggests an alternative. He says, “How about my brother Aaron? He would be a good leader, certainly better than I.” The implication is: “I’ll be glad to help– I just don’t want to be in charge.” I think this is a very normal response. I have heard a lot of people say, “I’ll be glad to help with that committee or Sunday School class or mission project or whatever it is, but I don’t want to be in charge.” Maybe you have said that.
Moses says to God: “I don’t want to be in charge. I don’t want to be the leader. Why can’t I just spend my days shepherding the flock?” I identify with Moses. That’s what I want to spend my days doing, shepherding the flock, being a pastor. When our church’s pastor search committee asked me to describe myself as a minister, I said, “I think of myself first as a pastor, second as a preacher, and third as a Bible teacher.” Unlike “being in charge,” those are things which I whole-heartedly embrace. I want to be a pastor because I love the Lord’s people. I want to be a preacher because the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. I want to be a Bible teacher because God’s word is relevant to our daily living and decision making. But being the leader– I look around and I see people who seem to me more gifted in that area.
Ironically, as we enter into this capital campaign, one of the areas where I know that I am not especially gifted or knowledgeable is finances. Somewhere in the campaign process, our campaign consultant was talking with some of our church’s financial leaders about the process we use which allows people to transfer stocks and bonds and investments to our church– I didn’t have anything to contribute to that conversation. I remember hearing Jeff Foxworthy say that he grew up thinking that 401K was a size for a lady’s undergarment. I’m not quite that bad, but I am certainly no financial guru. Actually, one of the things which appealed to me when I was considering coming here is that we have an administrator who oversees all of the financial stuff; and I appreciate Kenny Standley’s diligence in this area.
Did you hear about the two men who were shipwrecked on an island with only enough supplies for a few days?!” One of them said, “What are we going to do? We are going to die on this island.” The other man said, “Don’t worry– I make half a million dollars a year, and I tithe.” The first guy thought, “Isn’t that just like somebody with a lot of money, they think that’s the answer to everything.” He continued to be very nervous and anxious, and the other guy said again, “Don’t worry– I make half a million dollars a year, and I tithe.” The first guy said, “What in the world does have that to do with anything?!” The other guy said, “I make half a million dollars a year, and I tithe– our church administrator is going to find me!”
I appreciate Kenny Standley’s work as our administrator; and I know he would say how important Jerry Chastain and Nell Morton are in that work. Our capital campaign steering committee has done a great job; and this year’s stewardship committee has not only helped with the campaign, but they have been proactive and insightful about how the campaign intersects with our budget process. One thing I do know about leadership: if you are a leader, you need to know where you are not as gifted or knowledgeable, and then you keep around you people who are gifted in those areas. It gives me confidence, and it should give you confidence, when we look at the people in our church who take care of our finances.
There is another factor which has contributed very significantly to my understanding and practice of leadership, and it has to do with the fact that I am Baptist pastor who started in ministry in the early 1980's. Baptist have always practiced congregational church government and decision making. We believe that God guides the church through the collective wisdom of the body under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. In the 1980's, a very vocal group of pastors and leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention began to challenge this model. They began to say that the pastor is the head of church; whatever the church needs to know, God will tell the pastor, and he– and for these people, a pastor is always a ‘he’ and never a ‘she’– God tells the pastor, and he tells the church, and the church does whatever the pastor says, without dissension and without question. And suddenly church members who dared to disagree with the pastor were being pushed out of the church. At the last Southern Baptist Convention meeting I attended– and this is why it was the last– I heard pastor and then Convention president Jerry Vines say that anybody who disagreed with him was in sin. He said [and I quote], “When they all come over to where I am, then we will all be right.”
I have no stomach for these fundamentalist, self-righteous, pompous, chauvinistic pastors. The day I stand before you and say, “I am the head of this church, and what I say goes,” you need to send me packing! The one and only head of this church (or any church) is Jesus Christ! But when I was a young minister, I so abhorred this fundamentalist, power-abusing style of leadership that I went as far as I could in the other direction. Looking back, I see that just as some of those leaders erred at one extreme, I sometimes erred at other: I was so afraid of being– or being perceived as– a power-hungry leader that at times, I failed to be a leader at all.
So I had to come to terms with what Moses has to come to terms with in our Old Testament lesson. God says to Moses, “I want you to lead my people.” Moses says, “Choose somebody else.” God says, “I chose you.” Moses says, “I don’t want to be the leader.” God says, “I didn’t ask you what you wanted.” (God can say that.) “Besides,” God says, “I will be with you.” There’s the key: “I will be with you.” Relying on the presence of God is the only basis for authentic leadership in the church. It is what saves us from the abuse of power at one extreme and from impotence at the other. So somewhere along the way, I quit avoiding being a leader, and I began to pray that God would be with me and guide me and use me to help the church God has called me to serve– to help that church find and follow God’s will.
So the number one principle of authentic church leadership is: rely on God. The number two principle is what Paul says in our New Testament lesson: lead by example. There was a time when I would read these passages where Paul says, “Imitate me,” and write them off to Paul’s ego. Even now I do not think that Paul suffered from an excess of humility, but I now realize that when Paul says, “Imitate me,” there is always at least the implication of what he says explicitly in our New Testament lesson, that he is leading by example. Paul says: whatever I ask you to do– if I ask you to avoid immorality, to be faithful to worship and prayer, to give generously and sacrificially, to be committed to Jesus Christ above all else– whatever I ask you to do [Paul says], look at my life, and you will see that I am doing those same things. That is leading by example.
Under that heading, since I have asked you to prayerfully consider your role in our church’s capital campaign, I want you to know that the Hopkins have done that. Some time ago, Carol and I entered into a season of prayer about our pledge to the campaign. The first decision was easy: we knew that our gift to the campaign would be an over and above gift. For twenty-one years, Carol and I have tithed faithfully– to tell the truth, we tithe and then a little– and we knew that our campaign gift, like our gifts to our missions offerings, would be in addition to our tithe. If we simply redirect our regular giving into the capital campaign, we undercut the ministries which are funded by our budget.
Then we did a couple of other things. There is a new driver at our house, and we test drove a truck which he and his daddy really liked– it had all the bells and whistles. But when we looked at the payments, we said to the car dealer, “We’re going to be paying on this loan during the same three year period that we are giving to our church’s capital campaign.” Fortunately, our car dealer is also the Executive Director of our capital campaign, so he took the extra time and energy and effort to find us something with smaller payments (which he would do for anybody.) But we felt good about that because we feel like it accurately represents our family’s priorities.
The other thing we’ve done is rework our long range plan for our kids’ college education. Years ago, we opened a college fund for each of our children; we put a little more in Michelle’s because she would go to college first. We said then that when Michelle started college (which she did this fall), we would take the money we had been putting into her college fund and begin to put it in Caleb’s college fund. But as we prayed, we felt led to instead give that money to the capital campaign. So on some level, our gift is a sacrifice– it’s not a sacrifice compared to what Christ sacrificed for us– but it is a sacrifice in the sense that it represents a change in our plan and a reordering of our priorities. But what I like most is that it is a gift of faith. With this gift we are saying, “Lord, we trust that in three years when Caleb starts college, you will be at work to help us work all of that out.” And we are confident in our faith, because for twenty-one years, we have found that God is trustworthy– God can be trusted to meet our needs as we are obedient in our living and our giving. So as you pray for your role in our Renewing Hearts and Heritage campaign, know that I am praying for you and with you; and know that God can be trusted to meet your needs as you are obedient to God in your living and your giving.
George Patton, in his book General Patton’s Principles for Life and Leadership, says: “Picking the right leader is the most important task of any commander. I line up the candidates and say, ‘Men, I want a trench dug behind warehouse ten. Make this trench eight feet long, three feet wide, and six inches deep.’ Then, from an unseen position, I watch them without their knowing it. Some of them debate whether a trench of such dimensions is of any use, whether it should not be deeper. And they usually speculate about what I intend to do with such a trench. Others argue over whether to use shovels or power equipment. Still others complain that it is too hot or too cold or the wrong place to dig. If any of them are officers, they complain about why they should be doing such lowly labor. But then one man will take charge and say, ‘The general wants a trench, and he wants it at this place, and he wants it to have these dimensions. What difference does it make what he intends to do with it? Let’s get it dug and be done with it!’” Patton says, “There’s the leader: the man who obeys regardless of circumstances and regardless of whether he understands or agrees with the order.”
When I was a young pastor and I saw so many church leaders who were dictators, I didn’t want to be a leader. But if this is what it means– if leadership means obedience to God regardless of circumstances, obedience to God regardless of whether or not I completely understand or agree with God’s plan– if leadership means being out in front as we follow Christ and discover and carry out God’s will for our church, then with all of my heart, I want to be a leader.