Pastoral Leadership

For the Care of Souls

Harold L. Senkbeil, Lucas V. Woodford

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781683594765
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Chiesa cristiana

Christ's sheep need shepherding. That's where you come in.
With more than 60 years of ministry between them, Harold Senkbeil and Lucas Woodford have come to understand that everything in ministry--even administration, leadership, and planning--revolves around the ancient tradition of the care of souls. Pastors are entrusted with the care of a flock by the Good Shepherd and are called to be faithful to this task. But pastoring seems to be getting more and more difficult.
Based on a sound theological framework, Senkbeil and Woodford present a set of practical tools for church leadership and strategy. Calling on their vast experience, they encourage pastors to protect, guide, and feed their flock as Jesus would, bridging the eternal wisdom of the word of God with the everyday practicality of hands-on leadership. Originally published as Church Leadership & Strategy, this revision includes a new chapter and litany.

CHAPTER 1

Learning Leadership from Experience

Lucas V. Woodford

In 2003, I began my ministry at age 27 as an assistant pastor in a very large congregation. We had 3,300 members and a Lutheran parochial grade school (pre-K–8) of nearly 300 students attached. Between congregation and school, we had about fifty employees and a $2.4 million annual budget. With ministry operations on this scale, leadership is essential. I was part of a solid leadership organization, being one of three full-time pastors with numerous other part-time pastors on staff, as well as around forty teachers and numerous other office and support staff. Though I was only there for two and a half years, I watched as the congregation went through a governance model change and implemented various ministry efforts in a large setting.

I saw upfront the importance of leadership. In fact, our congregation was part of a leadership institute that served as a host site to assist pastors in becoming better pastoral leaders through hands-on experience at our church. At a relatively young age in ministry, I led groups of pastors through my area of ministry responsibility (discipleship, Christian education, and small groups) and explored with them the intricacies of pastoral leadership and teamwork in our large congregation.

So when I received the call to be senior pastor to Zion Lutheran Church only a short time later, I felt I had the skill set, the ambition, and the readiness to jump into that role at a smaller though still good-sized congregation and school (900 members and 150 students). Being confident in my leadership skills and excited for the new ministry and growing area I was moving to, I set out with great anticipation and confidence. However, I quickly found out the Lord has a way of humbling those who think too much of themselves.

My overconfidence and eager anticipation was met with a congregation and school beset by all kinds of internal strife, organizational disorder, ministry conflict, and personnel troubles. Though I was blessed to serve the saints of Zion for over a decade, the first five years were extremely difficult due to a host of issues, one of which was how I had bought into the lie that the church’s success was entirely dependent upon my own leadership. As you will see, I certainly affirm the importance of leadership. But making the success of a church (whatever that may be) hinge upon that one sole factor is dubious business.

THE TANTALIZING CHALLENGE

When I arrived, the congregation was convinced they needed to build a new, state-of-the-art church facility and school. In fact, they purchased twenty acres of land to do so just one month after my arrival. The congregation itself was situated in what had become a small but fast-growing bedroom community for the Twin Cities (of Minnesota), in the little town of Mayer. Formerly a farming community, new houses were exploding in three new developments. The congregation was growing and had a wonderful intergenerational mix of farmers and country folk combined with commuters and suburbanites of varying metropolitan mentalities.

But as I quickly found out, the congregation was not united about which property to buy (they had three possibilities), nor were they agreed on how to pay for this new building project (they had cash on hand for the land, but nothing after that), or even if that building project should be the emphasis of the congregation’s ministry. Adding to this unrest was the well-meaning but misguided efforts of some factions in the congregation to champion one or the other of the various ministries within the congregation by rallying troops to their cause, but which created significant divisions. Combined with this were some long-standing personnel conflicts, as well as a significant budget shortfall and mounting debt. So, you can imagine the disharmony and angst it created for me as their new, young, and inexperienced pastor.

I was quickly sucked into the unhealthy spiral of interaction and dysfunction, which ultimately led to compassion fatigue and burnout that I unhealthily tried to bury deep down in my gut and hide lest I be seen as a failure. Pride is a wicked vice the devil will try to use in order to bring down many a pastor. That is why personal prayer and meditation, confession and absolution with a father confessor, and the regular exercising of your faith (apart from sermon prep or Bible study prep) are essential to combat and treat such attacks of the devil.

PAYING THE PRICE?

I did my best to put on the appearance of a brave leader. I kept reading all the latest leadership books and was a master at putting on my poker face and acting like everything was great, even though I was being torn up inside. In fact, I kept trying to do more, work harder, and be the leader I thought they wanted and needed, only to find I was creating as many fires as I was trying to put out and alienating my family along the way.

Paranoia and uncertainty about the future of my ministry and the future of the congregation became my nightly obsession. Under the misbelief that if I worked more, tried harder, and was a better leader people would like me more, I began coming into the office at 3:00 a.m. to start my day and staying until late at night, after I had attended the last meeting of the day. Even so, landing on a common and uniting leadership emphasis for the congregation was ever elusive. Strife continued. Factions remained. Sadly, after one congregational meeting a former older staff member walked out of the meeting in anger and intentionally shouldered me, nearly knocking me down the stairs to our exit doors. He justified his action by saying I was full of “piss and vinegar.” Unfortunately, no one saw the interaction at the moment of physical contact. I viewed tattling on this individual as unhelpful and so buried it among all the other toxic and volatile unrest I thought a leader was simply supposed to willingly bear and smile about.

I was trying to do absolutely everything by my own reason and strength. I knew the Great Commission, I embraced it, and I was trying to fulfill it, even if it killed me! But the growth wasn’t magically happening like all the church growth books said it was supposed to. Those same books said a leader looking to bring change and vibrancy to his ministry should expect all kinds of resistance and animosity and needs to be prepared to endure some misery in ministry and life. They said this was just the price you pay if you want to lead a change toward a passionate, vibrant, missionoriented church.

I bought into the misbelief that all the misery I was experiencing was simply what ministry was supposed to be like and was the price of being a leader. Those were some very dark times. In fact, the only friend I thought I had was the hot shower I took in the morning. The devil and our own sinful flesh love to isolate us and attack us with all kinds of false beliefs, despair, and other great shame and vices.

But this is why what I offer here is my warning to recognize the important but limited role of leadership in ministry. Yes, pastors certainly need to be leaders and know how to think strategically and organizationally and how to balance staff personalities and directives as well as oversee and ensure things are getting done. Or, if that is not your strength, find someone who can do those things for the congregation. But to make leadership the hallmark of ministry is to subject Christ and his word to your leadership, which is not the nature of the church. Therefore, a word of caution is warranted.

A WORD OF CAUTION

During my early years at Zion, the congregation retained the services of a professional leadership guru and organizational manager in order to try and help steer the congregation in the right direction. The individual also happened to be affiliated with the same pastoral leadership organization that I assisted with at my first and much larger congregation. I worked with this person closely during this time, while also becoming engaged in a year-long contract with another ministry coach to assist myself and the congregation’s newly-hired-fresh-from-seminary associate pastor. I was bound and determined I was going to turn things around.

The leadership guru worked with our congregation for about a year, developing a strategic plan and work plan, which were unfortunately crafted in concepts foreign to the congregational leaders and therefore would end up ineffective. In time, after experiencing all the dysfunction and disorder happening internally firsthand, this leadership consultant decided to withdraw from the project, indicating the situation and unrest was just too intense and that leading the congregation through this was more difficult than first anticipated.

At that point I remember thinking to myself, “Seriously, you’ve got to be kidding me! I thought leaders were never supposed to back down. And you’re the leadership expert? If you’re the professional and you want out, where does that leave me? Sure, you get to go and hide from this mess, but I’m still here and still called to serve and love these people.” Very quickly I began to think, “Maybe leadership at all costs was not what it was cracked up to be, nor as effective some claimed it to be.”

Three years into this ministry setting, I was exhausted, terrified, and burned out. Yet, I never let a soul know just how lonely and hurt I was, nor the anguish that was eating me up on the inside. In fact, my anxiety was so high my regular digestive functions stopped working properly for a time. Thus, when the leadership guru bowed out from assisting the congregation, something in me finally snapped. If this leadership guru could not handle the intensity of this congregation’s situation and had to drop out, even though all the latest strategic planning techniques and leadership building exercises had been utilized and employed, where exactly did that leave me?

A NEW WAY FORWARD

It was here that I began to see the empty promises of those who made pastoral leadership the be-all and end-all for ministry. I did not disavow pastoral leadership. Rather I saw it in a new and more proper light. For it was also at this point that I began to see the care of souls and the historic role of the pastor as the physician of the soul was far more than my ability to be a good leader.

Part of that recognition occurred in the doctoral studies that I was also engaged in at the same time as all this unrest. (Nothing like adding more work to an already chaotic mess). It was here that I was introduced to Professor Harold Senkbeil (who would later become a very dear friend, confidant, and even baptismal sponsor to one of my children). This loving professor and pastor gave me permission to see ministry in a fuller and more historic light, which included profound insight into the care of souls, not just the leading of members. Thus, I began to care more intentionally and classically for the individual souls of the congregation, giving them Jesus as I was called to do, rather than giving them myself, my ingenuity, or my next great idea. I learned that leadership and the care of souls go hand in glove when soul care leads the way.

Coupled with the beginnings of a new strategic plan put in theological and leadership language that the congregational leadership could understand, I noticed a shift in my ability to lead and their receptiveness to my leadership. It was at this point that I began to recognize the tempered place of leadership, and the need to keep it in the helpful but limited role it has to play in pastoral ministry. As such, I began to study the larger role of leadership woes in the church and compare it to the historic confession of the church to see how I might use that historic confession to help lead and direct a congregation in the establishment of a new and more fully developed strategic plan.

A BALANCED APPROACH TO LEADERSHIP

From this very trying experience I want to offer a word of caution about how pastors might approach and carry out their leadership development in their congregations. Again, please understand I affirm the importance of leadership, but I want you to see it has a specific place and limitation within the pastoral ministry. Pastoral ministry is far larger than the leadership of a pastor.

Even so, for many years the trend and emphasis in the North American church has been on leadership, especially the leadership ability of the pastor. Workshops, courses, and whole institutes have been established around the importance of the leadership of a pastor, which also often promise increased vitality or numerical growth to the local church if pastors would just be the right kind of leader and develop the right kind of strategic plan. As I’ve already told you, I fully bought into that kind of thinking, though always trying to maintain my theological scruples. Yet I found the promises of this leadership model to be wanting in my own experience. And it took its toll on me emotionally, spiritually, and particularly in terms of my God-given vocations as husband and father.

If leadership is all the church needs in a pastor in order to grow and thrive, what need do we have of the Holy Spirit and the word of God? Even more, as I found out, a congregation can have the best leadership consultants around and still not be able to solve a church’s dysfunctions. Being a leader is not what forgives sins, nor does it soothe troubled souls. That is nothing against organizational leadership, it’s just demonstrating the limitations of that quality in pastors. The forgiveness of sins comes by the power of God’s word and sacraments, enacted through the art of caring for the soul as an under-shepherd of Christ. A good pastor will recognize the importance of leadership, but also its limitations. Sometimes leadership must step aside and let Jesus and his word of law and gospel take priority and be enacted.

OTHER CAUTIONARY VOICES

Others in the church have begun making similar realizations. Some have recently recognized the overemphasis on leadership in what might be called “leadership emphasis fatigue.” Lance Ford is one such author who addresses this leadership obsession head-on in his thoughtful book, Unleader: Reimagining Leadership … and Why We Must.

He laments what he calls a “leadership obsession”: “Perhaps the biggest mix-up concerning the current leadership obsession is that Jesus himself directly contradicts much—if not most—of what is being imported into the church under the leadership mantra.”1 He makes the case that this leadership obsession often reduces or ignores the servant nature of pastoral ministry and the life of a Christian and calls for true leaders to sit at the feet of a master to gain experience, especially from the master, Jesus Christ. It is a helpful echo of Pastor Senkbeil’s emphasis on the cultivation of a pastoral habitus—that is, the pasto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Prayer for the Ministry of the Word
• Chapter 1: Learning Leadership from Experience (Lucas V. Woodford)
• Chapter 2: The Many Sides of Leadership (Lucas V. Woodford)
• Chapter 3: Leading Your Sheep (Harold L. Senkbeil)
• Chapter 4: Pastoral Depletion Syndrome (Harold L. Senkbeil)
• Chapter 5: The Fine Art of Leading Leaders (Harold L. Senkbeil & Lucas V. Woodford)
• Resources (Lucas V. Woodford)
• Afterword
• Works Cited