The Work I Should Have Shared

I pastored one church for 31 years.

Inside those years I was really working five or six jobs, and most days I could not tell you where one ended and the next began.

The pastoral work itself I learned to share. I made sure the sick received visits, and many folks carried our visitation ministries. I did most of the preaching, but I opened the pulpit more and more as the years went on. That held until the pandemic, when I did 99 percent of the preaching for our virtual services. Our trustees were faithful with the church’s money and buildings, so I was freed from most of the business. I got to do what I loved. I preached. I taught. I led a congregation that kept growing.

Then there was the neighborhood, and the neighborhood would not let me rest.

We sat in a region of real prosperity. Major corporations and the state university were all within a few miles of our sanctuary. Step out of our neighborhood, and there was money everywhere. In our neighborhood there was none. The high school graduation rate was low. The crime rate was high. You could not get to decent healthcare, and you could not buy a bag of groceries without leaving the neighborhood to do it. We were ringed by some of the worst public housing I had laid eyes on since I walked through Soweto, South Africa. Directly across the street from the church stood a failed condominium development that had rotted into a slum, and the drug dealers ran it, not the residents.

For the 25 years before I came, the members had been saving to build a new church. A new sanctuary in the middle of all that would have been a beautiful building surrounded by ruin. So we agreed that before we could raise a new church, we had to raise the neighborhood. And that work landed on me, to lead and to manage.

I was built for it, or I thought I was.

I had completed an undergraduate major in community development. Most of our members did not live in the neighborhood, and most of the people in the neighborhood did not come to our church. So the work meant sitting with residents and business owners who owed us nothing and had every reason to doubt one more preacher with one more plan. I did that myself, door by door.

By the time we were fully in it, the church had formed six not for profit corporations. They carried community development, economic development, affordable housing through two separate companies, foster care and adoption, and employment and training. I was leading every one of them.

There is a particular tension for a pastor who sees something. You know that if you do not move, it will not move. No one person can carry work that heavy alone. And yet a real leader starts anyway, and trusts that people will come once they feel the thing taking off. So I started. And I kept starting. And here is the part I have had to live with. I got so busy doing the work that I never gave people sufficient information or the opening to come and do it with me. I told myself I was serving, and some of it was serving. But if I am honest, I felt trapped. I had made a moral commitment to see these things happen, and I could not lay it down.

Years ago, I read Gordon MacDonald’s book “Ordering Your Private World,” where he draws a line between the person who is called and the person who is driven. The called person works from a settled place. The driven person cannot stop, because stopping feels like failing. My extra work was driven more than it was called. Some of it may have been pride. Much of it was the quiet fear that if I let go of any piece, that piece would fall.

A handful of folks came anyway. They gave themselves to it, and some of them grew until they took the wheel out of my hands, and I thank God for every one of them. But this work was so new to our church, and so far outside what most churches do, that inviting a member into it was never as simple as recruiting an usher or a choir member. I did not build the on ramp. So most people stood on the shoulder and watched me run.

The hardest need of all was resources. Everything we tried to do took money, and I have learned that resources move through relationships, and relationships are personal. Corporate donations, government contracts, a banker willing to take a call. Every one of them ran through a person, and I made myself that person, again and again, until I was the bridge everything had to cross.

Scripture says the body has many members, and not one of them is the whole body. I knew that verse. I preached that verse. And still I spent years trying to be the whole body by myself. If I had it to do again, I would build the teams first and carry less on my own back. I am certain now that the help was there the whole time, standing close, waiting for me to turn around and ask.