Fear Driven Decision Making
This is the first blog from my new series, “A Field Manual for Pastors.” Each post will offer practical advice that I offer to pastors I work with. These are insights I never learned in seminary. They are lessons I learned from leading firemen and soldiers and from forty years of leading churches through every challenge imaginable. I will be sharing the core strategies I used as I sought to give my life to the church while protecting my heart and my time so that I could do what matters most to Jesus.
“This is so helpful. Could you send me an email with what you just said?” has become a common request, and these blogs are the vetted best of those conversations. I pray this series helps you as you navigate leading your churches well.
You can almost smell the fear in church leadership meetings. When faced with a hard decision, there’s a pause that has nothing to do with the data, nothing to do with the Bible, but a lot to do with consequences.
“We need to table this until we’ve studied this a little more,” one leader says. “Yes,” says another, “We should check with the staff and have them analyze the repercussions of the options.”
I’m all for prudent decision-making. Serving as a pastor or an elder in a local church is a crushing burden of responsibility. However, someone must ask, “Are we hitting the pause button because we don’t have the facts, or are we simply afraid to make a decision?”
If your desire to be viewed as a “good” elder or pastor is too important, it is tempting to focus on the comfort of a choice.
It is tempting to get your particular church tribe, family, or close friends to pat you on the back for representing their interests…to get your staff team to take fewer chances because you know that no matter how great of an idea is, it will involve change, and change is risky and untamable. Push for everyone to settle for church as usual. Slower processes, safer decisions, and more comfort — especially for the leader.
To be viewed as an effective elder or pastor in the Lord’s eyes, walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). Guarding your reputation as a flawless leader comes from a self-protective place in the old you. It’s from the flesh, the capacity to live life apart from God, and the sinfully desperate desire to make that work. The new you, Christ in you, could care less about reputation because only your trust pleases God (Hebrews 11:6). Your trust and the combined trust of your leaders will guide the church toward God’s will for your faith community.
During my first few tumultuous years as Lead Pastor of the Church of the Open Door, we never had enough money. And when I say “never,” I mean it - that was our reality. Every time we risked living by faith, there was pushback, usually from family and friends of the elders and entitled people who felt they needed a say in every decision.
You'll get far more lasting satisfaction if you have stories to tell about your faith in the face of disaster.
One story that has become a part of our living by faith, not by sight muscle memory involves a widow. Years ago when we had just a few dollars in the bank, we received a letter informing us that a former missionary from Church of the Open Door, now a widow, was hurting financially. We voted unanimously to drain our bank account and give it all to her. I said, “We don’t have enough money in the bank to cover even two more weeks. Let’s give it all, tell Jesus we’re doing what He said, taking care of widows, and ask Him to send us what we need.” I remember fearing what people would say when they discovered our foolishness, but the Lord’s words about widows and orphans won the day. Today, every time we rehearse that story with the next generation, it’s celebrated as one of the best decisions we ever made during my years as Lead Pastor. (A few days later we received a large estate from someone who lived in Seattle and nobody remembered ever going to our church).
If you focus on trusting God with wisdom AND courage, you will have stories to tell.
What kind of legacy would it be to look back on your years leading a local church only to say, “We didn’t make any big mistakes”? That’s not leadership; that’s a walk in the park — a groomed, boring, predictable path of comfort. You can whistle your way to heaven with that approach. You don't do great things for God by avoiding mistakes. Will you have regrets as a courageous leader? Sure!
What you won’t regret, and I mean never, is living by the faith that gives you a front-row seat to demonstrations of the power of the Living God.
