My first day on the field as an interim pastor and I reached for the phone to begin making calls. The first call was to set an appointment to meet with my immediate predecessor (who had been there six months before starting a new church in town). Then a call to the pastor who was before him (a seven or eight year tenure before leaving to teach at a seminary). The object was to get a feel for the history and identity of the church.
The longer tenured of the two had nothing but high praise for the congregation. “I don’t understand what happened”, he said (or something close to it, I’m working from memory without notes or a net), “They’re a terrific group: I think they would have followed me anywhere”.
The shorter tenured pastor held the opposite view. He felt deceived and lied to. “They said they were prepared to do ‘whatever it takes’ to reach the community – they weren’t.”
Can both men be right? Yes; or more precisely, they were probably both wrong. I came to believe the congregation would follow a pastor into hard labor – as long as the terrain were reasonably familiar and they had a pretty good idea of where and why they were being led.
“Whatever” clearly meant something different to the congregation than it did to the second pastor. They were prepared to give sacrificially of time and money. They were prepared to stretch outside their comfort zone. But they weren’t prepared to run completely and hurriedly away into the unknown.
A congregation in crisis. At least one reason was plain, old fashioned miscommunication. “Follow anywhere” and “whatever it takes” are abstract terms that need a history and a context to be fully understood.
In order to clearly articulate where it is we are going, we have to understand where we have been. And that requires understanding the context of people, places, and language.
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