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Some years ago I read a book that both disturbed and helped me. It was Darius Salter's "What Really Matters in Ministry - Profiling Pastoral Success in Flourishing Churches" (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990), the results of a survey of 100 pastors belonging to "successful" evangelical churches in the USA.
The ministry priorities championed by the church leaders surveyed shook me deeply. In many cases they were in stark contrast to what I had come to value as important. Furthermore, they were often in direct collision with my own skills and personality characteristics. At times I set the book down and wondered if there was any place in Christian ministry for a marred and weak vessel like myself.
As disturbing as this experience was, it proved helpful in the end. It made me re-think my convictions and priorities biblically, and test them against the wisdom of the centuries. I won't say that all of my preconceptions came through the process unscathed, but I did reach a more settled and strengthened position in the end.
Over the next few weeks I want to share some of the insights gained in this process. Given the plethora of new ideas about today, no one can escape wrestling with the issue of what matters most in ministry.
The results of Darius Salter's survey are a good place to start. Though based on church life in the 1980's, they are still relevant today. The ministry priorities of that era are much the same in popular, "successful" evangelicalism today.
Salter makes no bones of the fact that ministry priorities in successful churches today are radically different to those of the past. In fact, at one point he says, "What would have been the most desired trait for an American pastor two hundred years ago is the least desired trait today" (p. 31). That goes further than saying they are merely different. It says that they are opposite to priorities held in the past.
How does this show itself? The first and most prominent way is in the importance modern ministry attaches to the personality of the church leader. Personality rather than piety (the traditional emphasis), is viewed as the dominant factor affecting ministry effectiveness. "Success in ministry", Salter writes, "is largely predicated on personality. Personality is more important than the combination of structure, training, and procedural principles" (p. 62).
Piety, on the other hand, is totally out of fashion. According to Salter, none of the surveyed pastors considered themselves pious. "Piety in today's religious terminology prepares a person for the monastery but not ministry in the outside world. An overly pious posture would remove the pastor from the world of people and the sheer pragmatism of meeting the exigent crises of day-by-day pastoral life (pp. 21-22)."
A little later he writes, "The word 'pious' smacks, at least for the modern mind, too much of legalism, austerity and self-righteousness… American churchgoers demand morality, but not necessarily piety in their leadership… I have asked several laypersons in these growing large churches what is the secret of their pastor's success or his dominant characteristic. I rarely hear anything that would even faintly resemble sanctity, holiness, piety, or righteousness. Most answers are relational and not particularly religious: 'He cares; he is warm; he is sensitive to the needs of others; he knows when I am hurting; he thinks before he speaks; gets down to where the people are'" (pp. 31-32).
We shall pick up and explore this issue more fully later. But in the mean time, we need to understand more of the so-called "desired personality type" of the modern church leader. That's what we will look at next week.