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class="article-hero-meta"> <p><a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Chester+L.+Hunt/" class="byline-link">Chester L. 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by a new government.</em></p><p><span style="" class="">L</span>ast June, an issue of the <em>Manila Times Journal</em> reported the shooting of a colonel in the Philippine army and a woman assistant, allegedly by a guerilla priest, as they were disembarking from a helicopter in a mountainous area. They had made the journey hoping to accept the surrender of another guerilla priest, one of four who had joined the Communist-influenced New People’s Army.</p><p>This incident is the most dramatic in a series of confrontations going on for years between the Marcos administration and Catholic and Protestant churchmen. These confrontations date from the period immediately before martial law was imposed, when some clergy encouraged student activists to stage protest demonstrations. Since then friction has mounted, and there is no indication that the proclamation of the end of martial law in January of last year will bring any lessening of state-church conflict.</p><p>The Philippines was a Spanish colony for 350 years, and was then controlled by the United States until becoming independent in 1946. Nearly 90 percent of the population are Christian, mostly Roman Catholic, although there is also a vigorous Protestant movement that dates back to the start of the American occupation in 1900. Muslims, animists, and a few Buddhists make up the non-Christian sector.</p><p>The independent Philippine government was modeled to some extent on the American pattern. It was democratic in character, and in spite of charges of corruption, elections were sufficiently uncontrolled that no administration was reelected until Ferdinand Marcos won another term in 1969. His second term was marked by increasingly violent demonstrations by student activists seeking radical changes in government policy. Using this unrest as a justification, Marcos in 1972 proclaimed martial law as a means of both stopping Communist subversion and of bringing about a “new society.” Though martial law was ended in January 1981, critics claim Marcos retains dictatorial power and that his reelection by 88 percent of the votes last spring was a sham.</p><p>The casual visitor to the Philippines probably would be unaware of the state-church conflict. Not only are services held as usual in the churches, but religious schools, hospitals, and social agencies carry on their activities with no visible sign of restriction. Churches are often crowded, and the visit of Pope John Paul II in February 1981 was an occasion of national celebration, with Marcos and his wife conspicuously participating.</p><p>This surface calm is not altogether misleading. Guerilla priests and other militants are rare. Many of the clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, regard the Marcos regime as beneficial; others are indifferent. Still others may have reservations, but they have not become vigorous opponents. Most estimates are that not more than a third of the clergy would be classed as “progressives,” a label indicating a critical attitude toward the government. Cardinal Jaime Sin, the leading Roman Catholic prelate, has announced a policy of “critical collaboration.” Most clergy would not go further than this, but there is a dissident minority who feel the chasm between them and the government is very deep.</p><p>Part of this chasm is created by the routine interaction of church, people, and government. Especially since the early sixties, both Catholics and Protestants have been increasingly active in social welfare and action programs. They are, therefore, more in touch with people who have been disappointed in the government programs. When the farmer does not do as well as he had expected in the land reform program, has to pay more rent than he feels is proper, or must yield claim on land to a corporate plantation, the priest or pastor is one of the few people who will listen to his complaint. Likewise, the industrial worker, harassed by inflationary prices, may welcome aid from priests willing to support illegal strikes. Similarly, relatives of those who feel they have suffered arbitrary arrest or imprisonment may seek clerical intervention.</p><p>The progressive clergy have kept up a fire of criticism and have seized every opportunity to be advocates of any who feel aggrieved by government authorities. In turn, the government has suppressed publications, seized radio stations, raided seminaries, and occasionally arrested both clergy and active lay people. Such actions have usually been of brief duration, and those arrested are soon released. However, some of the foreign clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, have been deported, and a few Filipino priests have gone into exile.</p><p>Government actions are often irritating and sometimes harsh, but it seems evident that President Marcos has no desire for a church controversy. Indeed, there have been several attempts at conciliation. The failure of these attempts is due less to specific incidents, or to resentment at the strictures martial law placed on Philippine democracy, than to the ideological gulf that separates the activist clergy from the officials of the Marcos government. The activist or progressive clergy have been influenced by the theology of liberation and its concern for the poor and oppressed. The rhetoric of this concern is not greatly different from that of the proclamations of martial law government, which also talked about a revolution—albeit one considered democratic—and expressed a concern for improving the status and economic condition of the masses of the Philippine people.</p><p>Both church and state would appear to be united in their concern for social amelioration, but they differ in their diagnosis of the nature of the problems that lead to poverty. The advocates of liberation theology see poverty as produced by exploitation. This exploitation comes from both local and international capitalists. The only way in which significant improvement can be made is to overthrow the economic system that permits this kind of exploitation, and the government that supports such a system.</p><p>The government, which also professes a concern for the poor, sees the major difficulty as one of underdevelopment. The answer to underdevelopment is seen not so much in “freedom from exploitation” as in modernization.</p><p><a name="section.5.1" id="section.5.1" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Liberation Theology Policies And Tactics</h2><p>The Philippines has at least two similarities to the South American milieu in which liberation theology has seen its greatest development: economic development has lagged, and there is a significant proportion of foreign clergy. Some Filipino clergy have become advocates of liberation theology, but the greater activity has been exercised by non-Filipinos. The lag in economic development is accompanied by a poverty that is especially startling to those reared in affluent areas abroad. The foreign clergy are shocked by visible poverty, and desire to do something to justify their “service” motivation. Progress of any kind is uneven, and an idealized version of Marxism enables them to identify the “unjust structures” that must be destroyed.</p><p>Liberation theology, in its attack on multinational corporations and their local allies, strikes a responsive chord in some Filipino nationalists. Filipino intellectuals have long taught that their country’s culture was emasculated and its economy exploited by American control. But the intellectuals live in frustration because anti-Americanism is still a minority view. Many Filipinos remember the grant of independence, the wartime affiance, and the legends of the “good” Americans. Indeed, the American (or sometimes now Japanese) label is a guarantee of quality, and migration to the U.S. is the assurance of success. Needless to add, the frustration of the intellectuals only reinforces the intensity of their commitment.</p><p>Liberation theology brings the frustrated Filipino intellectual and the expatriate clergy together. It combines the usual Marxian views with long-standing nationalist grievances. The wonder is not that some of the clergy have found it attractive, but that the majority are still skeptical.</p><p>Those committed to liberation theology usually deny that they are Communist, but they urge the need to learn from the Marxists and to cooperate with them in attacking unjust structures. Violence is not necessarily to be deplored, and above all else, the Christian should avoid trying to impose his judgment on the techniques employed to attain liberation.</p><p>Despite the talk of violence, very few of the progressive clergy are involved in violent activities. Instead, they use the Alinsky technique of exacerbating any grievance that comes to their attention. The grievances may or may not be important in themselves, but expressing them gives voice to discontent and counters the government’s claims to progress. Likewise, as they have the opportunity, the progressive clergy engage in conscientization or what is known in American circles as “consciousness raising.” This means informing the poor that they are oppressed, and identifying the structures the liberationists feel are oppressive.</p><p><a name="section.5.2" id="section.5.2" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Role Of The Technocrats</h2><p>To read the speeches and writings of the progressive clergy is to get the impression that they are fighting against a reactionary and stagnant social order consisting of the hereditary holders of wealth. Looking at the government side, one sees a quite different picture. Here, the men who are in the forefront of shaping social policy are the technocrats. While they are not men of great wealth, they are highly educated and supposedly sophisticated in economic planning. They have done graduate work in elite universities in the Philippines and abroad in such fields as political science, economics, and business administration. They are probably as critical of current Philippine society as the advocates of liberation theology, but they see the trouble not so much as injustice as inefficiency and failure to make the best use of resources.</p><p>The technocrats, on the whole, are critical of socialism or excessive government regulation, and they regard private business as the most efficient way to organize economic activity. However, if left to his own devices, the capitalist will not necessarily move in the direction that will maximize the country’s productivity. Hence, he needs guidance—and this guidance is provided by the technocrats. Private capitalists will do the work using market mechanisms, but the market may be tilted by lower interest rates for some types of loans, outright subsidies, price supports, and so on.</p><p>The technocrats are interested in a greater degree of equality and improved social conditions, but they view the increase in productivity as essential before greater progress can be made. When they think of wages or prices, it is not in terms of justice but of the effect on productivity. Thus, if wages and prices are too high to meet international competition, they should be lowered. On the other hand, if there is a need to attract labor to new fields or to increase purchasing power, then wages might be raised. In this context, questions of the justice of a particular situation become irrelevant. Likewise, the class war that is assumed to be a basic fact of life by the liberation theologians tends to disappear. Rather than classes being arranged against each other, the technocrats see themselves as the designers of a unified society. Such a society needs management, technical skill, and capital. It is the job of the technocrats to see that these factors work together.</p><p>It is impossible in the course of a short article to delineate all the differences in the economic view of the liberation theologians and the technocrats, but the accompanying chart points up some of the significant items.</p><p><a name="section.5.3" id="section.5.3" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Factors In The Struggle</h2><p>The Marcos administration has placed its case for continuance in power on economic development. It has certainly greatly expanded the infrastructure of the country. New hotels and factories, better roads and harbors, and improvements in agriculture all give testimony to success in this endeavor. Such progress has been achieved despite wildly fluctuating commodity prices, depredations by the New People’s Army, Muslim unrest, OPEC oil prices, and massive natural disasters.</p><p>Yet, it is commonly alleged that there has been little improvement, perhaps even a decrease, in the level of living of the average man. In a largely agricultural country, statistics are murky and the truth is difficult to come by. But there is no doubt that improvement has been less than expectations. What will be the outcome, then? Will the followers of liberation theology be part of a successful battle to unseat the Marcos regime and its commitment to technocratic policies, or are they making futile gestures?</p><p>In many ways, there may be some chance of success for the progressive churchmen. The Marcos regime has indeed aroused more expectations than it has fulfilled. Furthermore, the bureaucrats and technocrats are not necessarily infallible and the military are sometimes heavy-handed. Above all, President Marcos has been in power for over 15 years and the public is beginning to become a bit weary and bored. Still, Marcos is an astute and flexible politician, and he may remain in power for years. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the forces against him are building up, and it may be that disciples of liberation theology will live to see a triumph of the anti-Marcos forces.</p><p>It is possible, however, that they may win the battle against the Marcos regime and yet lose the war. The end of the Marcos administration does not necessarily mean the end of technocratic influence in the Philippine government. The government that follows Marcos will still face the problems he faced. It is likely to use many of the remedies he sought to use, and to employ the technocrats as the best group to implement such remedies. For instance, any government will see a shortage of capital, and in spite of nationalistic feelings, it is likely to turn to the multinational corporation as a means of obtaining that capital. Any government will see a need to increase the production of agricultural export products, and it is likely to see the large-scale plantation as a useful device in this process.</p><p>In an economy with few sources of energy, the attraction of nuclear energy is understandable. The efforts of the Marcos regime to build a substantial nuclear plant have come under heavy criticism. But the need for energy in the Philippines is obvious, and nuclear sources are an obvious way of meeting at least a portion of these needs. If capital is to be developed and the Philippines is to be an attractive place for either foreign or local business, it will be necessary to see that there is internal peace and that labor demands remain moderate. Hence, it is likely that the priest who today leads the labor unions in a protest against the Marcos administration may also be considered a nuisance by the government which is to follow.</p><p><span style="" class="">T</span>o a great extent, the liberation theologians represent the religious version of the largely socialist thinking that has dominated universities and seminaries in recent years in the industrialized world as well as in the Philippines. The popularity of this thinking is beginning to wane as more and more academics are beginning to see socialism as the old slavery rather than the new freedom. The abandonment of Maoism in China, the discontent in the Soviet Union, and the troubles in Poland are certainly indications that the socialist dream has failed to lead people to any type of earthly paradise. The liberation theologians are intoxicated by the Marxian praxis and the hope of ultimate success and justice it promises. In the light of trends in the world today, though, Marxism is not so much a force whose time has come as a philosophy whose day is already past.</p><p>Whatever the immediate outcome of the struggle against the Marcos regime in the Philippines, it is doubtful whether the liberation theologians will be able to displace the technocrats from economic influence.</p><p class="is-style-article-bio">Chester L. Hunt is professor of sociology at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Among his published sociological works is Society and Culture in the Rural Philippines, which he edited (Alemars, 1978).</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="article-authors-pills"> <li> <ul class="author-links"> <li> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Chester+L.+Hunt/" class="article-hero-author article-title-link button primary"> More from  <span>Chester L. 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Theology: European Hopelessness Exposes the Latin Hoax</h1> <div class="article-hero-meta"> <p><a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Walter+W.+Benjamin/" class="byline-link">Walter W. Benjamin</a></p> </div> <div class="article-hero-deck"> </div> <div class="wp-block-post-featured-image article-hero-image"> <img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg?w=1920" class="feature-image wp-post-image" alt="" fetchpriority="high" rel="preload" decoding="async" srcset="https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg 2200w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg?resize=1024,576 1024w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg?resize=2048,1152 2048w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101915.jpg?resize=1920,1080 1920w, 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<button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/liberation-theology-european-hopelessness-exposes-latin/" aria-label="Copy Link to Clipboard"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon link" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-link-42857">link</title> <use xlink:href="#link"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Copy Link</span> </button> </li> <li role="menuitem" class="copy-to-clipboard"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/liberation-theology-european-hopelessness-exposes-latin/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-gift-75232">gift</title> <use xlink:href="#gift"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Gift Article</span> </button> </li> </ul> </section> </section> <div class="entry-content is-layout-constrained has-global-padding" id="body"> <p><em>Material plenty is always the Marxist promise, yet always deferred.</em></p><p><span style="" class="">I</span> have just returned from a sojourn in Eastern Europe. I was shocked by what I discovered there. Intellectually, I had always known that people behind barbed wire and machine guns had a different material and spiritual existence from people in the West. Seeing the conditions <em>in situ</em>, however, is a much different reality.</p><p>I began to wonder why many liberation theologians such as John Bennett, Robert McAfee Brown, Richard Schaull and others have a Latin fixation and are all but mute on totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Could it be that “ethnic is out” and “Latino is in”? That PIIGS (Poles, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Slavs) are passé and Latins are the “children of the promise?” Whatever the reason, the near silence of liberation theology regarding Eastern Europe reveals ethical astigmatism.</p><p><a name="section.4.1" id="section.4.1" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">A Somber And Dispirited People</h2><p>I did not find “communism with a human face” as envisioned by those in Christian-Marxist dialogue a decade or so ago. Instead, I received vibrations of depression, resignation, alienation, anger, and suspicion. These feelings had their origins in a Marxist material plenty that is always promised, yet always deferred. “Whenever anything goes wrong,” said a guide, “it is always blamed on the Second World War!”</p><p>We have been making sacrifices for years,” groused a teacher in Prague, “but nothing ever gets better.”</p><p>“Russia steals us blind,” said another.</p><p>The drabness and spiritual ennui of Czechoslovakia called to mind Graham Greene’s novel, <em>The Power and the Glory.</em> In this story, set in Mexico, a puritanical Marxist lieutenant tracks down a morally corrupt “whiskey priest” who in martyrdom proves to be a saint. In attempting to cleanse society from corruption and create “the new man,” Green shows how communism creates a forlorn and soul-stultifying atmosphere. The ambiance is in marked contrast to the enjoyment and gaiety of West Germany and Austria. There the beer halls, rathskellers, sidewalk cafes, band concerts, dances in the parks, window shopping, lovers openly necking, and guitar players in the city squares all testify to a basically happy people secure in the proper tension between freedom and order.</p><p>I recall a poignant conversation with a young medical school dropout. Academically qualified, he had to leave school because of family responsibility and the lack of funds. He could foresee only being a bellhop the rest of his life. I suggested that his wife get a job and that he put his two children in a state-run nursery.</p><p>“My wife and I are firmly against this,” he said, “for our children would be religiously separated from us. Communism doesn’t respect family bonds or our values.” He said 30,000 Czechs leave or escape their country each year. Many feel like trapped animals.</p><p>“I have given up hope of becoming a physician,” he said sadly. “Anyway, after eight years of study my salary would not be much more than a common laborer’s. Here they have more regard for ideology than intelligence. You don’t receive according to your merit.”</p><p><a name="section.4.2" id="section.4.2" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Economic And Agricultural Problems</h2><p>In spite of permissive abortion laws and stable population levels, Communist regimes have not solved the chronic housing shortage. The rural-to-urban tide continues so that every city has its gloomy projects of 14- to 16-story high-rise flats. They are human rabbit warrens with space carefully metered out so that a three-member family will be allotted two or three rooms but will probably have to share a kitchen and bathroom with another family or two. At a distance they look impressive; up close, construction ineptitude and “devil-may-care” craftsmanship are evident. Peeling paint, missing tiles, broken cornices, unmowed yards, and cracked cement facing are the rule rather than the exception.</p><p>Most liberation theologians assume capitalism pollutes while collectivism conserves the environment. They should check their ideology with the facts of Communist industrialization. The famous Skoda works of Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, was belching fumes without scrubbers the day I was there and was like our Pittsburgh of the 1930s. The cement and bauxite factories along the Danube in Hungary were also fuming and odiferous, and I was dismayed to think of Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz while gazing into that water! The largest lake in central Europe, Lake Balaton in Hungary, nesting home to hundreds of species of migratory fowl, has been severely polluted. In draining thousands of hectares of marsh to increase arable acreage, engineers destroyed the filtering delta of the Zela River, thus polluting the lake and destroying nesting habitat.</p><p>It is incredible that countries so rich in human and physical resources are perennially deficit in food. Yet few liberation theologians who are so enamored of Marxist theory admit to communism’s agrarian debacle in practice. Waiting in line is not quite the national pastime in Czechoslovakia and Hungary that it is in Poland, but I did see people lined up for cabbages, cucumbers, and potatoes. Shop windows display little more than tins of meat, tea, or jam. Poland is the only non—Third World country receiving CARE packages. It must be deeply humiliating to have bountiful free enterprise agriculture display before the world the inefficiency of collectivism.</p><p>The greatest tragedy, however, is communism’s disruption of man’s time-honored relationship with the soil. Before collectivization, small plots of wheat, barley, corn, sugar beets, and alfalfa were cultivated individually and intensively. Farmers developed a mystical, primordial, “I-Thou” relationship with the soil. Soil and soul belong together. The former was the only protection one had against an omnicompetent state. Marx, a city dweller his entire life, could not understand this; he wanted to free mankind from “the imbecility of rural life.” Later, Stalin would kill millions of kulaks in order to destroy peasant individualism and enforce collectivization.</p><p>Now the small plots of lovingly cultivated soil are gone, and antiquarian-looking combines that Iowa farmers would have junked long ago creep slowly across mile-square fields of grain. Soil and peasant have been conformed to industrial plant and worker. Hammer and sickle are joined, but the latter conforms to the paradigm of the former. The economics of scarcity in Eastern Europe is due to Marxist fundamentalism and not early frost, grain fungus, or CIA machinations. Short rations will be the lot of millions there until events force a change of agricultural dogma.</p><p><a name="section.4.3" id="section.4.3" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Christianity And State Religion</h2><p>While most churches are physically intact, it is obvious the Spirit is in the catacombs in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Our Czech guide dutifully recounted name, date, and style of each village Catholic church we passed, but most were closed, with grass and weeds two feet high, windows broken, and roof tiles missing. The regime allows a trickle of priests and pastors to exit the few seminaries each year. And while they can speak out on rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s, the dangers of loose living, and the importance of respecting those in authority, nothing can be said about Afghanistan, economic policy, or the state’s surveillance of people’s lives.</p><p>The regimes make sure Christianity is identified with oppression and all that is antiquated. The few open churches are supervised by septuagenarian, shuffling, blue-smocked women whose duty it is to guard the remaining miserable church fabric. To a young person potentially interested in the Christian faith, the environment exudes an odor of decay.</p><p>Yet no society can dispense with a faith or cult that enshrines hope, unity, and mission. In Austria, the beautiful field shrines are graced with fresh flowers and give evidence of deep, pastoral faith. In Czechoslovakia, they have been replaced by the village Communist shrine. These are in the village center, display a portrait of Marx or Lenin, are red in color, always have a slogan if not a flag, and are surrounded by flowers and neatly trimmed grass. Their care is entrusted to adolescent aspirants of party membership, the Young Pioneers.</p><p>Their slogans tend toward hyperbole and the tautological: COMMUNISM FIGHTS FOR PEACE; COMMUNISM IS THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF MANKIND; VOTE FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN; VOTE FOR PEACE. My favorite reveals that communism, in spite of official atheism, still needs the Puritan work ethic: WORK, SAVE, DO NOT WASTE—THIS WILL ENSURE THE COMMUNIST FUTURE.”</p><p>Religious and historical symbols of Czechoslovakian independence are downplayed. The city tour of Prague does not permit buses to come closer than a half-mile to the statue of Saint Wenceslaus, first king and patron saint of Bohemia, even though the boulevard is the widest in the city. The “Morningstar of the Reformation,” John Hus, is barely mentioned in tourist information, and so his statue is seldom noticed in the Old Town Square as visitors look the other way to catch the chiming of a famous fifteenth-century clock. Our hotel was devoid of memorabilia of Wenceslaus, Hus, or any other pre-Communist patriot or saint. The bust of an outsider, Nikolai Lenin, reigned supreme across the registration desk.</p><p><a name="section.4.4" id="section.4.4" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Suggestions For Liberation Theology</h2><p>1. Liberation theology should lose its Latin myopia. There is bondage elsewhere than south of the border. There is a genuine proletarian revolution gaining momentum in Eastern Europe: it has occurred against and within regimes that for 35 years have claimed to rule in the name of the worker. Liberationists should be more ecumenical in their humanistic sympathy. Too often, victims of Soviet oppression and their Eastern satraps, Boat People, Afghan rebels, the Kurds and Bahaists of Iran, Cuban political prisoners and exiles, and black victims of black dictators in Africa are ignored because the choice of underdog is selective and rooted in ideological criteria. Some liberation theologians are prone to the Jane Fonda syndrome and cannot admit injustice or oppression in Vietnam because, by definition, socialist countries cannot oppress.</p><p>2. Liberation theology should critique <em>all</em> revolutions, especially those that promise so much and look so romantic in the short run. Ernesto Cardenal, formerly a Trappist monk and now minister of education in the Nicaraguan government, has given recent events there a messianic perspective. He claims the revolution reveals a mutation in the evolution of the human species, that sinful structures have been overthrown by works of love, that a “new type of man” is in the making.</p><p>The first blush of a revolutionary regime is always beatific, especially for those who have a stake in it. Perspective, however, is gained by reviewing Christian anthropology from Saint Augustine to Reinhold Niebuhr. Liberationists should be especially interested in finding out what revolutions and/or Marxism do to intellectuals by reading Richard Wright, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Graham Greene, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Andrei Sakharov.</p><p>3. Liberation theology should give up the penchant to believe the worst about the United States. It is a mystery to me why some liberationists who prize an autonomous lifestyle are so enamored by masses of people in motion in closed societies, whether the staged parades in Havana, demonstrations in Tehran, or snow sweeping in Peking.</p><p>The world would not return to innocence with the sudden removal of the United States. Today we help feed two-thirds of the world and are still, since the founding of the republic, the central hope of the world’s oppressed and poor. Eric Hoffer is right: “The common man has had a love affair with America.”</p><p>Until liberation theology overcomes its anti-American animus, it will have little effect upon those who have been a party to that love affair and thus know American virtues as well as vices.</p><p>4. Liberation theologians should beware of irrational guilt. Robert McAfee Brown’s presentation before the World Council of Churches in Nairobi in 1975 was an example of undeserved flagellation. He testified that as a white male bourgeois American he embodied “racism, sexism, classism, and imperialism.” As a sign of penitence, he switched from the “linguistic imperialism” of his native tongue to Spanish, thus forcing his listeners to put on their headsets and return his Spanish to English! Later he apologized for not making Jesus “political enough” because of the fatal impediments of his bourgeois upbringing.</p><p>Liberationists might rethink the thesis of Julien Benda in <em>The Treason of the Intellectuals.</em> This French essayist held that the European intellectual establishment felt guilty about its nonworldly involvement and its disinterested intellectual activity in the late nineteenth century. Thus it left the transcendental for the political; the universal for the parochial. Benda charged that by providing class, race, and national passions with a network of doctrines, giving them moral, intellectual, and even mystical authority, the intellectuals stirred up hatred and strife and, in fact, became the promoters of the First World War. Can such a charge be levied against certain liberationists today?</p><p>Make no mistake: I am not a knee-jerk apologist for capitalism. It is not the Christian economic system—as if any economic system could be. Like all systems, it forges its own unique chains of enslavement. But the enduring values of free enterprise should not be overlooked: that profit is necessary for economic motivation, and private ownership is requisite for the full development of personality. It often lifts people out of poverty even without egalitarian redistribution. Moreover, Western capitalism keeps political and economic power divided. To whom or what does one repair when all political and economic power is coalesced in the state? When all jobs are dispensed by the state, the dissenter is highly vulnerable. Michael Novak’s observation rings true: capitalism works better than its circumspect ideology; socialism far worse than its romantic hopes.</p><p>I for one do not feel any sense of self-reproach for my heritage or my travels. Instead, I am grateful for the opportunity to extend my vision, and to put deed and thought together. I wish more theologians could experience what communism does to human beings. I rejoice that Roman Catholicism is vibrant and strong in Poland and even clinging to life in other countries in spite of persecution. I am saddened that naïve decisions and inappropriate map drawing at Yalta forced American troop withdrawals in Europe, thereby consigning millions to a future with little hope.</p><p>I will always remember the comment of a member of our travel group, a retired Hispanic postal employee from Los Angeles. Upon leaving Hungary and the Iron Curtain for the last time, he declared: “I don’t ever want to go back. I felt watched all the time.… Besides, those people don’t have it so good. Thank God I’m an American.”</p><p class="is-style-article-bio">Walter W. Benjamin is professor and chairman of the Department of Religion at Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota.</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="article-authors-pills"> <li> <ul class="author-links"> <li> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Walter+W.+Benjamin/" class="article-hero-author article-title-link button primary"> More from  <span>Walter W. 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is-layout-constrained has-global-padding" id="body"> <p><a name="section.3.1" id="section.3.1" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">The Plight Of Poland: News Behind The News</h2><p><em>Pulling all the pieces toward some conclusions.</em></p><p><span style="" class="">F</span>rom time to time, and more frequently than we deserve, God raises up a person or a people who draw to themselves the admiration of all who love liberty and justice. The people of Poland have won such a role in our day. We in the West are alternately intrigued by their valiant stand for freedom and grateful to God for them.</p><p>Poland is by far the largest and most populous of Russia’s European satellites. Among the latter it is also the least pliable and the most religious, with more than 90 percent of its population Roman Catholic and about 1 percent Protestant. It is said that Poland has a higher percentage of people in church on any given Sunday than any other country in the world.</p><p>Poland’s Communist overlords, pragmatic about the existence of more religion than they cared to see, had been uneasily aware since the summer of 1980 of a new independent spirit in the country’s legislature. Not unconnected with the strides made toward a free trade union, this was also boosted psychologically by an expatriate Pope in Rome who could never quite forget his Polish origins.</p><p><a name="section.3.2" id="section.3.2" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">A Jewish Scapegoat</h2><p>The other Warsaw Pact countries, three of which form Poland’s land frontiers, were aghast at the danger signals. They reduced essential supplies to their wayward ally, already the victim of economic mismanagement, in the hope of starving it into submission. To explain this dismal state of affairs, Radio Warsaw dredged up for a new generation an old crudity: the Jews were to blame. They were wrecking the economy by hoarding goods, stirring up unrest in universities, and “collaborating with international Zionism.” Never mind that supporting evidence was totally lacking; it had the makings of a useful diversion, designed to rekindle ancient antipathies between Roman Catholics and Jews. <em>Divide et impera</em> has been a useful weapon through the centuries in the tyrannical armory.</p><p><a name="section.3.3" id="section.3.3" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Add An American Scapegoat</h2><p>Moscow chipped in with a complementary version, attributing Polish problems to American support of dissident groups and Solidarity extremists. It was unthinkable, of course, that the workers should seek salvation through any source other than the Communist party. Was not the good of the working classes the party’s overriding concern, and its very <em>raison d’être?</em> Writing history books for the Communist young would become a nightmare! How could you explain the revolt of ten million workers against a government of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers?</p><p>Happily for the establishment, Solidarity became the victim of its own momentum. Instead of strategically pacing itself, it presented a head-on challenge to the Communist machine. On December 13, then, the tanks rolled—as they did on that other day of infamy 25 years earlier in Hungary, when they crushed another people’s inalienable right. Solidarity should perhaps have realized, as President Reagan put it two Sundays later, “that they were asking one thing that a Communist government cannot allow.” Marshal Viktor Kulikov, commander of the Warsaw Pact forces, had been on hand in Warsaw. Reports are that he gave General Jaruzelski the ultimatum, “Either you go in, or we do.” Jaruzelski did, and the oncoming winter exacerbated the suffering, misery, and depression that ensued.</p><p><a name="section.3.4" id="section.3.4" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Western Reaction And President Reagan’S Response</h2><p>Ten weeks passed. It is not the first time Western Europe has been frustrated and divided in its reaction to brute force and intimidation. As always, there is no lack of excellent reasons for doing nothing; ironically, the most dramatic response came from Polish ambassadors in two major world capitals, who sought political asylum.</p><p>President Reagan’s imposition of sanctions has received wholehearted support nowhere among his European allies. Many Americans became exasperated at what they regarded as Europe’s pussyfooting. This, they held, was no time for self-interest. Was not the plight of the Poles more important than the financing of a pipeline from Siberia? For their part, Europeans pointed out that if we Americans were a few thousand miles farther east our outlook would be different. In any case, in his refusal to reimpose an embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union, Mr. Reagan’s motives were domestic politics rather than international justice.</p><p>Moreover, on prominent display in the Free University of Amsterdam during last November’s World Council of Churches meeting was a quotation attributed to an American admiral and taken seriously by Dutch peace lovers: “We fought World War I in Europe. We fought World War II in Europe. And if you dummies will let us, we will fight World War III in Europe.” We agree with the incensed Hollanders. Any American admiral who said that should be court-martialed.</p><p><a name="section.3.5" id="section.3.5" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">A Detour Around Calamity?</h2><p>Many of the details of the present Polish situation are still not known: the plight and prospects of the many thousands who are detained; the extent of the ongoing Soviet involvement; the future of Solidarity; the nature and duration of military rule. And what of the indomitable Lech Walesa? We recall his rousing words at an outdoor rally in the fall of 1980: “We cannot surrender, for those who will follow us will say, ‘They were so close, and they failed.’ History would not absolve us then.” Thank God for Walesa. When the story of the decline and fall of the Russian empire comes to be written, Solidarity’s valiant part will not be forgotten.</p><p>There are two major factors on the Polish scene. One of these is the enigmatic Wojciech Jaruzelski. Has the general who in 1970 was arrested for refusing to order his troops to fire on striking workers, and who was again in trouble in 1976 for similar reasons, had a radical change of mind? Is he merely the dupe of Soviet tyranny, as many Russians believe? Or are the Europeans and large sections of the Polish citizenry right? Could he not rather have aimed to draw the teeth of the Russians and deprive them of a pretense for invasion because of the very effectiveness of his December 13 action? As one commentator put it, “A successful military autocracy might prove a far more deadly thorn in Russia’s side than a free trade union. Its dangers are much less obvious, but in the end, they are more devastating to Communist expansion. Military rule stemming from the Communist party’s inability to cope is itself a standing rebuke of the Kremlin.”</p><p><a name="section.3.6" id="section.3.6" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">The Pope Is Right</h2><p>The other prime factor in this situation is the position of the church. Both the dominant Roman Catholic body and the Protestant and evangelical churches of Poland are requesting help. They are, after all, without food and suffering from hunger. Moreover, they desperately fear any move that would bring a Russian military invasion closer. Minor relaxations of the Polish army’s harsh grip were widely advertised within a month, but a price was being paid—as Pope John Paul II was quick to point out. In order to keep their jobs, Poles were being forced to sign loyalty statements that conflicted with their consciences. “Violation of conscience,” the pontiff told a crowd of 30,000 in Saint Peter’s Square, “is a grave act against man. It is the most painful blow inflicted on human dignity, and in a certain sense it is worse than inflicting physical death.”</p><p><a name="section.3.7" id="section.3.7" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">The Wcc: Double Standards?</h2><p>It would be heartening to find this ringing appeal for liberty and human rights endorsed unequivocally by that sizable segment of Protestantism represented by the World Council of Churches. In the words of one leading British Socialist: “Those so justly vociferous about the denial of freedom in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have over the years been uncharacteristically reticent about repression in Eastern Europe. Now they must speak out or be condemned as hypocrites. Silence for them in this situation is a form of complicity.”</p><p>But they won’t speak; they do not really prize human liberty. The goal of the World Council is not primarily freedom and justice, but change in the social, and especially the economic, structure of society.</p><p><a name="section.3.8" id="section.3.8" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">An Evangelical Response</h2><p>Political decisions are not within our competence. Is Walesa simply moving too fast? Is General Jaruzelski a Soviet minion, or is he a patriot driving a hard bargain while choosing the lesser of two evils?</p><p>If the U.S. and Western European nations were to impose sanctions, would this drive the Russians to an immediate invasion of Poland? Or would they back away from their hard line to permit more freedom?</p><p>In the long run, is it better to push Russia so that it shows to all the world how utterly destructive to freedom communism really is? Or would it be better not to force that nation’s hand?</p><p>If we work to create a more secure world for the Russians, would this encourage them to remove the barriers to freedom throughout Poland and even the entire Communist empire? Or would such action merely unleash capability for further spread of Soviet repression to new quarters?</p><p>We must leave these decisions to the President and his advisers. We trust that God, in his good providence, will overrule their mistakes and guide them to work for the good of the Polish people and of all the peoples of the world.</p><p>But there are some things we can do.</p><p>We can begin by taking seriously our own obligation as American citizens. We live in a free democracy—imperfect, to be sure—yet still a democracy, and relatively free. For that reason we must assume some responsibility for the decisions of our own rulers. When things go wrong, we cannot simply blame Carter, or Reagan, or anonymous “politicians.” We are responsible for the politicians we elect. It is our duty to vote for good leaders—leaders of intelligence and vision and moral convictions and courage. But voting is not enough. Some of us must heed God’s call into politics, and all of us must participate actively in the political process to the degree that we can as private citizens.</p><p>At this point, evangelicals are most remiss. We usually leave that work to the local ward heeler because we are too busy to be bothered; but then we complain about the dirty game of politics. In a democracy like ours, <em>we</em> are to blame if politics is dirty. The freedoms won for us at such high cost over a thousand years can be lost overnight: all we evangelicals need to do is nothing.</p><p>Certainly we must also pray for the Polish people. Many are convinced that a showdown will come soon—probably as the warm days of spring approach. A staff member of the Slavic Gospel Association, who recently spent a great deal of time in Poland, warns: “Solidarity went underground right now. They are waiting for warm weather. In the springtime there will be trouble in the whole country.” He added, “Evangelical Christians say that the worst is yet to come. Right now they are using up their reserves.” In answer to a direct question from SGA director Peter Deyneka, he replied: “They need food badly, for in the market there is nothing available. Some food is sold in rations, but it is in very small quantities. Because of their poor health, Christians [in the evangelical churches of Poland] are most grateful for anything we can provide so they can live and carry on. But it is a very great need. Even at the hospital, the general director said to me, ‘If you could deliver some rice and sugar to our hospital, we would be very happy.’ If people in such positions are begging for food, then you can see that it is a crisis.”</p><p>The suffering people of Poland need our prayers. And we evangelicals believe in a God who answers prayer. We must faithfully keep this suffering people before the throne of God’s grace through the long and dangerous spring that lies ahead of them.</p><p>We can also thank God for their courageous love of freedom and their willingness to sacrifice to gain their liberty. We gain strength from their courage as they have fought so valiantly for the measure of freedom they have won.</p><p><a name="section.3.9" id="section.3.9" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">To Fight Or Fold?</h2><p>Evangelicals of North America will disagree as have evangelicals in Poland over the right of a Christian to seek to attain goals by violent means. Some evangelicals reject violence altogether. They believe obedience to government (see Rom. 13:1–7) binds them to obedience to even the most repressive communism. They point out that evangelical groups have received greater freedom from the Communist government to propagate their faith because they have rendered complete political cooperation.</p><p>Other evangelicals side wholly with the Solidarity movement. They have not condoned senseless violence against civilians, but only force against armed representatives of a government they conceive to be imposed upon their nation from the outside.</p><p>For our part, we believe it is right, when all else fails, to use force to defend the basic freedoms of a people. Physical suffering and even death are not the worst things that can befall mankind. But be that as it may, we can surely thank God for a people who value freedom and are willing to sacrifice for it. In moments of despair we sometimes wonder if our fellow Americans believe in anything deeply enough to sacrifice for it. We can take strength and courage from the Polish people. Some things <em>are</em> worth more than life itself.</p><p>Evangelicals, too, can thank God for leaders who have been willing to stand firmly for what they are convinced is right. It is so easy to convince ourselves of a position that will keep us out of prison. But in Poland we have seen what a few dedicated people can accomplish. Poland is now reaping freedom from the long years of wise leadership the nation received from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, primate of Poland from 1949 until his death in 1981. Throughout those years he was engaged in a constant battle with Poland’s Communist rulers, and for years it seemed almost certain he would lose that battle. He was confined for three years to house imprisonment and forbidden to carry out his duties. But times changed, and he later won significant concessions from the Communist hierarchy. In the end he proved that the church was stronger than the Communist party. Archbishop Glemp bids well to carry on in the same tradition as his late predecessor.</p><p>Of course, many other factors entered the picture, but the stories of Walesa, Cardinal Wyszynski, and Archbishop Glemp show that determined people with strong convictions and complete dedication can make a difference.</p><p>As evangelicals, we often hear that we have a crisis of leadership. But the difficulty is not a lack of ability, or of intelligence. Primarily it is timidity that inhibits—it is the fear of sticking out one’s neck lest it get chopped off. The truth is, it will. But this is the risk a leader must take. It is only if we are willing to take serious risks that we dare to assume the role of leadership.</p><p>The fact is, every value we treasure was once a despised cause. Someone had to sacrifice possessions, prestige, the honor of his peers, even life itself, that we might gain some value. We might never have experienced the Protestant Reformation had not Luther had the courage of his conviction. The dispute with Zwingli over the Lord’s Supper tested his leadership, and as a famous Lutheran historian points out, his stand against Zwingli was not smart. Luther had everything to lose and nothing to gain. In fact, some of us would say he was wrong. But all of us are better Christians because Martin Luther had the courage to stand by what he believed. Only the Martin Luther who was willing to stand with his conscience against Zwingli was the kind of leader who could stand before the rulers of the world and defend his faith: Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.</p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead2">To Those Who Thirst</h2><p>Finally, the Polish situation has brought Western Christians face to face with a very practical dilemma: Shall we withhold food and supplies from hungry, suffering people in order to punish a repressive government? The position of the American government is equivocal. There will be no official support or provision of supplies, but the government will not forbid private groups from meeting these human needs.</p><p>We believe this is wrong. We do not argue over the political nuances of whether or not this will in some indirect way aid the Communist regime. As a matter of fact, we believe a good case can be made that it will not. A committed Polish evangelical, who is also a devout supporter of Solidarity, explains the viewpoint of his people. In spite of constant government propaganda against the American position, they understand why it is being done; but they are hungry, and their children are hungry. They think it is a mistake. They and the whole world have witnessed a breakdown in the Communist government because of a revolt of the workers. Now only Western food can keep from hunger a land that has long been one of the breadbaskets of Central Europe.</p><p>And the evidence seems to support the view that Jaruzelski is at heart a Pole who bends as little as he can, but as much as he must, in order to prevent a blood bath of Poles at the hands of ruthless foreign troops. By sending food and supplies, America simply shows all too clearly that communism simply is not worth it.</p><p>But all this is really quite irrelevant to a larger issue that should be decisive for evangelicals. Innocent people—men, women, and children—are without food, and they are suffering; we have food to spare. Russia is not going to fight us over this food. Nor are the Poles going to turn to communism and do battle against us because we have supplied them with food. They are quite simply a people in need, and our Lord does not raise an issue of “Are you communist or capitalist, Roman or Jew?” when he bids us offer a drink of cold water. Rather, he declares: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink.” Love, like justice, must at times be blind.</p><p>Evangelicals, moreover, do not have the excuse that food sent may really fall into the wrong hands or not get to the hungry humans for whom it was intended. The Polish government permits the import of food, and eyewitnesses vouch for the fact that it is delivered to the churches. One evangelical relates how he personally drove trucks to the churches, where he was met by eager evangelical pastors who unloaded the trucks and distributed the food in 20-pound packages to other churches in the area. A similar story comes from French Roman Catholics who have given liberally to supply their fellow churchmen in Poland with food.</p><p>We are without excuse. From our comfortable homes we say to the Poles in need: “God bless you, be warmed and fed,” and do nothing. But there is a God in heaven. Someday we shall have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give account of ourselves and our careless indifference to the needs of others. We must be sure that we do not stand among those to whom he will say in that day, “Depart from me, I never knew you; for as much as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”</p><p>But with the apostle, we believe better things of evangelicals who have tasted of the grace of Christ and been the recipients of so many benefits of his lovingkindness. We see the need, and by God’s grace we shall respond.</p><p><a name="section.3.10" id="section.3.10" class=""></a></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead3">Others Say</h2><p><strong>Sometimes It’s a Practical Matter</strong></p><p><span style="" class="">L</span>ike the weather, Bible study is something we discuss but do little about. Most ministers have an arsenal of sermons by which they hope to encourage, threaten, or coerce their auditors to engage in Bible study. Next to involvement in evangelism, there is perhaps nothing a preacher desires more for his congregation than meaningful Bible study.</p><p>A student minister had just completed a blistering denunciation of the brethren in a small rural church for not spending more time in Bible study. Most of the congregation looked rather sheepish as they filed out that day. The preacher felt rather smug. Those shape-up-or-ship-out sermons always seem to give young preachers a great deal of personal satisfaction.</p><p>One sweet, little old lady spoiled it all: “Preacher,” she said with a smile on her face, “we know what we ought to be doing. Please show us how to do it.” Many young preachers (and perhaps some not so young) stand convicted before God of browbeating their people to study the Word while offering them very little in the way of practical help in this vital area of Christian growth.</p><p>JAMES E. SMITH</p><p><em>Dr. Smith is dean of Central Florida Bible College in Orlando.</em></p><p><strong>A Moral Lingo that “Leads” Nowhere</strong></p><p>“<span style="" class="">V</span>alues clarification” is education lingo for a technique sometimes used in public schools to help students understand how they make moral choices. But a little clarification of the values at work behind the new teaching technique is needed.</p><p>The proponents of values clarification say the approach treats all viewpoints alike and does not promote any particular system of values. However, the technique is not as value-free as it purports to be; in the new system, modern goals such as “self-actualization” and “rich experience” replace the more traditional “justice,” “courage,” and “truth.”</p><p>If the systematic teaching of morals within the bounds of the First Amendment requires systematic exclusion of a whole realm of meta-ethics underlying moral thinking in our society, isn’t this in itself a distortion of ethical discourse in the intellectual sense, and injustice in the social?</p><p><em>Adapted from</em> The Public Interest (<em>Spring 1981</em>), <em>reprinted in the</em> Chronicle of Higher Education <em>(May 26, 1981).</em></p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="share-post metadata-post-date"> <li class="gift-article"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/editorials-170/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift This Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" aria-hidden="true" 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At any rate, whoever said it obviously never served on a church committee, purchased anything on the installment plan, or spent much time at the dentist.</p><p>This is the last column to be signed by Eutychus X. In a fortnight, Eutychus XI will take over. To him or her, I hand the torch: May your fingers not be burned and may the smoke not get in your eyes. It’s difficult to type while holding a burning torch, but you’ll get used to it.</p><p>I want to thank the eight people who wrote me complimentary letters. I also want to thank the people who sent hate mail. My, what a collection I have! I realize that you have had a difficult time writing nasty letters to an anonymous enemy, but now the veil is drawn, and your target is here for all to see. I plan to use your letters in a future book, which will be a study of humor in evangelical ministry. I hope to get access to the Youth for Christ International files, and several seminaries have invited me to sit in on their faculty meetings.</p><p>“But has this Eutychus X experience done anything for you?” asks my inner man. Of course it has! For one thing, I have learned that too many Christian people and organizations can’t laugh at themselves. They take themselves too seriously, and this makes them stuffy. I have also learned that some people are not serious enough about humor, and this makes them shallow. Schiller was right: “Nothing serves better to illustrate a man’s character than the things which he finds ridiculous.” That means I’ve been telling on myself all these months—but so have you!</p><p>Nobody said it better than Swift: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”</p><p>No tears, now! Let’s not fog up the mirror!</p><p>A happy spring to you all, and to all—goodbye.</p><p>EUTYCHUS X</p><p><strong>Lord of the Harvest!</strong></p><p>Although it may be “inconceivable” to Bill Bright that “… God would come and terminate the harvest …” [News, Jan. 22], it is unthinkable to me that one of the farm hands would presume to know better than the Lord of the harvest!</p><p>JAMES R. PFEIFFER</p><p>Indianapolis, Ind.</p><p><strong>Dismayed and Envious</strong></p><p>Your report of “A Crystal Cathedral Spectacular” [News, Jan. 22] at first left me a bit dismayed and (I may as well admit it) somewhat envious. But then I sat back with my cup of tea and did some serious possibility thinking about our Easter pageant. Granted, we have no Disneyland with its makers of magic in our back yard, but there is one small, rundown grocery store whose proprietor is as ingenious as any Disney technician. Because our neighborhood is populated by poor folks who are incapable of shelling out from $6.50 to $12.50 a head for spiritual thrills (heaven knows they need them), I won’t get the money I need to bankroll a <em>really</em> good show.</p><p>This is precisely where the remarkable grocer will help me. If I just tell him what sort of lighting effect I’d like to have at the moment of the resurrection scene, I’m sure he could come up with one of those old World War II air defense lights that small businessmen like to use when they have a big sale. I’d like to work some famous show biz animal into the show, too. Everybody loves an animal on stage. Maybe I could get that monkey who costarred with Clint Eastwood in <em>Every Which Way but Loose.</em> He could play the part of some Pharisee who goes hopping mad when a soldier informs him that the stone rolled away.</p><p>The public must know the physical dimensions and numbers of things if a show like this is to be successful; folks like to be impressed. I’ll make certain they know it when the church’s huge, 96-inch doors swing open. (Ninety-six inches sounds better than eight feet, doesn’t it? It’s the number that’s important.) The old church floor might be threatened by a meager 300-pound rock for the tomb set, but if I put out its weight in grams, the people will marvel. The church choir is not exactly a large group—13 in all when old Hank Findley’s arthritis isn’t acting up. But by putting up mirrors on either side, I’ll be able to multiply the choir members to infinity. Think of the advertising appeal! Come and see a choir myriad in number! (Not quite on the up and up, you say? But people always expect to be fooled a bit whenever they see a show.)</p><p>Impressive sound could be a problem, but there are solutions there too. My pastor wants to be the narrator for the show—but can you imagine someone with the appearance and voice of Kermit the Frog sending shivers down the backs of an audience with, “Where, O Death, is your victory?” Perhaps I could find a rubber Billy Graham mask to fit over my pastor’s head and a tape recording of Orson Welles reciting Saint Paul’s lines. The Reverend would only have to move his jaw in “sync” with the tape. (“Syncing” is a very fashionable word these days.) The problem of our old organist’s failing eyesight and the condition of the ancient organ itself could easily be solved by playing an E. Power Biggs record on a little phonograph set close to the pulpit mike. As for the 13-member choir—what’s wrong with dubbing the sound of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with the Philadelphia Orchestra?</p><p>Now, if CT would give me a little publicity before the big event, possibility could become reality.</p><p>GALEN H. MEYER</p><p>Grand Rapids, Mich.</p><p>The Crystal Cathedral Christmas Pageant did not cost $1 million. The actual cost was half that amount. Most of the cost was for capital expenditures and additions to the still-uncompleted cathedral that were necessary for the staging, but also capital expenditures that will be used to stage the Glory of Easter in 1983 and subsequent years.</p><p>Fifty-six thousand people voted enthusiastically by purchasing tickets, which enabled the cost to be almost entirely underwritten the first year. Subsequent performances should produce ongoing income to endow the missions and ministries programs of the Crystal Cathedral.</p><p>REV. ROBERT H. SCHULLER</p><p>Crystal Cathedral</p><p>Garden Grove, Calif.</p><p><strong>What Does the Bible Teach?</strong></p><p>Your generally accurate article on the Chattanooga TV discussion [News, Jan. 22] began with a gross misrepresentation. I hope your readers understood that the quote stating that Peter Macky and I “were representing the view that the Bible is … errant in certain matters” came from the <em>Chattanooga News-Free Press</em> before we came to town. It does not represent our position.</p><p>I would be happy to say that the Bible “is inerrant in all that it teaches.” The issue we came to discuss was: What does the Bible teach on matters such as modern science? Those who read the whole article carefully would find ample evidence of that.</p><p>One reason I prefer not to use the word “inerrant” is that it is a modern word with technological overtones that tends to bias people in favor of looking at the Bible as a science book. I believe it is wrong to impose our changing twentieth-century standards of science on the Bible in an attempt to make it conform to secular standards. What people in all times and cultures need is the message of salvation in Jesus Christ that the Bible proclaims. In my experience people do not first test the Bible as a book of modern science before they seek in it the answer to their need for eternal salvation.</p><p>No evangelicals that I know doubt or diminish the full authority of Scripture.</p><p>JACK ROGERS</p><p>Fuller Theological Seminary</p><p>Pasadena, Calif.</p><p><strong>A Prophetic Voice</strong></p><p>Regarding your editorial, “Why We Print the Bad News, Even About Fellow Christians” [Jan. 22]—hopefully your readers’ reaction will be, Hallelujah! I certainly am rejoicing to see you accept and announce your God-given responsibility to be a prophetic voice to the witness of Jesus Christ in the world today.</p><p>JOHN MCINTIRE</p><p>Christian Growth</p><p>Bradenton, Fla.</p><p>Alas, some readers don’t know the difference between information and propaganda!</p><p>But their attitude reflects the attitude of the “conservative” church as a whole: put on a good front, cover up the wrongs, but don’t face them honestly. Many a “victorious Christian” is a defeated saint with a good image.</p><p>“Speaking the truth in love” is still God’s way.</p><p>REV. WARREN W. WIERSBE</p><p>Chicago, Ill.</p><p>You seem to have overlooked the instruction of Romans 14:10 and 13: “But why do you judge your brother? Or why do you show contempt for your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. Therefore let us not judge one another anymore.” Or 1 Corinthians 4:5 (NIV): “Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts.”</p><p>REV. ROBERT C. SAVAGE</p><p>Haslett Baptist Church</p><p>Haslett, Michigan</p><p><strong>Breath of Fresh, Spiritual Air</strong></p><p>The article “Israel Today: What Place in Prophecy” by Mark Hanna [Jan. 22] is an exhilarating breath of fresh, spiritual air!</p><p>May more like Hanna steer the biblical ship <em>Grace</em> back to the intended teaching that all apart from faith in Christ as Messiah/Savior and Lord will likewise perish, and receive no blessing in this life or the hereafter.</p><p>If we truly love Israel, we will not comfort them and anesthetize them in their blindness and rebellion to think God is with them apart from the Messiah, Jesus Christ!</p><p>The lostness of all men must be proclaimed and adhered to, in order for sinful men to find the grace and mercy of the living God in Christ.</p><p>REV. DENNIS L. FINNAN</p><p>Calvary Bible Church</p><p>Benton Harbor, Mich.</p><p>I was pleased to see continued exposure on the issues related to Israel and the church.</p><p>However, a corrective may be needed for evangelical knee-jerk responses that support all of Israel’s behavior; but this is not the tenor of Dr. Hanna’s article. Disappointing is his rigid distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Although this is a logically possible distinction, for most Jews it is not a practically possible distinction. Zionism is merely the belief in Jewish national self-determination. Only the Holocaust finally convinced world Jewry of its practical necessity. A state was needed as a refuge from the persecution of the nations. Although an odd Jew here and there might disagree, Zionism is overwhelmingly supported by 99 percent of the world’s Jews. Zionism is not Menachem Begin, but includes his opponents as well. To identify Zionism with strident, unyielding nationalism reveals an inexcusable ignorance of the facts. To give allowance to anti-Zionism, in distinction from anti-Semitism, betrays a great insensitivity to the historical factors that gave rise to Zionism. This shows insensitivity to Jewish people.</p><p>Hanna’s wholesale statement that “Israel is not the people of God and almost no nation in the world is more opposed to the Christian faith and its missionaries” is a gross distortion.</p><p>Israel allows missionaries to publish, to hold public services, and to proselytize adults. Yes, the power of the orthodox party in the state has made Israel, as a state, less receptive to Jewish believers in Jesus than we would like. Yet Israelis are open to the gospel. Tourists travel and witness freely, and Christians may distribute their literature!</p><p>REV. DANIEL C. JUSTER</p><p>Union of Messianic Jewish</p><p>Congregations</p><p>Rockville, Md.</p><p>While it is all too true that many dispensationalists declare that the establishment of the present State of Israel in 1948 was the “blooming of the fig tree,” thus heralding the return of Christ within one generation, that is by no means a generally held position among all dispensationalists. Although God may use the present state of Israel in fulfillment of biblical prophecy, it would violate no text of Scripture (interpreted with a dispensational hermeneutic) if a foreign power were to utterly devastate and annihilate the present Zionist entity. To assert otherwise, one would have to prove that God has established the present state in fulfillment of prophecy, and that its contemporary existence must necessarily be viewed as preparatory to the setting up of the kingdom.</p><p>REV. RODNEY J. DECKER</p><p>Calvary Baptist Church</p><p>Ecorse, Mich.</p><p><strong>Misleading Suggestion</strong></p><p>In a recent news article [Dec. 11], you cited a Houston newspaper story that suggested I have “more or less quit crusades.” The suggestion as it stands is misleading.</p><p>Last year I did cut back on the number of crusades in order to devote extra time to missions and evangelism conferences. This year I have resumed a full schedule of crusades.</p><p>A second priority is cooperative efforts and strategic planning in world evangelization; a third is encouraging younger people toward ministries in missions and evangelism. 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class="article-hero-category"><a href=""></a></div> <h1 class="article-hero-title wp-block-heading">Editor’s Note from March 05, 1982</h1> <div class="article-hero-meta"> <p><a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/" class="byline-link"></a></p> </div> <div class="article-hero-deck"> </div> <div class="wp-block-post-featured-image article-hero-image"> <img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101925.jpg?w=1920" class="feature-image wp-post-image" alt="" fetchpriority="high" rel="preload" decoding="async" srcset="https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101925.jpg 2200w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101925.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101925.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/1982/03/101925.jpg?resize=1024,576 1024w, 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</a> </li> <li role="menuitem" class="copy-to-clipboard"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/editors-note-448/" aria-label="Copy Link to Clipboard"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon link" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-link-25348">link</title> <use xlink:href="#link"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Copy Link</span> </button> </li> <li role="menuitem" class="copy-to-clipboard"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/editors-note-448/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-gift-30460">gift</title> <use xlink:href="#gift"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Gift Article</span> </button> </li> </ul> </section> </section> <div class="entry-content is-layout-constrained has-global-padding" id="body"> <p>For nearly three years, Eutychus X has entertained and enraged readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. In spite of ourselves, he has also instructed us. To me it was special fun, because he always directed his sharpest thrusts against those causes with which he himself identifies. My friends would complain that he was picking on them. He was—and on me, too. But especially on himself. And we all grew bigger because of it. Now Eutychus X moves into “retirement,” and we can all finally learn who this tormenter of Israel really is: Pastor Warren Wiersbe. Once editor of <em>Youth for Christ</em> (now <em>Campus Life</em>) magazine, he was for several years pastor of the well-known Moody Church in Chicago. Author of many books, he has more recently been engaged in radio and Bible teaching ministries in addition to his writing. We are grateful for his ministry to us through this column.</p><p>No Christian who seeks to be guided by the Bible imagines that Western capitalism is perfect. We can all testify to its corruptness at certain times and places. Marxism seems to share with the Bible a vivid sense of human depravity. That is why the Marxist argues for revolution as the only way humanity can be delivered from entrenched greed and exploitation.</p><p>But the Marxist commitment to the biblical doctrine of human depravity is not radical enough: it is when man has ushered in the new age of the classless society that all will be perfect. But the promise of such a manmade utopia cannot be delivered. Promises continue unabated, but the Marxists never deliver the goods. From two widely separated areas of the world this issue focuses on the broken promises of the Marxists and the disillusionment of those who know the system best—who have observed it personally in Eastern Europe and in the Philippines.</p><p>Book review editor Walter Elwell looks at the important new book by Richard Hutcheson, and raises hard questions about the direction of the so-called mainline denominations. We still believe the chief strength of the evangelical movement remains in what are called the older mainline denominations. But it will not stay that way for long unless the leaders of these bodies recognize the seriousness of the problem they face. Spiritually hungry people will go where they are fed—with the life-giving Word of the living God.</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="share-post metadata-post-date"> <li class="gift-article"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/editors-note-448/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift This Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-gift-8109">gift</title> <use xlink:href="#gift"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Gift This Article</span> </button> </li> <li> <section class="share-dropdown"> <h2 id="dropdownLabel" class="scr-only">Share</h2> <button class="dropdown-button" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false" aria-labelledby="dropdownLabel"> Share <span> <svg height="5" width="7" class="icon arrow_down" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-arrow_down-4322">arrow_down</title> <use xlink:href="#arrow_down"></use> </svg> </span> </button> <ul 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href="/pastors/">Pastors</a></div> <h1 class="article-hero-title wp-block-heading">Four Ways To Make Group Decisions</h1> <div class="article-hero-meta"> <p><a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Em+Griffin/" class="byline-link">Em Griffin</a></p> </div> <div class="article-hero-deck"> <p>One way or another, decisions always get made—but using the right method helps make sure the result is a good one.</p> </div> <div class="wp-block-post-featured-image article-hero-image"> </div> </section> </header> <section class="article-action-bar alignwide"> <div class="article-publication-menu"> <button aria-controls="article-publication-menu" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false" class="article-publication-menu-toggle dropdown-toggle-button" > <span> <strong> Leadership Journal </strong> </span> <span class="article-publication-issue-name"> Spring 1982 issue <svg height="5" width="7" class="icon arrow_down" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title 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class="citation">Getting Together</em>, published by InterVarsity Press.</p> <p>You’re the chairman of the Church’s missions committee. You’ve held the post for two years, but up until now the group’s duties have been routine-recruiting speakers, corresponding with missionaries, handling the funds that go to the denomination’s mission board.</p> <p>Now you’re faced with a larger responsibility. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of your church’s founding. Your pastor wants. to celebrate by raising $50,000 for a special missions project. He’s committed to making the campaign go, but he doesn’t know what the project should be. That’s your job.</p> <p>You aren’t completely in the dark. He’s given you some overall guidelines: You’re to focus on a single ministry, not a hundred different agencies. You’re to invest in people rather than things. You’re to find a project that will turn people on, a specific need that will capture their imagination.</p> <p>And there’s no dearth of ideas. People can always think of ways to spend money. Already requests have surfaced and been sent to your committee for consideration:</p> <p>1. Support a young couple in their work of radio evangelism behind the Iron Curtain.</p> <p>2. Educate indigenous doctors for a mission hospital in Bangladesh.</p> <p>3. Support a fledgling seminary for native American Indians.</p> <p>4. Provide seed money to launch a combined Young Life/Youth for Christ outreach among the unchurched teenagers of your community.</p> <p>5. People on the island of Haiti are the poorest of the poor. You could finance a local cannery, which would provide employment and keep the singlecrop harvest from spoiling.</p> <p>6. An inner-city pastor has approached you for help in setting up a holistic ministry in an urban housing project. His plans include a food co-op, tutoring, legal aid, parenting classes, and discipleship groups.</p> <p>All worthwhile projects, but you and your seven-member committee are overwhelmed. How do you decide? You obviously want God’s will. But one member has announced that it’s God’s will to support the radio evangelist, and you’re not so sure he has a pipeline to divine truth. The problem you have is typical of many faced by Christian group leaders. You want to select a project by using a decision-making process that will allow God’s will to speak through all seven of you.</p> <p>Unfortunately, no decision-making process is perfect. Each has its pluses and minuses. Not surprisingly, the strengths of one are the weaknesses of another. It’s often a tradeoff. As leader of the group, you have to figure out which one leads to a good decision in your situation.</p> <p>Five factors make for a good decision:</p> <p>• Quality. How good a decision is it?</p> <p>• Time. How long does it take to decide?</p> <p>• Commitment. Will all the committee members really support it?</p> <p>• Attractiveness. Did the process create an espirit de corps among committee members?</p> <p>• Learning. Did the committee learn during the process?</p> <p>That’s the goal: to reach a quality solution that all are committed to in a short amount of time, while still liking each other and learning in the process! Let’s look at four different methods to achieve this goal:</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Voting</h2> <p>The process of taking a vote is almost synonymous with democracy. Virtually every club, organization, school board, and legislature in our culture conducts its business on the basis of majority rule. But there are different ways to set it up. Let’s see how this might work for the missions committee.</p> <p>As chairman, you lead a discussion on the relative merits of the six proposals. You try to be impartial, giving everyone an equal chance to voice his or her opinion. After an agreed-upon period of time, you call for a vote. The project that receives four of the seven votes wins. If the first ballot totals three votes for Bangladesh doctors, two votes for the joint Young LifelYouth for Christ proposal, and one each for Soviet bloc radio evangelism and the Arizona seminary, the group would discard the losing projects and revote on the top two.</p> <p>Another route to a majority decision would occur if the group discussion began to center on one of the projects—the inner-city work, for instance. One of the members could move that this be the official focus of the fund drive. At that point, all of the discussion would focus on this single proposal. When a member’s “call for the question” is supported by the others, you proceed to vote the idea up or down. In case of a three-three split among members, you, as leader, would cast the deciding vote.</p> <p>Whichever route you take to get there, the final outcome is based on a one-man-one-vote principle that’s consistent with democratic ideals. On paper it looks like a good way to do it. But in practice, it’s a mixed bag:</p> <p>The <em>quality</em> of a majority rule decision is usually better than what would be selected solely by the luck of the draw. Suppose that an all-knowing, allpowerful, beneficent ruler of the universe (God) singled out the holistic urban project as the best use of the money. The odds of hitting upon that specific solution merely by chance are one out of six. Surely your panel of reasonably intelligent men and women of good will can improve on that. To claim 100 percent certainty would be presumptuous. But it’s not unreasonable to hope for a 70 percent probability of success.</p> <p>A good decision is likely because the issue has been aired in the light of day. Everyone’s had a chance to pump for his or her pet project, while poking holes in the plans that seem inferior. It’s a lot tougher to fool seven people than just one. Usually the collective wisdom of the group will be greater than the knowledge of any individual.</p> <p>A relatively high-quality solution isn’t the only plus for majority rule. It’s possible to reach a final judgment within a <em>short time span</em>. Not all chairmen are comfortable with this feature. They’d rather talk an issue out until everyone seems happy. When the last holdout gives in, they say, “Let’s vote.” In this case, voting is a mere formality-the stamp of approval required for the minister. But the ballot process can take a decision that’s dragging on and on and bring it to an abrupt conclusion. Used this way, voting is a method of conflict resolution.</p> <p>Calling the question not only moves the group to a swift decision, but it also forces individual members to make up their minds. I have a friend who has a terrible time figuring out what he thinks. Once, in a spirit of pique, I asked him if he had trouble being decisive. After a long pause, he answered, “Yes and no.” Voting cuts through the fog of ambivalence.</p> <p>Of course, this time-saving feature can kick up resistance to the winning solution. You can’t expect a person who’s been voted down to be committed to a decision he or she thought second best. Even a member on the winning side may be less than happy with the choices. How many people do you know who have been truly excited about a presidential candidate over the past two decades? Sometimes it’s worse than that. A member may be drastically opposed to the will of the majority—believing they’ve done something stupid, harmful, or even sinful.</p> <p>Attraction to the group follows the same pattern. We think folks who see things our way are very fine fellows indeed. “My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.” So decision by majority rule tends to draw us closer to those on our side of the issue, but alienates us from those who differ. This divisive feature is tempered by having multiple chances to cast ballots on varied issues, so that my opponent in one case is my ally in another. Overall, however, voting acts as an irritant to group cohesion.</p> <p>Voting and learning go hand in hand. The push and shove of parliamentary debate is a great training ground for leadership. One can hardly survive a number of motions, seconds, amendments, calls for tabling, and calls for the question without picking up a certain sensitivity for guiding a discussion. Similarly, the airing of different viewpoints is a great way for everyone to become knowledgeable about the topic at hand. By the time the vote is cast, everyone on the missions committee should know much more than they did at the start.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Appointing an Expert</h2> <p>This isn’t as easy as it sounds, because it entails figuring out which expert to pick. Of course, you or the pastor could do the deed by simple fiat. But dictatorial solution is outside the spirit of group decision making. A group can give its authority to a single wise person, but it can’t duck the responsibility for making a good selection.</p> <p>When it comes to selecting a competent pro, there’s rarely a lack of volunteers. Self-styled experts always come to the fore. The trouble is, you “can’t tell the players without a program.” The guy who wants to be appointed resident guru may not understand his own limitations. The woman who has the wisdom of Solomon may be too shy to put herself forward.</p> <p>It’s especially hard to pick the best member from within your midst when the possibility of hurt feelings lurks just beneath the surface. I remember a time I was counseling at a high school summer camp. Kids were divided into four teams for sports competition. As coach of one of the teams, it was my job to sign them up for the big swim meet. We needed one swimmer for each event, and we didn’t have time for tryouts. “Girls’ fifty-yard backstroke! Who’d like to enter?” I shouted at the team meeting. Two girls volunteered. How was I to pick between them? I asked if either of them was on a swim team.</p> <p>Both nodded. Did they remember their times for the fifty-yard backstroke? No. They even looked alike!</p> <p>The only noticeable difference was that one gal was eager to do it while the other was somewhat reticent. So I picked the former—and she lost badly. Later on in the week, I saw the second girl swim. We would have been well represented. I had a Junior Olympics swimmer on the team who could have won the race wearing army boots. She hadn’t volunteered because she’d just washed her hair and didn’t want to get it wet again!</p> <p>So identifying your best person is tricky. Getting him or her to volunteer is an additional hurdle to cross. But even if you identify and recruit the best person in your group, you still run up against a barrier to getting a top-quality solution. With one person—even the best person—you can’t get synergy.</p> <p>You may not be familiar with the term synergy. (You’re not alone. I once had a student define it on a test as “sufficient energy to sin.”) It refers to a group solution that is better than the best idea of any one member. A prized goal in any group decision, it comes about when members pool their expertise to achieve a collective wisdom greater than anyone of them possesses on his own.</p> <p>Delegating the judgment to one person looks much better when time is a crucial consideration. You may not get a good decision, but you can get it fast. Sometimes that’s just as important. All six mission projects have their strong points. It would be a shame to fritter away the golden opportunity through indecision. Besides, six committee meetings can consume eighty-four man-hours of precious time (seven members x two hours x six meetings = eighty-four hours). One quickie meeting of the committee to select the pro, plus his or her time spent in research, will probably add up to only ten or fifteen hours of work. The time efficiency is vastly superior to anything involving face-to-face interaction.</p> <p>Delegating the choice to an expert does little to insure member commitment to the plan of action. Group members will usually go along with a decision made by someone else—as long as they don’t see it as central to who they are or what they are about. Should the church’s brochure be printed in four colors at Acme Press or in two colors by Ace Printers? Who cares? Let someone who knows the business decide. But if the girl who married the Russian defector is my niece, however, or I met the Lord through the ministry of Young Life, I want some part in deciding which project we pick. Even if I agree with the decision, I won’t work as hard if I wasn’t involved in the process. I’ll be apathetic or even hostile to an idea that hasn’t been shaped by my input.</p> <p>Decisions by experts are a bit stronger on group cohesion. You’ll recall that one of the drawbacks of voting was that it split the group into two opposing camps. Appointment removes that source of irritation. The burden of judgment is on someone else’s shoulders, so they’re free to enjoy each other’s fellowship. It’s not the best-friend type of attraction that comes out of the crucible of common stress, but a warm, mutual appreciation can grow while members are waiting for the final word.</p> <p>Appointment is a loser when it comes to learning. True, the man or woman who knew something about missions is selected and now knows more about missions. But the rest are left out in the cold. Their ignorance confirmed, they conclude that it takes a seminary degree to decipher the nuances of missiology—and quit trying.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Delphi Technique</h2> <p>This calls up images of an ancient Greek oracle making decisions by consulting the entrails of a pig. That is not what this method is about. The technique involves collecting the decisions of each member and subjecting these to a process of statistical averaging. It’s like averaging judges’ scores at a figure-skating competition. Here’s how it works for the missions committee problem.</p> <p>As chairman, you solicit suggestions for the fiftieth anniversary project. You can do this by mail, phone, or in one-on-one interviewing. You ask committee members to rank the projects in order of their desirability. The first choice is assigned number one, and the least favored alternative is rated number six.</p> <p>The next step is to feed back this material to the committee without identifying who voted for what. They can study the data and draw their own conclusions before you survey them a second time. If I were a member of the group, here’s what I’d be thinking:</p> <p>-No use wasting a high choice on the cannery project. It’s a dead issue. Three people are strongly opposed.</p> <p>-Radio evangelism is right up there. I just can’t see it. Sometimes I’m more sure of what I’m against than what I’m for. I think I’ll put it last on my list next time to try to keep it from moving up.</p> <p>-The native American seminary doesn’t stir much interest one way or the other.</p> <p>-The group’s really split on radio evangelism and education for the doctors in Bangladesh.</p> <p>-There’s general, though not unanimous, support for holistic inner-city ministry.</p> <p>You then ask the members to go through the rank-order process again. They can list the items the same way they did the first time, or they can rearrange their priorities in light of the initial results. It’s possible to go through this cycle six or seven times, but things usually shake down after the second ranking. The lowest total is the group’s choice—even though the group never actually meets together.</p> <p>The big advantage of the Delphi technique is the equal weighing of each member’s input. Statistics are no respecter of persons. The big giver, the handsome man, or the lady who’s clever with words can’t sway the group to their side. It’s a balanced one-man-onevote system. Eccentric ideas get submerged by proposals that have general support.</p> <p>I saw a perfect example of this when I assigned different methods of decision making in my group dynamics class. I asked students to indicate the order in which Christ called his disciples. Note that this is a problem with a right answer, although it takes a harmony of the Gospels to ferret it out.</p> <p>The voting group was heavily influenced by a selfconfident fellow who was a Bible major. He was certain that John was first and Philip was the last one called. But he was certainly wrong and led the others astray. The group using the Delphi technique avoided the problem. There wasn’t any room for wheeling and dealing.</p> <p>You’d think that any system of averaging would render a poor-quality decision. Not so. The Delphi technique seems to tap into the collective wisdom of the group. It doesn’t occur every time, but synergy is a distinct possibility. In my class, the Delphi technique came up with a better solution than any of the other groups. Of course, these students had some biblical knowledge. As long as most group members have a decent grasp of the topic at hand, the solution will be at least as good, if not better, than other methods.</p> <p>In terms of time, the Delphi technique is great. It takes only a few minutes to rank-order a list of possible choices. One person can quickly tabulate the results.</p> <p>But the very efficiency of the method prevents members from drawing close to each other. There’s no chance to compare ailments, swap jokes, or show pictures of the new collie pup. None of these would directly help your mission group make a decision, yet they’re the stuff that interpersonal attraction is made of. We can be a bit cynical by saying that as long as there’s no interaction, folks won’t have reason to get mad at each other. But that’s a poor reason to adopt a mechanical process.</p> <p>Learning isn’t much better. I may catch a glimpse of social reality by seeing how others rank the items, but there’s no opportunity to discuss relative merits. It usually takes the public push and pull of ideas to stimulate new insights. Leadership training is also nonexistent. The biggest drawback, however, is the total lack of member commitment to the solution. Because of the statistical averaging process, you can end up with a solution that doesn’t exactly match anyone individual’s input. That doesn’t create feelings of ownership.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Consensus</h2> <p>When I say consensus, the picture that comes to mind is the seven members of the missions committee sitting around a table, all nodding their heads in agreement. As chairman you’ve asked, “Are we agreed, then, that our anniversary effort should be to raise funds to educate Christian doctors in Bangladesh?”</p> <p>“Yes.”</p> <p>“You bet.”</p> <p>“Let’s do it.”</p> <p>“Uh-huh.”</p> <p>“Sure.”</p> <p>“I’m for it.”</p> <p>That would be great. If all the members can coalesce on a given project, you know that the group will break their backs to make the fund drive go. When member commitment is crucial, it makes sense for the leader to take pains to insure that everybody is behind the action.</p> <p>Of course some will say, “You’re dreaming, Em. I can barely get the seven of us to agree on where to go for lunch. No way is such a diverse group going to reach unanimity on a single plan. Even if it were possible, it’d take hours of time.”</p> <p>I never promised that consensus was easy. You have to be prepared for a long haul. Unless your committee is acting as a rubber stamp, it can take hours of questioning and probing to reach unanimous consent. There’s not even a guarantee you’ll get it in the end. All that time may go for naught. But it is possible.</p> <p>On a twelve-member jury, one person can hold up the group if he or she has a reasonable doubt. This forces the group to talk things out along the lines of evidence. The old movie <em class="citation">Twelve Angry Men</em> had Henry Fonda as the one holdout against an eleven-man majority that wanted to rush to judgment. They were incensed at Fonda’s stubbornness. But the rules of law state that 11-1 isn’t good enough. They had to reach consensus. By the end of the third reel, Fonda had converted them all to a not-guilty position. This may seem far-fetched, but it’s been known to happen in real life.</p> <p>Of course, a jury has a relatively simple task. Their decision is a simple guilty/not guilty. They don’t have to generate ideas to support their choice—that’s up to the prosecutor and lawyer. And, supposedly, they are free from personal bias in the case. None of these is true in our missions committee example. But perhaps the example of a jury helps to show that consensus is a possibility, and that it’s worth striving for when the stakes are high.</p> <p>Can you reach consensus? There’s no ironclad guarantee. You may become a hung jury. But sticking to the following guidelines will give your group a decent shot at reaching agreement.</p> <p>• Announce your intentions right from the start. Let folks know that you’re prepared to hash things out until the group reaches a decision that everyone can support. This means that a single person has veto power. One member can block a decision if he or she feels it’s taking the group down the wrong path. Obviously, this could result in total chaos if everybody lobbies hard for his top choice. So encourage a mutual forbearance, where people listen to others’ thoughts.</p> <p>• Be a process person. As leader, your concern is more on how the group decides than which of the six options they pick. So be a bit suspicious of quick agreement. If you publicly check out the reason why people are in favor of a given idea, they may discover that they don’ t see eye to eye. Better for everyone to discover it now and wrestle through disagreement. You want to end up with true unity, not just a papered-over rift.</p> <p>• Encourage open expression of disagreement. Conflict isn’t necessarily bad. It can be healthy. Some members have quite probably come to the group with “hidden agendas”—pet solutions they are privately committed to. If these thoughts stay beneath the surface, they’ll keep a person from honestly considering any other possibilities. Better to get all the thoughts on the table.</p> <p>• Don’t mistake silence for agreement. It may seem reasonable to assume that people would speak up if they objected to the drift of the conversation. Some will. The average group has a few members that have no unspoken thoughts. But the same group typically has one or two reticent . members who are slow to voice their opinions. They may be naturally shy. Perhaps they’re intimidated by higher status or more vocal members. Whatever the reason, you need to create an environment that supports their ideas. Seek out their thoughts; encourage them to plunge into the conversation.</p> <p>• Don’t expect complete unanimity. That’s not really your goal—which is indeed fortunate, because it’s almost impossible to achieve this side of heaven. What you’re shooting for is a solution that can gain everybody’s approval. A lot of folks aren’t sure what’s best. But everybody has strong opinions about what’s worst. Your job is to help people discuss an alternative that all can agree to—even if it isn’t first on everyone’s list.</p> <p>Consensus stacks up well against the other methods in terms of quality. It leads to synergy with impressive frequency. The last time I gave the assignment about the disciples, one fellow put Bartholomew high on his list while all other group members had him down the line with Thaddeus and Judas. They tried to force him to give in, but he stood his ground and argued well for his answer. But he was wrong in thinking John was first-and wiser heads prevailed on that one. So the group ended up with a much better answer than anyone of them had by himself. Consensus is the best route to synergy.</p> <p>You can see how it also stimulates learning. After pooling and weighing everyone’s knowledge about the disciples, the group as a whole came out of the session smarter than they went in. And New Testament history was just part of the gain. The members received a short course in group dynamics. They can draw upon this interpersonal experience when tossed into another problem-solving situation.</p> <p>When it comes to member attraction, I know of nothing that will pull people closer together than a common commitment to unity. The Christian song “We Are One in the Spirit” is a hymn of consensus.</p> <p>I once invited, a class of sixteen students to our home for an informal evening together. I left the actual night and time up to them. I only asked that no one be scheduled out. Given night courses, jobs, family responsibilities, church work, and travel plans, this was an almost impossible assignment.</p> <p>But they stuck with it. After a prolonged discussion, they finally arrived at a date that fifteen of them could make. It wasn’t easy. Many of them had to flex their schedules to accommodate the group. But still, one international student was shut out. He worked five nights a week and desperately needed the money. The two nights he was free, a number of others had ironclad conflicts.</p> <p>It looked like an impasse, but the group refused to quit. They entertained a number of possible solutions, some quite bizarre. Then one girl suggested, “How about if we all chip in a buck and hire someone to replace you that night? You’ll still get paid, the work will get done, and we’ll all be together!” Everyone chimed in their agreement.</p> <p>The fellow looked confused. He admitted that the plan was feasible, but he couldn’t believe they’d do this for him. When the reality sank in, he was ecstatic. So was the group, and the evening was a huge success.</p> <p>Two notes of caution: If the group tries to reach consensus and fails, the resulting frustration can cause interpersonal attraction to plummet. It’s easy to find a scapegoat for the group’s problem. Everyone blames someone else.</p> <p>The opposite tendency is equally dangerous. The group may become so intent on having unity that no one can afford to raise honest doubts. This desire for togetherness-at-all-costs can lead to false consensus. The phenomenon has been labeled “Groupthink.” No one wants to rock the boat or spoil the cozy feelings.</p> <p>Groupthink is a special danger in Christian groups that treat all disagreement as schism. Such an atmosphere has a chilling effect on creative thinking. It’s often the result of a leader who subtly promotes the view that opposition to him is sin. I can’t help but feel that any leader so rigid deserves the second-class decisions that will come from his or her group. But it’s a shame that the followers have to suffer as well.</p> <p>I find it helpful to think of the proper relation between consensus and attraction in this way. Closeness isn’t the aim of consensus; rather it’s the byproduct of true agreement.</p> <p>By now you may be thoroughly confused as to which method of decision making to use with your missions committee. No method is perfect. They all have problems, but each one has something to recommend it as well. Voting is a good all-around route to go. It’s familiar, it doesn’t take long, and the decision reached is usually decent. But the losers may feel grumpy and flag in zeal when it comes time to implement the decision.</p> <p>Appointing an expert is one way of handling things with dispatch. By doing it, you avoid squabbles between members. But then, there’s no guarantee the decision will be a good one. There’s also no ownership of the solution.</p> <p>The Delphi technique offers the intriguing blend of a quick, high-quality decision. But it treats the human side of decision making as nonexistent. And that’s what members will be when it comes time for group effort.</p> <p>Consensus promises the wisdom of Solomon together with the kind of member commitment, attraction, and learning that a leader dreams of. But remember—all these people pluses come only when consensus is actually reached. If the process is abandoned, the benefits disappear. And the time involved in reaching consensus is sometimes horrendous.</p> <p>So what’s it going to be? It’s your choice. As for me, if the decision is a really big one—like a $50,000 fund raising project—I’d opt for consensus. (You could tell it was my favorite because I saved it for last.) But now it’s up to you. Different situations can call for different methods. And only you can tell which one fits your particular group and task.</p> <p class="is-style-article-copyright">Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/<em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.<a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/help/permissionsprivacy/permissions.html#answer" target="_blank" class="copyright" rel="noopener">Click here</a> for reprint information on <em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="article-authors-pills"> <li> <ul class="author-links"> <li> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Em+Griffin/" class="article-hero-author article-title-link button primary"> More from  <span>Em Griffin</span> </a> </li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul class="share-post metadata-post-date"> <li class="gift-article"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/groupdecisions/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift This Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" 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</div> </div> <footer class="entry-footer is-layout-constrained has-global-padding"> </footer> </article> <article class="post-container post-176283 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-pastors tag-prayer-and-spirituality tag-renewal tag-sabbath tag-self-examination tag-soul tag-spiritual-formation tag-spiritual-growth tax_publications-1982-leadership-journal tax_publications-leadership-journal tax_publications-spring_1982-leadership-journal"> <header class="entry-header is-layout-constrained has-global-padding article-header has-custom-bg-color"> <section class="wp-block-group article-hero has-global-padding article-hero-is-default"> <div class="article-hero-category"><a href="/pastors/">Pastors</a></div> <h1 class="article-hero-title wp-block-heading">Are You a Spring or a Cistern?</h1> <div class="article-hero-meta"> <p><a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Fred+Smith/" class="byline-link">Fred Smith</a></p> </div> <div class="article-hero-deck"> <p>Answering the question will impact your teaching.</p> </div> <div class="wp-block-post-featured-image article-hero-image"> </div> </section> </header> <section class="article-action-bar alignwide"> <div class="article-publication-menu"> <button aria-controls="article-publication-menu" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false" class="article-publication-menu-toggle dropdown-toggle-button" > <span> <strong> Leadership Journal </strong> </span> <span class="article-publication-issue-name"> Spring 1982 issue <svg height="5" width="7" class="icon arrow_down" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-arrow_down-22815">arrow_down</title> <use xlink:href="#arrow_down"></use> </svg> </span> </button> <div aria-hidden="true" class="article-publication-menu-dropdown" id="article-publication-menu" role="menu" > <div class="publication-issue-cover-image"> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/leadership-journal/1982/spring/" tabindex="-1" aria-label="View issue: Spring 1982"> 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data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/springorcistern/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-gift-7139">gift</title> <use xlink:href="#gift"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Gift Article</span> </button> </li> </ul> </section> </section> <div class="entry-content is-layout-constrained has-global-padding" id="body"> <p>Once you set out to teach—whether you’re a pastor or a lay leader—you need to decide whether you’re a spring or a cistern. There are very few springs in this world, as you know. People who are springs are thinkers; people who are cisterns are collectors of the information that comes from the springs.</p> <p>Most people are collectors rather than thinkers. They are the folk who make A’s in school. They can take in and spit back without changing the data at all, like Jewish rabbis, who transmitted the Law for years without the slightest alteration. Collectors are extremely important, because they do not pollute the flow of knowledge. But the flow originates with a spring.</p> <p>If you’re a spring, you face the danger of all who work on the creative edge—the danger of being wrong. You have to develop a certain discipline that says, Just because I have a thought doesn’t make it true. Otherwise you will become a dogmatic propagandist. You must apply your new creativity and prove whether it is true or whether it’s just new. New is not always better; change is not always an improvement. Therefore, springs have to give time and testing to their subjects.</p> <p>Cisterns, on the other hand, have to constantly read and research, or their water level will get low. They must always be collecting. I have been with people who are very capable cisterns, but when I pump them very long, I start to get muddy water. Cisterns have to be connected to inflow. The gutter and the downspout have to be in place to keep filling them up.</p> <p>If you determine that you are a spring, you need to know what size spring. After all, even a spring can run dry. So you must ask yourself, “How many new subjects can I handle? How many teaching assignments can I take?” The best lessons are those in which you use principles you have taught many times, simply updating the illustrations. The principles will always be old—they were old when you first discovered them. But the illustration and the language have to be updated.</p> <p>One of the most damaging things we can do to another person’s thinking is to say, “Well, that’s oldfashioned.” Breathing is fairly old-fashioned, too, but that does not detract from its importance. When it comes to principles, their age is actually a value, a plus. Only their application must be fresh and new.</p> <p>Are you a spring? If so, what size? Are you a cistern? If so, how large? Both springs and cisterns can be effective teachers, but they must know which they are.</p> <p>And highly creative springs should not get arrogant. A spring is simply the outlet for an underground source of water—a huge cistern under pressure, if you will.</p> <p class="is-style-article-bio">-Fred Smith</p> <p class="is-style-article-copyright">Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/<em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.<a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/help/permissionsprivacy/permissions.html#answer" target="_blank" class="copyright" rel="noopener">Click here</a> for reprint information on <em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="article-authors-pills"> <li> <ul class="author-links"> <li> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Fred+Smith/" class="article-hero-author article-title-link button primary"> More from  <span>Fred Smith</span> </a> </li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul class="share-post metadata-post-date"> <li class="gift-article"> <button class="copy-link-button" 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<footer class="entry-footer is-layout-constrained has-global-padding"> </footer> </article> <article class="post-container post-176281 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-pastors tag-preaching tag-teaching tax_publications-1982-leadership-journal tax_publications-leadership-journal tax_publications-spring_1982-leadership-journal"> <header class="entry-header is-layout-constrained has-global-padding article-header has-custom-bg-color"> <section class="wp-block-group article-hero has-global-padding article-hero-is-default"> <div class="article-hero-category"><a href="/pastors/">Pastors</a></div> <h1 class="article-hero-title wp-block-heading">Reach Out And Touch Somebody</h1> <div class="article-hero-meta"> <p><a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Fred+Smith/" class="byline-link">Fred Smith</a></p> </div> <div class="article-hero-deck"> <p>Good teaching does more than entertain or transfer information. Good teaching changes behavior.</p> </div> <div class="wp-block-post-featured-image article-hero-image"> </div> </section> </header> <section class="article-action-bar alignwide"> <div class="article-publication-menu"> <button aria-controls="article-publication-menu" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false" class="article-publication-menu-toggle dropdown-toggle-button" > <span> <strong> Leadership Journal </strong> </span> <span class="article-publication-issue-name"> Spring 1982 issue <svg height="5" width="7" class="icon arrow_down" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-arrow_down-94055">arrow_down</title> <use xlink:href="#arrow_down"></use> </svg> </span> </button> <div aria-hidden="true" class="article-publication-menu-dropdown" id="article-publication-menu" role="menu" > <div class="publication-issue-cover-image"> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/leadership-journal/1982/spring/" tabindex="-1" aria-label="View issue: Spring 1982"> <figure> <img 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I began to realize that a large part of every executive’s work is to teach. I already knew, of course, that because I was the boss, I could dictate. I could use my power to change behavior. But it made a lot more sense to teach, to persuade the people who worked for me to behave in a productive way. The same holds true in the church and even the home. Teaching is far more than the private specialty of Sunday school workers. It is a much wider gift than we have ever noticed.</p> <p>Preaching is something different; it’s the proclamation of concepts—and it’s a very limited gift. Only a few have been given that gift, and it would be wonderful if they were the only ones preaching. But the teaching gift is much broader.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Seven Marks of a Good Teacher</h2> <p>Whether we teach formally or informally, in a classroom on Sunday morning or alongside a co-worker’s desk on Thursday afternoon, we want to be effective.</p> <p>What are the signs of success?</p> <p>1. <em>Good teachers personify their message</em>. They not only say the truth; they model it. For example, a good teacher demonstrates that knowledge is meant to be used, not just stored. He or she gives usable material, things that force the listeners to apply. A person can spout interesting things and be very entertaining and still not teach. The material must be usable, and this happens most directly when it is personified.</p> <p>2. <em>Good teachers make learning exciting</em>. Plato talked about two kinds of teachers: those who simply transfer knowledge from one head to another, and those who awaken “the student within the student,” making him or her a perpetual learner. Good teachers woo their listeners to keep on learning, because learning makes life better.</p> <p>3. <em>Good teachers draw people rather than corral them</em>. The constant attendance contests that some Sunday schools run are a danger signal to me. The pleas to break records and come hear such-and-such a teacher tell me that the teacher really is not saying much. Great teachers will draw people. I almost think there is an inverse ratio between the need for attendance promotions and the quality of teaching.</p> <p>One of the ways I judge my own teaching is by whether people bring their friends to hear me. If I were going to a strange church, I wouldn’t walk in and ask, “Where do the people my age meet?” I don’t go to church to “peer,” I go to hear! So I would say, “Where is the biggest class in the church?” Why? Because, all other things being equal, the big classes have the good teachers.</p> <p>There’s no sense taking a big class and dividing it up just to fit somebody’s theory of education. I would rather see one large class with one good teacher than ten small classes with nine mediocre ones. In that case, 90 percent of the people have to put up with what I call “Saturday night specials”—teachers who dread all week to prepare the lesson and finally drag themselves on Saturday evening to scratch something together out of a quarterly or somebody else’s old notes.</p> <p>It is a simple fact: good teachers draw a crowd.</p> <p>4. <em>Good teachers know their style; they know whether they are lecturers or discussion leaders</em>. Some people can lead a great discussion but can’t lecture well at all, while others are exactly the opposite. One of the early things a teacher needs to do is to decide what his style is and then stick to it.</p> <p>If, however, someone lectures simply out of fear of not being able to answer questions, this will be obvious. A lecturer has to anticipate the questions in people’s minds and actually voice them. “Now, I know that if you and I were talking individually,” the lecturer will say, “you’d probably ask me how this applies. Well, let me tell you. …” The person in the audience then relaxes and says to himself, “That’s right—that’s just what I was wondering.” What you’ve done is carry on a controlled discussion. If you cut across someone’s prejudice, or you depart from a standard interpretation or assumption, you have to recognize that and give people a chance to rethink the matter. If you close the door and go on lecturing, people will stop listening to you while they worry about what you said. But if you deal with the surprise or controversy, you can tell by the look on their faces and the general body language that they are saying, “Okay, I’m ready to move on with you again.” Even though you are a lecturer, you have the responsibility to carry on a discussion with your audience, voicing their positions as well as your own.</p> <p>On the other hand, if you’re a discussion leader, you have to control the questions in order to keep the few talkers in the group from taking it away from you. Who needs meaningless tirades by those who wish they had been asked to teach but were not (for obvious reasons)? Discussion leaders control the discussion so that it accomplishes something.</p> <p>5. <em>Good teachers deal in reality, not theory; they change behavior</em>. One of their key words is <em>applicable</em>. Does this material actually apply to these people? Is it right for them? Does it fit with where they are in their daily lives? All of us have areas of unreality. Sometimes teachers will stand up and air their doubts, for example. I resent that; they should not impose these on other people. If they don’t have knowledge and faith to share, then they should not be teaching. This is one of the problems of small groups; they can wallow in their collective misery and never get to answers. It may be good for friendship, but it is not what teaching is about. Unless behavior changes, I have not taught. I must do more than entertain people; I must do more than store up information—even Bible information—in their heads. What is the difference between sitting around talking about the Bible and sitting around talking about Shakespeare if we don’t do anything about what we’ve discussed? <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+1%3A1-1%3A27" target="_blank" class="" title="view Scripture passage at BibleGateway.com" rel="noopener">James 1</a> says we are to be doers of the Word and not hearers only. If teaching doesn’t result in doing, then it isn’t teaching.</p> <p>During World War II we had TWI (Training Within Industry) courses, which were a total departure from standard pedagogy. Many women were coming into industry for the first time, and we had to train them very quickly. Our slogan was “If the student doesn’t learn, the teacher hasn’t taught.” People learned to operate machines in a matter of days, weeks, and months, whereas before an apprenticeship had lasted four years. Many who were not instructors learned how to impart their knowledge to others, because we were under pressure to do so.</p> <p>If the people in my Sunday class do not change behavior because of my teaching, I simply have not taught. But when they do change, they like to talk about it. They come up and say, “Fred, that idea you talked about—I tried it, and it worked.” Following a discussion on family life, an executive vice president told me one day over lunch, “You know, in Sunday school I realized that I listen to my employees a whole lot better than I do my wife. And that isn’t right. I’ve started listening to my wife at least as well as I do my employees.”</p> <p>When this happens, I ask the person for permission to quote him to the rest of the class in order to promote this kind of change. I say, “Would you mind my telling the class this, because I constantly want to drive home the idea of changing behavior.” The person usually is quite willing to go along with my request.</p> <p>This brings several side benefits. It tells people that I like to hear about these things. It makes the class review ideas. It also puts the person on record to continue the change of behavior. It gives him a reputation to keep living up to. People start asking the fellow’s wife if this is true, and so a fortress of change is being built. A lot of human interest is sparked as well.</p> <p>6. <em>Good teachers teach people, not material</em>. A professor was once too busy to get to a certain class, so he prepared a videotape to be shown. When he dropped in about—halfway through the class period, the tape was playing, but all the students had vanished.</p> <p>The next day he chewed them out. “When the TV screen is here, I’m here,” he announced.</p> <p>The next time he tried to use a videotape, he again dropped in to see what was happening. On every desk he found a tape recorder, and on the chalkboard a message: “When our tape recorders are here, we’re here!”</p> <p>It is not enough to call a meeting or hand out a quarterly that gives a Sunday school teacher the main points of the lesson. Leaders of Christian education must realize that they should send out teachers, not messenger boys, because personal rapport is as important as content in teaching.</p> <p>I listened to a man the other day who might as well have been talking to vacant chairs. He had worked so hard on his preparation and was so perfectly organized that he was teaching the lesson, not the class. He had no feel for people who were hearing it for the first time, who might differ with him on some points, who might need an added explanation here or there.</p> <p>A good teacher is always thinking more about the class than about the lesson. He is sensitive to when their minds are open and when they are closed. To teach five minutes beyond closing time is foolish, because 90 percent of the people have already shut down. Sometimes I have stopped right in the middle of a sentence when closing time came, because I wanted to impress the audience with the fact that I quit on time. For the same reason I believe in starting on time as a way of saying, “This is important.” If you don’t start on time, you’re saying to people, “This doesn’t really matter so much,” and you’re cutting down the amount of time you have to teach.</p> <p>7. <em>Good teachers are used by the Holy Spirit</em>. He is the teacher’s Teacher, and the student’s as well. One of the things I pray for is that moment of holy hush, when suddenly, without my manipulating or even realizing it’s happening, we are all in tune and God is using me to say something that they are hearing in the Spirit. I call them pregnancy moments, because I know something is being born in someone’s heart at that time.</p> <p>I cannot develop these moments; I can’t control them. I can only recognize that this is when true teaching happens, when the Holy Spirit is the real Teacher. These have been some of the greatest moments of my Christian life.</p> <p>The enjoyment of being used by God is the greatest joy that can come to a teacher. The greatest pain is the feeling that instead of being used by God, I have used God. I have used his hour to propagandize, to impress people with my knowledge, or to hint at what a good Christian I am. This brings on depression.</p> <p>I’m never depressed, no matter how insignificant the results, if I feel at the end that God used me. But if I sense in my heart that I used God, the magnificent crowd and the loud applause mean nothing.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">How Good Teaching Happens</h2> <p>A long-time friend surprised me one day by saying, “When you go to look something up in a book, and you open to a page that isn’t on the subject, you go ahead and read the page you opened to, don’t you?”</p> <p>“Yes,” I replied.</p> <p>“Well, you’re a generalist,” he announced. “You accumulate information. You get so intrigued by reading whatever comes along that you even forget whatever you were headed toward. Learning, in itself, is fun for you.”</p> <p>He was right.</p> <p>“Other people,” he continued, “aren’t tempted in the least by something they’re not looking for. They’re very specifically targeted in their learning.”</p> <p>Both kinds of people can be good teachers, provided they know themselves and how to proceed. We generalists have to discipline our naturally curious minds to focus. If I’m going to teach thirty minutes, I invariably wind up with three or four hours’ worth of material. And I have to get up at five o’clock on Sunday morning to fight it down to thirty minutes. Focusing is my problem.</p> <p>The other folks have to work hard to expand. They must drive themselves to keep collecting ancillary material in order to fill out the points, or they will fall into monotonous repetition.</p> <p>None of us can afford to plunge into our preparing at the beginning of a week without first naming the major point we want to send home. When I start to put together a lesson, I work backwards; first I settle “How do I want people to feel when I quit? What do I want them to do once they leave the class?” Then I know how to organize all that should come before.</p> <p>Once the teaching begins, whether in a classroom, a staff meeting, or a training seminar, we must always hold to the search for truth. The greatest scholars are those who search for truth rather than display their knowledge like a showman.</p> <p>If someone asks a question that contradicts our theory, we ought to be honest enough to say, “You know, I never thought about that. Tell me some more; I’m interested in what’s behind what you just said. I want to think about that.” This creates the reality atmosphere; this tells people, “Here is someone who really wants to know what the truth is.”</p> <p>If you’re a propagandist—not a teacher—you will always contend for your viewpoint, whether it’s right, wrong, or indifferent. You want to get your man elected. So you propagandize. Teachers, on the other hand, love finding truth no matter where it comes from: children, subordinates, spouses, anyone.</p> <p>I can hardly think of a more miserable position than to say, “I already have the truth; what is there to learn?” I may have a foothold on truth, I may be into its fringe, but I’m still flying in the clouds, not in the open sky. Every so often I get a little glimpse of the brightness above, and that excites me, but my visibility is still far from clear.</p> <p>This is not to say that Scripture is not the source of truth. I hold the truth in my hands, and I must always uphold this textbook to my students as reliable. The difference is that I honestly admit, “Here is the way I interpret Scripture, but if that is not what Scripture really says, then I’m wrong. Let the Holy Spirit teach you as he will, because he is the interpreter of truth, not me. In the final analysis, we are all students of his.”</p> <p>This tentativeness, however, does not keep me from being boldly specific in my teaching. As the Spirit guides, I teach principles to act upon. A lot of people teach Bible stories without teaching principles. For example, they will teach about Daniel and deduce that if you do right as he did, you won’t get in trouble.</p> <p>That’s not the principle of Daniel at all. If it were, what happened to Stephen? He did right, but the rocks still crushed him. Why did God protect Daniel but not Stephen?</p> <p>The principle in both stories is that you must make up your mind to do right whether they put you in the lions’ den, in the fiery furnace, or in front of the rock throwers. And the way life works out, sometimes you get killed, sometimes you get a miracle. Either way, you take your stand for right and leave the results to God.</p> <p>I’ve isolated at least twenty major principles for living from Genesis 16, the story of Abram, Sarai, and Hagar. An obvious one is the danger of doing God’s work with a human plan. Sarai had decided that God wasn’t going to get around to giving her a child, so she made up her own strategy using her servant woman. The result was disastrous. Today as well, we too often devise human plans to do what only God can do.</p> <p>Having taught a principle, I follow with a handle, a quick phrase to carry around the principle. One of my principles has the handle “wait to worry.” In other words, don’t start worrying before you have the facts. People have come back to me twenty or twenty-five years later and are still using that handle; they say, “You know, over the years I’ve really learned to wait to worry.”</p> <p>Last comes an illustration. Until I tell a story that demonstrates the principle and its handle, I never assume that it is clear in their minds.</p> <p>Afterward, in discussion, I like to ask people to tell me what I’ve told them, feeding it back to me, because even after these three steps, I find that people have a great tendency to augment what they have heard. Once I gave a speech on ten principles of supervision, one of them being that you must maintain discipline among those you supervise. A tough fellow walked up afterward and said,” agree with you 100 percent; we must maintain discipline!” Apparently he missed the other nine points altogether.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">The Rewards of Good Teaching</h2> <p>We know we are teaching well when people want to be taught by us. A class that is giving its members what they need will be a growing class. Classes don’t grow through organization; they grow through meeting needs. When we see more and more people wanting to receive our teaching, we know it is speaking to their problems.</p> <p>When we really touch somebody, they want to talk to us. The more we reach their immediate needs, the more we see their eyes light up, and their questions and responses begin to flow. The longer we teach, the more chance we have to see long-term fruit from the seeds we have planted.</p> <p>The excitement of teaching is in seeing people change. In a way, teaching is like fishing. Why does a fisherman go out there and put in his time? Because he loves the experience—even though it’s rare—of catching a fish. I have this same feeling every time I step in front of a crowd. Today, something is going to happen to somebody. Not everybody will change today, but somebody is going to hear something that will make a difference. Somebody is going to change an attitude. Somebody is going to discover the thrill of learning. Somebody is going to turn on to the practicality of the Bible.</p> <p>And it’s my special privilege to be on the other end of the line when that happens.</p> <p class="is-style-article-copyright">Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/<em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.<a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/help/permissionsprivacy/permissions.html#answer" target="_blank" class="copyright" rel="noopener">Click here</a> for reprint information on <em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="article-authors-pills"> <li> <ul class="author-links"> <li> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Fred+Smith/" class="article-hero-author article-title-link button primary"> More from  <span>Fred Smith</span> </a> </li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul class="share-post metadata-post-date"> <li class="gift-article"> <button class="copy-link-button" 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href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Daniel+W.+Pawley/" class="byline-link">Daniel W. Pawley</a></p> </div> <div class="article-hero-deck"> <p>Four pastors talk about what they do with their time.</p> </div> <div class="wp-block-post-featured-image article-hero-image"> </div> </section> </header> <section class="article-action-bar alignwide"> <div class="article-publication-menu"> <button aria-controls="article-publication-menu" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false" class="article-publication-menu-toggle dropdown-toggle-button" > <span> <strong> Leadership Journal </strong> </span> <span class="article-publication-issue-name"> Spring 1982 issue <svg height="5" width="7" class="icon arrow_down" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-arrow_down-57650">arrow_down</title> <use xlink:href="#arrow_down"></use> </svg> </span> </button> <div aria-hidden="true" class="article-publication-menu-dropdown" id="article-publication-menu" role="menu" > <div class="publication-issue-cover-image"> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/leadership-journal/1982/spring/" 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class="copy-to-clipboard"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/othersixdays/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-gift-64223">gift</title> <use xlink:href="#gift"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Gift Article</span> </button> </li> </ul> </section> </section> <div class="entry-content is-layout-constrained has-global-padding" id="body"> <p class="is-style-article-intro">We sat with a pastor last spring who told us, “You know what I’d like to see in LEADERSHIP? I’d like to know what other pastors do with their time—how they schedule their day, plan for the week, determine their priorities for the future.” So assistant editor Dan Pawley looked closely at how four pastors spent a typical week.</p> <p class="is-style-article-intro">We also created charts that divide their days into three periods: morning, afternoon, and evening. After reading the four accounts, you might want to ask yourself how you spend your time. As Ted Engstrom notes in this issue’s interview, if you’re working more than eighteen of the twenty-one periods, you’re not taking enough time off.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Paul Bubna</h2> <p>If you try to phone Paul Bubna on Monday, you’ll likely hear the high-pitched hum of a busy signal. Paul, the pastor of Long Hill Chapel (Christian and Missionary Alliance) in Chatham, New Jersey, likes to have few interruptions on his day off; he frequently takes the phone off the hook.</p> <p>What he does like is to start a crackling fire in the fireplace and to join his wife and teen-age daughter—the youngest of several children-at the breakfast table. Consuming spoonfuls of Shredded Wheat, raisins, and scattered bits of All-Bran, Paul listens to his daughter talk about school, teachers, and friends.</p> <p>After breakfast, she leaves for school, while Paul and his wife read Oswald Chambers in the warm glow of the fire. For an hour or so, they intersperse prayers and comments between the lines. Conversation flows with a laid-back, Monday morning ease. No phones ringing, no one to see, no appointments to keep.</p> <p>A walking machine and an exercise bike wait in the basement. Paul, the victim of three heart attacks, exercises daily. In warm weather he walks the neighborhood, in the cold months he’s in the basement.</p> <p>After a while, Paul and his wife begin a leisurely circuit about town. They visit the bank, the shopping center, the dry cleaner; they browse in a bookstore, pick up eyeglasses that have received the optician’s touch and enjoy a slow salad bar lunch. Then they work their way back home, where, with a little luck, they coast through routine chores, supper, newspaper reading, television, and an enjoyable table game until bedtime.</p> <p>Eleven o’ clock, lights out.</p> <p>In the early morning on Tuesday, Paul’s surgical adhesions—the internal traces of open-heart surgery—wrestle him from sleep before six o’clock. But what could be a subtle daily torture to another individual is turned into a time of productivity. It’s a time for sowing seeds for the Sunday sermon.</p> <p>(One Tuesday morning, for instance, in the predawn darkness of a December day, he struggled with a series he’d been preaching on the Gospels all during that month—a vivid portrait of how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each uniquely saw Jesus. The Luke portrait wouldn’t come. Finally bits of inspiration started to form, and according to Paul, “I pictured this medical doctor going from village to village, visiting, healing, or just listening to people. Little by little I began to realize that the uniqueness of Luke’s view was that he saw the humanity of Christ with greater perception than anyone else. Then the whole sermon seemed to come together.”)</p> <p>Paul finishes breakfast, leaves the house a little before eight, and arrives at church by eight. Since morning is a creative time for Paul, he deliberately arrives thirty minutes before any office staff. He positions a magnet on the check-in board to indicate he’s in. The telephone answering device stays on.</p> <p>He cleans his desk, a task he sees as a visible metaphor for the uncluttered emotional frame of mind he tries to bring to the office. Letters that need to be answered go into a mail folder on one side of the desk; all sermon sources go into a book holder on the other side.</p> <p>Blocking out most of the morning for sermon study, Paul continues the preparation that began before dawn. But the sermon he prepares is not next Sunday’s sermon; it is the following Sunday’s. To protect himself from emergencies, he tries to stay a week ahead on his sermons—”so I don’t get caught.”</p> <p>After a light lunch with one of the church leaders, Paul is back at the office by one o’clock. Since creativity drains from him like water down a pipe, he uses the afternoon hours for overlap business from Sunday: appointments, staff encounters, visitation. He spends Tuesday night at home.</p> <p>The priority on Wednesday is Wednesday night prayer meeting. He sees to it that the printed prayer list is taken care of, but most of the day gets divided between preparation for the evening’s talk and additional sermon study. Paul preaches his rough sermon into a tape recorder, has the secretary transcribe it, and uses the transcription for his notes. “Much quicker than writing it out longhand,” he says.</p> <p>Since Thursday night is tennis night for Paul, he skips his basement routine on Thursday morning. Instead, he lounges by the fire in the living room with a good book, the air filled with classical music, while shadows play on the beige carpet and early American furniture.</p> <p>After another leisurely breakfast, he’s at the office to complete his sermon, to get the bulletin ready for printing, and to have a routine counseling appointment. Hospital visitation has been delegated to a staff member. He drops in on a shut-in and later has a satisfying yawn that seems to say, “Ah, it’s been a smooth week.”</p> <p>That’s when the interruption comes. Paul’s daughter is on the phone as he steps through the doorway at five o’clock. She runs to him and says, “Dad, somebody’s just died of a heart attack!” It’s the son of one of the older women in his church.</p> <p>Forget about supper. Paul and his wife jump in the car and head for the mother’s home to break the news. In the car, Paul relives his own three heart attacks—”a sharp pain in the middle of the chest that grows bigger and bigger until it feels like your chest is caving in.”</p> <p>How is he going to comfort this woman? Carefully using his gift of mercy, Paul brings a compassionate spirit to the woman. He speaks gently, feeling her pain of loss.</p> <p>Later, he feels absolutely wiped out. He goes to bed.</p> <p>In the morning, the experience lingers with him, but he knows work can’t stop because of an emergency. His Friday frame of mind tells him to stay completely flexible in case more emergencies happen. What if the mimeograph breaks down, for instance?</p> <p>Friday is staff meeting day. Paul’s goals at these meetings are relational; he wants to build a team. One member leads a devotional time that speaks to a common area of each person’s life. Everyone is called on to share something personal. Paul tries to be as open and vulnerable as he can—not an easy task for a basically shy and reserved man.</p> <p>Remaining flexible, he ties up loose ends on Friday afternoon. That evening Paul and his wife go to a play.</p> <p>Is it a wild imagining of some pastors that those who take time for Saturday morning men’s fellowship have fewer men who invade the pastor’s study during the week “just to talk”?</p> <p>Paul thinks it works, so he takes the time. He meets an interesting mixture of businessmen, retirees, and younger guys just married. After prayer and Bible study, they laugh and cut up at a local restaurant. “All the barriers come down,” says Paul. “These guys really want to be with me, get to know me, build relationships.”</p> <p>Saturday afternoon, it is understood by the staff, is flextime: a work day, but not necessarily an office day. It’s a time for finishing tasks that have been squeezed out of the weekday schedule. Otherwise, Paul encourages staff members who have not had adequate time with their families during the week to spend this time with them. He and his wife go “curb-ing.”</p> <p>In New Jersey, when people want to discard an old piece of furniture, they put it out by the curb. “It’s quite respectable,” says Paul, “to drive around the neighborhoods and pick out something you like.” He finds it a relaxing activity, and his wife refinishes the furniture they find.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Edward J. Hales</h2> <p>At First Baptist Church in Portland, Maine, Edward J. Hales wages a frontal attack on the week’s work every Monday morning. Ed is assiduous in work and study, an embodiment of the New England Protestant work ethic.</p> <p>A near-opposite personality type to Paul Bubna—though no less an effective pastor—Ed plunges into his work on Monday: “If I don’t get a jump on the week’s activity, I’ll be in trouble before the week’s over.” That he <em>is</em> the pastoral staff of his church prompts him to add, “A lot of things accumulate on Sunday that I have to give immediate attention to.”</p> <p>He’s in the office shortly after nine o’clock. Stopping to chat for a moment with his secretary, he feels this initial, informal contact with her is important. In a few minutes he climbs a flight of stairs to his office.</p> <p>A stack of visitor’s cards waits on the desk. He looks carefully through them and takes them to the secretary. She types a personal letter to each visitor, following a form letter Ed has written.</p> <p>After taking care of bits of unfinished business, such as preparation of the monthly newsletter, the eleven o’clock mail comes. Monday mail is the heaviest of the week, and Ed moves into it in bulldozer fashion. He handles each piece only once.</p> <p>Then, after lunch, he begins dictating letters, using what may someday be patented as “The Ed Hales Time-Saving Dictation System.” He includes good sentence punctuation as he goes along.</p> <p>A few years ago, Ed had a secretary who could neither spell nor punctuate. In frustration he forced himself to learn to think grammatically as he dictated. Now, it’s become such a force of habit that he catches himself wanting to include commas, semicolons, and paragraph breaks in casual conversation with his present secretary. Wouldn’t it save even more time to have the secretary present while he’s dictating? “Absolutely not,” says Ed. “Tying two people together for dictation is one of the biggest time wasters of all. Every time the phone rings, you get interrupted. You lose your train of thought. And if you need to pause before you say something, your secretary sits idle.”</p> <p>On Tuesday morning, after his daily bacon-and-eggs breakfast, he arrives at the office at half past eight. For three hours he does in-depth sermon preparation, and ‘the secretary knows he cannot be disturbed until 11:30—unless, of course, there is an emergency. “But a pastor has to come to grips with what an emergency really is,” says Ed.</p> <p>A surprise premarital counseling session, for instance, is not always an emergency, according to Ed. Recently, a young girl popped in without notice, told how she was to be married in two weeks, and wanted immediate counseling. As lovingly blunt as possible, Ed told her, “Look, I’d love to do it. I want to help you. But this is going to take some time, and we need to set an appointment. We’re going to have to work at this; it can’t be done in fifteen minutes.”</p> <p>But the emergency does come. It comes on Wednesday, on a bright, sunny afternoon. Ed is in the middle of preparing for the Wednesday night service. He hears a volunteer in the next room filing music for the choir. She leaves unnoticed. In a little while the phone rings, and a weeping voice says, “Pastor, I’ve just hit a man with my car. Will you come?” She has called her husband, who works nearly an hour’s drive from the accident, and he’s suggested she get the pastor immediately.</p> <p>“Yes, I’ll be right there” says Ed, reassuringly.</p> <p>By the time he arrives, paramedics have removed the elderly man from the hood of the car, and Ed looks at the shattered windshield. The woman is beside herself with shock. Ed suggests they pray. Then he follows the woman in his car to make sure she gets home all right. The following Sunday, in her husband’s presence, the woman gives Ed a warm hug and says, “Pastor, I just want you to know that I love you.”</p> <p>Ed is back at the office working on Wednesday night’s service. He’s home for supper, then back at church, then back home again. A night person, he’s fatigued, but his mind is still churning. He reads a book.</p> <p>He tried once to make Thursday his day off but he found it didn’t work. “I always seemed to have an unfinished agenda,” he says, “and never felt ready enough for Sunday when I took Thursday off.” Thus, he’s at the office hammering away on his sermon. Completing the Sunday morning sermon outline, he has it ready for the bulletin by the afternoon.</p> <p>He goes to a local hospital to visit someone, but confesses, “We have a daily hospital list of six to ten patients and a shut-in list of forty to fifty. So I’ve found it necessary to put one of my retirees to work as visitation coordinator. This retired member does most of the visitation. My deaconesses make forty to fifty shut-in visits a month, and three of my deacons are actively calling on new membership prospects. I couldn’t make it without them.”</p> <p>Friday does work as a day off for Ed.</p> <p>It’s a day of goofing off. He and his wife leave town after their twelve-year-old son goes to school. They may take a stroll on an ocean beach and look for the quaint little cottage they’d like to invest in. Out past the colonial and raised-ranch style homes; past the old decaying buildings and row houses, steam-cleaned and refurbished in 350-year-old Portland; past the harbor and waterfront section known as The Old Port Exchange; and they’re out of the city for the day. “I’m a camera buff,” says Ed, “and we’ll stop at a camera place along the way somewhere.” They also stop for lunch at a seafood place on the ocean.</p> <p>Returning in the afternoon, Ed spends the rest of the day working with his hands. He helps his son construct the model ship he’s wanted to put together for three years. Woodworking at a well-equipped workbench is also planned. “I find working with my hands to be a welcome change of pace,” he points out. “It gives my mind a chance to function on a different level.</p> <p>“I solve some of my more complicated problems during these times, because my mind runs free. It doesn’t take a lot of intensive study to put a model together, build a desk, or mow the lawn. You’re not under the pressure of deadlines; you’re free to consider options and variables. I even talk to myself sometimes.”</p> <p>When Saturday comes, Ed takes care of mechanical problems in the church. The parts of a typewriter are on his desk; he tries to put the machine together and get it in working order. He makes sure he has all the data for Sunday’s baby dedication and baptismal services. Ed works with lists, and he likes to have everything checked off by late Saturday.</p> <p>Behind closed doors, he wraps up his sermon preparation. And like the desk he works behind during the week, his pulpit must be clean and orderly. “I am psychologically frustrated by a Sunday morning pulpit that’s cluttered with stuff underneath,” he adds.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">William J. McEllroy, Jr.</h2> <p>It is Monday morning in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Bill McEllroy’s wife still can’t believe what her husband did the night before. To make the Twenty-third Psalm more meaningful to the youth group, Bill took a church member and his pickup truck forty-five minutes out into the country, borrowed a lamb from a local farmer, and brought it to church. Dressed in old clothes, he carried the lamb from the truck and down the church stairs to where the young people were to meet. They loved it.</p> <p>Having a membership class immediately prior to the youth meeting, Bill ran home and made the quick change into his suit clothes. After the youth program, he stormed the parsonage once more to grab his old clothes. Carrying the lamb up the stairs and out to the truck, he was careful not to step on the droppings. He drove the lamb back to its owner and arrived back at the parsonage just after ten o’clock. “I’ve seen you do some strange things,” his wife says, “but that was surely the strangest!”</p> <p>Anyway, it’s seven o’clock on Monday morning, and Bill, pastor of the small but vibrant Olivet Evangelical Congregational Church, is reading to his three young children. The kids quietly eat breakfast as their daddy takes them through a children’s version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Fifteen minutes later they sing choruses, and each child prays a short prayer.</p> <p>After the kids are off to school, Bill steps into his jogging suit and is off into the neighborhood. More than just exercise, it’s a kind of daily ritual when he can move through the quiet residential streets, past the old homes of Bethlehem steel executives since moved, past old trees and familiar landmarks. The three-mile jog gets him ready to take on another week.</p> <p>He showers, changes, and goes to the office for his morning devotions. At nine o’clock, he heads for the local hospitals to visit parishioners.</p> <p>Tuesday is a busy day. Bill begins piecing his Sunday sermon together, organizes information for the weekly bulletin and monthly newsletter, prepares for the Sunday evening membership class, corrects the weekly quizzes for that class, starts the Wednesday evening youth lesson, works on the Wednesday morning men’s Bible study, and cleans up administrative detail.</p> <p>The newsletter is twenty pages long, and the church people look forward to having it arrive on time in the mail. They like to see what’s going on in the church and find out whose birthday it is so they can send cards. But, since the church cannot afford a full-time secretary, Bill has to take up the slack.</p> <p>He gathers all the information, types it up, runs it off, assembles and folds it, and gets it ready for mailing. The hours slip by, and it’s two o’clock in the morning before he finishes.</p> <p>At 6:30 on Wednesday morning, Bill’s back at the church for the men’s breakfast and fellowship. Later, he abbreviates his time for hospital visitation and begins writing his sermon. With a break for lunch, sermon preparation takes him until supper; then he’s back at the church for youth meetings and a board meeting until ten o’clock.</p> <p>He skips his personal devotions on Thursday morning because he meets with a group of parishioners for an exercise-devotional class. Led by his wife, the class provides an opportunity for people to spend time with the pastor’s family. They exercise for twenty minutes and have devotions for the same amount of time. Usually they have a discussion about foods, dieting, and activities that are good and bad for their health.</p> <p>After showering, Bill returns to his study, this time to write notes of encouragement to people in the church. Writing short notes to his shut-ins, for instance, can take up a chunk of time, but it’s a lot quicker than visiting each person. He tried one year to visit each adult on his or her birthday, but the time that took was too difficult to recover later in the week. The encouragement letters have been a time saver and an effective way to maintain communication with the congregation.</p> <p>Thursday night means family night to the McEllroys, and Bill lets nothing interfere. He learned this the hard way. A couple of years ago he became slack in setting aside weeknight time for his family. One night he was called to attend a meeting, and as he was leaving the house, his oldest son said, “I hate God for making daddy be out so much!” “That awakened me right away,” says Bill. Now, they have a picnic right on the living room floor—hot dogs, macaroni salad, Popsicles—and later they go to the local library so the kids can pick out some books.</p> <p>Friday is another loosely structured day for visitation and tying up loose ends. “I like to have everything finished up by Friday night,” Bill says, and with good reason. Saturday finds him at Willow Grove Naval Air Station for his chaplain’s duty. He can be awfully tired when he gets home on Saturday night.</p> <p>All in all, not a bad week for a pastor who is the entire staff of his church. No outrageous interruptions—that is, until early Sunday morning.</p> <p>The phone rings at three o’clock in the morning. A young woman from the church is calling for help. She’s been drinking, swallowing different kinds of pills, and now she’s trying to stay awake. She lives alone.</p> <p>Bill comforts her, but is stern; he tells her not to go to sleep. He wonders what to say next. His wife calls the father and tells him to meet Bill at his daughter’s apartment. They arrive a little after three o’clock.</p> <p>Not being serious enough to warrant an ambulance or the hospital, Bill and the father get the girl to vomit the pills up. She feels better and rests. The father is very upset because it was just two weeks earlier that the girl had moved out of the house and into the apartment. Bill counsels him as well, and they remain at the apartment until seven o’clock.</p> <p>Bill suddenly realizes he has a service to lead in just over two hours. In the early dawn, he drives home and tries to get some rest.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Arthur M. Umbach</h2> <p>Farther south, at the Redeemer Lutheran Church in Richmond, Virginia, Pastor Art Umbach begins the week by updating his “care list.”</p> <p>The list features the names of parishioners who need the pastor’s attention during the week. All the hospitalized members are on the list, and when they leave the hospital, Art puts a yellow line through their names. This indicates that, although they’ve been released from rigid medical care, they still need attention—perhaps just a note or an encouraging phone call. Eventually they are taken off the list.</p> <p>The care list saves Art the time of making repeat visits to people who can be kept in touch just as effectively by telephone or letter. He keeps a running list of about thirty names.</p> <p>On Monday morning Art also does his dictation and correspondence. From 10:30 until noon he looks over the Scripture text and gathers the sources for his Sunday sermon. He goes home for a lunch of sandwiches and fruit.</p> <p>In the afternoon he heads for local hospitals to see patients on his care list. A normal visit takes half an hour. However, today he has a patient facing surgery. Art serves him Communion, which, after Bible reading and a prayer for healing, takes up the better part of an hour. They come before God, unload their concerns through prayer, and confess their sins. The operation is a serious one; Art will be back to visit later in the week, perhaps more than once.</p> <p>Tuesday, after a breakfast of various seeds and honey (a nutritional cereal his wife makes), he goes to the office and cleans his desk of unnecessary distractions. He leaves his office door open, but instructs the secretary that he would rather not be disturbed. She does her best but doesn’t realize the church’s property chairman is in the building taking care of necessary odds and ends.</p> <p>While Art penetrates the sermon texts he’s chosen, the property chairman wanders into the office. He’s a fine fellow, Art says; they have a good relationship, and the man just wants to chat. With honesty and firmness, though, Art says, “I’d really love to talk with you, but I’m in the middle of preparing my sermon. Can I call you a little later?” The property chairman respects his honest gesture and leaves while Art still has his train of thought for the sermon. No harm is done.</p> <p>Another time, however, a man comes in off the street and tells Art that he needs some food. Thinking about the church’s food closet, Art offers food to the man but discovers what he really wants is money. Art stands up, remembering how physical movements can move people toward the door, but it doesn’t work this time. The man tries intimidation and even threatens physical violence. It takes more than half an hour just to get him to leave. Meanwhile, Art has lost his train of thought.</p> <p>At eleven o’clock, he counsels an alcoholic. After lunch, he’s back at the church for a time loosely structured for counseling or additional sermon preparation. He goes home for supper and returns to church for the weekly membership class.</p> <p>Art patiently walks through his care list on Wednesday morning, makes a few caring phone calls, and writes some notes of encouragement.</p> <p>Wednesday’s also the time to determine all the tasks, administratively speaking, that require Art’s immediate attention. He keeps an accordion folder close at hand that has three individual pockets. The top slot contains information about tasks that need to be taken care of immediately; the middle slot is for tasks that are a bit longer in range; the bottom is for long-term tasks. He consults his folder frequently. Furthermore, since he cannot possibly attend all the church’s board and committee meetings, he reviews the monthly board report at this time. To effectively keep him up to date, the reports answer two fundamental questions: What have we done this month to accomplish our board’s goals? What do we plan to do next month to accomplish our board’s goals? By reading the answers to these questions, Art can make quick, concise evaluations of progress in different areas.</p> <p>Preparation for a Wednesday afternoon youth class that Art teaches, and more sermon work, dominate a loosely structured pace during the early afternoon hours. One activity, though, that Art never spends a lot of time on is the search for sermon illustrations. He likes to glean illustrations on the run, and today he has to run out to a hardware store. As he walks along a store aisle, he notices something unusual. It’s a flawed screw without a slot in the top. He buys it. On Sunday he will work it into his sermon, which deals with God’s love for our useless, defective souls.</p> <p>He takes Wednesday evening off to be with his family.</p> <p>He uses all of Thursday morning to write out his sermon. At lunch he meets with a support group of professional people from his church and community, who, in his words, “provide the kind of listening ears I can tell anything to.” Often the group will be the major crutch that helps him hobble through all the crises and interruptions a week in the pastorate can offer.</p> <p>One week, for instance, besides bearing the emotional drain of ministering to a couple going through an ugly separation, a forty-year-old man who discovered he had a brain tumor, and a young man who nearly died on the hospital operating table, Art had a couple in the church who lost twins in the seventh month of pregnancy. The woman had previously gone through three miscarriages. Now she was having to carry her twins for a whole week before they could be delivered, and Art was trying to comfort her and the husband.</p> <p>“I can be very honest with my share group,” Art confesses. “1 tell them when I’m down or under extreme pressure.” Being able to dump these things on this group of men helps Art get through the week. “I never miss attending,” he adds, “except, of course, in emergencies.”</p> <p>He tries to leave Thursday afternoon and evening flexible, and if possible he takes them off.</p> <p>Friday stays guarded; neither Art nor his wife schedules a single appointment. They have breakfast together, and for lunch they go to a local park for a picnic in the mild Virginia weather. Taking a long walk around the lake, they talk about pressures and in this way unburden themselves before the week-end comes.</p> <p>In the afternoon they head home, and Art feels his hands itching to work with wood. He goes to his workshop, where for a year he’s been building a cherry writing desk for his wife, and puts a coat of finish on it.</p> <p>He turns and says, “You know, I wonder if there’s any profession in the whole world that’s as difficult to evaluate as the pastoral ministry?”</p> <p>Building things out of wood, however, gives Art something to evaluate. He stands at a contemplative distance and studies the cherry-wood desk that came out of joyful sweat and toil; he sits in his recently completed family room and looks with pride on the cupboards and bookcases, the chair and crown moldings that are the by-product of many hours in the workshop.</p> <p>But for days, weeks, and months at a time, the only visible evaluation of his real job manifests itself in a few growth statistics, a slightly raised salary, and a few generalized comments about how nice last week’s sermon was. Deep inside he knows God is using him to reap great heavenly rewards in his people, but these things too often lack visibility, and Art finds himself staring blankly at a wall or out the window thinking, “What good am I really doing? Is my life making a difference?”</p> <p>On Saturday he remains in a flexible frame of mind. He runs the sermon once more through his mind, makes a last-minute visit, and returns home.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading is-style-article-subhead1">Conclusions</h2> <p>Interruptions. Crises. Emergencies. As shown by our four pastors, they roost in every pastor’s schedule.</p> <p>“But it has to be that way,” says Ed Hales. “The crisis visit is one of the greatest opportunities God gives us to become close to our people.”</p> <p>To illustrate, Ed shares the following experience. “Recently, a ninety-six-year-old woman in our church prepared to take a bath, but she forgot to turn on the cold water. As she got into the tub, she was severely burned. Doctors tried to do skin grafting on the woman, but at ninety-six years old, the skin doesn’t regenerate rapidly. I’m afraid she’s going to need a lot more skin than she’s able to produce.</p> <p>“She’s a fine lady, and when I heard about the accident, I willingly rushed to her side. I sat next to her, prayed, and when I looked up, her eyes were still closed. I thought she had drifted off to sleep. But after a moment, she began to pray for me, that God would be with me as I went about my daily tasks. She prays for me each time I go to visit her now.”</p> <p>No one disputes the momentousness of rushing to a parishioner in a time of crisis. Yet, still, the other side remains—the routine functions of the pastorate. Routines aren’t the answer to every scheduling problem, but they can help control a schedule that must contain a good measure of looseness and flexibility.</p> <p>Perhaps in the final analysis, the answers lie in what Ed Hales cautiously refers to as “a theology of interruption”—the constant awareness that even in the most interrupted weeks, the Lord provides the grace, as the right priorities are set, to carry pastors to the end of the week with their houses and ministries in order.</p> <p class="is-style-article-copyright">Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/<em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.<a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/help/permissionsprivacy/permissions.html#answer" target="_blank" class="copyright" rel="noopener">Click here</a> for reprint information on <em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="article-authors-pills"> <li> <ul class="author-links"> <li> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Daniel+W.+Pawley/" class="article-hero-author article-title-link button primary"> More from  <span>Daniel W. 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aria-label="Gift Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" aria-hidden="true" role="img"> <title id="title-gift-32511">gift</title> <use xlink:href="#gift"></use> </svg> <span aria-live="polite">Gift Article</span> </button> </li> </ul> </section> </section> <div class="entry-content is-layout-constrained has-global-padding" id="body"> <p>I should begin with a disclaimer. I am not against time management … I think. I make out schedules and keep to them fairly steadily. I own a pocket Day-Timer, one page per day, complete with little yellow insert pages headed TO BE DONE TODAY. Last year I even got around to reading that book on time management I had no time to read for so long. You could even say that time management changed my life. As a sophomore in high school, I had been placed in an accelerated academic program on the basis of my aptitude test scores. Within a few months of being involved in this more rigorous academic regime, along with interscholastic sports and church activities, I found myself on the verge of flunking out. I just couldn’t seem to find time to get everything done. A teacher suggested that I make out a schedule and plan my time in blocks for study, sports, church, sleep, meals, recreation, and whatever else. It worked. Who knows, I may never have gone to college and then to seminary had I not learned about time management. Instead of writing this article, I might now be sitting in front of a television set with a beer in my hand, at the end of an eight-hour day on a garbage truck.</p> <p>So I am not against time management … I think. What follows is more a long sigh about the whole worthy enterprise than anything else.</p> <p>The place to begin is with two pictures that hang side by side in the hallway of my home. One is of a little boy with a round face and high forehead. He’s wearing overalls and sitting on a chair. Beside the chair is a table with a large birthday cake. The cake has one candle. The picture was taken December 22, 1943. The boy is me.</p> <p>The other picture is also of a little boy with a round face sitting on a stool beside a table that bears a birthday cake with one candle. The picture was taken September 22, 1977. The boy is my first son.</p> <p>In one deft stroke those two black and white photographs sum up thirty-four years of time: who I was, what I’ve become, and where I hope to be. They are filled with meaning. They are literally joy, tears, dreams, disappointments, success, and failure caught within two frames.</p> <p>The passage of time: what does it mean? The Greeks had two slogans posted over the temple at Delphi. One is very familiar to us. It was “Know thyself.” The other is much more significant for us, living as we do in a narcissistic culture. It was “Know thy moment.” It is also more biblical. Jesus chided the Pharisees for their blindness to the “signs of the times” (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+16%3A1-16%3A3" target="_blank" class="" title="view Scripture passage at BibleGateway.com" rel="noopener">Matt. 16:1-3</a>). He wept over Jerusalem because she did not know the time of her visitation (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+19%3A41-19%3A44" target="_blank" class="" title="view Scripture passage at BibleGateway.com" rel="noopener">Luke 19:41-44</a>). That lack would mean the city’s destruction. To know what time it is and to be appropriately obedient to God within the context of that knowledge means the difference between life and death!</p> <p>In both cases, the word Jesus used for time is the Greek word <em>kairos</em>. Its meaning is best understood in contrast to another word in the Greek language for time, <em>chronos</em>. <em>Chronos</em> signifies time as an interval; <em>kairos</em> refers to the features of that interval. <em>Chronos</em> is a period, a quantity; <em>kairos</em> is the quality, the meaning of that period. <em>Chronos</em> is abstract dimension; <em>kairos</em> is concrete circumstances. <em>Chronos</em> is a date: November 26, 1981. <em>kairos</em> is a season: Fall, Thanksgiving.</p> <p>These two words signify two overlapping, yet different universes of meaning. <em>Chronos</em> is time to be controlled, managed, and used. <em>Kairos</em> is time to be understood and responded to in order to obey God. The evening my third son was born, my wife and I had just sat down to eat dinner with some friends in the church. Her water broke, and labor began before we finished the soup. Our time, our <em>kairos</em> had come. What <em>chronos</em> it was was only marginally relevant. All we could do was understand and respond. To control it would be folly.</p> <p>When time is viewed predominantly as <em>chronos</em>, there is a tendency to see it as determined, as abstract, even as having no meaning in itself. The <em>kairos</em> perspective sees time as given by God, as meaningful, going somewhere, and open ended. In 1895 the chancellor exchequer of England had lunch with a fledgling young politician. He told him, “The experiences of a long life have convinced me that nothing ever happens.” <em>Chronos</em>. The young man’s name was Winston Churchill. His lifetime of ninety years demonstrated the opposite: practically everything happens. <em>Kairos</em>.</p> <p>It is not hard to see which view of time prevails in our culture. We are a people obsessed with <em>chronos</em>; how to get more of it, how to control it, how to manage it. A few years ago a young man named Mark Mabry was arrested for the murder of his mother. A search of his room turned up a list headed THINGS TO DO: (1) buy shells, (2) shoot father, (3) shoot mother. Life gets so busy sometimes it’s easy to forget.</p> <p>Os Guinness has observed that we are conditioned by the social experience of possessing wrist watches. This is so much the case that quantities can equal qualities. Nine to five, the twelfth hour, forty hours, the twenty-five-hour day, and overtime are but a few examples.</p> <p>Perhaps now you can see why I said I am not against time management … I think. The Christian’s first question should not be, “How much time do I have, and what should I do with it?” It should be, “Do I see the moment presented to me by God, and how should I respond to it?” Paul reminded the Christians at Rome that they knew what <em>kairos</em> it was and should therefore “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” and conduct themselves “becomingly as in the day” (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+13%3A11-13%3A13" target="_blank" class="" title="view Scripture passage at BibleGateway.com" rel="noopener">Rom. 13:11-13</a>). The word translated “becomingly” is a word that means elegantly, gracefully, with class. There is no technique to be used to do this. Elegance and grace are the fruit of harmony with God. They are not skills but gifts.</p> <p>Somehow all of us time managers with our furrowed brows, set jaws, and priority lists miss the bill here. We are to reading the signs of the <em>kairos</em> what a child’s somersault is to the pirouettes of an Olympic figure skater.</p> <p>There is a frantically preposterous dimension to the very idea of time management, whether the time be <em>chronos</em> or <em>kairos</em>. Who do we think we are anyway, attempting to subdue time? Inexorable <em>chronos</em> cannot be slowed down or speeded up. And <em>kairos</em>! Do we really propose to manage the moments presented to us by God? Change your term to “life management” and it gets worse. Life is messy. People are messy. Death is messier than both, and will not be managed. There is a sense in which God himself is the messiest of all. Life, death, God—all are management-denying. Our culture’s denial of death is, in part, a denial of death’s and life’s and God’s denial of our management.</p> <p>I’m not against time management, honest … I think. Given the opportunity and time (heh heh), I may even take another seminar or read another book. And I sincerely hope you will benefit from all the things in this issue on time management. But while we read the books, peruse this issue, and take the seminars, we would do well to wink at one another as we do, maybe even grin sardonically, and sigh.</p> <p>When I’m in the midst of all this talk about time management, I think of how I felt as I drove to work the morning after I got engaged to the girl who became my wife. I was caught up in the midst of rush hour traffic, and a song by the group Chicago came on the radio. The song was “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” It was about people rushing here and there with their wrist watches on, not knowing what time it was. “Does anybody really care?” they sang. “We’ve all got time enough to die.”</p> <p>As I listened, I thought of how no one with me on the freeway had the faintest notion of the wonderful thing that had happened to me the night before. I wanted to get out of my car, go to each of their cars, and tell them. But neither they nor I had the time.</p> <p class="is-style-article-copyright">Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/<em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.<a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/help/permissionsprivacy/permissions.html#answer" target="_blank" class="copyright" rel="noopener">Click here</a> for reprint information on <em class="citation">Leadership Journal</em>.</p><div class="article-content-footer"> <ul class="article-authors-pills"> <li> <ul class="author-links"> <li> <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/search/Ben+Patterson/" class="article-hero-author article-title-link button primary"> More from  <span>Ben Patterson</span> </a> </li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul class="share-post metadata-post-date"> <li class="gift-article"> <button class="copy-link-button" data-link="https://www.christianitytoday.com/1982/03/havetime/?utm_medium=widgetsocial" aria-label="Gift This Article"> <svg height="14" width="14" class="icon gift" 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