Gum Flappin' and Jaw Bonin'

Churches are primarily, if not exclusively, in the people business. We gather, organize, and manage people to help them grow into faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. Others might argue, well that’s beautiful idealism, pastor, but the church is still a business. We need to raise money, pay salaries, and keep the buildings in repair. True enough, but do those two concerns, building people and maintaining an institution, have to be mutually exclusive?

Peter Drucker, whom Forbes Magazine once called “the most perceptive observer of the American scene since Alexis de Tocqueville,” doesn’t think so. Listen to his sage summation of business principles and see if we can learn anything for the church.

The mission comes first. The mission of nonprofits (including churches) is changed lives.

• The function of management is to make the church more church-like, not the church more business-like. (What if our boards and committees, for instance, became small groups for spiritual formation?)
• An organization begins to die the day it begins to be run for the benefit of the insiders and not for the benefit of the outsiders. (Heaven help us if the church becomes just another club!)
• Know the value of planned abandonment…you must decide what not to do. If a program has run its course, let it go.
• Know the value of foresight…you can’t predict the future, but you must assess the impact of present events on the future.
• Focus on opportunities, not problems. Most organizations assign their best resources to their problems, not their opportunities.
• Management is a social function and has mostly to do with people, not techniques and procedures.
• People decisions are the ultimate mechanism of an organization. That’s where people look to find out what values you really hold. (If procedures, programs, or protocol are more important than people, then something is out of whack.)
• All work is work for a team. No individual has the temperament and the skills to do the job alone. The purpose of a team is to make strengths productive and weaknesses irrelevant.
• The three most important questions are: “What is our business?” (Calling people to faith in Jesus Christ and shaping them into faithful disciples.) “Who is the customer?” (Church members and attendees, spiritual seekers, and the un/de-churched.) and, “What does the customer value?” (This is all over the map, but if we plan everything for insiders, we will never attract outsiders.)

I think this is a pretty good list of principles to help keep us on the target of our purpose. As we think about defining a vision and a strategic plan in preparation for calling a new pastor the first question we need to ask is, “What will it take to reach our goals?” not “What will it cost?” And as we think about programming we need to ask, “What do we do well and how can we strengthen it?” and “What has outlived its usefulness and is it time to let it go?” Idealism and realism can be friends after all.

December 21st was the longest night of the year. Many churches host what is called Blue Christmas or a Longest Night Service for there are those for whom Christmas is not very merry. It might be the first Christmas without a spouse or a child who has died the previous year, a financial set back or living with cancer that just sucks the life out of Christmas. Below is an article of mine that the Christian Century published a few years back. It was based upon a sermon I preached at a Blue Christmas service recalling the first Christmas after my father had become paralyzed. I share it as a reminder that the first Christmas happened in a real world of pain and suffering and continues to come to us as such today.

On a nasty night, Christmas Eve 1965, members of my family walked into my father’s hospital room. We had just returned from my grand-parents’ home, where we had celebrated a Swedish smorgasbord, caroled and opened presents. The sideboard boasted turkey, meat-balls, limpa bread, inlagd sill, lutfisk, spritz cookies and svensk plum pudding. But this year it all looked a little gray and lackluster. Usually the children went to bed after dinner and were awakened at midnight to open gifts until 2 a.m. But this year we opened presents right after dinner so we could go to see Dad.

This was the first year Dad couldn’t be there. A month and a half earlier he, my cousin, my uncle and I had been putting aluminum edging up on my uncle’s house when the scaffolding collapsed. Suddenly, at age 42, my dad was a paraplegic. Instead of spending Christmas leaning on the parlor door frame making wisecracks while everyone opened their presents, he spent it in a Stryker frame that was rotated every half hour so his back would heal evenly.

We put a good face on things—Dad insisted that we go and have a good time. Like the returning nightmare that makes you afraid to fall asleep at night, so was the knowledge that my dad was in that drab hospital room disguised with a few garlands of tinsel while we went through the motions of Christmas reverie.

At 12 I hadn’t lived enough life to know the gravity of being paralyzed for the rest of your life, but it pulled a little more fiercely on me when I walked into that room. Dad beamed when he saw us and wanted to know all about our evening—who was there, what we ate, what we got. It was very awkward. This wasn’t supposed to happen on Christmas Eve. I stared at my shoes and shuffled my feet. I wanted to get back and play with my new toys before bed.

Then came the flood of tears. Dad cried a lot in those days. He was telling us to go on home—it was too nasty to stay out that night—but his eyes were begging us to stay.

This incident vividly came to mind on the Christmas that I was 42—my dad’s age on that Christmas night long ago. It was then that I understood my dad’s tears and mine during this season.

T. S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, but one can make a pretty good case for December. Perhaps it’s a heavy sense of incongruity that marks this season with its persistent, engineered cheerfulness. Set against our holiday parties and buying sprees is a different mood—dark, reflective, even mournful. I suspect that our winter memories of personal loss have always been an argument for our festivals of light. Whoever has lost a child or spouse or parent or friend remembers it especially in December. When the sun is lowest, we remember that we are losers of the light.

How desperately I wanted someone to stand up in the middle of that parlor laden with brightly wrapped packages and say, “Folks, this is a wonderful season and a blessed time to be together, but this year it is bittersweet because Harold is not with us. It is hard to be happy; it is hard to celebrate when someone we love has just had his legs taken out from underneath him at such a young age. To pretend that this tragedy didn’t happen would be just as wrong as it would have been to cancel Christmas because of it. But we are here to celebrate nonetheless because life does go on, and we dare to light a candle of hope rather than curse the darkness of despair. We are here because God’s yes is greater than tragedy’s no, because love is stronger than death, truth is more enduring that falsehood, and beauty is beyond all ugliness.”

That’s what I wished someone had said for me, but no one did. So I’ll say it. During this Christmas season, out of a stable, out of the dry, provincial hills of Bethlehem, comes a cry. It is the cry of a baby and it is the cry of God. It is the cry of every mother who has buried a child; the cry of the worker whose hands lie idle because of another layoff; the cry of the husband whose arms are empty this Christmas after 60 years of companionship; the cry of a body in the death throes of AIDS or cancer or heart disease; the cry of every human heart that has suffered.

But it is also the cry of God, who says, “Enough! Enough of blind eyes and hard hearts, enough of compensation instead of justice, enough of slander instead of truth, brute strength instead of gentle power, hunger instead of fullness!”

The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will restore the years lost

to you, I will give back the withered legs carried in a wheelchair, I will fill those

deaf ears with music beyond all imagining, I will satisfy those longings for which you have wept and pummeled your pillow on 10,000 nights.

“On the longest night of the year, the word will become flesh and dwell among you. You will behold the glory and the truth of that word in Christ Jesus.”

Retail evangelist
What I learned selling shoes

The Christian Century, Sep 23, 2013 by Norman B. Bendroth

One year when I was between interim gigs I became a sales associate at Macy’s. I’d be a natural, I thought, and so I took a job selling women’s shoes. When I alerted Facebook friends to my new vocation, one of them sent me a cartoon of a medieval painting of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. A disciple asked the kneeling Jesus, “Do you have these in a 10EE?” and Jesus replied, “Let me check in back.” Despite my initial confidence, the job had a steep learning curve. After all, my last retail job had been during college, and
things had changed. Every morning, the management and staff started the day with a rally in the handbag section. We applauded sales associates who had opened the most new accounts, cheered if we had reached our sales goal the day before, and heard pep talks about new sales goals. We left with an injection of “atta-boy” adrenalin.

This retail evangelism or “Macy’s magic” wasn’t unlike church outreach training. Make contact, our Macy’s supervisors told us. Ask open-ended questions. Give suggestions. Inspire the sale. Finally, celebrate the sale. We never understood what that last directive meant—dance around a cash register?

It’s the same at church. Make contact—What brings you to church today? Ask open-ended questions—What are you looking  for in a church? Give suggestions—We have an amazing youth group that may interest your teenagers. Inspire the sale—We need questioning, searching people like you in our congregation. Finally, celebrate the sale—I’m sure you’ll enjoy it here. It seems like a good fit for you and for us.

Yet the real business of selling shoes was about a lot more than a smile and an encouraging comment—it was rigorous and challenging. I lost ten pounds running back and forth to the stock room, where I’d search frantically for one particular shoe in shelves of shoeboxes that ran ten feet high and 300 feet long. Incredibly, we learned where things were. One day Iasked a fellow sales associate where the Nine West medium-heeled pumps in gray alligator skin were located, and without missing a beat he said, “Aisle 9 on the right about a third of the way up.”

The customer base was as diverse as the shoe selections. Families from Colombia, Haiti and Greece would buy 15 to 20 pairs of shoes during markdowns using one coupon at a time to get maximum savings. I asked one Colombian gentleman why he wanted so many shoes. “I’m sending them home,” he said. Aging women would find the one shoe that fit just right
and buy three pairs in different colors.

Doses of hard-won common courtesy went a long way. I was ringing up the purchase of a woman who was trying to squeeze every dime she could out of available discounts. She asked how much 15 percent off would be. I did a rough estimate in my head, but that wasn’t enough; she wanted a sales slip on each item to prove it. When I told her that this was not possible, she raised her voice. I responded as calmly as I could while mentally sticking pins into her.

The most satisfying part of the experience was working with sales associates from all over the world. Asar from Egypt told me about Coptic Christianity. Daryl from the Dominican Republic showed up late for mass because he forgot that we were on daylight savings time. A young Indian woman was a nominal Hindu who had been educated in Episcopalian schools.

I became kind of a surreptitious chaplain for them all. Indira cried on my shoulder after being chewed out by her first rude American customer. Maitea told me about her weekly trips to take her dad for dialysis. One colleague had a sluggard boyfriend who wouldn’t get a job, another couldn’t make ends meet, and still another showed me pictures of his daughter’s graduation. My Ugandan colleague asked for help in picking out a good used car.

The old divines speak of common grace and special grace, the later being the grace that comes to those who trust Christ; common grace is the glue that holds families, neighborhoods, cities and the world together in the midst of all of our fussing and fuming. For those few months in the world of retail I saw how common grace holds a disparate group of people together.

Every pastor should work at Macy’s. He or she will learn how to punch a clock, take only a half hour lunch, meet a sales goal, work under a boss, deal with irritating customers and toil alongside people who have no choice but to come in the next day and do it all over again. I could not hide behind a divinity degree or brag about things I’ve accomplished; I had to
prove that I could sell shoes. I’ve said a lot in sermons about how we’re all equal, but in the shoe department this was real.

It was an odd place to learn how to be a better pastor, a better husband and father and a better human

http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-09/retail-evangelist