The Calendar That Stops Short

The elder is a quiet man and he had clearly rehearsed it, which is what made it land.

They were putting chairs away and he said, without looking up, that he had been on that board for nine years and in nine years the church had never once planned anything more than twelve months out, and he wondered what the pastor was afraid of.

Not accusingly. He is not that kind of man. He asked it the way you ask about a noise in an engine.

And the pastor said something about flexibility, which is what he has always said, and heard it land in the room the way a coin lands in an empty tin.

Here is what is true and what he has never articulated. Nine years. No building work beyond repairs. No three year plan when the denomination asked for one, and he had a reason and the reason was accepted. Two people trained up and then not given anything long to hold. A youth worker on a rolling annual arrangement for six years, which is not fair to her and which he knows.

He can defend every one of those individually and has.

What he cannot defend is the shape they make, which is a church that has been held in a twelve month posture by one man for nine years, and the man is him, and he has never said out loud why.

Sit down and put the chair back down. There is a verse about working that has one word in it that goes at exactly this.

Heartily, as for the Lord

Here it is, and the word is heartily.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.Colossians 3:23

Heartily is a word about the whole of a person going into something. Not carefully. Not provisionally. Not with a hand kept back in case it needs to be withdrawn.

And the standard it sets is not the outcome. It is the audience: as for the Lord and not for men. Which means the quality of the commitment is the obedience, and the results are not the thing being measured.

You are being asked for your whole weight rather than for your caution. Colossians 3:23 puts heartily in front of whatever you do, and the Spirit inspired it without any clause about how much time is left.

And notice who Paul was writing to when he said it. That instruction, in its own context, is addressed to people whose ordinary working lives were about as insecure as a working life can be. Nobody in that situation had a five year plan. He told them to work heartily anyway.

What flexibility has been covering

Now the elder's question, because he asked the right one and deserves an answer better than a coin in a tin.

Flexibility is a real value in leadership and there are seasons that require it. What has been happening for nine years is not that.

The tell is the same as it is anywhere: the individual decisions each have a reason and the pattern has a cause, and the cause is not in any of the reasons.

And the cost is not abstract. A youth worker on a rolling annual arrangement for six years cannot plan a life. Two people trained and never given anything long to hold will eventually go somewhere that will give them something. A congregation held at twelve months learns, without being told, that nothing here is worth investing in past next spring.

You have been making a decision on their behalf. Nothing written anywhere authorized it, and the Spirit is not the source of a nine year posture that a man has never been able to explain out loud.

Answering the actual question

Here is the part the elder was really asking, and it will take longer than a chair stacking conversation.

What are you afraid of. Not rhetorically. It is a real question with a real answer, and it is probably not one thing.

Some of it may be about money and some may be about your own tenure and how long you expect to be there. And some of it, and this is the part that will be hardest to say to a board, is very likely a settled assumption about how much time there is, absorbed over years, never examined, and now running the calendar of a whole congregation.

That last one has to be named because it is the one operating in a register nobody can challenge. Money can be discussed. Tenure can be discussed. An unstated expectation about the length of the age cannot be discussed, because it has never been put on the table.

And there is a particular reason this one hides so well in a minister. Every other fear a pastor might have looks like a weakness when it is said out loud, and this one looks like faith. That is why it has survived nine years without a challenge. Nobody on a board is going to press a man who declines to plan long on the grounds that the Lord may come, and so the thing never gets examined and the youth worker stays on a rolling annual.

You are able to put it on the table. What is written asks for heartily rather than for hedged, and the Spirit does not require anybody to have a forecast before they commit a church to a three year plan.

Go and find that elder. Say you have been thinking about his question and that you do not have the whole answer, and start a three year plan anyway, badly.

Badly is doing real work in that sentence. A three year plan produced by a man who is not sure will be worse than one produced by a man who is, and it will still be the first thing that congregation has been given to lean forward into for nine years. The plan is not the point. The posture is, and the posture changes the day something with a date on it further out than next spring gets written on a board where people can see it.