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This year marks the 30th anniversary of my work in New York with the Orchard Group. It was Memorial Day weekend in 1979 when Willie Winger drove the truck as I piloted our Ford Fiesta down route 17. We were leaving bucolic upstate New York for the hustle and bustle of the New York City area. I was both excited and terrified as I prepared to enter the world of church planting.
As I look back on three decades in the Big Apple, I have pondered on what has allowed me to remain with one ministry for 30 years. I believe it can be summarized in five verbs.
Stay
It takes a long time to get a new ship up to speed. It takes even longer to turn around an old ship and bring it to full speed in a new direction. It took 10 years before I began to understand the culture of New York.
Once we began to understand the culture, our approach to church planting changed. We began churches with more people on staff and more advertising, and with a greater focus on New York’s unchurched population. Our new churches have grown remarkably since that time, but that was after years of agonizing effort to make sense of our place in the family of things.
There were plenty of times I was ready to cash it in and head back toward the plains of the Midwest or the hills of eastern Kentucky. But I had a mentor who said, “When you think you need to change the state you are in, you probably need to change the state you are in.”
I took his advice and began doing therapy, seeking the guidance of a spiritual mentor, and listening to the sage advice of my wife. I discovered I was the obstacle to change and growth! Had I not stayed through the dark night of the soul, and the next one, and the next one, I never would have discovered the areas where I needed to change.
Listen
Pay attention to your environment. Read voraciously, think critically, and avoid “how-to” books, except when absolutely necessary. When you’re not reading and thinking, listen. Listen to what people affirm about you. In their praise you will see the shadow areas in which you need to grow—those realms in which they are not affirming you.
There appears to be only one sustained area in life where honesty reigns supreme—marriage. Scott Peck used to say there were only two legitimate reasons to marry—to have children, and for the continuing tension. It is in that tension that growth occurs.
Outside of marriage, it is hard to find a brutally honest environment. We want to be nice. We do not want to pay the price of thoughtful confrontation. So you have to be instructed by the silence. What do people not affirm about you? What do you never hear that you do well? In the silence is your weakness.
I do not believe I have ever heard anyone say to me that I am an always steady bastion of good cheer. Hasn’t happened. Probably not going to. And there you have it. I am prone to moods of cheerlessness. That’s why I need friends like Dave Stone and Rick Rusaw. You don’t find them having many down days.
Listen to people who are not “players,” who do not have influence and are not in the limelight. They are the audience on which you most need to focus. I remember my first ministry in Brooklyn. Jimmy ran a deli and his sister, Anne, was in a wheelchair, having lost both legs to diabetes. I held a Bible study at their house every Wednesday night. They changed my life. Although they may have had little worldly influence, for me they were a pure gift, salty and strong-willed and precious as gemstones.
You also need to listen to people who are “players.” But be cautious. Beware being co-opted by their agendas, as you learn to respect their key intelligences—those strengths that have enhanced their leadership. It will add a measure of wisdom to your ministry.
Trust
Hire slowly and well, looking at character, competence, and chemistry. Know your own limits. I have great respect for strong-willed, dominant leaders, but I know I do not like to have them directly reporting to me. I tend to allow them to badger me into approving agendas I do not truly endorse. I do better when we keep our professional distance. It is a boundary I have learned to keep over the years.
Make sure your staff members have a strong frame of reference, and then turn them loose. If they know what their job is, they do not have to be watched over every hour of the day. A strong frame of reference creates its own order. You do not have to tell a river to go to the sea. It understands its job. It may not always look incredibly efficient on the journey, but over the long haul it will find its way.
When you have a clear frame of reference, you can stick to managing the ends, while your staff manages the means.
Trust the paradoxical truth that it is not about you, except when it is about you. A group of corporate chairmen were asked the most important element to their success. The number one answer was, “My own growth.” They knew if they were not growing, their staff would not be growing. And if staff were not growing, the bottom line would not be growing. Trust the need to focus on your own growth.
Search
Hold your understanding of truth lightly. Many things you think are essential are not, and vice versa. It is fascinating to see how many young ministry leaders compromise their stand on the doctrine of the church, only to later regret the wholesale abandonment of boundaries.
On the other hand, the methodologies you think are so critical will be gone in the blink of an eye. Stick with that which is essential for every Christian in every culture and every age, and reexamine those beliefs regularly, and cautiously. As for the rest—hold it lightly.
In your search, believe the truth will set you free. For most of my life I have publicly stated that I wanted to know the truth. But on many days my actions speak otherwise. I have believed in the comfortable, the familiar, the self-serving, more than I have believed the truth will set me free.
In your ministry, search for where the “world’s deep hunger meets your deep gladness.” That is where God calls you. Those words of Frederick Buechner have been with me as a ready instruction through many nights when I contemplated leaving New York.
And as the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner suggests, search for meaning over the long haul of a lifetime, not the short span of a decade or two. It is only when one reflects on a half-century and more that the thread can finally be drawn through the fabric of your days.
Love
You enter the world alone, and leave it alone, but there is one person who remains throughout your entire adult life—your spouse. Put that person first. Always. It took too long to understand that one, yet she loves me still. Wonder of wonders.
Give your best to your children. There is plenty of time to make your mark on the broader world after they have grown up. When my children were young, I could not grasp how long my productive period would be after they had left the house. Only now do I see how thankful I am that I thoroughly enjoyed my children in their youth. There has been plenty of time left to conquer the world.
And finally, risk loving and anticipate the pain. I have lost friends over the years. But I have also discovered that when you least expect it, what goes around comes around. Many of those friendships have been restored long years later, when time and memory choose the good over that which is not redemptive.
I do not know how much longer I will be privileged to serve with the Orchard Group. But I do know that through staying, listening, trusting, searching, and loving, the privilege has been mine!
Paul Williams is editor-at-large of CHRISTIAN STANDARD.
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