FAITHFUL AND FRUITFUL: COACHING FOR RURAL CHURCH LEADERS

By Paul D Glazner

In "Faithful and Fruitful," author Paul offers invaluable coaching and insights tailored specifically for rural church leaders. Drawing from his own experiences and lessons learned along his leadership journey, Paul provides practical guidance on navigating the un

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul D Glazner
• Release date: Apr 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869307422

Book preview

Faithful and Fruitful

Coaching for rural church leaders

Paul D. Glazner

Copyright © 2024 by

Paul D. Glazner

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the author.

ISBN: 979-8-8693-0741-5

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank my wife Jan, the love of my life, who has walked with me through all the ups and downs of ministry life. Being a pastor’s wife is one of the most difficult life roles to balance and she is a wonderful example of someone doing it well. She gave so much time and energy to our wonderful daughters and to those in the church who looked to her for wisdom and support. She and I are very different in personality and interests but share so many of the most important foundational beliefs and commitments. She has given me balance, wisdom in handling situations and a lifetime of loving, supportive partnership. We are a good team together. She is also an amazing editor, and this book is much better and more readable than it would have been without her!

I owe a great debt to the many people who have served with me in ministry and especially those who have shared deep times of prayer and sharing. I am privileged to have many friends I could call in any urgency and they would be there for help and support in a heartbeat. There are too many names to mention of those who have mentored me, prayed for me, prayed with me and spent hours talking and strategizing over what God is leading us to do. I also am deeply indebted to those who have allowed me to teach and mentor them.

Three church congregations in Greenacres, Oregon, then Lynden, Washington and for the past thirty-six years Sutherlin, Oregon have allowed me to have a leadership role in their story. I have been amazingly encouraged and changed by the many people who have refined me, challenged me and trustingly followed my lead. Thank you to all for your love, patience and challenging me to become a better leader.

Foreword

I have started this book in my mind many times, and now I have a reason to finish it.

I remember, as a young pastor, walking by a pastoral coaching booth in Dallas, Texas, when I was attending a seminar there, and they were offering church coaching. I had this funny mixture of feelings. On the one hand, I felt like I had been a pastor for twelve or thirteen years, and there was nothing a seminary student could teach me. I am embarrassed to admit that level of pride. The other strong feeling I had was that most of the coaching help they would give would work well in a larger church, with a more talented leader, in a larger city where there were many people in the surrounding area. In other words - not me, not my church, not my town.

I was a pastor in a small town of seven thousand, in rural Oregon. I had a basic Bible degree and some experience from growing up in the pastor’s home, but I was overwhelmed. The tiny church of forty people that I had come to in 1986 was now pushing the limits of our small building and I needed the faith and expertise to lead through adding staff, managing change and a building project, which I did not have.

If I had been very honest with you, I would’ve admitted I needed help. However, I didn’t feel like I could afford the help or that the help would really be customized to a small church in a small town. I am hoping that if you relate to any of that this book might help fill that gap.

Although I know it may have value for anyone in a leadership position, I am writing this book primarily for people who are in a similar place of leadership in a local church. Over the years, I have watched our church grow to three campuses with many people on staff, and I have learned a few things. Sometimes, I was greatly helped by books, seminars, coaching organizations, and sometimes by making mistakes and evaluating what I wish I had done. I want to help next generation leaders who need encouragement, strategies, and ideas that will work not only in the mega church or in a large city but in small congregations all over the world. I will offer an introduction to many other sources which you can pursue if they strike a note with you. There are many organizations, books, and networks that can support you in your unique journey.

Some of this book contains personal stories of Jan and I and our growth in this process. We hope you get to know us a little as we share our story.

The first part of the book is very personal about how God developed in me the foundation for faithfulness that would guide and sustain me through many questions and struggles. The second part is about how those lessons can serve to move the ball down the field in whatever ministry you are in. I hope you will run through some of the challenges and ideas and ask yourself the questions at the end of each chapter in a reflective process to let God work in you the fruit that he desires.

I think of reading a book as a conversation with a wise person. Anyone who takes years of experience and distills it down into a few chapters has something to offer. I humbly hope that my experiences and ideas give the Holy Spirit room to work in your heart. I know faith is contagious. If God can use me in this small town, it may encourage you to believe that he can do great things in your situation, in your life.

I am impressed at the power of a great idea, but I am more deeply impacted by the power of a great question. The questions you ask determine the answers you get. The problem is we are often not asking the best questions. I hope to give you a few ideas that I have gleaned over the years from many different sources, but even more than that, I hope to embed some troubling questions in your heart that will help you as you struggle to get better and better answers for them. I want this to be a conversation. I want this to be a journey. I hope to offer myself as a resource for many young men and women who are attempting to see God’s work done in what may seem like limiting and often discouraging situations. I want to bring hope, inspiration, some powerful ideas, and pesky questions. Let’s talk. If you get even one good idea, one question to wrestle with or some encouragement for your journey, it will be worth it.

How to read this book: I would suggest that you read all the first eight chapters straight through as you normally would. These chapters contain much of my early ministry life and progress. They also contain some valuable foundational spiritual lessons. Then choose the chapters that sound like they might fit your situation or need. There are many different seasons of ministry and we have differing strengths in leading. I think everyone would benefit from the chapter on our spiritual steam and suffering well. I would love your feedback as to what you found helpful or what you can add to the conversation. Feel free to email me at [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Learning Faithfulness

Chapter 1 Forces That Shaped Me

Chapter 2 Leading The Hardest Person To Lead

Chapter 3 Sorting My Motives

Chapter 4 Blind Spots In All Of Us

Chapter 5 Impressing People Or Impacting Them?

Learning Fruitfulness

Chapter 6 Lead, Feed and Protect

Chapter 7 Keeping Your Spiritual Steam High

Chapter 8 Relational Harmony

Chapter 9 Leading Healthy Change

Chapter 10 Too Fast Or Too Slow?

Chapter 11 Managing Expectations And Stress

Chapter 12 Improving the Speaking Ministry

Chapter 13 Creating a Teaching Team

Chapter 14 The Tough Question Of Metrics

Chapter 15 Learning From Failure

Chapter 16 Working With A Church Board

Chapter 17 Tensions to Manage

Chapter 18 Goldilocks Zone

Chapter 19  The Importance Of Suffering Well

Future Fruitfulness

Chapter 20 Long Game, Short Game

Chapter 21 Success Equals Succession

Afterword

Learning Faithfulness

Chapter 1

Forces That Shaped Me

Faithfulness is a deeply embedded commitment to the work of God in me and through me.  It is constantly battle tested and never fully learned.  Fruitfulness is the visible spiritual results of a life in serving the Lord either vocationally or as a volunteer for life. The results are people’s lives changed to the glory of God.  This book is dedicated to the premise that we learn faithfulness in the process of pursuing fruitfulness.  God is the gardener who works in us and through us.  It often feels foggy and I am easily distracted, but as I look back on all that God has done, I feel so privileged to be at this point in the journey where I can see more clearly how God has led and worked in my whole life.

Howard Hendricks, long time teacher and mentor of leaders, has many brilliant quips which he underscored with an amazing life of training good leaders. One of those which comes to me with regularity is, A mist in the pulpit is a fog in the pew. Even though most of our churches have neither pulpit nor pews anymore, the truth remains. Even if you are not a leader who stands in the pulpit, mist is dangerous. If I only have a vague idea of what I am trying to do, and only a generic way of explaining it, it will not motivate or direct my life toward impact or growth. Mediocrity and stagnation are the most common default settings. According to the Malphurs group (www.malphursgroup.com) Eighty to eighty-five percent of churches in America are either plateaued or declining. That is both shocking and a clear warning. Many times, the reason is that a leader is, or was stuck and foggy himself. I have had many moments of being fogged in and could not see the way forward, but God has always been at work.

Every growing, healthy church is an act of God. It also involves the hard work of learning and growing as a leader. It involves answering the hard questions and leading people through the hard processes of growing pains.

Every leader who continues to serve in a church ministry for many years has faced many obstacles and frustrations both in his own life and in the people he or she is serving.

I want to share some of the things that God did in me and some patterns he embedded in my soul that would help keep me out of or break me out of the stagnation that I easily fall into. My prayer is that this will give you encouragement and insight for the stage of the journey you are in.

Vision

Vision is described as a preferable picture of a desired future. So many churches can walk through a vision setting process without really engaging in the deeper issues involved. It is not hard to borrow a generic motto which looks good on the website or reader board and makes the church sound good, and makes the pastor feel accomplished without it making any real change to the status quo.

I think if I were deeply honest, I was torn between competing visions as a young leader.

On the one hand, I wanted real life change that brought people to an experience of God through an encounter with Jesus that endured and progressed to real maturity in Christ. On the other hand, I wanted what should probably be called simply Success. Success is measured in visible organizational change which usually gets reduced to bodies, bucks and buildings. The first is a deep calling of God that prepared me to endure the hardest days of ministry and rejoice in little changes along the way. The latter is what gets you recognition, more salary, credibility in the community or denomination, and feelings of accomplishment. There is constant rivalry between the two. One is faithfulness to the call of God, the other is ambition. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but there is competition every single week.

If your motivation is shallow or even selfish and your vision of what you are called to do is fuzzy, the result will be unclear or selfishly directed vision which ends up with stuck leaders and stuck churches.

Before we move on to be fruitful in ministry, we have to do the harder work of letting God shape us into faithful servants that can be used in His Kingdom. I am convinced that God must do a lot in me, so he can do a little through me.

As I look back on my life, there were some helpful experiences that helped me continue to clarify my calling and vision. There were three very wonderful seasons where I saw God at work in me and in others. The first was very personal and hidden. The second involved a spiritually organic youth group, and the third began to train me for church life. I will tell you my experiences and encourage you to look back and ask yourself what formative experiences have set your understanding of who you are and what you are doing in leadership.

My Personal Faith Journey

I was privileged to grow up in a pastor’s family, as the oldest of five children, in small rural churches. My dad was limited in the areas he served by the mission he worked with and by his own background. He never pastored a church of more than a hundred and twenty, but he was very good at involving others in ministry. When I was a sophomore in high school, we moved from a small town called Green River (Utah) to a smaller community called Greenacres near Coos Bay, Oregon. It was a huge upheaval in our lives, and we faced many daunting challenges.

The pastor who preceded dad at this country church had gone through an incredibly difficult year and a half before he decided to leave. His teenage son had rebelled against him and against God and had made such a commotion in the church that this pastor decided to move. He told dad, Beware of the public high school. Everything I was afraid would happen in my son’s life did. Dad responded to this challenge by sitting all five of us down for a family discussion (ages ranging from me at 15 to my sister at 9). He told us the general story of what had happened in the pastor’s family and in the church. I remember his next comment so clearly, This is not a one-missionary family, it is a seven-missionary family! If you don’t help reach the kids at your age level, I may not be able to reach those at the adult level. I remember feeling so afraid of going to this high school where there were over two thousand students when my previous school had an average graduating class of eighteen. I also remember feeling challenged with the vision that we could make a difference. I was challenged with a vision, but unprepared for the pushback.

For those of you who were not alive during the 70s, let me sketch a little bit of the cultural changes that were going on at the time. It was in the culture of Woodstock with its celebration of nakedness, drugs, and free love. There was a desire to throw away the culture of behaving in proper ways because of control from the outside (the Establishment). The Beetles were in ascendance, and they had their eastern spiritual guru making Hinduism and mysticism popular. Drugs were seen as the new way to expand our consciousness and the humorous motto, never trust anyone over thirty was a sign of the younger generation taking over and wanting to change the world. The old pattern of marriage, working your whole life to get to retirement, and being loyal to the same company were under assault. The Judeo-Christian worldview that had been the norm, even if it was only for appearance’s sake for many, was failing fast. The shell of a set of behaviors from the past, without the reality of a Christian core, was rejected as fake. All of these changes were in evidence at Marshfield High School where I was entering as a scared, naive sophomore.

I grew up in a home that was spiritually centered. Both of my parents had come to the core decision to follow Christ and to give their lives to church ministry. I was very blessed to be loved and trained to follow Jesus from a young age, but my childhood faith was not up to the challenge of the culture I was thrust into.

I was very well educated in the Bible and the right way to see the world, but my own spiritual journey had just begun to be personal. I was a good church kid with a lot of head knowledge, but I wasn’t really alive to God or his purposes. The summer before we moved, I volunteered to go into a program called Christian Youth in Action. This involved spending a week in training in how to conduct a backyard five-day club with kids from age three to sixth grade. During the training, I was in the company of about one hundred other teenagers and young adults who were also committed to this summer mission. The chapel services and the training sessions were an inspiration to me. The next six weeks, a smaller team of us went to various towns in southern Colorado. This summer spent leading small groups of neighborhood kids to know bible stories and to make a decision to follow Jesus with their lives, was life changing for me. It brought the mission of following Jesus down into a form where I could not only participate but also make a real difference. I experienced God using me to change others’ lives. It brought me to a great sense of joy and purpose of living on a mission for Jesus. I was hooked.

My faith was now personal, but there were many holes in my belief and understanding. Much of my behavior was still held in place by peer pressure and my innate desire to please people. I got so much esteem from saying and doing the things that pleased my parents and the people at church, but underneath it all, I had some serious questions I needed to deal with. God had work to do so that my internal life would match my external. I had to deal with my doubts. I am convinced that many people who are in church and even church ministry have deep gaps in their belief system which they don’t want to acknowledge but will be revealed in the stresses of life. Especially life which involves church leadership.

Growing up in a pastor’s home brings an intense layer of expectation. I think of it like squeezing a watermelon seed between thumb and finger until it shoots out one way or the other. PK’s in my limited experience, usually go hard after a life of serving God, or they go the opposite way and attempt to prove that they can be as bad as anyone else. I was in the squeeze of that pressure. I was a good student, a very responsible older child and said all the right things at church, but there were several layers of my thinking that were being impacted by the world around me.

In school and in the culture, I was personally influenced by several big challenges. I was able to learn things easily and do well at school so I considered myself smart and that was a foundational part of my identity. It also appealed to my vanity and led me to explore many other ideas about reality. There was a sea of voices calling to me.

Evolution was presented in our school as the only intelligent way to see human origins and was used as the foundational understanding of all of our traits and social norms. It was alright to be spiritual and even religious as long as you didn’t take all the myths literally. Some of the arguments made a lot of sense and to claim that God created a naked man and woman in a garden who got deceived by a snake seemed to align more with bedtime stories than intellectual honesty. It seemed naïve and anti-intellectual. If God didn’t create us and if the Bible wasn’t the truth, then everything my faith was built on could crumble.

Alternate spirituality was very much in evidence with people meditating, reading horoscopes based on their astrological signs, and reincarnation expressed as a real possibility. I knew that I had been well indoctrinated by dedicated parents and my small church culture, but I didn’t know if my child-like faith could withstand the rigors of the real world. My thinking was that I had been well taught, but that the same would be true if I was raised in a Mormon, Hindu, or atheist home. I believed in Jesus in a small bubble but had no confidence that it was more than one viewpoint among hundreds.

The sexual revolution was very much in evidence in my high school, and I felt the strong pull of the exciting sounding promise of sex without responsibility.