The big man syndrome

“In your movement, you like the big man.” This was another Christian leader’s comment regarding the movement I am part of. Though the comment was probably made in jest, it disturbed me.

The extent to which it is accurate is open to debate, but as they say, there is no smoke without fire. I don’t believe this guy had an axe to grind. He was merely describing what he saw.

So we have a issue. You could call it the “big man syndrome.”

Here’s what it is. Direction and decision-making are referred back to somebody who sits on top of the pile. Everyone defers to that person. The larger a church is, the more likely it is to fall into this situation, if only for the reason that megachurches are often built on the personal ministry of pastors who become so powerful they cannot be challenged. Until disaster intervenes, as it sadly too often does.

The same thing happens with movements, though the title of the one at the top may range from bishop to president to apostle, depending on your theology.

With a good leader, the damage, though real, may be limited. But when an insecure person reaches the top, the shrapnel from wrongful control due to self-protection and self-promotion cascades down the chain. People, churches and movements are hurt, sometimes critically.

This is a particular problem with newer movements and churches, which tend to be built on the foundation of relationship. Relationship is a good thing, but trust can be abused when there are no safeguards. Older movements may be encrusted with tradition and institutionalism. That often isn’t great, but it does provides protection from the big man syndrome because there are all sorts of counterbalances (synods, presbyteries and the like). Even the Pope, as I’ve been reading lately, has limited power to change the Catholic church.

What is wrong with the big man syndrome is the damage it does to the Biblical view of relationship, and in particular to the consistent teaching of Jesus and the apostles on servant leadership.

Jesus compared himself to a servant waiting at table, not the one being deferred to. Paul described a genuine apostle as one at the end of the parade, not the parade marshal. Peter told leaders to serve as humble examples, not to seek position or power.

When I look at the life of Paul, it strikes me that his ministry always involved extending the boundaries of the kingdom. He never sat at the top of a movement or ecclesiastical pile. He was too busy moving on to the next place to establish a hierarchy involving the previous places. He exercised authority out of his position in God, not out of his position in a church movement.

My friend Jason Reid spent many years in the Royal Navy specializing in submarines, attaining the same rank as James Bond (but without the extras). I asked him how leadership in that context works. Here are three things I learned from him. Submarine command in the Royal Navy “is predicated on an implicit trust between the Ship’s Company and their Commanding Officer.” He is a servant (despite some of the huge egos involved), not a tyrant. The job of the commanding officer is first to keep everyone safe, and in the process to get the team to its destination. He is not there to build an empire for himself, but to put the interests of the mission before his own (“mission command”). His ability to share leadership with the three department heads on the vessel is critical to this mission. He is a delegator, not a micro-manager.

A great leader is always in the business of empowering and enabling others, always in the process of raising up and giving away. Success is successors.

Authority is a good and necessary thing. The cure to its abuse is not anarchy, but correct use.

Perhaps we could learn something from the Royal Navy? We also want to keep people safe, and get them to their destination.

And remember this. There is only one big man in the church.

His name is Jesus.

Pressure is my friend

It must have been one of those kinds of summers. Here is my second post on pressure in one month.

Every so often I have one of those awful days when one crisis seems to land on top of another, and I reach that point where I think that if one more thing happens, I am going to crack up, explode, implode or just simply drop dead, which would resolve all my problems quite nicely.

It’s at those very moments that a phrase spoken many years ago by my spiritual mentor, Duane Harder, always surfaces in my mind. I hate those words he spoke, mostly because I knew they were true. So here it goes: “Pressure is my friend.”

No, no, I protest, you made a mistake there, Duane. Pressure is not my friend at all. It is destructive, it is soul-destroying, it makes my life miserable.

But here’s the thing. Pressure does produce all sort of undesirable feelings and emotions, and it can absolutely ruin your day, week or month, no doubt about it. I’ve been there.

But the question to be asked is this: Is God really sovereign? Is he truly sitting on the throne of heaven? Is his absolute sovereignty just an item of theological truth we believe in our mind, or is it a lived reality in our experience?

If God is sovereign, then he has allowed that pressure to come upon us. That is not to say he is the author of some of the bad or wrong things that caused the pressure. It is just to say that he sovereignly and purposefully allowed the crisis to come upon us.

We complain about pressure because it doesn’t feel good. But what we should be doing is asking what God’s purpose is in the pressure.

And here’s an answer which is as good as any: pressure is meant to propel us into the presence of God.

When do we grow in God? Not when times are good, but when things are hard. The impact of our still very imperfect nature ensures that we usually don’t seek God seriously until we have to.

When the pressure mounts, can I encourage you to do one simple thing? Go somewhere where you have some privacy, throw yourself on God’s mercy, submit to God’s ways and cry out to him for help.

I have a good friend called Mike Monson who owns a couple of meat-packing factories, one in Michigan and the other in Indiana. If you tour the premises, you will see how the beef or pork is ground up and squeezed into packages fit for sale. That’s what pressure does. In this case, it produces some of the tastiest pork patties you will find anywhere in the United States.

I have days when I feel like the poor cow or pig entering Mike’s killing floor. But the truth is that pressure has the effect of killing my pride, my independence and my rebellion. It may not make me fit to eat, but it does make me fit to live more effectively as a son of God.

I love men and women of faith. But faith is not the ability to shield ourselves from pain and pressure. Faith is the ability to stand in the midst of anything hell can throw against us. The power of faith is not in our confession, but in the God whose promise and Word we confess.

When the pressure becomes unbearable, all you can do is hold on to the sovereignty and the love of God. But that is all you need to do, for in fact his love is holding on to you.

And what the enemy intended for evil will be turned to good in his amazing hands.

If you’re in Michigan, try one of Mike’s pork patties, and be grateful to God that the result of his pressure process leaves you in much better condition than Mike’s poor pigs.

But here’s one last tip: don’t ask Mike for the recipe. He won’t give it to you.

And you don’t need it, because what works for Mike or his pigs may not work for you. God’s recipe for producing character in each person is different. Just embrace what he is doing in you.

Pressure is your friend. Let it do its work.

Winning the waiting game

The other evening, a few of us were sitting around our dining room table trading airport horror stories. They all revolved around one thing: waiting.

I hate waiting.

If there is a Bible verse that rubs me the wrong way, it’s this one: “Wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7).

This year it seems to me that I have been waiting for something most of the time. I vented my complaints to God with no tangible results.

At some point, it occurred to me that maybe God had a good reason for what he was doing. The problem might not be with God, but with me. In that case, it might work better for me to thank God for whatever it was he was doing while I was waiting, even if I didn’t know what it was and wasn’t happy about it.

There are actually good reasons God wants us to learn to wait. Here are three of them:

1. We rush into way too many wrong decisions because we are too impatient to spend the time making a careful evaluation. Why do you think supermarkets place all the wrong kind of items right at the check-out? When you have no time to analyze, you jump without thinking to fill a need you don’t really have. Waiting changes what we are asking for. It allows the Lord to adjust our will to fit with his will. And when that happens, it releases the purpose of God for our lives.

2. God’s plan for our lives involves many other people and circumstances. I don’t know why people can’t figure this out. We think the entire world revolves around us. But just as other things in life involve all sorts of factors outside our control, so also does God’s plan. You want a husband or wife. But what if the one God has in mind is in another country and way too young right now? That’s not hypothetical -- it was Elaine and I. It’s just as well I waited! If life is a big jigsaw puzzle, God has the capacity to bring all the pieces together in such a way that it enables what he wants for our lives. But it takes time to do that, even for God. His role is to make it happen. Our role is to wait. Waiting changes our circumstances.

3. Waiting, more than almost anything else, draws us into the presence of God. As we become more and desperate for what we are seeking, we turn to the Lord for help. If all waiting does is deepen our walk with the Lord, it’s worth it. Waiting changes us.

So out of all this, one thing becomes clear: waiting is one of the most important activities we can undertake. Waiting is an action which will change things for the better more than almost anything else you can do.

Waiting does not make you powerless. It is probably one of the most important ways you can bring about change. Why? Because you give up trying to make things happen quickly and let God make things happen properly.

I opened with one verse on waiting, and I’ll close with another:

“Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31).

This verse proves one thing: waiting works.

Try it. Wait a while and you’ll see what I mean!

The bottom line

I remember the day, many years ago now, when I watched my neighbour backing out of his driveway to go to work, and wishing it were me. He had a great job as a stock broker, few if any financial worries, and for the most part worked with numbers, not people. I am not going to illustrate the differences between him and me, but you can fill in the blanks.

Have you ever day-dreamed about a life where there was no stress, no anxiety and no pressure? Have you ever looked around you and felt you were the only person in the room facing all those things? Have you ever wished you had the peaceful, happy and prosperous life of all those people around you?

Admit it. You have. I don’t think you’re any better than me.

There are several problems with this. First, you will never get a life that is so completely filled with endless positives. Nobody lives like that, not even the most enthusiastic prosperity preacher. Second, remember all those other people you are envying? Guess what? They all have problems too. Half of them are probably looking at you, wishing they had what they think you have.

I like to make a distinction between happiness and joy. I get this from C.S. Lewis as well as the Bible. Happiness is the delusion that we can find total serenity based on outwardly positive circumstances. Apart from the fact that nobody lives in such circumstances, it makes us hostage to every wind and gust of adversity that might threaten all the nice but flimsy supports we are relying on. Remember the house built on sand?

So are we, as Christians, to live in continuous gloom and despair? Not at all. Joy is the gift we receive as we realize we can find an inner peace and contentment in our relationship with Christ that is not dependent on outward circumstances but on the God who rules the universe.

Think of the most beautiful stained-glass window you can imagine. There’s an amazing rose window in Durham Cathedral that will take your breath away. Stained glass only comes to life when the light shines through it. God has created a magnificent stained-glass window. The window is his dominion over the created world around us -- people and circumstances as well as geography. The Holy Spirit is the light. When he enters your life and fills you, you see the window you never saw before.

It doesn’t mean everything suddenly becomes easy, but it gives us a very precious and vastly under-rated gift: perspective. Not just any perspective, but God’s perspective. It’s the gift of seeing as he sees.

Paul was writing to his friends about the reality of evil and the hardship of spiritual attack. Then he says this: “But the Lord is faithful” (2 Thessalonians 3:3). The small word “but” overrides everything that has gone before. And there’s something else. Normally the Greek verb “is” would be left out and the meaning understood without it, but it isn’t. That means the sentence should read: “The Lord IS faithful,” as if Paul is screaming the word “is.”

Seeing the stained-glass window puts everything in a different light. You start to see how what you wanted would not have helped you, and how what you didn’t want did help you. You remember that God works all things together for good. You start to become grateful. You begin to ditch the self-pity. And bit by bit, you stop looking out your window wishing you were your neighbour.

My neighbour’s literal bottom line was undoubtedly better than mine.

But after a while, I began to see the stained-glass again. And I reminded myself of the real bottom line:

“But the Lord IS faithful.”

Facing the flood

Do you ever feel overwhelmed?

We had that feeling last week. Our eldest son Michael was married to his fiancee Samantha on Saturday afternoon in our back yard. As the week progressed, our house filled up with people. Children and grandchildren appeared from every direction. Fridges and freezer were stuffed with wedding food. A marquee was erected. A stack of chairs materialized. Odd jobs put off for months were finished off in rapid order. And to top it all, the weather network decreed a sudden end to our three-month drought, predicting heavy rain, high winds and thunderstorms just in time for the outdoor ceremony.

And in the meantime, all the other challenges and circumstances of life and work continued. People did not stop have crises or needing help.

We were stretched, but in this case only by what I call the volume of circumstances.

What happens when it’s not just the volume, but the nature of the circumstances that becomes overwhelming? What happens when you’re not just physically exhausted, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually worn out?

I have found there are two possible options. One is to try to control everything myself. That means doing everything I can to change the circumstances around me. My end goal is self-protection. I want all the nasty things to go away and leave me in peace.

There’s only one problem with this. God’s end goal is not to protect me from everything that stresses me out. His goal is to draw me into a deeper dependency on himself. It won’t take you long to figure out how those two goals could easily be at cross-purposes.

So the smart thing to do is to take the second option. That is to throw myself on the mercy of God and ask him to keep me in the midst of whatever it is he is doing in me. In the end, it will work out far better for me to let God’s purposes take their course.

This is why Psalm 55:22 has always meant so much to me: “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.”

To cast your burden on the Lord means this: give the control over to him. Stop trying to interfere, manipulate and self-protect. It never works, and will only wear you out.

Your act of faith in casting your burden forms the bridge to his promise: “He will never permit the righteous to be moved.” To go over that bridge can seem like the scariest thing you’ve ever done. It’s that moment when fear and darkness will do their best to paralyze you and keep you back.

It is at that instant that an unshakeable belief in the sovereignty of God is so critical. That conviction involves two things: an assurance that God is all-loving and the knowledge that he is all-powerful.

Faith is neither intellectual certainty nor emotional serenity. Faith is a gift, a conviction that we are to step out in obedience, born at the place where God’s Spirit encounters our spirit. It stares down all that opposes the will of God. In utter human weakness it reaches out for divine strength, and in that strength it conquers. “And this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith” (1 John 5:4).

If you have that faith, it will come up under your feet like a solid rock. It will enable you to run boldly across that bridge. You can be sure of one thing: Jesus is standing on the other side to welcome you.

And what about our wedding? For twelve hours it had rained and rained, and at 1 pm, the appointed hour, it was still raining. But God’s timing is perfect. The bride was 25 minutes late. At the very moment she stepped out of the car in our driveway, the rain stopped. And it stayed dry all day. To the south of us, storms, winds, torrential rains and even a tornado raged all afternoon and evening across large parts of the province. But in our back yard, we had a great wedding, meteorological serenity, and a wonderful start to what we trust will be a great marriage.

Thanks be to God.