Who's Going To Play Second Horn?
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series II, Cycle C
Object:
I know someone who achieved a modest excellence in playing the French horn in his high school days. He mastered the first movement of the Strauss Horn Concerto in F, and received a superior rating in a music educator's contest. Then he entered the school of music at the state university thinking that surely he would become the first horn immediately, but this didn't happen. At the university there were other fine horn players, one in particular. It became obvious to our friend that he would never sit in the first chair. The best he ever could do was play second or assistant first horn.
This is the way it is in life, isn't it? We are not going to play first horn on the SAT list, at the office, as a pastor or a layperson in the church, as a public servant, or as an author or literary figure. Recently, a sportscaster was describing a player who parlayed his mediocre talents into a starting berth on the Major League All-Star Team. "He's a bit slow, and he doesn't have a good arm," the sportscaster said, "and he doesn't bat for a high average. But here he is tonight, starting at second base." This player accepted his "second horn" status and has become an inspiration to all the rest of us "second horn" people.
Our lection for today deals with a lot of Corinthian folks in the church who thought they ought to be playing first horn. Since there were only a few leadership positions available, many were going to have to settle for "second horn" spots. Of course, Paul puts all of this in terms of the various gifts of the Holy Spirit. In last week's lection, he describes how the Spirit offers a variety of gifts for the common good of the church. Today, he is continuing this theme that the Spirit allows no superiority among Christians in the church, for all are one and all gifts of the Spirit are one -- the gifts of the first horn, as well as the gifts of the second horn.
Most Churches Need To Learn To Play Second Horn
Someone needs to voice a bit of realism to the churches of our day -- most are going to be fated to playing second horn. They will not double or triple their size by using the right church growth program, nor will they fantastically increase their membership by having some winsome, razzmatazz pastor in the pulpit. Unusual growth isn't going to happen. They may experience no growth at all. They certainly aren't going to become one of those mega-churches, so perhaps a lot of us can quit spending our money on church growth books and attending church growth seminars. We can cease going to our judicatory and pleading for a pastor who will win a whole bunch of new members to our congregation. Even if we have been a first horn church in the past, it is not likely that we will recover that status. We must settle, graciously, to being a second horn church. And still further in sober realism, some of our churches will die despite all our efforts and prayers.
The church growth movement in today's church is often a cruel deception. Driven by the social sciences, meaning it is more guess and hunch than solid science, it programs, charts, categorizes, and details how a church can grow. Church leaders from the highest levels of the judicatories down to pastors and members in the local churches have been caught up in the slick frenzy of church growth. A lot of time and money has been spent on church growth projects. Expectations have been high. Yet there is little proof that most of the programs work. The statistics have come forth that tell us that we cannot manage the Holy Spirit in such a way as to get new folks into the pews on Sunday morning.
The cruelty in all of this is that pastors and congregations sense they are failures because having tried these church growth programs, held prayer meetings to petition for growth, and slipped in a bit of contemporary music into the morning service, they still have not seen any growth. Is it possible in God's wisdom that most churches will not ever grow, that growth in members is not one of the measurements of the witness of the church? I know this is difficult in modern America where almost everything important is measured in numbers, bigness, and size.
The late Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review, said that he didn't think that the world would end as T. S. Eliot said, "with a bang and a whimper." Cousins said the world would end with some CPA shouting, "cost benefit ratio." We prize everything that can be measured and the largest measurement receives the greatest honor. First horn is always more honored than second horn. A 3,000-member church is always more honored than a 300-member church. Church denominational leaders and leaders in the local congregation, pastors and lay leaders, could do much for the rampant false measurement of success in the life of the medium- and small-size churches, by insisting that growth is pretty far down the list of things that count, if it counts at all. We all know that there are some churches that are dying and soon will cease to exist. Yet, they can be successful right up to the day they close their doors -- something the church growth folks' doctrines fail to consider.
Churches Can Help Their Pastors Play Second Horn
Sometimes it is overlooked that churches can have a role in ministering to their pastor. Today in our topic, I am suggesting that congregations can help their pastor to play second horn. Most pastors, particularly young pastors, are full of ambition. They are impressed with their own abilities and think, like our culture encourages, that pastoring a large church would honor their talents and skills. Once in a while, this happens; a young pastor is called or appointed to a large congregation. But most pastors begin in small congregations and hope to move up to larger and larger congregations until they reach that large church that matches their estimate of success.
Most pastors, however, stay at the medium and small congregation level. It is not that their skills and talents are less than those who move on to larger congregations, it is because of supply and demand. Today, there are many more pastors than there are congregations. Much of this is because of the entrance of able and fine women into ordained ministry creating an excess of pastors. This means that some men and women go without a call or an appointment. Judicatories have difficulty finding congregations to which to send these folks. This means that pastors just entering the local church pastorate, as well as those already there, will find the sluggish mobility from small to larger congregations a burden on their spirits. This is in contrast to the '50s and '60s when a shortage of pastors meant a more rapid upward mobility. In the late '60s, a national denomination merger played out in one judicatory that the smaller partner to the merger brought 200 congregations and only about ten of those being sizeable. All this meant a huge loss of upward mobility for the larger partner of the merger and a gain of upward mobility for the smaller partner in the merger. This has not changed to this date.
Now pastors are not angels or saints. Try as they might, they cannot completely stuff their culturally fed feelings that success is pastoring a large church. Listen in on any group of pastors talking about the churches they pastor and you'll hear something like this:
Pastor A: Hello, Pastor B, how's it going over at your church?
Pastor B: Oh, we're getting along. How is it with you?
Pastor A: Great! We took in 200 new members this year and we're now up to 1,550 members and almost 800 in Sunday morning worship. Our budget is now $2,000,000. (puffed with pride he comments) You didn't tell me much about your church.
Pastor B: Well, we've no great story like yours. We confirmed five new adults, and four teens this year. But for some reason attendance at morning worship is dropping. We get only about l40, and our budget may not cover our missionary concerns next. I feel pretty depressed about it all.
As you can see in this conversation, Pastor A has little sense that he/she is the right person in the right place at the right time. His or her success probably has little to do with his or her abilities. They are in circumstances where the church is destined to grow, like the '50s and '60s when it was said that if a church was built almost anywhere and opened the front doors, people would flock in, regardless of the competence of the pastor. Pastor A seems to be in that situation.
Pastor B is caught in the cruel circumstance of our cultural assumption that a larger bottom line is indicative of more success than a lesser. He/she judges himself/herself by growth of the congregation, the budget, and the size of the congregation at Sunday morning worship. He/she has been told by the church growth movement, that there is no reason that his/her congregation should not be growing. So Pastor B considers himself/herself a failure.
A local congregation can minister to Pastor B by helping himself/herself to see that pastoral success is not a matter of bean counting at all. Pastoral success is measured by how effective the pastor has been in enlarging the congregation's vision of what the church can be in their community wherever they are. The pastor's success can be measured by how skilled the pastor has been in creating the reality of the church over the comfortable but restrictive congregations of which we so often are a part. One woman from the deep south found herself in a small northern, suburban congregation undergoing racial integration. When leaving the congregation as her husband was being transferred she said, "I don't know that I always liked being here, but it really made me think." The pastor along with his laypeople had successfully been the church, in this woman's discomfort, but in a way not reported on some judicatory report.
A congregation can help Pastor B to be successful when it affirms his/her right to preach the scriptures and doctrines in new and modern interpretations no matter how distressing they are to some of the members of the congregation. The congregation will understand that there is no win-win place in this matter. Either way fundamentalists or modernists will be upset. A choice must be made, and if the church looks to the future and to those who will come to Christ and to the Bible and the teachings of the church, it makes sense to present them in a modern style. A congregation that affirms their pastor's right to preach and teach freely from his/her pulpit is helping their pastor to feel successful no matter if he or she is playing second horn.
This is the way it is in life, isn't it? We are not going to play first horn on the SAT list, at the office, as a pastor or a layperson in the church, as a public servant, or as an author or literary figure. Recently, a sportscaster was describing a player who parlayed his mediocre talents into a starting berth on the Major League All-Star Team. "He's a bit slow, and he doesn't have a good arm," the sportscaster said, "and he doesn't bat for a high average. But here he is tonight, starting at second base." This player accepted his "second horn" status and has become an inspiration to all the rest of us "second horn" people.
Our lection for today deals with a lot of Corinthian folks in the church who thought they ought to be playing first horn. Since there were only a few leadership positions available, many were going to have to settle for "second horn" spots. Of course, Paul puts all of this in terms of the various gifts of the Holy Spirit. In last week's lection, he describes how the Spirit offers a variety of gifts for the common good of the church. Today, he is continuing this theme that the Spirit allows no superiority among Christians in the church, for all are one and all gifts of the Spirit are one -- the gifts of the first horn, as well as the gifts of the second horn.
Most Churches Need To Learn To Play Second Horn
Someone needs to voice a bit of realism to the churches of our day -- most are going to be fated to playing second horn. They will not double or triple their size by using the right church growth program, nor will they fantastically increase their membership by having some winsome, razzmatazz pastor in the pulpit. Unusual growth isn't going to happen. They may experience no growth at all. They certainly aren't going to become one of those mega-churches, so perhaps a lot of us can quit spending our money on church growth books and attending church growth seminars. We can cease going to our judicatory and pleading for a pastor who will win a whole bunch of new members to our congregation. Even if we have been a first horn church in the past, it is not likely that we will recover that status. We must settle, graciously, to being a second horn church. And still further in sober realism, some of our churches will die despite all our efforts and prayers.
The church growth movement in today's church is often a cruel deception. Driven by the social sciences, meaning it is more guess and hunch than solid science, it programs, charts, categorizes, and details how a church can grow. Church leaders from the highest levels of the judicatories down to pastors and members in the local churches have been caught up in the slick frenzy of church growth. A lot of time and money has been spent on church growth projects. Expectations have been high. Yet there is little proof that most of the programs work. The statistics have come forth that tell us that we cannot manage the Holy Spirit in such a way as to get new folks into the pews on Sunday morning.
The cruelty in all of this is that pastors and congregations sense they are failures because having tried these church growth programs, held prayer meetings to petition for growth, and slipped in a bit of contemporary music into the morning service, they still have not seen any growth. Is it possible in God's wisdom that most churches will not ever grow, that growth in members is not one of the measurements of the witness of the church? I know this is difficult in modern America where almost everything important is measured in numbers, bigness, and size.
The late Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review, said that he didn't think that the world would end as T. S. Eliot said, "with a bang and a whimper." Cousins said the world would end with some CPA shouting, "cost benefit ratio." We prize everything that can be measured and the largest measurement receives the greatest honor. First horn is always more honored than second horn. A 3,000-member church is always more honored than a 300-member church. Church denominational leaders and leaders in the local congregation, pastors and lay leaders, could do much for the rampant false measurement of success in the life of the medium- and small-size churches, by insisting that growth is pretty far down the list of things that count, if it counts at all. We all know that there are some churches that are dying and soon will cease to exist. Yet, they can be successful right up to the day they close their doors -- something the church growth folks' doctrines fail to consider.
Churches Can Help Their Pastors Play Second Horn
Sometimes it is overlooked that churches can have a role in ministering to their pastor. Today in our topic, I am suggesting that congregations can help their pastor to play second horn. Most pastors, particularly young pastors, are full of ambition. They are impressed with their own abilities and think, like our culture encourages, that pastoring a large church would honor their talents and skills. Once in a while, this happens; a young pastor is called or appointed to a large congregation. But most pastors begin in small congregations and hope to move up to larger and larger congregations until they reach that large church that matches their estimate of success.
Most pastors, however, stay at the medium and small congregation level. It is not that their skills and talents are less than those who move on to larger congregations, it is because of supply and demand. Today, there are many more pastors than there are congregations. Much of this is because of the entrance of able and fine women into ordained ministry creating an excess of pastors. This means that some men and women go without a call or an appointment. Judicatories have difficulty finding congregations to which to send these folks. This means that pastors just entering the local church pastorate, as well as those already there, will find the sluggish mobility from small to larger congregations a burden on their spirits. This is in contrast to the '50s and '60s when a shortage of pastors meant a more rapid upward mobility. In the late '60s, a national denomination merger played out in one judicatory that the smaller partner to the merger brought 200 congregations and only about ten of those being sizeable. All this meant a huge loss of upward mobility for the larger partner of the merger and a gain of upward mobility for the smaller partner in the merger. This has not changed to this date.
Now pastors are not angels or saints. Try as they might, they cannot completely stuff their culturally fed feelings that success is pastoring a large church. Listen in on any group of pastors talking about the churches they pastor and you'll hear something like this:
Pastor A: Hello, Pastor B, how's it going over at your church?
Pastor B: Oh, we're getting along. How is it with you?
Pastor A: Great! We took in 200 new members this year and we're now up to 1,550 members and almost 800 in Sunday morning worship. Our budget is now $2,000,000. (puffed with pride he comments) You didn't tell me much about your church.
Pastor B: Well, we've no great story like yours. We confirmed five new adults, and four teens this year. But for some reason attendance at morning worship is dropping. We get only about l40, and our budget may not cover our missionary concerns next. I feel pretty depressed about it all.
As you can see in this conversation, Pastor A has little sense that he/she is the right person in the right place at the right time. His or her success probably has little to do with his or her abilities. They are in circumstances where the church is destined to grow, like the '50s and '60s when it was said that if a church was built almost anywhere and opened the front doors, people would flock in, regardless of the competence of the pastor. Pastor A seems to be in that situation.
Pastor B is caught in the cruel circumstance of our cultural assumption that a larger bottom line is indicative of more success than a lesser. He/she judges himself/herself by growth of the congregation, the budget, and the size of the congregation at Sunday morning worship. He/she has been told by the church growth movement, that there is no reason that his/her congregation should not be growing. So Pastor B considers himself/herself a failure.
A local congregation can minister to Pastor B by helping himself/herself to see that pastoral success is not a matter of bean counting at all. Pastoral success is measured by how effective the pastor has been in enlarging the congregation's vision of what the church can be in their community wherever they are. The pastor's success can be measured by how skilled the pastor has been in creating the reality of the church over the comfortable but restrictive congregations of which we so often are a part. One woman from the deep south found herself in a small northern, suburban congregation undergoing racial integration. When leaving the congregation as her husband was being transferred she said, "I don't know that I always liked being here, but it really made me think." The pastor along with his laypeople had successfully been the church, in this woman's discomfort, but in a way not reported on some judicatory report.
A congregation can help Pastor B to be successful when it affirms his/her right to preach the scriptures and doctrines in new and modern interpretations no matter how distressing they are to some of the members of the congregation. The congregation will understand that there is no win-win place in this matter. Either way fundamentalists or modernists will be upset. A choice must be made, and if the church looks to the future and to those who will come to Christ and to the Bible and the teachings of the church, it makes sense to present them in a modern style. A congregation that affirms their pastor's right to preach and teach freely from his/her pulpit is helping their pastor to feel successful no matter if he or she is playing second horn.
