I was in a meeting the other day with a diverse group of people. I wasn’t the leader, but I noticed my anxiety going up as some differences developed. In this particular setting, I found myself getting quieter and quieter, rather than saying what I thought.

Before meetings, especially ones that you think may be difficult, set some goals for yourself for the meeting. These goals have to do with your own functioning, and will differ with the nature of the meeting and your role. Possible goals include: Keep my sense of humor. Define myself as clearly as possible around the issue at hand, using only the word “I,” not “you” or “we.” Say no to further commitments in that area.

Pastoral leaders have a crucial role to play, and our voice needs to be heard in congregational life. At the same time, we may sometimes need to set a goal to talk less. As a pastor I found that being the resident expert on a whole range of issues, or at least the person who could be relied on to find the expertise we needed, was exhausting. And when I began to do it less, I noticed that other people started having more ideas. We can pay attention and assess, is this a time to lean forward or backward in my chair? Will my ideas stimulate others’ creativity or squelch it?

And of course sometimes you do need to set a goal to speak up, as I failed to do in the meeting I described. You may have silenced yourself around an important issue because we are afraid. Speaking up does not mean anxiously spouting off just to unload. Speaking up means you think through how you want to define yourself around a particular issue, and say what you think as calmly as possible, without any expectation that others will agree. Then, as a corollary, look for those who can respond “I agree” or “I disagree,” rather than slavishly following along, or getting upset or spouting off, “Pastor, you’re wrong.” Those who can agree or disagree in a calm manner are good candidates for leadership.

What are your goals for yourself for your meeting tonight?

Do you have a meeting tonight? Are you clear on the purpose of the meeting? Is everyone else? Do you know when it will end? Meetings without a clear purpose and clear ending time tend to go on and on, and they can use up all our time if we let them. They can be good avenues for building relationships, but they will serve everyone better if we have greater clarity about why we’re there.

Congregations differ, of course. In a smaller congregation the purpose may be the relationships even more than the task at hand, and we may have to encourage them patiently to focus on the task. In larger churches with lots of corporate-trained leaders, we may have to encourage them patiently to work on spiritual growth as part of the meeting. We have to manage ourselves in relation to the culture of the church we serve. But whatever the culture, when we are thoughtful about meetings rather than mindlessly carried on by routine, it will be easier to move forward.

What is the purpose for your meeting tonight?

We’ve all experienced those crisis moments: the phone call comes, or you open the e-mail, and disaster, small or large, has struck. What’s your first response in a crisis? Your first reaction may be to panic. Your heart starts to pound. Your body is overtaken by anxiety. What should you do now?

Here are five tips for handling a crisis. Tips one and two will help you respond better in the moment the crisis breaks.

1. Focus on yourself first. Your own functioning is critical: you need to handle yourself, not the crisis. Panic is contagious. But so is calm, and if you can keep your own anxiety down, everyone will make better decisions.

2. Breathe. Oxygen literally helps your brain work better. When you feel your heart start pounding, stop and take a few deep breaths.

Over time, keep focusing on your own functioning, and keep breathing. Some crises take some time to resolve. The following tips will help you as you continue to respond.

3. Think. If you can reflect on the crisis rather than simply reacting to it, you’ll be better able to manage yourself. Here are some questions to consider: Why now? (Crises usually don’t come out of nowhere.) Who else besides me needs to share this responsibility? What’s the worst that could happen, and how would I handle that?

4. Get thoughtful counsel. We often go looking for advice in a crisis, but choose your advisers carefully. Look for those who can ask good questions, and offer a bit of a challenge along with the necessary hand-holding. Spend time with people who are calmer than you are.

5. Pray. Or meditate, or whatever works to help you get the bigger picture. And there’s always a bigger picture. No crisis is ultimate. The story will always go on, and when we can tap into a larger hope, we will lead better, especially in crisis.

Most crises are not as disastrous as the initial panic indicates. Even if the worst happens, whatever that may be for you, this approach will continue to help you. But if you can keep your head, and thoughtfully take steps to respond, often the turmoil will subside, and you can keep moving forward toward your goals.

I remember as a pastor sitting in a meeting where someone read a litany of complaints about my ministry, covering most areas of church life. Stunned, I had a hard time taking it all in. It turned out to be a tempest in a teapot, but I was rather shocked in the moment. I wrote last time about a Third Place, an actual physical space to go in order to think and reflect. We also need to develop over time (and it takes a long time), an internal place so we can reflect in the moment. When we can maintain a place inside ourselves for reflection, an internal place where we maintain the boundaries around ourselves, we are less vulnerable to the conflict and criticism that can sap our energy.

Our place is the center of our “true selves” as Thomas Merton wrote about it. We become in that place who we really are, who God created us to be. Merton writes in New Seeds of Contemplation, “to work out our own identity in God…is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears. It demands close attention reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God…” (p. 32) This is much harder work than finding a seat in a coffee shop to get out of the office, but worth every ounce of effort.

When an unexpected challenge or crisis comes along, we may be caught up the reactions of the moment. (I’ll say more about facing a crisis on Friday.) I walked out of that meeting reeling. But as we cultivate our inner space, our true self, we can find our equilibrium more quickly.

When I was a pastor, every fall I would think, It’s not possible. I can’t do the fall program startup and the stewardship campaign and all the denominational meetings that start up in the fall and plan for Advent, not to mention personal events like back-to-school nights. Somehow I managed to get it all done, year after year after year. Yet we can go all year like this, and never really get time to think about the bigger ministry picture. Between the weekly, monthly, and seasonal demands of ministry, we can be very busy without ever thinking strategically about the ministry, or even more importantly, about our own larger life purpose.

How to make that happen? Speaker and author Sam Horn, suggests an interesting model for writers that may be useful for pastors as well. She talks about finding a Third Place to think, write and plan. She says it needs to be a place outside your office or home, and that you need to go there at least once a week. You get used to doing that higher level thinking there. Create a habit: the third or fourth time you’ll find yourself writing or planning almost automatically.

While techniques like this don’t automatically solve our problems, we can find it interesting to experiment with them. Where might a Third Place be for you? It should be a place that doesn’t turn into pastoral care opportunities. What time works best for you? Early morning? Lunch? Evening?

And a Fourth Place for clergy should be someplace to go out of town on a spiritual retreat at least once a year. I go to the Trappist Abbey in Lafayette, Oregon. For Protestants, it needs to be a real retreat, not the chatty kinds of clergy retreats we usually have. Go away alone, with your Bible and a notebook, and not much else, and see what you hear from God in the silence, about your ministry—and about yourself.

Israel Galindo in a comment on my last post raised the issue of leadership styles. He points out, “leadership is about one’s functioning, not one’s ’style.’” That reminds me to get on my hobbyhorse about style. Sure, knowing your leadership style, in whatever system you want to use, may have its place. But it’s not the most important factor. The most important factor is not style, but maturity. People of different and even conflicting styles who are relatively mature emotionally will be able to work together. People of compatible styles who are immature will have problems. So we’ll get a bigger payoff from working on our own maturity than we will from trying to figure out our own style or the styles of others. And, as we become more mature, we have a bigger repertoire. We will be less stuck in the same style, and be more able to choose what seems appropriate in any given situation. Our responses will be less rigid. That’s good for us, and good for those we lead.

Working on personal maturity is a lifetime project, but it’s worth it. How do we work on it? Here’s my take on that question: 1) sustained spiritual practice, 2) doing family of origin work, ideally with an experienced coach, 3) having people around who will challenge us and not just prop us up or listen to us whine. Not an overnight project, and much more difficult than taking a styles inventory. But taking these endeavors on will make a real difference over time.

Church leadership’s biggest secret is that it is more about us than it is about others. When we bring our truest and fullest selves to congregational life, we are more likely to be effective in ministry and less likely to burn out. We can find new sources of energy, and we can find our way forward more easily in ministry. We can find ourselves better able to withstand the pressures for conformity, we can take risks in ways we didn’t think possible before. None of this is easy. But it is easier to be yourself than to pretend to be someone else for years. People sense authenticity: they know real when they see it, and they also know fake when they see it, at least over time. They can sniff out pretending, and it is exhausting to pretend, anyway.

The secret to ministry is self: having one, growing one, calling forth self in others: true self in the way Merton talks about it. This involves patience, humor, prayer, grace, having a life. Service without overfunctioning. Setting boundaries without withdrawing. Perseverance in the face of challenge. Openheartedness without giving yourself away.
David Whyte in Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (highly recommended), puts it this way: “To wake the giant inside ourselves, we have to be faithful to our own eccentric nature, and bring it out into conversation with the world.” (p. 51) That is our gift, bringing our unique perspective and contribution, rather than trying to be like everyone else, whether those others are family, colleagues or parishioners.

Last night I finally watched a videotape of the ABC special program a few weeks ago, Pastor to Power: Billy Graham and the Presidents. (The link is to an article about the show, but unfortunately the show itself is not posted on abc.com.)

It shows the longing of the presidents to connect with someone with whom they could be authentically themselves. And the way Billy Graham has consistently been himself throughout his ministry. The question kept being raised by anchor Charles Gibson, did Graham use the presidents, and did they use him? Using of others involves a borrowing of self from the other, which occurs to some degree in every relationship, and perhaps even more among powerful people. But the presidents interviewed, and first ladies Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton, all seemed to have a sense that they could express their authentic selves with Graham. Clearly he had challenged the Clintons as he worked with them post-Monica. No one said anything about challenges he had offered from a moral perspective about the great events of the day. Every pastor has to deal with that prophetic-pastoral tension and Graham no doubt more than most in these relationshps.

Spiritual leader meets political leaders. An opportunity for growth on both sides, and for being co-opted on both sides. Graham apparently learned something from his experiences with Nixon, and was more careful with succeeding presidents not to be viewed as supporting a particular political position. A fascinating slice of American history, as the program noted, unlikely to come again in quite the same way.

I always admired Graham’s willingness to take stands, on issues such as integration and cooperating with mainline churches, for his financial and sexual integrity, for his consistency of message. He is who he is, and at the same time he has clearly learned from his experience over the years.