Bloom where you are planted

One of my ministry heroes was H. B. London, Jr. H. B. was a cousin of James Dobson, and after retiring from active pastoral ministry became the director of a division in Focus on the Family addressing needs of pastors. I had the privilege of sharing the stage with him in a leadership conference back in the early 2000s and having lunch with him during that conference. He wrote a number of excellent books in the 1990s which I still have in my library.

H. B. believed that pastors needed to sink roots down in the place where they were serving. Like me, I think he believed that too many pastors are too anxious to move to larger places of service the first opportunity they get to do so. As a result, their ministries and that of the churches they serve never experience the positive benefits that come from long-term pastoral leadership.

He understood the pressures of ministry and how difficult some churches can be, but he also understood that abandoning such places does nothing to improve them. One of the things he wrote in one book was that if you are serving in a good place it is because someone stayed there long enough to make it a good place. And, if you are serving in a difficult place perhaps God has placed you there to make it a good place, and that will take time.

This really resonates with me. I went to a small, rural church that had voted whether to close its doors or try one more pastor, a fact that was not told to me until after I had gone there. Things were not easy those first few years. Their average pastoral tenure prior to me was 12 months, and it had been that way for many years. I had been there about six months when I heard people were already wondering when I would leave them. I stayed 20 years and we saw many wonderful things happen during that time. We accomplished things many people said we could never do. When I left I reminded the congregation of many of the things we had accomplished and explained that my main contribution to any of that was that I hung around.

God can do amazing things even in difficult places, but it's hard to do much when the leader keeps disappearing. If you had a family in your church whose husband and father kept leaving every 2-3 years you would say that family was dysfunctional. It would also be a family carrying a lot of pain. I doubt that any of us realize the amount of pain some churches feel because of the frequency with which their pastors abandon them.

If you want to have a better church to serve, then remain where you are and make it better. Instead of asking God to move you somewhere else, bloom where you are planted. Maybe your difficulties are what God wants to use to change you, and if you keep running from those difficulties He will never be able to make the changes in your life He wants to make.

I encourage you to fall in love with the congregation God has given you. Pour yourself into those people and provide servant-leadership to them. A person who truly loves his or her spouse doesn't spend time looking over the shoulder to see if there is someone better. A pastor who loves his or her congregation isn't going to be checking out open churches to see if there might be a better one.