The most challenging context to answer this question is around other pastors and church planters. Most pastors are polite to recognize the implications of the question. We tend to recognize the insecurities that drift around this line of inquiry. Since there aren't that many vocational ministers running around, comparison is inevitable. The biggest fear is the dreaded: "How many people attend your church?" It's the metric that towers above all other metrics; like asking a woman how much she weighs. It’s a number you can't really hide and due to social media, it seems others are always thrusting their numbers at you.
This is the mindset I came in to the Acts 29 North America conference in October. My church belongs to the Acts 29 church planting network and this was the first COVID-era large in-person gathering with over a thousand attendees. Lots of pastors and church planters. All asking each other the same question.
So in preparation, I came up with three sets of responses. It's important in these settings to strike a balance between boastful and overly self-aggrandizing. It's kind of like a whiskey sour. You have the sweetness of the whiskey offset by the tartness of the citric acid. Together, it's a compelling combination. My first response is the urinal neighbor pitch (shorter than the elevator pitch), which is usually just a few words. Something like "Good but hard". A response that is just above a grunt or nod and sufficiently vague to steer away further questioning. The second response, which is usually one minute long, describes the positive in ambiguous terms but is more specific about failure, as people tend to relate to failure much better than to success. It's also generally good to act humbly. Something like "Yeah, we're still figuring out who we are and we struggle to reach non-Christians". It’s a pretty safe response that many pastors and church planters can empathize with. This is a good meal-time answer where you have more time but still want to assess the attention span and interest of the listener. The third response is reserved for close friends and members of my pastors' cohort - a group of about ten men. Our twice-a-year cohort retreats set aside a large chunk of time devoted to each person answering that question. I spent the least time crafting this response as our retreat gives an hour for each pastor to sketch an answer to the question on a large notepad. This is where I experience the most freedom to be candid and the law of reciprocity makes a huge difference here. When you know everyone else is getting naked, it helps you take off your shirt.
During the conference, I answered the question many times and generally felt good about my responses and how others' responded to my answer. On the last day of the conference, I talked with a church planter in Los Angeles. His church planting journey was quite bumpy, spanning almost a decade, with fits, starts, and plenty of challenges. I sensed a lull in our conversation and before he could ask me the dreaded question, I beat him to the bunch - "So how is your church going now?"
He paused and said, "Man, that's a tough question to answer" and then began to describe some of the challenges in his current ministry setting as well as some good things that had been happening recently.
I was stunned.
How did he not have a prepared answer to this question?
Did he forget where he was and not realize he would likely be asked this dozens of times?
Was there an oversized burrito in his recent past?
I really could not get how he did not have a canned response to this question. He was a ministry veteran and asking about how his church was doing was tough to answer. I couldn't get that question out of my head so when he paused, I said, "Hey, I appreciate that you said it was a tough question to answer. I often want to say that but don't have the courage".
He looked at me, smiled, and said, "Man, I've been at this too long to care what people think of me".
And that's when it hit me. I’m a middle-aged man with my dream job and satisfying relationships and yet like my pimply teenage self, I still care deeply about what people think of me. The line between my job and my worth as a person is very blurry. The question of how church is going is as innocent as I want to make it.
This pastor didn't see his worth on the line so he could answer however he wanted. It didn't matter what people thought of me. I've heard a thousand times that Jesus loves me. I pray it over myself frequently but it's moments like these that I realize it hasn't sunk as deeply into my heart as I hoped.
And yet it's also moments like this one where I meet someone else and I realize I'm not a prisoner to others' opinions, I don't have to be afraid of being judged, and I can answer freely and candidly. It's a moment where the reality of Christ's love realize can sink deeply enough so that question doesn't threaten me and I can just say, "Hey, that's a tough one".
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