Perception is a fickle thing. We may think our senses are pure tools for observing the world. We may believe that our eyes and our ears will lead us to the simple facts of any given situation. They do not.
In court, eyewitnesses are known to be notoriously unreliable. You get three of them together, they will often notice things quite differently. In fact, some of them will often contradict one another on certain details. I believe this happens for two reasons.
First, even though we may be experiencing the same events at the same time, we are experiencing them from different perspectives. One person may observe an event from a balcony above the whole scene. Another may catch a glipse from around the corner. One person may see one person's face while they speak. Another may not.
The second reason is we all have to filter what we take in through our brains. Our brains rarely objectively observe anything. It fits personal experiences into scripts, filters, and pictures that it is pre-wired to categorize in a certain narrative. That doesn't mean that we always observe with a prejudicial attitude. It means that when we are eyewitnesses of something our brains work like a computer search engine, using prompts and verbal and non-verbal "keys" to attempt to define what we experience.
As a person in ministry, I can attest to the fact that we as ministers tend to have a unique angle on percieving what is going on in our churches. There are times when we witness what is going on in our church from a detached perspective. Because of our lack of history in our local community and church community we can see things with an outsider's perspective, and bring those helpful observations from the outside into our leadership.
The opposite is also true. There are times as pastors that our prominent role in church life, our attachment to the people with which we are dealing, and our emotional investment in the mission of the church that we fail to see things clearly. I want to share about an idea I have about one of these situations where pastors are often "too close" to see what is really going on.
Most pastors, if they are leading their church anywhere, have "crisis points" in their ministries. Perhaps this crisis point is due to a conflict with a church leader. Or maybe it is due to the congregation decreasing significantly in one's ministry. It could even be a financial crisis in the life of a church family.
Most pastors, except in their most difficult ministries, also have "mountain-top" phases in their ministries with a congregation. These can be moments. They can also be periods of time. Seasons where the minister enjoys favor with their congregation. Moments where the pastor feels especially valued and appreciated.
What is important for those of us in ministry work to remember is that none of this really is driven by the "now", and rarely will what we say or do in response to these moments and moods have an immediate impact. This is because ministry works on a time delay basis.
As a pastor, most people deal with you on the basis of who you were or how they percieved you months ago. That may not be who you are or what you are doing today. You are going to have to live with the results of yesterday for a year or two to get to the blessings or curses of what you have done today.
I have a pastor friend. His church had to cut his ministry staff because of financial issues. The church shrunk to half of the attendance it was before. It is obvious they have to deal with issues in the congregation today. The truth is, though, that this crisis was like a slow moving tsunami moving through time. Certain crisis happened a few years before. They did not respond appropriately to the crisis. They thought because the wave of destruction didn't hit them right away, the tsunami would never come. But it took time for the wave of consequences to travel to them.
The mistake of a pastor and leadership team in situations like this is to address symptomatic issues that have presented themselves in the last 6-12 months, and not to understand that they are often dealing with consequences of things that happened 18-36 months ago, or longer.
So let's say a church is complaining about the pastor's preaching. They are probably not concerned about the pastor's preaching in the last 3-6 months, they are probably working with a perspective constructed 1-3 years earlier. It will take a year of improved preaching before the church notices any difference.
On the flipside, a pastor could have worked very hard for 3 or 4 years. Then his pace of ministry slows down. A congregation will take at least 18 months to be concerned about this change, unless the pastor is doing absolutely nothing. They will continue to laud him for his work ethic, even if he is not working nearly as hard as he used to be.
Here is a simple example in my life. When I started as Associate Pastor at FBC Springs, people had a difficult time trusting what I was doing. I could have blamed all that distrust on myself (I may have done a little of this), but for the most part I realized that the track record of my predecessors created a script that had a lack of trust built into it. Even when I reached a crisis moment a year later, in retrospect, I should have noticed that some of the challenges I experienced were due to distrust that had built 2-3 years before, and not as much about who I was or my ministry had done. This is because perceptions come in time delay within congregational life.
If the pastor believes the press about his present perception in a congragation, he is going to be a prisoner of the moment, and that moment is yesterday. This can be dangerous, because in order to be effectively moving forward into the future, one needs to be focused on the "now" as a leader. Otherwise we will always be chasing our tails.
So, we need to acknowlege people's perspective's about us and our ministry primarily based in the past and not the present, but we need to minister in the present and not in the past of people's perceptions. When those perceptions from the past are also true in the present day, we need to address them. We also need to realize that, as ministers, we can make significant changes and address significant issues today, but that positive action and growth will not be perceived by those we serve for another 18-36 months. Anyway....something I am thinking about...
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