One of the most common complaints I hear from churches is how
they wish their introverted Senior Pastors were friendlier and more
approachable.
The good news is this can be very easily addressed, without Senior Pastors running themselves into the ground.
Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years to help introverted Senior Pastors practice being more relational:
1. Don’t focus on friendliness. Focus on displaying the fruit of the spirit.
Nowhere are we commanded to “be super friendly and outgoing” in
scripture. But we are commanded to be joyful, peaceful, patient and
kind. The former is an unrealistic expectation for anyone, introverted
or extroverted. It is perception-based. Trying to play to people’s
perceptions is a fool’s game. Focus instead on exuding the fruit of the
spirit in every encounter you have.
2. “Many light touches, few deep touches.”
Years ago
Steve Sjogren, former pastor of the
Cincinnati Vineyard and author of
Conspiracy of Kindness,
told me the way he survived being a Senior Pastor in a thriving,
chaotic church was to be strategic about how often he’d do a “deep dive”
with a person. His goal was to physically shake hands and hug as many
individuals as possible on Sunday morning. Then he limited the number of
30- to 90-minute intensely volatile emotional encounters he had with
people during the week where they shared their problems.
By adopting a strategy like this, it clarifies what you’re trying to
do with people. This also creates healthy boundaries for yourself.
Probably the best advice I’ve ever learned from Andy Stanley is “Do for
one what you wish you could do for all.” When we do that, eventually
everyone feels the ripples of our love.
3. Smile when you preach.
The good news is that people can know their Pastor, even if they never
actually
meet their Pastor. Ninety percent of the kinds of complaints about
“unfriendliness” we receive stem from how we come across when we preach.
Believe me, most people don’t actually want to shake your hand and talk
about last week’s game with you. Quite frankly they’re busy, or
intimated, or see no real need.
What is important is the perception that you are approachable if they
need to approach you in the future. So help them out and smile. Watch
yourself on video with the sound off and count the number of frowns vs.
the number of smiles. Be brutally honest with yourself. Then change your
behavior.
I used to do this with a former worship pastor who never smiled. It
just didn’t come naturally. I made him force himself to smile once
during each song he led. After a while it became natural, and the
friendly guy I knew
off stage soon became the friendly guy everyone else knew
on stage.
4. Have someone quiz you on people’s names.
Up until we reached 2,000 people in our church I had a staff member
bring pictures of people in our church to our staff meetings and quiz us
each week. This is incredibly helpful in the 200, 400, 600 and 800
range.
Now I focus on memorizing certain segments of people in the
congregation. Knowing someone’s name is the clearest sign that you care.
It’s certainly better than calling people, “Hey youuuuu…”
5. Make sure you have one pastor to every 100-150 congregants (even if they are volunteers).
The day I changed my staff members’ titles from “Director of” to
“Pastor of,” any complaints about my unfriendliness virtually went away.
Years ago I was sharing with a retired pastor friend of mine the
unrealistic pastoral care and relational pressures being placed on me.
He wisely responded, “It could be because you’re the only person with
the title ‘Pastor’ in the church.” We were young. Staff were being
created within the church and had little theological education (
theological
education is a huge deal for me). But they were pastors, and the moment
I called them such (and accelerated their theological training) things
changed overnight.
People need someone “official” they can turn to, and if you don’t
have a 1 pastor to 100-150 congregants ratio, you’ll feel the effects.
There are certain universal truths about the way congregations work, and
this is one of them.
6. Publicize where you’ll be after services, and be there to greet people, every week.
The people in the church I serve know that after each service I stand
at the back of the room until the last person leaves. My goal is to be
available to have a word with anyone that would like to do so.
When individuals come up and start crying because of a heavy burden, I
immediately invite them to speak with our prayer team a mere 20 yards
away. For those that “must” talk to a pastor, I have a male and female
pastor (or trained volunteers) on stand-by for all such situations,
again, a mere 20 yards away.
I would suggest you have a similar set up for your people. Having a
male and female pastor as well as a prayer team available frees me up to
meet new people and connect with regular attendees. Without this I
would inevitably be drawn into a single conversation that makes the
other 15 people waiting to say hello eventually leave.
7. Open emails with “Hi _____” and end them with “Your friend, ______.”
You’d be surprised how blunt you can be in an email. It’s hard to
gauge emotion through short, written communication. That’s just a fact.
So as Senior Pastors we need to be strategic about the way we
communicate. I always open the
emails
I send by writing “Hi” before I type the person’s name. That may seem
insignificant, but trust me it helps. I know how I feel when I receive
an email that is addressed “Hi Brian” vs. “Brian,” and so I’ve always
wanted to respond in kind.
My friend
Rick Stedman
always ends his emails by typing “Your friend, Rick.” I occasionally do
that, but that seems forced to me unless the situation is right. I have
been doing it more and more, though. Rick would say he wants to be
everyone’s friend, and he genuinely means it, so why not go ahead and
say it? Good point.
8. Send one handwritten note a day.
Go to
Overnightprints.com
and order a cheap set of personally designed cards so you can hand
write one note to someone every day. Few people send hand-written notes
anymore, so it touches people when you send one.
My rule of thumb is whenever I feel thankful for someone, or blessed
by their ministry, I want to let them know it. Ever been to a funeral
and heard all these beautiful things people thought about a person, but
you wonder if they ever actually shared those feelings with the person
while they were alive? I don’t want to go to the grave with unexpressed
gratitude in my heart. I want people that have blessed my life to know
it immediately.
9. Tell three personal stories in your sermons.
While describing his Senior Pastor’s preaching, a congregant recently
said, “He spoke for 45 minutes, and 99 percent of it was the Bible.”
Preaching is simply truth expressed through personality.
If all you do is quote and explain scripture, people might as well
read a chapter of a Bible commentary. People want to know you, so let
them get to know you! Be personable from the stage by being transparent.
Make fun of yourself.
I tell the
Senior Pastors that I coach
to tell an opening story, closing story, and one or two good stories in
between. Help people feel like they know you from the stage, and the
pressure will be off to get to know you personally.
10. Always give people “a look, a touch and a word.”
Robert Schuller
(before he got all weird and self-helpy), was a dynamite church
planter. One of the best pieces of advice he ever shared with Senior
Pastors was this: Whenever you encounter people do three things: Give
them a
look (look them in the eye), give them a
touch (a handshake or appropriate hug) and give them a
word
(say something encouraging to them). That’s magnificent advice for any
pastor, let alone introverts. Looking someone in the eye, appropriately
touching them and then sharing something encouraging with them is a
powerful gift we can give people. And that’s my encouragement to you.
Focus on giving people something—a feeling, or a confirmation of love or
hope—instead of trying to change their perception of you. “Give and it
shall be given to you.”
11. When you meet someone new, find out their F-O-R-M.
A friend of mine,
Russell Johnson,
a Senior Pastor I interned with years ago, always impressed me by how
he was able to make a personal connection with every new person he met.
He was never at a loss for words. When I asked him how he did it, he
shared a simple formula he follows during every new encounter. He asks
them about their F-O-R-M:
Family,
Occupation,
Religion and
Mission
(what makes them tick). That’s such simple, easy-to-follow advice. One
of the keys to being effective in ministry is mastering two-minute
connections with the new people we meet. Using F-O-R-M as a conversation
guide will make this task much easier.
12. Regularly tell your people how much you love them.
We should find a way each week to tell our people how much we love
them, appreciate them, pray for them, root for them and are thrilled to
be their Senior Pastor (even when we don’t feel like it). Being in
ministry is like being in a marriage. We speak healthy relationships
into existence.
If we focus on continually telling our people how we genuinely feel
about them (or want to feel about them), they will internalize that. I
do this in my weekly
“Behind the Scenes with Brian”
email that I send to the congregation, in sermons and in social media.
But honestly, I don’t do it enough. I love the people that I serve, and I
want them to know it, every week, just like I want my wife to know it,
every day.
13. Adopt Jesus’ mental framework of ochloi and mathetai.
It’s clear that Jesus saw people in two distinct groups: There were the crowds (
ochloi in Greek) that followed him everywhere, and then there were the disciples (
mathetai
in Greek). He spent time with both, but unevenly. To me, this is how I
envision spending time with people on a weekly basis. On Sundays I’m
with the
hoi ochloi—I preach, pray and minister to every single person that I can. But when the service is over, I spend the rest of the week with
hoi mathetai—throwing myself into my staff and key leaders.
Knowing that Jesus spent hours with the crowds but weeks with his
disciples gives me a theological basis for how I structure my time.
Having a theological framework ungird my relational interactions removes
any hint of guilt from not “spending enough time with” congregants. It
helps me say “no” or “sorry I can’t meet” much easier. Reserve Sundays
for
hoi ochloi and throw yourself into teaching, loving, healing and serving them. Then spend the rest of your time pouring into
hoi mathetai (the roughly 10 percent of the staff/lay leaders in your church).
14. Finally, remember that “No one likes you as much as you think they do.”
The Senior Pastor of the church where I grew up used to tell people
this all the time. Part of the reason we feel such a sting when we hear
people complain about us is that we think, at our core, that people
really like us. Like
REALLY like us. The reality is they don’t like you as much as you think they do.
Knowing this lowers expectations. Once we realize this, it is
freeing. It takes the wind out of the sail of our people pleasing
tendencies. A sober self-perception frees us to focus on being vs.
performing. It frees us even to be unfriendly at times toward people
who, quite frankly, shouldn’t be coddled or placated.
Jesus certainly never focused on being liked “for being liked sake.”
Neither should we. But we should always concentrate on being gracious.
As my friend Avia, a missionary friend of mine in India, always tells
me, “Brian, be bold, and kind.”
If you think another Pastor might be encouraged by this, please share this on the social media tabs below. Thanks!
