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In our last post we looked at trust – what part it plays in ministry, and how to rebuild trust. But it’s not always possible to rebuild trust when it dips below zero – even if both parties try their hardest. Because trust is not a matter of the will or the intellect – but the affections.

And sometimes it can be so damaged that it gets in the way of ministry. It may mean that good ideas are rejected without serious consideration – because you suggested it. Or that preaching is unheeded – because it happens to come from you.

Here is a quote from Richard Baxter that highlights his advice in this situation.

If it be on account of any weakness of his, or difference about lesser opinions, or prejudice against his own person, let him first try to remove the prejudice by all lawful means; and if he cannot, let him say to them, “it is not for myself, but for you that I labour; and therefore, seeing that you will not obey the Word from me, I desire that you will agree to accept of some other that may do you that good which I cannot;” and so leave them, and try whether another man may not be fitter for them, and he fitter for another people.

For an ingenious man can hardly stay with a people against their wills; and a sincere man can still more hardly, for any benefit of his own, remain in a place where he is like to be unprofitable, and to hinder the good which they might receive from another man, who hath the advantage of a greater interest in their affection and esteem.

Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, 233.

Richard Baxter says that in such cases where prejudice is involved, it may be best to leave – and see if in God’s providence they will listen to someone else.

Murray Capill comments that,

So important was this relationship of love between the pastor and his people, Baxter held that in some situations a pastor must leave his charge if  he has lost the love of his people and cannot win it again or remove the prejudice against him.

Murray Capill, Preaching With Spiritual Vigour, 68.

I know that some pastors say that you should never leave, and instead tough it out and build trust over a long time. But unfortunately in this fallen world it’s not always possible to secure trust. And the work of the gospel is broader than one minister – and one church…

The importance of trust

A lot of ministry depends on trust.

If you have the trust of people, you can do a lot. They will easily forgive your failings as innocent and loveable bumbling. they will give you a lot of freedom to try things out. they will allow you to use a lot of money.

But. If you are not trusted. Then… things become much more difficult. Every failing is scrutinised with frowns as further evidence of grave negligence. they will tell you that you have to check everything you plan to do with them first. and they won’t let you spend any money without very good reason…

And it all depends on trust. If you have trust, then rules are seen as guidelines. But if you don’t have trust, then rules are unbreakable as iron.

In conversation, the people who distrust you will tell you things that they would like you to do: hand things in on time. tell them in future. check with them before spending this kind of money. And it may seem as though the issue is that they are concerned about are all those things – that you didn’t hand it in or time, or that you didn’t tell them, or that you didn’t follow proper procedure. At the surface it may seem as though by simply doing those three simple things, they will be happy, and everything will be solved.

But don’t be fooled: at the root of it may be a trust issue. The real issue may be that they do not actually trust you.

Rebuilding trust

How do you win trust once it’s been damaged? It is possible to regain trust if you have lost a bit of it. What you can do to win back trust here depends a lot on the person you are relating to, because certain things speak louder to different people.

Some of you know about the DiSC inventory, based on the work of William Marston. Well DiSC can also be used to highlight four ways in which you can rebuild trust based on the four behavioural styles:

High D – Straight forwardness – “What I say is what I mean”

High I – Openness – “I give and ask for feedback freely”

High S – Acceptance – “Who you are is OK with me”

High C – Reliability – “I’ll do what I say”

And by showing yourself to be reliable or straight forward (say) over a long period of time, it is possible to regain the trust of people.

Negative trust

However if your trust level has dipped below zero and you are now in negative terriotory – it’s impossible to restore your trust back into positive territory through those normal means.

That’s because anything you do will be seen negatively. Even good things that you do will be seen suspiciously, and of course the occasional slip up further reinforces your negative standing.

Yes, they may have demanded that you do better by submitting claim forms in on time, or by checking beforehand – but simply doing those things is not actually enough to rebuild trust. In fact it will only have the opposite effect. Your efforts will be dismissed as non-genuine: “ahh, really he’s only doing that because we told him to. He doesn’t really care.” Or “he’s only doing what we want because he wants to stay in leadership.”

At this point, reasoning with them is not going to help, nor is appealing to someone else for help. That’s because trust is an affectional thing, and can’t be swayed by force of logic. And you can see this very easily for yourself.

Here is a thought experiment: (1) think of someone that you distrust deeply. Now (2) think of what they could do that would make you seriously, genuinely change your mind about them so that you would trust them entirely. My guess is that you will not be able to think of anything that would seriously ever change your trust about them. Yes they might do the things you want them to do – but you would still harbour feelings of deep suspicion and uneasiness about them for many years…

Resetting trust

When you are in negative trust territory, there are two strategies that may help.

When negotiators were working  with Arabs and Israelis to negotiate a peace settlement, they found that both sides deeply distrusted each other. They were well and truly into negative trust territory. Their strategy was to get people on one side to intentionally disappoint the negative expectations of the other side. The Israelis expected the Arabs to hate them and all their kind. And so negotiators encouraged the Arabs to disappoint the negative expectation of the Israeli team members. By buying a nice gift for the Israeli delegate’s family, and asking about them in a friendly fashion. The aim being to disappoint the Israeli delegate’s expectation of hateful Arabs – a crisis that forces them to rethink their whole attitude (or affection) towards the Arab delegates.

The other strategy is to wait for a huge crisis to suddenly occur. A crisis at the personal level which overwhelms the ones who distrust you – and which allows you to respond in the midst of the crisis with leadership and sensitivity. Such as perhaps a tragedy that strikes their loved ones, and your genuine care for them through that crisis. Again, this forces a reset in their attitude (or affection) towards you – so they are suddenly able to see you in a new light.

In both cases what is necessary is to move them beyond that deep-seated negative feeling they have for you (the same one you had for the person you distrusted in the thought-experiment above). And that can only happen by resetting trust through some kind of crisis event.

Bypassing trust

In this fallen world, however, it may not be possible to rebuild, or reset trust. Yet people who mistrust each other still have to find means to protect themselves and get on with life. People may do this by going their separate ways, or relating to one another strictly through formal structures.

This is not as unusual as it first seems: consider for example how opposing parties in parliament are able to conduct the business of government through the standing orders. Or how the army gets things done using the chain of command.

It’s helpful to have trust. It makes things work much easier. But in this fallen world, it’s not always possible to have…

You may have heard the term ‘first-generation ministry’ and ‘second-generation ministry’. These terms are used to describe what migrant churches are like. First-generation ministries are those that encompass those who grew up overseas and migrated to their host country. And second-generation ministries are those that encompass the children of those migrants (and often those who were mostly raised in the host country).

And so English ministry in Chinese churches (in places like Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom) have historically been second-generation ministries.

And very significant for the development of second-generation ministries is the nature of its relationship to first-generation ministries.

While we like to do second-generation ministry, the reality is that the wider environment in which ministry is done can have an effect on ministry. The expectations and decisions of leaders of other congregations, the comments and actions of parents in other congregations, can all have a significant impact.

Sometimes it has a positive impact: such as funding and providing resources for a ministry that will not be self-supporting for many years. But it can also have a negative impact: unreasonable demands and constraints, leading to frustration and burnout in second-generation leaders.

Over the years different second-generation ministry leaders that we have known have tried different approaches towards the leaders and gatekeepers of first-generation congregations. Here are five of them:

You can see that some approaches may have the appearance that all is well – because conflicts may be minimised (eg. in ‘stay and submit’). Or they push the point of conflict to where it is not so noticeable (eg. ‘buffer’).

Other approaches embrace conflict (eg. ‘fight for change’, or ‘leave for another church’), but for this very reason fails to build bridges with first-generation leadership.

And still others fail to appreciate the dynamics of majority/minority culture (eg. ‘communicate’).

If the approach your second-gen ministry is current taking is leading to frustration – be wary of quickly adopting another approach which might have its own set of hidden limitations…

1. How to mishandle money like an amateur

Over the years I’ve found that many Christian ministries are not so sharp in how we use money in our ministry budget. Consider the following approaches:

• You have no idea how much money has been allocated to you in the budget.
• At the end of the year you find that you have barely touched the money allocated to you in the budget.
• Each year you increase your ministry budget by +5% or keep it level – but without a real plan of what you intend to do with it.
• You run your ministry as cheaply as you can, reasoning that it is possible to do stuff without spending money.
• You pay for things out of your own pocket, rather than have an allocated budget.

As a result many of our ministries end up running more like a small family shop, than a serious enterprise. You can see this in the kind of approaches we take:

• money is tight so we should only spend on things that are absolute necessities
• we can keep it small, it doesn’t matter

In addition we also think quite defensively:

• don’t waste money (and so spend as little as possible)
• prevent people stealing money (and so we should double-count the collection)

And so when it comes to money, all we can think of doing with it is to preserve as much money as we can. Our efforts are only about preventing people from stealing it.

2. How to handle money like a pro

Brothers and sisters we are surrounded by people who despise the glory of God, and who happily give the love and worship which belongs to him – to created things! In Romans 1 Paul tells us that it’s because of this that the wrath of God is coming. Because of this, two culture shifts need to be made in our use of money.

2.1 The aggressive use of money

Your ministry needs to prosecute the mission of God in your area hard – and that means making smartest, fullest use of all the resources made available to us – including money. If you have money set aside for your ministry, you need to think how that money could be used to prosecute the mission of God. How could it enhance what is already being done? How could it expand the reach of your ministry? How could it build capacity for the future? Why are we just aiming to maintain numbers in our ministry – instead of making use of the money available to us to put us in contact with new people?

For a ministry to not make use money made available to them may in fact be to mismanage that money (and here the parable of Luke 19 springs to mind). Are we really saying that we can’t think of any good way to use this money that might build the kingdom?

You can see that this is quite a different from the attitude of not touching your budget as much as possible. And in fact it’s strange that even those people who work in the business world, and are used to making use of the company’s money to aggressively prosecute their company’s vision, suddenly take on the small family shop approach to money when it comes to our ministry!

One simple, but drastic way to force this kind of thinking is called zero-base budgeting. This means that each ministry starts off the budget process with a blank piece of paper, instead of a copy of last year’s budget and last year’s actuals. This makes that ministry think through what it would actually like to do in the coming year, and what is actually required to fund those activities. This reduces the laziness of adding +5% while not having a plan for how to use that money.

2.2 The risky use of money

In order to prosecute the mission hard, we will sometimes need to take calculated risks. Because not all the ventures we dream up will pay off – and in fact some will be disasters! However the job of calling people to see and love the glorious God is not an exact science. We do not know whom the elect are, and sometimes the most unpromising opportunities surprise us. But if we are to press hard on that mission it means boldly venturing out – often in ways which require money.

Which means that the goal of avoiding risks is the wrong goal. Because ultimately the greatest good for us is not the preservation of money – but that people come to love him, fear him, and worship him alone. And so it is appropriate to take calculated risks in order to see this happen.

This can be a real challenge to risk-averse people (and you can how much this is the case by the careers we choose). But this only means we have to be aware of the culture in ourselves and work hard to counteract our risk-averse tendencies.

3. Ideas for using money

I’m no expert in how to make the most of ministry money – you really need someone with a more entrepreneurial mind than mine! But here are some things that I imagine you could do with money (and I welcome your ideas in the comments):

Build up capacity

• invest in some training for your leaders
• put on a staff member / student pastor
• get some consulting work done on your ministry

Open up new fronts of ministry

• invest some money in promotional material
• hire a hall to establish another meeting place
• establish a relationship with another ministry

Level-up what your ministry can do

• buy resources such as video clips
• get someone in to run a training workshop for your fellowship group
• get a speaker to come speak at your fellowship / retreat / dialogue meeting

So be aggressive in your use of money. Don’t avoid risk. And make use of money to prosecute the mission of God in your area – hard!