Fred Craddock is the Bandy Distinguished Professor of Preaching and New Testament Emeritus in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University and one of the most widely-known preachers in America. He currently is a minister of Cherry Log Christian Church in Cherry Log, Ga. John Chandler, team leader of the Mission Board’s courageous churches team, recently interviewed Craddock, who was a featured speaker at this year’s annual meeting of the Baptist General Association of Virginia. Chandler’s interview will appear in his forthcoming book, Courageous Church Leadership: Conversations with Effective Practitioners, to be released next fall.
John Chandler: How did you become minister at Cherry Log after years of teaching, preaching and serving as a guest preacher around the country?
Fred Craddock: Let me say first that I did not intend that. We moved to the mountains because we loved the mountains and I had retired from Emory. Secondly, I wanted to hold workshops for bivocational ministers in southern Appalachia. There are many of them. I wanted to go to them, on an ecumenical basis, on their own turf, and talk with them about preaching. And I have been doing that about 10 to 12 times a year.
When we moved to the mountains, we learned that it was a long way to a local Disciples of Christ congregation. We were worshiping in Methodist churches, Baptist churches, and I was gone most Sundays. But then some Disciples folk said, “Why don’t you hold a service with your own denomination in the area?” I said, “I’m a tired and retired seminary professor. I have no church and no place.”
Then a minister who had been dis-fellowshipped from the acapella Church of Christ offered me the use of a little pavilion he owned near a lake. I said, “What will it hold?” “Fifty people, maybe.” There were no seats, no pulpit, no communion table. But people got busy—borrowed chairs, borrowed Bibles, borrowed tables. Made a little lectern. We held a service. I thought it would be a one-time thing.
We did it on Labor Day weekend 1996. Well-attended, good spirit. They said, “Let’s do this again.” So six week later, we did it again. They said, “Do it again,” and Thanksgiving, we had a service. We had a Christmas Eve service. In January 1997, some of the people who had gotten fascinated with this open, ecumenical service said, “Why don’t we meet every Sunday?” I said, “I have a lot of commitments; I can’t be here.” “We’ll get someone else when you’re not here.”
So I began to teach and preach as often as I was there. Easter of 1997, they said, “We’re going to form a church,” and opened a charter with 14 people. A year later had 84. Started talking about building a building. I said, “Wait for me, I’m your leader!”
These are strong people with a strong church background. And it moved along rapidly. They put up a beautiful log church that will seat about 150. Membership grew. Baptized in the river. And it got to the point that it was obvious that they needed a real minister and not a retired seminary professor. And pastors are called on to do things I was not trained to do. It had been a long time since I was in seminary; I wasn’t going to go back to school to be a pastor. But I stayed with it for about six years. And its success ran away with me.
So they now have a young man from Virginia doing a good job. Just broke ground for a new building and have a membership of about 275. High percentage attendance, good participation. My wife and I worship there. I didn’t intend it, but I’m glad to have been a part of it. It made a difference in my preaching.
Chandler: You’ve often said that the best preaching happens in local churches from local pastors. Why do you say that, and how was that true in your own experience?
Craddock: Well, it was true in my own experience for two reasons. One is, the pastor knows the people in a variety of reality situations. A guest preacher comes in and makes a speech, hopes that it will be appropriate to somebody, but never has the satisfaction of knowing. Not having any feedback, not having any follow-up conversations. It’s just a blurb on the screen. It may be a good speech; it may not be.
But the pastor knows the people and can temper the wind to the shorn lamb. He’s still there on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday to get feedback. Because a sermon on the local level, by a pastor, is part of a larger conversation. It’s a piece of the conversation. And that conversation goes on and on in a hospital, over coffee, in the committee and in the community. And it’s just a complete thing.
Second, it’s the appropriateness of it. It’s appropriate because you have the cumulative effect of this conversation. And conversation means they can talk back. They don’t talk back to the guest speaker unless they just go out in a mad fury. Besides that, I would have to say that the discipline of speaking to the same people every week raised the level and the quality of my preaching. My wife agrees.
Chandler: You used up your bag of tricks pretty quickly?
Craddock: Exactly. Now you are speaking to occasions, to particular people. You close your eyes and know where every one of them will be seated. Notice when someone’s absent. Notice visitors. And it quickens your preaching.
Chandler: Being in a local congregation means there are all sorts of leadership sub-texts in your preaching. So your preaching is not an event in and of itself, but becomes a part of your larger leadership in the lives of people you know and care about.
Craddock: That’s right. You can take the recording of your preaching to a hospital. Play it bedside. “You thought you were going to get out of this, but I caught you, so here it is!” Because they like to be part of the conversation, too.
You mentioned sub-texts. You can make allusions when you’re the pastor. Allusions to things local, things joyous and sad. Things that have just occurred. The guest preacher cannot. Even if he or she knew, he or she couldn’t do it—they don’t have the credentials of the local pastor. It’s sort of like if you had a nickname and a stranger used it. You’re like, “You have no right to use that; that’s for the inner circle.” That’s the way it is with preaching as part of local church leadership.
Chandler: You said that your church grew to a certain level and then it “got away from you,” and it was time to step down. Can you elaborate?
Craddock: Well, I had made a commitment to hold these workshops for bi-vocational ministers, and I was doing it. It took a lot of my time because I went to them—eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, North Carolina and north Georgia. I was traveling and spending time with them and didn’t want to cut that off and say, “Sorry fellows, but I have a church going now.”
I intended to go up with these bi-vocational pastors; I didn’t intend that church. I don’t minimize the church; it’s just that it was not my intention, and I was not going to let that bump the other off the calendar.
Chandler: You had a clear sense of your calling and, in a sense, what the church became was not it.
Craddock: Yes, that’s right. It was not it.
Chandler: Do you have a word from your experience for pastors where either they or their churches grow to a place where their sense of calling or the level of their ability to lead changes and no longer fits?
Craddock: Yes, I would like for the relationship between pastors and congregations to be open and free to sustain a conversation as to whether I am still the one to be the pastor here. There are some very good pastors where, if their congregations grow to over 200 people, their particular gifts cannot be exercised. They need to become more C.E.O., more administrative, more this and that, and that’s not their gift. And somebody else has those gifts.
There are gifted people who can handle a larger church. Some, just as gifted, but can only handle smaller ones. They need to assess every year or so: “Am I the right person still?” It’s not a matter of resigning or being fired. Out of the conversation may come, “This is not what I came here to do, thank you very much for the experience.”
Chandler: So some people have the potential to be a full-flowering dogwood, some have the potential to be a full-flowering oak, and there’s no judgment in that, but a matter of the matching of the calling and gifting of that pastor with those of the congregation and the community.
Craddock: That’s right. Exactly, exactly. There’s some pain in leaving, but there’s pain in staying, too. Do I change my fundamental commitment in order to stay here? Or do I stick with what I believe God gave me gifts to do? And perhaps that’s to be somewhere else. “Thank you, I’ve enjoyed my chapter here, this trip of three or four years, whatever, but I must go.”
Chandler: How do ministers cope with the pain of staying or the pain of leaving?
Craddock: It’s very difficult, but it seems to me that if a minister would write on their desk, “There is always going in my staying, and staying in my going,” then that would help. Keep enough intimate distance—keep the intimacy, keep the distance—so that it’s not the end of the world to stay, it’s not the end of the world to go.
Where I have taught, I have had that feeling. I enjoyed very much my years of teaching at Emory in Atlanta. But I was not so deeply enmeshed in that where I said, “If something happens to this, I would just shoot myself.” It was a piece of a larger picture.
Chandler: “Whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit and striving for the faith of the gospel.”
Craddock: That’s right.
Chandler: So ministry leadership is being able to engage on a substantial level in a particular place, but not being so tied up or enmeshed in that one place that your whole calling can only be expressed with these people in this place.
Craddock: Yes. There has to be that freedom. It’s not cool or aloof—“I don’t want to get close to you.” But it’s rethinking every week who I am and what my identity is, and my relationship to these particular people. Is my identity in this only congregation, or do I have an identity in Christ without it? Once that freedom is clear, the church is healthier, and I am healthier. Both can survive without the other. It gives us freedom really to enjoy each other.
Chandler: What role might courage from the leader play in the overall health, growth and vitality of the congregation? What would courage look like from a pastoral standpoint?
Craddock: From a pastoral standpoint, I think courage might look like engagement with the congregation on a level playing field. That is, I have conversations with the congregation at times other than from the pulpit. The pulpit is always bully pulpit. From the pulpit, I have a kind of home-field advantage—a sort of a “no talk back.” But when issues locally come up that should engage the mind, activity and prayer life of the whole church, to have an hour of conversation with the church—the leader just standing down front, entertaining questions, entertaining points of view.
People need to learn to express with courage. If I have the courage to stand down here and raise a matter, listen to your objections, listen to you in a way that feels the anger of some and support of others, then everybody is growing. If I just “preach on it,” then it becomes, “That’s what the minister thinks, and I agree or disagree.” And I never want to put a congregation in that position of just agreeing or disagreeing. There has to be a fuller expression of its own life.
Chandler: Maybe the most courageous preaching is not found simply in the preaching event but in the larger context of conversation between the pastor and people.
Craddock: Precisely. And you can handle very controversial matters if you as leader are on the floor, level with the people, and they can talk back. If they can’t talk back, you trigger things. People feel like all they can do is quit giving their pledge or move to another church. Those are not healthy alternatives.
Chandler: How might a good leader start that conversation?
Craddock: I tried it after worship, after a sermon. But I had already expressed myself so fully in the sermon that it became a simple matter of agreeing or disagreeing. So the way I did it was to request the adult Sunday school hour before worship. We would pull the adults together for an hour, and they would know ahead of time what the conversation was to be about. And that was before the sermon. Sometimes it ended in such a way that I really had to shift gears to get ready for worship—but so did they.
I had these sorts of meetings, conversations, regularly. If you called the meetings only for controversial matters, the congregation will make everything controversial; that’s the pattern that’s set. So sometimes you get them together because something grand has happened. Sometimes you do it because we need to discuss how we are going to respond to Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes we are going to measure a whole new spurt of growth and ask, “What is really happening here? We didn’t do this.”
Talk about good things, bad things. Churches have those lists and moments of joys and concerns, but too few of them celebrate any joys. So talk about those joys together. And then you have a larger context in which to discuss the painful.
Chandler: So create conversations that are forums for discernment and wisdom, and these form the relationship out of which preaching and leadership can be courageous, because it’s connected.
Craddock: That’s right, it’s connected. And you can make allusions to previous conversations. Now, some of your members weren’t in on the other conversations; that will always be true. But it makes those who were there glad they were there, and those who weren’t there think, “Maybe next time I ought to go.” So I don’t allow myself to be silenced by the absence of some people. You can feed off of that conversation in your preaching. “As we talked about last Sunday morning ….” You can say things about it.
Chandler: This idea of facilitating congregational conversations strikes me as a wise model until the church moves beyond its accustomed size. Suddenly that requires different ingenuity or intentionality or gifts to lead congregational conversations in a church that has grown to a new size.
Craddock: It’s very difficult. I have never been pastor of a very large church but have been present to see how it was done. And large-church leaders almost always learn to chop it into smaller groups, age-wise, experience-wise or labor-wise. Can’t do it all in one lump.
Chandler: Once the congregation reaches a certain level of complexity, then leadership is about continuing to have these conversations, but figuring out how to do contexts for courage in new ways.
Craddock: Right. A woman with whom I talked recently talked about her minister; she belongs to a very large church. I said, “I heard he was ill.” She said, “He is?” I said, “I was going to ask you about it; he’s your minister.”
“Well, I’ve never really spoken to him.” “Haven’t you shaken hands with him at the door?” “Oh no, he can’t shake that many hands.” “Then how do you participate?” Well, she’s part of a group within it. And they create many such groups in the congregation. Perhaps the lead minister circulates to those groups, or perhaps it’s done by a staff person or lay leader. But they figure out a whole new strategy for having these conversations. I wouldn’t know how to do it.
Chandler: Everyone has a certain set of gifts, and some gift-sets are better suited for single-forum conversations, some for creating multiple forum conversations.
Craddock: That’s quite true.
Chandler: From your experience as a local church minister, what word of hope would you offer other local churches and ministers?
Craddock: I would remind ministers and churches not to get in the competition circle. “Why does that church down the road have 3,000 and we have 300?” “What are they doing and what are we doing?” Both churches at both sizes can be healthy and belong to God. Get rid of envy and competition; be healthy with your own identity. That may not mean to rest and relax simply at your present size. But to define your calling, what you do.
Where I was pastor, at Cherry Log, we said,“When we get to 300, we will start a new church down the road somewhere, where there needs to be one, and ask some of our members to participate.” And that was agreed on and is going to happen soon there.
Chandler: Getting rid of envy—that implies that the word of hope could be that if leaders and people will deal with core issues of the spirit—envy, gluttony, greed, sloth, the deadly sins—then there is hope to have vital congregational life and to impact the community with the gospel.
Craddock: Oh yes. “To say, “We are a full-service church here, with 120 members.” To celebrate that—not to rest there, but to find contentment with God’s calling at whatever God-called size. There’s my word of hope. My word to denominations would be, “Do not encourage, by the movement and employment of ministers, upward mobility. Separate faithfulness and success in ministry from size. It can get built into ecclesiastical structures if we’re not careful. And therefore if I’m in a church of 100, I’m not very successful or faithful. That has to be attacked by all levels of the church.
Chandler: Somewhere between sloth and contentment is a magical place where the pastor recognizes personal gifts, the congregation is clear on its unique calling, and where there’s a match, then there’s a blessed church that can be a blessing to its community.
Craddock: Oh, so true. And we should hope and strive for nothing less.
This interview was conducted in Woodbridge, Va., on Nov. 11, 2005. Copyright by John P. Chandler.