Cumbered with a Load of Control

Trust More; Control Less

The hymn mocks us.

“Are we weak and heavy laden,
Cumbered with a load of care?”

¹

To which pastors reply, “Are you kidding me? Pastors are veritable poster children for cumberedness. For some, our personal and family lives are strained to a dangerous degree and for others our churches keep us awake at night. For a few, an unhappy few, perhaps more than we want to acknowledge, both home and church are in various degrees of chaos.

“Are we cumbered with a load of care?” Don’t ask.

Many cares cumber us, but in my case a good deal of this care has arisen from my fruitless attempts to keep it at bay. In my family, and in the church I’ve acted as if I needed to control everything. I’ve acted like I’m God when I am not, attempting to manage all the unmanageable matters in life. I have thus invited care that I could not bear, while the best pastoral, and paternal, models in my life have repeatedly whispered, “Trust more; control less.”

I’ve proven to be a slow learner.

Early in my ministry, while devouring books with the revealing titles Survival Tactics in the Parish and Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, I visited with a rural Lutheran pastor named Lloyd. Lloyd was notably uncumbered. He could relax on his front porch calmly smoking his pipe. Relaxing has never been a chief feature of my skill set.

Part of the explanation for Lloyd’s “cool as a cucumber”

²

demeanor is personality of course. We are all different people. I can no more be Lloyd than he be me, and we ought never to desire this to be any other way. A reproducible part of the explanation, however, was rooted in his pastoral vision. His job, he explained to me, was to help his people achieve their goals, not to invent those goals for them. It was not his responsibility to marshal the troops or to grow his church. He was called, he understood, to feed and care for his flock, to trust their ministry gifts and instincts, and not to attempt to control them. Perhaps that is why relaxing was easy for him.

This was not a strictly rural Lutheran bit of wisdom. A suburban Presbyterian church planter once told me that he would give the people in his church ministry reins whenever he could. If they made any messes along the way, he would clean it up later. He led by trusting, not controlling.

Trust more; control less. I’m not wired that way. New things make me nervous. My wife, Barb, sees this part of me all the time. If we are heading for the grocery store, and she suggests a side trip to Walgreens, my brain can melt trying to fit that variation into my carefully controlled life. This isn’t sin as much as it is neurology, but it implies distrust to Barb. She has learned to cope with this; I’ve had to learn to fight it.

Years ago, when a woman came to me asking permission to gather some others from the church to start a prayer meeting, my mind did it’s thing. I began to imagine the dangers and risks. This prayer idea was Walgreens in a grocery store day. It was new. It didn’t fit.

But then the ridiculousness of it all dawned on me. I had somehow created a church culture where if two or three wanted to gather together they believed they had to ask me first. This was absurd. People should feel free to gather to pray without the pastor’s permission.

This was a rare lightbulb moment for me.

I had cumbered my congregation with a load of control when what they needed was a culture of trust. Control risks quenching the Spirit and clipping the wings of those whom the Spirit has gifted to help the church fly. I began to imagine what good might happen if I were to trust the Spirit to do his work among God’s people.

“Sure,” I told her. “Go pray. Let me know how it goes.”

I’ve not mastered this. I still want to shape things so that they are done decently and in order. That’s not always a bad thing. But within this I need, as well, to trust Christians to do good Christian things. Unplanned trips to Walgreens are not necessarily the risky things I once thought, and they sometimes open up opportunities unimaginable before.

It’s still hard for me to grab a book, a beverage, and a patio chair—my own version of porch and pipe—to attempt this thing people call relaxing. But I’m trying.

I’ll always have cares. That’s who I am.

My aim, though, is for a notch or two below “cumbered.” Whatever that looks like, it seems a better place to be.

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1. “What a Friend we have in Jesus,” Joseph Scriven. Trinity Hymnal (United States: Great Commission Publications, 1991), p. 629.

2. I like to imagine that “cumber” is related etymologically to “cucumber.” It’s probably not, but please don’t burst my fantasy with any facts to the contrary.