Welcome to the eighth edition of Mockingbird’s preacher interview series! Since the fall, we’ve been interviewing some of our favorite ministers from diverse church contexts around the country to find out more about what is really working in American Christianity today and how to do church well. (See also eps. 1–7.) Our eighth interview is with a man who needs no introduction in these parts — priest, theologian, and pop-culture aficionado Paul Zahl.
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M: Paul, thank you so much for doing this. If you were talking to a brand-new clergyperson and they asked, “What are the keys to parish ministry? What are the things that are most important for me to try to do — with the help of the Holy Spirit, obviously — as I take on this new responsibility and privilege of being a parish minister?” what would you tell them?
PZ: Well, you stated the question beautifully because you’ve focused on the verticality of the call. You can’t always assume that, but let’s assume it here. There are two things I would tell this person, and I would add a third, but it would be more of a procedural thing. First, you have to have a message. You need to be certain that you have a message, and the message really needs to be the one-way love of God expressed in Christ profoundly and uniquely. You will fail if you don’t have a message. Now, that’s not all. But that’s numero uno: a message that God’s grace is for people in pain, whether they’re victims or whether they’re active protagonists — and most people are both.
Number two: it’s a requirement that you love people. I know that can be a cliché, and it seems almost sentimental to say it, but if you don’t love people, if you don’t actively care for individuals, then you’re not going to be good at parish ministry. Because what you’ll be doing, really, is spending much of your time with individuals in pain. So it’s a requirement that, hopefully by experience of your own suffering, you have learned to love people and especially sufferers. Most of the people you talk to, even if they don’t say it — and you can’t impute that to them, you can’t put words into their mouth — but most people are there for a reason. Maybe 85–90% are there for a reason.
Now, let me say one more thing. In the old days in the church, it was common to say that there are three reasons parishes grow. Either (1) they have a really good preacher that attracts people; (2) they have a wonderfully loving pastor who just by sheer grace — reflexive, spontaneous, generous, love — draws a response of committed, loving people; or (3) they have a parish that is eclectic, that offers something unusual. For example, it might be a “high” Anglican/Episcopal church in a city where most of the churches are more “liberal low church,” so the “high” church might grow simply because people who want that, even if they’re 30 miles away, will come. But of those three reasons, by far the best and the ones that will last are the first two; that is, a preacher who has something to say and a heart for pastoral care.
M: OK, a question about that: you say you have to love people, but what kind of people-loving are we talking about? Is it that a pastor just needs to sort of be a “people person,” someone who is very social and enjoys being around people, enjoys small talk, or is it more specifically an ability to feel compassion and patience with those who are suffering? Or are both equally necessary?
PZ: Well, it’s the latter of the two alternatives you presented. Gregariousness is perfectly good. And a lot of ministers will say, “Well, actually, I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession.” And that’s often true. People in ministry have often been drawn to religion because they are sort of internalizing, constantly thinking and feeling inside. But then in ministry you have to be an extrovert, even if you’re putting it on. But extroversion is not the key, actually. The key is: do you have a heart for sufferers primarily rooted in your own experience? That doesn’t mean that you tell people all about your own experiences, or you stand up and say, “Remember when I did this or that.” But the heart has to be there. And if the heart is there, individuals pick it up instantly.
You may have heard me use this analogy before, but in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indy runs into a kind of underground cult practicing ritual human sacrifice. Now, Indy’s been forced to take psychedelic drugs, so he has a vision of this priest literally reaching inside a man’s rib cage, grabbing his dislodged bloody heart and holding it up in front of everybody. That’s a heavy image, but that’s basically what the minister does in his service and in his private life, but holding his or her own heart up in front of everybody.
M: When you were talking about the reasons churches grow, I was surprised you didn’t mention the music. What would you say about the importance of music in the church? What approaches to music seem to be most effective at inspiring people — while also avoiding conflict? Because we know that music can be a source of great division.
PZ: Oh, we don’t know anything about that! Yes, that tension will crop up in any parish. But there are two things I would say about music. First, music is important as a psychic tool to help people abreact otherwise hidden or masked emotions, and that’s true whether it’s popular music or folk music or Bach or whatever you’d have at a Sunday night family service. Music is God’s way of giving emotional voice to unarticulated feelings, usually pain. And that’s why people will constantly say, “I go to church, and the moment the music starts, I start to cry.” You’ll see that across the board from the people who are 22 to 82. And sometimes they’ll even say, “I don’t like to go to church because the moment the hymns start, I start to cry.” But the point is, music is a universal tool to free unexpressed emotions that are there in people, and that’s why it’s so important.
Having said that, music will not in fact grow a parish. There’s no evidence on record for that. I’ve been at churches with wonderful music of all sorts, whether it’s sort of Christian rock or folk music or high-class “classical” music. And yet, what I would say is that you can actually grow a church without music, oddly enough, because the message coupled with the love is more important than the music. However, again, Christian music can have a tremendous beneficent effect, but it accompanies the main thing.
Now, I personally prefer more traditional music and hymns music in church. But at almost every church we’ve been in, we’ve had a service, often on Sunday nights or Sunday afternoons, where we had guitars and modern worship music, and that can be good, but it has to be done right. The Babylon Bee has a running joke [here, here, and here] about contemporary worship leaders in megachurches who just go on and on … You know, they’re really in it for their own emotional closure. They’ll go on 20 minutes longer than needed! So you have to have a music leader who is good and strictly watching the clock. If it’s too long, it’ll destroy the power of the service. But if it’s right, and if it’s in service of the main thing, it will profoundly deepen the impact of the service.
M: You mentioned that you were involved in small group ministry in New York. How important are small groups in the church?
PZ: Small group ministry is an absolutely vital element of the tactics of the church’s pastoral ministry. For people to really bond in a church — in four out of five cases — to really bond long-term, they need to find a home in a loving small group. And if they do, they will never stop coming. It’s that powerful.
M: But then how do you set that up? I mean, what are the best ways to structure small groups? Is it just Bible studies? Or is it a “Young Moms” book club? Or a “20s-and-30s” group?
PZ: There are many different ways to structure that. But the point is it has to be real. It has to allow for real connection. Because people, when they find that they’re loved and they can talk freely and be themselves, it changes them. Because we never are like that. We just aren’t. We’re always putting up a front. It may be benign, but everybody — 100% percent of the time — is wondering to themselves, “How am I coming across?” Everybody. We know this, and so a small group gradually allows the mask to fall. And you know, it may be a year and a half before you feel comfortable enough to open up.
We were in a small group in New York, the very first small group we established there in our ministry. It was a group of twelve people, and we had one very challenging person. She was very evangelical and she’d come from a Young Life / Campus Crusade background. She was lovely, unmarried, and had a lot to say about the Bible — and that was great — but I knew instantly that she was sitting on massive pain. And after about a year and a half, I turned to my wife, Mary, and I said, “You know, I just don’t think she’s ever gonna come out and say what’s really on her heart.” About two weeks later, in the middle of our sharing time, something happened and her mask finally fell off, and she cried, not hysterically but deeply, and she explained what her real pain was. And it was life-changing. She not only changed in front of our eyes, she also never left that church. And she finally met the man she married, a really good man, a lovely person. And it all happened when the mask dropped.
Now, with small groups, two things can happen that you have to watch for. Either (1) they become too text-centered, too content-centered, and so it’s an easy out for people. They might get through 18 verses in Philippians, but everybody’s really sitting on something heavy in their lives and not sharing. Or (2) they become too psychotherapeutic. That’s why you don’t want the sharing to come too soon in the time you have.
In my view, the best way to do a small group is: first you have content — half an hour for the BLT, the blessed loving thought, and usually you vary who is leading it. So let’s say you’re doing four verses of 2 Thessalonians. One person talks about how it affected them, and then we have a discussion. Next, you have sharing for a half hour, but not longer, unless it’s warranted. And you want people to really share. Finally, you make sure you pray for 20 minutes. What usually happens is that people share right up until it’s nine o’clock, and then you have only two minutes to pray. And you say, well, so-and-so, will you close us out? And then he says, Lord, we pray for da-da and da-da-da. But that’s not prayer. You need to allow about 20 minutes for prayer, even if it’s silent.
M: I love that. Earlier you talked about how important it is for a minister to be in touch with their own pain. How much of that should factor into your preaching?
PZ: There was a woman I spoke with on Sunday, a lovely person, and she wrote something to me. This is what being a minister is really about. She wrote, “You have a way of weaving inner healing with the gospel when you speak, and it’s incredibly refreshing.” Weaving inner healing with the gospel. Most of the sermons I hear, and I hear very well-intentioned sermons, are orthodox, biblical sermons, and I don’t disagree with anything that I’m hearing. But the problem is that they’re primarily expository, mental, and so as a listener I come off from it with no impact whatsoever on what I came to the church worried about. It doesn’t mean that as a priest you want to be Sigmund Freud up there. You have to allow God’s Spirit to do the work. But if, like in Indiana Jones, your heart is in front of you, you will connect with the people you’re speaking to.
Let me just add this for our listeners: you should go online and find Jack Kerouac’s “Rules of Spontaneous Expression.” In the late ’50s, Allen Ginsberg said to him, “Jack, something about the way you write gets to the average reader in a way that I can’t do. What is it that you’re doing?” And Kerouac wrote down these rules in which he described the inner work that he did before writing each day. And it’s exactly what a preacher should do, although Kerouac was talking about writing fiction.
M: Interesting. What other advice would you give to a new priest about preaching? I know you’ve already said a preacher has to connect with their own pain and that of their audience.
PZ: Well, I’ll add a couple things. In practice, if you’re a new priest or minister, on Monday — if that’s your day off — go ahead and read the lesson for next Sunday. Just read it. You can even do it Sunday night. I’m not saying you should spend the whole week thinking about it, but on Monday just read the lesson that is appointed for the following Sunday. Then go live for two days, maybe three. And on Thursday, write down what has happened to you or what you’ve thought about in light of that lesson. Because inevitably, you will have some notes — this made me think about this or that … In other words, what have you gotten so far from just living with that passage? And then live with that for another day or two. Then on Saturday morning, but not Saturday night, do your sermon. Because by Saturday, you’ll be ready. It may be two pages of thoughts — this is what I want to say in eight points. It’s only one point, really, but eight things I’m thinking about.
Sometimes when you’re really young and starting out, you need to do a manuscript. But you have to be careful with that, because, by the way, one of the worst things that preachers do consistently is they read their manuscripts from the pulpit. You can see it a mile away: they’re reading. And that is a total turnoff, it completely discards the impact of the sermon. It’s very understandable, but if you can find a way, just try to use notes.
M: And in your process, I assume there’s a lot of prayer involved?
PZ: Yes, thank you for that. In some sense the process is one of free association, but it rests in the belief that God answers prayer and brings it all together. Last night we showed Barcelona by Whit Stillman. We had a packed house, and I was a little worried that it was not going to be a success because it’s got a lot of banter. It’s very funny, but so much banter. But then suddenly at the end, there’s a catastrophe and everything turns serious. And what Stillman does is that he brings together about eleven threads of the story the banter has covered up. There are about eleven different misplaced individuals, misplaced jobs, misplaced sadnesses, misplaced frustrations, and in the last ten minutes he brilliantly brings every single element together. And that’s God. In other words, what Stillman is saying is that when you’re at the end of your rope, God wants to give you something. And if you’re quiet, he’ll probably bring together a lot of these strands. God has a way of bringing oneness to what was total chaotic plurality.
So what I’m trying to say is, it’s not just about your natural process. God is in there. In fact, the lead guy in the movie even prays. He’s at the bed of someone he loves who’s dying, and he looks over to this Spanish working girl who’s also there, and she’s doing a sketch. So he’s praying for his cousin, who’s dying in front of his eyes, and he looks at the girl, and she’s drawn a picture of him praying, the sick cousin, and an angel — the drawing has a beautiful angel at the bedside. So that’s the vertical part of it.
M: That’s beautiful. Switching gears, what’s your overall vision for doing children and youth ministry?
PZ: Well, there are two things. First, you as the rector can’t do the Children’s Ministry. You may have little children yourself. I remember one time, Mary was in our parish in Scarborough, sitting there during the church service with John, David, and Simeon, and they ranged in age from two to seven. And the children were acting up. But of course I was conducting the service. And somebody else overheard a woman in the audience say to another woman with whom she was seated, looking at Mary, “Where on earth is that woman’s husband?!”
M: Haha.
PZ: So the first point is you need to find the right person to be the children’s minister in the congregation. And that person is out there. It’s usually a young mom who’s a teacher by day, or something like that — someone who loves little children, maybe has a couple children of her own, and really wants them to know God. That’s crucial. But the first thing you do is pray to God for the right person to come. And that person is out there.
Now with youth ministry, you also want to get the right person. Usually it means getting a man and a woman, if you can do it, if it’s possible. But I want to add one thing. When I was young, in two parishes, we could not afford a youth minister. And I was still young enough to do it, so I became the youth minister in both Scarborough and in Charleston. And that ministry proved to be extremely powerful. I was it. I did have a young woman in one congregation who kind of helped — she would drive a car. And we had a layman who would help out a bit, and he attracted some of the guys because he was a jock. But really I was it.
So I would go on all the youth ski trips, all the summer trips and so forth, and I hated it. I mean, I couldn’t stand it because I was already exhausted with my own small children, and then I had to go and listen to all these fourteen-year-olds talk about nothing for hours in the car, driving in the snow. And yet, you know, it turned out to be one of the best things we ever did because these children were converted. Later on, they’d come to me and they would say, “Paul, you may not remember me, but I went on that summer trip to the beach, and I will never forget the love I felt …” So hire a youth worker if you can, but it may fall to you to do it if you’re a young priest.
M: That makes sense. A priest can’t do it all, and shouldn’t try. You have to find the right people for the job and then trust God to work through them.
PZ: Yes, and you know, sometimes it can happen like a miracle. At one point when we were in Birmingham the first time, we had this strange fellow come down to work with us. His name was Paul Walker.
M: Haha, I’ve heard of him.
PZ: I had to work very, very hard to get him to come because he said “no” twice. He was already at this wonderful place called Christ Church Charlottesville. But finally, I listened to a song one day by REO Speedwagon called “I Just Can’t Fight This Feeling,” and I called up Paul and I said, “Listen to this song.” And the miracle was that he had just been listening to that exact song, and I was calling him to tell him that that was the song for our calling here in Birmingham. So he agreed to come. Of course, his wife Christy had to come down and give it a look. But Paul ended up coming on as Canon for Parish Life for a few years.
M: That’s a great story. So what does guide your hiring process? Are you mainly just looking for people who can complement you and do the things that you’re not really able or called to do?
PZ: Well, hiring is an enormous problem in life, not just in the church. In any institution, it’s very hard to know if you’ve made the right hire. You start with a need: you know, we need a youth worker, or a pastoral care assistant, or a minister to come on as assistant rector who can do a little bit of everything. But what happens is that you’re so needy of having someone in that position that you often hire the wrong person. You judge too quickly. You don’t call their past employers. You should always call. Of course you don’t want to do it because you’re afraid you’ll get a bad answer, but it’ll save you years of agony. So you have to do the background work, but the only way to hire properly is to pray to God that he will send you the right person.
At Church of the Advent, we had mostly good hires, but with a couple of exceptions. I’m not actually very good at hiring. Some people are terrible at it. Some rectors always hire the wrong person. So you really have to know what you need, and pray to God that he’ll send you the right people. Also, you have to have a trusted warden or vestry person who knows what they’re doing and will give you straight answers, and who has the best interests of the church at heart. And that’s also important if you ever have to let someone go.
M: So what would you say is your management style?
PZ: Well, I used to say at the Church of the Advent, I love everything about being Dean of the Advent except being Dean of the Advent. What I meant by that was, I can’t stand procedure and church politics. Like every institution, in the church you have little groups, little gossip. It’s just human nature. But I can’t stand when the central thing is subordinated to the secondary thing. Another way of saying it is that every institution, from car dealerships to churches to governments, eventually becomes the opposite of what it was intended to be. So I’m very anxious by nature to keep the first thing the first thing.
Now that sounds like I’m washing my hands of all that. But it doesn’t mean I’m not aware of it. If you’re a rector, you know that that person over there is not really a person of goodwill and would rather have you out. Or you know that this person over here who you’re hoping to be your voice on the vestry, in fact, is too shy to ever say anything. Or you know that the altar guild is running your life, or the problems with the music team.
The way I dealt with that is, first, again, to pray that God will raise up other people to deal with those issues. Now, some people have the gift, and they can be both pastors and administrators, but I don’t think that’s ultimately what St. Paul means when he talks about gifts of the Spirit. If you’ve been given the gift of preaching the gospel from the heart, and if you’ve been given love, that’s the main thing you’re called to do. So pray that God will raise up people to do the other things. And what we did at Church of the Advent was that we had a vestry that understood that about me. They understood, for example, that I didn’t really care about money. I never preached about money the entire ten years I was here as Dean, and we did fine. I was forced to once, but I said, “You don’t understand. If people are really touched, money will come.” The point is that the wardens of the parish understood that they were my defenders, so that I could do what I was really there to do. They were in charge — they were lawyers or business people or they were whatever they were, and they did that work.
Secondly, we always hired someone as an administrator who had that gift. They had someone here at this church for fifteen years — he died recently — but he did an amazing job. He was a real Christian and just loved running a large operation with many employees. And he specifically wanted to help me not have to deal with things that weren’t central to my role. Because it’s important for the priests to be able to do what they do best.
Let me give you an example. In most small parishes, vestry meetings are usually about two or two and a half hours long. And by the end of the meeting, if it’s held at night, usually the liquor that a couple of the men had before they came to the meeting at their cocktail hour has worn off, so their non-alcoholic angry self emerges. That’s why vestry meetings at around 9:30 p.m. turn horrible. So first of all, don’t have vestry meetings at night. The Advent used to have hour-and-a-half vestry meetings at lunch, and all the other work was done in committees and that was wonderful. But finally I said, “Let’s just do an hour, because everybody’s busy.” And I would always give an opening thought — a BLT, blessed loving thought. It would always be five minutes and then we’d do the business. But what happened was they came to me about two years in and said, “Paul, could you speak longer at the vestry meetings?” And then I said, “Okay, I’ll speak for ten minutes.” Finally it ended up that they wanted me to speak for 20 minutes out of an hour long monthly Cathedral vestry meeting. And this is a church with a great many feet on the ground. And yet, the vestry meetings got shorter and shorter the longer I spoke. Now I know that sounds counterintuitive, but that’s what happened.
M: I love that. So, you’ve mentioned that you avoid preaching on money issues. But how else should churches go about raising money? What’s a good philosophy for fundraising in churches?
PZ: Well, the place to start is Charles Simeon’s four principles of parish ministry. The one about money is rather lengthy, but it’s perfect. He wrote: “Always put money in a secondary position, knowing that God’s work done in God’s way will never suffer for lack of provision.” And that idea has stayed with us from the very beginning. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a yearly campaign. I’m all for that and I’ve always had it. And we give, Mary and I. When pledging time comes around, we sign a pledge and we mean it. But there are two things to add. First, there was this early charismatic Episcopal priest who was a major figure in the Renewal Movement. He became rector one of these big Episcopal churches in Charleston, and one day he made the mistake of asking to see the financial records of the church — that is, who was giving what. And by the way, the rector should never look at that, because that’ll inevitably touch sin. But he did, and he found out that the person who was giving by far the largest pledge was a young, recently certified nurse at the University of South Carolina Medical Center. She had nothing. She was just a young nurse, but she was tithing, and that completely changed the way he understood the issue of giving in the church.
The second thing is, when we were at Grace Church, we had a big endowment, so the church didn’t really need to worry that much about money. But one day a guy came to our church who was a Hollywood actor who suddenly had become really successful. And I didn’t know anything about his career, but he wanted to talk. He’d been sitting in the back and he said, “I’d like to talk to Mr. Zahl.” So he came in and told me about his life, which was very worth hearing. He’d become a Christian. And then as he left, he handed me a check. He said, “I wanted to give this to the church.” And it was by far the largest check that we had received the whole time we’d been there. But it was done entirely of his free will, and totally unexpected. I learned there that Charles Simeon was right. Now, I don’t want to seem stupid or dumb, and I’m fully aware that you have to provide support for your people, and sometimes it’s appropriate to say, “Guys, I can’t pay my bills. Could you help me?” There’s nothing wrong with that occasionally, but it should not be part of a process or policy and instead always in the context that “God’s work done in God’s way will never suffer for lack of provision.” I would swear by that, and I’ve been doing this for over 50 years.
M: That’s good to hear. So as a pastor in a church that preaches grace, what is your advice on how to deal with difficult people in a loving, compassionate way?
PZ: A couple things about that. First, there will always be difficult people, and that’s fine, but they can do a lot of damage. In a Bible study, for example, you can only have one really difficult person for every eleven people. If you have more than one really difficult, neurotic person in a Bible study who just doesn’t shut up, the Bible study will go to pieces. So you have to find ways to manage that sort of thing.
Secondly, you will always have really difficult people attracted to the church, and you have to take precautions. For example, at the Advent, they actually have police officers — not in a bad way, but in a good way out in the front, because there are so many homeless people in our area, most of whom are really druggies and people with severe mental health problems, that they’re able to come into the church and totally disrupt everything. So you have to take some precautions. That’s just being wise. That’s called the “first use of the law.” You’re not putting a moral judgment on people. First use of the law is: we have to keep order here for the sake of the enterprise. So, sometimes you have to have security. And at the same time, we always have a minister here whose job it is to actually help the homeless. You know, we have two Bible studies for the homeless here at the Church of the Advent. And it’s a very good thing. It’s a sacrifice on the part of the leader, but it’s a good thing. And we should never stop doing that.
The biggest issue, though, is you need to understand human nature — and the devil. Mary and I have always had difficult people in our parishes. We have never been at a point in our life when we haven’t had at least one very difficult person in the parish — whom we still loved. We were not going to stop loving them. I mean, we’ve got one right now, and I’m not about to stop showing love and concern. You know, once we even invited the most difficult person in the parish to actually live in our apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland.
M: Wow.
PZ: We were willing to do that. But you need to get the right help and support to deal with those people, and the number one thing you need to watch out for is that something negative inside you doesn’t get touched by these interactions. It’s called countertransference. What happens with clergy is that they often make small mistakes with certain kinds of difficult people, and then they make a big mistake. In many cases, if you want to know why many clergy suddenly fall or do something that is really disqualifying for ministry, it’s that they have not realized that a particularly difficult person has sort of gotten into their space in a way that causes them to start reacting in all sorts of inner unhealthy ways. So you have to be aware of that.
Let me add one more thing. My friend Nancy Hanna is such a powerful person in our ministry. She’s now on the staff of Jacob Smith’s parish in New York. But when I was in Scarborough, we had many, many needy single people in our congregation — lovely people, but just psychologically lonely, needy people. And I realized that I needed to have a Nancy on the staff, someone who is not male but a female who also had love and compassion and could help a number of single people who might bring all sorts of projections to me, father projections. And so Nancy had an office in the local diner. I mean, she spent four hours in the diner every Tuesday, from 7:00 to 11:00, and everybody came to talk to her. But you can see how that also took the burden off me so I could deal with the male needy people and/or just loving the whole congregation.
M: Makes sense. Last question here: what do you wish you had known when you first started your ministry that might save a lot of young clergy some headaches?
PZ: You know, I wish that I had really prayerfully worked on — with a mentor of some kind — the experience of conflict in the parish. We used to call this the “theology of the difficult person.” Because when it came to real conflict, I wish I had been more prepared to not engage or to not attach emotionally to antagonism. I wish I’d maybe been a little bit more “Eastern” in my reactions. Because the resistance that came to me wasn’t personal. It had to do with them or ideas in their minds. But I took it personally.
M: Well, Paul, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. I just want to say you have touched a lot of people with your ministry, including me. I probably have about five of your books at home. So thank you for all that you’ve done and continue to do.
PZ: Thank you. And bless you.
