Kurt Fredrickson and Cameron Lee of Fuller Theological Seminary are coming out with a new book on Cascade Books in a few months. It is entitled What Pastors Wish Their Congregation Knew (Good title eh?). Kurt asked me along with several other pastors to write a letter in response to the book. All of these letters will be published at the end of the book. I enlisted Matt Tebbe, a former co-pastor with me and Geoff Holsclaw at Life on the Vine Christian Community, to write it with me. We exchanged a few ideas and below is what we came up with. I thought the finished piece reveals well what went on between us all in the development of a multiple pastorship in mutual submission at Life on the Vine. I think it helps flesh out alot of what I’ve been writing for years on this blog about multiple bi-vocational pastoring. Matt did alot of the “good” writing on this piece. You can tell :). I hope it helps others who are also seeking to pastor out of “mutual submission one to another.” Your comments and questions are welcomed as always.
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Letter by David Fitch and Matt Tebbe – co-pastors together with Geoff Holsclaw at Life on the Vine Christian Community – to the readers of What Pastors Wish Their Congregation Knew.

We (Matt Tebbe and David Fitch) have pastored together and feel like we have learned first hand many of the things Cameron Lee and Kurt Fredrickson write about in What Pastors Wish Their Congregation Knew. We co-pastored the Life on the Vine Christian Community in Chicago’s northwest suburbs together with Geoff Holsclaw. Matt was the preacher and the pastor. Dave preached and pastored too, but was more often the apostle – gatherer – prophet. Geoff was the teacher-administrator. From our different perspectives, we learned first hand the importance of nurturing healthy relationships as pastors. As Kurt and Cameron articulate well (in ch. 8), this means handling conflict incarnationally: i.e. taking a posture of being among, with, and in submission to those we live the gospel with. We learned this first, however, through cultivating our relationships as pastors with each other. Only in working out our own co-pastor relationship did this truth work its way into the many relationships with and among the congregation of Life on the Vine.

For a church to be healthy, the pastors must be healthy. Often (not necessarily) church structure can calcify unhealthy emotional systems of pastors – especially senior pastors. The senior pastor in particular can set the “temperature” of the congregation; as the main leader, the congregation (and associate pastors) will submit to his or her decisions and way of handling difficulties and conflict. But this means that the emotional health of a congregation is tied to one man or woman; they are subjected to his or her character deficiencies, weaknesses, and blindspots. His or her reactions to conflict, ways of discerning, sensitivities and approaches to handling crisis become how the church operates in those capacities.

When we first started co-pastoring together we brought to our relationship a complex arrangement of ideas, visions, agendas, hopes. Throw in another co-pastor as well (Geoff Holsclaw) and it was a recipe for a power struggle. Two dominant leadership options were available to us:  Geoff and I (Matt) could submit to Dave as the lead and founding pastor of Life on the Vine. We could give him input but he would make final decisions. Or – we could have a democracy – There were three of us and each of us could have an equal vote – or – discreet areas of ministry where we took each other’s input but ultimately we had the final say. We all knew, based on previous church experience and a growing sense of self-awareness, that there existed in us a capacity for self-deception, egocentric leadership, and our own unhealthy emotional responses setting the temperature of our church. So – with Dave’s encouragement and careful leading – we decided it was better for our church to enter into a relationship of mutual submission as co-leaders as the means to invest in the health of our congregation. This was the most difficult and most fruitful relationship I (Matt) ever entered into. There were two characterological postures we learned in this relational commitment: 1.) Trust of the Spirit vs. Self-willfulness of me as pastor and 2.) Conflict as sanctification vs. something to me minimized, managed, or leveraged for “health” of church.

Trust vs. Self-willfulness

Because of our experiences and spiritual giftings, Dave and I would often see the same situation in two completely different (and sometimes in competing) ways. Training leaders, leading meetings, scheduling and planning church events, how to handle conflict – all of these created tension and brought into focus our divergent personalities. The relational matrix of mutual submission between us as pastors became the means God used to “strengthen our congregational immune system” (ch. 8).

Dallas Willard is oft quoted as saying, “What God gets out of me isn’t what I do, it’s the person I become.” We would say that what God got out of us as pastors was the people we became – in mutual submission to his work in each other. The same goes for the entire congregation at life on the Vine. As we lived into the reality of mutual submission in co-pastoring we found it to be best for our congregation and for our spiritual formation as pastors. But how could we tend to the kind of persons we were as pastors and not become self-preoccupied, egomaniacal narcissists? The answer, we discovered, was trust – submitting ourselves to each other in love and vulnerability. We learned to trust that the Spirit speaks and works not just in each person individually but in His church. We learned to test our agendas, preferences, opinions and sensitivities based on giftings to the Holy Spirit. Through the discipline of mutual submission we found ourselves becoming the kinds of people who increasingly trusted the Holy Spirit and each other. This vulnerability and trust became the posture and attitude out of which we sought to lead our congregation into health and wholeness.

Conflict as Sanctification vs. something to be minimized, managed or leveraged.

“In the end, what makes for a healthy church is not just how we respond to the conflicts that erupt, but the kind of relationships we cultivate before an eruption happens.” (Cameron and Lee, ch. eight ) Conflict – among the three of us and by extension in our congregation – went from something we sought to manage or minimize to an opportunity to grow, learn, submit, love, die, and rise to new life. Conflict became ground zero for the seed to find fertile soil in our pastoral relationships – and then with that imagination – in the life of our church.

We have learned that conflict is the means by which God moves a congregation deeper into His mission. In order for conflict to be used by God however, we as pastors cannot control it. Instead we as pastors must become vulnerable, carrying a posture of submission always as a model to one another following Matt chapter 18. In so doing, we allow conflict to ferment in the Spirit. If the conflict is about us (which as pastors it will be many many times) we must listen and submit. We must reflect back what we have heard, and then give our observations and then submit by saying “is this how you see it?” We might describe how we see the way forward, how we see Scripture on this or what we hear the Spirit saying. But we will always then submit these affirmations to the one we sit with. What do you see? In your prayer what are you hearing God say to us? In this place of mutual submission a coming together happens. Jesus becomes present and a binding and loosing” is shaped where we discern together where to go from here? (Matt 18:15-20). It is the very Kingdom of God breaking in.

When we as pastors find ourselves participating in such relationships, the burden of managing conflict is taken from us.  The power relationship is put into the hands of God. The act of submission places one into God’s power, what the Spirit is doing… and asking everyone else to test it. This is at the very heart of what we have learned together about pastoring in Christ’s authority not our own, what Kurt and Cameron call “healthy relationships.”

May God bless this book in guiding many pastors, leaders and disciples of all kinds to this place of putting the power relationship into the hands of God. In so doing, God’s power will be unleashed in His church.