Let’s call him Bill (because that was his name).  An incredible craftsman, I met him when he supervised a few college students (including me) while we worked our way through college doing dorm maintenance (code words for “fixing stuff”). One of those students “painted” a door that would have looked better had he not “painted” it. Turns out, the guy had never painted anything. Bill’s comment was, “I’ve never met somebody who couldn’t paint.”

Painting only seems simple if you have never painted or if you have painted a lot. It’s the same with leading. Most of us get stuck somewhere in between.

(If you know how to paint, you can skip this next section.) If you only think you know how to paint, this brief overview sheds a little color over what’s required.

You pick the right brush, because you use certain brushes for particular paints (or stains) and certain surfaces. To paint well, you have to hold and move those brushes in specific kinds of ways to put the paint on correctly.  And, you move the brush different ways depending upon what you paint. In addition, when you use a roller, you first have to know when you should use a roller. Then, when you use it, you must pattern your movements in particular ways for the ceiling or wall to look smooth and uniform. 

Furthermore, you should follow a certain process when you paint. First, you move all the furniture out of the way, then you prep the surfaces. Prepping can include cleaning, removing nails or screws, spackling (or patching, if it’s plaster), sanding and filling or repairing holes (which may or may not include cutting and installing sheetrock and the requisite taping, spreading mud, feathering it out and repeating that process at least three times due to drying and smoothing the surface). After the prep, you paint the ceiling first because it’s the lightest in color (so, if you get some on the walls you can cover them up with a darker wall paint). Then you “cut in” around the ceiling, in the corners and along the baseboards. Then, you paint the wall, using the proper techniques, probably with a roller.

Simple, right? And, I’m not even a very good painter. I really don’t know a lot about it, just enough to know I don’t know.

It was simple for Bill. Because Bill spent most of his life around painters. 

“I’ve never met somebody who couldn’t paint.”

What is simple for Bill overwhelms a lot of other people.

The same for leading. The same for me.

I grew up being around painting. I didn’t grow up leading.

The way Bill viewed painting looks a lot like how most people view leading. 

“Just paint the wall,” seems so deceptively simple.

So does, “Just love your people.” Or, “Just pastor the church.”

Just as painting involves tons more than what a freshly painted room implies, leading a church includes lots of things you may have never seen.

Bill told the student, “Paint the door.” Because he thought everybody would know how to paint a door, and it was beyond his experience that anybody in the world didn’t know how to paint a door.

Great leaders view leading the way Bill viewed painting.

That’s why a lot of them, I believe, give very simplistic instructions to growing a ministry. They promote the Pastoral Fallacy. (Read my previous blogpost for more detail on what the Pastoral Fallacy is.)

“Just do expository preaching.” Because, that leader can’t imagine that anybody would ever tolerate things like:

• A staff person that undermines the ministry of the church
• Not knowing how the church’s financials should be reported
• Consistently getting asked about how old the church’s furnace is
• Letting a key leader live an ungodly lifestyle without it being addressed
• Not mowing the church’s lawn regularly
• Doing his own PowerPoint presentations
• Not presenting a clear vision that people work
• People who go to Sunday School but don’t attend worship
• Accepting money from anybody who wants to give it for their pet project that doesn’t fit what the church is doing
• Along with a whole host of other things that many churches do regularly.

Great leaders promote the Pastoral Fallacy (I believe) because they cannot imagine there are tons of us who don’t know all the rest of the stuff.

A few other reasons people promote the Painting/Pastoral Fallacy are:

• Inexperience – “Everything is easy to the person who has never done it.”
• Lack of Exposure – Most churches leaders have never seen great leading, so they don’t know what it looks like.
• Avoidance of Their Own Stuff – Pastoring taps us emotionally. When we don’t deal with our own issues (like anger, past hurt, lack of a father, poverty mindset and the like), we stymie our own leadership.
• Appeal of a Quick Fix – Just like taking a pill for an ailment, all of us would rather do one thing and fix it than to go through the difficult task of changing ourselves.

Fortunately for me, I learned those things from some incredible leaders over the years. That’s why I started leaderINCREASE, to help lots of other leaders who either haven’t experienced great leading or would benefit from some help to get to the levels of effectiveness you desire.