Help!

“And as far as I’m concerned, pastors cannot be trusted.  It’s time for you to go before you hurt somebody.”  After his tirade, Bill stopped in embarrassment.  This was far more of his hand than he had intended to show before the meeting.  But there it was.  Bill stormed out of Martha’s office before anyone could respond.

Martha and the pastor sat in stunned silence for a few moments.  Then the clock on Martha’s wall chirped.  That’s not a metaphor.  Martha was a lover of all birds, and she had a bird clock in her office.  Each hour the clock struck a different bird call.  At 5 p.m. it was a tufted titmouse.

The chirp shook the pastor out of his torpor.  “It’s five o’clock!” he groaned in disbelief.  “In two hours I have the meeting of my life.  What am I going to do in less than two hours to prepare?”

Martha pursed her lips into a pout.  Then she pointed her finger at the pastor.  “First,” she said, “you are not going to give up now.  Some of us have lived with that terrible little man our whole lives.  You’ve only had to deal with him for a few years.  So don’t you dare think about bailing out on us now!  We need you.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Martha,” the pastor smiled.  “But what am I going to do?”

Martha scratched her forehead.  “I don’t know.  But I know you’ll think of something.  Now go home and get some supper.  You can’t do this on an empty stomach.”

The pastor walked home, deep in thought.  What to do?  Then it dawned on him. 

Get help.

This was one of the hard lessons of pastoral ministry.  He routinely underestimated how willing people were to help him when he needed it.  At first, he didn’t even notice this fact.  After all, he was a pastor.  He was supposed to help everyone else.  He wasn’t supposed to ask for help.  That was a sign of weakness.  And if he was honest with himself (something that happened with distressing infrequency in those early years) he would admit that he had ended up in the pastor business in part in order to be the strong one in charge.

Then there was that terrible quarter in his last call.  Offerings were down for a variety of reasons.  The options were few.  The church council could terminate a staff position.  They could withhold their gifts for mission projects.  Or they could institute an across the board cut of ten percent of expenditures, including compensation.  That’s what they chose, with the pastor’s distressed agreement.  Then they sent a letter informing the congregation of their decision.

The explosions began as the letters were opened.  They all sounded the same.  “Why didn’t you tell us there was a problem?” members asked.  “Why didn’t you just ask us for help?” they protested.  “We would have done something.”

The result was a special congregational meeting.  The budget rollback was rescinded.  The shortfall was recovered in three weeks.  And the pastor and council learned a valuable lesson.  When you need help, ask for it.

A few years ago, the Bulldog had shared an article with the pastor.  It was called, “If You need Help, Just Ask: Underestimating Compliance with Direct Requests for Help.”  The researchers found that those who request help are focused on the costs to the potential helper of saying “yes.”  And the requesters thus fear that response.  

Those being asked, however, have a higher sense of the costs of saying “no” in addition to the price of an affirmative response.  They made this hypothesis: “we would expect there to be a trend toward underestimating a person’s willingness to offer compliance because most help seekers would not fully appreciate that person’s motivation to avoid a loss of face…”

They conducted several studies involving direct requests for help to strangers.  The levels of compliance were far higher than the requesters might have estimated.  The authors concluded, “The findings from the present research suggest that this fear of rejection is somewhat unfounded.  Instead, people are more willing to help than others assume, although their interest in helping may be driven by face-saving needs rather than altruistic motives.”  People have all sorts of reasons for saying yes that may not be obvious to the requester but that are powerful for the respondent.

The pastor had learned to overcome both his hubris and his fears of rejection.  More than that, he had learned to appreciate the good and willing hearts of many church folks.  Those driven purely by self-interest may often have had the loudest voices, but they were never in the majority.  We live in places where winner-take-all is the implicit rule: in school, in business, in sports and in politics.  That implicit rule is not really the rule of life.  Our culture leads us to believe that people are rationally self-interested choice machines.  Instead, people are often broadly other-interested compassion engines who really do want to help.

So he asked for help.

He hit the door at a run.  “What did you make for dinner?” his wife asked as he trotted into the study.

“Would you mind putting together a sandwich and some milk, dear?  I need to do some things before the meeting tonight.”

At other times that response might evoke some good-humored howls of protest.  But his spouse knew the stakes for this evening.  So she let him work.

The pastor composed a simple message to go out on all his electronic venues.  “Dear friends in Christ, I would like to invite you to attend the meeting of the Personnel Committee this evening.  That meeting may determine whether I continue as the pastor of this congregation or not.  This may come as a surprise to you.  I do not wish to bias you one way or another as to the content of this meeting.  I ask you to come with an open mind.  Most of all, I ask you to come.  Prayerfully yours…”

He hit the “Send” button and took a deep breath.  He had asked for help.  Had he also launched a bloody civil war?

(Two articles are worth reading in connection with this episode: Dale T. Miller, “The Norm of Self-Interest,” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 1053-1060; Francis J. Flynn and Vanessa K. B. Lake, “If You Need Help, Just Ask: Underestimating Compliance with Direct Requests for Help,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95 (2008), 128-143.  PDF’s of both articles are available online by search author and title.)