COMPLAINING, A STEP BY STEP GUIDE

COMPLAIN YOUR WAY TO A BETTER LIFE

A man wanted to become a monk so he went to the monastery and talked to the head monk. The head monk said, “You must take a vow of silence and can only say two words every three years.” The man agreed and after the first 3 years, the head monk came to him and said, “What are your two words?” “Food cold!” the man replied. Three more years went by and the head monk came to him and said “What are your two words?” “Robe dirty!” the man exclaimed. Three more years went by and the head monk came to him and said, “What are your two words?” “I quit!” said the man. “Well,” the head monk replied, “I am not surprised. You have done nothing but complain ever since you got here!”

Most of us complain but too few of us complain enough or do it particularly well. Literally hundreds of thousands of lives and thousands of marriages have been ruined but could have been saved if there was more and better complaining! One of the essential skills every person – and especially every leader – must have is the ability to complain. Learning how to do this well could save your life, your marriage, your business, and open up amazing opportunities for you.

One of life’s great injustices is that we often learn its most valuable lessons too late! Many of us can look back over our lives and see how we could have done things so much better if we had only known then what we know now. The Christian band, Mercy Me, capture this sentiment beautifully in their song – Dear Younger Me.

Dear younger me
Where do I start
If I could tell you everything that I have learned so far
Then you could be
One step ahead
Of all the painful memories still running thru my head
I wonder how much different things would be
Dear younger me, dear younger me

Dear younger me
I cannot decide
Do I give some speech about how to get the most out of your life
Or do I go deep
And try to change
The choices that you’ll make cuz they’re choices that made me
Even though I love this crazy life
Sometimes I wish it was a smoother ride
Dear younger me, dear younger me

One of the most painful examples of this late-in-life-lessons is the rate of Christians who divorce and remarry. According to Gallop, some 40% of Christian marriages in America are ending in divorce (this of course means that 60% last a life-time). Curiously though, 70% of these divorced Christians who have remarried have coincidentally deepened their spiritual life and consequently their commitment to their local church. Perhaps many of these people would, with a sigh of regret, tell us that during their first marriage they made some big mistakes. Among the biggest, they would say, was that they neglected to put God first in their relationship (Matthew 6:33). It’s easy to do of course. Married life is an adjustment. Then children come along and those things that make for an Acts 2 type of Christianity get put off for a day, then a week, then a month. Prayer, Home Group, Bible reading/study, and attending Church worship become too inconvenient and less of a priority and an all-too obvious indicator of where they are at spiritually. Yet all of this damage could be avoided if someone had complained.

“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth;
I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”

Job 7:11

WHY SOME COMPLAINTS DON’T WORK

An expert complainer is not necessarily someone who does a lot of complaining (although most expert complainers do a lot of complaining). Rather, an expert complainer is someone who avoids the common mistakes of lower-ranked complainers and has learned how to use positively use complaining to bring about helpful change. Expert complainers complain because they care. Lower-ranked complainers usually complain because they are frustrated, hurt, angry, and want to let others know how upset they are. People rarely listen to lower-ranked complainers. They sound like whiners, whingers, moaners. Whereas a higher-ranked complainer sounds like they are trying to help.

Shortly after I arrived in Tasmania in 1995, our little church grew rather rapidly. You would think that everyone in our church would have been happy about that. But I received a lot of complaints from many (not most and certainly not all) of the 17 members who were in the church when I arrived. One of them took it upon themselves to write a letter to me telling me how arrogant I was, how all I wanted to do was to bring fancy “mainland” ideas to our church, and how everyone in our church was so unhappy with me. It was (un)signed ‘anonymous’. Top-ranked complainers don’t do things like that. They’ve learned that the best complaints happen eye-to-eye.

Kim is a great complainer. The other day as we were hosting our guest from Missouri, Kim and the girls took him into our city to buy some souvenirs. She got into town just after 4PM and went to one of the major souvenir gift shops but the lady had just shut and locked the door. Kim thought this rather strange especially since their closing time was 5:30PM. The lady yelled out from behind the locked glass door that she had to have a restroom break and that there was no one to mind the shop. “Come back in ten minutes” she told Kim and our guest. Kim did. But this time not only was the door still locked now the lights were turned off. Kim knocked at the door and the lady behind the counter yelled back, “We’re closed and I’m just counting up the till so I can’t let you in.” In our attempts to show off our city to our American visitor this small-mindedness was extremely embarrassing for us. The next day Kim went back to complain and the rest is now history.

I remembered God, and was troubled;
I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed.

Psalm 77:3

If you want to be a better complainer you have to learn to become a better carer. The reason many lower ranked complainers don’t get heard much is because they moan rather than care. They make their complaint more about them and their feelings than the other person and how they can be helped.

COMPLAINERS IN THE BIBLE

We see both types of complainers in the pages of Scripture. The children of Israel complained in a moaning fashion when they came out of Egypt into the Sinai Wilderness.

¶ And the people complained in the hearing of the LORD about their misfortunes, and when the LORD heard it, his anger was kindled, and the fire of the LORD burned among them and consumed some outlying parts of the camp.

Numbers 11:1

But we also read of King David complaining to the Lord in prayer and seeking God’s help for his predicament (Psalm 5). And in the closing book of the Bible, we read of King Jesus declaring His complaints against several churches.

I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.

Revelation 2:3-4

A careful reading of the Lord’s complaints in the second and third chapters of The Revelation will reveal a First Class Complainer – because He cares like none other. His complaints were not mere criticisms. His complaints contained hope, and a positive remedy. Ours can too.

FIVE STEPS TO BECOMING A FIRST CLASS COMPLAINER

STEP 1 – Start to ask for permission from the one you want to complain to before making your complaint.

STEP 2 – Start to make your complaints about the behaviour or action of a person, rather than the person (distinguish the behaviour of the person from the person themselves). Don’t ever say, “The problem with you is … !” Rather say, “When you do this [insert particular behaviour here] it irritates me because …. “

STEP 3 – Be more selective in who you complain to. First Class Complainers don’t complain to everyone, rather they complain to the one who needs to hear it and could make the necessary changes.

STEP 4 – Before you complain, be open to the fact that you just might be mistaken. Therefore, ask some clarifying questions to determine whether you have the whole story and have it correct so that your complaint is at least justified.

STEP 5 – Be prepared to help the one your complaining to. As followers of Christ, this at least means that we pray for this person to be blessed before and after we make our complaint.

Follow these steps and it just might save your marriage, your job, your business, and maybe even your life. When I worked for Kmart we were always taught that our best customer was our complaining customer, because they could help us improve our business, whereas the dissatisfied customer who didn’t complain not only didn’t continue shopping with us, but usually told seven other potential customers to stop shopping with us as well.

THE OTHER SIDE TO COMPLAINING

But what if someone complains about you or to you? A wise person will listen to their critics and treat constructive criticism as a gift.

Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you;
reprove a wise man, and he will love you.

Proverbs 9:8

A lot more marriages could be saved if more husbands understood that when their wife complains to them, it has the potential to make them a better husband and give them a better marriage. And perhaps more churches could avoid splits and schisms if everyone put Philippians 2:14-15 into a practice, which would ultimately make our world a better place.

¶ Do everything without complaining and arguing, so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God, shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people.

Philippians 2:14-15

Amen.

Good To Great Churches

What makes a church "good"? For veteran believers the answer is not going to be as simple as what happens on a Sunday. Church Consultants are amazingly in agreement over the answer to question unlike other fields where the aficionados differ wildly. Unwittingly unaware of this expert common knowledge is the average person who looks for a "good" church based on their own ideas. 

At the risk of asking another question before we've settled the original one: What makes a good church "great"? The answer to these sister questions are the "secrets" that many successful business people have used to build their empires but few care to admit are borrowed from what we know about good and great churches.

GOOD CHURCHES HAVE "JE NE SAIS QUA"

From my trainee-pastor experience I am learning that people looking for a church usually say they are looking for the same thing. Sure, they use different words to express it. Acceptance, mateship, caring, loving, new friends, community. Sometimes they don't even use these words although they mean them (French church goers realise this and use the expression 'Je ne sais qua' instead). People wrap them with such spiritual gift-paper as: Biblical, Anointed, Powerful, Free (+teaching/worship).

Church Consultants know this too. Perhaps to maintain the mystique of their profession they of course don't list "loving relationships" straight up. Pretending they know something the rest of us don't their list starts with such traits as "Empowering Leadership", "Holistic Small Groups", "Gift-Matched Ministry", and after a few more, eventually what most church-goers never need a Consultant to tell them about what constitutes a good church - "Loving Relationships".

IS THE TAIL WAGGING THE DOG?

We all know that a "good" church is at least a church where there is an accepting, caring, community where you feel wanted and needed. It doesn't take long to detect whether a church has this or not. It's intertwined in it's culture. And culture is obvious. You can see it in the way people worship together. If they don't "enter in" because they are self-conscious about what the others around them are thinking of them if they expressed their worship (resulting in cold, lifeless, inhibited, drab singing) it says more about that church's love culture than it does about its worship culture. Some clever churches have figured this out and more-or-less get the tail to wag the dog by working on having their music artificially geared toward being highly expressive so that it gives the impression they are "on fire" or "anointed". The same cultural observations can be made about doctrine when we see people within a church fighting between each other over such weighty matters as whose interpretation of the Bible about how many long it took God to create the universe is correct. It looks like a doctrinal issue when in fact it is a love issue. (Doctrinal disputes are rarely primarily about doctrine.)

CHURCH MAGIC

It is universally acknowledged that good churches are loving. But that's not all they are. They do care about doctrine, direction, discipline and development. They take both the front and the back ends of the Great Commission very seriously. They don't just evangelise. They assemble. When good churches assemble something magical happens. The act of assembling brings a church to order. Assembling is like a Roll Call. It invites submission. Submission requires humility. Humility attracts God's grace. Good churches are drenched in God's grace but few believers realise the role that sacred assembling plays in receiving God's grace. The Apostle James tried to tell us this when they spoke of the assembling of a church in love, submission, order and care (James 2:2-9; 4:6-7). The Apostle Peter tried to tell us as well. He wants believers to realise that there is an almost undetected magical transaction of God's grace toward each other when believers assemble.

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace [First Peter 4:10]

LET'S GET CRITICAL

Good churches are easily detected by their love for the Lord and His Word. They talk about God. They draw on His Word. They pray passionately for Christ to have His way in them and through them. When it comes to obeying Jesus: they walk the talk. They clearly look like they fear and respect the Lord, because they do. Their leaders are leading because they are called and gifted to do so. When someone is struggling they offer help. When that help is abused or rejected they keep loving anyway although it may not look like it to their critics. And good churches have their critics. In fact, it is criticism that makes a good church great.

Good churches get criticised. They remain good if they misappropriate the criticism. They become great if they grow from the criticism. (Sometimes the greatest lessons come not from the criticism itself but from learning how to respond to it.) Good-to-Great churches do not shun criticism.

A MERE CHURCH OR A GOOD CHURCH?

Good churches risk become mere churches if they lose the courage of their convictions when criticised (especially by those outside of their church community) and dilute their message or mission. Instead of citing the Bible, they summarise the Bible without being too true to the actual Text ("...as the Bible says..." but they never actually say what the Bible actually says or invite people to look with them at the Bible). The Bible gets reduced to a footnote in their message, rather their message.

ABOUT GREAT CHURCHES
Great churches not only love, not only match people to ministries they have God-given gifts for, not only have small-groups where discipleship and care happens, not only have leaders who are called and gifted to do so, not only work hard to provide an inspirational worship experience -- they stand up under the criticism from the Enemies of our Risen Lord, and persevere in doing the right thing. Great churches are not for the faint-hearted. They must possess the qualities of courage and faithfulness that Christ said was necessary for anyone who would truly follow Him. As a result of this costly way of being the church, great churches are not always large churches.

GREAT CHURCHES ARE "BIG"

All Great churches are "big" churches.  They have a big heart for God. They have a big heart for people. They have a big problem with the way the world is. They know that sin is a big problem. They know that God is a big God. They know that Bible addresses the big issues of life and they aren't afraid to make a big deal about it! They know that God has big plans for them. And they know that when they were a good church, they had their critics and problems. Now they are a great church they have bigger critics and bigger problems. And it is perhaps for this costly reason that too few churches go on to become great.

A BIG SECRET
If you want to be part of good church becoming a great church you must become more critical. But unlike the criticism of the Sanballats of this world (Nehemiah 2:19) your criticism must be constructive, submissive and humble. And sorry to interrupt your Amening at this point but you must also learn to handle criticism positively as well as learning to positively criticise. Successful business leaders will now be wondering why I am hesitating to divulge this truth. In order to build and grow their businesses from good to great they have had to learn this church lesson. "It works!" they are telling us as they wonder why so few believers in good churches make the transition to "greatness". These successful business people, like successful husbands and wives within a marriage, all regard criticism as a gift to help the good become great. They almost welcome criticism and as a result they transform their critics into coaches, evaluators, testers, and advisers who then feel like they are contributors not merely customers.  

Curiously though, although they practice it a lot, Church Consultants never list "criticism" and its facets as one of the defining characteristics of either a good church or a great church. But maybe that just goes to show Consultants don't always know what trainee pastors have learned from successful marriages, businesses and churches.

Pastor Andrew Corbett
17th February 2012, Legana Tasmania