I have weighed posting this. I realize that it will sever my relationship with the evangelical church fully and finally, and I realize the horrific cost if I am wrong. But watching the growing elephant in the room, I feel that I must speak, even at the risk of being wrong.
I have listened to numerous pastors lament declining membership, declining contributions within their churches. And always, always the blame has been cast on the congregants. They're not guided by faith, they're putting money before God, they're putting the world before church; I've heard them all. But I am going to tell you from firsthand experience why I believe with every fiber in my being that you are wrong, and that the problems emanate from the front of the church, rather than the back.
First, the most fundamental role of leadership is accountability. Satan cannot steal from a properly tended flock. Pastors have listened too much to experts that focus more on MBAs than they do on their relationships with Christ. Experts who make Jesus out to be a CEO and tell you to cut your least profitable elements.
They will tell you that those who walk away will walk away anyway, and that they are merely malcontents. They will tell you to cut the least profitable elements of your ministry. They will tell you that marketing and multimedia make a church.
But as the old rule goes, nobody has to advertise toilet paper. It is a needed product, and people WILL find it. The same goes for the church, if you are properly tending your flock.
People are hurting like no time in recent history. For many Americans the recession never ended, and for many more, wages have lost ground against inflation. You can judge them for their iGadgets and their cars, but the truth is, in an increasingly connected world, many of those gadgets are necessary, and since the only way for many folks to buy a car is through payments, they are buying newer cars in the hopes their cars can outlast their payments. There are too many variables for you to make those judgments, so don't.
Jesus railed AGAINST the status quo; He spoke out AGAINST the exploitation of the poor, yet modern ministers are enabling it. The very best seats in the church go to the biggest donors, and the church has done so much to dismantle social safety nets and shame the poor that it is becoming very clear who too many of these ministers are working for.
Want to find the problem with church leadership? Get up, walk down the hall and look in your bathroom mirror. You will find it. And I am saying this as much about myself as you, for I have known this for many years, but remained silent because I hoped at one point to actually be able to be a leader within the church and make change. I did not know that there was an entire system in place to keep people like me from ever inheriting the mantle of ministry.
We come from a church of simple faith, a church that didn't busy itself with political endorsements. A church that realized the role of the church and the role of the state had conflicting interests, and that taught its members to respect their authority, not to rebel against it, and certainly not to seize government land and force standoffs. A church that despised injustice.
Today's church leaders are as bought and sold as our politicians. Instead of guiding the church by faith, they have guided it by business principles. I understand that; it's hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel sometimes. But as I have discovered in my personal life, sometimes you have to believe.
I am closing this article with a purpose: I have wrestled long and hard against what I have to do. Today, I am officially beginning my personal ministry (appropriate, as I am writing this on the first day of Lent). I know the road ahead of me will come with many bumps, and I know that I will fall at least as often as I walk, but I know with God's guidance I will get there.
The service to the poor in our community has been abandoned to the "liberal" church, and they have been too long despised for doing the work that Jesus commanded. I intend to be about that business, and that alone, for as long as God allows me to remain on this planet. I am renouncing any material comforts beyond what is needed to communicate and to continue to do what I am called to do, and I am building my ministry without walls. I'm no longer complaining about it, I am setting about fixing it.
And you are free to join me. I hope you will. But if not, I will not wait for you to join, or to lead. I am open to instruction, I am open to Godly correction. But I am not open to anything or anyone that will derail me on this course. I will no longer be the problem. And I hope my words will inspire you in that direction as well.
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