A couple of weeks ago, I started talking about the shortage of pastors that many US denominations appear to be facing. I then chased the rabbit of some sermon plagiarism accusations and spent some time on that subject. Shortly after that, the accusations that spurred the discussion then blew into a multi-church semi-brawl where lots energy got spent by people on social media trying to cost other people their jobs and reputations.
Most of them were pastors or church elders who also work as pastors.
Now, this one was a public (social-media-based) fight that played out over the course of a few weeks, although it was connected to some other tempestuous batches of social media interaction at times over the last few years. But I think sometimes we are so enamored and frustrated by the current state of public discourse that we forget, rumor mills and character assassination are nothing new.
In fact, if you grew up in church, you likely saw a lot of it. People would get angry over issues, then get apologies, then claim to have forgiven but not really act on that. It’s not uncommon among pastors to note that churches may forget, but they rarely forgive. People will forget why they’re mad, but they won’t forget being mad.
And you know who saw that the whole time? The next generation of church members, where church leaders come from. Those kids you thought were oblivious to the rapid rotation of Sunday School teachers? Yeah, they noticed how stressed each one of them got before it was time for someone new. Or how they’d go from a new teacher who was excited to have them and then it would time for a person who was irritable and not good with kids, but had an important spouse or parent in the church.
They saw the politics. They saw the youth workers that the church get chewed up and spit out because teens that weren’t from church backgrounds dared to show up in shorts on a Sunday night. They saw lies, deception, gossip, slander, backbiting…
And that’s what they began to understand the church to be. It was a place where the carpet was too holy to risk chewing gum and where you dressed up to pretend you were something that you weren’t.
Then, they read their Bibles. They listened to the Holy Spirit. They even listened to some of those church leaders who said things like, “The Church is not a building, it’s the people…”
As they read and listened, they heard the call of God to serve His Church and be workers in His Kingdom…so they went into other career fields and started small house churches. They taught school and small group Bible studies.
But they didn’t add to the Annual Church Profile a “surrendered to the ministry” statistic for the association to look good. They didn’t go to seminary. They didn’t put their life into keeping people happy whose version of Christianity came about in 1910 and never changed, especially when challenged by preachers like Martin Luther King or Martin Niemoller or Gladys Aylward or Lottie Moon or a thousand others who pled that God’s people give their lives not for cultural preservation or institutional advancement but for the sake of the Kingdom of God and God’s agenda: to seek and save the lost; to demonstrate God’s justice and righteousness.
To live as citizens of a Kingdom with totally different priorities.
Most of the people God has called to ministry in the last two decades heard Him and answered. They just didn’t choose to serve in churches that were in conflict to the Kingdom.