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Phileo Prayer for Godbloggers

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Prayer power!Having burned out my brain on the epic post from yesterday, my thoughts turned to simpler things today.

The Godblogosphere seethes with unhealthy anger. I suspect I foment more than my share of it here and in some of the comments I leave elsewhere. I aim to be as level-headed as I can be, but sometimes the passions run amok.

Still, unchecked fury doesn’t get any of us closer to the image of Christ.

So I was thinking, what if we consider a better response the next time we want to drop explosive missives just to teach some minor heretic bloggers a point or two about a divisive issue (that hasn’t been resolved in 2,000 of Church history by holier people than us). Instead of leaving a steaming, radioactive crater in their comment sections, we could e-mail them and request three specific needs in their lives we could pray for.

I suspect that if we all did this for four months, not only would the Godblogosphere be a much healthier place, our own souls might grow as well. Who knows what precious truth might come out of the experience?

The Pastor: Not One of Us

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Blood on the collar?Does the title of this post bother you? It bothers me.

I’ve known pastors in my life who crashed and burned. They flamed-out, transgressed, or a combination of both. In each case, he faded into the ether like some double-agent, either by choice or by his ex-congregation expunging his name like he’d never been in the pulpit.

No vulture-like obsession with the carrion once known as Ted Haggard washed over me, but reports that he’s hightailed it out of Colorado Springs still caught my eye. Made me shake my head, too, but not for the reasons one might think. Everywhere one looks in Evangelicalism, the story’s the same: pastor falls, congegation responds by acting like he never existed, and he’s out of town on the next red-eye to Obscurity.

Time and again the unintended message we Evangelicals send to the world shows that we don’t truly bury our wounded, as goes the common in-joke. Instead, we act is if they were never part of us to begin with. “Our wounded? No, someone else’s wounded.”

You encounter a lot of handwringing in some sectors of the American Church from those upset at a lack of church discipline. Why is it then that this group typically consists of those who fire their fallen pastor, kick him while he’s down, and run him out of town on a rail? They decry the fact the Church can’t seem to discipline, but is it “discipline” for them to toss their pastor’s carcass on the burn pile and wipe their hands clean of the whole mess? What kind of church discipline is that?

The way we operate in American Evangelicalism forces our pastors into a no-man’s land of fellowship. We may crow about our renowned community, our loving fellowship, and on and on, but if we were honest with ourselves we’d have to admit that holds true for everyone BUT the pastor. He’s different. He’s not truly one of us.

Part of the problem comes from our shocking inability to raise up pastors within our own congregations. I would venture to guess that at least 90 percent of churches are pastored by the product of some other church’s educational system. He didn’t grow up in the church he pastors. Has no real familial ties to the church, either. He’s already an outsider from the second he takes the call. This disconnection of history and relationship only further aggravates the tendency to affix him to the pyre the second a problem arises.

In some churches, we’ve also developed this wacky idea that the pastor is Wholly Other, like some enlightened paraclete who transcended to a lofty plane inhabited by the rarefied likes of Paul, Moses, Peter, and Elijah. His decision to leave Abraham’s Bosom to visit us poor mortals is almost shocking in its humble bravura. So when he finally stumbles like a normal human being, we—like some cannibal tribe no longer impressed by our white-fleshed gods who descended to us out of the belly of a metal bird—cook the poor sucker and eat him.

But any quick perusal of the New Testament makes it pretty clear that the Lord Jesus wanted his Church to be brothers, not lords over each other. The pastor is not first among equals; we’ve made the mistake of equating him with Christ Himself. No, the pastor’s a fallen human just like you and just like me.

In that case, why is our discipline for pastors so radically different from what we mete out to others in our congregations?

Perhaps we need an adjustment of how we view pastors. Not that we hold them to some slack standard, but that our dedication to restoration match our swiftness to discipline.

Restore a fallen pastor? What a novel idea! I’d love to see it happen. In truth, I’ve never seen it happen. I’ve seen pastors blackballed from their denominations, but I’ve never truly witnessed one restored to his own congregation.

It shouldn’t be that rare. In fact, it should be the norm—at least the way I read the Scriptures.

As long as we’ve got this pedestal we put Church leaders on, we’ll continue to see assaults on the pedestal and the persons atop it. What happens when the whole thing comes crashing down should be something we address in a healing community. Instead, we heat up the tar and feathers. No wonder these guys vanish like smoke.

Sure, once in a while a real con artist dons a clerical collar, but I suspect that most guys who get into the ministry do so because they genuinely love the Lord and love other people. If all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, then there’s not a guy preaching today who’s not guilty of something. If we blackballed them all, we wouldn’t have a Church. Still, people line up to cast the first stone…

In the end, the messages we send to those in the pews when we run guys off like this should cause us some real soul-searching. I could post on those messages for the next week, but I’ll leave you to think about the between-the-lines preaching we do to the impressionable in cases like these.

Oh, well, why not just one: Don’t you ever mess up or we’ll treat you like toxic waste, too. Doesn’t sound very Christ-like, does it?

I’d love to see a Church that treats pastors as fellow laborers and saints, not grand exalted poobahs. A Church that deals wisely with a pastor’s sin, rather than marking him like Cain before he’s driven off into the wilderness. But to get there, we need a total paradigm shift in how we view THE MINISTRY or else we’ll perpetually fall into the mode of shooting first and asking questions later.

Love Your Lord? Love Your Staff!

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I once worked in professional ministry.

There, I confessed. 😉

People paid me to show the light of Christ to others. And while I’ll add to the lament that the pay seemed to amount to little more than the change from a vending machine, it was pay nonetheless.

Where there’s one paid employee, there’s usually more. I worked in camping ministry for several years, Your typical summer camp staffon staffs of about a dozen to almost three hundred—a half dozen staff experiences in all, split between mainline Protestant camps and Evangelical.

If I learned one truth during my tenure in professional ministry, it’s you can’t be a Christian organization and not have some kind of hierarchy of ministry focus. In my years as a paid Christian camping professional, I saw two different ministry focus hierarchies:

1. Our ministry focus is on God first, people who fall into our ministry objective second, and staff third.

2. Our ministry focus is on God first, staff second, and people who fall into our ministry objective third.

Let me tell you about the places I worked that employed that first hierarchy of ministry…

When you work at a Christian ministry that puts everyone else before staff, you discover that about halfway through your ministry objective timeline the well’s run dry. So much time has been spent pouring the life of the staff into the lives of the people they’re ministering to that in a few months time your staff’s inner lives resemble the Sahara Desert—during a drought. And with a plague of locusts, too.

Leaders of ministries who follow a staff third ministry model succeed in doing one thing exceptionally well: creating ministry burnouts.

The problem for leaders comes from always expecting staff to pour themselves out, while not lifting a finger to refill their earthen vessels. In the end, everything about the ministry fails. It may have started ministering by the Spirit, but when people dry up—and they will in this environment—they start ministering with the arm of flesh. And we all know what that means: failure.

One of the camps I worked for had a nationally-recognized name, multi-million dollar budget, and several hundred people going through its gates every week. But they also had a bizarre curfew on Sundays during the summer that made it nearly impossible for summer staff to make it to church and back under the curfew. As a result, a lot of staff had no chance to worship.

I worked on year-round staff. Because of some special skills I possessed, I transitioned from my regular duties into the summer duties and found myself bound by the curfew. My response? Start an in-camp worship service for staff on the one night of the week we all had free.

Seems reasonable enough.

But you’d be astonished at how much persecution came down on our worship—from the camp leaders! No, I wasn’t an ordained minister, but this was a Protestant camp right? Martin Luther, priesthood of all believers? And yes, we did offer communion, too. Or was that wrong, as well?

Honestly, I felt like the leader of an underground church right there in Evangelical land. But you know what? The folks who came to that worship service left filled. And those who begged off and complained stayed empty and later burned out.

The worship service persecution was just one of many ways that camp kept pouring out its staff and giving nothing back. The list went on and on. In fact, it could be the poster camp for how to grind up and spit out a staff.

And they LIVED for the staff third hierarchy. Practically engraved it on the walls of every cabin in the camp.

I worked at another Evangelical camp (see the trend?) that had strange rules in place, such as A-level staff couldn’t associate with B-level staff outside camp. I had no idea such a lamebrained rule existed until I told the camp director in passing that I was planning on taking the mildly-retarded camp janitor, who had no friends on staff that I could tell, out for an ice cream so he could get away from camp and talk with a real person. From the pummeling I received for merely attempting to minister to another staff person, you would’ve thought the whole idea was part of a scheme to murder the guy!

The sum of all the rules at that camp added up to a legalistic tangle of nonsense that proved…well, anti-human. In time, I feared I might be subjected to forty lashes minus one for ministering to the wrong person. Or the right person in the wrong place. Or the wrong way. At the wrong time, or—oh, the heck with it.

Conversely, the mainline camps I worked for—you know, liberals—went for the staff second approach. Their leadership perpetually worked to meet the spiritual, mental, physical, and social needs of the staff. They paid better. They threw special parties for staff. They celebrated milestones for everyone on staff, even the summer-only folks. They routinely asked each person on staff how his or her relationship with the Lord was going. They treated staff like real people and not underlings.

And they actually allowed staff to minister. To the visitors. To the other staff. To anyone.

Their success came from understanding that people cannot be perpetually poured out without something being poured back in. Yes, people can have a devotional life that provides some of that refreshing, but anyone in leadership knows that real leadership means giving something back.

Let’s be honest here. The amount of personal time we devote to interacting with the actual subjects of our ministry may pale compared with the amount of time we spend with other staff. Any wise person leading a ministry realizes that the lives most likely to be changed by the ministry are those who actually work for it. Yes, a ministry that works with the poor may very well touch the lives of the poor to whom they minister, but it’s far more likely that the ministry will forever change the staff that works in that ministry.

And I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s true for every single ministry on the face of this planet since the Day of Pentecost.

If you’re the leader of a ministry (doesn’t matter what kind), my charge to you is to lay down your life for your staff. Christ laid His down for the ones who follow Him. If your ministry model has been staff third, shred it—now. If you don’t, rather than building your staff, you might very well be creating burnouts who never darken the door of any ministry again. If you don’t believe me, I’ve got the e-mail addresses of a couple hundred ministry burnouts I can send you.

If you love the Lord, then love your staff. Show it in practical, tangible, life-changing ways. The Lord demonstrated that kind of love to His disciples, the ones He called friends. We can do no less for those people with whom we minister.