A
Pastors Thoughts
The
following is from an email I received last week from Tom Lamb (http://beyondcamp.net
beyondcamp@clear.net.nz ). It is some reflections
on ‘church’ by a US Baptist minister, written in an email to Tom.
Tom,
Thanks
for the article and your willingness to share it with me. I also went to your
website and read some of your other articles. I agree with your observations
about the state of the modern institutionalized church. If you would be so kind
as to indulge me for a moment, I'd like to make a few observations of my
own about the "system" as you call it.
First,
let me confess that I am a pastor (I pastor a Baptist church in the
Midwestern region of the USA).
Let me also say that I am not apposed to the idea of church. It is the body of
Christ and the bride of Christ. He loved her and shed His blood for
her. I especially love the people God has entrusted to my care; they are
wonderful; I have no gripes with them personally. What I am frustrated with is
what the church has become. It has gone from being a vibrant, home-based,
interpersonal, life-giving body (New Testament church), to an exhausting, often
lifeless, institution-based, impersonal organization (today).
I
am not saying that nothing worthwhile ever happens in local churches; that
would be an inaccurate statement. I have been blessed in many ways over
the years through local church involvement. I just have many questions and
frustrations about the way church is done, especially here in America today. I detect from your
articles that organized churches in your country suffer from similar maladies.
Anyway, here are the gut-level honest frustrations of an institutional
insider: (note: from here on I will refer to the church as the
"institution')
- As a pastor I often feel like
the guardian of an institution rather than a participant in a revolution.
The advancement of the kingdom
of God, the
spreading of the gospel, and the making of true disciples is often lost
behind the seemingly endless busy work that must be done in order for the
institution to continue to function. Everything gets bogged down in red
tape and institutional bureaucracy. Rather than being on mission with
Christ, the institution spends most of its time, energy, and resources
promoting and preserving itself; i.e., keeping the "machine"
oiled and running. I often wonder how many poor, oppressed, and spiritually
lost people we could help in Jesus' name; how much human suffering we
could alleviate; how many missionary endeavors we could undertake; and
ultimately how many disciples of Jesus we could make around the world
if we moved our gatherings back into homes, fired all the professional
staff, sold all our institutional buildings, and pooled the proceeds
together. (Shhhh..don't
tell anyone that the pastor was actually thinking something like
that)!
- As a pastor I am expected to be
a fund raiser, vision caster, motivator, organizer, and administrator. It
recently occurred to me: "I am not a shepherd,
I am the CEO of a corporation called 'church." And my
success as a CEO is often measured by how large my congregation is, how
fast it is growing, how much money we have, and how fast we are building
new buildings. Unfortunately none of these things are within my control,
so you can imagine the frustration. And of course within the congregation
there are the whiners, complainers, critics, and pathological antagonizers who love to torment institutional
leaders. Oh, and don't forget the church politics, unresolved
interpersonal conflicts, and denominational garbage that goes on. By the
way, I read last week that 20,000 pastors leave the ministry forever every
month in the USA!
I wonder why? Hmmm.....
- As a pastor I am weary of
continually trying to motivate spiritually lethargic, apathetic (and
probably lost) people, to no avail. I'm convinced that our churches are
literally filled with deceived people who equate being a Christian
with institutional involvement, i.e, "I
am a good Christian because I am active in the institution."
There is no real life transformation going on; no submission to God; no
being conformed to the image of Christ; no daily spiritual
disciplines; no exercising on one's spiritual
gifts; just attendance at the institution (and sometimes
nominal attendance at that). And because of the way the institution
is structured there is no accountability mechanism in place to address the
issue with them. This is nothing but deception from the enemy. Jesus said
that many faithful churchgoers are going to wind up in hell, much to their
shock and dismay (Matthew 7:21-23). It saddens me more than you know.
People say they love Jesus yet deny Him with their lifestyles. The
hypocrisy is unnerving. They want to call themselves followers of Christ,
they just don't want to do what He said (Luke 6:46). I'm really not trying
to be self-righteous (I'm not perfect either). It's just that, as a
pastor, it breaks my heart when people live under a deception that brings
reproach on the name of Christ, destroys their lives, and
jeopardizes their eternal destiny. How did we get here? One
problem I see it that this modern-day monolithic institution called
"church" has all but lost the ability to get
people together regularly in small fellowships in intimate settings,
where they gather around the Scriptures, encourage one another, pray for
one another, and hold one another accountable. It seems to me it
would be very difficult to live a double life and be a hypocrit
in such an intimate setting.
- In many American
"institutions" Sunday worship services have degenerated
into little more than slick, high-tech entertainment designed to
manipulate the emotions. The "auditorium" is constructed so that
the audience (congregation) can sit and be entertained by the
professional performers (singers, dancers, actors, and speaker) up on
the "stage" or platform. Preaching in many of these places has
reduced the Almighty to a Genie in a bottle and a cosmic therapist. The
focus is man-centered (give sinners whatever they want so they will
like us and hopefully accept Jesus). If I read
my Bible correctly trying to make sinners like us is both
unrealistic and futile (See Matthew 10:22; John 15:18-19; 2 Timothy 3:12).
When God instructed the Hebrews concerning how His tabernacle was to be
constructed He did not say to them, "Go survey the Philistines and
Jebusites and find out what they would like in a
tabernacle and then build it that way." No. Because He is holy,
He gave them strict instructions as to how HE wanted the tabernacle
to be built and to function. When the early church was
forming they did not survey the Greeks, Romans, pagans, or Gnostics
to find out what they might like in a church. No. They were consumed with
radically loving God, radically loving one another, and walking in the
power of the Holy Spirit. They were too busy being the church to
worry about how to do church. It was about substance, not
style. They had no institutions, no buildings and no bureaucracy.
They had no professional church growth consultants or mega
church growth conferences or marketing strategies or
seeker-sensitive services, yet somehow God added to their number
daily those who were being saved (Acts 2:47). What a shock by today's standards!
What can we learn from this?
- It seems to me that after 2,000
years of church history we have shaped, organized, and structured the
church and its practices according to the traditions of men rather than
the Word of God. So much of who we are and what we do is not prescribed in
Scripture. I understand that as cultures change the church has to adapt in
some ways. But we've become something I can't imagine God intended. How
did we get here? As Greco-Roman culture overtook the early church, and
as Constantine
later united church and state (leading to what would eventually become the
Roman Catholic church), we lost much of
what early believers understood about what it meant to be the
church. Regular gatherings of believers were moved from the
homes to the cathedral; ministry was taken away from the common man as a
sharp distinction was made between laity and clergy; an
complex ecclesiastical hierarchy was instituted; the Bible was taken out
of the hands of the common man and entrusted to the priest. All this
had devastating ramifications. And the Protestant Reformation did not
restore what was lost. We've never recovered. Unfortunately, we are what
we are. And there doesn't seem to be much freedom to fix this. If you
start trying to color outside the lines of tradition you are labeled a
nut, a heretic, a troublemaker, or a cultist. As you well know, the
Radical Pilgrim pays dearly for departing from the status quo.
I
could go on, but I will spare you. All I'm saying is,
I wholeheartedly agree that the modern institutionalized, westernized,
monolithic, materialistic, consumeristic church
has evolved into something that is incapable of being what Jesus called His
body to be. And frankly, I don't see the situation changing. I have recently
had a rather sinister thought, however. Intolerance for Christians is
increasing at a rapid pace in the USA as American
culture has succumb to postmodernism (this
represents persecution from within). Radical Islam is trying with all its might
to take over the world. These nut cases want to kill everyone on the planet who
does not embrace Islam, especially Jews and Christians. They have now declared
Jihad against the "West" on every continent on earth (this
represents persecution from without). If the persecution against Christians in
America got severe enough at some time in the future, might this force the
church back into a 1st century kind of situation? Would we have to abandon our
buildings and structures and go underground, meeting once again in homes? I
pray fervently that it doesn't come to this...
Please
don't interpret my words as those of an angry, embittered pastor. As I said, I
love the church (Jesus loved the church and it seems to me that if I love Him I
will love what He loves). I don't mean to insult His bride. I just
think we could do church a better way. >From reading your articles it sounds
like you guys have discovered one way to do it better. Thank you
for your time.
Blessings!
A
Radical Pilgrim wannabe