Restoring Kingdom Builders

There is a plague that continues to make its way through Christian churches in our day: the forced termination of pastors.   The same church board that carefully checks out a prospective pastor over time discards that same pastor overnight.  The same people that act like loving Christians in hiring a pastor act like Satan’s messengers in forcing him to leave.  The same individuals who want a pastor to meet biblical qualifications before he’s called use crass political games to get rid of him.

And when a pastor is forced to leave a church, there are usually people who do their best to destroy his reputation.

This is an excerpt from a book I’m writing about what happened to me – and what happens to my fellow pastors – when a group in the church decides you need to leave for good:

When I first became a pastor in my late twenties, I was shocked at how many pastors in our district were forced to leave their ministries because they were opposed by a handful of antagonists.  As a rookie pastor, I met on a monthly basis with our district minister and other area pastors for lunch, and whenever a pastor was forced to resign, I wanted to know why it happened and how he was faring, especially since some of those pastors were my friends.  The dominant impression I received at those ministerial gatherings was that those ministers were forced to resign their positions because the pastor did something wrong and the lay people – usually the church board – reluctantly handed out the treatment he deserved.

For example, I once heard about a pastor in our district who told his congregation in frustration that they “didn’t give a damn” about a certain issue, but because this pastor used the word “damn” in a public meeting (not a church service), the person who relayed this news to me believed that the pastor had disqualified himself from office.  In other words, if a Baptist pastor can’t control his tongue in public, then he shouldn’t be a pastor at all.  But I wanted to know why this pastor used such strong language in public.  Was this the first time he had ever done that?  What might have caused him to use such language?  When I first came into the district, this pastor took a special interest in me.  One Sunday morning, he called me at home just to pray with me over the phone.  He seemed to be a good man, and if he became so incensed that he used strong language inside the four walls of his church, then maybe he had a good reason.  Maybe a few less than spiritual individuals in the church pushed him over the edge.  But in district circles, we rarely heard about unhealthy congregations.  Instead, the implication was that if a man was forced out of the pastorate, you could trace his departure to something he did or said.  In essence, he was a loser.

So early in my ministerial career, I learned how the district (and by implication our denomination) viewed pastors who experienced forced termination.  In general, the pastor became the scapegoat and was blamed for whatever conflict occurred.  Upon hearing the news that another colleague had bitten the dust, I would call that pastor and let him know that I cared for him.  I would also ask him about the factors that conspired to force him to resign, and every man I called was transparent enough to tell me.  Then I’d ask this question: “How many other pastors from the district have called to express their concern for you?”  The answer was always, “No one has called me.  You’re the only one.”  As I recall, in my first several years as a pastor in our district, seven pastoral colleagues were forced to leave their churches, and every one told me I was the only one to call.  That information broke my heart.  I later did a study of pastors who had served inside our district and discovered that out of sixty pastors that had left their churches, fifty were no longer connected to the denomination.  I felt so strongly about this issue that I wrote an article for our denominational magazine entitled “Who Cares For Lost Shepherds?”

Why don’t pastors seem to demonstrate concern for their colleagues who experience forced termination?  Maybe pastors have enough on their plates inside their own congregations to reach out to their peers.  Maybe some pastors are better leaders or teachers or administrators than they are shepherds and wouldn’t know what to say to a colleague undergoing crisis.  Maybe some pastors just don’t want to become embroiled in another church’s issues.  It also might be true that a lot of pastors know very few of their colleagues.  But my guess is that many pastors don’t want to associate with their terminated brethren because they are stigmatized as losers.  In other words, if you’re a pastor and you’re forced out of your church, the perception is that you are either incompetent, guilty of immorality, or don’t know how to play church politics properly.  There is something wrong with you, not the church, and in rare cases, that’s true.  But it’s not always true.  Jesus wasn’t crucified because He was unhealthy but because the political and religious leaders of His day were spiritually dysfunctional.  Paul wasn’t chased out of European cities because something was wrong with him or his message but because his hearers were hostile toward the gospel.  It’s popular to say, “If the team isn’t winning, fire the coach,” but some pastors have led their churches to growth and yet are forced to leave anyway because the old-timers feel insignificant as the church expands – and they wish to feel powerful once again.  While there are always pastors who deserve termination, the great majority who are forced to leave their churches have not done anything worthy of banishment.  But whether or not a pastor deserves termination, the church board should always treat him with dignity and respect.

Years ago, I sat with a pastor friend at a restaurant.  My friend had been forced to leave his former church exactly one year beforehand.  His daughter had been falsely accused of something she hadn’t done and the pastor chose to resign to protect her.  (The truth came out sometime later.)  The “clergy killer” in his congregation was both a church board member as well as member of the trustee board in our district.  Guess whose story got out first?  One year later, my friend had no idea why he had been mistreated so badly.  What had he done wrong?  I gave him a book called Forced Termination by Brooks Faulkner, and after reading it, my friend told me that he now understood what had happened to him.  But how much did our district help him?  According to my friend, they didn’t help him at all.

Several months ago, I was having a meal with a pastor, and I asked him if he knew how an old pastor friend of mine was doing, and this pastor told me that my friend left his church “because he was having some problems.”  The implication was that my friend left because of problems he had, not problems that were lodged inside the church family.  The pastor who told me that my friend “had problems” probably figured I would never reach out to my friend and discover his side of the situation.  Pastoral reputations can be ruined with a few key phrases or awkward pauses.

In my opinion, we can handle these situations much, much better.