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Archive for May, 2011

Criticizing Pastors

Posted in Church Conflict, Conflict with the Pastor, Current Church Issues on May 4, 2011| 8 Comments »

My wife and I recently visited a church that meets in a high school.  When we drove into the parking lot, we had no idea what to expect.  As we walked toward the front door, we wondered: What’s this church all about?  What kind of service will they have?  Will the pastor’s message be something we can relate to?

At the church we’ve been attending for the past ten months, people arrive early to get a good seat.  That wasn’t necessary at this church, so the place largely felt empty until well into the worship time.  When the service did start, worship was led by a guy wearing a cap who told us that those on the stage were “stoked” that we were present.  Although the worship leader and his band sounded okay, there wasn’t as much dignity during the worship time as I would have liked.

When the pastor got up to speak (at 11:02 am – I always time the preacher), he looked like a friend from my former church.  His message was a bit paradoxical to me.  While his written notes were intricate and extensive, he didn’t spend much time interpreting Scripture and spent most of his time making rambling applications.

At one point during the message, the pastor asked how many people were watching the NBA Playoffs.  I think three people raised their hands.  (If the Phoenix Suns aren’t in the playoffs around here, basketball doesn’t exist.)  He then asked if there were any Lakers’ fans in the house.  Even though I am a HUGE Lakers’ fan, I kept my hand down.  (I’m a low-profile kind of guy.)  But my wife instantly raised her hand and went, “YEAH!”  She was the only one in the whole place with her hand up.

Oh, no.

The pastor wanted to launch into an anti-Lakers tirade (evidently quite a popular pasttime in Phoenix churches), but after looking at Kim, he said, “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything.  It looks like her husband can take me.”  (I looked that way because I knew he was about to disparage my second-favorite all-time sports team.)  The pastor then criticized Kobe Bryant for something and moved on.  As a first-timer, I did not like being singled out, but what can you do when your wife expresses her undying support for your team in front of strangers?

The pastor’s message lasted slightly more than an hour.  When Kim and I got into the car, we quickly discussed the church and the message for a few brief moments, and then we talked about something else.  We haven’t talked about that experience since.  We instinctively knew that church was not for us.

However … it perfectly met the needs of the people who attend it.  They absolutely love their church and their pastor, as well they should.  There was obviously a connection between the shepherd and his flock.  It wasn’t one that I understood, but it was palpably real.  After all, the guy has been there forever.

Based on our little experience, let me share a few comments about criticizing pastors:

First, find a church – and a pastor – you like.  When a pastor stands in front of a congregation week after week, he can’t hide who he is.  It just emerges.  Sooner or later, you’ll learn how he relates to God, his wife, and his kids.  You’ll learn what he thinks about politics and social issues.  (And the Lakers.)  You’ll even learn how he feels about himself.  Discerning listeners could write a brief biography of their pastor after hearing him speak for a while.

To remain under a pastor’s teaching ministry, you have to like and respect him.  You don’t have to agree with everything he says.  But if you cringe every time he preaches, then find a church where you’re comfortable.  Because if you stay in a church where you don’t like the pastor, you will inevitably tell others about your feelings.  If you tell 50 people, 48 might disagree with you, but even if only two agree, you’re starting to form a critic’s coalition – and you’ll start lobbying for more members.  (And that’s how conflicts begin.)  Although I’m sure I could be friends with the pastor I mentioned, I didn’t resonate with his preaching.  If I stayed, I’d become a critic, and that wouldn’t be healthy for either one of us.  So I need to visit enough churches until I find a pastor I can listen to consistently.

Second, pray for your pastor before he preaches.  It is amazing how prayer can turn critics into supporters.  If you pray for your pastor’s teaching ministry during the week – and especially right before he speaks – you’ll have formed an alliance with God on your pastor’s behalf.  Rather than nodding off during the message, you’ll eagerly listen for God’s voice.  Rather than picking apart the pastor’s logic, you’ll be rooting for him to make sense.  Praying frequently and fervently for your pastor will not only make you a better listener – it will make him a better preacher.

When I first started preaching as a young man, a group of people always stood around me and prayed for me right before the message.  At times, I sensed God’s power coming upon me during those prayer times.  I became more energized, passionate, and courageous  because I knew that those who prayed for me were interceding on my behalf.  When Aaron and Hur held up Moses’ arms in Exodus 17, Israel prevailed in battle over the Amalekites.  When the two men took a break, and Moses’ arms fell to his side in exhaustion, the Amalekites gained momentum.  Pastors can only hold up their arms for so long.  They need solid supporters who will stand next to them and hold them up before the Lord.  If you’ll do that for your pastor, I guarantee that he will preach better – and you’ll criticize him less.  You’re invested.

Third, realize your pastor is all too human.  He will screw up on occasion.  He will screw up in his preaching, his leadership, and his pastoring.  Count on it.  He may execute his duties flawlessly 97.3% of the time, but he will goof up – sometimes badly.

A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a memorial service for a man I did not know well.  The service was scheduled to be held in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.  I had prepared my remarks well in advance and was positive I knew the time the service started.  So I casually made my way over to the local retirement center, thinking I’d be early.  But when I entered the public assembly room, I discovered I was half an hour late instead … and everybody was waiting for me.  (And not all of them were happy.)  I know why I was late: the wife of the deceased kept changing the time over the  phone, and I latched onto one of the times without double-checking.  (My fault.)  Naturally, I apologized to everyone present.  But I didn’t look prepared that day, and I was a sitting duck for criticism.

If you were in that room, would you have forgiven your pastor or criticized him to others?  If the deceased was your husband or father, would you have been tough on him?  If the pastor was late to every memorial service, okay, he’s got a problem, but if he’s only late to one in his life – and this was the only one in my three decades plus career – it’s an anomaly, not a pattern.  (By the way, the wife of the deceased told me that she was just glad I made it, and our friendship never missed a beat.)  When a pastor makes a mistake, and he apologizes for it, forgive him and let it go or else you’re the one in the wrong.

Finally, keep most criticism to yourself.  The pastor of the church Kim and I have been attending is a terrific preacher.  He’s prepared, passionate, relevant, and courageous.  But he’s been letting someone else preach more recently, and while this person appeals to a younger crowd, my wife and I don’t enjoy listening to him.  Instead of interpreting a passage accuarately and then doing creative applications, he prides himself on doing creative interpretations – some of which do violence to the text as well as the history of the Christian faith.  We’re both so uncomfortable listening to him that we plan to check out other churches on the Sundays he preaches.

I don’t know this pastor, and I will probably never meet him, so I haven’t earned the right to criticize him to his face.  While I don’t think he’s a heretic, he’s an emerging church guy … and that’s all I’m going to say right now.  His views of Scripture, Jesus, and the church are vastly different than my own.

We won’t lobby to have him removed.  (Nobody would listen to us anyway.)  We won’t share our feelings with our friends.  (Unless he starts teaching heresy.)  So instead of insisting that he leave (and how selfish that would be), we plan to look for a pastor and a church whose vision and preaching we can fully support.

What are your thoughts on criticizing pastors?  I would love to hear them.  Thanks!

Check out our website at www.restoringkingdombuilders.org  You’ll find Jim’s story, recommended resources on conflict, and a forum where you can ask questions about conflict situations in your church.

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Charging Leaders with Wrongdoing

Posted in Church Conflict, Conflict with the Pastor, Pastoral Termination on May 2, 2011| 5 Comments »

I’ve been writing this blog about pastor-congregational conflict issues over the past five months.  Every day, I’m given the terms that people type into their search engines to find the blog, and the top two phrases have been “how to terminate a pastor” and “facing your accusers.”  Evidently there is a lot of confusion among Christians as to how to handle the correction and termination of a pastor.  (And pastors don’t help because they rarely teach on this issue.)  Take a moment to imagine how differently pastors would be treated if every church took Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 19:15-21 seriously:

“One witness is not enough to convict a man accused of any crime or offense he may have committed.  A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.  If a malicious witness takes the stand to accuse a man of a crime, the two men involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priests and the judges who are in office at the time.  The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against his brother, then do to him as he intended to do to his brother.  You must purge the evil from among you.  The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you.  Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

Please notice several things about this passage:

First, an accuser must be a witness.  An individual had to see someone committing a crime before they could report it to the authorities.  You were not allowed to say, “Well, I heard that Joshua stole a cow” or “some of my friends told me that Seth assaulted the high priest.”  If you reported what you heard from someone else, that might make you a prosecutor but not a witness.  There’s a big difference.  You had to witness the events firsthand for someone to be tried.  If you didn’t, you wouldn’t even be heard.  J. A. Thompson notes in his commentary on Deuteronomy that this section deals with “the false witness who has been a menace to society in every age and among many peoples.”

How differently matters are handled in our churches.

Can you imagine going to a meeting of the governing board or standing up in a public meeting and accusing your pastor of a litany of charges without ever having witnessed any of his offenses yourself?  And yet this is exactly what happens in many churches.  Rather than instantly believing (or disbelieving) the charges, someone should ask the accuser point blank, “Have you personally seen or heard the pastor commit any offenses?  If so, when and where?”  If not, the person has been disqualified as a witness and should be silent.  Then those who have seen the pastor say or do something wrong should come forward.  If nobody does, the charges – according to Scripture – should be dismissed.

One of the best features of American jurisprudence is that a plaintiff is able to face his or her accusers.  In other words, a witness cannot make charges against someone – resulting in their arrest – and then be able to hide out as the accused is tried and sentenced.  The accused must be able to face their accuser in court and have his or her attorney cross-examine them.  Many Christians believe that this legal principle comes straight from passages like this one.  It would be a shame if unbelievers obeyed biblical principles in a greater way than believers.

Second, one witness is not enough to establish guilt.  What does Scripture say?  There must be “two or three witnesses” to a crime, not just one, because one person could easily misrepresent an event.

When I was in high school, I was walking home from school one day with a friend when we both witnessed an accident between a motorcycle and a car.  The motorcyclist ran a stop sign, hit the car broadside, and then flew over the car, landing on the pavement.  (He was okay.)  While I told the police what I saw, my friend saw things a bit differently – and probably more accurately – because he planned to become a policeman (which he eventually did).  We both saw the same accident and yet came to several different conclusions.  Several witnesses are able to give a more complete version of events than a single witness could ever do – and this protects the accused from a personal vendetta by one person.

Both Jesus and Paul later quoted from this passage when they mentioned the necessity of having “two or three witnesses” establish the facts in a confrontation (Matthew 18:16; 1 Timothy 5:19) – and Paul’s words to Timothy deal specifically with Christian leaders.

Third, every charge against an individual must be investigated by an impartial body.  While I’m stating the obvious here, a witness cannot say, “I saw So-and-So commit such-and-such an offense” and be instantly believed.  Their charges must be tested.

The other night, I was watching a dramatic depiction of the trial of Sir Thomas More, who served as Chancellor under King Henry VIII of England.  Henry had More (a Roman Catholic) arrested for high treason and confined to The Tower of London.  More’s Protestant opponents (sad to say) continually accused him of denying the right of the king to be the head of the church in England.  While More successfully beat back the initial wave of charges, he was finally accused by Richard Rich (the king’s Solicitor General) for denying the king’s right to lead the church during a personal conversation.  Based on the testimony of one man, a jury required a mere fifteen minutes to pronounce More’s guilt and arrange for his execution.

Regardless of how you might feel about Henry VIII and Thomas More, isn’t there something inside of us that recoils when we hear that a private conversation with a single person could result in the death of a Christian leader?  By the same token, how can the wild accusations of one person result in the besmirching of a pastor’s reputation in our day?  And rather than just take one person’s word for it, shouldn’t an impartial body be appointed to check into the charges?  Isn’t this what Paul had in mind when he told the church in Corinth (in 1 Corinthians 6:1-8) that they should be able to handle their own affairs without involving the secular court system?

Finally, if the charges proved to be false, then the witnesses were to receive the exact punishment the accused would have received.  What Brown writes about societies applies even more stringently to Christian churches: “Any society is sick if people within it will lie deliberately in order to inflict harm on others.  The Lord is a God of truth; he does not deceive us by anything he says.  Therefore, the word of those who belong to the covenant community must also be reliable and trustworthy.”

Please note that the law of lex talionis (known as “an eye for an eye”) specified the limit of punishment (if Joseph harmed your eye, you could harm his eye but not his ear) rather than demanded punishment (if he harmed your eye, you had to harm his eye).

Several weeks ago, I had lunch with a veteran Christian leader who told me about his church’s policy when it comes to accusing staff members of wrongdoing.  Two women in the church claimed they had seen a staff member engaging in inappropriate behavior.  Their claims came to the attention of my friend and he did a thorough investigation of the matter.  While he concluded that the staff member did not use his best judgment, he exonerated him from any serious wrongdoing.  One of the women was dissatisfied with the decision and began to repeat her charges to others.  My friend then contacted her and told her that if she did not stop her accusations, then discipline would be exercised against her.  Her accusations ceased.

This step is missing in Christian churches today.  We have created a climate where people can make accusations with impunity – whether they’re true or not – because they know that nothing will happen to them.  These accusations are often passed around the church in the form of gossip and are believed before the accused leader even hears about them or can respond to them.  Because the leader is then perceived to be in the wrong, he or she is asked for their resignation.  What a travesty!

I recommend that Christians find ways to include the principles embedded in this Deuteronomy passage (not necessarily the penalties!) into church life so we can protect our Christian leaders from false and malicious charges.  As Moses said, “You must purge the evil from among you.”

But the truth is that this passage is a safeguard for everybody – including leaders.  Isn’t this the way you would want to be treated if you were accused of an offense?

What do you think about this passage and these principles?

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