Decades ago, just before I started attending a particular church, it went through a split. It was situated near a large gated community, and some of the folks who lived beyond the gates wanted only fellow gated-community members in the church. They wanted to hold church functions inside the gates; they didn’t want to accommodate people who lived outside them—which’d include me and my neighbors. Bluntly, it was a class-warfare thing: They didn’t want “poors” in their church.
So there was a fight amongst the members, the classist leaders were voted off the board, and they and their pastor left to start their own church—which met at his house, within the gated community. Met until the homeowners’ association shut ’em down for running an unauthorized “club.” Ironic consequences can be so fun.
I arrived right before the new pastor arrived. The new board members were running the church at the time, and invited me to lunch (at the community country club, in fact; seriously, a lot of ’em lived there) and warned me what I was getting into. “But you’re all good now, right?” I asked, and… well, sorta. Some of ’em were still grieving. They lost friends over this.
Sounds like the church handled everything correctly, right? The pastor was classist, contrary to the gospel; Jesus’s brother James straight-up calls it sin.
Now what if they hadn’t won the vote?
Hey, sometimes it happens. What if the classists won, and people who didn’t live in the gated community were barred from ever joining that church? ’Cause here’s the biggest problem with democratically-run churches: Sometimes they vote wrong. I’ve been a member of churches which voted wrong. God was on our side, but the votes weren’t. Vox populi simply isn’t always vox Dei.
Sometimes churches aren’t even democratically-run; sometimes the pastor runs the church like a feudal duke, and the church board is just a bunch of yes-men. I’ve been a member of such churches too. In one of ’em, behind the scenes, the pastor was critically mismanaging the finances, and cuckolding his wife. How’d the church handle things? By sweeping the scandal under the rug and letting the pastor “retire”–at which point he simply did what I call “pulling a Mark Driscoll”: He waited a bit for the furor to die down, then quietly started running another church. A church which had no clue he was unfit to lead.
There are a lot of churches where this sort of thing happens. The wrong people get made pastor or board member. Sometimes Mammon
In their wake, they leave a lot of broken Christians who trusted them to steer them right, and instead were crashed into rocks over and over again, and don’t wanna go to church anymore. Can’t say I blame them.
“What kind of good God would put them in charge?”
The
And the victims of these disasters wanna know why things were allowed to get that bad. Why the Holy Spirit didn’t intervene faster—or, as far as they can tell, didn’t intervene at all. Why everybody in the know, simply let the leadership get away with all the sins they were committing. Kept letting the treasurer write herself bonus checks. Kept letting the children’s pastor touch the children. Kept looking the other way when the head pastor flew into abusive, violent rages, and demanded to get his way or he’d raise hell, and his board members let him do whatever he pleased, sinful or not, and
So how on earth
Lemme first say when you have a functional church (not a dysfunctional one), its people crack down on evil immediately. I’ve seen it in action. Pastor does something ungodly, and he doesn’t just get rebuked by the Holy Spirit; he immediately hears it from fellow pastors, board members, church members, and everybody else. Nobody has the mindset, “Well he’s a pastor; he probably knows what he’s doing.” Nope; the church is mature, well-trained, knows what Jesus expects of them, and knows he expects it of his leadership all the more. These pastors quickly see where the lines are drawn, and appreciate their churches for keeping ’em on the straight and narrow. Nothing gets concealed; everything’s out in the open, and where appropriate (and if they broke the law, it’s always appropriate), police and civic authorities get involved too.
When a church is seriously dysfunctional—when its people wrongly believe God’s given pastors license to do pretty much whatever they please, either because they’ve always had dysfunctional leaders, or because they don’t care enough about Jesus to learn what he expects of them, much less church leadership—evil shepherds are quickly gonna find a way to worm themselves into leadership, and start fleecing and raping the sheep.
So the proper question isn’t how God could let this happen, but how we could let this happen. It’s our job to police ourselves, and challenge our leaders when we see ’em go astray. If God has to step in, it means things are profoundly fouled up. Ain’t nobody following Jesus.
True, if you’re a newbie—if you’re an immature Christian who was never taught any such thing; who never thinks you have to grow up because pastors will always be around to lead you by the nose—you’ll likely remain clueless about this, and evil leaders will take so much advantage of you. Evil leaders are kinda counting on Christians to remain as ignorant as possible, and encouraging them to think as little as possible. For that matter (they swiped this trick from politicians): They’ll even test our gullibility by getting us to embrace stupid beliefs, like
Nope;
I know; you might be tempted to go to no church at all. You gotta resist that temptation. Because, ironically, staying away from church makes you unaccountable to any fellow Christians. You turn yourself into the very problem you’re fleeing.
