Christian Living

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A very wise pastor once told me the following tidbit about teaching people. He said, “If you want to touch people’s heads, bring a message from your head. If you want to touch people’s hearts, bring them a message from your heart but if you want to touch people’s lives, bring them a message from your life.” I’ve tried to follow that advice throughout my time in Christian ministry and it has been an accurate truism, to be sure.

What I am about to share with you is not a research paper on pastoral vacancies nor is it a collection of heart tugging anecdotes designed to pull a tear from your eye and send you on your merry way. I want to try to answer the question “why are pastors leaving the pulpit in such high numbers” from behind one of those abandoned pulpits.

You see, I am one of the statistics; a pastor who walked away from the pulpit after 20+ years of serving (and warring with) "God's people". In that 20+ year tour of duty, I have seen and experienced God’s people at their very best and their very worst. I have enjoyed the blessings and benefits of the best God’s people can offer and I bear the scars to prove just how “worst” God’s wonderful people can get.

For example…

I’ll never forget the first time I saw “Kurt”. He walked into our small church building on a particularly stormy Wednesday evening; our traditional mid-week service time. He quickly seated himself in the back of the auditorium and listened intently to the sermon. I couldn’t tell you the subject of the sermon but whatever it was, “Kurt” loved it. He left the church that night with praise on his lips followed by promises of his return on Sunday with his family in tow.

The following Sunday, “Kurt” was as good as his word. You could feel the energy level in the room increase when “Kurt” led his family of eight to an empty pew and filled it up. Any member of a small church will tell you there’s nothing that’ll improve the morale of a small church faster than new faces; especially a pew full of new faces. The service ended and “Kurt” left the church with even more enthusiasm than he showed on Wednesday night. Less than a month later, “Kurt” and his family joined our church. Morale had never been higher.

Six months later, the church was a circus and “Kurt” was the ringleader.

The beginning of the end came when the pastor decided to introduce a contemporary praise and worship song into the hymn-centric song service (If memory serves, I believe the song of choice was “Lord, I lift your name on high”). Even during the song service, “Kurt” made his displeasure with this decision known via body language and participation level. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of “Kurt’s” communication methods. Monday dawned with a plethora of e-mails in the pastor’s inbox. Among the reading list were scores of articles attacking “modern” praise and worship music as devoid of scriptural merit (at best) or satanic heresies (at worst). The cake icing was a lengthy letter from “Kurt” himself extolling the virtues of the tried and true hymns and lamenting the inclusion of one of the dreaded “contemporary worship” songs. As far as “Kurt” was concerned, the song choice was the pastor’s only faux pas in an otherwise exemplary series of sermon and music choices.

The next Sunday the pastor brought another “new” song to the table. The Monday morning response from “Kurt” was as quick as it was venomous. Surely the pastor had no intention of following the current church music “fad”. The primary reason for he and his family’s decision to join this church was its apparent dedication to the time tested (not to mention scriptural) methods of worship and ministry. While the music selection isn’t a deal breaker for “Kurt”, his disappointment in the pastor’s decision to continue down this road of musical debauchery is clear.

The pastor made several attempts to discuss the matter with “Kurt” but the only conclusion that could be drawn was that both sides were firmly entrenched in their position on this issue and neither of them would be swayed. So, the music-wars escalated to the next logical step; gather your troops and prepare for battle. In “Kurt’s” case it was a series of strategy meetings with like-minded church members under the guise of a home bible study. In the pastor’s case it was an ignorant assumption that he had done nothing that would warrant a full-scale insurrection and that God would take care of his church.

By the time the dust settled “Kurt” was removed from the membership, the tiny church was fractured and the pastor was well on his way to Elijah-level discouragement, a Moses-like tantrum and a Jonahesque breakdown.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised by now, I was the pastor of that small church. By the time my experience with “Kurt” came to an end, I was a bloodied mess. It wasn’t just the “Kurt” experience; it was 20+ years of warring with the people who were supposed to be on the same team I was on. It was the emotional toll taken every time one of my sheep revealed themselves to be a power-hungry, agenda-driven manipulative wolf; a revelation usually accompanied by some form of betrayal that left deep wounds. It was decades of political fighting, power struggles, territorial wars and a growing list of former friends and colleagues. Above all of that it was the repeated feeling of abandonment by the God who said He would never leave me or forsake me.

When I walked away from ministry I was a bitter shell of the young 13 year old boy who had sincerely (and innocently) dedicated his life to the Lord who had saved him from Hell. The 40 year old man who left and forsook God and His church was a shadow of the young 20 year old who took his first pastorate with dreams of pastoral significance and a vow on his lips to do everything God asked him to do no matter what the cost. Two decades and several churches removed from that first pastorate I entered the “real” world with a king sized chip on my shoulder and a new vow on my lips never to darken the doors of another church building as long as I lived. I figured that decision would be the end of the story for me. Put a fork in me Lord, I’m done.

The only question in my mind was would I end up like Moses, Elijah or Jonah?…

(To Be Continued...)

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