You, pastor, must understand the challenges here: people in their late sixties and seventies are afraid, and they bring that fear to the boardroom with them. Usually without realizing it, they vote that fear, fear manifesting itself as hostility, condescension and skepticism. They’ll call a new idea bad or ridiculous not because it is but because they don’t understand it and are too embarrassed to admit it. These folks are vital to the health of the church as younger people are too focused on themselves to take much of an active role in church leadership. These folks are extremely resistant to change because they're afraid of being left behind.

Reason 9: Fear

There’s this mother I know who sings in the choir. When she’s singing lead, she’s effusive, with a big grin, full of energy and drive, exhorting the congregation, bursting with love and worship. But, when she’s singing in the alto section, she looks bored, disengaged, annoyed, with this put-upon look on her face. She needs to be down front, holding that mic. In most churches I’ve known, folks love to grab that mic. The leadership in many of our churches tends to skew toward older folk. This is mainly because younger folk have less interest (or, frankly, less need for validation) than older folks. Our society tends to push older folks aside, which is incredibly stupid since they tend to be smarter and wiser than us anyway, but a lot of older Church Folk gravitate toward church leadership because they have more time than we do, need something purposeful to do and need the validation of being, well, useful.

Because the older folk are the most faithful givers, and because the older folk tend to seek leadership roles more so than the younger folk, the older folk tend to be the church’s shot-callers. Change comes slow to most of us, but even slower to the older folk. Older folk tend to fear change the most. Their fear of change tends to embarrass them because, most older folk don’t want to feel that they’re out of touch or have been left behind. They tend to become hostile toward new concepts, not because the new concept is a bad idea but because the older folk, the trustees and deacons and what have you, don’t understand them.

It’s been nearly seven years and I can’t get any pastors to write for this web ministry. In fact, I’ve given up trying. I know dozens of pastors, many of whom are powerful speakers, but they don’t write. There’s always some excuse. Oh, I’m too busy, which is a lie; most of these guys are just chilling all week. The truth is, writing is a gift. Not everyone can sing, not everyone can write. But, rather than say that, say "I can't write," I get lied to. By pastors. “Oh, I’m tied up.” Nonsense. You can’t write. You write like a high-schooler. Bad grammar. Incomplete sentences. Worse, many of our older pastors, especially, can’t type. For our elder generation, typing was a woman’s job. That’s what the church secretary is for. Typing was not a skill most men acquired or, frankly, needed back in the 40’s and 50’s. So, I get, “I’ve got too much on my plate,” because he’s too embarrassed to say, “I can’t type.”

Embarrassment is a product of fear. Lying is often a product of fear. We’re afraid to admit who we are, to admit our shortcomings. I can’t hit baseball. I have terrible hand-to-eye coordination. I’m a lousy basketball player and a mediocre pianist. I’ve made my peace with the fact I’ll never be a rock star. I’ve come to terms with the annoying fact I’ll spend the rest of my life being a half-inch short of six feet. I want to be six feet. It’s not going to happen. But fear will have me saying things like “I‘m five foot eleven and a half.” What’s this, “and a half” nonsense? It’s ego. It’s fear.

The black church is stuck in the mud

largely because of fear, because the people who embrace change, who work for change, who are excited by change, usually end up having to go to the older folk to get approval for that change, and that approval is usually not forthcoming. Before I can implement change at a church, I have to sit down with the shot-callers and explain what this is and why we need it. It’s a daunting task because, usually, these folk are so far in backfield that trying to explain, say, what PayPal is, requires me to explain what a website is and before I can do that I have to explain how the Internet works and who is on it. Usually, this is too much for the shot-callers to absorb in one sitting; it’s overload. Their attention span maxes out at about ten minutes and they get cranky. I can’t explain the Internet and how a website works and what PayPal is in ten minutes.

At a website presentation last spring, I had one sister take me to task for her church’s website not being user-friendly. She said it was difficult to navigate and confusing, and if she—a church member—couldn’t navigate the site, how could we expect visitors to find their way around? The very premise of her question told me she knew nothing about websites, the Internet or “visitors,” as most people surfing the web are veteran surfers acquainted with how websites work. Any website—ours, Google, MSN—requires a bump or two for the visitor to acquaint themselves with the site layout and navigation, with where all the buttons are. My ongoing frustration with church websites (and why I now no longer build them) is most black churches seem to want their church websites to be so easy to use that the site leaps out of the screen and punches the keystrokes for you. The reason for this is these folks are not terribly computer literate. They are not web people. They may know how to check their email but that’s about it. When pressed for details, this sister finally admitted to me, privately, that she hadn’t been to the site in months and then only once, and she didn’t know an awful lot about computers or websites. But the damage was already done. Once she’d made her criticism public, a dozen others at the meeting mumbled in agreement, shaking their heads in a rambling chorus. This is what small children do: first one says he doesn't like spinach, then all the others at the table chime in, even the wee little ones who don't even know what spinach is. To an ever-increasing degree, Church Folk are very much like children, speaking when they should be listening and making irrational Spanky And The Little Rascals arguments for refusing to embrace the future. I’m sure, if I pressed each one of them individually, they, too, would admit the truth: they’d never even been to the site. But sister girl had given them cover to hide their embarrassment over the fact they knew little or nothing at all about their own website, computers in general, or most anything newer than Alf and Murder, She Wrote.

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This is what fear does: it turns us into liars. It robs us of our dignity, our strength, and, ultimately, our usefulness to God. Not one person at that meeting had the strength of character to admit they hadn’t been to their own website and knew very little about computers. Instead, they let this woman attack me, just let me get beat up. It’s an occupational hazard, particularly when working with black churches, to get criticized and castigated as a cover for folks’ embarrassment over being unprepared for something, uneducated about something, or having dropped the ball. Nobody accepts responsibility anymore. It’s all Blame The Other Guy.