The Glass House
Reason 9: Fear
Black To The Future
Many of our church leaders stopped learning, stopped growing,
back in the 60’s. I like to say 1965 because that’s how many of these folks act;
their frame of reference is typewriters and hi-fi record
players. They stopped learning, stopped growing, stopped paying
a whole lot of attention to how the world works. They started
walking in a rut, developing routines and habits, traditions
that become engraved in stone—the entire congregation made to
stand there while we go through tired, tired, long, drawn-out
funeral dirge of The Lord’s Prayer, sung half-heartedly by
the bored choir and not at all by the congregation.
That’s why many of our churches still use that tired “devotion”
service, which is devoted mainly to the deacons getting
attention. This nonsense of singing deacons is an ongoing battle
in many of our churches, deacons believing the bible says they
are entitled to drag the service to a halt while they stand
there droning on the same five songs every week. This is what
these men were taught, yes, back in the 50’s and 60’s. Which
means, for fifty years, these men have not studied the bible
past a surface, cursory understanding or beyond whatever they’ve
heard from the pulpit. The fact is, many of our older
congregants and shot-called have very weak bible skills and very
weak understanding of doctrine. What they know is tradition.
And it is the traditions they hold sacrosanct, not the biblical
precepts underlying them. Challenges made to their liturgy,
their traditions, are usually violently resisted—even when you
open the bible and show them how wrong something is. Many of
these people simply don’t understand. But, rather than say, “I
don’t understand,” they become hostile, ridiculing and
attacking. They are afraid to admit that, having spent 40, 50
years in the church, they really don’t know much about the bible
and really don’t have a good grasp on sound doctrine. They are
like musicians who play by ear. I’m not knocking musicians who
play by ear—I myself rarely read anymore—but I do know how to
read and write music and studied music theory briefly. Playing
only by ear develops a host of bad habits. Like the church folk,
you develop a kind of oral history without understanding the
underpinnings of it. As such, you harden into defending the
church’s traditions without actually understanding proper biblical
doctrine.
Fear: A tale of two PC's.
Mac The Knife
Fear is a big hindrance to church growth. Church growth, by
syllogistic reasoning, requires change. Leadership, in our
tradition, is usually done by the elders who gravitate toward
leadership because they need the external validation. These
people fear change because change is threatening to them, first
and foremost because change requires them to admit they are no
longer masters of the universe. They do not understand how the
world works anymore and, worse, change may require them to admit
they’ve been wrong about something or some things for a very
long time. For many of our church leaders, reality as they’ve
known it would be badly damaged if they were to allow themselves
to grow, to evolve, to change. It’s very tough to admit you’ve
been wrong. It’s near impossible to admit you’ve spent a
half-century being wrong. It’s embarrassing. It undermines the
external validation you’ve grown dependent upon. Rather than let
that happen, many of our leaders will fight tooth and nail to
keep change from happening. Their predisposition to any overture
of change is to not like it. And you can talk yourself blue in
the face explaining these concepts; many of our church leaders
are simply not going to understand what PayPal is. They’re
afraid of PayPal, and they think you’re a nut or, worse, trying
to rip the church off. They will demonize PayPal and demonize
you for proposing it. They’ll stop short of forming a lynch mob
or dunking you in a barrel of water for heresy.
Most every suggestion I’ve ever made to a black church has met,
initially, with resistance. Didn’t matter what it was. From the
trivial to the major. The web stuff, the PraiseNet to be
specific, was met with incredible hostility, here, so much so
that this ministry is visited and utilized mainly by churches
out of state. I’d imagine most pastors we talked to (and we
talked to nearly all of them) found this ministry to be
threatening because they didn’t understand what a web site was
or what purpose it served. But, rather than admit that, they
hemmed and hawed and, many of them, started calling around town
suggesting Neil and Henry and myself were scam artists trying to
get over on churches. Pastors—pastors—behaving like ten-year
olds. That’s fear. That’s what it does to you.
Fear keeps you from being you. Keeps you from admitting who or
what you are, what your limitations are, what your infirmities
and challenges are, what your hopes are. This meanness, this
hostility toward change and growth, causes most people to shy
away from even suggesting new ideas. Pastors miss out on dozens
if not hundreds of great ideas every year because they’ve got
Deacon So And So in place, and this guy is at first dismissive,
then condescending, then ultimately hostile toward any
suggestion of change. Change threatens Deacon So And So.
Threatens his position, undermines the people’s confidence in
him. Because, in Deacon So And So’s mind, his having to admit
(1) that he has no idea what PayPal is, though most any ten-year
old could tell him or that (2) the church might benefit from
having a PayPal account translates into his having to admit his
way of doing things has been wrong.
Which isn’t at all true. Deacon: your way of doing things isn’t
wrong, has not been wrong. But, times change. It’s wrong to keep
using a rotary phone because you think push-buttons are of the
devil. It’s wrong, dead wrong, for a church—any church—to not
have an email address or a website or Internet access. It’s
wrong to keep using a horse and buggy when we have cars now.
Change doesn’t mean you’re wrong or even that you’re stupid. It
just means God had expanded your territory with new ideas and
new advantages. Our problem is we’re too afraid to go possess
that land.
One of many straws that broke the back of many camels for me was the week I discovered a pristine set
of Macintosh G5's in a second-hand electronics store, priced at only a few hundred dollars apiece.
Retail price for these workhouse Macintosh computers started at $2600 apiece. I cracked the machines open
and inspected the innards and tested the motherboards to make sure this wasn't some kind of scam.
These were three thousand dollar machines priced at less than one-tenth of their retail value.
The church I was working with was producing terrible video through antiquated equipment and outdated
software, but when I excitedly urged them to snap up this pair of gleaming aluminum towers the
church's video guy balked. First he tried to bad-mouth Apple's PCs, which sounded
ridiculous, then
he whined that he'd have to learn new software, which was even more ridiculous. The Adobe suite,
which is the gold standard of media creation, was created for the Macintosh. The Windows versions exist
only as a secondary market consideration; the code was natively designed for the Mac.
Then one of the sisters who worked in the office--not sure how she even factored into a decision about
the church's video production--chimed in, complaining that they'd have to learn a whole new operating
system. I told them Windows XP and Windows 7 were, essentially, rip-offs of Mac OSX. The operating
systems work virtually the same. Then she complained that Macs wouldn't run her PowerPoint presentations--
which was completely absurd-- Macs run MS Office exactly the same way Windows machines
do.
The entire discussion became a terrible struggle, one neither the deacon in charge nor the pastor took
any interest in whatsoever. The deacon ultimately sent the matter to the pastor's desk where he ignored it
as he ignored most anything with my name on it. Next time I stopped by the store, the Mac towers were gone.
The church continued to have lousy, grainy, desaturated, hideous video. The video guy and the office lady high-
fived their victory over me and the church continued to wallow in
mediocrity.
This was all about fear. This was two 50-year olds acting like children, bound and determined to mire
the church in mediocrity, and about leadership too absent to notice or care.
Black To The Future
We’re afraid of new people. White people, Spanish
people, Asian people. We’re terrified of gay people, which is
why we’re so hostile toward them. It’s fear. Our sanctuaries
continue to look like mausoleums because we’ve still got the
notion of the church sanctuary as a sacred place, as the Holy of
Holies. Jesus died to end that separation, to split the veil
dividing man from God. It is reasonable and, yes, right to
respect our church sanctuaries, but stop bolting down these ghastly expensive
heavy oak pews. Pews are dumb. They can’t be moved, the room
can’t be reconfigured. You’re limiting the use of that room to
one purpose only and you’re doing it to “keep it holy.” There
is nothing whatsoever holy about a church sanctuary; it’s just a
room. Use it to win souls. Put in chairs instead of those
danged pews so you can re-configure the room to suit whatever is
happening inside it.
Most churches I know would never allow that. You’d get laughed
out of the building for even suggesting it. Most churches I know
are deep in hock (or have been deep in hock) paying for those
expensive and utterly useless pews. Most black churches I know have
blood-red carpet and dark hues all over the place, making the
place look like a funeral parlor or Dracula’s rec room. By
contrast, most white churches have auditoriums—some call them
sanctuaries, but they’re auditoriums, with chairs that can be
reconfigured for concerts or lectures. They are bright, cheery
places with lights that dim for music or presentations.
There is no scriptural basis for expensive, heavy, unmovable
wooden pews in your sanctuary. That’s just tradition. The early
churches of the bible existed in people’s homes. Later churches had people standing--yes standing
throughout the many-hours long worship service.
As long as your church continues to be YOUR church, don’t expect
it to grow. Real growth requires real acceptance of different
ideas and different cultures, which is not likely
to happen with Deacon So And So calling the shots. Which is not
to say kick our elders to the curb, but that you, pastor, must
understand the challenges here: people in their late sixties and
late seventies are afraid, and they bring that fear to the
church with them. Usually without knowing it, that fear
manifests 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, at all, what the proposer is
talking about. Not only do they not understand the new idea,
they don’t understand the culture or the background behind it.
Not all of them, but most of our elders have simply stopped
growing. They set the mark at whatever point in life they
decided they knew enough, and that point was, likely, at least
twenty-five years in the past. They are not at all well-rooted in sound
doctrine but are defenders of church tradition, which they
understand to the letter. Many of these people couldn’t find
Psalms in the bible, but they’ve memorized, to the letter, the
church’s bylaws. They put their trust and faith in those bylaws,
which in turn uphold the church’s liturgy and tradition more so
than faith in God’s word which, for many of them, is a
cryptic and impenetrable document which is translated by the
pastor in drips and drabs on Sunday mornings. 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. However, these folks are extremely resistant to
change. So much so, that many folks, imbibed with the zeal of
Christ, with the dynamic thrust of God’s progressive
self-revelation, just burn out. We stop even offering new ideas
and many of us ultimately drift away. Your congregation begins
looking older and older, with fewer and fewer middle-aged or
younger members, while your shot callers rock back and forth to
the pale, off-key gargling of your deacons grinding the service
to a halt every Sunday with their Devotion To Themselves.
Keeping our elders, our precious resource, in place, in key
positions, while policing their behavior is a tough challenge.
But, just as youth can tend to be impulsive and self-absorbed,
age can be intransigent and self-absorbed. Both demographics have vital wealth to
offer a ministry, but both demographics need to be ministered to with a rational
understanding of their gifts and their shortcomings.
Many churches wither simply because the pastor either doesn’t
understand this phenomena or is himself too self-absorbed or disengaged to
care much about it. The old folks block change every which way
and the younger people drift away until you look out from your
pulpit one day and see hardly anyone under the age of 60.
That, pastor, is fear. And it’s one of the main reasons the
church isn’t growing.
Christopher J. Priest
10 August 2008
editor@praisenet.org
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