This Foolishness With Pastors
Does Ministry Have An Expiration Date?
Gullible and Foolish
This lack of investment in Christian study creates the phenomena of the gullible and foolish Church Folk,
people who consider themselves wise but who are in fact the
biggest fools imaginable. These are the people who compose the
vast majority of black church-goers, people with money and fancy
suits and big hats and even advanced degrees who know even the
most minute clauses of the church’s bylaws but who don’t
actually know Jesus in any personal way and whose level of
biblical training remains somewhere around grade school. Most of
these types of Church folk will insist any pastor they hire hold
a doctorate or at least a master’s degree, which is an
unbiblical requirement. The biblical model for pastoral
selection is I Samuel 16, where the farmer Jesse paraded whom he
believed most worthy among his sons before God's prophet, while
leaving the scrawny kid David out in the field. This is how
Church Folk pick pastors. What degree did Jesus have? Simon
Peter, to whom Jesus prophesied, "Upon this rock I will build my
church," was a blue-collar worker and likely illiterate. Our
task, beloved, is to find God's man. Discover God's man and
polish him up later--send him to school for that degree if it
makes you feel better. Ironically, the same shot callers will
insist on advanced learning from their pastors while they themselves
are comfortable with whatever they remember from being eight.
They don’t read. They don’t study. They name their church after
King Solomon.
This tribalism creates the atmosphere for what is most
common in black churches across America: people worshipping not
God but the pastor. An educated Christian, who knows the love of
Jesus Christ, is qualified to know and love God. Nobody’s asking
you to become a biblical scholar, but all of us should know
something about the bible. For, if we do not, we fall into
idolatry, which is what is, to my experience, most widely
practiced in our black church tradition. We holler “Jesus,” but
we worship the pastor. We clean up our language, straighten up,
come to attention when the pastor passes through the room, while
resuming our bawdy talk and evil plans the moment he is out of
earshot. But, isn’t God always in the room? Why do we honor the
pastor more than we honor God?
It took me a long time to grow out of this mess, to stop seeing
the pastor as a magical leprechaun or a wizard of Oz. It’s tough
to reconcile, but the pastor is just a human being. Despite his
best intentions, he is just a guy who gets up, yawns, scratches,
and puts on his pants one leg at a time. And, like all mortals,
the pastor is prone to failure and self-deception. He is no more
or less impervious to sin than was King David or his son
Solomon or, for that matter, this editor. The only thing that holds the pastor in check is the
Holy Spirit and the pastor’s connection to God. The only people
who can hold the pastor accountable is his flock. But if his
flock has contented itself with only the level of biblical
knowledge of a typical eight-year old, how will they even know
when the pastor has gone astray? If the flock has no connection
to God, they have no authority from God. They are blind and
lost, worshipping a man who is becoming increasingly consumed by
ego and substituting his own values for God’s word and his own
logic for God’s law.
Bishop P. Diddy Rev. Jamal Bryant celebrated his 40th birthday party last month with an intimate celebration at Milan (1000 Eastern Ave.). He’s pictured here with Sonjay DeCaires (TheFabEmpire.Com). Would Jesus take this photo? Bryant is clearly struggling between wanting to be God's man and wanting to be Sean Combs.
Make A List, Check It Twice
It’s really not hard to know when your pastor has fallen into sin. The
most obvious sign is his behavior, his personal conduct, begins
to look less and less like the personal example of Jesus Christ.
There is a very simple laundry list of works of the flesh and
fruits of the spirit laid out for us in chapter five of Paul’s
letter to the Galatians. Using this list requires no special
anointing or gift of prophecy. Here’s a bunch of qualities
inspired by flesh, here’s a bunch of qualities inspired by the
Holy Spirit. Make a checklist and determine how many of which
qualities your pastor routinely demonstrates. If your pastor
embodies few or none of the fruits of the Spirit, he
demonstrably does not know God. He has become disconnected from
God, and you—his flock—are to hold him accountable.
To my experience, more often than not, Church
Folk will claim some bizarre loyalty to the church--to the social organism--as an excuse
for not removing an un-Christlike pastor. They dig in,
determined to “wait him out.” Or the church splits, with
loyalists to the pastor laying claim to the facility and money
and the reprobate pastor holding the church hostage to his
contract. Beloved: you are not called to "wait" somebody out. Precious blood was shed for you.
The church is not your building, not your group, not your little social clique. The Church
is the living, breathing, Body of jesus Christ. And you're sitting there, on your behind,
letting some jackal run it. "waiting him out."
This is why we see today, the
increasing foolishness with pastors: pastors clearly out of
fellowship with God, lost in ego, becoming jerks before our
very eyes, while the congregation defends their behavior,
celebrates and even encourages them. The pastor’s behavior is
disgusting. The fact he has not adequately prepared the
people—which is the mission of the pastor in case you didn’t
know—to know God’s word and to know Jesus Christ, proves he was
a lousy pastor to begin with. Any pastor worth his paycheck
would have taught us enough about the bible and about Jesus that
we could recognize the symptoms of a good pastor gone bad, or
even a good pastor moving beyond his expiration date. That we
just sit there, week after week, year after year, learning
nothing, not growing in grace, is evidence enough of a weak or
ineffective pastor. That so many of us come to church on Sunday
not to worship, not to lift up the name of Jesus, but to dig in,
coming there even out of spite, engaged in a battle over a
church split, is startling evidence of our having substituted
our social organization for a relationship with Jesus Christ.
The Holy Choke-Hold:
Pastor Creflo Dollar mug shot after being booked for allegedly
choking his 15-year old daughter.
Schadenfreude
These are grumblers, complainers,
walking according to their own lusts; and they mouth great
swelling words, flattering people to gain advantage. 17 But you,
beloved, remember the words which were spoken before by the
apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ: 18 how they told you that
there would be mockers in the last time who would walk according
to their own ungodly lusts. 19 These are sensual persons, who
cause divisions, not having the Spirit. —Jude 16-20
NKJV
Pastor Tony Smith, another YouTube evangelist, takes apparent
gleeful delight in scabrously needling these men and women,
which is, itself, sin. We should never delight in moral failure,
but our hearts should mourn the greatness these leaders once
modeled. Human weakness being what it is, it is only a matter of
time before mockers like Smith are served up a career-ending
moral failure of their own. Smith, who spits out doses of hate
and retribution on his admittedly entertaining YouTube posts,
personally demonstrates none of the attributes of Jesus Christ
or the fruits of the Spirit [Galatians 5]. He is, instead,
routinely negative, hateful and un-Christlike. He says he won’t
be praying for Bishop Bryant, but praying for Bryant is
precisely what Christians should be doing. This is a General
Officer in God’s army who has fallen into a sad and obvious
reprobate state, refusing to withdraw, making excuses for his
sin, and putting forth a defiant arrogance rather than
submitting himself to any accountability. Not only is his
current conduct sinful but he is leading his ignorant and
gullible followers into sin, the blind leading the blind into
the ditch.
Pastor Smith seems to otherwise be on-point with his doctrine
and preaching, while Bryant is currently preaching an apostate
doctrine, the defensive sputtering of someone God has given over
to Satan. Smith is a bit more conservative than I, as he
dismisses seminary training and, apparently, historical context
for scriptural exegesis (Smith admitted this in an interview for
The Lexi
Show). As such, Smith tends to prefer a plain-text reading of
scripture as opposed to placing those words within a historical
context. The Holy Bible is a living document which Smith tends
to treat like a boilerplate lease, leading to the kind of
head-in-sand doctrinal conclusions I spent most of my early life
coming to terms with. It is not my place to criticize his or
anybody else's doctrine, but his biblical perspective is
important to coming to a fuller understanding of Pastor Smith's
shenanigans.
Smith also tends to be hard on women and extremely homophobic—insisting a rather
young sister come up to the podium to laughingly confirm Smith
had sent a pickle and a jar of petroleum jelly to Bryant, whom
Smith insists is gay. Smith will someday be called to account
for that sister who, like the handful of other grinning
sycophants glimpsed in his static, single-camera videos, thought
the gesture was funny. It wasn’t funny. It was hateful. God is
not the author of hate. My prayer is that Smith focus less on
other preachers beyond praying for them and publicly appealing
to them to get right with God, and that he learn to demonstrate
at least a few of those qualities of Jesus Christ, not the least
of which is humility. As is, he comes across as more a parody of
a black preacher, an art house project or Saturday Night Live
skit, than a dynamic force; his strength being undermined by his
lack of discipline.
Pastor Tony Smith: The man is a genius. An early adopted of YouTube, Pastor Smith has harnessed the power of social media to catapult an otherwise obscure minister into a national phenomena. Love him or hate him--and we should never hate him--Pastor Smith is the real deal, saying many things many of us wish we could.
Writing On The Wall
I am loathe to get involved in any of this. In terms of
doctrine, we simply must respect the doctrinal convictions of
others, even if they conflict with our own. There are places we
can go and things we can accomplish together. Our doctrinal
hair-splitting should not inhibit our unity in Christ.
This kind of foolishness makes it difficult for seekers to
believe in God. It makes it impossible for most reasonable
people to believe in pastors. Once unconditionally trusted and
loved, all black pastors now labor beneath the shroud of
suspicion created by pastors whose faulty
judgment or outright apostasy marks them as complete fools. We
of the clergy are all painted with that suspicion, making it
that much harder for our voices to be heard or for the love of
Jesus Christ to be trusted. And this is the true sadness of all
of this foolishness with pastors: the great holocaust of souls
lost to their vanity. If they weren’t so completely
self-involved, they’d actually fear God, and tremble at the
judgment each of us must someday face.
Which brings me back to Pastor Rickie Rush's creed, writ boldly
in his foyer. Amid all the back-and-forth, accusing and
defending, "exposing" and criticizing going on, Rush seems to be
the only player actually talking about winning souls. I do not
know Pastor Rush, so I am in no position to speak for him, but
his were the only words of encouragement discovered along this
journey and the only voice that sounded anything remotely like
Christ. Will Rush eventually be co-opted by ego and fame? Only
God knows each of our ministerial date of expiration. I pray
mine coincides with my death.
Jesus changed the world in three years. If you’re a pastor
celebrating your 40th anniversary preaching to the same twelve
chairs, it’s probably long past time
that you should have made room for somebody God can actually
use.
Christopher J. Priest
31 January 2013
editor@praisenet.org
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