Pastors are insecure people. We are. Believe it. At least the ones I know are. The one I see in the mirror everyday certainly is. We hide it well behind the face mic, five o’clock shadow, and skinny jeans. We look confident. We carry an elevated air or self-assured authority as we stand behind our pulpits or casually behind our stools. Neatly manicured sermon in hand tethered to a silver tongue.
Fig leaves, all of them. Truly. Modernity covering over something ancient: shame and frailty. The pastors I know are deeply aware of their inability to set themselves up as models of the Christ-life. We know we are shoddy examples—empty suits of sorts. But we still try. Clean, religious, pragmatic store owners who open the doors wide on Sunday to shuffle our wares. We do believe what we are selling. Truly. This is no fire sale for spiritual tonic that promises to cure every ache. This is a message of substance. The stuff of the heavens. We know this as we open the bible and invite others into God’s rhythm. We feel the weight of it as rows of souls (or throngs of eyes watching on-line) lean into this mystery with us. We believe this stuff of faith—incarnation and sin and resurrection. They are deep wells of truth. In spite of our brokenness, we feel the weight of this gospel. The water of earth and baptism colliding. We feel the power behind what we say.
At the very same time we feel the weight of this world. The magnet of success pulls us somewhere we didn’t ever intend to go. We begin to seek after applause and smiles. An audience, not a congregation. A stage, not an alter. We yearn for laughter and amens like an addict craves his fix. We scrutinize the numbers. We rally the troops to fill the seats. We daydream of fame. For Jesus, we say, of course. Church slowly turns away from prayer and people and grace and truth. Something else. It’s hard to put a finger on how we drift. And then, even without our knowing, we relent to what we never intended.
We begin preaching for the people, not to the people. We pander and preen and give hearty, throaty, impassioned sermons about nothing in particular.
HERALDING OR HEADLINES
Our prophetic calling, this lonely place of heralding and pleading and gospel push and pull, gets minimized to a 30 minute Hallmark card. For our people. We open the doors of this store knowing the customer is always right. We relent to them, give in to their whims and desires. We want our congregation to be happy so that they will come back and love us. That’s it! We want our people to love us. Not only respect us or be grateful for us, but love us. We don’t seek a paternal love that is earned in hospital rooms and sacred spaces. Our hearts yearn for cheers and ovations. We want to be celebrated, tweeted, quoted, liked, and reshared. We swallow the shim sham of one-liner preachery that gets paraded on social media and we try it out. We kick the tires and discover that showmanship suits us. We craft a narrative more for motivation and inspiration than deep calling to deep.
We know better but often don’t do better. I am guilty of this.
It’s a giving in. Which is a greater evil than giving up. I have been guilty of both, but more so the former. Every Sunday underneath my prayers and offering to God I hope my people like me. I pray God is glorified and secretly that my people, God’s people, dance around me like a shiny calf. Love me! Love me!
If only they knew my frail little heart.
Our pastoral theology (God, man, sin, salvation, heaven, resurrection, and how to apply these to real-life) is no longer shaped by the likes of Eugene Peterson, John Owen, or Thomas Kelly but rather by whatever New York Times business guru is hot. Systems and seminars replace wrestling over deep things that matter. I’m all for church systems that make sense—paths that drive hearts to deeper devotion. And these happen in a thousand different ways and I say count me in and sign me up. But when I hear pastors say things like, “We want to teach you how to leverage your influence,” I just wonder how that jives with what ole St. Paul might say— “I want to teach you how to take up your cross and die.”
Realigning our theology and practice will come at a great cost to us who long for the applause of men. In crying out to our people to put their eyes on Jesus, we recognize that they will inevitably cease to see us. The applause will terminate, the tweets and cheers will go slowly into the night. When this happens, when we do this thing—this most pastoral thing—we will step squarely back into our calling and out of the light of praise.
Pastors, we must do this. For our sanity. For our people’s good. For our church’s well-being. For our heart’s wholeness and ministry’s longevity. Pastors, we must admit, confess, and repent (publicly and privately) of our desire to build a brand instead of building His church. We must do this. When we do, our people will thank us for it. They will respect us for it. They will love us for it.
But they will have their eyes and hearts where they are meant to be, on Jesus.
