Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Pastor, how much fear do you experience?

Speaking from my experience, I feel like so much of the problem with pastors is they are just scared to death. They’re scared of their people, they’re scared of deacons, they’re scared of their overseer, they’re just scared. You know, if you’re scared of someone, you can’t lead them; you can hardly even influence them. I tell businessmen all the time, “You’d never go to work for an organization where the customers can hire and fire the president of the company they bought products from.” But that’s the church world in many cases.

If the people can make the decision about the pastor (directly or indirectly through the overseer), they are saying, “We’ll follow you unless we don’t like the way you’re leading us, then we’ll get us another leader.” What other organization can the clients and the customers hire and fire the leader? So the church is set up, upside-down. It’s an environment that is not conducive to leadership in some ways. Consequently to lead a church, you just have to have a lot of courage because the group to which you’re saying “follow me” can get together and fire you. Well, that’s just the way it is. That’s not going to change very soon, so it requires a lot of courage. Otherwise, we start bending toward the people that hired us (instead of God) and we’re in trouble.

The irony is, we stand up and talk about Daniel in the lion’s den but then we won’t even confront elders. All of these bible heroes – David and Goliath – and we love to preach those sermons and draw these parallels, and then we’re scared to confront people. I think that dynamic alone is a big part of why the church is where it is. The leadership – or lack of leadership – is just so much fear of people.

When I see pastors who are scared, I want to tell them, “Just lead.” If they fire you and you don’t think God will take care of you, then you have no message for your people anyway. Because, we get up every Sunday and say God’s grace is sufficient. He’s going to take care of you, He’ll meet your every need and you’ll never see the “righteous go hungry.” It’s what we preach, but if our lack of faith in those practical things causes us to not to be able to lead then what’s our message anyway?

[from Pastor Andy Stanley]

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