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Church, Stop Hiring Preachers and Performers To Be Your Pastors

“John, it’s not an overstatement to say that I have zero interest in ministering to people.”

“Wait, did he just say that?” I wondered to myself, trying to hold my poker face and keep from doing an olympic level spit-take across the little metal strip-mall coffee shop table we shared. “Did he just say he had zero interest in ministering to people?”

“Yep, that’s what he said.” I quickly replied back to my own inquiry, both stupefied and stunned.

(Cue internal facepalm)

You see, this wasn’t just some random guy in a church or a Christian friend from the neighborhood or even a member of my small group, this was the lead pastor overseeing a massive, bustling megachurch in the Southwest, one with thousands of families in its care; care that unsurprisingly was almost nonexistent for those folks when the rubber actually met the torn-up road.

Pastor Dave’s church wasn’t dissimilar from those that probably dot the suburban landscape in your town; those shiny, sexy, big box store complexes adorned with slick, colorful graphics and state of the art production facilities; pristine buildings with all kinds of wonderfully themed, deftly crafted environments for kids and teens; places with every amenity and every variety of eye candy the Christian consumer could think to ask for. In other words, it’s The Church as product, perfected and packaged and franchised out.

But get past the dazzling light shows and the constantly elevated cathartic emotion of the Sunday services; go beneath the flash and din of the sixty minute, big screen rock show euphoria—and you often find there’s very little else there. The veneer is gorgeous for sure, but beneath that it’s all particle board and duct tape.

The American Church is growing prettier but more and more hollow.

It’s little wonder we’ve found ourselves here. For the past three decades organized Christianity has made our church communities “worship service-centric”, constructed completely around a building and an hour on Sunday, with everything the organization does pointing to and myopically serving that event. (The hub and heart of the whole thing then, is ultimately faith-based entertainment).

For years and years we’ve become comfortable building churches backwards like this; in almost complete opposition to the way we see Jesus assembling the first one. So many of today’s religious centers push personalities and production to the fore, relegating community and care to an afterthought. They remove the humble, serving, pastoral heart that Christ modeled so beautifully, and replace it with insulated, elevated religious rock stars who can speak well but listen lousy.

This entertainment-driven structure requires a very specific skill set to make it all work, and that’s why we hire preachers and performers and try to make them pastors. The American Church continually places at the top of the organizational pyramid and at the height of visibility and influence (sadly, mostly) guys with style and panache who possess a great command of the stage; ones armed with that coveted mix of sweet, folksy warmth and take-me -to-church brimstone gravitas. They’re all equal parts Billy Graham and Bono.

And that’s all well and good for an hour on Sunday. That gets butts in the seats and cash in the collection plate and bigger buildings built. And truth be told it, often does yield really good preaching and some encouraging, challenging, extremely valuable spiritual food for those in the community. Yet things often collapse during the rest of the week, when the people in the crowd are hurting and come to the Church for help. When grief, dysfunction, addiction, and the gory mess of life turn folks from amen-ing spectators into suffering souls looking for relief, they often find little solace because their pastor is far less adept in that environment.

I can still remember the day a frazzled mother of three teenagers in Pastor Dave’s church said to me, “Well, Pastor Dave is my preacher—he isn’t my pastor.” I winced internally and tried not to show my disappointment for her and those like her, as she went on to share how many times she had gone to him and to his staff for help, and how ill-equipped both proved to be in providing any real, sustained, compassionate care. Her husband followed-up the sobering observation, “I never knew of a shepherd who didn’t spend time with the sheep.”

And ultimately that’s the Achille’s Heel of our modern preacher-performer leaders who are tailor-made for the worship service. They have an incredibly tough time responding to people when they have to do so outside of the stage or the pulpit, when the lights are off and the photo ops nonexistent and the kudos less easily come by. They’re largely unwilling, but just as worrisome, they’re unable to step into the bloody trenches of humanity and do that brutal, sacred work of giving a damn.

That’s simply not good enough for a Church that claims to be devoted to Christ and committed to perpetuating his likeness on the planet. Since churches like all organizations, tend to take on the personality and priorities of the leader, we need men and women at the highest levels whose hearts echo the humility of Jesus, who know how to get their hands dirty or who are able to delegate this well to others in reliable, scalable systems.

Pastor Dave was and is a really good man who believes his primary job is “making disciples”, but he doesn’t really know what that means after the altar call. He’s a great preacher and powerful communicator and those are true and valuable gifts. He’s just not particularly qualified to oversee a church or to set the example for what it means to pastor people well.

Pastors exist to serve as much as they exist to be seen. If we continue to place the burdens of people’s pain and need on those who aren’t equipped to carry them, we will continue to compromise our care for those entrusted to us, and we will give the world a Church that is less like Jesus than they deserve.

Churches, stop hiring preachers and performers to be your pastors.

 

 

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