Dear Megachurch Pastor,
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but, well I’ve been busy. (Wait, who am I talking to, right?)
Anyway, I’m worried about you.
I’m worried because I see you… everywhere.
You’re preaching and teaching and blogging and traveling. You’re at student conferences and leadership summits and training events and tent revivals.
You’re plugging your book and your blog and your website, and your band and your brand and your plan.
And lately, I’ve been wondering, where Jesus is.
Now, I’m not questioning your faith or your morality or even your motives.
I’m just letting you know that, what I’m getting for you lately is, well, a lot of you.
I know your tone and your sense of humor and your 140-character proverbs.
I know your quirks and your anecdotes and your family stuff and your event schedule and your series titles.
I know your building projects and your mission trips and your multi-media ventures.
I know your high-profile pastor friends and your great achievements.
I know these things because they are unavoidable whenever I hear from you.
It’s hard, I realize. I’m pretty small-time, as far as the scale of ministry and the profile you are dealing with, and it can be a challenge for me to stay spiritually small, and to keep Jesus at the center.
You have all kinds of people affirming you, showering you with compliments, ReTweeting you and quoting you. You have armies of followers and scores of sycophants.
That kind of admiration is intoxicating. It can anesthetize. It can inflate.
I imagine that it can difficult to keep people around you who are willing to tell you the truth, to ask the hard questions, so I’ll try…
When’s the last time you visited someone from your congregation in the hospital; someone who wasn’t a huge tither or pillar of the church?
How many evenings this year have you spent away from your family, and does it make your passionate messages about loving the people in your home ring hollow?
What’s the longest you’ve gone without blogging and Tweeting and checking texts? How about the longest you’ve gone without prayer?
When’s the last time you did a good work, and not used it as a message illustration or blog post?
You currently have more followers than Jesus had in his prime while on the earth. How do you think that is affecting you?
I would ask you to consider these things. Pray over them. Sit with them. Wrestle with them.
Our instinct is to want to be greater, better; to strive for more and bigger stuff. Excellence and quality and progress can drive us further up the ladder and into the brighter spotlight.
My prayer for you, is that you hear the words of John the Baptist: “He must become greater; I must become less.” (John 3:30), and realize that they came from a minister with great buzz and a growing following. it was the voice of a “man on the rise”, not wanting to get too big for his britches.
John was a man looking to shrink.
Feel free to call me and we can sit over coffee some time and be honest and accountable, as two people doing the most difficult work in this world, not of serving God, but of staying small in the process.
With Love,
John
P.S. I’m going to logout for a couple of hours. I need to shrink, myself.
