As we begin our new series, “The Glass House,” I’m bracing myself for the storm of emails calling me names and threatening me. Usually, I’m pretty tickled by “Christians” calling me names and threatening me—people I don’t even know attacking me personally when I’ve done nothing at all, personally, to them.
I’ve been asked, time and again, “Why do you have to be so negative?” Well, first, I don’t think I am negative. I believe I am constructive. And contextual. But, the fair answer to that question is, “Because no one else is.” Most people—churched, unchurched, media—are afraid to criticize the church, the black church most especially. For whites, there is peril of being called racist. For blacks, especially black believers, there is a tradition of virtual infallibility on the part of the pastor where criticizing him or the traditions of the church is tantamount to heresy.
In every generation, God has raised up prophets to warn His people about dumb stuff they are doing and about those actions’ consequences. I myself do not claim the gift of prophecy, but I do claim the anointing of God, the harassment of God if you will, to be a vocal critic of the institution I love. Absent critical voices, we continue blindly following tradition and appeasing weak, unspiritual leaders; the blind following the blind further into the ditch.
Beloved, somebody’s got to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
Somebody’s got to open that book and read what is in it and hold it up to our claims and practices. Now, if there were a hundred folk doing this, I probably wouldn't bother. Like many of us, I’d just grouse about this and that in private, among friends. Many of you do this. Many of you think the very words that are written here on this online ministry. But few, if any, of you say them out loud, let alone from a pulpit. Thus, the conspiracy of the silent continues, with foolishness left unchecked by people who are too spiritually unlearned to know any better, enabled by people too spiritually weak to stand up for what the bible actually says.
The main thing we won’t do: call the pastor into account. We won’t do it. We love our pastor, or we’re intimidated by him. Some of us show far more respect to the pastor than we do to God—acting like pure heathens out of the pastor’s sight. But, see, we are always in God’s sight. The worship of the pastor offends God (Exodus 20:2). Our two-faced, trifling behavior, straightening up around Daddy then going back to being heathens, is a direct measure of the quality of your pastor’s leadership.
Far too many of our churches exist, primarily, to serve the pastor. The pastor is often the biggest line item on these churches’ budgets. The ministry pays a secretary part-time, and maybe somebody to play the piano. The whole point of the church is, otherwise, to pay the pastor. To have these gross, obscene “pastoral anniversary” celebrations: many of them going on a week or, in some cases, an entire *month* of services where all funds collected go to the pastor. Where the people are taxed to give the pastor a “gift,” and the pastor and his wife are set on display like figurines on a cake while we sing and dance and exalt him.
Often att the culmination of these things, many of our churches present the pastor with a check, or a car or a cruise or some other lavish gift. Sometimes a bag full of cash--*cash*--offerings collected during the many services.
In God’s house. In *God’s* house.
This is an abomination to God, a gross distortion of the simple idea of seeing to the needs of God’s prophet. It is extortion and exploitation of God’s people, a people the pastor himself has failed to properly educate in biblical principles because, otherwise, they’d realize how utterly disgusting this tradition is. It is simply the pastor taking money and drinking in applause and adulation and, yes, *worship* that belongs to God..
It is a distortion of God’s word, a perversion of scriptural teaching. Which, by definition, is witchcraft.
Your pastor should be afraid, very afraid, of the unbridled enthusiasm of his people. He should redirect that energy into evangelism. Let it flow out onto the streets of the block your church is on—telling them abut Jesus. About the work of the ministry. Seeing to their needs. That suitcase full of cash is a stench in the nostrils of God. The things it buys are a millstone around the pastor’s neck. It is the Church Folk equivalent of Aaron’s melting the Hebrews’ earrings into the golden calf. And the pastor knows this. Or, at least, he should know it if he’s calling himself “pastor.”
Most of us are too intimidated by the pastor to ever call him out on this stuff. To ever say the emperor is naked. We assume his behavior, though clearly contradictory to what the bible teaches, is okay somehow. That his arrogance is somehow appropriate or useful. And, since we rarely read our own bibles, many of us simply don’t know any better. So much to the point that I get fussed at by angry church folk accusing me of being so negative all the time.
Bottom line: if your church, your pastor, is not guilty of these things, beloved, I am not talking to you. There’s no need to get offended and clutch pearls and so forth if you know none of this applies to you. But if it does apply to you, if we are indeed hitting a nerve, here, don’t get mad at me. Talk to the God Who sent me, Who ordained me to this work. See what He has to say about it. Right there, in His book.
Much of what we do, in our black church tradition, is simply wrong. It lacks a biblical foundation and has no model in the scriptural example and intent of the church. And this is foolishness we need to be led out of by men and women strong enough, anointed and spiritual enough, to follow Christ instead of blindly following men with suitcases.
