Should Who is in the Audience Influence the Sermon?

Most of being a pastor is wondering if certain people will be there, followed by wondering why certain people weren’t there.
@FailingPastor

While preparing sermons, I often consider how certain people will react to what I’m preaching. I can see their faces. I reflect on past conversations with them and the verses that trip them up. Every person in church has issues and verses they struggle with that I’ve learned over time.

When those issues and verses come up, sometimes I want those people to be there and sometimes I don’t.

Whether they are there or not doesn’t change my sermon content; I’m no Pilate, making decisions to keep the crowd happy. But I will shift my tone or attitude and I find this to be good. I want to be sensitive to people’s true concerns without compromising the message.

I also know that many doctrinal issues have been disputed for hundreds of years. My one sermon is not going to settle the argument. As I prepare my sermons I go over how to say things in light of these people, in light of their past issues, or even on a church-wide basis and the history our church has had with these issues.

Once the sermon is preached, I anticipate the reaction those people will have to the sermon. Will they say anything to me? Will they complain? Will their life change?

Usually I’m met with silence. I got to talking to someone and so did they and then they were gone.

Then I wonder for the rest of the week if they will email or call. Then I wonder if they’ll show up to church.

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Criticizing My Sermon is Criticizing My Faith and it Hurts

My faith would be much happier without constant feedback about it from everyone and their mother.
@FailingPastor

Preaching is to be a major part of what a pastor does. I like my preaching to be personal, an extension of my faith. If I haven’t lived with it, struggled with it, or incorporated it into my life in some sense, I probably don’t preach about it.

This is good because it gives personality, emotion, and first-hand experience to the passage preached on. I think it becomes authentic and real. My sermons are not copied out of a book; they are taken from my life.

Not only does this make better sermons, it also keeps me on the road to spiritual growth. If I aint living it; I’ve got nothing to say!

The massive downside to it is that my sermons are mine. That’s me up there. That’s my heart being talked about each time. When criticism is leveled at my sermon or doctrine; that’s criticism of my faith and my heart.

It hurts to have something so personal be criticized, ridiculed, and rejected. It gets old after a while and makes a guy wonder why he keeps doing it. My faith has taken a beating since becoming a pastor. People’s opinions affect you. You may not want them too, but they do, for good and bad. Weighing their opinions against your own and God’s is a weekly battle. One I don’t always win. I imagine I’m not the only pastor who deals with this.

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Grace, Forgiveness, and Jerks Who Leave Churches

PAIN-IN-THE-NECK PEOPLE LEAVING THE CHURCH: I’m sorry we ever came to this church.

ME: Apology accepted.
@FailingPastor

Of all the people who have left my church, not one of them has ever apologized.

Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me. People who leave churches always do it for high sounding spiritual reasons. Part of the fun of tearing apart the pastor is to make yourself feel spiritually superior, above the lowly ones you are leaving.

But I mean, think about it, is it possible that every single person who has left my church (and there have been many) was innocent? Is it possible that none of them ever did anything wrong to the church? Is it possible that only I made mistakes?

I have apologized to pretty much every person who has left my church and had a civil conversation with me about it, usually after calling them repeatedly or just showing up at their house because they weren’t going to initiate the conversation.

Which is another point: why is it that so many leave without saying anything? Is this a guilt admission that they know they weren’t perfect in the situation?

I don’t know. I probably spend too much time thinking about people who don’t think about me.

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Using Business Models to Hire Pastors is Bearing Ugly Fruit

THE CHURCH: I bet if we follow the world’s ideas of leadership it will work out great!

THE CHURCH 10 YEARS LATER: Huh, that’s weird, it’s not working. Welp, let’s keep at it.
@FailingPastor

Almost every week there is a news story about a pastor of a large church taking a fall. There are stories about para-church organizations that have grown big and their leaders abuse their power. There are reports of churches covering up sexual abuse and knowingly having felons lead ministry.

The news is quite depressing, especially since the world takes particular glee in reporting such things. Beating on pastors is good fun.

I, in no way, defend creepy pastors. They deserve to get punished by the law in the here and now and I believe for eternity they will receive their due for their behavior as well.

There’s even part of me that takes glee in seeing terrible pastors get caught and busted. They ought to be. Unfortunately, the mourning I feel far outweighs any gleefulness. The disastrous reputation we’ve given the church, causing the “Gentiles” to blaspheme, is a heavy weight that all pastors live under.

People view pastors with suspicion. That’s not a bad thing necessarily. Using skepticism in choosing a pastor is a good thing, it’s just too bad it takes abuse to make that a thing. Instead of being skeptical about what the pastor is teaching, now people are skeptical if the pastor can keep his hands under control and his pants zipped.

One of the main reasons there are so many pastors getting into trouble is because there are too many pastors. James gave the wise advice to not have many of you be teachers (James 3:1). Paul’s guidelines for choosing church leaders are mainly moral issues.

But today we use business models for choosing pastors and building churches. We look for degrees and track records of success. At some point in pastoral search committees someone will raise Paul’s qualifications, but it’s sort of tacked on and gets interpreted as, “Is this guy nice?”

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Volunteers and Other Terrible Things

The worst idea in all Church History is having everyone take their chair and put it on the chair rack themselves.
@FailingPastor

Churches are always looking for volunteers. My church is not.

I have given up on asking for volunteers. The people most wiling to volunteer are frequently also the people least likely to be able to perform the work for which they volunteered. Volunteers are generally people who think they can do the job. The only people who think they can do a job are people who don’t know what the job is.

Cynicism makes up much of this opinion, but experience has informed it as well.

When we needed more volunteers for our kids’ ministry, we would throw out a general appeal. Terrible people ended up filling those roles. We had pregnant unmarried women, people arrested for drugs and drunk driving, and people who hated every minute of being there and merely agreed due to our guilt-ridden pleas.

I eventually cancelled the kids’ ministry due to the terrible level of “leadership” we were providing kids. I was hoping this would reform the leaders. Nope, they just got mad, left the church, and blamed my pathetic leadership.

Church buildings are maintained by volunteer work. I’m amazed more church buildings have not burned to the ground.

Chair carts are all the proof you need. If you tell a group to fold up their chairs and stack them on the cart; the leaned over, stuck together, facing every which direction mass of chairs, kind of on the cart, that will result will make you cry. Half the cart will be taken up by leaned over chairs, which makes others lean their chairs up against the cart rather than on the cart. This defeats the entire purpose of having a cart for chairs, people.

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Christians Don’t Want The Truth, They Want The Happy

If people only knew how well they were not hiding their problems.
@FailingPastor

One of the perks of being a pastor is that you know the truths of people’s lives. OK, that’s not even close to being a perk; it’s one of the massively depressing cons of the ministry.

Everyone attempts to put on a good face. Facebook allows people to give the manicured, happy Christian spin on their lives. Yet we know the pain behind those smiles, behind those Christian clichés that are spouted by seemingly happy people trying to make others happy.

It amazes me how persistent people are in maintaining their happiness while their life crumbles around them.

Several people going through divorces have said it was “God’s will that they get divorced” and the other guy they were seeing is a much “godlier man.” This was God’s convoluted way of bringing about “His will.” I’m always confused how divorce, which is not God’s will, is part of how God makes His will happen. The amount of sin being blamed on God to maintain our happiness will come up on Judgment Day.

People are hurting. This is one reason why pastors are depressed: we know the pain that people are going through. On top of that, we also are met with the complete indifference most have toward addressing that pain biblically. Most will maintain a happy Christian veneer on their pain instead of dealing with it.

Several divorcing couples had at least one spouse who refused to talk to me because they didn’t want to hear “all that Bible stuff.” So they went on their way, finalizing their divorce and telling their Christian friends it was “God’s will” and “all things work together for good.”

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5 Things Pastors Do That I Find Annoying

I’m a pastor. The main perk of this is that I don’t have to go to another pastor’s church.

Although being a pastor gives me a legitimate excuse not to go to another pastor’s church, I still know pastors. I know quite a few pastors. Pastors know things about pastors that most church-goers are unaware of.

Pastors are kind of annoying. Here are the top 5 things I find annoying about pastors.

Many think church is a business and their job is sales.

The extrovert salesman personality should be an immediate disqualifier for ministry. Unfortunately, about 63% of pastors have this personality. They are constantly selling. Hyper-happy emotion comes out their mouth when speaking of the most mundane things, like reading Leviticus. Their attempts to make mundane faith sound exciting can be summed up with one word: lies. It’s all lies. They lie to people. And it works, for a little bit anyway. People get sucked into their happy vortex until the bottom drops out. People don’t trust pastors and church then because they saw through the lies. It hurts the whole thing.

Many don’t read their Bible.

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Serving People Who Despise You and Other Perks of Being a Pastor

Pros and cons of loving people:
Pros: Loving
Cons: People
@FailingPastor

One of the bits of advice I heard when I was considering pastoral ministry was, “Love the people.”

That sounds common sensical and is very true. It is also very difficult.

It’s easy to love the idea of people. It’s easy to love people when you assume they will be so grateful for your life-changing sermons and advice that saved their marriage and helped them raise great kids.

But when people call you during supper to warn you they will leave your church “unless” you bow to their demands, love gets tougher. When people yell out disagreements at you during your sermon and invite people to their house afterward to inform them of how dumb the pastor is, love is hard. When old timers from the church invite you over for dinner, only to find out it’s an ambush so they can stand over you and lecture you about how you are ruining “their church,” love gets hard. When you are accused of being legalistic the same week someone leaves your church because you don’t enforce enough rules on the people, love gets confusing along with hard.

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Alleged Christian Testimonies of Ministerial Triumph

George Muller’s prayer raised 100’s of orphans. My prayer once got my daughter out of the bathroom before I peed my pants.
@FailingPastor

The way George Muller tells it, he prayed and hundreds of orphans were fed. He wrote a book about it. I read it. I don’t know. I’m one of those guys. It’s possible this is simply my guilt and inadequacy on display, but I think George Muller was full of crap.

I think the same thing when I read about Francis of Assisi. They just make me want to puke.

I’m not belittling anything they did that was legitimately of faith. Just the way they convey what they do to others, I don’t know, it creeps me out.

There are all kinds of stories about these “great men of God” who did these “great acts of faith.” If we just could be more like them, then we would be awesome too.

There’s a solid chance these guys are better than me and anyone else I’ve ever known. There’s a chance. Not saying that’s impossible. I am saying it’s highly unlikely. People are people. I know some are better than others, but at the base, we’re all people.

The thing I don’t like about books about or by these guys is that God comes across as a genie in a bottle. If you pray right with the right amount of weepy and the right amount of feels, then God will do all this stuff for you. It looks more like superstition than anything explained in the Bible.

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Your Sin and the Doubts About Whether You Should Even be a Pastor

When pastors sin,

they don’t just have guilt over the sin

they also have guilt about whether they should be a pastor.
@FailingPastor

Pastors are people. Most pastors know this, but others tend to forget.

People are sinners.

Pastors are people.

Thus, pastors are sinners.

Pastors make mistakes. We have bad days. We lose our temper. We covet and lust after things we ought not. We lie here and there. We sin.

Sin is not good. Christians are at war with sin and the life of every Christian is a battle against sin. Too many Christians resign themselves to sin. “Well, Bible says we can’t help sinning, so whadaya gonna do?”

Pastors should really be taking this battle seriously. And, I believe, should have a track record of successfully battling sin. There should be a higher standard and that standard should be met regularly.

And yet, pastors are people. People are sinners. There’s a reason why grace and forgiveness are a thing.

One of the frustrations with being a pastor is that I’m not allowed to talk about my sin, and watch out if one of my sins is ever on display.

“You know, pastors shouldn’t do that. Maybe you should get out of the ministry.”

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