This has never been my experience, nor the experience of most pastors I know. However, we all know there are some like this.
You can get a quality fine art print of this cartoon here.
Or you can get my fine art here.
cartoon: building the church
Leave a Reply
-
My name is David Hayward, and I am the nakedpastor. I am a graffiti artist on the walls of religion.
-
-
LOL! I generally think of pastors as salesmen. Like if you were in the insurance business, you might be fairly successful, but some of your colleages are REALLY good at it. They have a natural talent for sales. So the big compensation packages follow.
Or think of motivational speakers making tons of money off people. Same thing. Like when I catch Joel Osteen on tv once in awhile. He’s a motivational speaker. He makes people feel better about life. They’ll pay a lot for that.
Any religious system that focuses on the maintaining of an institution in order to help God out is going to fall into this trap, to a lesser or greater extent. The pastor as CEO is usually the beneficiary of the warped interpretation of tithing that is prevalent in the Evangelical world. The ‘mission’ then morphs into bums on seats to keep him/her in the position that he/she feels that God has called he/she to. A very dysfunctional model of leadership in the modern ‘church’.
Finally, I know of pastor ‘friend’ who after having an extra marital affair during his ministry threatened to take his ‘church’ to court for unfair dismissal under UK employment law. They eventually coughed up around £60,000 to stop the legal action hitting the papers.
Unbelievable but true!
Amen.
Interesting how what the church defines as our duty as Christians also happens to be mainly what benefits the church as an institution and little else. Pastors consistently seem more concerned with church growth rather than making disciples of those that are already in the church.
Why do pastors say we should come to church only to seek God? Church is a place where people are gathered for fellowship, to love and edify. Pastors make their church into a place of busy activities and claim that this is where you “encounter God”. Ridiculous!! One encounters God in quiet and solitude!
If you are doing jundo (Korean for evangelism) because the church pews are starting to look a little thin and the pastor decided to have a “evangelism drive”….STOP. If you are doing Jundo to fill a quota…STOP. Before you drag the reluctant to church to fill the pews with warm bodies, consider first why the pews thinned out in the first place.
I understand where it is coming from, so I don’t mind, but personally most the ministers in my experience have been pretty decent people, and some of them completely phenomenal. I know in great detail what things look like from their side, and the hardships they encounter, and well,’rural Nova Scotia’ pretty much means ‘poor’ when it comes to church coffers and minister’s pay.
That said, what I really, really despise, is the TV Evangelists that would ask for more and more money, and guilt it out of people…and of course, the most vunerable are the elderly or sick shut-ins that often would send their old age pension, and barely eat, thinking that they were doing good… and the TV Evangelists could care less that they were literally taking food money from them.
I can’t say it is the same for mega-churches, because the one I was in wasn’t really that ‘mega’ and it seemed like they were trying to do good work, but from some of the ones I’ve seen on TV shows that were enquiring into the phenomena, it didn’t seem very healthy there, either.
/rant
ps – TV Evangelists pleading for money really pisses me off. Sorry for the rant, but that bugs me way more than what individual average size churches do.
@Michael Kwak:
One does not only encounter God in quiet and solitude.
Jesus said wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there. He also said that whatever you do to “the least of these” you do to him. We encounter him in community and we encounter him in others that we serve.
Fred,
You say he’s in all these places or situations because he said he’d be there. But what takes place that lets you know that he’s there? Do you sense him in some way, or do you just know he’s there because he said he would be?
My former pastor got a raise last year but none of the other staff did. This year the church is proud that they were in the black every month for the first time in many years . They sent out pledge cards stating what a good join they did by finishing the year with a surplus. They forgot to mention they fired one staff member and another quit, and neither were replaced so they didn’t have those salaries to pay. Of course they no longer have a Sunday school classes either. They do have a lot of burned out volunteers…… So yes,i have seen that kind of church..