Oooh, now that’s a provocative title. 🙂
Church pastors can be the most co-dependent people in the world. (Being a recovering co-dependent myself, I ought to know.) I don’t say this to slam well-intended men and women of God; I say it because I believe the institutional church system promotes codependency among its leaders.
Okay, time for true confessions…
I spent most of my childhood and adulthood in the institutional church system. I was a proponent of it, and ::wincing:: I looked down my nose at those who had a problem with it or abandoned it. I passed them off as anomalies, as people who fell through the cracks, as people with issues of their own, predisposed to being negative, etc., etc. I blamed the devil for it. All sorts of denial.
Categories: Rantings
Categories: Meanderings (look it up), Rantings
One of the dangers in opening up a discussion like this–when you start asking questions about things like religious systems and institutional church–it can create the impression that you are simply anti-whatever-it-is you are questioning. In reality, I’m more for true relationship with Jesus than I am against something else. But when you’ve been engrained in the religious system as long as I have, you have to spend some time de-constructing what is in place before you can re-construct something better. We usually don’t have any motivation to change something unless we can see what needs changing. So for awhile, it might seem that I’m just “raging against the machine”, but track with me for awhile, and things will get better. 🙂
In my last entry, I made a rather blunt remark that great expectations can be a terrible curse. I’d now like to pick up that thread and explain that statement.
It’s not that we shouldn’t strive for excellence, have vision and goals, or just go through life by the seat of our pants and all be under-achievers. That’s not what I mean. Great expectations are when people are so enamored with your gifts and your perceived potential that they fail to see the real you. And those kinds of expectations are so weighty that the greatest of men and women buckle under them. Why? Because there is no such person as super-Christian, and none of us were meant to carry that kind of burden. I’m convinced that this is a huge reason why we’ve seen so many high-profile “celebrity” ministers fail morally and financially. We just aren’t built to be worshiped that way.
So…some more about my background…and with it, some of the cracks that started to appear in my religious foundations…
I grew up as a “good kid”. I said my prayers (usually), I ate my vegetables (mostly), I obeyed my parents (except for a few compulsive behaviors). But even when I didn’t do everything right, I tried very hard to please. I hated to be in trouble. For the most part, I was all about following the rules. Not only did I consider it my honorable duty to keep the rules, but I felt it was my moral obligation to help everyone else keep them, too. If I noticed my mom slightly speeding, I’d point out the speed limit signs. When I saw a classmate breaking a rule, I’d helpfully remind that person that we weren’t supposed to do that.