Why We Should Sort of Take It Easy on the Pastors

For the past few days I’ve been pondering the whole clergy-laity thing, and the idea of leadership within the context of the institutional church. A couple of days ago, I invited the readers to discuss whether human church leadership is Biblical–and there was a lot of very helpful input and insight left in the comments (thanks!). Yesterday, I weighed in on the conversation in this separate post.

Today, because I think/hope it will lend perspective…I have some thoughts about the abuse of authority in the church–from the leaders’ standpoint.

Among the blogs I read, I often find an undercurrent of subtle animosity toward church leadership in general–and that’s understandable, especially when someone has suffered control, manipulation or abuse from their former leaders. If I could summarize some of the more common themes, they would boil down to a few general underlying assumptions:

• Pastors are manipulative, controlling, greedy, and self-serving.
• The decisions of church leadership are mainly motivated by getting and keeping our money.
• Pastors are more interested in building their own organizations than they are in our needs.

Now, I’m not about to deny that there are elements of truth in much of this, and I have no intention of justifying the bad behavior of spiritual leaders. But perhaps looking at this issue from the perspective of a leader will at least bring a greater understanding of the problem.

Having been part of the institutional system as a leader, and still functioning as a leader outside the walls, I understand all too well the urge to control and manipulate. And you might as well know, I’ve been guilty of both. I’ve also been guilty of letting money be the primary motive in many of my decisions, and of trying to build my own kingdom–things I have come to regret greatly. But ironically, despite all that…I really had a sincere desire to love and help people and to make a difference for God. I still thought I was acting in people’s best interests, even when I wasn’t.

It seems really weird to think about that in hindsight, but the truth is…I knew no other way of getting things done. I loved people the best way I knew how, and actually did a lot of things right along the way. I just didn’t realize for a long time that my approach to leadership was self-defeating, because the need to maintain and protect my position got in the way of my freedom to love.

The point here is that many of the leaders who end up manipulating and abusing really have good hearts, or at least start out that way. Much of the problem is that these leaders are working within a broken system, one that expects super-humanness from them and accuses them for not achieving it–one that makes the stakes so high that it feels nearly impossible not to manipulate things in order to stay upon the pedestal of prestige.

You see, the other side of exalting our leaders, of forming a clergy class and putting them on pedestals, is this: once they are up there, their main priority, by necessity, becomes staying up there. No matter how much they desire the kingdom of God or love people…first and foremost, they have to stay on that pedestal. If they fall off, everything they feel called to do turns to dust. If they fall off…bye-bye, ministry. When you are that pastor or leader, placed in the position of admiration, power and authority, you suddenly find yourself with an awful lot to measure up to, and an awful lot to lose if you don’t. And the cruel irony of it is–many pastors generally feel this is the only way they can do what they are called to do. Many of them really aren’t all that greedy, egotistical, or hungry for power or prestige. They just simply believe there won’t be any opportunity for them to do good if they don’t stay on top of the heap.

I cannot tell you how many leaders’ eyes I’ve looked into and found that the main emotion there was fear. It certainly was my number one emotion. The fear of loss can be staggering, because everything hangs in this delicate balance, and it feels like there is so much to lose. The impulse to control can be compelling, to say the least.

So what happens when a pastor is having trouble making the payroll or paying the mortgage? That pastor preaches harder about tithes and offerings. What happens when someone starts raising questions about the way things are done? That person gets marginalized as rebellious and divisive, and in some cases might even be asked to leave. Why? Because in that pastor’s mind, there can be no ministry if there is no ministry platform. He (or she) probably hates that things are going that way; but he sees no other way to keep things afloat. He must defend his turf; he must manipulate; he must put position ahead of people. The show must go on.

And what of the people who get wounded in this system and walk away? They take it out on leaders who did the wounding, because they view it as a betrayal. And what of the pastors who fail, who finally cave to the pressure and act out by stealing money or visiting a prostitute, or some such thing? They are viewed as the scum of the earth, ostracized, and rarely regain any credibility to ever minister again.

But that’s only part of the story. You see…we set it up this way.

We, the church, set it up when somewhere down the line we forgot how Jesus modeled leadership, stopped taking responsibility for our own discipleship, exalted our leaders to an elite class, fed their pride, and began expecting them to be less human and more God-like than we were.

Look, no one’s suggesting that leaders should not be accountable for their actions. Everyone should. No matter how broken the system is, it doesn’t justify abuse in any form. And there really are some leaders out there who are corrupt, predatory, and just plain wicked. But there are many more leaders who simply fell into the dysfunctional cycle of staying on the pedestal. Even our natural laws offer some provision for entrapment. How can we place all the blame on the shoulders of our institutional leaders when we were the ones who put them on the pedestals–we, and our unbiblical, codependent, clergy-laity system? How can we blame them entirely for this mess, when the church as a whole has blatantly ignored Jesus’ warnings about this?

Why do we think Jesus warned us about this in the first place?

In my own healing process, I’ve come to see the damaging ways in which I led, and have made a lot of changes in my approach–and I still am learning. I don’t blame the system itself for the errors I made, or the people that I hurt; I was the one who did it. I wish with all my heart that I had known then what I know now, for perhaps I could have made different choices and spared a lot of pain. I’ve been out of the institutions for awhile, but un-learning the institutional style of leadership took longer. And the further I gravitate from that system, the more I see how it enabled the worst in me. It was so easy to lead that way within that system. In fact, I’d venture to suggest that it can be easier to lead the wrong way within the institution than it is to lead the right way. And that makes sense to me, since it approaches leadership the opposite way to what Jesus taught. How does one practice servant leadership in a man-exalting system? It can be done, to a point, and I’ve known some of these folks that I’ve come to respect greatly for their efforts; but those who succeed in doing so are swimming upstream.

I share this perspective so that perhaps the next time you see a pastor or leader acting out…you’ll remember that leader is fighting his/her own battle, and probably working within a system that actually makes it difficult to do things the right way. And the truth is…there is no elite spiritual class. Most of these leaders are just as broken as we are, and just as in need of mercy and compassion and healing. They just don’t always feel as free to be honest about it. And so I think we can’t solve this problem by just bashing the bad leaders. I think we need a whole different approach, one that returns to Scripture, and to Jesus’ example.

In the final post in this series, I’ll ramble a bit about what that might look like. (And that’s likely what it will be–rambling thoughts.) 🙂