Perry Noble has a great post that I think all pastors and church workers should read entitled “10 Warning Signs that you Might Not Be Healthy”. Here are the first five:
#1 You cannot remember the last time you clearly heard the Word of God speak to you about an issue in your own life.
#2 You no longer use the Bible to learn more about Jesus and hear His voice…you are simply using it to find your next sermon.
#3 You actually begin to hate and despise the people in your church (who, by the way, are the very people you are called to love!)
#4 You spend more time on the cell phone and computer when you are at home than you do with your own family.
#5 You are so obsessed with pleasing people and putting out fires that listening to God and doing what He says is no longer the goal of your life and ministry.
Pastors… church workers… you HAVE to be healthy. Â I’m tired of seeing friends and acquaintances fall. It all starts with a little crack. You think you have it covered, but before you know it, you’ve lost everything.
Friend, heed the warnings. If you need help, get help.
What areas are you vulnerable in?
Okay;
Great list, but really pretty shallow.
The church has a systemic problem. It’s all filled with “sick” people. Jesus said He didn’t come for the well, He came for the sick. Well, none of us are well. And even those who say there’ll healthy, often are the ones making the “healthy” list and have yet to see their own illness.
So while the list provides a “starting” point it grossly misses the point. The point being WE ARE all ill and don’t need a quick fix to health but a complete transformation of engrafting Jesus’ love into our very being. Not a few sessions of therapy, or confessing hidden sins of lust, etc.etc.
The older I get the more extremely irritated I become with lists, self-help “how-to’s” which only drive the problem deeper.
I’m not negating the value of the list as indicating a warning, but it can’t stop there. The problem is much much deeper and it’s in all of us. The very core of our being is messed up, and many pastors simply leave when they begin to burn out, or run out of energy and move on to another congregation which allows him to go on his merry way. Still sick, still needy, while the whole time the congregation is just as sick and just as needy.
So what’s the answer? Real Love! Yeah! Love! That Pastor is sick because he hides behind his pulpit, or vestments covering up his lack of whatever. AND the congregation let’s him do it, because heaven forbid, what if he finds out we’re hiding, running, jumping around the fire of religion just like him.
There’s an old concept I learned from John Maxwell in his study of Kind David. He says (and I’m paraphrasing) “People can only rise as high as the leader will allow or is capable of handling.” And, “The atmosphere of a congregation, organization, institution can only derive it’s timbre from the head (And I don’t mean Jesus).”
Tom Hanks said in the movie “Forrest Gump”, Stupid is as stupid does.
So what do we do?
Stop treating the symptoms and start treating the disease. The list above is a great tool for diagnosing the symptoms, so what’s the disease?
He’s sick!!! That’s not the disease! That’s the condition, and the condition of all of us. How do we treat the condition?
1. Authenticity – admit we’re all sick. Admit what we’re doing ain’t working. Including church and the whole shallow churchianity stuff. Get real. And that will only come, probably, when you’ve bounced off the bottom of your resources.
2. Transparency – you can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge. Find someone who doesn’t agree with you, or see’s life from another perspective. Enlarge your pool of people you hobknob with. For the most part, church people don’t tell the truth. (Not all of course) But as a system it usually sinks the lowest common denominator, not the highest and best.
3. Give up trying to fix yourself – Surrender to God’s Infinite Love and Grace – and quit trying to please Him through works, more performance based ministry paradigms. You’re probably sick of trying to please everyone because that’s the yardstick of success.
4. Begin to love yourself the way God loves you, not men, wife, etc. That takes guts, courage and a will to seek the truth.
5. Be thankful that I am loved beyond what I could ever imagine or think possible. In all my messed up-ness, I am loved, I am loved.
6. Love someone else with unconditional love. If you’re loving your family with conditions, then how will YOU EVER love the way God loves us? Impossible. And it’s impossible anyway until you’ve been loved that way.
FOr most of us the target of love is vastly evasive. Hitting the target of God’s love is like being blind folded. We look for love in all the wrong places.
This is extremely long and my apologies for busting anyones balloon. But lists of identifying systems seems to be what we’re about. But engrafting the pure, unconditional love of God at best illudes us.
The pastor who fulfills all 10 of those sick characteristics doesn’t need church discipline, He needs to find Himself totally lost in “real Love”, not the counterfeit love that fills so many halls of our churches and Christian insitutions.
Blessings in your journey toward finding real Love!
James
I agree with what you are saying James, but you kind of burst your own bubble when you slam lists and then make a list. Identifying and naming what’s wrong with us and then putting together an action plan to overcome and eradicate it from our life sometimes requires lists. We need lists so we can remember what it is we need to do. It’s not so much that lists are wrong. It’s a matter of what is on those lists and we leave off prayer, repentance, and listening for God’s voice and if in making the list and plan we rely solely on self and leave no room for the work of the Holy Spirit then the list is nothing more than a to-do list that will not get done or at best will not net the desired result. The list should convict us of the changes we need to make, but also acknowledge that without God, the effort is in vain.
You have a great list as does Perry Noble. Lists aren’t bad, just the contents and manner of usage can be.
God bless you on your journey as well,
Response to David;
I’m laughing out loud. I read over my comments and said to myself, “Hey you just made a list.”
Ha! You are so right. Thanks. Yes lists can be good guidelines to indicate problems and bring about solutions.
I react to lists which only identify, but do little to help bring reconciliation, healing and wholesness to people. And we have to confess that most of the lists we’ve been raised with have been don’t lists, and a few “do” lists or better yet “be” lists: Be love, Be kind, Be compassionate, Be grateful, Be good to another etc.
Thanks David, your Da Man!
Blessings,
James