I feel like we(the church)’re missing something, and won’t find it until we ask a different question…”Why?”.  A much harder question to ask is  ”Why?”.  We often go straight to “What?” because it’s easier.  What does the Bible say about _____?  What is the right thing to do about _____?  What would Jesus do about _____? What have other churches done about ____?  What should we do about him/her?  And inevitably, all of those questions lead most Christians back to the first one…”What does the Bible say about ______?”  It’s a GREAT question to ask, if we claim that the Bible is A or THE foundational source for understanding the Christian faith.  In the following comments, I am not at all suggesting we don’t consult the Bible or our experience with it.  However, I don’t think the question “What” has always, or even often, given us the stability we are looking for when it comes to grasping the reasoning for why we do what we do, and how we should really be living.

Instead, I think the question we need to be asking more often is “Why?”  Why does the Bible say that about _____? Why should we do or say ______?  Why would Jesus do ______?  Why have other churches done _____?  Why should we respond that way to him/her?  Why does he/she do that?  Why do I believe “Why?” is a more important question?  Because I think the question “What?” is usually a cop-out from doing the harder work required by asking the question “Why?”.  The question “What?” often propels us too quickly into action, and we love that, because it helps us feel like we’re in control.  Frankly I think control is the root of all of our human initiated problems, and one of the things we all love the most.  God, that sucks.  One of the things we love the most is something that causes us the most problems.  Sounds like the root of sin to me.  The most powerful word I think I read in Corey’s comment was Kurt’s word “controlling”.  The root of all sin is control.  If Mars Hill leadership believes that controlling repentant people is the answer to “church discipline”, then they themselves are the epitome of the very sin they act like they want to banish.  Only they have twisted Biblical teaching to back them up in order to retain all the power…and control.

The question “Why?” causes us to contemplate intention and motivation.  I believe if we can spend more time considering those two things, and less time chasing “what” the right thing to do is, we may find the key to unlocking a lot of mysteries, not only about human behavior (“why” people do what we do), but “why” the Bible says what it says.  But if we don’t ask more “why” and less “what”, we’re bound to continue to demand control, and our individual and corporate mental illness will continue to grow.

Why did I bring up the DSM-IV in my last couple posts?  Because it gives a very educated perspective on a number of mental disorders (of which we all struggle with to some degree), that if left unaddressed, will lead individuals and whole communities into a frenzy for control.  I have seen and experienced more NPD and BPD within Christian churches and organizations that I have worked for/with and attended than I have in any other arena of my life.  NPD and BPD are found in people who demand control because they can’t mentally handle the fear and shame that comes from their lives being out of their control.  Most of their lives were out of their control when they were younger, and they were severely abused by people who themselves demanded to be in control.  If you take the issue of control to it’s most extreme, you end up with psychopathic and sociopathic behavior.  I’ve seen some of that in the church as well.  The question I ask you is “Why?”.  Why do I ask the question “Why?”?  Because inevitably it leads me back to grass roots awareness of my need for control, and the damage that can do if left unchecked.  It seems to me that the leadership of Mars Hill Church in Seattle is demanding to remain in control and unchecked.  Andrew on the other hand gave up control the first time he confessed to someone that he did something he didn’t think was right.  True repentance surrenders control.  The problem is, there are people out there that pray on those who have given up or lost their control.  We call the former…perpetrators, and the latter…victims.  The word those two categories fit best under is…ABUSE.  It’s a BIG problem in the church.

“Oh My God! I just read part two and gasped…out loud! I must have missed it when I commented on part one. I’ve got cold sweats right now. What a wicked way to “lead”. The amount of control and manipulation that was exhibited in that letter is frightening. Andrew, speaking from experience, I am glad you are free. As hard as it will be in the days, weeks, months ahead for you to watch people sacrifice you for their own fantasy, I’m confident from the little I’ve read that you and God will be just fine together. Again, if you or others read this comment and want help, let me know. I am working with a number of counselors in the Seattle area who specialize in helping people recover from institutional religious abuse. Some of them do distance counseling over Skype if anyone outside the Seattle area needs help. You can find me at botolff@gmail.com.

Here is Part 2 of Matthew’s posts…

http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/mark-driscolls-gospel-shame-the-truth-about-discipline-excommunication-and-cult-like-control-at-mars-hill/

“Dear God,

Can you please wake up the church?  It seems much of it is in some sort of trance.  I’m not kidding God.  It’s weird, and frankly pretty creepy.  It’s so hard to explain.  So much of what is happening is blatantly violent and abusive, but so few seem to see it.  I admit,  and repent, that it took me a while to snap out of it, and for a long time I just perpetuated it.  Frankly, sometimes I see myself still buying in to the lies, and if not causing more abuse, giving it permission by doing nothing about it.  But now that I’ve experienced and studied the trauma of such severe abuse, I can’t stop seeing it, and I don’t want to keep causing it.  God please, save your people from our own slumber.  Give us the wisdom and strength that it takes to learn about our own abusive ways, and to spot it in others.  And God…forbid us to keep pretending that we don’t have a serious problem, before our children reap the consequences, and develop even more manipulative tools than we did to keep the fantasy going.”

~ Botolff

This prayer comes as a result of a post that was forwarded to me by a friend…

http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/mark-driscolls-church-discipline-contract-looking-for-true-repentance-at-mars-hill-church-sign-on-the-dotted-line/

To Andrew and others who find themselves in similar situations, please know that there are people in the Seattle area, and around the country, who are committed to working specifically with faith based folks who have found themselves tied up in abusive institutional structures.  Speaking from experience, there are religious leaders locally, nationally and internationally who say they are guided by Biblical standards, when in all actuality, they are guided far more by their mental illness.  We want to try and help those trying to recover from that kind of leadership.

If you, person of the church, are starting to wake up and willing to risk your own responsibility in the matter, a helpful tool to begin reading is a DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).  Start by reading about NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder).  If you need some help interpreting, contact me and I promise to do what I can to help you wade through the professional lingo, and help you become part of the solution, instead of part of the problem.

• Intro
• Dictatorship of the Weak

_____________________

Chaplain Mike over at Internet Monk posted some good thoughts on 2 Corinthians today. One of the things the Apostle Paul was concerned about was the type of leadership that was influential among the people of the Corinthian church. He feared that the Corinthians were more apt to follow snakes than true Christ-like leaders (2 Cor. 11:3).

The good Chaplain remarks that the type of tools a leader utilizes makes a huge difference. We can utilize Kingdom tools or carnal tools.

I have used both types of tools, I must admit, and I am way better at the carnal ones. Therefore, I should stay away from the pulpit and stay away from leadership.

What are these carnal tools?

First, there is a tendency to build a personality cult around a charismatic leader. It was true in Paul’s day and it remains true in ours. Evangelical pastoring often assumes that the preacher has such a forceful personality that he/she is able to move and nurture the church by the force of his/her presence.

Second is the dependence on carnal philosophies and methodologies. We live in a day and age when pastors proudly refer to themselves as their churches’ CEO. I once had a conversation with a church-planting coach that taught me a church growth means that was pulled straight from a pyramid scheme’s playbook.

The Church is addicted to this kind of stuff and I often felt pressure to comply with these types of strategies. I look back a bit horrified to realize that I wasn’t too bad at these kinds of things and I regularly incorporated them into my ministry.

But, I was never comfortable with such carnality. I was never able to sell out completely. I could act according to carnal principles during the day and then have trouble looking in the mirror at night.

This put me in a bad spot. I was pretty good at the carnal stuff, but I wasn’t very good at the Kingdom stuff. Looking back, I think I unwittingly attempted some sort of hybrid between the carnal and Kingdom orientations. Trying to mix those two things together is a perfect way to botch everything up. Thus, I made a bit of a hack job out of most of the ministries I was a part of.

My advice to any young pastors out there is to be one or the other. Either be the pyramid-scheme CEO, or try to be the gracious Christ-like shepherd.

Dictatorship of the Weak occurs when a ministry revolves around the weakest members and their (dys)functions. Now, I don’t mean weakness in the sense of the Beatitudes. For instance, a church rallying around a struggling family or a member with addiction issues. In Christ’s kingdom, those people are worthy of the attention and resources. The struggling and hurting should be a focus for any Christ-like ministry.

When I say ‘weak,’ I invoke the backwards, upside down Kingdom mentality presented in the Gospels. Within that perspective the drunken beggar is the image of Christ, but the haughty Pharisee is the antithesis.

Too often in the American free church, the Pharisee gets all the attention while the drunkard gets ignored or worse. Ministry meetings are dominated by people complaining about the length of the service, the attire of the youth minister, or the placement of the flags on the stage. To end the meetings, a quick prayer is said for the couple in the process of divorce.

*****

Most people in the church are well-intentioned and low-maintenance believers that are so supportive and gracious. My time with them was actually refreshing and encouraging. However, I also saw a lot of high maintenance people in my offices. Some of them were struggling hurting people that grappled with their own brokenness on a daily basis. In short, they were a mess and somebody needed to hold their hand for every step in the darkness of their lives. Such work was exhausting, but Godly and good. There was, unfortunately, another set of high maintenance people.

The other set of high maintenance members were the Dictators. Under a guise of Christianese and spiritual jargon, they would dictate how the ministry should proceed. They would critique everything and hotline complain about how the ministry was not meeting their (God’s) expectations. One meeting would lead to another and any effort to engage them on a subject or offer a different perspective would be met with a thinly disguised threat to leave the church.

In a full panic, the church would respond:

‘So and so is going to leave the church?’

Gasp!

Why are they leaving? Why can’t the pastor just give them what they want? Can we afford to lose their tithe?

inevitably, the church would rally around the dictators and anybody responsible for upsetting them were given a free lesson in ‘unity.’

****

Anybody who gets their way via threats and manipulations is a spiritual weakling and these are not the people who should be running the church, unless the church wishes to be weak.

Such people are unavoidable in any institution, spiritual or secular. Also, any organization follows the old rule that the ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease.’ For certain, these people know how to squeak. So, if a person is going to pastor or lead any organization they have to learn to tolerate such people, right?

No. The Church is uniquely qualified to help such people grow past their sniveling immaturity. The New Testament is a wonderful picture of wildly diverse believers pushing through disagreements yet remaining focused on the work of the Kingdom. Did people gripe and make a fuss? Yes. Were they dealt with? Yes, but they were not allowed to run the show and they were certainly not allowed to derail the focus of the ministry.

The New Testament church is the place where people go to grow up. We move from milk to meat by learning that if we throw temper tantrums somebody is not going to run over and coddle us. If we have a hissy fit in the middle of a business meeting, the pastor is not going to change his sermon, but he is more likely to refocus us on the goal.

So, why can’t I pastor anymore? Because I was bad at dealing with such people

• I never learned to pull punches. When I preached, I preached the text as I saw it and I had no issue with pointing out particular issues within the church directly.
• I never learned to coddle people that were acting like jerks. Every time somebody threatened to leave the church, I told every one of them to hit the road. In fact, I usually referred people to a different ministry. However, I never ran anybody out of the ministry. I was willing to work with them and love them, but they needed to get their butts to the back of the line.
• I never learned to allow the dictators to run amok. If somebody was getting run over by one of the dictators, I said something and I always tried to stand up for those being wronged.

I’ve been told by several pastors that this is just part of what it means to be the church. I’ve been told that my temperament and personality was not ministry material. They give me a pat on the head and shake their heads at me. Then, they return to their pulpits to coddle their dictators, water down their sermons, and collect their checks. Screw that. I can do that anywhere.

I was told by a friend that I don’t have what it takes to pastor. So, the question remains: am I done? I’ll explore that question on here from angles for and against returning to the ministry and maybe you can help me out.

My thoughts? Erm… Ugh.

Let’s start with the good. Essentially, Jefferson presents a video that says there is a Jesus that is not like the ‘religion’ that claims his name. Anybody that is passionate for purity and truth in their faith deserves to be commended. As far as I’m concerned, the author/speaker is doing a wonderful job trying to present an alternative Jesus. There are a lot of us milling around outside the church right below a ‘do not enter’ sign. Many of us would like to know that there is a different Jesus than the one represented by the meanies that gave us the boot. So, kudos for that. I think presenting such an alluring alternative is resonating because people are looking for something/someone different than the Jesus in Church.

Now, on to my specialty. Nit-picking.

On an aesthetic nit-pick level, I think the video is annoying. He just spouts off some rather stale bumper sticker type theology in a way that is almost self defeating. That’s my job and I do it on a thing called Twitter! Hands off, Mr. Leather Jacket!

Time for a more serious nit-pick. Isn’t this just a different way of retreading that stalest of Jesus Movement flotsam: I’m spiritual, not religious.

I would (should) never fault anybody for using hyperbole to get their point across, but I think this hyperbole pushes us in a wrong direction. ‘Religion’ is the collection of practices that people of faith perform for spiritual and worshipful reasons. Prayer is a part of religion. Also, meditation, fasting, gathering, singing, praising, preaching, fellowshipping, etc. Is Jefferson saying that Jesus ‘hates’ fasting and prayer? Worship and fellowship? I can’t think that he does. Nor should we.

For those of us that have found ourselves on the outside looking in, it is easy for us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We want to pursue some sort of homebrewed spirituality because we’re sick of all the ‘religious’ people. So, there goes our prayer life. Adios to the peace of meditation. Farewell, to the genuine love and accountability of a corporate faith. Why? Because we’re spiritual not religious. We believe in Jesus not the Church.

That is a real quick way to end up being a grumpy jerk that nobody likes. More on that here.

The thing that bothers me most about this whole spoken word bumper sticker theology thing is that one of the primary means of finding Jesus is via religion. Rarely do people have spontaneous revelations or sudden epiphanies. Christ’s sanctifying work is a long process – a steady erosion of our sin and shame, and then a rebuilding of love and hope. It takes a long time and it is an intensely social process.

It is also a religious process.

People’s shame and guilt are not exorcised by sitting at home watching YouTube or reading blogs like this. Our inner hells are vanquished when we gather and we pray and we love one another enough to partake in the body and the blood.

You can’t baptize yourself.

I know I know. Nobody complains more about the church than I do, and Ithink sacerdotal religious practices tend to do more harm than good. OK. I’ve got issues; you’ve got issues; we’ve all got issues. But, I sincerely hope to continue  being a voice from within the Church. I should be calling out for people to right the boat and not abandon ship.

Amos answered Amaziah, “I am not a prophet, nor am I a prophet’s son; but I am a shepherd, and a trimmer of sycamore trees. But the LORD took me from shepherding the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’

-Amos 7:14-15

Amos was so cool. He never pulled a punch and his message went right up to the King of Israel and hit him between the eyeballs. But the message that Amos brought was not exactly enjoyed by the nobles and the good church-going folks of his day. The king’s toad of a priest (Amaziah) told Amos to buzz off and learn some respect.

I can’t really blame the king or the priest. Amos had a tough message to hear. ”The Day of the Lord won’t be no party for y’all” was essentially the message Amos brought. He said that God was sick of the idolatry and the injustice, and he wasn’t about to put up with it anymore:

Doom to you who turn justice into poison, 
      and throw righteousness 
      to the ground!

I know how many are your crimes, 
      and how numerous are your sins— 
   afflicting the righteous, 
      taking money on the side, 
      turning away the poor 
      who seek help.

-Amos 5:7,12

Yikes.

I find it fascinating that when the priest tries to teach Amos some manners, Amos doesn’t give his credentials, show his ordination papers, or anything of the sort. In fact, he does the opposite. He says to the priest ‘I’m not a prophet at all! I’m just a shepherd and a fig-picker.’

I picture Amos sitting in front of the ornately dressed priest. What a contrast! Amos has his bib overalls on with a straw hat and a piece of grass hanging out of his mouth.  You don’t learn manners when you’re herding sheep, and you don’t learn to keep your mouth shut when you’re picking figs. Amos was saying that he was too dumb to keep his message to himself. He was too common to ignore the call of God.

We could use an Amos these days.

That is part of the reason I am so eager to see the ministry in my rear view mirror. So many preachers preach toward their own popularity, or attempt to coddle the message and make it nice. Meanwhile, the truth-tellers get their heads served up on a silver plate.

I’d rather throw on some overalls and pick a few figs. A fig-picker tells the truth when the high priest can’t.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. But, I do know what I can no longer do; I know what I can no longer be. I can’t be some sniveling priest, kissing up to the king and justifying corruption. Hell no. I don’t have manners enough for that.

I love my mother (the Church), but I’d rather not. I love her despite the fact that she spends a lot of time sleeping around with counterproductive political ideologies. I love her despite the fact she’s regularly found in spiritual dark alleys mainlining all of our world’s junk – consumerism, materialism, etc. I love her though she refuses to change or even recognize her issues. I love her, but she doesn’t make it easy.

I’m on the verge of giving up, throwing in the towel, and turning my back for good. But,  such a move wouldn’t make me a better person. For, loving the unlovable is the ultimate love, and the Church has been pretty unlovable.

Also, I still need a mother. It is easy to stay on outside the Church hurling insults. It is lazy to see her problems as unsolvable and just walk away. It also sounds selfish – taking my Bible and going home.

Without my mother, I’d probably be even more of a selfish jerk.

What would I do without the Church? I would probably sit around and mope. I would probably troll the facebook statuses of church people and make fun of them and their/our Mother.

But, that is too easy. Isn’t it?

Lillian Daniels wrote a scathing article a while back where she called people like me ‘boring’.

There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you.

Pathetic as it may sound, this is why I still need a Mother. Isolating myself from those who I have so many problems with means I am insulating myself from anyone who might call me out on my crap.

I love my mother. I can’t help it. I love her for all the time I have spent in church basements sipping weak coffee from a styrofoam cup while some old church lady told me that I was valuable and good. I love her for all the times I have been the one pouring the coffee or the one expressing love. I love her for my baptism. I love her for offering me the Body and the Blood. I love her for the gifts of God. I love her for the people of God.