A reason I quit

I'm not a Paul Washer fan, generally speaking, but his words here reflect one of or some of the reasons I left paid, full-time ministry.  I 100% don't buy into the "pastor" model he's talking about, or the “male only leadership" thinking, or a whole bunch of other stuff that he's about... 

...but I do agree that many in leadership positions inside of churches have eyes for "growing a church" or "planting churches" to the degree they will 100% sacrifice their own sheep so as to attract more sheep that are like themselves and/or attract the specific kind of sheep they'd like to have.

That line where he says something to the effect of "you love the church as much as you love your most difficult member" is pretty true.  

Our model(s) of church allow us to prioritize the reaching of/creation of certain kinds of "disciples" and the freedom to cast off, ask to leave, and/or, most likely, completely ignore those who don't understand "our vision" and ask too many questions that we're tired of answering - something I personally witnessed in my last few years of “church work”.

People who are in leadership that don't/can't reach out to share Jesus naturally and effectively in their own personal sphere/life (work, neighborhood, where they shop, friend groups, etc) but has to have the structure of "church activities" (a created, focused ZIP code, etc) and an artificially created target audience that is no where near their own life, socially or physically, in order to share their faith - well, that's why most churches are where they are today, in my opinion.

And yes, I completely understand that not everyone has the gift of evangelism, but all believers are called and/or assumed to be able to explain the hope they have within them.  

And maybe they ARE sharing the hope they have...and maybe that's the issue?  Maybe their hope is "We have a growing church!  We have a great church!  We have a _____!  Come join us!".

Maybe that's filtering out a lot people who'd love to hear about good news in Jesus, but aren't interested in a spiritual timeshare package known as "church" these days.

I 100% get it. It's hard. It's our inheritance from generations of churches borrowing from business models and educational models, but it's just not working in most instances.  

And they're afraid to do much differently because it's a house of cards and a lot of institutional money, and I mean a whole lot of money and momentum would stop if we tried to think and do differently.

Anyway, I just happen to run across this video someone shared and it is good at summarizing one of those things that was causing way too much cognitive dissonance in me.  

There's a lot of other stuff you can see in earlier blog posts and so this isn't the only thing (if this is the first thing you're reading of mine), but when I see something that says it better than me, I like to make note of it.

__________

God is still good!  More than I'd imagined before.  He's still at work in people, more than we imagine now.

I am grateful for eyes to see new things out of really old wisdom and to realize that God doesn't "pitch us into hell" because we've messed up some things and maybe even were really zealous about what we were messing up.

Peace and goodwill.