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Your friend Sarah comes to you with a question:
"What is the appropriate course of action to take when you've come to feel that your pastor is both manipulative and deceptive?"Here is Sarah's story:
I come from a church in the central part of the U.S. In four years, our pastor has hired and fired four different associates. Each time he asked one of them to resign, he has told that person that he'd make things very difficult if he or she said anything. So the church didn't know why these associates left until much later. We want to be fair in judging him, but he hasn't cut his associates any slack. So, we're not sure why we should give him the benefit of the doubt.
His people skills don't seem very good. He has treated the youth group as unimportant. He has run off several church members. As a result, attendance has dropped from 400 to 300.
I know pastors tend to be overworked and underpaid. I know that many of them bear the weight of unrealistic expectations. However, our pastor seems too often to take the shortcut of bending the truth if the objective is noble. For instance, he reports people who transfer in from other churches as "new Christians." To me, that's being deceptive. It doesn't give an accurate picture of what's happening to either the local church or to our denominational headquarters. Those kinds of things have eroded trust in him.
Though our church continues to decay, the board seems unwilling to do anything. Some say they want him gone, but they seem content to wait out the situation: "It's our church, not his. Eventually, he will leave."
Complicating the scenario is the fact that the pastor and the district superintendent are good friends. On top of that, all our district superintendent seems to want to do is be a "peacemaker." So he doesn't demonstrate good skills when he needs to be an interventionist. Those who've tried to talk to the superintendent about problems related to our pastor have simply been told that this is an issue for the church board. I know that is technically true within our governmental policy, but can't the district superintendent take some kind of lead?
Fortunately, I guess, there are some in the church who are oblivious to it all. And although our town isn't real large (35,000 population), there's no gossip going around about him yet.
There has to be some point where we change direction and move on. How do we know if we're there? If we are there, what do we do?What do you say to Sarah? She's not on the church board. What course of action should she pursue?
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Howard Culbertson, Southern Nazarene University, 6729 NW 39th, Bethany, OK 73008 | Phone: 405-491-6693 - Fax: 405-491-6658
Copyright © 2002 - Last Updated: March 12, 2007 | URL: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/deceit.htm
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Article by Howard Culbertson. For more original content like this, visit: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert