There is a lot to Christianity a person doesn’t see while they are sitting in a pew. Even some of the active members of the congregation don’t see it, or if they do, they don’t know enough to put a stop to it or they don’t care. Sometimes they just choose to trust the pastor anyways, despite their misgivings.
One of my first shocks in this area was in the first church Bob and I served as youth ministers to in Northeast Arkansas. It was Vacation Bible School week, and I truly enjoyed teaching my second graders. The way it worked, I taught my class then just kind of supervised the rest of the night. One night, I was standing near the pastor, Brother Jerry, when he made this remark.

“Yeah, vacation Bible school is pretty pointless. We spend more money on it than any other event, and it never brings anyone to church. It’s supposed to help us bring in new families, but it doesn’t.”

Really? Because I thought VBS existed to bring kids to Christ. At the very least, expose some unchurched kids to church and help familiarize them with it, so that if they ever decide they want to come to church, it won’t be completely foreign to them. Any kind of membership rise is completely bonus.

What people don’t realize about many churches is that success is not measured in money–they pressure you to tithe mostly because small and mid-sized churches do often truly struggle to pay the bills. The churches I worked in, the pastors did not make much money and probably wouldn’t get much of a raise unless just a HUGE number of people started coming to church and donating a HUGE amount of money. It does happen, but mostly in larger churches.  (Now, I don’t think the pastors I worked for deserved any kind of raise, but that is another story.) Southern Baptist pastors have to give annual reports to the convention about how many new members were brought in, how many were saved and Baptized, etc. It is embarrassing for a pastor to have to stand at convention and say, “We had 0 new members this year.” But if he has a church of 50 and added 100, well, they practically throw him a party. He is bearing fruit, so he must be the real deal!

This is yet another reason why I can honestly say that Christians are no more moral than the rest of us–these are their leaders who only care about earthly success. Or maybe they are looking for some kind of heavenly reward as well, but their actions exist solely to puff themselves up–not to minister to people. I know there are genuine pastors and ministers out there, but they are probably rarer than you think. It seems that they either care about numbers, money, dogma, or both. Though I know they must exist, I have yet to meet a pastor who cared about loving people, ministering to them without expecting any kind of church attendance reward, and respected them even if they disagreed.

I was completely blown away by Brother Jerry’s comment. If it had been a one time sort of thing, I could have ignored it, but in the years I spent in ministry, I heard many comments such as this. If a program didn’t bring new people into church, it got zero support. I visited a Presbyterian church once and the entire service, I kept thinking that something was different about their ministries. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Finally, on the last song, it hit me. Their ministries were designed to minister to people, the way Jesus supposedly wanted. Baptists only cared as long as it brought more numbers. Very noble. I am sure Jesus would be proud.’

Tags: Baptist, Christianity, ethics, ministry, morality, pastors, religion, VBS

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 2:17 am and is filed under Life in General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.