One of my favorite parts of Velvet Elvis is the story about people leaving the church parking lot feeling cranky because it was crowded and it took too long to exit. Rob Bell announced the next week, “If you are here and you aren’t a Christian, we are thrilled to have you in our midst. We want you to feel right at home. But if you are here and you’re a Christian and you can’t even be a Christian in the parking lot, please don’t go out into the world and tell people you’re a Christian. You’ll screw it up for the rest of us.”
Ask anybody who has left the institutional church and they will regale you with stories about:
- mean people
- stingy people
- abusive people
- bullies
- people who miss the point
Hypocrites are the least of our problems.
Some of us – institutional church people – find ourselves in the throes of church conflicts or divisions, or even churches leaving their denominations over theological differences. It’s exhausting. And it’s distracting from what we are supposed to be doing.
Christians disagree with each other and with others who are not Christians. Nevertheless, Jesus said something about loving our enemies which includes people with whom we disagree and/or don’t like very much. It’s rather outrageous to observe people who self-identity with the One who said, “Pray for those who persecute you” and yet they proceed to shred their their pastor behind their backs. It’s rather stunning to hear people engage in ugly parking lot conversations about other members of their own faith community. I have personally observed:
- church elders laughing during prayers for their pastor
- a church leader making fun of his pastor’s desire to take a day off
- one pastor denigrating another pastor on the same staff during a church meeting
- a church leader sabotaging another church leader’s reputation
It’s enough to make me wonder why we we stick with such congregations. And yet, we can be healthy churches.
Healthy churches hold each other accountable and seek reconciliation. And my job involves trying to help congregations become or stay healthy. Sometimes it’s tiring.
A Church for Starving Artists 
I would say to Rob Bell, “Don’t tell other people you are a Christian, you’ll screw it for the rest of us.” Self-righteousness is fun, huh?
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Scott – I didn’t see it as being self-righteous. It reminds me, instead, of that feeling I get when a person who self-identifies as Christian blows up a women’s clinic or burns a Koran. It makes it hard for others of us who self-identify as Christians because non-believers assume that all of us would do such things. It brings me back to that Barna study from a previous post.
Thanks, nevertheless, for your comment.
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I find it’s the holding each other accountable. I hear eye-wtiness accounts of unChristian behavior and speech all the time. But the person who witnessed it rarely is willing to say anything at the time that it happened.
There are many days that I think the one thing that could transform most churches overnight would be for all of us to gently and lovingly call attention to our behaviors and speech that are unloving. Instant feedback like that would be hard to hear, but could have a vast impact in how we live as a community.
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I once knew a church with people who were mean. Not everybody, but many of the people who made things happen. I like to think that they had not been given permission by previous leaders to be sad or worried or to ask questions, so when bad feelings came up, *mean* was the only way they knew to express themselves. *Mean* gets attention in a way that curious or sad does not, often. And they were very much an attention-seeking people, with pretty low self-esteem.
That is the explanation that allows me to sleep at night.
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Jules – This is a great explanation. I always thought people were mean because that was acceptable behavior wherever they came from: mean families, mean work sites.
Shawn – You are totally right about accountability. I had the experience of a former pastor visiting the church I served and some of the longest-standing members took him and his wife out to lunch after worship. On Monday morning, he came by to see me before leaving town, and he said that the hosts of the gathering spent the entire lunch shredding me and my co-pastor’s reputations.
“How did the others respond?” I asked, knowing that the others at the lunch were faithful leaders at the church, serving as elders and deacons and important volunteers. “They said nothing,” the former pastor said. “They said nothing to defend you, probably because they wanted to be ‘nice’.”
We need to teach our people that nice does not mean condoning gossip/injustice/meanspiritedness. The church is not a club where we tolerate bad behavior for the sake of keeping the peace. The church is a spiritual community where we help each other grow in spiritual maturity.
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Brillant thought Jules.
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