Letters To A Pastor
Excerpted from: “No Place For Me: Letters to the Church in America”
Excerpted from: “No Place For Me: Letters to the Church in America”
IN RESPONSE TO A PASTOR WHO WRITES: “Dear Sir, I am a prominent minister who reads your letter and feels your pain. I shared it with many other pastors in the hopes that we can hear the soul of it…. We needed to hear from you…” Letter from Anonymous Pastor, 2005
By John W. Fountain
Letters To A Pastor Part II — The Good Shepherd
November 3, 2011
DEAR PASTOR, I hear you, man. …But the people perish. And yet, the clergy flourish. So many among you manicured and also wearing regal, customized preacher robes and golden crosses in the pulpit, wax eloquently Sunday after Sunday about love. And yet, daily, in loveless urban streets, often within the shadow of churches, death, poverty and hopelessness rage like a relentless, violent storm — so-called light and darkness coexisting, like good neighbors.
And I wonder how is this possible? Doesn’t the faintest presence of light dispel darkness? Where are the good shepherds?
Just the other day, I saw on a street corner in a troubled Chicago neighborhood a symbol of the state of the black church and its glaring disconnection: A proud but lifeless brick building adorned with the symbols of Christianity. It stood dark and shuttered and protected by black wrought-iron bars, even as life beyond Sunday mornings ebbed and flowed up and down the avenue — unfazed and unaffected by the church that generally remains visionless regarding effectual change for a people.
“I can’t sleep this morning. Honestly, I felt like buying a bottle of rum to anesthetize my pain — the pain of saying what I feel about something I love as dearly as the church…”
In these times, far too many pastors fill their coffers on the backs of the poor. Far too many remove themselves from the daily travails of the sheep, choosing instead to dwell on far away hills of suburban meadows where gunshots, crime and the cries of their people form not so much as a whisper as they lay their heads on peaceful pillows.
Some pastors complain the road is too hard. Some pervert the calling, preferring the glitz and glam of being a big-shot preacher boasting a large membership, which — if a pastor has political aspirations — also translates to a hearty voting base.
Too many pastors these days trot out for news cameras amid the latest neighborhood tragedy then fade to black once cameras are gone. Too many are MIA or else remain mum on matters of critical importance to the poor and downtrodden, are prone to going on retreats when the church ought be advancing, prone to say what is politically expedient rather than speak the unadulterated Gospel truth.
Even more conspicuous is the absence of many pastors from the frontlines of any war against the ills and evil entrenched all around their churches.
In these times, sheep care for the shepherd.
I have seen pastors use the Bible to browbeat folks into giving their last dollar for “the church” then leave even faithful longtime members to fend for themselves at times of crisis, or else make them feel like beggars when asking the church for help.
But isn’t that why the church exists? Isn’t it supposed to mirror the early church in the book of Acts? Isn’t the church the body not the building?
Do bricks have souls?
And yet, the twisted focus of this American paradigm of Christianity is one that erects multi-million-dollar edifices, even in the ‘hood, leaving congregations saddled with debt for near perpetuity. It is a model that resembles a more insidious pimpology — carried out all in the name of God.
One that systematically takes from the poor and exchanges for their tithe, talents and time a soothing, yet milquetoast, brand of Christianity that leaves them dependent on the institution of church rather than on the living Christ — without the transformative power to break generational curses.
I have witnessed the love of the church wax cold, even as the world itself has grown colder — poverty rising like the morning sun, murder stealing our sons and daughters and the socio-economic gap ever widening.
Preaching these days has become big pimping and the focus of the church insular and characterized by pastoral anniversaries, mega-faith conferences, by holy convocations and other church fare that are more about glorifying man than God.
Clearly, it’s not all pastors, but enough to make the issue pervasive and this son of the church cry. I would be without hope were it not for the words of Jeremiah 23 that warns “shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture” and assures punishment for them, but that also promises that the lost sheep will be restored.
I pray, dear pastor, that you will be part of the promised wind of change and restoration. For the people perish.
* * * *
Letters To A Pastor Part III — Your First Love
Nov. 10, 2011
Dear Pastor, It’s just after 4 a.m. I write to you with tears in my eyes, depleted and heavy with the burden of feeling compelled to say publicly what so many among you will not about the church’s current state. I can’t blame them.
The church has, after all, become a sacred cow, a cash cow. And raising one’s voice can draw the ire of even loving, little old church mothers, even if motivated — less than by anger, bitterness or any disappointment over any perceived failings of the church — more by a heart that agonizes over the debilitating and deeply enslaving conditions of our people.
I can’t sleep this morning. Honestly, I felt like buying a bottle of rum to anesthetize my pain — the pain of saying what I feel about something I love as dearly as the church; the haunting pain of having seen as a ghetto child, as journalist, as man, the destruction of black folks, far too many of whom stagger like zombies on hyper-segregated islands dotted with liquor stores, drug dealers, poverty and also too many impotent churches.
It is the pain of being a writer with a love for God’s people and the sense of obligation passed through generations to help our brothers and sisters — a sense that unless we all “make it,” none of us truly ever makes it, and that in the words of the gospel song, “If I can help someone as I pass along, then my living will not be in vain.”
I believe nothing holds greater transformative promise than the church of Jesus Christ — a healthy church, moving, living, empowering. And yet, in so many communities, the church is no more effective than a bottle of rum in healing what ails us.
Know this, dear pastor: I am not your enemy.
But some apparently believe I am the enemy, at least one of the devil’s minions. Recently, at an event where I was master of ceremonies and standing just off stage, a pastor remarked in passing that my writing about the church was bound to make more people become atheists. And I thought, “How so, when my doubt is only with man, not with Christ?”
Since I began writing these letters to you, while I sat one day recently minding my own business in a café, a pastor whom I barely know asked with a twisted expression on his face, “What qualifies you to speak on the church?”
I might have asked him the same about being a pastor.
For theology degrees and ordination certificates, clergy collars or gold crosses don’t equip someone to love, or to serve. And one need not be draped in church pedigree, have apostolic authorization or bear the clergy-certified stamp of approval to think aloud for themselves, feel, cry — only a heart, a brain, a soul, a voice and knowledge of the Gospel truth.
Dear pastor, I understand how difficult and unpopular it can be to speak truth, especially to power and especially when we are ourselves imperfect, fallible. How tempting it can be to say only those things that tickle people’s ears. I once heard a preacher say before a large audience that he knows his calling: “To preach the kingdom of God.” Then he added, “But if I do that, I’ll have to look for another job.”
But don’t callings supersede mere jobs? Isn’t the sustenance of every believer truly greater than any of our momentary earthly resources or treasures? And if the Gospel, pastors and also preachers are compromised by the materialistic infection we now see spreading like cancer, what is the hope of the poor, the widowed, the downtrodden and all those whom the Gospel can redeem?
That is why I choose to not remain silent, even at the expense of being labeled the enemy. It’s like fire shut up in my bones.
Never am I more contemplative, cautious, careful — prayerful — than when writing about matters concerning the church. It is a church I see through the eyes of a black man with a foot in each world — one black, the other white; one secular, the other spiritual — and through the duo lens of having been both insider and outsider.
And what I have come to see regarding the current state of the church is simply this: We have left our first love.
Returning to it — to Him — is the first step to healing our homes, our neighborhoods, our lives, our souls. We’ll need good pastors in our sojourn, shepherds connected, committed and clear on their purpose, priorities and passion.
As for your question of which fire a pastor should put out first — the one at the White House, the church house or his house? That’s easy. Charity begins at home.
As for buying a Rolex or other earthly treasures to compensate for “not having a life,” I say, “Take some time to enjoy life, brother” and also, “What profit a man to gain the world and yet lose His soul?”
Good pastors get weary. There is always work to do, always someone who wants something from you, the hours long, the job sometimes thankless, and the folks you help the most sometimes the least grateful. I get it.
But there is no greater calling. And He who has called you says, “…be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life.”
The same bible exhorts me, especially in times like these, to be sober — even if sometimes in pain — and to cry aloud. So I write, understanding that the answer lies neither in liquor nor in my silence. I write. Keep me in your prayers. Your brother, John.
Email: Author@johnwfountain.com
Website: http://www.johnwfountain.com
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