Why You Don’t Like Pastors
He was one of the leading pastors in the city. But this pastor was getting the kitchen sink thrown at him. It was not something he had not heard before. It started like any other regular interview.
It went into the usual stuff – a personal story, family life, and his professional career. He was one of those likely to succeed as an investment banker before the detour to become a man of the cloth.
The interviewer asked him what the ministry he was running was doing to address social justice in society.
And that was where she came with all guns blazing.
According to her, the pastor was not doing enough. He needed to be setting up entrepreneurial loans. This would help the financially-disenfranchised access credit to set up businesses.
The school the ministry was running was not cheap enough until it could be near free. There was nothing the pastor could say about what they were doing that could change the interviewer’s mind.
The pastor was a big fat cat not doing his fair share of the work to make life better for the rest of the people on the bad end of Lady Luck’s deal card.
So, what do we do to make the pastors do their fair share?
Did Jesus Really Stay Dead For 3 Days Before Easter?
I don’t know if you are like me. But I always like to ask all the “why”, “how”, “what” and “when” questions that come with Christianity. One of those “how” questions I asked for a long time was about Easter.
How could Jesus have stayed dead for 3 days if Easter says he was crucified on Friday evening and resurrected on Sunday morning? The math was not adding up
By my calculations, that seemed less than 72 hours if I go by the words of Jesus on the expected timeline for Him to stay dead.
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. – Matt 12:40
So, what happened here?
Time To Stop Sharing Testimonies In Church
I would like to share the testimony of this 30-year-old guy – it’s one of those really good testimonies.
He was working in the mailroom of a large multinational and had been there for a while just doing his job. There had been people that he even helped on the job who had now become management level staff now but he was still just a contract staff.
One morning, he got a call on his intercom to come to the Boardroom. He quickly grabbed his jacket, tried to straighten himself up and make a quick dash to meet them
Arriving there, he found out that the board and management team were having a strategy session.
The MD had spent the night thinking about an initiative but he could not adapt it to make it work for the organization. As it turned out, no one else in board or management team could either.
It was then that the head of administration unit (who once worked with the young man in the mailroom) suggested that they call him. In his words “this young man has a way of analyzing things and coming up with a plan for how they can work. He did that for me once”.
As it would turn out, the young man was able to do the same thing at the strategy session. The MD was so impressed that he made the guy the deputy CEO immediately and put him in charge of executing the initiative
So, in the morning a mailroom staff and afternoon deputy CEO, a senior management staff.
As you can imagine, everyone in church went high – most people were already claiming the testimony.
So, what is wrong with sharing this testimony?
Why I Don’t Pay Tithes
During one of the lean times of one of the social causes I support, one of its officers had made an impassioned plea for voluntary contributions.
Along the lines of passion, he had asked that people consider giving their tithes because of the need that the social cause was supporting.
As you can imagine, this started the next episode of The Battle Of The Planets. The only problem was that no one could really tell who was Zoltar as everyone seemed to be playing Commander Mark.
Let’s just say we had a couple of “my church should always get my tithe”, “tithe is not for you” and so many other points of view you can add to the mix.
I don’t really think we came to one point of view that day but I guess that what you should expect. Any talk of money has a way of bringing out the superpowers that most church folks keep hidden for just that occasion.
What’s Tithe Got To Do?
So, what is all the hullabaloo on tithe?
Lessons From Leading A Student Fellowship
During my undergraduate, I served as president of a campus fellowship in school. As things would turn out during my time in leadership, it had the largest number of attendees. In simple church growth lingo, we had the largest fellowship on campus.
But you know the funny thing, I don’t know how many people attended our fellowship meetings. Don’t be too awed, we were not so big that we couldn’t count. Rather, I told the ushers not to bother counting how many people showed up during services.
The only reason we were seen as the largest fellowship was that we filled the whole chapel auditorium. Other fellowships filled sections of the chapel – we took the whole place.