It usually goes something like this, “Hi pastor, first, I want you to know that I love you like a brother, but…”
Instinctively, I’d brace myself whenever hearing this, having learned that, “I love you like a brother” is often Christian code for, “You’re not going to like what comes next!” And then they’d let me have “it” with both barrels! It’s the Bank Teller’s equivalent of a customer saying, “I hope you’re having a good day,” while sliding a folded note across the counter. Most tellers instinctively know that in that scenario what comes next is never pleasant or in one’s “best interest.”
Most often, it’s about a serious moral lapse or leadership failure—like the time I added a Saturday evening service, or the time we took all the people standing against the wall in our teenie, tiny, original worship building (now the children’s building) and started a video cafe service. Or the jaw-dropping time I made the decision to do my first lesson by video to try and leverage technology to reach even more people.
See? Pretty serious stuff! The kind of stuff church splits are made of.
People squabbling over this kind of petty stuff really used to eat my lunch until I spoke to more and more pastors and learned that most (if not all) experience the same kinds of things. We all have our battle scars, horror stories, and “been there, done that “ T-shirts to prove it.
But this bears talking about. Since this stuff IS GOING TO HAPPEN, it becomes a lot more about how you handle it then how you avoid it. As Chuck Swind0ll once said, “I love you like a brother—”
No wait, that’s not it. Oh yeah, “Life is about 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent about your attitude!”