A couple years ago, Southbrook Church had a father/son — hockey/pizza night. It was a blast! It was also an opportunity to see the difference between the following group’s behaviors;
1. Adults
2. Boys
3. Adult boys
The men of SCC faired pretty well in this comparison test. Given opportunities at Bobcats arena to,
1. Vie for world’s greatest fan status
2. Just look goofy whenever the camera was near
3. Show enthusiasm and have fun or
4. Sit there like a bump on a log and pretend to be into it
They usually opted for number 3 (with an occasional number 2 here and there).
The BOYS, however, we’re the most fun to watch. The young ones WANT to be caught picking their nose or making facial contortions when the camera pans near. Slightly older ones we’re reinventing what looked like gangsta signs with their hands and looking cool. It was fun to watch. There was even a heavy set (like that?) dude in a cowboy hat acting as a sort of MC of the night and the boys tried real hard to get his attention. Alas, he never looked our way — a huge mistake, because judging by the attendance, we were the biggest single group there! Even so, there were around 6,000 in attendance to watch the checkers play the Pensacola Ice picks or ice cubes or something like that. So, you can see that old Cowboy Joe couldn’t get to everyone. No, his job is to make everyone feel included without personally sitting down with or shaking hands with everyone. It was cool though. The kids seemed to understand and never gave it a second thought. And THAT right there leads me to the point of this post.
Friends, let’s take a “large church” as our example. A so-called “mega-church” is around 2,000 people. To put this in perspective, that’s two thirds of the total attendance of that professional hockey game! That’s a lot of people to care for, disciple, equip, love on, etc. I assure you, most large church’s leaders take their role as shepherds very seriously. Yet there’s always a group who gets angry and exercises their right to push the eject button. As they leave, they often stomp their feet and festively festoon (again, like that?) over the fact that the lead pastor would not sign (in blood) their personal ‘best friend’ contract. The terms always seem more than fair to these man-sized toddlers. Here are a few unspoken examples:
1. The pastor should meet me for lunch whenever I call (at least once a week).
2. The pastor should call my family every day for every reason under the sun– even if my 32 year old son’s goldfish dies. Who better to do Marlin’s memorial?
3. The pastor and ONLY THE PASTOR should do all visitation, marriage ceremonies, funerals, and hospital runs — starting with me and my family!
4. Small groups are fine I guess but I need to be in THE PASTOR’S SMALL GROUP!
5. If I need to talk, the pastor should drop whatever he’s doing and accommodate me (even in between services on Sunday morning or when a 2 or 3 minute video is playing).
You get the idea? Good. Want to know the sad truth of this? It’s almost always the long term Christians that think like this — almost always people who have been at SCC long enough to know our mission, our size, and to know better!
Know what else? We had several leave this year and 3 or 4 of them actually stated several of the above reasons. <– I would have thought people would be WAY too embarrassed to admit this stuff, but the opposite is actually true. They believe it’s mature. They expect this from their pastor, and they are going to keep right on crutch shopping, oops, I mean, church shopping until they get it.
Best of luck to you. But you should probably know this…any church worth going to is going to be led by a pastor who understands his mission and knows exactly what God called him to do and NOT to do.
In the mean time I think I can help. Be more like the kids at the hockey game who all had a great time with their friends from SCC. Find a small group and begin ministering to others. Be the kind of friend you expect the pastor to be and you’ll have so many friends around you won’t know what to do with them.
Just some thoughts