Cain lured his brother out to the field where he “attacked his brother Abel and killed him” (Gen. 4:8). We could describe this first, primal sin after humanity rebelled against God in any number of ways, including the misuse and abuse of power. Cain had the strength—the power—of mind and stature to destroy a life. From marriages to the military, the typology of this tragic tale has replayed itself across the rough cut scenes of history. People with power—strengths of mind, body, authority, resources, and more—all too often neglect the proper use of power and instead mis-use and ab-use it. The last half-decade has displayed such ugly scenes, as #MeToo has trended on our screens and #ChurchToo has reminded us that the bride of Christ is not immune. Stories of powerful pastors and Christian leaders like Bill Hybels, Ravi Zacharias, and Mark Driscoll demonstrate the ways that power can accrue to a person and that person can grossly abuse people with that power. This is a problem, clearly.
But what if there were another, even more prevalent problem in our churches regarding the misuse and abuse of power at the intersection of pastoral leadership? I recently posted on Twitter, “For every horror story you tell me about a pastor who abused his leadership, I can tell you ten about leaders who abused their pastor.” Horror stories of pastors returning from summer sabbatical to find the elders had decided to terminate the pastor. Stories of small groups of angry members spreading misinformation and lies to congregations to dislodge a pastor from any positional or moral authority. Stories of pastors pouring their lives into person after person, only for person after person to receive the pastor’s services for free, and ghost the pastor for the smallest things. Here I want to ask a question, reflecting on that primal story from the fourth chapter of the Bible. What if for every pastor who is like Cain, using power to destroy, we could point to many other pastors who are like Abel, being abused by the power of others? Knowing that stacking anecdotes together does not make something empirical data, I still think we can acknowledge that pastoral abuse is a terrible problem, not just for pastors who are abusers but also for pastors who are abused, battered and bruised. Let me share three ways I think pastors can be subjected to patterns of abuse.
1. Individualist Consumerism
Individualist consumerism floats in our culture invisibly like an airborne virus. It tells us through overt marketing and subtle messaging that we determine our destinies and that we purchase our purpose. If we don’t like something, we return it or our money back. We check online reviews and leave online reviews about products and people, including our churches. If our church doesn’t have the program we need for our family in a given season, we pull up our temporary tent-stakes and move on to the next spot. Even the most mature and faithful Christians often fail to escape the spirit of the age, falling into such individualist and consumerist patterns without conscious awareness. We describe our desires in spiritual terms, wanting deep teaching, or true community, or a sense of purpose or inspirational motivation. But often these only mask an individual or consumerist mindset about getting certain needs met by certain spiritual professionals and programs. At the risk of overly dramatizing the situation, this individualist consumerism subjects pastors and church leaders to seemingly endless patterns of abuse. People leave churches for tiny reasons, often unstated expectations and needs no pastor could ever hope to meet.
For example, years ago someone left the church I was pastoring after a discussion about moving the time of the service 30-minutes. Not that we ended up changing the time of the service, but we had talked about the idea of changing the time to facilitate our vision. A member of this family had told me some time before this situation that they had come to our church because they wanted to “help build” there. They left, without a word to me, because we talked in a congregational meeting about a 30-minute time change. Every pastor could tell you similar stories of people ghosting the church and the pastor for such seemingly small or silly reasons.
2. Intransigent Constituencies
My computer’s dictionary defines “intransigent” as being “unwilling or refusing to change one's views or to agree about something.” Every pastor, especially those stepping into a role at an established church, knows the ways that such constituencies or groups can make life miserable. Often such constituencies are led, like a pebble in a shoe, by just one person who refuses to follow pastoral leadership. Any change of direction or implementation of vision or strategy for evangelism or discipleship or leadership development finds itself breaking like a wave on a rock against such stubbornness. The pastor will open long-form emails, talk on hours-long phone calls and coffee meetings about who, what, when, where, why, and how this, that or the other should be reconsidered, reengineered, or rejected. Such intransigence nearly always distracts the pastor and at its worst can destroy the pastor’s confidence, joy, or credibility. Such intransigence abuses the pastor who has been called by God to lead a particular local church. A pastor should not have unchecked, unaccountable, or unilateral authority, but neither should a pastor face consistent opposition from a cluster of usual and stubborn suspects.
For example, I know of a pastor who was doing his earnest best to lead well, establishing vision and slowly leading his established congregation toward health and growth. But every proposal, every process, every thing this pastor did found pushback from the same, small group of people, who would complain and gossip about anything but maintenance of their vision of what church was supposed to be. This pastor lost sleep and found himself getting anxious and angry as he sat on the floor playing with his kinds while his mind wandered to the constant complaining. Every pastor could tell you similar stories of such stubborn and intransigent sheep who seem to make it their ambition to make a pastor’s life as miserable as possible.
3. Insurrectionist Cabals
Maybe you think I have overwrought the title of this third point. Insurrectionist cabals? That sounds like something for James Bond or Jason Bourne more than for a pastoral leader, you might protest. Yet I think this accurately describes the ways in which small groups of leaders in churches can move to undercut and overturn a pastor’s leadership for ecclesial political gain. Alliances and factions form in the shadows, where they whisper about perceived problems with the current pastoral leadership, verbally assaulting a person called of God to a congregation. Whereas the intransigent constituency makes it their ambition to be a stumbling block to a pastor’s strategies, the insurrectionist cabal makes it their ambition to be a landmine in a pastor’s ministry. They will stop at nothing less than removal of a pastor from leadership. They might couch the situation in sensationalist terms, they might fudge the facts, they might outright lie about the situation as they scheme to topple the current leadership.
For example, I have a pastor friend who took a well-deserved summer sabbatical. He returned to find that the friend who had moved halfway across the continent to plant the church with him had joined another ambitious elder to fire the pastor and take over the church. Time would fail me to tell of pastors bullied and abused by deacons or elders or influential laypersons, until the pastor resigned out of despairing exhaustion or was terminated outright. Every pastor could tell you stories of attempted or successful insurrections or ones at least very close to home.
Conclusion
Part of me hesitates in writing an essay like this, because I kind of hate the “Woe is me, pastoring is so difficult” genre of lament literature. Pastoring is hard, but in some ways it’s no harder than anyone else struggling in a world of thorns under a hot and fallen sun. But in other ways pastors do get especially and spiritually battered and bruised, often because of these three forms of abuse. Yes, some pastors destroy the people of God like Cain, but more often I think pastors feel crushed like Abel.
“So, what’s the answer? There isn’t an easy one, because the answer is the long, difficult pathway Jesus plodded down for us so long ago. It’s the pathway of Christian maturity, both for pastors and for Christians under their care. Maturity not to let abusive patterns destroy faith, hope, and love, and maturity to dismantle abusive patterns in the first place. Even more, it’s the pathway of the Christian gospel—death, burial, and resurrection. The cross always precedes the crown, especially for pastors. If the chief Pastor willingly suffered the abuse of power on the crest of Calvary, his under-shepherds should expect no less. Perhaps this is what Paul was saying when he said “I am completing in my flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24 CSB). Not that Paul or any pastor atones for sin, but that Christian pastors reenact as a living parable the life-pattern of anyone following a crucified Messiah. Pastors, then, rejoice in their suffering as they look to the God who turns abuses of worldly power into a display of his power to raise the dead.”
This resource is part of the series Not So With You: Reflections on Power, the Pastorate, and Life in the Church. Click here to explore more resources from this series.
Danny Slavich is the Pastor of Cross United Church in Pompano Beach. He completed his PhD at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. His dissertation is entitled “That the World May Know: A Trinitarian Multiethnic Ecclesiology. Danny is a member of the St. John Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
