Why ‘The Glass Pastor’? Whenever that moniker occurred to me, I think I must have been struck by my own understanding of the two operative words: ‘Pastor’, a shepherd, and ‘Glass’, that which is transparent and breakable. As I now reflect on my own professional career in Christian evangelicalism, I understand that during all those years, I was neither; neither transparent, nor a shepherd.
I was, instead, like my mother before me, a showman; a performer who found a stage, a microphone, and a full-time, paying gig to go with them. The fact that I was called ‘pastor’ never gave me any inward assurance that this is what I was. What I was, I suppose, was whatever the people who decided to be influenced by me needed; a ‘spiritual leader’, a hero, an example, a model, and maybe just someone to deflect anger toward when the Christian promise of joy in this life isn’t fulfilled.
Don’t get me wrong, for my part I did my best to play the role of ‘pastor’, but I always knew that I would not be able to really pull it off. First of all, I didn’t really buy it. There aren’t any church pastors in the New Testament, and I could never get past that. Moreover, I was simply not emotionally healthy enough for the job. I had far too many secrets concerning the neurosis that filled my psyche. So, I became instead, an actor. I found, to my surprise, that I was able to act pretty competently. I say ‘pretty’, because all along the way I failed people pretty flagrantly, and caused more than a few people to take me off of their ‘like’ lists. But, and for this I am grateful, never did I tamper with money, nor did I ever mess around in any way with any woman other than my wife. Indeed, over my 33 years as a full-time senior pastor, never did I have a salary of more than $45,000 per year.
So, I suppose I was reliable, and in some sense ‘trustable’. But in other ways, I was a stunning disappointment to those who threw in their lot with my leadership(or lack thereof). In fact, there were two different occasions when I knew that I should quit and get out, but on both occasions all I could think of was what a quitter and ‘abandoner of the sheep’ that would make me.
The first occasion was the launch service of our new building in Surprise in 2005(or 2006?). I remember seeing the 435 people that attended, and realizing two things: first that this would be the largest service we would ever have, and second that the whole thing, the new building, the idolizing of growth, the excitement of numbers, that all of it, made me literally sick to my stomach. I wanted no part of it. It turned out that it was, by far, the largest service we ever had, and I did get heartsick over the false joy and excitement, so that I was gone just a few years later.
The second occasion was at a particularly grievous meeting of elders and deacons, in which the crux of the meeting was the angry expressions by some of these men concerning the fact that ‘worship’ was lousy. I will never forget that. I remember the sickness I felt inside when I realized that we who professed to be representatives of Jesus on earth, could not get past our hostility over the style or competence of our church’s ‘worship'(whatever that is). This would have been about 2008, or 2009, and I realized once again that I was in over my head. But, being the neurotic and the actor that I had become, I was neither able nor willing to pull the plug, and simply check out.
I have said before and remain convinced that no one did wrong, or did me wrong. At the end, the narrative was that I ‘had retired to pursue a real estate career’. This was not the case, but in the church world, we often must portray what we hope will cause the least alarm among the ‘sheep’. In spite of this, all of us, (and I hope someday that those whom I have angered over the years will find this in their hearts), all of us were simply doing the best we knew how to do. Being as unbiblical as it is, the current organized church model, with its paid executives, contrived spiritual hierarchies, and pervasive failure to bring any true transformation to anyone’s life; this model is a harsh and merciless taskmaster toward all its participants. All of us did no more and no less than we were at the time capable of. We were struggling in a dysfunctional corporate and social system, one that had a life of its own, and one that ran counter to any possibility of finding the true grace of God in our midst. It was not personal. There were no bad people. There are only bad ideas and bad beliefs. Until we cut these loose, these ideas and beliefs will continue to be our task-masters, causing us, in our misery, to blame one another for those things that we ourselves have chosen.
The Glass Pastor
The Glass Pastor 
I was just thinking about your blog within the last few weeks. Our family started attending a new church for the first time in several years. It is a Mega church in Phoenix where we now live. There was a endless supply of pastor and amazing theatrical performances. Needless to say, we made 1it a grand total of four weeks. It was nauseating. You be perfectly honest, Brad, I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you for your teachings over the years. I did not mind being a dumb sheep. Now, I guess I am jaded and yet grateful about your honesty and candor about the big business of faith.
Your ‘big business of faith’ comment is a real poetic beauty. It makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Thank you for your comment….
The problem is one of terminology. People aren’t sheep and don’t need a shepherd. (Enter the accusations of heresy here. Behold I’ve left a placeholder for them.) Well some people might be sheep but they shouldn’t be. Rather than seeing it as our job to keep people as sheeple and lead them around by the nose, we ought to see it as our job to unsheeple them, show them that they have the ability to stand on their own two feet and lead themselves to water.
But the job of pastor in the church as its defined today is the job of a PR guy whose job is to hide all the dirty dealings the company doesn’t want the public to know about. The pastors’ main job is to lie as much as necessary to keep inerrancy afloat, and to keep the people believing the denomination’s doctrine. If anyone disagrees, the pastor’s motto is any stick is good enough to beat a dog, so any pejorative to quickly quell the threat: calling people Pelagians works real nice right now. You’ve got to keep the people ignorant and biblically illiterate. You’ve got to keep them reading Scripture as disjointed fortune-cookies, that way they’ll never understand it and liberate themselves from your denominational government and doctrine. As long as they think your set of proof texts is all Scripture teaches, they’ll stay in submission and pay their tithe. But only God knows what will happen if they start reading Scripture, especially the Old Testament, in context!
Rather than being a hireling for the modern church business, the pastor should view their role as getting the people to STOP reading the Bible as disjointed fortune cookies and begin reading it in context, to stop believing in a childish notion of inerrancy that says Paul is not contradicting himself from Romans 2 where he says “the doers of the law shall be justified” and Romans 3 where he says (as we have it translated in English anyway) “by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” The pastor should convince people to STOP covering for errors and misuses of the Old Testament that are found in the New Testament. If the pastor is just going to cover for these things, the title ought to be changed to professional liar. That’s what I feel like I was. Although I never held the title ‘pastor’, I was only called a teacher, still my job was to keep inerrancy (which is a lie) afloat and I feel guilty for it.
There is no contradiction at all between Romans two and three. Romans two is about God’s standard for justification and chapter three is about the sinner’s inability to meet that standard. If you don’t understand that, I agree you should never have been a pastor.
Your issue isn’t inerrancy but canonicity. You are really questioning whether Paul’s epistles can be trusted. If his writings cannot be trusted as can the other Scriptures, they have no place in the canon at all.
Frankly, I would perfer to trust the apostle Peter’s view rather than yours.
To you the issues of inerrancy and canonicity are one and the same. Any book declared canonical is automatically inerrant for you. To me they have become separate issues. A book is canonical because there is something in it that is considered useful, or rather WAS considered useful by the Catholics when they canonized it, even if all the rest of it is total trash. With Romans, I would consider chapter 1 and 2 about the universal knowledge of God via creation is the useful part. The Catholics who canonized it probably considered Romans 6 about baptism to be the useful part. Romans 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9, however, are not only useless but absolutely evil. Hence Romans is canonical, but certainly not inerrant.
And the epistles of Peter (neither of which was written by Peter, of course, as was known even prior to the council of Nicea since they were always one of the “disputed books” until then) — it calls Paul “beloved brother” not apostle. It doesn’t say he’s inspired or inerrant. “Peter” in fact warns us against taking Paul too seriously.
And there certainly is a contradiction between Romans 2 and 3. In Romans 2, for instance, Paul says in Romans 2:6-11
“[God] will render to every man according to his deeds: To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; But glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile: For there is no respect of persons with God.”
So everyone who seeks glory and honor from God via WORKS will be granted eternal life. Well certainly this is not what Paul says in Romans 3-4!!!! So its a huge contradiction.
As to the Pauline epistles, even your “Reformed” buddies acknowledge that Paul didn’t write them all. Protestant scholarship says he didn’t write the Pastorals. The problem is they are still trying to hang on to the lie that the historical Paul, the oral preaching missionary, wrote anything at all. All the Pauline epistles are written by later Gentile authors. There have been a few scholars brave enough to admit this. But one day it will become mainstream just as it took a long time for it to become mainstream that Paul didn’t write the pastorals. The epistles all contradict each other, and the major ones, like Romans, contradict themselves within the same epistle, which argues for a process of compilation over time via interpolation upon interpolation.
What a great post. As a former marketing consultant to mega churches, boy can I relate to it. I helped spin many a good tale on why so and so was leaving. I have even seen men put into positions in other churches they should not have been in because they were forced to leave the mega but the pew sitter could not know the real reason. So we just exported the problem.
And don’t get me started on building new “buildings” because God is blessing us. The idolatry of Christendom. I started viewing these monstrosities as towers of babel. (I can remember some of the facility staff in one mega talking about the electric bill which was 20,000 per month. yes, you read that right.
I don’t know what “scholarship” you are referring to, but none of what you are saying is accurate. The problem with picking and choosing what you find “useful” is that you are not the final authority on what is useful and what is not. If Paul claimed to be an apostle and was not, he cannot be trusted in anything he wrote. Everything is suspect at that point. Though Peter did not refer to Paul as an apostle, he did talk about people like you who twist Paul’s writings as they do also the other Scriptures. I suppose you may as well just through out the NT Scriptures altogether. I wouldn’t have let you be a janitor much less a pastor.
The comments on the epistles of Peter have nothing to do with modern scholarship, other than that unlike you modern scholars and I both have read Eusebius’ Church History and know these books were “disputed books” until Nicea.
And no, “Peter” did not say “Scriptures.” There is no word “Scriptures” in Greek, only “writings.” They didn’t have the fancy English technical terms we have What “Peter” says can only be understood if you understand he is talking about two sets of Paul’s epistles, “those in which he speaks of these things” and “the rest of the [i.e. his] writings” which means those in which he does not speak “of these things.” It is common in Greek to leave off the word “his” and replace it with “the” which is what is done here. What our wonderful biased translators have given us as “the rest of the Scriptures” is really “the rest of his writings.” That is, they twist Paul’s writings in which he speaks “of these things” as much as they do the rest of his writings. That is what is being said.
And if you are unaware of the scholarship on the Pastoral not being authentically Pauline, you obviously have been living in a cave in Afghanistan your whole life, because if you’ve ever read one scholarly book or article on the New Testament or Christian origins, you would have encountered that.
There are no contradictions between the epistles of Paul or anyone else for that matter. The supposed contradiction you mentioned indicates nothing about the epistle but a great deal about your obtuseness.
Please just become an atheist and be really honest. I think you would be much more comfortable that way.
See Heikki Räisänen’s Paul and the Law. This is a scholarly work, and you might have some trouble if you don’t know Greek, which I doubt that you do. But he demonstrates very well Paul’s contradictions on the subject of the Law. He only deals with Paul’s contradictory positions on the Law, not on anything else, but that makes for a rather copious book by itself! The thesis is that Paul is not as coherent or smart as tradition makes him out to be, and coming from one who used to hold a Lutheran position on Paul, it is very damning to Paul.
I’d love to see a guy like you struggling to answer Räisänen’s book on your blog. It would be so amusing.
As for your suggestion that I just become an atheist, this is the goal of Calvinism, to turn all Christians into atheists. That’s the problem with you guys. Thanks for openly admitting this is your goal! But I’d certainly rather convert to Judaism than become an atheist. Is that OK with you? Its not possible for me not to believe in God and the 10 commandments. But that’s your problem from the very beginning, you Calvinists, you don’t believe in God or his commandments, that’s why you accept Paul, as a cover for your atheism.
Justification by faith alone as I once heard it explained by a wise man is a statement that “Because the malady is imaginary, so must be the cure.” That is, you Calvinists don’t believe in God, heaven, hell, sin, the Law, any of it. You believe the malady is imaginary, so you present an imaginary solution: faith alone.
So convert to Judaism and earn your way to God by keeping the commandmants of God’s law. Let me know how that works out for you.
I actually do read Greek but I wouldn’t waste my time interacting with an unbeliever like you or your liberal “scholarship.”
Why are you speaking to me as if I have free will, you Calvinist devilworshiper? I thought on your Satan worshipping devil-derived theory nobody had freewill? Yet you reason with me as if I can choose what to do. You try to persuade me to become an atheist. When I throw out the suggestion that instead of that I could at least convert to Judaism, you try to dissuade me from that in another demonic attempt to persuade me to become an atheist. You’ve let the cat out of the bag, minister of Satan, that your whole plan is to convert Christians to atheism, that this is all Calvinism is or ever was, and that this is why there are so many more atheists than there ever were now that the churches are in the Calvinist captivity. But you act like you can persuade me, like I have freewill to be persuaded. You admit then that Calvinism is nothing but a lie, that you Calvinists are nothing but the devil’s army to recruit for atheism which is your true religion. As such, its hilarious you would call me “liberal.”
This is a great blog