Shawshank Without The Redemption

There is a very telling scene in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, where Morgan Freeman’s character is working in a grocery store after just getting out of prison.  Freeman’s character, Red, who has spent almost all of his life behind bars, is now an older adult and in the scene he has to go to the bathroom.  Before he goes, he raises his hand and asks the store manager, who is helping some customers, for permission.  The somewhat irritated manager reminds Red that he doesn’t have to raise his hand and ask to go to the bathroom.  But of course when you have spent your life ‘getting permission to pee’, as Red narrates the incident, you don’t know anything else.

How similar has been the experience of a group of us who have been meeting together as friends and Jesus-followers, over the past year.  Like Red, we have all been indoctrinated in a segregated and controlled authority system for so long, that our biggest challenge has been to learn to be normal people, accepting ourselves and each other just as we are.  Like Red, our freedom was taken from us by an authority system, but the difference is that unlike prison, the church system never owned up to its own behavior.  While we were being ‘discipled’ into obedient children, we were told over and over that ‘where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty!’

As a former professional church pastor, I can tell you that most pastors are really nervous that people might find out that the New Testament contains no senior pastors; that there is no concept of human authority in the New Testament; that the early church would think that they had landed on another planet if the saw what we call ‘church’ today; and that someone might finally ask a real good question:  Why is all the money going to salaries, benefits, mileage, vacations, trips, travel expenses, bonuses, and buildings, when money was never, ever spent for such things in the record of the New Testament church?

Indeed, the church we have today is a stronghold, to use words attributed to Paul.  Most local churches are the vain imaginations of young and self-absorbed entrepreneurs who get in over their heads, and then blame everyone and everything but themselves for the trouble they get into.  Have you noticed how all of a sudden churches are combining with and being taken over by bigger religious corporations?  Do you know why?  The answer is quite clear.  It is not because of some ‘leading of the Holy Spirit’.  It is because some guy in his twenties of thirties or even forties or fifties, decided that he was going to go big time.  He is going to ‘build a great work for God!’

Now, with the economy and real estate situation what it is, the ‘great work for God’ doesn’t seem to have God’s support after all.  All the foolish mortgages and accruals of debt can no longer be serviced.  But then, we all got on board and made it happen.  Unlike Red, they didn’t tell us when we could go to the bathroom, but they did tell us what to believe, when to show up, what to do when we got there, what not to do when we left, and most of all, why it was vital that we kept increasing our offerings.  After all, our ‘our pastor’ needed to see his fantasies come true!

The Glass Pastor