Pussyfooting Pastors: A Call To Repentance From A Millennial

The pastor in the picture above, by the way, a very good man.  Which is why I included that picture.

I had the good fortune of speaking with a pastoral counselor at Focus on the Family eons ago when I was considering a run for the professional pastorate.  He gave me a list of questions to ask myself to see if I were best suited to the task.  Frankly, I don't remember most of them, or even this gentleman's name.

Except this one thing that has stuck with me ever since our conversation, something I haven't been able to shake.

At the time I prided myself on my oratory skills, my ability to captivate an audience with an intriguing story.  Many people had complimented my writing abilities, and turns out, I still have a knack for storytelling.

Such things are important, but in this Focus On The Family counselor's opinion - and, as I've grown in my own walk with Christ, in mine as well, what's far more important than oratory skills, what he said he believes is needed more than anything else in the pastorate today is - are you ready for it?

Character.  Not character as in the facetious or dramatic sense, "Characters welcome."  Or, "We don't need any characters around to give the joint 'atmosphere.'"

No, I mean character as in moral integrity.  Are you for real?  My, my my, is that a mighty interesting story you told with some interesting tidbits culled from Holy Scripture.

There are lots of pastors who have great oratory skills, the counselor told me, but without character - meh.

We can't always attach a word to that visceral punch-in-the-gut kind of sense we get when we visit a particular church and realize, to our disappointment, that it's just another inflated orator - and usually a bad one at that - with nothing genuine to offer us in return for trusting him with our time.  We do the respectful thing out of some silly feeling that it's what we ought, and it's our kindness toward him - or even her - that condemns us to throw away the remaining fifty minutes or so we might have spent visiting a good friend or family member and doing something useful with our lives.  An hour that, in other words, we might have genuinely moved closer to God in some more worthy pursuit than keeping the pew warm.

And none of this, of course, can we ever admit to the pastor, or even ourselves, less we be overcome with a mysterious sense that somehow, we are in the wrong for feeling, for thinking that way.

There are many kinds of thoughts the Bible condemns, be they coveting, worshipping something other than God, lusting for someone else's wife.  All of these, thoughts, it would seem, stemming from deep within us that, if we believe that Book is God's word, we believe that we are sinful creatures, and that when such thoughts arise - anything other than love, which is God - we need to put the kibosh on those thoughts.

Thus, out of love for the pastor, we sit.  And we listen.

And yet, something still doesn't sit well.  We can't quite put our finger on it.  It's the same reason we don't trust the professional talking heads on television.  And, wouldn't you know, back in the colonial days, pastors functioned as reporters.  Part of their job, on Sundays, was to inform the community of what was really important.  And back then, pastors like Jonathan Edwards existed.  Highly intelligent and moral men.  You didn't listen to them talk about events of the day because it was the most entertaining thing to catch your attention.  You were part of a community that filled a meetinghouse, and you listened because that particular orator had the generally unwavering respect of your family, who never spoke ill of, or even suggested indiscretion of that man - unless there was something truly wrong.  In which case, you would approach the elders, and that wrong would be confronted, the pastor forced to change his ways, and if necessary, receive the appropriate punishment.  And naturally, that went for me and you as well.

Granted, they weren't all like Edwards.  They couldn't have been.  However, just as one bad apple can rot the bunch, it's amazing how much trouble of the good kind one wise soul can accomplish within a world of evil.  When such lights shine, they overwhelm the darkness.  All the inflated egos, all the windbags; well, they are simply ignored because they stand in the presence of something so good, and right and true that no words are needed to condemn lesser men.  Their follies are not a danger to anyone because, well, all are the wiser and keener for the light - the light of Christ - shining from deep within that one Edwards, and it catches among those with the gift to be a conduit of such light.

There's an elementary scientific concept of the difference between accuracy and precision.  Accuracy is how close one's predictions, or answers, are to the actual truth.  Precision is - well, I remember an old analogy that my high school science text made.  It looked similar to this:

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I don't know much about shooting a bow and arrow, other than that it's fun to do, and the late, great Zig Ziglar famously used another bow-and-arrow analogy, so I am, perhaps without even knowing it, in keeping with a good tradition.

Precision is how close your shots fall together.  But just because you're precise doesn't mean you're accurate.  Accuracy is, as you can see above, how close your "arrows" are to the actual target, the bullseye.  You can be very precise, but very precisely inaccurate.  You can shoot a bunch of arrows that land very close to each other, but so far from the bullseye that you'd simply leave your audience wondering if your brain needs to be recalibrated.

We can speak very sincerely - but we can be very sincerely wrong.

And it's a shame.  I mean, what talent it takes to shoot all those arrows within such a small distance of one another.  What great skill.  And yet, if for whatever reason, the underlying motion, or premise skews that narrow result three feet up and to the right - well, no matter how close your arrows are to each other - it's like you can't even see the target, or you're willfully ignoring it.  And you might think that you've made your own, new target, with some special inside knowledge that you have of truth that isn't accessible to everyone else, somehow.  And that may be the case.  However, if you're lying, the big, red bullseye that you missed is right there, for everybody to ultimately see.  And so those foolish enough to remember you will only remember you as the guy who was way off target.  The only way that your precision might have been relevant was if you, like someone shooting a bow-and-arrow, recognized the problem, and, as I wrote earlier, recalibrated your brain to atone for, to correct, the error, that all your misfired, close-together shots, might hit the right place.

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I began this piece by discussing that advice a friend from Focus on the Family gave me, comparing integrity to oratory skills, or storytelling skills.

If we compared the two skill sets - integrity and storytelling ability - to archery, I think you could say that storytelling is kind of like precision.

See, our culture is loaded with lots of storytellers.  People spinning yarns about all sorts of things.  Steve Jobs is often referenced in TED-like entertainment pseudo-business circles as a the ultimate corporate storyteller.  He accomplished what all narcissists can only dream of.  He had a goal, which he pursued at the cost of most of whatever interpersonal respect those he worked with had for him - but when he died, most of those he seemed to step on in pursuit of his vision have a difficult time criticizing him, because his ruthlessness is justified in so many people's eyes.  It was almost like - he believed that ultimately, his work would prove of benefit to them, and humanity in general, and so he pressed on in the face of routine criticism, dauntlessly and without guilt conveying, somehow, that any trials those who interacted with him endured was - ultimately, for their benefit.  Why?  Because, well, if they did have the privilege of helping him, they would themselves, be part of a kind of movement that would help their fellow men better navigate life.  To have a better quality of life.

Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't.  Well, as someone who believes in Christ, and thus as a media and technology critic, I can tell you I'm of the persuasion that it isn't.  But that's not the point here.

The point is, Steve Jobs would appear to have been driven by a compulsion to prove himself, as an adopted child.  It's kind of like that same syndrome that drives people to work in media, or to be artists (thank you again, Neal Boortz).  A kind of need to prove themselves - ourselves - to a father figure.  If we're religious, it's a Father who lets loved ones die when they're not supposed to.  Who, though seldom in America, starves us occasionally, and lets our significant others be diagnosed with things like cancer or diabetes, and lets others get into accidents that leave them crippled.  Others, He lets endure diseases, like the kind that make your eyes look bloated in that distinctive way that signals a severely impeded mind.  Others he gives faces that we don't recognize as similar to ours.  And on top of it all, He asks us - no, commands us, to love all of these people.  To not ignore them, but to, especially if we are men, to actively move into their lives, not for the purpose of exploiting their weaknesses, like a vacuum cleaner salesman, but to give of ourselves to them.

A pastor in a Presbyterian Church in America(PCA) denomination church I attended yesterday tried to sell me on the party line popular in that denomination, and in most of Evangelicaldom, of "reaching people where they're at."

And I at once pinned him as a pussyfooter, a liar, a scallywagger with a carpetbag full of little, nice-sounding Biblical tidbits all rolled up together and teaming with the dust of unapplied high ideas never taken out of the minister's toolbox and actually put into practice.  Though I didn't know I had pinned him as such.  At the moment, I just got that bad ole' feeling - the "Oh, no.  I'm going to spend another sixty-minutes in here."  Because the sermon, you understand, hadn't even begun yet.  I was shaking that pussyfooter's hand.  And I almost wish I hadn't.  I wish I hadn't.  I just knew that while yes, I wanted to save the people inside from that pastor's ignorance, I also knew that I had to get out of there.  But that I'd have to sit through the sermon.  So I simply told him, "Alright.  Let's hear your sermon."  Thankfully, there was a visiting pastor.

I hadn't even known it was a PCA church at the time.  Fact is, I had some previous experiences with a PCA church.  It was one of the churches where I had investigated the process of becoming a pastor - only to find out that just like most political circles, just like most business circles, the pastors were much more interested in receiving my implicit praise and worship than they were about worshipping some God that they always mentioned in passing.  Which is why at this one PCA megachurch called Perimeter in the Atlanta area, I kid you not, the ringleader, Randy Pope (Yes, Pope!) actually tells all his new visitors investigating the church the story of how he got started in pastoring.  As a self-proclaimed introvert who seems quite proud of his introversion - just like inverted people, in the deviant sense, are proud of their inversion today - he tells his new visitors the story about how he prayed that God would bring someone along dumb enough for him to evangelize to - because, he explained, of his introverted personality.  Presumably to give other introverts confidence to find other dumber people to evangelize to.  And - when you're at one of these church intro get-togethers, surrounded by all these other people there, I mean, let's face it, there's alot of pressure.  And so the whole experience had me thinking that perhaps this was it.  The future of Christianity in America.  Whatever "the future" of anything means.

And that, unfortunately, is kind of the flagship church of the PCA denomination.  Not that your more liberal branches of Presbyterianism are any better - let me be perfectly clear on that point.

What are all these various strains of churches, these denominations?  They're the same thing your favorite television show is.  They're in the business of yarn-spinning.  That's right.  Your pastor is, if you're in that unfortunate 95 percent plus of churches I've observed, a pussyfooting liar.  What's he pussyfooting?  Pussyfooting means you're getting around, rather than hitting directly at, something worthy of being hit at.  In this case, our bullseye, that reason you turn on the television after a long and seemingly futile day under the sun, in your factory, your office, your salt mine, or your digital hell, your numbercrunching hell.  That place where you labor, under the care of a God who'd sooner break your back, let your teeth rot, let your child receive failing grades, let your child fall prey to the media-imposed homosexual craze, and all for what?  What in hell could be worth slaving forty hours a week, along with your wife, who doesn't even get to spend time with the kids - because she's slaving away too in her own corporate hell not all that different from yours.

And all you want at the end of the day is a little peace.  Doesn't matter what it is.  Something to submit to, someone to speak softly words of assurance as your weary body and mind begin to cry out that fundamental need for rest.  For recreation - even if the only kind you'll get is lying in bed.  And so you turn on - what - the television, to be told a story.  A bedtime story.  To help you go to sleep.

This bedtime story isn't the kind with daring, good princes and dastardly, kind knights saving princesses from dauntless aggressors - no - such fantasies of goodness and kindness and genuine human idealism are laughable to you as you think about your long day sucking up to people you don't respect who, no doubt, do things you'd disrespect them even more if they were ever actually open about the person that they really are.  The person that would be - believe you me - more than known in the good old Puritan days.  The good old judgemental Puritan days!  (I use the "j" word lightly, as we will be judged to the extent we judge others, of course.)  So you sit back, and you choose your favorite bedtime story.  One of car crashes, murders several blocks over, corrupt, screaming politicians - and the only relief, the only moral of the story?  Buy Claratin.  Or Advil.  Or whatever the advertiser happens to be selling on that given night.

But we, humans, have an innate, God-imprinted desire, and at last, a need, to submit to an authority greater than ourselves.

I think it was said in one of the Hannibal movies that what we see regularly, we begin to covet.  And what we covet, we grow obsessed with.  That's why building "familiarity" through brand recognition is so important in advertising.  Whatever the substitute for one worthy of our actual worship, be it the nightly news scares, or Advil, or Motrin, or Jiffy Peanut Butter, or Avon calling, or Diamonds are Forever (they aren't - really), or you - because, after all, You're Worth It, aren't you?  Or Bah-dah-dah-dah-dah, I'm Loving It.  Or - A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes.  Or, You Can Do Anything You Put Your Mind To.  Or, If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It.  Or - Islam is a Religion Of Peace And Love.  And the list of familiar-sounding slogans, not repeated at nauseum because, as in the slogans of ancient days, many people found them particularly true and useful after reading them in the Bible or another widely-regarded text, but because someone trying to squeeze another dime out of us spent precious money electronically duplicating that axiom for the purpose of manipulating us into repeating it, that we might patronize its incidentally associated product for an even vaguer sense of benefit to us from using such product or service.

Corporate storytelling at it's best.  And what are the morals of the corporate stories?  A McDonald's hamburger is akin to childhood happiness.  Disney is sincere.  The latest version of X software is the greatest, and don't be left behind by using the old one.  The latest model of our car is more stylish and sexy than the old one, and if you buy one, you'll be stylish and sexy, too.  Are you a pushover?  Well, nothing will make you more bold than buying a Ford - because Ford believes in "Bold Moves."  Aldous Huxley went so far as to replace the "Lord's Day" with "Ford's Day."  Thank the Ford.

And yet, American Pastor - stay with me, now, I'm almost done - these odd little whispers of marketers whom C.S. Lewis informed us, particularly in the realm of erotic appeal marketing (anything that inflames lust- and this is out of Mere Christianity) - these odd little placating slogans, bits of nonsense that advertisers pay dearly for the privilege of imposing on the unsuspecting, weary, hard-working American's mind when we're at our weakest after trying oh so hard to do right by our families and communities by holding our own, day in, day out - doing the right thing- in the name of getting us to buy more toxic food to make us even more unhealthy-

Pastor, tell me why it is, please - that these nonsensical corporate fairy-tales, and "nightly news" constructions of a chaotic universe somehow are told with greater clarity - greater precision - than your Sunday morning story about an all-powerful God who not only gives and takes away but doesn't even offer us any free hamburgers or headache relief!

What's that, you say?  You're better than the Red Cross because you provide for the Spiritual needs as well as the physical.

As I look on one particular list of the 50 most iconic brands of all time, I notice that the Red Cross, which twenty years ago was the most recognizable brand in the world, has taken a back seat to Nike, alas, it's not even in the top 50 most-recognized icons in this one particular insignificant study.  Which indicates to me how humanity's priorities have shifted.  Minorities, once interested in helping other minorities worldwide, now care more about buying shoes worn by athletes.  But there's a good story, a good moral explanation behind it: Just do it.

Pastors, this is what you're competing with.  "Just do it."  At least the Red Cross - well, they had half the Gospel down.  James 1:27 -- look after orphans and widows.  You know I'm no proponent of the "social gospel," but if we're not caring for those even spiritually in need - what are we doing?

It's tough, isn't it?  Much tougher than you ever expected when you signed up to be a pastor.  And I want to give you "props" for trying, as minorities taught us millennials to say.  That's respect.

 Except, I've visited a lot of churches now.  Probably over a hundred.  The first thirty or so were Catholic, and then my visits to churches became less visits and more careful studies, guided by self-proclaimed experts in theology at a little known bastion of liberalism called "Gordon College."  There, I took a class devoted to everything really significant about life, a required course called "Christianity, Character, and Culture."  That was in spring 2005.  I cannot remember my teacher's full name; I believe it was Dr. Kay.  He was a science guru.  Physical or biological I am not certain.  

The course taught me to visit and evaluate churches.  It spurred my interest in discovering church settings far different from my own for the purpose of understanding better what the church is, and removing perhaps the preconceived notions that my own particular church background gave me - in my case, Catholicism and my recently discovered answer to Catholicism (which really was no adequate answer at all), the local media-centric and uncoincidentally pentecostal-leaning Assemblies of God.  Cowards, all.

All around us, in pre-sodomic Boston, the media was sweeping up my neighbors into a tide of indifference surrounding the sin of homosexuality.  Men ruthlessly plunging their members into the waste orifices of other men and calling this love!  And you.  You cowardly pastors, calling yourself leaders of men - you let it happen.  You let it happen.  The sin that would rot the heart of this great, blessed nation.

I urged you to do differently, but what did it matter to you?  Tithe income seemed to be holding steady, and, well, compared to the corporate Catholic child molesters across the street, also a complicit media pawn, heck, you looked like saints for simply standing by and doing nothing.  Like a gloating politician.

You'd talk occasionally about the great sin of homosexuality, but at last would capitulate to give the congregation what they want.  Which is, namely, some vague notion of "love" which requires no sense of conviction, or gumption.  As America began crumbling all around us - right in greater Boston, where our great, blessed nation whose exceptionalism you deny - began.  All so you could send your kids to college.

I can't judge you.  At the time, it was a compelling story to me, as a high school teen.  It was as good a narrative as any.  Certainly, on a logical level, the Bible made more sense to me than anything else I'd heard.

Today, you seduce minorities into the narrative that only the dumber and more vulnerable among us ever bought back in the day.  Heck, I always suspected you were democrats at heart.  And I didn't recognize it at the time I was a vulnerable high school teen, but you exploited the fact that at the time you had a slightly better story than the other narratives offered us by educated derelicts we had in public school teachers.

You probably think I'm being really hard on you.  After all, you're a man or woman of God (the woman qualifier is another discussion).  Who am I to be a church critic?  You've got a difficult job.  Trying to lead the masses where they stubbornly didn't want to go, just like Moses.

Except- when the masses worshipped idols at the foot of Sinai, Moses came down with God's Word and, let's face it.  He acted like a Bible thumper.  He literally threw the book at them.  And it was worse than a book - it was tablets of stone!  Tablets of stone!

I'm not going to stone you, but I am going to make a rather serious accusation - at least to those of us who believe that the Word of God is the Word of God.

But first, let's revisit how the church is failing to serve as an effective, numbers-oriented growth non-profit.  Because, I'm afraid, that's what most of you in America's flailing pastorate really care about, though you haven't yet admitted that to yourselves.

Here's your communications error.  Remember the bull's eye analogy?  There's a target, which only one who has ever walked among us has ever reached.  You know who He is.  (It's Jesus.)  It's God.  It's the Word itself.  The Book.  Jesus is the Word.  And we?  You and me?  We're nothing.

Nothing.  *sigh*  And I know you say that a lot.  But we millennials are incredible B.S. detectors.  The likes of B.U. and Harvard turn us loose with B.S. B.S.'s every day.

We're a generation that was raised by a bunch of cynics, who emotionally abandoned us.  Unlike you, we lacked the advantage of a tight-knit social circle that we could be fortunate enough to keep our entire lives.  The media has presented idols that have, more-or-less successfully, persuaded us in the most illogical manner away from reason; away from truth; away from truth; away from goodness.  Why?  To extract a few extra bucks from us.  You know this.  You've brought your children through the cereal aisle of a supermarket.  Grrrrrreat.

You know, Walt Disney, the grandfather of one of the most egregious offenders, was not that kind of man, I am most convinced, given one of Curt Schillings most recent retweets, that he would not approve of how his life labor is being run.

Funny thing, Walt Disney was much like Steve Jobs.  The people who worked for him hated him.  The author of one of the most respected bios of the man, as I recall, went so far as to call his Snow White operation a cult.  People worked very hard hours for little promise of pay.  They simply liked what they were doing.  They believed in it.  It's the kind of obsession that any of us involved in any creative work - including my own, makes or breaks any great work.  And I say, if you're going to make a movie, cult-like obsession is the only way to reach perfection.  Which is why, as a screenwriter, whose ultimate vocational aim as such is to create a screen-masterpiece, I realize my own need to submit to God-honoring teachings from the pulpit.  God always, always, always, favored the spoken word to any kind of image representation of himself.  If one is called to play with this dangerous fire called art I, for whatever reason, am fully convinced because of what others have said to me, but most of all because of my own talents, that it is how I am called to bring folks one step closer to heaven -

Then believe me when I say, Pastor Man, there is nothing I have desired as a native New Englander, born in Boston and blessed to have grown up in one of the loveliest communities in the world, that my heart is absolutely broken - more for you than for the body of all whom God has called into His grand congregation, be they strong enough to weather your abuse, primarily of His Word, or not.  You know, the kind of abuse the Boston Globe will never be able to report on.  They can't be concerned with abstract concepts such as idolatry, or lust, or spiritual murder.  I mean, they are, but they're under this delusion that objectivity prohibits them from broaching such subjects.  And by that, what I really mean that it is their own relative sinfulness - that limits their ability to report anything except for after the bomb goes off and all hell has broken loose.

Well, all hell has indeed broken loose.  As a trained journalist, all I could really do was observe, and try as best I can to work within the system.

I've confronted you regarding your sins.  And, like the hypocrites of the Book you say you believe in, you retaliated, so you could maintain your dwindling circles of power, not unlike the corporate C.E.O.'s and politicians that you're so fond of putting down.  Randy Pope, you scoffed at a politician who wanted to speak at Perimeter.  Never mind that the contemporaries of Jonathan Edwards, whom all preachers worth their Biblical salt revere, wrote Election Sermons.

Why don't you tell it like it is?  You're not trying to protect the integrity of the Body of Christ.  You're trying to protect yourself.  You're trying to keep those "dumb enough"(Randy Pope) coming back and paying more tithes.  And rubbing it in our faces, as you do so, that it's our privilege, our service of God, to give you more money so that you can continue running a cowardly corporation, and an awful one at that.

Of course, Randy, when you tell enough people who sign up for the "new members" course at your church that you have a knack for selling dumb people on things, we start getting to believe it after a time.

I'm picking on Randy, because he's one of the best snake-oil salesmen of our day.  And - coincidentally - this isn't a value statement, by the way - when he comes out to perform his sermons - which, by the way, are rather impressively developed theses concerning the Word of God - he dresses in a casual style that simply says, "Steve Jobs."  The stories are so elaborate that I'll be darned if I can follow all of them, but the important thing is that each and every message is kicked off and finished with an electronically age-targeted, made-for-television concert in a highly innovative, highly technical departure from Biblical worship.

Randy makes a distinction, of course, between supporting a political cause or politician; and supporting a "social justice" cause.  And again, this isn't just Randy, this is the Evangelical church at all.  Randy's - like Erwin McManus's Mosaic, are the top "innovative" churches every other church is trying to be like, to their own demise.  What even Randy admits is that there's really a fine line between a political cause and a "social justice cause."  What he - and every other cowardly pastor-tician fails to admit is that political causes and social justice causes are the same exact thing!  Except -- ready?  So-called "social justice causes," worthy as they are, simply happen, at various points in history like our own, to be less popular than other political causes.

Heck, Randy will even admit that according to the Bible, homosexuality is evil.  But take an active role in fighting that evil, and Randy's team will hunt you down.  Take away your church membership.  And by the way, I was wise enough to never become a member there to begin with.  Abortion, anything the Bible is crystal clear about that's unpopular, same thing.  Just as one righteous man can spur righteousness among many, a cowardly man calling himself a pastor and not doing anything regarding the present American sexual identity crisis and homosexual epidemic can wreak havoc from sea to shining sea.  And whether you've realized it or not yet, it is doing just that.

Legions, legions of unwise cowards doing their darndest to forge an imaginary connection between what the Word of God actually says - loving people - and "reaching people where they're at."  Being "seeker-friendly."

And there might have been a time in our history when rock-concert evangelism was a permissible, if traumatically rebellious, excuse.  Look at all the people coming to know Christ!  Honest evangelist Paul Washer says even Billy Graham, father of television Easy-Believeism, admitted that only a minuscule percentage of people who "accepted Christ" at the Billy Graham crusades were actually saved.

How close is your most recent sermon to the bullseye of God's complete Word?  How close is this writing, is what I must ask myself as I write this?

See, lots of corporate storytellers have a heck of a precise narrative.  Usually it goes like, buy this, and in return, you shall receive that abstract quality that "Just Do It," or "Bah-dah-dah-dah-dah I'm loving it" implies.  Happiness.  Joy.  And Randy Pope's PCA message isn't that much farther off.  He simply warns, after he's let you hold the theological sneaker - or more appropriately, after he's wined and dined you - that you're guilty of a grave sin if you don't pay for it in the form of tithes.  He appeals to your pride by explaining that tithing is high-school-level giving.  I don't remember the specifics, but there's a whole pyramid of merit assigned to how much you give - and don't get me wrong, it's a very elaborate story.

But it's not a precise story.  Come to think of it, there are so many less hoops to jump through to simply buy a sneaker.  A lot less bait-and-switch.  You see the celebrity endorser, you pay the money, you get the sneaker.  And you're still unfulfilled, because it's just a sneaker.  But at least - you get what you were overtly promised.  In that way, Nike is more ethical than most of today's church pastors.  And they have a message that is, often, more needed, and more concisely stated than many sermons I've heard.  Just do it.  Quit messing around, and do something useful with your life.  Or whatever you're not doing that you know you ought to be.  Silly, I know, but - again - I think more effective and moral than lots of sermons I've heard.

At least, even for a vague slogan, it's much more concise.  Will buying Nike bring salvation?  Of course not.  But it will get you something you need to succeed in other aspects of life.  And that's a far cry from what you get out of many sermons from the cowardly pastor.

See, Nike may not be accurate.  It might be way off from the bullseye.  But at the very least, it's precise.  It's way off, but it's consistent.  At least - you know where Nike stands.  They sell sneakers.  And yes, there's a vague slogan which you don't even need to buy the sneaker to benefit from.  If you don't buy the sneaker, Nike probably wishes you did, but they're not terribly offended.  The slogan is free advice you can actually use.  And it will probably make you a better person.  Never mind that the news anchor delivering your news has probably scared you out of leaving your front doorstep, so that when you get to the Nike commercial, the slogan kind of balances out the hypnotism of the newscast.  And they pay dearly for the privilege of doing so.  Granted, Nike has abandoned TV ads a long time ago, but you get the idea.

If precision is your ability to tell a cohesive, consistent story- whatever that is; integrity is your ability to use that otherwise useless gift of precision to recalibrate it, to turn it, to focus that tremendous ability to close in on a goal which is precicion - and align that goal with God's goal.  For secular readers, to align that life force with is all of our gifts - with objective truth, and to report it truthfully, to use it for good and only good.

As Paul Washer quotes a wise man in the sermon above, your best friend is the one who tells you what is true.

So, do you want to be your congregation's best friend?  Do you want to be your audience's best friend, as a reporter, as a politician, as a C.E.O. at a stockholder meeting?

Do you really?  Do you really want to be their go-to man or woman?  Their friend?

Take that uncanny ability that you have for spinning wildly precise stories, for hitting those targets that you're so great at doing.  For making bank.  For getting your investors dividends.  For closing the loveliest women on dates.

You've got it down to a science.  You can do it without thinking.  You have abilities to tell stories that your congregation - most of them - could only dream of.  That's why they're there.

Maybe start by writing out a list of those Bible verses that you're the most scared of.  Here.  Let me help you start it off:

1 Timothy 2:15  But women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.
Let's take a look at the context for that:
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve.  And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.  But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety."

Genesis 19:5-8  (Before God Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah) "They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.  Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

Psalm 127:4-5  "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth.  Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them."

Titus starting at 1:5 "For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you, namely, if any man is above reproach, the husband of one wife, having children who believe, not accused of dissipation or rebellion. For the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict."

1 Corinthians 6:9 "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals."

Matthew 18:15-20  “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”

I don't need, or cannot within the scope of this reading explain to you, at this point in our wayward history, the manners, and mannerisms, through which you are conveying to the millennials whose hearts God has given you the privilege of speaking into, an uber-contradictory and disordered story.  You know what you're doing, don't you?  You're telling a story that is more illogical, more self-doubting, more double-crossing, even by its own standards -- that you are making the media's chaos theory story look like order.  That's the only reason that the media - as much as you might complain about it - actually makes more sense than you.  Because while members of the media might lack integrity, accuracy in all things -- at least, well, they're precise.  They make no pretense of doing what they do to make a living off of their audiences.  You, if you're in the majority of pastors I'm speaking to - and you know who you are -- you tell a sordid, twisted story in which you are content, by your omission, to let homosexuality take hold within the hearts of the most vulnerable children, even among your own congregations.

And you don't even realize that not only is it immoral - which you don't even care about at this point, because you're so concerned about survival, and unlike the common journalist aggressor, you can't even admit that much about your motives to yourself as they can.  Test your motives.  Because if you don't - well, I guarantee you that the only One who matters is.

Jeremiah 17:10  "I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds."

Pastors, you're being beat.  Not only by Satan and your own failure to understand how your own mind works - your own failure to see that your own cowardice, your own effeminacy, or, as -- Randy Pope, of all people -- was astute enough to note - androgynous parenting, which leads to homosexual behavior in children - not the media, -

Just please stop, and look at what you, yes you, anti-authoritarian baby-boomer pastors are doing to this blessed beyond blessed country.  Look at the fruit of your labors.  Do you think you've done a good thing here?

Forget your congregation.  I'm asking you to repent, pastor.  Your job is important.  Whether you, in particular, are best suited for it is a question only God can really answer.  I hope you'd hear that answer before the rest of us have to tell you.

Because I'll tell you one thing.  Most of you pastors are doing more harm than good, right now.  And everybody knows it.  I know it; the people in your congregation know it - Oh, dear.  I have a dear friend and pastor in Arizona, and his whole story, not unlike Randy Pope's spends a majority of time focused upon his "testimony."

Oh, before I quit writing, let me tell you about how I loathe the modern Christian's testimony.  At least, as it comes from the pulpit.  Sad stories in this baby-boomer raised disaster of weaklings we call millennials are so common - enough.  We don't need any more.  They're not entertaining any more than the latest plane crash on the nightly news.  Enough gimmicks.  I'm not naming you, pastor, and don't get me wrong, I feel bad that you fell off your deck drinking and smoking crack and that's why you have to tell everybody about Jesus.

Why don't you spend a little more time in your church-intro gatherings talking a little less about your doctrine and your personaltestimony of how you acceptedjesusasyourpersonallordandsavior-HA!

Enough theatrics.  Corporate storytellers - who are, at the moment, much more apparently diligent than you at life - I don't know.  Maybe you're Mother Theresa and we just don't know it.  Then praise God this is making you suffer for your commitment to Christ all the more.  Pardon my skepticism.  I am, after all, a journalist.

So pardon me again when I quote Jesus's words, "You hypocrites!"  Why did I have to hear that in Godspell and not in the pulpit?  Godspell, for crying out loud!

Corporate storytellers are very precise if they're not accurate.  But you, Pastor - ha - you think, unlike the wonderful Christian tradition of forever, that this thing invented by a Catholic called John Rock, that birth control is what God wants.  That women ought run the church.  Read the Bible verses above.

If you're going to say that - if that is seriously your theological take of the Bible - then at least be honest and throw out all of the above Bible verses.  Don't make pretense of love.  Don't bend to feminist scholars.  Because you and I both know it's garbage.

Everybody knows it's garbage, Pastor.  Your congregation knows it's garbage.

It's not accurate, sure.  But unlike your commercial salesmen's yarn - yours isn't even precise.  Because on the one hand, you believe that book is the Word of God.  The whole thing.  Is what you say.  And then you go and have women assume authority over men in the church, telling us to sit, and stand, and even teaching in the worst cases, with pretense of spiritual leadership.  And then you say on the other hand that of course you don't support Hillary Clinton for president.  "You hypocrites!"  Jesus said.  Can I get an Amen?

I'm only the greatest sinner of all.  I'd have to be, right?  Maybe you'll listen to the words of a noted preacher who was good at what he did.  One that this sinner respects.  It actually begins with a note of encouragement to you.  So accept and heed this encouragement, and heed its chilling aura.

"Brethren, our preaching will bear its legitimate fruits. If immorality prevails in the land, the fault is ours in a great degree. If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discrimination, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in religion, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it. Let us not ignore this fact, my dear brethren; but let us lay it to heart, and be thoroughly awake to our responsibility in respect to the morals of this nation."

The cult of the press, and television advertising may have held sway over your mind.  It may have made you men of God fear women at one point.  But now that you know that television is a feminizing force that has disrupted your psyche, has undercut your manhood, you need to turn that over to Christ, and let him do His perfect work within you for a nation that needs none of you - or me -- and all of Christ.

If you don't repent, you shall continue to make converts who are twice the hypocrite you yourself are.

Thanks for your time.

Love, the greatest sinner of all,
Peter

(photo source/credit https://sites.google.com/a/apaches.k12.in.us/mr-evans-science-website/accuracy-vs-precision)