The Rule of the Churchman

Years ago, while serving as an associate pastor at a church, the senior pastor and I became at odds with one another. It developed into a very sharp dispute. We had already set a date for my departure, but the conflict became so intense that we moved it up by several months.

This led to a divide that lasted many years. Only in the last couple of years has it subsided in a meaningful way. We’ve been able to have several very warm conversations, which has been nice because I missed him. We had enjoyed a fruitful partnership.

But what I want to talk about isn’t our reconciliation, or even the cause of the dispute. I want to talk about the ground rules we acknowledged while we were at odds with each other.

In a nutshell, we never involved our congregants in the dispute or used them to buttress our positions. We kept the controversy between us, the elder board, and the ecclesiastical authorities involved.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but when Mom and Dad are having an intense fight, they should have it behind closed doors. They shouldn’t unnecessarily involve the kids.

The church we served was full of people we both loved and cared deeply about. We had worked together to grow those people and stabilize them in the Word of God. Whatever differences we had were between us. The people didn’t need to be dragged into them.

We certainly used the bylaws, the BCO, and the various functions of the elder board to make our respective cases. But we didn’t use the people, no matter how frustrated we were with each other.

That was the great rule of the churchman.

A churchman has been called into the service of the church and her overall health. The church doesn’t exist for him. Quite the opposite. We both believed that. It had been deeply ingrained in our modus operandi.

When Paul warns the Ephesian elders in Acts 20, he tells them that ravenous wolves will arise even from among their own number, having no concern for the flock, and drawing disciples after themselves.

For these types of men, church is always about personality. Who is faithful to whom? Who is following which personality?

Ironically, these men will often make much of the dangers of personality-driven ministries. And I have my criticisms of those ministries, too. But what drives these men is often not a principled objection to personality-driven ministry. It’s a disagreement over which personality people should follow.

You shouldn’t follow that guy. You should follow me, or at least the guy I follow.

A couple of people did find out about the dispute I was having with my pastor, and they asked me what they should do.

I told them to continue being good members of the church, keep their vows, and trust the process. Pray for unity and for God to guide us. The best way they could be involved was to function as they had promised they would.

I didn’t need these people going from house to house, stirring things up. I didn’t need them bullying my pastor, telling him he was being mean to me.

And I wanted to deal with things as straight up as possible and through the processes available to me.

Just a couple of months after I had resigned in good standing and moved back home, I received a call from my former pastor regarding a very complicated church discipline issue we had been working on together.

We were still very much at odds personally, but I had taken the lead on the situation and kept all the notes. So we reviewed his questions, and I helped him work through what he needed to know so he could move forward without me.

I will say that the boundaries we maintained during our dispute contributed to our ability to reconcile over time.

For us, there was never a nuclear option.

To hit the big red button would have been to hurt people we both loved and cared about. Whatever our personal grievances, neither of us was willing to do that.

It’s what men do. It’s what churchmen do.

And we desperately need a generation of churchmen. Men who understand that there are certain rules you simply don’t break. Men who aren’t free-floating independent operators, drawing sheep after themselves, not out of love for those sheep, but because of some twisted popularity contest driven by ego.

We live in such a self-serving time that the importance of vows has almost entirely been lost. They are no longer treated as solemn promises that invoke God as witness, but as if-you-feel-like-it statements.

I like that churches have membership vows.

Vows don’t save you, of course. But they represent a commitment to higher principles by which you promise to live, even when doing so becomes difficult, costly, or personally inconvenient.

And so it is with ordination vows.

To break these vows is not merely to rebel against men, an organization, or some ecclesiastical system. It is to rebel against God, before whom those promises were made.

So we keep our vows. Not merely when they serve our interests, but especially when they don’t. We keep them because we fear God, because we want to be kept by God, and because we recognize that some things are bigger than ourselves.

Some lines mustn’t be crossed.

Churchmen know where those lines are. And they don’t cross them.