{"id":53350,"date":"2021-01-19T16:54:55","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T21:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=53350"},"modified":"2024-11-20T17:13:38","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T22:13:38","slug":"i-fired-them-deacons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2021\/01\/19\/i-fired-them-deacons\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I fired them deacons’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I\u2019ve posted this story before, but it was some 10 years ago (!) \u2014 see \u201cPreached down to four<\/a>,\u201d which I\u2019m copying from here \u2014 so I think it\u2019s fair game to revisit it now. After all, I first heard this story from Tony Campolo, and he repeats it far more often than once a decade. Tony got the story from Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farms and thus, later, of Habitat for Humanity.<\/p>\n

In the 1950s, an old \u201chillbilly preacher\u201d invited Jordan to come and speak at his church in rural South Carolina. Jordan arrived to find, to his surprise, a large, thriving and racially integrated congregation \u2014 a remarkable thing in that time and place. (Sadly, it\u2019s actually a remarkable thing in\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0time or place.) So Clarence asked the man how this came about.<\/p>\n

When he first got there as a substitute preacher, the old man said, it was a small, all-white congregation of a few dozen families. So he gave a sermon on the bit from Galatians where Paul writes: \u201cYou are all children of God \u2026 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here I\u2019ll pick up from Tony Campolo\u2019s retelling of Jordan\u2019s story:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the service was over, the deacons took me in the back room and they told me they didn\u2019t want to hear that kind of preaching no more.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Clarence asked, \u201cWhat did you do then?\u201d<\/p>\n

The old preacher answered, \u201cI fired<\/em> them deacons!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow come they didn\u2019t fire you?\u201d asked Clarence.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, they never hired me,\u201d the old preacher responded. \u2026 \u201cOnce I found out what bothered them people, I preached the same message every Sunday. It didn\u2019t take much time before I had that church preached down to four.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tony and Jordan told that story as an illustration, generally, of the principle that the preaching congregations need<\/em> to hear is often the very preaching that those congregations don\u2019t want<\/em> to hear. And they both told it, more specifically, to point out that what most white congregations don\u2019t want but very much need to hear is preaching that condemns white supremacy. They both held up the success of this \u201chillbilly preacher\u201d as an example of the kind of church growth and fruit-bearing ministry that can come about only if churches are willing to tackle \u201cwhat bothered them\u201d \u2014 i.e., the sin of white supremacy \u2014 head on.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all very biblical stuff. Very Isaiah 58<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 loose the bonds of injustice, break every chain and set free the oppressed and \u201cThen your light shall break forth like the dawn,\u00a0<\/span>and your healing shall spring up quickly \u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/span>and you shall be like a watered garden,\u00a0<\/span>like a spring of water,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>whose waters never fail.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;\u00a0<\/span>you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;\u00a0<\/span><\/span>you shall be called the repairer of the breach,\u00a0<\/span>the restorer of streets to live in.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I like to think that\u2019s all true \u2014 that good moral advice will also be good practical advice for church leaders seeking to have growing, thriving congregations. Alas, I\u2019m not entirely hopeful that it always works out so neatly. Sometimes, as in the case of this hillbilly preacher\u2019s success, doing the right thing will lead to greater success. Other times, I\u2019m afraid, virtue will need to be its own reward because it will be its only reward.<\/p>\n

In any case, I\u2019m reminded of this story because Clarence Jordan and Tony Campolo are both, like me, Baptists. And so is Louie Gohmert and so is Andrew Gardner, who writes about people like Gohmert for Baptist News,<\/em> \u201cWhat should pastors do if their members helped incite the Capitol riots?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Many reflections on evangelicalism\u2019s relationship to the current Republican Party and Donald Trump think in the abstract about this group\u2019s evolution.<\/p>\n

Such abstractions do not shed light on how to lead a congregation when a member of the diaconate, for instance, incited violence or stormed the U.S. Capitol. \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gardner avoids abstraction here by focusing on one specific example, that of Rep. Louis Gohmert, a long-time member and deacon at Green Acres Baptist Church. Gardner, Gohmert, and Green Acres have some history in thinking about these things, going back to Gohmert\u2019s ugly remarks following the mass-shooting in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012:<\/p>\n

I wrote a piece challenging Gohmert\u2019s rhetoric as unfitting for both a Christian and his office.<\/p>\n

In the course of writing the piece, I discovered that Gohmert publicly states on his congressional website (and still does to this day) that he is a longtime member, deacon and Sunday school teacher at Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, Texas. \u2026 I sent a cordial email to his pastor,\u00a0David Dykes, expressing my sadness over Gohmert\u2019s statements and a link to my blog post.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, Dykes responded. He thanked me for my email and expressed his gratitude that we both live in a country where we can express our differences of opinion. Rather than defend Gohmert\u2019s comments, Dykes defended Gohmert as a \u201cbrother in Christ\u201d whom he had known \u201cfor the past 22 years.\u201d He wrote, \u201cI feel like the French guide at the Louvre who heard an American tourist criticizing some of the classic art. He said, \u2018The paintings here are no longer under scrutiny; only the critics.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s quite the analogy. St. Louie Gohmert, his pastor says, is the Mona Lisa<\/em> of Christianity, and anyone who would question his piety is an ugly American tourist. Wow. The audacity of that claim is as arrogantly weird as the fact that the same guy making it simultaneously regards himself and his powerful congregation as a persecuted minority of \u201creal Americans\u201d beleaguered by the oppression of suspiciously French elites.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Anyway, that was back in 2012 and the prions gobbling Louie Gohmert\u2019s brain have been very busy over the ensuing years, leading up to his current, ongoing support for the Big Lie that incited the January 6 insurrection \u2014 an attack on the Constitution and on democracy itself that Gohmert is still reluctant to condemn.<\/p>\n

Gardner writes:<\/p>\n

Gohmert\u2019s statements and the events of Jan. 6 are not likely to result in any spiritual recourse for Gohmert at Green Acres Baptist Church, but I wonder how things would be different if that were a possibility. Pastors certainly have a lot to deal with on a daily basis. Policing their congregants is likely not something they wish to add to their already busy lives \u2014 and where would one draw the line anyway?<\/p>\n

Abstract and subtle or even not-so-subtle hints buried in the Sunday sermon likely do little aside from encourage pastors to assume they have done their due diligence. Silence from the pulpit, however, also breeds complicity. For instance, by not making a statement, Green Acres Baptist Church essentially condoned Gohmert\u2019s rhetoric as perfectly acceptable behavior for a member of their congregation.<\/p>\n

The possibility of losing members is another glaring obstacle. As congregations continue to face membership decline, publicly and even privately calling members out for their behavior could threaten the budget. In so doing, this could threaten ministries and even a pastor\u2019s job, depending upon congregational politics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gardner never quite manages to answer the question posed in the title of his piece: \u201cWhat should pastors do?\u201d He reaches back for historical examples, discussing the ways 19th century church leaders hoped that seminaries would help to \u201cpolice\u201d unacceptable behavior in congregations, and he somewhat lukewarmly considers earlier forms of \u201cbans\u201d and \u201cexcommunications\u201d in Baptist congregations.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the sort of thing that other denominations turn to in what they would regard as matters of \u201cchurch discipline.\u201d But, again, we\u2019re talking about Baptists here. We Baptists don\u2019t do that. We don\u2019t do \u201cchurch discipline\u201d because we\u2019re not a church and we can\u2019t \u201cexcommunicate\u201d anybody because we never communicated anybody to begin with.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Clarence Jordan\u2019s old friend, the hillbilly preacher, and his approach to exactly this situation: \u201cOnce I found out what bothered them people, I preached the same message every Sunday.\u201d No need to kick anybody out, just preach what bothers them \u2014 preach what they need to hear \u2014 until they either repent or choose to leave on their own.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if that always or even usually works. But it\u2019s a very, very Baptist approach.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}