When Church Fails You

Being in the pastoral ministry for sometimes now, I and my wife have known and seen many potentially wonderful people walk out of the church, shutting the door behind them forever.  Memories of these individuals, though as old as a quarter of a century, still remain fresh in our minds and at times wonder and wish that there was something we could have done better to avoid their departure from the church.  Yes, in hindsight, we could have done something different. But then, we were young and inexperienced pioneering pastors struggling to raise a new church to stand on its feet.  Like Paul to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, we never wanted to be a burden to the church and thus worked hard on many odd jobs, not only to provide for our family but also for the needs of the church such as paying rent and other utilities so that we could also present them the example of sacrificial service in God's kingdom. As indigenous church planters in a heathen society without any missions or supporters behind; it was a staggering task.  But by choice, we took up the challenge of becoming bi-vocational pastors.  Because of the bi-vocational nature of our ministry, we could not give as much time as we wished to the needs of many of the believers; yet the call of God for the pastoral ministry was so clear and we could not convince ourselves to abandon the church when we faced many difficult situations.  The difficulties arising from the lack of finances, ill health and persecution were not as challenging as arising from a disgruntled church member.  Whenever a church member demonstrated the traits of disgruntle, as inexperienced as we were, we would spend more time with such members, try to pray more, try to reason with and always hoped for a miracle that someday he/she would understand the grace of God in Christ Jesus.  More often than not, we failed to convince such members to appreciate the grace of God; concepts like forgiveness, consideration, understanding, love and sacrifice failed to make sense.  In our failures to minister to them, often we questioned our own intelligence thinking whether we are delusional in attempting to Pastor a people that does not contribute anything toward our welfare.  Instead of the church taking care of our material needs, we had to work hard to meet the needs of the church and yet these members would manage to find reasons to complain and murmur about one thing or the other in the church.  By serving the church freely, we thought the church members would see the kind of sacrifices we were making, the kind of unconditional love we demonstrated toward them by bringing them to Christ, being there with them in times of happiness and sorrow, and teaching them to become the kind of people God wants them to be.  The Bible says that the one who labors for the gospel must eat from the gospel and the pastors and teachers of God's word are to be paid better.  But we were doing it all freely and yet these church members always managed to find something wrong either with the church or with the leadership and decided to walk away from it.  We hardly forget these members who have walked out of the church; a great sense of loss from all sides remains in our psyche.  By God's grace, a few years ago, we were able to handover the leadership of this church to our fellow pastor, knowing that the church is now self-reliant, able to feed its shepherd and is birthing many new churches. 

Nearly four years ago, after we moved to Korea, we took over the leadership of our current International Church, and of course the church is not able to pay us the required pastoral salary and thus our bi-vocational nature of ministry continues.  Just like in the past, it is our desire that some of our members would see the kind of commitment it requires to be a follower of Christ from our example.  If we are followers of Christ, then, we are called to serve and not to be served; we are called to give than to receive.  Our contract with the church is limited to our Sunday preaching and we can say "Why bother for Bible studies, counseling, visitation and so forth; just go for Sunday sermon because that is all the church requires of us".   But no, we are called by God to minister regardless of whether we are paid for it or not.  We are to lay down our lives for the cause of the kingdom of God and his people.  When we see a fellow believer encouraged, a backslidden returned, a sinner saved as a result of our ministry; this becomes our greatest reward in this world.  And, in fact, we are grateful to the Lord for the growth of our International Church and the commitment of many volunteers.  We are grateful for our worship team, serving team, ushers and Sunday school teachers.  All of them are doing what they do freely and for the cause of the kingdom of God. Many of them invest their own money, time and talents into what they do.  Some of them have been doing it cheerfully for many many years.  It is wonderful to see that from a handful of members, today we are numbering into many scores who join us every Sunday for worship and fellowship.

But along with the growth comes the challenge of practicing our Christianity.  We have people from many nations, cultures and languages.  There is going to be confusion, miscommunication and misunderstanding.  With such diversity, an international church can have the greatest potential for either healing or hurting one another.  Our spirituality is going to be tested severely.  If we don't take our personal discipleship very seriously, we are going to find so many reasons to complain and murmur about our church, about our leaders, and about any and everything.  If we allow our feelings to dictate our decision making process, its going to steal our joy and peace that God has freely given to us.  It's going to rob us of the love of God that he poured in our hearts.  And if we don't take preventative actions, we may eventually either walk away from the church or make others to leave the church altogether. 

Therefore, brothers and sisters, as a fellow believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, I urge you to fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.  Listen to his words and consider the price of discipleship he has laid out for us to pay.  Let us pick up our cross daily and let us ask God to pour out divine love in our hearts, let us ask God to give us the joy of the Holy Spirit, let us ask God to give us the peace that surpasses all our understanding.  Let us ask God to give us patience, kindness, and goodness so that we can tolerate members who are difficult to deal with; love the unlovable.  Let us ask God to give us faithfulness, meekness and self-control so that we continue to grow in the knowledge of God in bearing the fruit of the Spirit. 

We live in a broken world among the broken people and the church is also comprised of broken members.  Although we hope for the church to behave better, let us not walk way from it just because some members demonstrate their brokenness.  The church is still the body of Christ and as members of his body; let us do our part in healing and restoring even when people keep hurting us.