The Forgotten Pastors

Tim Alberta has a new book out about the American church in an age of extremism. Progressive atheist Rob Reiner has a new documentary out about the dangers of Christian nationalism. Some friends participated with both Tim’s book and Reiner’s documentary.

I have other friends who are antagonists towards it all. Some proudly call themselves Christian Nationalists because it gets a rise out of all the right people. They are not, definitionally, in favor of passing laws barring anyone but orthodox Christians from seeking office, etc, but because the left gets worked up over the term, they’ll embrace it.

Alberta, in writing his book, experienced awfulness at his dad’s funeral, where a member of the congregation harassed Alberta about politics. My wife, in 2016, told her Bible Study that she’d been diagnosed with cancer, and a woman told her that the woman would pray for my wife but wanted to hit me for not supporting Trump.

People have let their politics get the best of them, and too many people are letting their politics shape their faith.

But, concurrently, a prominent pastor friend of mine who passed away earlier this year had more than one conversation with me where he and I were concerned many of our friends were letting their critics radicalize them. This is a growing problem in American Christianity — a far bigger problem than Christian Nationalism. People are being radicalized by their antagonists. People are weaving their theological concerns and practical concerns within evangelicalism around how others have treated them.

This is not just happening to those who now criticize evangelicalism from within. It’s also happening to those who criticize the critics. They want to rile them up. For a time, many of the pastors I talked with were concerned about people in their churches after George Floyd, insisting that the pastors needed to speak out about social justice. Now, I am far more likely to encounter pastors who are combatting congregants convinced that the pastor has gone woke if he is not denouncing social justice every Sunday. The merry online band of TheoBros see woke everywhere unless you’re explicitly against the wokes daily, and the merry online band of deconstructed evangelicals see Christian Nationalism everywhere unless you explicitly reject the GOP.

The only religion that has a concept of grace has a lot of graceless people in it on both sides, convinced myopicly that only they are in the right. And a lot of that gracelessness comes from a sense of betrayal by others.

While all these people are squabbling and writing and talking on camera and banging away on keyboards, tens of thousands of pastors are going to get up this morning and preach. Then, they will spend time with family and friends before going to make hospital rounds to pray for those ailing and dying members of their congregations. Tomorrow, most of them will get up and go to work their day jobs because the pulpit is a passion calling, but working at Walmart or driving a bus pays the bills.

Remember, most pastors in the United States do not have the church as their full-time calling. If your church has a full-time pastor who does not work another job, you are in the minority.

When the authors write the books, the talking heads talk to Rob Reiner, and the TheoBros fight back online about the meta conversations and actual conversations of evangelical problems, worries, fears, concerns, and creeping nationalism in the congregation, tens of thousands of pastors who will never be interviewed, known nationally, or write a best seller will divide their time between visiting wounded souls and preparing a message of hope in a fallen world.

The national discourse has given too much airtime to the wounds, grievances, and gripes of those who now see problems in evangelicalism because of Trump and those who see no problems at all except with those they perceive as traitors, whiners, and “BigEva.”

And on both sides of that divide, otherwise well-intentioned people with good hearts who think they mean well and who are friends of mine are using their platforms, pulpits, press releases, columns, and tweets to fight a fight that is not as big or loud in the world at large as it is in their sphere and, in fighting that fight, help everyone on all sides forget the invisible local shepherd of the local flock who will struggle this week to pay a bill before standing, for free, in a pulpit on Sunday to remind people that the world and Hell itself will not prevail against God’s kingdom.

Perhaps we need fewer laments, fewer Rob Reiner documentaries, fewer TheoBros puffing chests and banging on keyboards, and more reminders of the small church pastor focused on doing the right thing without a spotlight on him.

The aggrieved airing their grievances are putting the spotlight on themselves, convinced they’re performing a vital service correcting an error. Increasingly, it looks like chasing idols while we forget that within evangelicalism, the Holy Spirit still works wonders daily and, again, God can take of the church without your tweet or soundbite.