Telling the Truth

Christian Smith recently wrote an article in Christianity Today entitled, "Evangelicals Behaving Badly with Statistics." The article is very important because it brings to light a practice among evangelicals which is incredibly un-Christlike and represents, I believe, a distinct lack of faith. The summation of his article is that evangelicals, as a subgroup within our culture, are particularly bad about distorting, manipulating, or just plain ignoring facts when making their case before their congregants. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that "the truth is more important than the facts" and this seems to be the theory under which evangelicals often operate. This lack of integrity in making our case is strangely ironic as we've really claimed a cornering of the market on finding truth.

The article is well worth the read but will probably come as no surprise to those who have found themselves at one time locked in the grip of this system and are now trying to pull themselves out of it. It seems to be cultivated in us as pastors in training that the best methods of motivation are fear and guilt. And so we heap them on, service after service, hoping that we will be able to effect some change. We talk of grim, truly frightening statistics. We take incomplete data and use it to spell imminent doom for the Church. We manipulate research in order to "scare" congregants into living the radical life, as if anything less will lead to the demise of their children and grandchildren. We condemn them and heap upon them a burden of guilt for failing to live a "Christlike witness" in their culture, basically pointing the finger at them and laying blame on their doorstop for the terrible state we find ourselves in.

It may seem like I speak in too absolute of terms but the truth is that I've been there myself and can speak with some amount of authority as to how pastors operate and the culture under which they are brought up. In my own search for answers as to why we choose to take this approach I believe I've found three distinct reasons. The first is that we have an understandably human need to control. Knowledge is power and so if we have some special knowledge that those who sit under us do not have then we can lead them and hold power over them. It strikes me how many pastors I hear speak on these issues. There's nothing wrong with noticing alarming trends or seeing disconcerting things going on in our culture because they certainly abound. What IS wrong is that it seems like everyone of them already have all the answers. I was like that too. I trumpeted death and destruction. I attempted to terrify my students and guilt them into living these radical lives. I can't tell you how ashamed I am of that. I read through some of the messages I taught over the years and I just shake my head as my stomach turns. I had to have power. I had to have answers. I had to "lead" them out of the muck and the mire which they had gotten themselves into. I had to shock them so that I could hold their attention. It wasn't enough to give them the words of life. I had to lace them with fear and guilt so that they knew how far they were and needed me to lead them.

The second thing which I believe leads to our warping of statistics is a terrifying fear of failure. You hear it in politics all the time. In order to beat this bad news we've got to "get out in front of the story." We've got to make sure that our spin is the official spin. That way when the crap really hits the fan we can stand there and say, "I told you so" or play it off as an obvious effect of what we've been saying all along. And what if the crap never actually hits the fan? That's okay because we've moved on to fear mongering some other hot topic. It should be obvious by now to everyone who's spent any time in church...pastors fail. And I'm not just talking about the oops, had an affair kind of failure. I'm talking about the more serious kind. The kind that is rarely brought to light. It's the failure to let people know that we're human, the failure to let them see us make a mess of things. And so they place us on these pedestals and put us up in glass houses and we're terrified of doing anything that might possibly mess that up or reveal our humanity. I'll be the first to tell you (after the fact of course, when it's safe and being able to provide for my family isn't on the line) that I was a failure as a pastor. I "failed" because I didn't have the answers and I had to pretend like I did. I failed because I had to be absolutely sure I was doing the right thing, all the while self-destructing on the inside because I couldn't even look at myself in the mirror. It was the culture I grew up in and the culture I worked in. In the end, it was my inability to just be okay with duality and hypocrisy that did me in.

Finally, I believe there is an overwhelming need to distort the facts in favor of the "truth" because many pastors suffer from a distinct lack of faith. It may sound crazy but it's true. We lack the faith to believe that Jesus is the one who redeems people and so we use these wild tactics to win them ourselves, to compel them by our own abilities. We lack faith to believe that we can change the world one person at a time. We use the shotgun approach because it protects us from failure. We can't mess people up from behind a pulpit nearly as much as if we took four or five and said, "Follow me as I follow Christ." We lack the faith to believe that living differently will make more difference than our fiery sermons ever will. Heck, we lack the faith to believe that Jesus can and wants to make us different first.

And so we cry from the watchtowers. We exaggerate and manipulate the facts because it's easier than getting down in the dirt and risking failure. We weren't the first to do it, but we've certainly perfected the art form.

I don't know that I'll ever get the chance to do ministry as a full-time profession again but I hope and pray that if I do it will be drastically different this time around. I don't want to be so interested in being the all-knowing, all-seeing answer man that I forget to let God work in his amazing ways and use me and all my failures for his glory. I don't want to live in a glass house, I want to be one.