Tag: Bitterness

Spiritual Takeaways

Many, many years ago, a preacher I respected mispronounced “concupiscence” — or maybe it was “incontience” — some “bible” word — and I made the mistake of pointing it out. It was even privately, one-on-one, well after the fact. He proceeded to tell me a long story about how he heard his pastor mispronounce a word once, and as he struggled to get a note to him to point it out, he heard him explain the word correctly anyway. The lesson was obvious. You shouldn’t try to correct your spiritual superiors. It’s not your place.

Several years later, he told a story about a woman in Las Vegas getting into an elevator with 2 black men, and thinking they wanted to rob her, and she got all scared and dropped her bucket of slot machine coins. As the story goes, it turns out it was Eddie Murphy and Michael Jordan, who thought it was funny, and sent her a bunch of money wrapped around roses or something. It was one of those stupid email chain letter things in the 90’s, the kind that Snopes was invented to debunk. It never happened.

Having seen this long before, and not being about anything spiritual, and ignorantly thinking he wouldn’t want to relay “fake news,” I sent the Snopes article to him. Just him. I didn’t CC anyone else. I wasn’t trying to embarrass him. A few months later, he told the whole story again, with nary a hint of it being fake. I took that as a direct shot at me, to show that he was going to say whatever he wanted in the pulpit, no matter what. I understood the point to be that I should never question him. About anything. Ever. After that day, I didn’t. In fact, I can’t recall ever saying anything to him about what he preached again, good or bad.

Because I never brought it up, and never talked about his preaching again, I’m sure he felt the “teaching moment” had achieved its intended effect. However, the lesson I actually learned from it was that he played fast and loose with the truth, even if he was in the pulpit, and I never looked at him the same way again.

Little did I know that this was the first few snowflakes that would eventually start an avalanche.

Church Embezzlement

There were a lot of stories in the 80’s about Jim and Tammy Baker embezzling millions from their church. Closer to home, there have been stories about UPCI preachers embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from their local churches. When I hear stories about church embezzlement now, as someone who has been deeply involved with a church for 30+ years, I’m realizing that it’s not just about the money that was selfishly and illegally extracted out of the church. There’s an additional “opportunity cost” of what that money could have done in the mission of the church: more staff, more programs, more outreach; more of the work the church is supposed to be all about. And as someone who supports the idea of the mission, it’s an added disappointment to an already-dismal occurrence.