There was a Sunday when I stood in my own pulpit and called out, by name, preachers I considered prosperity preachers. I did not just say their names. I told my congregation that these men were bad people and bad leaders, that their preaching was negative, and that their teaching amounted to heresy. I was frustrated because I had grown tired of helping people, both financially and emotionally, who had sent money to these ministries expecting a harvest of blessings and found themselves in hardship that needed immediate help. What turned my frustration to anger was that members of our own congregation were among the ones giving.
I felt my critique of the prosperity preacher movement was correct. I wrote the foreword to a thoughtful book on the subject, “Exploring Prosperity Preaching: Biblical Health, Wealth and Wisdom” by Deborah J. Mumford. In that foreword I wrote that prosperity preaching “allows preachers to proclaim feel-good messages that have no foundation in trustworthy hermeneutics.” That was a polite way of saying the teaching was bad theology. I also tried to say that many of these churches have some redemptive qualities. But on this particular Sunday my distaste for certain leaders boiled over, and I did not restrain my feelings.
I felt so badly about it afterward that I made a commitment never to do it again. I don’t believe God put me in a pulpit to berate other pastors by name. The people who gave were not fools either. Most of them were hoping for a blessing. What they needed was a pastor who would teach them to be wise with money.
That regret pointed me in a different direction. I stopped aiming my criticism at other pulpits and started building something for my own people. I developed my own approach and curriculum, and they became my DFREE® program.
I think about that Sunday often now, because hardly a day goes by that I don’t see one Christian leader taking a swing at another. A pastor gets picked apart for his sermon, a church gets mocked for its worship, and a belief gets called heresy by somebody who only heard a clip from a message and never sat in the pew where it was taught. Social media did not invent this. It only turned the lights on.
Christians have disagreed about almost everything for two thousand years. Since Jesus walked the earth, folks have argued, and sometimes killed each other, over who he is, what he represents, and how to follow him. The ones who heard him and touched him are long gone, and the mystery around him only grew as the eyewitnesses faded into history. The Bible itself became part of the argument. Language, authorship, translation, and years of verbal transmission all leave honest people room to read it differently.
In the past, those debates happened behind closed doors, in academic institutions, and inside the branches of Christianity that catechized their members. When you study that history, you find thoughtful people making serious arguments and landing in very different places. Those differences gave us the different traditions, and each one celebrated its own point of view. It was mostly rich debate, and it had its roots in real study.
What I see now is closer to verbal warfare between Christian camps and their leaders. Leaders attack leaders. Differences are met with passionate intolerance. A lot of the criticism is mean-spirited, and a good bit of it looks to me like personal jealousy more than insightful judgment. It is much less thoughtful than the debate it replaced.
A few principles guide how I try to respond to the wide variety of Christian traditions. The first comes from Jesus himself. His disciples complained about a man who claimed to believe in Jesus but did not run with them, and Jesus told them that whoever is not against us is for us (Mark 9:40; Luke 9:50). In other words, relax. Let people practice their faith the way they choose.
The second comes from the Apostle Paul. He told the Galatians that when someone is caught doing wrong, those who are spiritual should restore that person gently, remembering that it could just as easily have been them (Galatians 6:1). Correction belongs to the person who knows he or she is capable of the same fault.
The third is where I draw a line. When people use the name of Jesus to do harm to others, Scripture calls that the unfruitful works of darkness, and Paul tells us to reprove those works and expose them (Ephesians 5:11). The Ku Klux Klan has claimed the name of Jesus while terrorizing people. That behavior should be exposed and condemned, and I will do it without apology. But condemning an injurious act is one thing, and attacking a person in a way that demeans him is another. I can name the harm without stripping anybody of his dignity. I crossed that line myself once. What I see today crosses it every day, and it is aimed at pastors whose only offense is that they preach differently, worship differently, or read a verse differently than the one doing the shouting.
If you are a pastor who shares this frustration, you can do more good at home than from the pulpit next door. Before you say a word about another ministry, ask yourself three things. Did I hear the whole message or only a clip? Have I spoken to this pastor privately? Am I criticizing a teaching I can name, or a person I want to embarrass? Then turn to your own people. Teach them to ask where their giving goes. A ministry that files as a nonprofit must make its IRS Form 990 available to the public, and any member can read it. Help people set a giving limit that never comes from the money they need for rent or groceries.
I know why many pastors stay quiet. Speaking up can cost you members, friends, and invitations. I still believe the cost is worth paying when the harm is real, but I won’t pretend it is small.
I am not naive enough to believe we will all like each other. We are, however, called to love each other, and I think there are two things we should do.
The first is to spend time understanding other people’s perspectives. Protestants should spend more time understanding Catholics instead of assuming Catholics aren’t real Christians. Baptists can spend more time understanding Pentecostals, even though Baptist and Pentecostal doctrines are different. The more we understand each other’s beliefs and backgrounds, the more Christian-like we may be in the way we respond to our differences.
The second is to pray for each other (James 5:16). It is very hard to attack people you pray for, and Jesus told us to pray for those who despitefully use us (Matthew 5:44). If we really believe somebody is in error, or is interpreting Scripture improperly, or has become an embarrassment to the kingdom of God, then we should start by praying for that person. It is hard to hate people you pray for.
Our behavior towards one another may be the most effective message we send about how we follow Jesus. I had to change my own behavior so that Jesus would look better than I had made him look on that Sunday.
