One week ago, we began wrestling with this painful question. While I’ve seldom had it put to me as bluntly as my title, I’ve heard little speeches like the following, several times:
“We prayed and worked through our pastor search process but the guy we got was not what we were looking for or expecting to get. He was nothing like the pastor who ‘sold’ himself to us during the interviews and weekend visit. How could this go so wrong? And particularly, for you, Pastor Brian, you told us, based on that passage that you seem to love so much – I Corinthians chapter three, verses one through seventeen – that God would sovereignly, providentially give us just exactly the new pastor that He knew that we needed. What we got was a ‘dud.’ We might just as well have thrown some resumes up in the air and taken the one that happened to land on the table!”
Last week I shared the first three of what will eventually be a number of possible answers to our question. Click here for last week’s post. Here’s a very brief synopsis, followed by three more possibilities to ponder.
(1) Perhaps it “just happened.” God didn’t send our “bad pastor” because He didn’t know or care about what was happening. See last week’s post for the details, but I utterly reject this as a possibility.
(2) Maybe it was because you didn’t do your “due diligence.” There are pastoral search committees that don’t pray much and others which do a cursory job of interviewing the candidate and his first and second tier references.1
(3) Maybe he was a good man who was a terrible match for your church. This implies no serious fault on either side; it was just a poor marriage that was never going to work.
Here are three more possibilities:
(4) Perhaps it was because your church was bad and God gave you the pastor you deserved.
There are a few thinkers and writers I’ve encountered who believe that God deliberately gives poor pastors to poor churches as a sort of punishment or chastening (Hebrews 12:1-11, Revelation 2:14-16, 2:20-25, 3:19). I’m reminded of a couple of old sayings regarding civil government: “A nation tends to get the amount of governance that it needs and the kind of governance that they deserve.”
This is not a pleasant thought, but it is at least worth considering the possibility that this happens with churches as well. It’s definitely not karma, but it might be providence – God’s changing and arranging, His benevolent meddling into, the details of our lives for our good and His glory.
God sending a bad pastor is not far-fetched. We have the Biblical example of King Saul in I Samuel 8-31. God made provision for Israel to eventually anoint a king (Deuteronomy 17). When the time came, however, the Jewish people wanted a king for some very “worldly” reasons (I Samuel 8:5). God, through the prophet Samuel, warned the people about the kind of king they were going to get. The warnings went unheeded, Saul was anointed – after having been chosen by God to scourge His people – and the nation suffered under their king’s severely flawed leadership.
Could this happen to a church? I can’t see why not. In the Revelation passages cited above, Jesus threatened three churches with some form of chastening. Could this not have been carried out by way of “bad” pastors?
(5) Maybe you were being given a very specific “lesson.”
This is not quite as bad as the scenario described immediately above, but it is, nevertheless, painful for all sides.
I remember the days when those of us who were part of a church plant were longing for a “stronger” leader. After our founding church planter resigned, I sought out a man who looked like he would be the dynamo we were looking for. As it turned out, our new strong leader made himself the absolute dictator of our little church. We learned a painful lesson.
(6) Maybe you needed a rough leader to bring about needed change.
This one is somewhat similar to #’s 4 and 5, above, excepting that this pastor is sent by God into the congregation not to punish it, but to bring about needed change in a rough and tumble fashion because the church would not accept change at the hands of a gentle shepherd.
Emergency room physicians don’t have to have excellent “bedside manner” and they usually don’t. Corporate turnaround CEO’s likewise have to be willing to fire hundreds of people or even close dozens of locations.
The aforementioned King Saul, as flawed as he was, was described by God Himself in I Samuel 9:16 as the man God had compassionately chosen to deliver His people from the Philistines.
King Jehu (II Kings 9) is an example of a rude, crude, heartless leader whom Judah desperately needed to “clean house.” Lest anyone say that Jehu was an “accident,” the passage clearly states that this violent man was chosen and anointed by God (I Kings 9:1-3).
A chastened, humbled king Nebuchadnezzar famously declared that “the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes and sets over them the lowliest of men” (Daniel 4:17).
They even acknowledged that the traumatic ending of the pastor’s ministry helped them to come to grips with some weaknesses of theirs which they wouldn’t have recognized by way of a smoother ending! That’s an unusually wise response to a not-so-wise young pastor’s rough-hewn ministry.
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Next week I’ll share three or four more possible answers to our question: “Why would a good God give us a bad pastor?”
May God give you insight and understanding as you work through this material with me!
1First tier references are those the candidate supplies; normally, of course, big fans or dear friends of the candidate. Second tier references are those supplied by the first tier references after you ask for them. They are more apt to be objective than the first tier references.
