My parents wanted me to be nice in church. My mother taught Sunday School for many years and for one of those years she was stuck with me as a student and I was stuck with her as a teacher. We fully agreed that she didn’t think I was a nice student and I didn’t think she was a nice teacher.
I remember at least one of the days when my father caught me red-handed trying to smuggle a Matchbox-sized toy car into the church with me. I didn’t even get near the building when I was apprehended and the vehicle was confiscated.
In middle school, I remember being exceptionally nice to a teacher who was only a high-school student herself, and genuinely pretty.
In a confirmation class, Mike Mutz (not his real name) was so “un-nice” that he manipulated the legs of the heavy old folding table we were sitting at, causing it to collapse on top of us. That actually got a cuss word out of the pastor, which wasn’t very nice on his part.
During a break in another confirmation class, a bunch of us boys were horsing around in the holy space behind the altar rail. The pastor didn’t think that was very nice and chased us out with a holy scolding.
So last week I wrote about the problem of being too nice to be honest in the church boardroom, a practice which causes serious problems in many churches. If you haven’t seen the post you can click right here to find it.
- We are too nice to say “no” to unqualified people who want to serve as church leaders. See I Timothy 3:1-13, I Timothy 5:17-22 and Titus 1:5-16.
The Apostle Paul gave us these qualifications for a reason. Taken strictly literally, they disqualify all of us. Understood with a measure of grace and understanding – remembering that at least some people who met the qualifications must have existed in actual churches in Paul’s day – these standards protect us from many sorrows. The Apostle warned, “…he must not be a recent convert” (I Timothy 3:6), “do not be hasty” in choosing leaders so you do not “share in” the blame for their sins (I Timothy 5:22), “Keep these instructions without partiality…” and “do nothing out of favoritism” (I Timothy 5:21). (I wrote about this in more detail here.)
That means that we:
- Never call an unqualified pastor because he seems to be extraordinarily gifted.
- We never choose a person to be a church board member because he or she is charming, gifted, wealthy, powerful or threatening.
- We never choose a board member on the basis of family membership or tenure in the church.
Never.
- We are too nice to implement and consistently enforce a comprehensive child and youth protection policy. Some of us remember well when such policies were considered new, extreme and controversial. The church which I served as pastor had to talk and listen and pray our way into such a policy over a period of a couple of years…but I’m so glad we paid the price to do this. Only God knows what we protected our teens and children from by working through the process.
That was thirty years ago. I find it amazing that some churches still have not taken this important step, even as our culture has sunk to ever lower depths of depravity and abuse. More predators than ever are thrilled to find churches which are too nice to eliminate them as volunteers.
Church members or leaders who continue to resist taking this important step on the grounds that it’s not nice to make people fill out forms and list references, simply need to repent.
- We are too nice to lovingly confront our brothers and sisters in Christ about their glaring faults, bad habits and disqualifying traits. This is something we are supposed to do…because we love God and because we love each other:
“Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” Leviticus 19:17-18
This passage, the source of the second greatest commandment of the Law (Matthew 22:39), is the ancient foundation beneath the New Testament commands to go and talk to your brother one-on-one when he has seriously sinned against you (Matthew 18:15-20), try to rescue your sister if she is overtaken by a fault (Galatians 6:1-5), and speak the truth in love to your brethren about their need to fully grow up into Christ (Ephesians 4:11-32).
The last passage mentioned above – Ephesians 4 – seems to point back to the Proverbs about “iron sharpening iron” – the love-motivated, difficult ministry of “grinding the rough edges off each other” (Proverbs 20:5, and 27:17). Since we don’t see our rough edges any more than we see the backs of our heads, we are reliant on others to tell us what they see.
Here’s what isn’t nice: Failing to tell each other the truth, failing to confront each other, failing to rescue each other or sharpen each other, because we’re too “nice.”
I worked with a church in which everyone in the room had rough edges which disqualified them from church leadership. Everyone was aware of everyone else’s glaring faults…for years. They had enough integrity to disqualify each other, but they didn’t have enough mature love to help each other change.
- We are too nice to practice Biblical, church discipline. No, the term “church discipline” isn’t in the Bible, but the practice certainly is. In spite of the fact that it has been practiced badly and crudely on many occasions by many varieties of Christians, it is not, in essence, something unkind or draconian. It is real, tough, love, in action.
Church discipline, which in the Bible, begins with the one-on-one conversations described in the Matthew 18 passage referenced above, is nothing more or less than the loving confrontation of a sinning brother who is hurting God’s reputation, his church, other persons and/or himself with his persistent and serious sin. It is loving our (professing) brother too much to let him ruin his life.
Church discipline is not much different from the interventions practiced by families and friends who “gang up on” someone they love who is destroying his life or the lives of others with alcohol or drug addiction.
Some would say that such congregations are not churches at all. They are like people living in the same house who are not a family. They’re just “hanging out.”
This isn’t love, it isn’t family, it isn’t church. It’s a chapel which has no intention of functioning like a body of Christ in a given community.
The Proverbs say that if we don’t discipline our children, we don’t love them (Proverbs 13:24). Not dealing with the biting sheep shows a disdain for both the biter and the bitten (Acts 20:28-32).
In all four of these areas: leadership selection, child protection, personal confrontation and church discipline, we need to move beyond mere “niceness” and practice real, tough, God-honoring, sacrificial love.
Is your church “nice,” or genuinely loving?
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Next week: Several more ways in which we’re too nice in our churches.
Meanwhile, if you could use a listening ear and a praying heart, you’re welcome to get in touch with me at churchwhisperer@gmail.com.
