I write advertising for a living. One of the things you do when this is your job is send everything you write to lawyers for a legal review. This is not my favorite part of what I do. As you can imagine from reading this site, sometimes lawyers beat my words like they are a pinata overstuffed with sarcasm and mildly amusing wit.
Once, at a company outside of Boston, I sent our head lawyer a ten page document containing thousands of words for a new branding campaign. A few days later, I got an email. Here is the entire message he sent me:
NO!
I wanted to write something equally rude back. I wanted to say, “Ohhhh is it already ‘one word Wednesday?’ I want to play! I want to play! OK, how about I respond with ‘WHY?'” Or I wanted to say, “Whoa, enough of that legal jargon. Can you please explain things in terms I will understand? Can you please simplify your thoughts?
But I couldn’t say anything but “thanks for the feedback” because this guy was untouchable. He was roommates in college with the guy that started the company I worked at and so he got to do what he wanted in any way he saw fit. (By the way, if you wear a bow tie to work, like this guy, you should be jolly and happy. Jerks should not be allowed to wear whimsical bow ties. That makes no sense.)
I was admittedly angry at first, but then I realized that I should feel bad for him. Because of his status, he was not living in the real world. He was suffering from what they call “CEO disease.” People wouldn’t tell him the truth. People only told him what he wanted to hear. Like the emperor in the fable, “the emperor’s clothes,” no one was honest with him. He was insulated in this fake world where his actions and words were not challenged at all. So he had grown foolish and disconnected over the years. The scary thing is that this happens to Senior Pastors too.
I wish this wasn’t true. I wish this was just me flossing about an idea not a real issue, but I think it’s true. Somewhere along the way, as a church grows, members can often move from respect to inappropriate levels of reverence for their minister. They stop challenging the messages. Stop questioning the decisions. And you don’t have to look very hard to see examples.
One massive minister was caught in an affair a few months ago. In his initial attempts to defend his innocence, he answered questions about why he often got a hotel room by himself in the city he was from. He said that he used the hotel rooms to write his books in, that’s all. What? Are you kidding me? His wife, his staff, his accountability partners, the people in his life that cared about him, never questioned that behavior? If I ever told my wife that I was getting a hotel room in downtown Atlanta for the weekend so I could get some quiet writing done, she would laugh out loud and tell me to go to a coffee shop for a few hours. And then she would laugh some more, just muttering to herself and shaking her head, “ha, hotel room in Atlanta. Ha.”
Another minister in my neck of the woods was given a Rolls Royce as a gift by his church. I’m not even sure where to start with this one. I admit, I prefer to sit on baby seal skin leather seats and I like the dashboard of my car to be virginal cherry wood from a small cove on the coast of Portugal, but that just how I do things.
How does it happen? How does Senior Pastor Syndrome sneak in? I think it starts in marriage. Growing up, a lot of the marriages I witnessed at church and at friends’ houses had some pretty clearly defined roles. The husband was the hero. The wife was the cheerleader. His role was to be super awesome. Her role was to tell him he was super awesome. I can laugh about that now, but for a few years that really damaged my own marriage.
The first time my wife tried to criticize me, out of love, inside I thought, “What? What is she doing? I’m the hero! The cheerleader doesn’t criticize me.” It took a while for us to tear down these harmful roles and have a real relationship.
If you’re a pastor, this is a good time to do a reality check. Are you getting critical, loving feedback? Or are you driving a Rolls Royce right now because you are so super awesome? And husbands, does your wife have the freedom to tell you the truth?
Mine does now, most of the time. We’re admittedly a work in progress. Yesterday, after I read her my “dear dads” post I wanted to put on this site, she told me it was no good. And she was right. It wasn’t. So I didn’t post it. But that was the truth and though I fail at that often, that’s where I want to live.
Update:
I tweaked one of the paragraphs in this post because it felt like the jerky, judgmental Christian nonsense I usually argue against. The idea is the same but I felt that I was disrespectful in the way I presented it initially.
