We must take a stand for truth, not allowing any assault on God’s people to continue. Because that’s what it is to disobey Scripture and keep a pastor who is not above reproach in office, an assault to Christ’s bride, the very people he is to serve. It’s easy to avoid this kind of mess and offer cheap grace. But that is unloving for any pastor, elder, advisory board, or lay person to consider.
(I’m bringing in the caboose on our three part series. Todd started us off with What Is Not Happening, and Carl wrote Of Good Reputation With Those Outside.)
Messy. Now there is a buzzword that will earn you some evangelical street cred. The currency is authenticity points. It’s now okay, no admirable, to share our messiness, to confess some of our failures, and lean on grace. In some ways, this can be celebrated. Finally, it is okay to admit we don’t have it all together. I can tell you about my total mom fail this morning as I attempted to send my kids off to school as well equipped students dressed in the armor of God. I can humorously share about my breakfast breakdown, or how I doused my 9-year-old with a rigged spray of fabric softener and water, sending him off damp into 32 degree weather because there was no time to iron, and how I raced through the longer route out of the neighborhood because the bus was in front of us and that just can’t happen (won that race, by the way).
We like to throw a messiness bone that actually distracts from the close up examination. And we rely on the required Christian response of grace. It goes: I stink at whatever I am trying to accomplish, Jesus accomplished everything that matters for me, and now I claim that grace in my life. Everyone reading appreciates my transparency, identifies with my struggles, and thankful for the very real grace that has been given to them, extends the same grace to me. We call this humbling ourselves.
The messy that we usually openly share is of the trivial sort. Some of it isn’t really sin; it’s more like creative survival techniques that fail to meet our ideal standard. But maybe in some of this sharing we have inadvertently cheapened extended grace. We think that since grace is given to us to freely receive, it shouldn’t cost us anything to give.
Let me ask you this, what happens when it is your pastor that is messy? Does the same formula work? The recent discussion concerning Pastor Mark Driscoll’s grievous sins of plagiarism, using massive amounts of church money to cheat the bestseller’s list for his personal benefit, apparent mishandling of elder relationships, among other troubling statements and patterns of behavior, brings up the question, “What kind of messy is acceptable to confess, ask for grace, and move on, and what kind of messy renders their pastorate condemned and in need of the yellow tape?” The thing is, it’s easy to extend grace to me when I’m repentant about something many can identify with. It costs you nothing. But extending grace to a person when their sin is betrayal and serious character flaws, well that’s some expensive grace to extend. Extending grace in these situations calls for something much more difficult. It calls for love beyond what we are capable of giving.
What is this grace that we extend? What did it cost? First of all, it is God’s grace. Extending grace is an act of forgiveness.
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