Pray for your haters, ask God to help you love them, and take every opportunity to do them good. Don’t avoid them and don’t take sneaky swipes at them from the pulpit. One of the wonders of the gospel is that God can make the worst of enemies the best of friends. View this as a massive opportunity to display the power of the gospel.

If you want to avoid hate mail, simply avoid any public leadership role. Yes, pastors receive their “fair share” of hate mail, but so also do politicians, business owners, teachers, and many others.

That said, there are seasons when pastors receive more hate mail than normal, and now is probably one of them, when churches and pastors are taking courageous yet unpopular stands on numerous moral issues. So what should we do when the haters start hating?

Let’s first recognize the difference between hate mail and appropriate criticism. Hate mail is motivated by hate, a desire to harm and hurt. It is usually insensitive in tone and content, and intends to discourage, damage, dishearten, and demoralize. Appropriate criticism is motivated by love, by a desire to help and grow a person. It is expressed with kindness, wisdom, and balance. Unless we have a particularly thin skin, or have developed a martyr complex, it’s usually quite easy to distinguish hate mail from constructive criticism.

Anonymous Hate Mail

Second, let’s distinguish anonymous from signed hate mail. My practice used to be that if there was no identifying name on the envelope or letter, that I would trash it once I had read enough to recognize it as hate mail (usually the first couple of sentences was enough to identify the characteristic abusive and threatening language).

I still recommend reading no further than necessary to discern the hostile nature of the communication; there’s no point in letting the author achieve his or her aim of upsetting or frightening you at no cost to themselves. However, instead of trashing them, I now suggest giving any such letters to an experienced Christian in your congregation, probably to an elder, and ask him to read them and keep them secure.

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