The One Truth that Tempted Me to Return to the Traditional Pastor-Led Church

I'm a geezer.

This has been a bad winter for both Evie and me. She's home today with a fever only about a week after she was down for about a week with an intestinal viral sickness.

I've been fighting a bad snot condition since just after Christmas. I haven't missed an entire day of work during that time. However, most of my work days are divided into two half-day shifts and, several times, I worked a shift when I was manager and went home when another manager was on site.

Our visits to mom and dad have been profoundly effected, mostly because we don't want to expose them to an illness we might pass on.

It's been weeks since the two of us have visited them together.

For the first time, I felt like I just want to shut down and become a consumer of religious products and services.

For a brief moment, this morning, I dreamed of joining a traditional parish priest-led church so I could become a shut-in and, after a few weeks, begin to complain:

"The pastor doesn't visit enough," and "We need a pastor who will take care of the old people."

In that moment, I was willing to write out my tithe check to a traditional Christendom church so that, as a legitimate consumer of a church's religious products and services, I'd have a legitimate right to complain about the poor service and to demand that the body divert its attention from the mission Jesus commanded to care for its most important customer: ME!

Of course, that moment was short-lived.

Or...

...perhaps, there is no "of course" about it.

But, the truth is that, after that brief moment of cerebral flatulence, truth regained its hold over my soul.

To do what I wished for in that brief moment would have been pure narcissism.

Yet, I think,empowering narcissism is a real-life core value of many, probably nearly all, of the 80 per cent of CGGC congregations Lance describes as either in stagnation or decline. I've seen hints of it at least in every traditional Christendom pastor-led church I've ever encountered.

And, it's a value that Shepherd Mafia-based ministry embraces and accepts as legitimate and which it happily enables.

And, perhaps most importantly, it flies in the face of a core Jesus principle of discipleship: That in order to follow Him you must, first, deny yourself.

It seems to me that what has become traditional in church, not Kingdom, focused ministry is the enabling of narcissism.

We need to demand that all members of the body live with the attitude of a servant and that those who seek to be great live among us as slaves of all.

We won't be disciplers until we do that.

We must repent.