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“Preachers, Hirelings, and Owners”
Categories: Meditations
Let me give you a list of some of the men in the brotherhood whom I most admire. Max Dawson. L. A. Stauffer. Mark Russell. David Maravilla. Andy Diestelkamp. These men (and others like them), in addition to having a blameless character, are also preachers who have worked with the same congregation for several decades. Max, for instance, began with the Dowlen Rd. church in Beaumont, TX, in 1978, the same year I was born.
I don’t have to know anything else about you. If you’ve been in the same work for 40-plus years, you’ve been doing something right.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve continued to reflect on Terry Francis’s series of posts about preachers being treated as hirelings. The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if part of the problem is that preachers act like hirelings.
Recently, I ran across a quotation that urged, “Work like you own the place.” Obviously, no man can own a church belonging to Christ, but there is still a difference between a hireling, even a hard-working hireling, and an owner (or, to use the John 10 language, a good shepherd). Back when I worked for Wal-Mart, I worked hard until the managers told me I could go home, but I didn’t stick around to lock up. Hirelings don’t do that. Owners do.
In the same way, I suspect there are subtle differences in the behavior of a preacher who is determined to remain with a congregation, come what may, as opposed to the preacher who says in his heart, “If worse comes to worst, I can always find someplace else to preach.” If you know you are going down with the ship, you’re going to work a lot harder to keep the ship from going down.
I think this is particularly true when it comes to relationships with brethren. Most preachers who have been preaching very long have accumulated their share of stories about shoddy treatment by members of their congregations. However, none of these stories occur in isolation.
Sure, there are so-called brethren out there who are eaten up entirely with malice. However, I don’t think that most Christians who sin against preachers are like that. Instead, I think they are generally good people whose relationship with the preacher somehow gets caught in a death spiral. Those situations give the devil an opportunity.
Yes, ordinary Christians bear their share of responsibility for failed relationships with preachers, but preachers often do too. It’s easy for preachers to focus on the sin, and get all righteoused up about being sinned against, while overlooking the years of folly and neglect that allowed sin to flourish. Complaining, “It’s not my job to cater to everybody in the church,” is simply another way of admitting, “I am a hireling and act like it.”
I do not mean to suggest that preachers who leave their congregations for another work have sinned. Far from it! However, if we don’t want to be treated like hirelings, we need to quit thinking and behaving like hirelings. If we want commitment and genuine relationships from the leadership and the congregation, we first must show that commitment and build those relationships ourselves.
