Dealing With Mean People in the Church
It is an uncomfortable reality that few churches deal with well
I had been in my first appointment at a small town church for about a year. My mother was turning 60 years old, and my younger brother was living in Austria, so she decided to pay for my new bride and I to go with her to visit him across the world. The news got out to my congregation that I would be away in Europe for a couple weeks. A few days before we flew out, I got a call from one of the older ladies in the congregation: “Preacher, how can you afford to go to Europe? We obviously pay you too much.” I lightheartedly laughed and explained that my mother was paying. She harrumphed and hung up.
On my first Sunday at this appointment, this lady approached me with a nice older man whom she introduced as her boyfriend. At first I thought they were explaining to me that they had a cute courtship going on. I later realized that she was confronting me to let me know that they were conducting a relationship outside of wedlock that displeased God. She was challenging me to say something; I was just too stupid to hear the challenge at the time.
Over my years there, she was a consistent dripping faucet of complaints and invective. In the receiving line after worship, she would complain to me about the hymns I had selected, or how long my sermon had been, or how I had interpreted a given passage. Much of her free time in the church building was spent going from person to person, agitating against the pastor. Here is what the scriptures say about the power of a matriarch to affect a household:
“A continual dripping on a rainy day
and a quarrelsome wife are alike;
to restrain her is to restrain the wind
or to grasp oil in one's right hand.
- Proverbs 27:15-16
Restraining her was indeed like trying to restrain the wind. Eventually the Staff-Parish Relations Committee got involved. They started timing the different elements of the worship service to gently correct her when she accused me of preaching too long. Of course, this made no difference. They eventually spoke seriously of assigning her an escort whenever she entered the church building so that she would be pressured not to speak evil so routinely. While they were serious about it, it was not a serious idea. Nobody is going to sign up for babysitting a bitter old lady to help her govern her tongue at church. Yet here is what the scriptures say about the power of the tongue:
“So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell.”
- James 3:5-6
My church couldn’t conceive of this. While I warned about the fallout of continual complaining, while the scriptures warn about the wickedness of grumbling (ex. Jas 5:9), human nature is to think we can ingest poison and continue to be okay. We are currently seeing the results of such a mindset in our society by the way, as we have been ingesting phthalates for decades to terrible effect. Let that be a metaphor. When we ingest poison, if we don’t die, we do suffer. That church suffered greatly because of that woman’s grumbling. And while the leadership insisted that everyone knew she was crazy and nobody really listened to her, it was demoralizing to have someone in our assembly who was obviously unmoved by the call to holiness. While I stood at the pulpit and preached sanctification, the assembly routinely tolerated rank ungodliness within the body. It was a like a person trying to be a health coach while smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. The presence and persistence of such behavior invalidated any words or intentions expressed about following Christ. Here is what the scriptures say about how an older woman in the church is to be treated:
“Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.”
- 1 Timothy 5:1-2
And here is what is said about how older women should behave:
“Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves too much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”
- Titus 2:3-5
This was not the only older woman who ever misbehaved in a church I served. I have actually dealt with worse behavior from other ladies of elderly disposition. One at another church was so toxic that I actually had to defend her from other members of the church at times. Even so, one day, when she was speaking evil, I corrected her, “Please don’t act like that.” She was so offended that she and her husband stopped attending, even writing a letter to the church: “After 53 years of membership in the church, we are now leaving to find a community that actually knows the love of Christ.” They did indeed seek another church to attend. They were humbled in the effort. When her husband died unexpectedly in the night, her heart yearned for her old church. I officiated the funeral over her husband. I was genuine in my affection for him from the pulpit. I had a lot of pity and compassion for a man who was faithful to a wife like her. To my surprise, she was so warmed by my service to her husband, that her hatred for me was quickly transformed to love. For the rest of my time in that church, her feelings of anger and dissatisfaction were transformed into a great affection for me, which she regularly voiced. It was an amazing transformation that I was glad to witness and experience.
Even so, that has been the one exception to a general rule: When an older person in the church refuses to conform to scriptural wisdom, insisting that their own knowledge is permissive, it will ruin the fellowship. Older men of this disposition generally just quietly leave. A higher percentage of older women insist on staying and complaining. It is a most tragic tendency that tries the patience of many churches. Sometimes it can be tolerated and managed if it is irregular or soft enough, but it can often spin out and cause many problems.
If I continue to pick a scab, then I can hardly be surprised if one day I get a staph infection. Likewise, if the body of Christ continues to tolerate an unregenerate member, leaking poison into the body, then one can surely expect an infection to form. Continuing to tolerate such a presence in hopes that they will soon die, on top of being pretty evidently evil, is a great roll of the dice. The scriptures are clear about what must be done of unrepentant sinners of any age: “Give them over to satan for the destruction of the flesh, that their spirit might be saved on the Day of the Lord Jesus,” and “Let them be to you as a pagan or a tax collector.” The purity of the body must be defended.
It bears reminding that being on the membership roll of a church, or sitting in its pews, does not result in salvation. The one condition of salvation is faith in Christ Jesus, which is evidenced by a transformed life, a new birth, a regeneration marked by the fruits of the Spirit. A church that tolerates members who routinely, habitually, proudly persist in sin invites destruction and anomie. The entire purpose of the church is to be a people set apart, transformed by the renewing of their minds, sent forth to live as a peculiar people, living as stars shining in the midst of darkness. Yet when wandering stars are welcomed into the fellowship (let the reader understand), they invite damnation upon the whole assembly. Our radically individualistic society fails to comprehend the ways in which people are intricately connected to and influenced by one another. The fellowship of the local church, and its purity, must be vigilantly guarded if it is to be expected to be the crucible of holiness that our scriptures undeniably point to. Our society’s pull away from the church has largely been the result of its self-evident hypocrisy in tolerating rank wickedness among our members when the world knows that Christians should be different.
I grew up in a clergy family that regularly had anxiety because of church members behaving badly. The poison leaked into the confessional body was internalized by my parents, who brought it home and tried (though sometimes failed) to keep it from leaking into our family affairs. On top of the clear biblical principles I have already walked through, there is also the practical concern of being a husband and father. I was clear from an early point in ministry that I could not be a godly man in my household if I was internalizing wickedness from church members. I could not be a punching bag. Yes, Christians should expect persecution from OUTSIDE the body of Christ, but when Christians start turning against one another in the church, the church refuses to be the church.
Sara Beth and I chose very intentionally not to start a family in that setting. We did not want to welcome children into such a mess (there were other dysfunctions not mentioned in this article). Yet when we moved to Nowata, there was soon an event that could have quickly deteriorated into the complaining and evil-speaking that I had become accustomed to. As the reality of the situation dawned upon me and my wife, I remember looking at her seriously and soberly to acknowledge that we could once again be in a situation in which we should not have children. We watched and prayed. As the affronted person traveled the congregation to get others up in arms, member after member refused to align against me. The aggrieved party eventually gave up and left the church. She did come back to me and apologize later, and I eagerly extended forgiveness. The church had intentionally, both as a group and as individuals, refused to give a platform for evil. Sara Beth was pregnant two months later. We are now raising four children in the midst of two churches that intentionally govern their tongues. They aren’t perfect, but they agree that the standard is what it is.
Part of the reason I never made it through the process overseen by the Board of Ordained Ministry in the Oklahoma Annual Conference was because of my stated intolerance of bad behavior in the body of Christ. I was clear in some of my interviews that I was not willing to internalize abuse from the body out of concern for my family and for the integrity of the church. I remember one older lady on the board was particularly upset at my words: “You mean there are churches we might send you to that you might not serve?!”
“Well, I would go, because I believe in the itinerant system and I am in submission to the bishop, but I wouldn’t tolerate bad behavior. After a time of bearing with them, they would either have to change, or they would have to go, or I would have to go. I would not engage in a longterm dysfunctional dynamic.” She harrumphed and voted me down, as did many. When one worships a God of infinite and unconditional love and acceptance, then a pastor who exercises discernment and discipline in the body is most unwelcome.
This dynamic is a large reason why The United Methodist Church is in decline. When church discipline becomes anathema, then the church becomes a hotbed of iniquity, which is what is seen throughout the denomination. The question in my mind is if the Global Methodist Church will develop and maintain an intolerance towards unholiness in the church. It seems to me that, at this point, the hope is that GMC leadership can cast such a compelling vision of a fruitful and vibrant church that individual members and churches will get on board and be so excited that they won’t have room for grumbling and complaining. However, without the stick of church discipline, I am pessimistic about the long term prospects of such hopes.
The church in America has worried about PR for some time. Aware of the stereotype of the judgmental, harsh community, so many have resolved not to allow for any semblance of church discipline. And while the simple love of Christ is repeatedly shown to be insufficient to transform disobedient hearts, while we have the model of Judas IN THE SCRIPTURES, people continue to beat their heads against a wall expecting for people to change. Meanwhile the church is in freewill and nobody can tell me the distinctive marks of a disciple. We make disciples but can’t tell you what they are supposed to look like beyond vague descriptors like ‘showing the love of Christ.’ Okay. Why is this faith worth living and dying for, again? So often it becomes clear we are simply christening worldly lives rather than insisting on the transformed lives of holiness that Christ died for.
I am now rambling. The undergirding sentiment of all of this, while I am frustrated with the lack of discernment American churches seem to have in general, is actually gratitude. The Lord brought Sara Beth and me into a pleasant place. We don’t have big churches with big programs. We have faithful churches that proclaim Christ and him crucified. When I preach self-denial, mortification of the body, the threat of sin, the power of darkness, the threat of damnation, the high standards of Christ — they keep listening to hear what is on the other side of that: the power of Christ, the sureness of salvation, the depths of God’s love and mercy, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, the trustworthiness of our scriptures, the promises and the covenants. As I return to Acts of the Apostles regularly, I find that the churches I serve more and more closely reflect the intimacy and obedience of those early fellowships.
I rejoice that the Lord saw fit to bring us into this place. I now guard it jealously. As new people come in, they discern quickly our insistence on holiness and our intolerance of evil speech. Most who step in step right back out after a few weeks. But of those who stay, they find a community of love and forgiveness. Our intimacy is sweet and true. I hope for a future in which this sort of dynamic becomes the norm and expectation for all Christian fellowships.
A closing prayer: May those who claim the name of Christ grow in fidelity to the ways of the Kingdom, such that our tolerance of willful sin within ourselves flows out into a culture of intolerance of sin in the body of Christ. May the purity of the church be treated as a realistic goal rather than a pipe dream. By the power of the Holy Spirit, may the bride of Christ be sanctified and purified, so that when Christ returns, he will find a worthy assembly waiting to greet him!
***Disclaimer — I’m well aware that pastors can be abusive in the body of Christ and conflate themselves with Christ, insisting that people mindlessly obey and show deference to pastoral leadership. Pushback and critique is indeed needed in the body of Christ, and pastors should be expected to regularly receive these things with grace, even as he should also be able to expect believers in the body to be kind in their critiques. Pastors need to regularly self-reflect and question if the way they feel reflects reality, and whether persons who have affronted them could potentially be in the right. Also, churches need to always err on the side of grace and forgiveness. My willingness to exercise church discipline shouldn’t be construed as an eagerness to kick folks out. Any church that is too intolerant to the frailties and failures of its people will rightly fall under its own weight rather quickly. If your inclination while reading through this was to poke holes in it, it might be worth re-reading it with a more gracious eye.
I have noticed certain people in the church with a certain political viewpoint are rather strong in speaking about it. They are intolerant of any opposing their stance. I only wish they were as devoted to taking up their cross and following Christ as they are to their politics. As for bad behavior in the church, we should heed scriptural advice to gently correct once, then a second time before sending away. Titus 3:10