Pop Church Circus | Theocast

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we have a discussion around the insanity of the modern church as it relates to the pastor and congregants, and how often church feels more like an exhausting circus, moving from one big program to the next.

And then we're going to spend some time talking about what is biblical Christianity, what is the responsibility of a church pastor and a church congregant. We hope you find this conversation edifying, and we definitely pray that you find rest.

We'll talk to you soon.

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Theocast’s Aim: Rest for Weary Pilgrims

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. This conversation is about the Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. We have three pastors all hyped up on love, affection for each other, and caffeine around.

The microphone.

Coconut water.

Coconut water around the microphones this morning. We have Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Jimmy Buehler, everybody a round of applause out of the microphone today.

Pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and I'm John Moffitt, I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Sticky, Tennessee. It is quite sticky. We're going to hear from Jimmy in a minute.

Before we do, Justin, brother, what are we giving away, why are we giving it away, and who are we giving it to?

A lot of questions, man, I feel pretty burdened. We are giving away one of our books, one of the things that the three of us wrote together. It is our little book on faith versus faithfulness, a primer on rest, at least that is as it is titled up to this point.

It's a little book that we wrote essentially on confessional theology and what it looks like to rest in Christ. We are giving it away through, I guess, somewhat random processes today. I basically listened to John and Jimmy throw a bunch of numbers around.

I was just sipping my coconut water completely uninvolved, and somehow, someway, we came up with one of our members to give this book away to, none other than Dave Fortin. Dave, we will be getting this book to you.

If you haven't heard anything from us, I think you need to shoot us a little message with your address or something like that.

We'll shoot you an email.

We'll get the book to you. Like I said, we will shoot you an email, and you can tell that I am intimately involved in the book giveaway process.

That's right.

Yeah, so we'll email you, Dave, and get that book to you happily, man. If you're listening to this podcast, it releases on a Wednesday morning, and you're thinking, I would love a hard copy of Faith Versus Faithfulness.

We are here for you. If you go to any of our social media handles, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you will find instructions on how you could enter yourself into the fray to possibly win a copy of Faith Versus Faithfulness.

So we leave that to you. We trust you can read the instructions and do what is necessary.

Before we throw it over, I want to give a nice shout out to Jen, who has volunteered to take over the shipment of our books. Jen, thank you so much.

Thank you, Jen.

I am obviously quite clueless as to how all this happens, and sometimes I receive messages from people about book giveaways, and I sort of try to kindly respond and be like, I'm going to pass this along because I have no idea what to do with this.

So Jen, thank you for handling it.

We just pray, and then they just show up at the right place.

That's right.

They just materialize.

They do.

It's pretty remarkable.

If God wants it there, it's going to get there.

That's right.

They just do it.

Yep.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They just suck it.

So, all right.

Now that we've done that, we are going to talk about something else today.

Yeah.

And Jimmy, why don't you set it up for the listener, man?

Yeah.

Okay. So here's my joke to begin. Are you ready? John just rolled his eyes at me.

John does that a lot.

He does.

And the way you guys describe me, it's mean.

He is. He's just a...

Goodness.

Anyway. So, what do Britney Spears, Elephants, and John Calvin have in common?

Wow.

Waiting for the punchline on that one.

The punchline is...

There's an idea for a graphic.

I have no idea. But today, what we are going to talk about is Pop Church Circus. Pop Church Circus. And I think the person that we are aiming to speak to today, maybe you are that church member or that church attender where you feel like you show up to church on Sundays and you're looking around and you're seeing all of these things happen around you, different people volunteering.

And have you ever had the thought of... Everybody seems to be very busy and very involved and very much part of the movement, but I actually have no idea what's going on. Or I have no idea what all of this is for.

And it can be really disorienting, particularly here in the West, here in the United States. And the reason why we kind of titled this the Pop Church Circus, if you've ever been to a circus, you walk in and it's like a thousand and one different things are fighting for your attention.

Whether it's the ski ball machine or the bearded lady or the conjoined twins or whatever it might be, there's just a thousand things that you can look at and give your attention to. And it's almost too much.

It's almost too overwhelming. And I'll just speak from personal experience in the different churches that I've been involved in. It always seemed like there was a new initiative or a new movement and corresponding matching t-shirts to go along with it.

And so eventually what can happen, and I think actually what we're seeing, particularly in our generation, the post-boomer, I think that would be Gen Z, millennial, is you see a lot of deconversion stories or ex-evangelicals is a lot of times what they call themselves, where essentially they're running away from this kind of circus.

And so what we want to do today is just kind of talk about and hopefully bring hope and rest to that kind of person. What do we do in that kind of situation? But maybe before we get there, would one of you just kind of want to step in and kind of flesh this idea out a little bit more?

The Exhaustion of the Popular Church

Yeah, Jimmy, I'm happy to jump in for a second here and put it maybe in my own words. I think there are all kinds of expectations heaped upon people in the church, and that would include pastors and congregants.

And then there are a lot of unhelpful notions in the popular church of what pastoral ministry looks like, and there are also a lot of unhelpful notions about what being a church attender or a church member looks like in the popular church.

And people can, because it's all just like this fire hose coming at them, and like you said, I love the analogy of there's all these different things going on and there's a t-shirt for every program and there's a t-shirt for every new thing that we're doing and every initiative, and it all can just be exhausting.

And we talk all the time on this podcast about the rest that is ours in Christ, and so I think one of the goals of today's conversation is to liberate people who are exhausted by the popular church. And that would, whether you're a pastor, like whether you're paid to do vocational ministry, whether you're a lay elder perhaps and you're helping pastor the church in that regard, or whether you're a member of a church or an attender of a church somewhere, our hope for today is that you walk away from this podcast with some simple handles and takeaways.

Like, man, the Christian life is unfathomably deep, but at the same time it's actually quite simple. And so I can give myself to these few things and I'm going to be absolutely inside the will of God and I'm probably going to be a little bit, I don't know, more rested, and I'm probably going to be more effective in the things that I'm doing.

That's sort of where I'm coming from in having this conversation. John, do you have thoughts that you want to add to that before we maybe get into the content itself?

Sometimes what's helpful when you are wrestling with that doesn't seem right or that seems wrong, that seems off, and then you can sit down with someone and you just touch it to see what happens and then they completely regurgitate back to you, yeah, this, this, this, this, and this.

It helps you just calm down and go, okay, I'm not crazy. I'm not the only one who goes, that is a circus and I don't want anything to do with it. That is definitely the conversation we want to have with you.

If you're looking at modern church and what seems to be popular, if you just drop a pin in any church in any city and look at what the mega churches are doing, the big churches, what's popular, what's moving, and even most church plants, it does feel like a circus.

It feels as if the culture drives whatever works and that's the pressure we all fall under and it feels, the way I describe it, it feels superficial. It feels as if no one can have problems and whatever is the most important thing going on in the culture is the most important thing going on in the church.

Brief interjection, and you feel like there's no way that any ordinary church can pull this off because it's this incredible machine that's been built and it requires millions of dollars a year. And how in the world could we, just as ordinary Christians and ordinary pastors, ever do this thing?

Yeah, and I would just kind of pipe in here and say this is kind of a plague, I would say, in our modern culture in the church scene. And John, you said the haunting words, which is whatever works. And our measurements and metrics and definitions of what a successful church is have just become so far away from what I think Scripture teaches and frankly, we're coming from a reform perspective what a lot of the reform confessions teach.

And so that's kind of what we want to get into a little bit. I mean, everything just kind of, it seems like the rat race where, I don't know about you guys, but in our life, our life is just tremendously busy.

We have little kids and we're not even, I know some people are listening and they have kids that are perhaps in sports or in different activities. We're just getting into that. And I just know how easy it can become when you're part of a church.

And it seems like any day that ends in Y, you are either at the church building or you're doing some sort of church-related activity.

I just had a conversation yesterday with a guy who just started attending our church, Jimmy, to your point. And he was just asking me about life and the rhythms of our congregation. And I let him know that we unashamedly prioritize Sunday and then just time together in terms of just kicking it and getting to know each other and being in one another's lives.

But we intentionally don't actually fill up everybody's calendar with church activities because we don't think that that's the best way to try to arrange our lives together. And that may be a different podcast for a different day, but I think that observation is good.

Didn't mean to interrupt you, bro.

No, that's okay. I mean, like I was saying, I think it's very easy to become so busy and so oriented around activity in church that the actual, and I mean, to use the cliche phrase, the actual being the body of Christ to one another just actually never happens.

Right.

Yeah, we've kind of programatized it to death.

Exactly.

So anyway, I think in having this conversation, we might take two different groups of people, one at the time, just for the next little bit and see where this goes. We'll speak first to pastors, to people who are in leadership in the church and have been set aside to do that work, and then we'll talk more specifically to congregants, which would be the vast majority of people we trust listening to the podcast.

The Pastor’s Actual Job Description

So when it comes to being a pastor, the three guys sitting here behind these microphones are in vocational ministry, and we all have planted churches. And in particular, I think in the church planting sphere, some of this circus of the popular church is, if anything, more obvious and more in your face, and all the pressures and the expectations that are placed upon guys who are going to plant churches and be pastors can be off the charts overwhelming.

And guys can feel like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be a pastor. What in the world do I give my time to? There's a million things I could do, which is true. And especially if you're in a situation like you, Jimmy, where it's not your full-time job, you've got very limited bandwidth, and what do you need to give your time to?

So we're going to talk about just a very few things that we would see in the Scripture that the Reformed Confessions would also bear witness to. I'm just going to go ahead and lay them out, and we can talk about them one at a time.

So you are fulfilling your job description as a pastor if you give attention to the following things, and it's not a long list. One, preach the Word of Christ and administer the sacraments. Two, oversee the church.

And by that we mean not run it like an organization, but oversee it doctrinally and guide it in that sense. Three, love your people. Which would include meeting with them and shepherding them.

Or as Jesus said, tend my sheep.

Tend the flock. And then four, invest in other people who can also be pastors. Because the best way to pastor the church is to see the pastoral ministry multiply in that regard. So it's pretty simple.

Preach the Word and administer the sacraments. Oversee the church. Love your people. Tend the flock. Four, invest in other people who can lead. And if you're doing that, you're going to be doing well.

And there's a million other things you could give your time and attention to. And if you've got the bandwidth for it, knock yourself out. But if you're thinking, I don't have that kind of capacity, pay attention to these few things and you will be doing a faithful job as a pastor of the church where you are.

Thoughts about that, guys?

So when we... I went to a preaching magazine conference here in Nashville and I walked through the exhibit hall and was engaging, trying to hold my nose for most of the time. What I saw were... I could get a doctorate and degrees in leadership.

I could get it in church organizational structure. What I didn't see were helps for pastors on how to shepherd, how to counsel, how to care, how to deal with loss, how to deal with suffering. It was really geared towards if you want to take your ministry to the next level and kind of reach that moment of pinnacle, like 500 or 1 ,000 people, right?

These are what the successful pastors are doing. This is how they're preaching. They're doing leadership training. They're focusing on basically how to communicate in a style where it's more effective, communicating your mission, communicating your objectives.

And it was exhausting. I lasted one day. I was supposed to be there three. I lasted one day.

I didn't go back.

I'm tired listening to it.

I didn't go back.

To which then the two series of sermons I did hear about were about racial reconciliation and how I was a white pastor. It's my fault that racism is in the United States. And I was like, all right, well, this isn't what I came for.

But what we feel, what I feel as a pastor, and I'm in the buckle of the Bible belt, and Christianity was invented in Nashville. It's the hub of it.

Good to know. Good to know.

It may very well be where the new Jerusalem comes in.

Yeah, I was thinking Jerusalem, but Nashville's close.

And I was in a coffee shop yesterday with one of the guys I planted a church with, Patrick Crandall. And I literally looked around the room and there were four other pastors meeting with staff or church members in there.

And I was obviously the most underdressed of all of them. I didn't shop apparently wherever they shop, and I definitely didn't have my haircut wherever they got their haircut. And I just chuckled. I don't really care.

But I know most of these guys' churches, and I've been to their websites. I unfortunately have been in conversations with them. I look at the pressures that they live underneath to try and keep up with what's happening.

And I was talking with a Presbyterian pastor that's a very good friend of mine in Columbia, and he described modern Christianity in this way that most Christians jump from one church to the next because there is no connection.

And it's kind of like, this one now offers this, or this offers this, or this sermon series here. And I love the word circus because a circus kind of shows up, it blows in, it blows up, it blows out to the next city, and it does its song and dance.

And you either increase the song and dance, you either make the attractiveness better, or you're going to lose your congregants to the next big thing. And I have congregants rolling into my church saying, I am exhausted by the circus of Christianity.

And I know for a fact there are pastors who are exhausted by this system, and they get chewed up, spit out, and they leave ministry because they can't keep up with guys that are exploding churches of 400, 500, 1 ,000, 2 ,000, 5 ,000.

It's just a machine that just chews people up to death.

Right, yeah. There is something that very much happens in the church in the States, which is the pastor becomes either the CEO or the spiritual guru that has wisdom on almost every area of life. So, I mean, whether it's parenting or marriage or finances or work or whatever it may be, your pastor has all of the answers on how to do these things and do them well and to create results and to create metrics and so on and so forth.

And so my wife and I, we've been married for 11 years, so we're not rookies per se, but at the same time, there is a profound sense of a lot of areas that I just don't know. I would not go write a book on marriage right now because there's just so many areas that we don't have figured out.

Actually, you could, Jimmy, just to interject, everything you shouldn't do.

That's right.

We all could write that book.

I mean, if you want the book of mistakes, I can tell you that, but I don't have any solutions. And the same thing with parenting. I still go to older members of our church that have raised teenagers that are still walking with the Lord, and I'm like, how do you do this?

Because my kids are driving me nuts right now.

The joke about parenting is just talk to the couple that has a one-year-old and it's their only child.

And they'll tell you everything you need to know. Yeah, they tell you everything they need to know, exactly. But this is often what the expectation that is laden on pastors. And sometimes that can go one of two ways.

One, the pastor gets a ginormously huge head because they all of a sudden believe that they are the expert on everything, right?

Sure.

And then they become the celebrity. Or two, what John has mentioned, they end up burning out because they become the answer guy, that if you need to know anything about life, they will know it. I think what JP mentioned earlier, what is it that a pastor is supposed to do, right?

I mean, this is what we see in the book of Acts, right? That the elder, these shepherds, they give themselves to prayer and ministry of the Word. And frankly, I would say there is probably a really good chance, high percentage, like I would say in the 90s, that your pastor does not have time for those things because of all of the other expectations that have been thrust upon him, concerning being the spiritual guru or the life coach that many people want him to be.

If you're new to Theocast, we have a free e-book available for you called Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest. And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a Reformed confessional perspective.

You can get your free copy at theocast .org slash primer.

Prayer, Word, and Shepherding as a Pastor’s Priorities

Yeah, can I just, to add to the weight of what Jimmy is saying, I read this list in an installation service I did on Sunday. I just want to read it to you here. Here's the various hats that people expect pastors to wear.

Preacher, counselor, leader, financial planner, designer, project manager, entrepreneur, videographer. The list still goes on. Supervisor, volunteer, coordinator, theologian, receptionist, greeter, webmaster, community activist, writer, recruiter, life coach, shipping department coordinator, I've done that, strategist, social mediaite, dreamer, student, disciplinarian, teacher, social activist, event specialist, chaplain, CEO, COO, CMO, CFO, operations manager, janitor, salesman, and communications specialist.

That's just the name of you. Which is, people think I'm crazy, but they do.

We're being facetious in some ways, but it's not, yeah. It's not so crazy when you look at some contexts.

My favorite thing too is, we only work one day a week, right?

That's true. I do. The thing that's interesting is, a lot of that stuff that you just read, John, the vast majority of it, and Jimmy, using your language of the pastor being a CEO and a guru, none of that's in the scripture at all.

It's not. I would go so far as to say, if I was really going to talk about the most important thing that pastors do, I think we would all probably liberate ourselves a little bit if we were content for every aspect of our ministry to fail, save the preaching of Christ.

But then, I think there are other things that we need to be doing. As I'm thinking about my own job, giving people Christ in the service every Sunday is paramount, in the Word, in the table, and in baptism.

That's critical. But then, beyond that, the other thing that happens twice a month at our church is our pastors meet together to pray for our people and to discuss matters of oversight of the church. In those times, those are the most essential things that I do.

Therefore, they should receive a lot of my attention and energy as a pastor. Then, other things that occur are important, like the meetings with people, like John and I were just talking about it, meeting with congregants, because he and I are both full-time pastors.

I had three meetings with individuals yesterday. I've got one today. I think John's the same. You give yourself to that, where you meet with your people and you talk with them about their lives. You often just listen to them talk and offer what you can.

But you're not a guru. You can't answer every question. You're mainly just listening and pointing them to Christ and encouraging them in Him. I think the task is weighty. It's thrilling. But the main things that we need to do are actually few, and it's a relatively simple job description in that regard.

It's beyond our capacity, and we need the sufficiency of the Lord. Amen to that. We don't do ourselves a service when we overcomplicate this, and we make the list a million items long.

I was talking with a dear saint. He's a pastor in Texas. He was describing to me some of the pressures he's been feeling as a church planter, like all the things that are expected of him. One of the words he used was an entrepreneur.

If you don't have an entrepreneurial spirit, then you're not going to be a successful church planter. I just say that is nowhere in the requirements of a pastor. I'm sorry, of a pastor or church planter.

I love that the illustration used is shepherd. Jesus literally says to Peter, who by the way is not a very successful human being at the moment he is hearing these things. He has denied Jesus. He's hiding in a room.

He's not your primo example of the leader that you want leading the flock of God. What does Jesus do? He loves him. He gives him mercy and grace and forgiveness. Then he says to him, Feed them. Tend my sheep.

Shepherds are designed to do two things, feed, care for, and protect the congregation. When a pastor starts to feel the weight of he needs to be a public speaker, he needs to be this, he needs to be that, his attention throughout the week is drawn away from the very moment that he should be present, which is administrating the word and then caring for those receiving the word.

When I think about what pastors spend their time doing, how is this related to the one thing you've been called to do? They become administrators. They become communication specialists. What did you spell out?

You said influencers. We're not influencers. Pastors don't have to have a public persona to do their job effectively. They don't need to have a massive podcast or a YouTube channel or whatever else you want to put out there.

That's right. Not only that, can I just interject here, just because a pastor is popular and has a big following doesn't mean he has more, what he says is more influential. I'm going to just be a little cranky right now and say I get exhausted being compared to what other famous pastors have said.

I don't care what they say. They're not in my context, they're not in my city, and they're not in my church, and therefore what they say has no authority. Period. All right, I'm done.

The celebrity pastor notion is just absurd. I've said this to people and they look at me like I'm nuts, where when they listen to their favorite celebrity preacher and I tell them, well, you know that he has no authority in your life, right?

That's right.

Because he's not your pastor. He might say some good things that are helpful, but he bears no authority. To call you out on things because he's not your pastor. The other thing that I was going to say is there is often a weight placed on pastors that they were never meant to bear.

Sure.

Those are the things that you listed off. I'll never forget what one of my mentors said to me one time, and it kind of haunts me to this day, even as I think about the various things that our church does, where he said, and this I think can help us transition into as we look at congregants as well, is your church can be very busy and productive, and yet the hand of God can still be against you.

I remember that hitting me in the chest like a sledgehammer because at that point, I was leading a ministry that was quote-unquote successful, but we were very busy, and we were doing things, but I think our metrics and measures of success were just so far out of whack.

I realize that not everybody listening to this is a pastor, but I think also as congregants as well, some of the things that can happen is congregants, as we've mentioned before, can be part of a church.

Let's just describe the typical standard fare of what a typical congregant might experience in church today. The expectation is this. You attend church on Sunday morning where perhaps you volunteer in some way, whether that's teaching Sunday school, volunteering in the nursery, maybe you're an usher, maybe you're a deacon, or maybe you're a cleanup crew or setup crew or whatever it might be.

Then Monday night, you have some sort of church meeting where you have to discuss some matter of the church. Tuesday night, you have your community group or your home fellowship group or your small group.

Wednesday night, you have the kids or youth programming that you volunteer in that you have to show up. Thursday night, you have to do your own family things. Then Friday night, you have a worship night that you have to attend and be part of.

Then Saturday morning, there's a serve day. Then eventually, before you realize it, you're actually not really living in the community in which you live. You just keep driving 20 minutes to the church building and doing church-related activities.

You have no time to interact with your spouse. You have no time to interact with your own kids. Then eventually, you realize, I am so exhausted. My marriage is on the rocks. My kids don't want to go to church anymore because all we're doing is church-related functions and activities.

Guys,.

Is this realistic? Is this sustainable? What do we do?

Short answer,.

No.

What Church Membership Means

We do realize that the vast majority of people listening to this are probably not in pastoral ministry. The comments about pastors that we hope are helpful to the congregant in thinking about what you should look for in a person who's going to be your pastor.

Hang on to those things and set realistic expectations in your own mind and heart for your pastors, for your shepherds. Jimmy, you lay it out well. I think a lot of people are flat-out exhausted by the demands that the church puts on them and the rigor of just church life and all the events and things.

There are, I trust, good debates that can be had about what's valuable and what isn't. Let me just start with this. The only thing that's essential in the life of any congregation is the Sunday morning gathering.

Anything outside of the Sunday morning gathering is a wisdom call. I think we would just do everybody a service if we could just talk like that out of the gate because a lot of times, I think people think that there is an absolute, if not biblical requirement, close to it to have all of these various other things going on in the church calendar and in the life of the congregation.

I'm going to go ahead and lay out a few things that I think are the most simple and basic things that congregants should concern themselves with. This list is even shorter than the list that we had for pastors.

If you are a person who attends a church, you're a Christian and you want to be involved in a church somewhere, three things.

One,.

Join a church. Become a member of a church. We'll talk about that in a minute. It sounds crazy to some, but join.

Two,.

Show up. Your primary ministry in your local church is to show up to service on Sunday. Three, love the brethren, love the saints, and that's it. Join, show up, love each other.

Then volunteer for nursery.

That could be a subset. A subset of loving one another, we realize, has a lot of implications biblically. Let that be your motivator. Let that be your guide. I don't know which one we want to take on first.

I have a number of thoughts about each of these. Church membership, do we want to start there, Jimmy?

I think so. I have some words on that. I know that church membership is all over the board probably for our listeners. For some people, it doesn't mean anything. Then I would say, on the opposite extreme, I think for some people, dare I say, it almost means too much.

Like it's a primary doctrine.

I would say there are areas that maybe the church has authority in somebody's life that they don't need to have authority. Again, a whole different podcast. I would say for the most people, nine out of ten, the average listener, what church membership might mean in your church is, well, you get to vote on important matters and then maybe someday you can become a leader of some sort, some ministry or you can become an elder or whatever it might be.

Or you can play in the band.

Yeah, right. You can play in the band.

Because who doesn't want to do that?

Who doesn't want to do that, right? And so, skinny jeans not included.

Anyway,.

I think membership can be underthought and it can be overthought. At least my own ideas. I do think church membership is biblical, right? There's always been an in and out of God's people. But what I've communicated, what I communicated to our people when we were starting this church is church membership, one, becoming a member of the church communicates to that body, to that pastor, I am here and I am one of you and I belong here and I am committed to this place.