by: Bob Reccord

I just got off the phone with a friend in the Midwest serving in a denominational leadership role. He’s one of the finest men I know. His heart has been on fire for Christ since I came to know him about 23 years ago. He would share Christ with anything that moves. He’s led churches as a pastor, and watched them grow by leaps and bounds. His character is something he has worked hard to protect and I’ve always felt I could take his word to the bank. He has been faithful to his wife throughout their long marriage and he has been a dad who loved and equipped his kids for life.

Yet, he finds himself in the crosshairs, not of people outside the church, but those inside of it. Allegations are being thrown around which simply leave “questions” hanging in the air about his character. Decisions are being reviewed, questioned and held out for public ridicule. It’s not scores of people…but it doesn’t have to be, as long as they are focused, tenacious and driven. And his heart is broken.

That’s not to say he’s weak, by any means. He’s a man’s man. It’s not to say he’s worried, because he knows he’s been true to his character and to his Lord. He wouldn’t say that everything done has been perfect…who of us could? But he has worked hard to make the best judgments he could at any point, given the information available at the time. But “arm chair quarterbacks” don’t care about that.

And not long before that I talked to a friend who followed a legend as pastor of a great church in the mid-South. He has been attacked, publicly criticized, blogged to death, faced with attempt after attempt to humiliate him in the public arena. While he has had wonderful people supporting and walking in support of him, you can’t remove the deep hurt, shock and heartbreak a leader has when walking through such a gauntlet.

And these instances can be reproduced over and over across the land.
I can identify, due to some challenging experiences in my own journey in the last year. So how did we get here?!?

Have we forgotten that the Sermon on the Mount focuses much more on how we treat each other than on simply what we believe?

Have we prided ourselves in holding strongly to orthodoxy while compromising on “orthopraxy” (putting the orthodoxy into practice with each other?

Do we just lay aside Matthew 18 and the process clearly laid out there for confronting issues within the community of faith…in private if at all possible?

Or have we become political animals within our religious realms that use closed room “caucus” meetings as skillfully as the Democratic and Republican national parties? Do we “leak” material to publications to strengthen our position, at the expense of the soul of a brother of sister?

Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “And they will know you are my disciples by how you love one another”? But I fear the world watches occurrences like the ones I started with…and stays away in droves!

God help us if we don’t get our house in order in how we treat one another.

 

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 8:49 am and is filed under Bob Reccord. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.