Shootings and Perry Noble

The shootings continue (today again in Berrien Springs, a small town in southwest Michigan) and another high-profile evangelical pastor (Perry Noble) in South Carolina was removed from his position as senior pastor at NewSpring due to his recent struggle with alcohol.

Before I make the next comment, I want to just note that I have great respect for Perry Noble and the ministry God has done through him in the past. I cannot fathom the amount of attack he was under from the enemy as he has been elevated to a platform where he was impacting literally thousands of lives through his ministry in South Carolina.

Now with that being said,

It was indeed tragic to see a nation under the tyranny of violence and hatred and an evangelical pastor who made it to the news because he had relentlessly intoxicated himself to survive church expansion.

Has it really come down to this?

The world killing each other and pastors drinking to relieve church-induced stress?

I can’t help question how many pastors are so caught up with church and ministry expansion that they don’t really have time for the dying world?

Wonder how many pastors have the spirit that is quite willing but the flesh that is super-weakened through all the church-related affairs? Because of all the stuff they need to do — to grow the church?

As much as church programming, events and new buildings/campuses are supposed to be for God’s kingdom and lost souls — are they really?

I wonder what other coping mechanisms are currently being used by many of my pastor colleagues — to survive the stress of growing ‘their church’?

Could this possibly be God’s will for the pastors?

To grow the church at the expense of a dying world, dying marriage/family and a suffocating soul.

I think not.

What prompts the pastors to think that they need to perform and make it happen?

What drives pastors to thoroughly burn themselves out to somehow get themselves in the radar and somehow climb up the ever so subtle and invisible ministry-ladder?

They craft grand vision/mission statements and call it Kingdom Expansion, but is it really?

The world is killing each other.

And pastors are killing themselves.

This can’t be right.

Something’s wrong.

And pastors need to awaken to this reality.