“But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ because you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters.” (Matthew 23:6 CSB – Read the chapter)

The average pastor in America (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter) works hard in a little church in total obscurity. He loves his people and they love him. He spends a lot of time working on multiple messages for each week. He visits people in hospitals and in their homes. He meets people for coffee or a meal at least once a week. He does a fair bit of counseling, some of it formal, much of it informal. He has to be reasonably well-versed in managing both people and finances. He has to remember the names and faces and stories of a lot of people in one shot. He probably spends less time with his family than he should, and he definitely doesn’t give himself and his needs (spiritual or physical) the attention they deserve. But he loves the Lord and is utterly in awe of his call to do all of this whenever he has time to stop and think about it. He will one day reach the end of his journey and hear from his Lord, “Well done good and faithful servant.” This is all how God designed pastoring to work at least in this particular cultural context. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t. Let’s talk today about a couple of reasons why and how to avoid them.

The adult Bible study group that meets on Wednesday nights at my church has been working our way through Matthew’s Gospel for almost three years now. This past week, we arrived at chapter 23 where Jesus absolutely blisters the religious leadership of His day with a series of woes (oracles of judgment) that pointed out a whole laundry list of things they were doing wrong. He blows them up for their hypocrisy, for acting as kingdom bouncers rather than greeters, for twisting the law into a series of loopholes designed to make their lives easier and everybody else’s lives harder, for giving all of their attention to external acts of public righteousness and ignoring the kind of inner righteousness that really matters to God. It’s a pretty bruising chapter if you are a Pharisee…and you’re not a Pharisee, right?

Before He gets into the formal woes, Jesus starts by addressing the crowd that was gathered around Him there in the great courtyard of Herod’s temple. He warns them against walking the path of the Pharisees and seeking to be known publicly as righteous while not worrying about developing an actual, personal relationship with God. After telling them how much the Pharisees love all the public accolades they received for making themselves so obviously religious, Jesus called the people away from all of that. They weren’t to desire to be in that kind of a position because it is so spiritually dangerous. “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ because you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters.”

His point here was not to push for some sort of communist elimination of all distinctions. Let’s make that clear out of the gate. Yes, you could clip this from its context and use it to support that kind of an end, but that wasn’t where Jesus was aiming. But He was reminding the people that the ground at the foot of God’s throne is level. And when we start elevating certain people to greater and greater social heights, there is a cost to be paid that can quickly get expensive.

Pause that line of thought for just a second and think back with me to the average pastor serving in obscurity somewhere around the country. While many of those guys are doing just fine, there are not a few of them that aren’t. And although the distinction “not fine” could apply in a number of ways, I’m talking about their finances. They are not paid well. They don’t have any kind of health insurance. They are struggling to make ends meet. Sometimes this is because the church is so small that it genuinely can’t afford to pay them more than they are. Sometimes, though, it is because the church isn’t willing to pay them any more than they are because they’ve bought into the idea that it is their job to help God keep them humble by keeping them poor.

In some of these churches there is one family or a small power group within the church that controls everything. The pastor may serve the church, but he is really working for them. They pay his salary and therefore they can tell him what to do. They can tell him how to preach. They can tell him who he can and can’t meet with. They can tell him what kind of a vision for the church he can support. And if he tries to cross them, they are happy to send him packing and ruin his reputation in the community to boot.

Connected as I am to the local community of pastors in my area, I hear stories like this on occasion. There are some guys who have been called by the Lord to this work who have seen some stuff. They have lived through some stuff. They have seen the absolute worst of people who profess to love the Lord but are absolutely wolves in sheep costumes. They have built up their flock of sheep they can devour as they please, and they will utterly destroy anyone who threatens their source of food. These guys encounter churches and people like this and somehow maintain their faith in God and love for the Lord, and keep serving faithfully anyway.

This is not how things should be. This is one of the ways they can go wrong. Pastors should not be treated like this. Their families should definitely not be treated like this. These people and these churches will be subject to the judgment of God one day and that experience will not go well for them. They will be among the crowd crying, “Lord, Lord!” on the last day who will be greeted with the soul-crushing, “I never knew you; depart from me you lawbreakers.”

As tragic as this kind of a situation is, though, this is not the only way things can deviate from how God designed them to work. While there are pastors that are absolutely pushed to the ground by their churches, there are some who suffer from the opposite problem. I should have probably put the word “suffer” in quotes like that there because if there is any kind of worldly suffering in this other departure, they don’t feel much of it.

I’ve recently been hearing a lot about a new Netflix documentary called “Death of the Pastor’s Wife.” I haven’t watched any of it, but I’ve been made pretty familiar with the basic story. It’s about a pastor of a charismatic church in Myrtle Beach, SC who had an affair with a teenage worship leader in his church, divorced his wife to marry her, and put her through an earthly Hell of a marriage that ultimately resulted in her taking her own life.

When hearing about a story like this one, my first reaction was to wonder aloud how and why this church continued to employ this man as their pastor while all of this was going on. All families occasionally go through struggles, and sometimes marriages come to an end. That’s even true for pastors. Just because a pastor goes through divorce doesn’t necessarily mean he is therefore entirely disqualified from ministry. That being said, as a matter of caring for their pastor, it would not be unreasonable for a church to invite their pastor to take an immediate sabbatical while they lovingly help him sort out what happened and make sure that both he and his family are receiving the help and support they need to recover from this tragedy. And if it becomes clear during this process that the pastor himself was in the wrong in the breakup in some significant way, it would be equally reasonable for the church to invite him to publicly confess his sin or even to take a season away from ministry while he gets his own life back in order and his own relationship with God back in the shape it needs to be to continue to serve as a minister of the Gospel.

With this pastor, none of that happened. Instead, after divorcing his wife, he quickly married the much younger woman he was rumored to have been having an affair with. This apparently didn’t raise any red flags for the church leadership. This tells me one of two things was happening. Either this pastor was an incredibly convincing liar who expertly deceived not merely the congregation but his whole leadership team to the real goings on of his life and his personal relationships, or he had been elevated to such a status of leadership and power in the church that no one was willing to challenge him on the personal decisions he was making. Unfortunately, I suspect some of both was the problem here.

Some pastors get into the work of serving the church, and find themselves being treated differently by their church because of a deeply ingrained culture of respecting the pastor. After all, those who serve the Lord faithfully are worthy of double honor. They start receiving this different, preferential treatment and discover they like it. A lot. They like being noticed. They like when people praise them publicly. They like when people defer to them. They like being able to give people counsel that is immediately followed to the letter. They like the power and the prestige. Depending on the size of the church, they like the compensation and luxury that comes with the position as well.

Yet all the while the pastor’s ego is being inflated, the church is playing right along with it. They like having a leader who is visible and strong. They like a decisive leader who is willing to do their spiritual thinking for them. They gradually become spiritually lazy and start to live out their relationship with God vicariously through the increasingly ostentatious public religiosity of their pastor. They like when they tell people they go to the church of their increasingly well known pastor.

They like all of this and they don’t want to lose it. So they start getting protective of him. They start making excuses for him when rumors bubble to the surface of questionable decisions he has made. They start automatically taking his side when critics complain about how he has treated people who disagreed with him or crossed him in some way. They buy into the line he is more and more frequently selling that he not merely deserves all of the things he is getting, but needs them to keep him physically and emotionally and spiritually fit to serve the Lord faithfully on their behalf. He gets a title and a parking space. He loves “the place of honor at banquets, the front seats in the synagogues, greetings in the marketplaces, and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by people.”

When we ignore Jesus’ counseling here and start using things like titles to elevate our leaders to places above the “normal” church member, we are setting a dangerous precedent that not only could but has led to all manner of abuse and manipulation and harm to people as well as the Gospel itself. We wind up with situations like this pastor who believed and perhaps still believes that he is somehow above reproach in spite of actions that are rather decidedly reproachful and even disqualifying from continuing in ministry. Doing this creates pastors that are monsters, and it also creates congregations that are spiritually blind and lazy and do almost nothing meaningful to proclaim the Gospel or advance God’s kingdom. These kinds of pastors and congregations are neither deserving of such a title.

At the end of the book of Proverbs (meaning we’ll get there eventually), a wise man named Agur prayed that God would “give me neither poverty nor wealth; feed me with the food I need. Otherwise, I might have too much and deny you, say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or I might have nothing and steal, profaning the name of my God.” I think something like this idea can and should apply to pastors. They should not be kept artificially humble by their congregations, treated like God’s man to serve them at their pleasure. Neither, though, should they be elevated to a celebrity status that results in both them and the congregation thinking they are better and worth more than they actually are. God’s kingdom doesn’t need them any more than He “needs” anyone else to advance His purposes. But He will use those who are faithful to great effect if they will live in simple and committed obedience to His commands. That includes you if you are willing. Perhaps you will consider it.