I preached last Sunday at West St. Charles Baptist Church in Boutte and tried to prepare them for the changes they could expect under a new pastor they will soon be getting. A couple of weeks earlier, I did the same for FBC Belle Chasse as they welcome a new pastor any day now.

This morning, I preached at FBC of Norco and tried to help them appreciate the changes they are already experiencing under the new pastor God sent them some 6 months ago.

I’ve chronicled here the complete revamping that occurred at this small church a few miles west of the New Orleans airport after Rudy French came as pastor. I told them, “Everywhere I go, I tell the Norco story–how you were willing to redo your building and your programs in order to host visiting church teams that would come and help you reach people for the Lord.” I explained, “Now, we have a number of churches set up for hosting teams of volunteers to go into the city and help rebuild homes, but you are the only church geared up to take those teams from door to door and tell people about the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Worship leader Ben Blackwell announced that in vacation Bible school this week, FBC Norco enrolled 89 children and perhaps 20 adult workers, and had 24 children saved. That’s an incredible ratio. Minister of Education Kenneth Tew announced that tonight he will be meeting a team of 7 volunteers at the airport, a group of Coloradans coming to minister in the area while staying in their facilities.

This church is slowly but surely making a difference in the community.

I suppose they would not be a typical Southern Baptist church if this transition had not been difficult for some of them. That’s what I tried to address this morning.

When we say a congregation is “a typical Southern Baptist church,” most of us usually understand the term, while a newcomer or outsider would not. It’s something of a good news/bad news assessment. On the positive side, it means a church stands for the old-time doctrines of the faith, probably uses Baptist literature, and generally supports the program of the denomination.

Negatively, it often means a church is encumbered by a degree of Baptist traditionalism. That traditionalism can take any number of forms–perhaps a plethora of committees or a reliance on monthly business meetings to make all decisions. The deacon body or a few strong personalities in the congregation might have assumed the unofficial leadership of the church and the pastor has to work through them or move on. And it means that church does not like change. Particularly, not too much too fast.

Recently, a young pastor in another state sent his resume for us to share with churches looking for a new pastor. He would be interested in moving to a pulpit in our area, he said, but he had a word of instruction. “Please do not send my resume to any church in the maintenance mode. I want to go to a church that is ready to grow and reach people for the Lord.”

I e-mailed him back and asked for a clarification. “There are no pastorless churches down here with everything in place, just waiting for a new leader to arrive and the church will explode with growth. What we have are a lot of churches in crisis mode. They’ve been devastated by everything from the loss of their buildings and community to the loss of many of their members and income, and they are hurting. They will need to be loved and helped and taught and ministered to. In time, as the church becomes healthy, they will respond to your leadership and you can have a great ministry here. My question is whether you’re willing to pay that price.”

He said he didn’t, but he wouldn’t be the first minister who wanted things easy. I feel that way myself a lot.

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I usually take the pastor’s side in leadership issues. Almost all the years of my adult life have been spent in the pastor’s role, so that’s to be expected, I suppose. And yet, I’m not blind to the faults of the minister. I’ve made just about every mistake in the pastoral-leadership book, and certainly should know one when I see one.

But what gets my goat, irks me, tans my hide, and rubs my fur the wrong way (and a lot of other homely metaphors) is when church leaders do not give the pastor a chance. He sets in to making decisions and trying to get the church to going-and-growing and his critics go to work. No change he makes pleases them, he’s overlooking how we’ve always done things, he didn’t put Mr. Crenshaw on that committee, and did he not know that Mrs. Luverne had bought that furniture he threw out.

An outside observer would like to ask them, “So, did you prefer the church sitting there doing nothing, the way it was before, or do you like the way God is finally doing some good things through your church?”

You can’t have it both ways. If the church is going to come alive, change will be the order of the day. The very word “repentance” means to change.

In preaching of these things to our churches, I try to cushion the impact of my comments by assuring them that, while I’m delivering the message God laid on my heart for today, I’m saying similar things to a number of other local churches in similar situations.

But I cannot get out of my mind the visit some church leaders made to my office almost 20 years ago. They wanted me to know that the members of the church were unhappy with me and my leadership. I would need to start looking for a new church to go to, they felt.

My nature is that of a people-pleaser, I confess with deep regret. It is not a characteristic of the godly. So when members are unhappy, something in me feels I have failed and that I need to do things differently.

But it ain’t necessarily so.

God’s Word cautions us to serve the Lord “from the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ; not by way of eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” (Galatians 6:5-6)

Something about His servants being “men-pleasers” is repugnant to our Lord. “No man can serve two masters,” as Jesus said in Matthew 6:24.

This may be what got me out of the bed in the middle of the night recently to jot down the makings of a cartoon. Since I frequently pray for the Holy Spirit to lead me regarding the cartoons–giving me ideas, blessing the execution, guiding in the way they are received and how they are distributed–this one, I believe, was directly from the throne. It’s as pointed and on the mark as any I’ve ever done.

The pastor is at his desk, addressing a group of stern-faced official-looking church members in his office. He says, “I’m sorry to hear that the church is unhappy with my leadership. But you need to know, the Lord did not send me to make the church happy. He sent me to make it healthy and Him happy.”

I don’t have the money to send that out to every church on the planet, but if I could, I would.

Because, while I don’t know about other denominations, I strongly believe there is not one Southern Baptist church in ten that catches the distinction. The congregations and particularly most of the leaders really believe the pastor’s job is to make them happy. To be sure, they wouldn’t phrase it like that. If asked, most would say something like, “His job is to serve the Lord and shepherd the flock. But when he’s doing a good job, the people are happy. If they’re not happy with his leadership, he’s failing somewhere.”

As though the mood of the congregation was the barometer for gauging the effectiveness of the pastor’s ministry.

Show me that one in the Bible, and I’ll show you a dozen places where the “congregation” was unhappy with the ministry of the Lord Jesus Himself and later of His apostles. In fact, Jesus went so far as to say, “Beware when all men speak well of you.” (Luke 6:26) Remember that the next time someone compliments their pastor by saying, “Everyone adores him.”

Changing the way God’s people think is not an easy task. But that surely is one of the assignments of those called by the Lord to preach His word.

We are killing our churches and ruining our pastors by our warped expectations of these men of God.