HOW MUCH DOES THE PAYCHECK
INFLUENCE WHAT IS SAID?

Someone tipped me off that a professor at Yale had made an unusual statement in Christianity Today about how the paycheck influences what preachers say and do not say to their churches. I went to the library at Dallas Christian College to check it out. This is what Jaroslav Pelican, longtime professor of history at Yale, said in an interview as he spoke of the needs of the church in our time:

You have to give the church what it needs, not what it wants. And in order to do that you may have to leave its payroll. It hurts me to say this because I want to be part of a church where that doesn’t have to be said. But show me one where it is not true.

Are ministers generally inclined to allow job security to influence them to tell their churches what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear? Pelican is saying that every church has things it needs to hear that it probably isn’t hearing. A preacher cannot talk about those things that people don’t want to hear but need to hear. If he does he is likely to be fired.

The professor, whose father and grandfather were ministers, says that it is painful to him to make such a charge, and he wishes it were otherwise. He would like to belong to a church where it was not true, but where is such a church, he asks. Can we point to Churches of Christ/Christian Churches as an exception?

I thought of Pelican’s statement when an elder in a Church of Christ in a sincere effort to defend the minister said, “He has so many people to try to please.” He was saying, in all innocence, that the preacher can’t please everybody, so don’t be hard on him. But did he realize what he was saying about preachers and preaching? Is the preacher to try to please anybody at all? Is that what he is up there for? Is that what preaching is about, pleasing people, pleasing anybody at all?

Occasionally some brave soul among us talks about preaching being prophetic. I think they mean by that that preaching is to be a call for repentance, for change, for renewal. The prophet cries out against the sins of the people, such as pride, luxury, and selfishness. His preaching brings them before the judgment bar of God. Such as we have in Is. 58:1: “Cry aloud, spare not; lift up your voice like a trumpet; tell my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.”

The modem minister could respond the way Billy Graham did when someone criticized him for not crying out against the nation’s sins when he preaches in the White House and cavorts with presidents, reminding him of the way Old Testament prophets did. “I am not an Old Testament prophet,” he said.

But the Christian preacher is to be like the prophets in some ways. He is to “Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2). That passage goes on to warn that some who have “itching ears” will call for teachers after their own desires. And Paul always seems to tie “endure afflictions” with being a faithful preacher of the gospel, as in 2 Tim. 4:5. Furthermore he urges the young preacher to “Take heed to yourself and to the doctrine. Continue in them, for in doing this you will save both yourself and those who hear you” (1 Tim. 4:16). It may not occur to the minister that he is to preach so as to save himself. After all, the Scriptures now and again warn against “eye service,” being “men pleasers,” and “loving the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

This is to say the preacher is to please God, not the people; he is to be God’s man rather than the elders’ man. The Yale professor may be right that this is difficult for the man who draws his pay from those he preaches to. His temptation is to water down what needs to be said or not to say it at all. The old saw is still true that he who pays the piper calls the tune. We have created a system that calls for the pulpit to provide what the people want to hear, not what they need to hear.

But it is not all the preacher’s fault. It is the people that support and preserve the system. They owe it to themselves and to God to make some changes in this regard, which must start by encouraging the preacher to be a man of God, by encouraging him to allow God to speak through him and to say what God wants him to say. And we must overcome this mentality that says, “He can’t please everybody,” and insist that as a man of God he is indeed to be prophetic and cry out against sin, even if that means pleasing nobody. Therein lies our answer: stand by the preacher when he pleases nobody.

Part of our problem in Churches of Christ/Christian Churches is that the elders usually have sovereign rule over the minister. They can call him in on Sunday afternoon and fire him, and the congregation that pays him be hanged. The elders don’t have to give an account to anyone. So the minister has to satisfy, pacify, and coddle the elders. Only if he can keep the elders satisfied is his job secure. Oftentimes this is but a few men in a congregation of hundreds. This is sheer nonsense, and it is contrary to the New Testament which teaches democratic principles.

The hiring and firing of the minister should be in the hands of the congregation, led by the elders. Other denominations have learned better than we have ways to give the preacher at least a little more freedom. The Nazarene Church, for instance, has in its polity the rule that a preacher cannot be hired or fired but by the consent of something like three- fourths of the voting members. A large congregation might have a plan whereby 10% of the congregation, selected by the people, half of whom should be women, would serve as an “executive committee” for the hiring and firing of the preacher and other staff people.

We are suspicious of such democratic liberties as voting in the church, so we resort to an oligarchy that allows decisions to be made by a self-perpetuating eldership that functions not unlike a corporate board. Since power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, power in the church should be widely distributed. Elders are the leaders, true, but they are to be leaders among equals.

This of course will not completely solve the problem that the Yale professor is talking about, but among us it will at least help. The final answer can only come from the hearts of the preachers and the churches. The preachers must be men of God (period), and let come what may. If they will speak up unafraid, the people might respond with like courage. But if they must “leave the payroll,” as the professor puts it, so be it. That way they save themselves. And the people must be God’s people and put away their itching hears and encourage preachers to preach the whole counsel of God in season and out of season. I take it that that means when it is pleasing and when it isn’t.

It all calls for a change of heart. Each of us must ask himself or herself, “Do I really want to hear what I need to hear or only what I want to hear?” —the Editor