Over the past few years, there has been a lot of attention given to the ways that pastors may abuse their parishioners. Such attention is appropriate and every pastor ought to prayerfully guard himself against such abusive behaviors. Every church leadership structure ought to build rigorous systems of accountability and follow biblical guidelines in the event they observe abuse among themselves or are accused of it by others.
My interest in this article, however, is related more to the misuse of the office than to the outright abuse of it. Having considered churches I have been part of through the years, having observed many pastors locally and at a distance, and having gazed into the sometimes ugly depths of my own heart, I’d like to offer three ways in which pastors may be tempted to sin against the people they are called to serve. We might consider these “respectable sins,” to borrow Jerry Bridges’ term—sins we can easily dress up as virtues.
(Note: I am a firm believer in a plurality of elders who have equal authority, and though I write this in the singular, it applies equally to a board or team of elders. That said, one of the benefits of a plurality of elders is that it ought to mitigate some of these concerns by placing a church under the leadership of several men rather than one.)
Three Sins
Pastor, you may be tempted to use your congregants as raw material for enacting your dreams or pursuing your passions. As a pastor, you are called to lead your church and this often involves casting vision and setting direction. We like and need visionary leaders! Yet you must be wary of the temptation to cast a vision that reflects your desires more than God’s or that leads in a direction that massages your ego more than it serves God’s purpose. If you are not wary, you may put your parishioners to work at fulfilling your mission rather than God’s. When this happens, the church members may think they are serving the cause of the Lord when really they are serving the cause of their pastor. Hence, you must carefully separate your personal passion projects from what matters to God or those objectives that make you feel successful from those that make God look great.
In the world of business, it may be appropriate for a founder or leader to call employees to rally around his vision or to serve his mission. But not so within the church, for the church already has a founder and it already has a mission. The members of the church are to be loved, valued, and cared for and then tenderly and patiently directed to serve in ways that foster God’s purposes. A church is not a collection of willing workers called to serve your cause, but precious children of God called to be devoted to his. Your mission must fit within God’s mission and your vision of success be consistent with God’s vision of success.
Pastor, you can use the church’s budget to serve your own purposes rather than God’s. You may be far too upright to enrich yourself from the church’s accounts, but just as you can misuse people to fulfill your own vision instead of God’s, you can misuse funds in much the same way. As the one who directs the church’s spending, you can insist it go toward expenditures that shore up your ego more than they build up the people of God or to expenditures that make you feel good more than they make God look great.
There may be good reason, for example, to purchase excellent audio-video equipment to record or broadcast your sermons. But it may also be that your vision of success is to look great on YouTube, and you may have directed church funds in a way that makes you feel successful. You aren’t exactly stealing, but you are still misusing the church’s funds. There is nothing easier than spending other people’s money, and it’s possible that all of those expenses do a lot for you but little for the church and less still for the Lord. Another example might be spending a lot of money to bring in a very famous preacher one Sunday, not because the church will benefit all that much, but because it makes you feel good to be associated with him—to have friends in high places. There are many expenditures that may be respectable, yet still be sinful.
Pastor, you can communicate standards of righteousness that reflect your ego more than biblical commands. You can make the church feel like they have honored God by doing—or dishonored God by failing to do—things that are more important to you than to the Lord. In other words, when circumstances threaten to make you feel like a fool or a failure, you may cajole the church members to do things that are beyond your rightful jurisdiction.
Perhaps a fundraising drive can serve as an example. You may be a bit embarrassed by how old or how small the church building is, so you press the members to give beyond what they usually do—even though those members are already giving willingly and cheerfully, each as the Lord has directed them. Yet based on your admonitions, they begin to feel good about giving more and guilty about failing to give more. But that standard is yours, not the Lord’s. You have no right to push them to give more than God has directed, especially when the cause is more important to you than to the God who cares so much more for the sanctuary of the heart than the sanctuary of any building.
Be careful what you tell people they “ought” to do and honestly assess why you feel it so strongly.Share
Or perhaps there is a ministry in the life of the church that means a lot to you but is not clearly prescribed in Scripture. Yet you feel like a failure if people do not show up in droves. For that reason you may press people to participate, using words like “should” or “ought” when you speak about it. Yet because the Bible offers no “should” for such a ministry, you are creating a standard of righteousness that flows from the idolatry of your heart rather than the purity of God’s. Be careful what you tell people they “ought” to do and honestly assess why you feel it so strongly.
What Matters To God
In light of such misuse of the office, it strikes me how little the Bible says to pastors about the ways they are to direct the people to serve within the church. That’s certainly true when compared to how much it says about the ways pastors are to tend to them and care for them. What matters to God is his people—the people he called, created, and redeemed. It is of the utmost importance to him that they are faithfully shepherded by pastors who are willing to deny themselves—to deny their own egos, their own desires, their own visions of success—for the sake of caring for what he values most.

I have been saying it for years: there is still a place for blogs. Even while many new forms of communication have come our way in the past 10 or 15 years, and while each of them may have its own place in the media ecosystem, none can exactly duplicate the unique strengths of blogging. A few years ago I shared some Random, Granular Tips for Bloggers that were meant to help bloggers grow in their craft. Today I am offering an additional list of tips that I hope will accomplish the same goal.

Don’t botch the opening lines. The first line or two of any article are the most important because they are the ones that will determine whether people will continue to read or just go on to the next piece of content begging for their attention. A common but ineffective way to begin an article is with something like, “This is part two of a series on…” or “in the last part of this series I covered…” Not only are those uninteresting sentences, but they immediately tell readers that unless they have already read the previous articles, they won’t get much from this one. It is far better to begin with words that stand well on their own and will draw in new readers. After you’ve got them interested you can remind them of the previous articles. (Like in a sermon—first give a great introduction, and then remind people where you’re at in the series.)
Don’t botch your title. In a similar vein, make sure your title is strong—not clickbait or misleading, but also not drab and ineffective. One way you can go wrong is to put something like “Part One” or “Part Two” in your title. There is nothing wrong with writing a multi-part series, but by advertising it as such you may drive off people who haven’t read previous entries or who may not want to read the first part of a series when they don’t know when or if they will read the follow-ups. Make the article strong enough to stand on its own and let people know it is a series after you’ve proven that it will be worth their while to invest the time and effort in reading it. (Further to this, remember when you write a series to go back to earlier entries to add some way to navigate from one to the next. Also, remember that you can change titles later on to add “Part One,” etc.)
Consider not using the words “Book Review” in your title. I have covered this one before, but want to circle back to it. I suppose it relates to what I have already covered, but I will say it nonetheless. In general, I recommend avoiding explicitly titling an article as a book review. There are exceptions, of course, if the book is very well-known and the kind people are already interested in or if you are writing for a more academic audience. But as I explained previously, in most cases, a headline that beings with “Book Review:” is not going to make much of an impact. Consider, for example, two options for Tara Isabella Burton’s look at the rise of the “Nones” and how they are creating and adopting new forms of spirituality. The first might be “Book Review: Strange Rites” and the second, using the book’s subtitle, “New Religions for a Godless World.” I rather suspect the second option will prove more effective. (A book’s subtitle often makes a great title for the review since where a title is often clever, a subtitle is usually far more descriptive.)
Make sure readers can subscribe via email. Though many bloggers use RSS readers to subscribe to blogs, the average reader does not. If they want to be notified of your new material it is likely they will want to do so via email. For this reason it makes sense to have some kind of an email list that will push your new content to subscribers. For smaller lists and less frequent writers you may want to do this manually; for larger lists and more frequent writers you may want to automate this. Services like Feedblitz will do this for you.
Understand the medium. Blogs are (generally) not an academic medium. Neither are they formally published books. While you should obviously never plagiarize, neither does it make the most of the medium to cite sources as if you have written a term paper. The better approach may be to relate to sources in a similar way as a sermon, explicitly mentioning when you are directly quoting another person or leaning substantially on their work. But otherwise I think the medium permits a more casual relationship to citations, perhaps by simply noting who you have drawn from or been inspired by at the end of your article. In most cases, it is unnecessarily distracting to fill an article with this [1] kind [2] of [3] citation. For good or ill, most blogging platforms just haven’t developed good ways of creating helpful citations.
Make the ordered list your last resort rather than your default. I sometimes joke that there’s no problem a blogger can’t solve with 5 numbered points (and no problem he/she can solve without). The point is that the ordered list (or listicle) has long been a mainstay of blogging. Yet, in my view, it is rarely the best way to communicate. Listicles were created to be shareable, not to be helpful or edifying. So though there really are times to use them, there are often superior ways to package up your ideas. This is especially true when dealing with difficult, emotional, or controversial topics. So make that format your last resort rather than your default. You’ll become a better writer for it.
Mix content creation and curation. Most bloggers set out to create content. Well and good. But there is also a lot of value in curating content—pointing people to articles, videos, podcasts and so on that exist on other sites. While I’m sure there is a “business case” to be made for this, the best reason is simply to recognize and honor others for their hard work. Learn to spread your focus from just your site to others.
And finally, let me loop back to a key tip I shared last time: Ignore most of the “rules” for blogging. There are lots of sites (and even books) about how to start a successful blog and how to gain a large audience. But what you need to keep in mind is that most of these resources will teach you how to create a blog that primarily benefits you. They will teach you the rules that will gain an audience but not necessarily benefit that audience. They’ll teach you to create material that is viral but not necessarily edifying. As Christians, our main concern should always be loving others and doing what is beneficial to them. You may find the best way to do this is to toss many of the “rules.”

The beginning of a new month is just the right time to consider that right now, today, at this very moment, God is reigning upon his throne.

There’s a good little list of Kindle deals to work through.
You Can’t Channel Him Because He’s Not Dead
Anne Kennedy: “A dear and wonderful friend sent me an article about the most fantastical religious trend I think I’ve come across to date. In all my wandering around the cyber highways and byways of American religious culture, I have clicked on a lot of surprising beliefs and hashtags, but this one beats them all.”
Ten Reasons Why Nursing Homes Are Great Places to Minister
Here’s a fairly thorough explanation of why nursing homes are a very good place for churches to minister.
As Long as it is Called Today
I am really thankful for this strong call away from procrastination. It turns out I needed to read it…
22 Questions That Reveal Character
“It’s hard to discern a potential leader’s character, even in our native cultures. Unlike physical features, the terrain of character is invisible, demonstrated over time through a person’s life.” Here’s a series of questions that can help, no matter your culture or place.
Holiness Means More Than Killing Sin
This is a helpful article from Sinclair Ferguson about putting sin to death and coming alive to righteousness. (For more of Ferguson’s thoughts on the subject, you can read his excellent book Devoted to God.)
Bask in Your Identity
“Is it selfish and self-centred to spend time reflecting on and enjoying the new identity we receive in Christ? I’ve sometimes heard people suggest it is. To do so, some would claim, is to put ourselves at the centre rather than God. It is to imply that we are more important than him, and that the gospel is about us rather than about God. To focus on ourselves is to come perilously close to the very heart of sin – putting something other than God in God’s place.”
Flashback: Services Shaped Like an Hourglass
We begin our service distracted, narrow our focus to Jesus Christ, then broaden our gaze to living in this world for God’s glory. We do it again the next week, and again the week after that.

At the point when we begin to think of God as being anything other than holy is the moment we are imagining a completely different god altogether. —Jackie Hill Perry