Just as I was posting Dave’s most recent article on “preserving your pastor,” my friend Melodee posted a link to this article on Facebook and I was struck by how much the two overlapped:
The article makes many excellent points about why young people “de-church in droves” (60 to 85 percent of our youth leave the church once they are 18 years old) and why even those who remain in church have “serious doubts about what the Bible says about Jesus.”
But the quote that struck me the hardest was from a pastor’s son. Listen to the echoes of (the opposite of!) John 17:20-23 (what Francis Schaeffer called “the final apologetic”) in what this young man reports about relationships in the church. Is our unity showing the world that the Father sent the Son and that the Father loves them? Far from it!
“Beginning around the age of eleven, Matt writes, “I would read about Jesus, and how he treated people, then I’d look at Christians, and the two just didn’t match up.” Matt goes on to say: “Sometimes we’d go by the church to surprise my dad in the middle of a work day, and there’d be someone in his office yelling at him for changing the carpet, or not using the choir robes. We would receive threatening anonymous letters at our house . . . certain church members would interrupt the service to call meetings. They wanted to edit sermon content. They hated the music. They controlled the finances. They cursed. They slandered. They schemed.”
Not wanting to “end up looking like those people,” Matt said “[he] washed [his] hands of the church.” And who can blame him?
Oh. Oh. Oh. Rev. Dr. Philip Ryken was right:
“The Devil has many other plans for running your church, all of them equally insidious. He wants you to get so distracted by internal disputes that you hardly have time to go out and meet people with the Gospel.”
May it STOP being so. Please, God, please cause us to stop being so duplicitous and sinful in our relationships in the church. Please help us to preserve our pastors and redeem our conflicts for your glory—confessing, confronting, forgiving one another “just as in Christ we have been forgiven” (Col. 3:13).
And may our youth see authentic faith in and dependence on Christ alone! May we actually live as the Church. One family. One body. With One Head. Loving one another so that we will show ourselves to be disciples of Jesus (John 13:35).
SDG,
Tara B.
Redeeming Church Conflicts 
Reblogged this on iconobaptist and commented:
John 17 tells us Jesus wanted our love to confirm to others that the Father really did send the Son to be the Saviour of the world. May it be so, Lord! May we bring You joy by loving one another!!!