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Jonathan Storment

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Church Work: Don’t Do It For A Paycheck

Church Work: Don’t Do It For A Paycheck

Last updated on: May 27, 2016 at 5:01 am by Jonathan Storment

Church Work: Don’t Do It For A Paycheck 2016-05-26T21:39:43-05:00 Jonathan Storment

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Getting a paycheck for doing that thing you love may actually ruin it. -Rob Bell

There’s a story in 1st Kings 22 about a King Ahaz. He’s wanting to go to war and so he does what any king would do in that day. He gathers the prophets. He wants to know if he can win this fight, and they all say Yes.

Then one person notices that not all the prophets are there. A prophet named Micaiah wasn’t in the mix and they wanted everyone’s take on this upcoming war. I think that what King Ahaz says in response is kind of interesting. He basically says, “Not Micaiah, that guy never prophesizes anything good for me. Only disaster.”

Micaiah goes on to eventually tell the King not to go up to war. He is the only one of the prophets to do so. And he was right.

There are a couple of reasons I think that is interesting. There are 400 other prophets there, but not Micaiah. Back in that day when a prophet served the king he would be supported and fed by the king. They would go on payroll. But Micaiah’s isn’t one of them, he hasn’t taken the retirement plan, he stands outside of this system so he can give it a fresh word.

That’s the thing about structures and systems and institutions…they can be domesticating.

I don’t think that they are inherently bad, in fact, because of the writings by James Davidson Hunter and Andy Crouch, I’ve come to believe that institutions are doing some of the best work in the world today.

But the downside of institutions come when those of us called to leave and serve them become overly dependent on them. What happens is that a paycheck can really mess things up, because all of sudden you don’t know what you and what’s the job, what’s your heart and what’s your obligation.

Even reading the Bible can get very confusing. Do you read devotionally or homiletically?

Now I get paid by a church. A big, institutional church. And I don’t think that’s wrong, I like to eat, I love my job, and I love my church. But the problem comes when I take my job more seriously than my calling. That’s a problem because now my economy is now tied to whether or not I am saying what people want to hear.

I have several preacher friends who have been chewed up and spit out by their respective institutions, and sometimes they lose their edge to say some of the things that need to be said for their next church. I know of some preachers who have become so enmeshed in the church they serve that they don’t know how to disagree with her anymore.

I like the way Barbara Brown Taylor talked about this. She was asked in an interview what advice she had for young preachers. This was what she said,

“Most preachers I know are afraid of something- divine anger, congregational shrinkage, job loss, their own transparency in the pulpit- so my first piece of advice is to figure out what they are afraid of, then to find something that matters more to them than their fear. Fear is a great gagger of preachers.”

The truth is, in every church a minister must be a priest before we can be a prophet. We must first earn the right to say the things that need to be said. And even after you earn the right, there is a balance, and if you have a tendency toward being a harsh prophet, then maybe this post isn’t for you. But it seems to me like to be a minister is, at least at times, to say something that isn’t going to be popular, but that needs to be said.

Dr. King Jr. wrote a letter from his cell in a Birmingham jail about this. He wrote that his biggest frustration with the civil rights movement was not the KKK but with the white moderates. The moderates, King writes, were more devoted to order than to justice, to the absence of tension rather than to peace.

The world didn’t need more moderates. It needed a prophet.

To be a preacher is to occasionally stand outside (at least on this level) your system/institution so that you can give a fresh word to her.

Even if it’s not popular.

To be a preacher is to find a bigger purpose than all the trivial fears that press themselves on us for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

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