Discipline Frustration

Recently I have been having meals with pastor friends. I always like to hear their stories of how they came to be pastors. Most of them had no plans to pastor until God arrested their heart and mind and they couldn't be satisfied doing anything else. Their stories are charmingly similar. I think these stories reveal the wisdom in the saying that if someone can be happy doing something else, they should do something else. Pastoring is tough. It is so much more than preaching twice on Sunday and eating fried chicken the rest of the week.
I also like to hear what pastors say about their churches. What a pastor says about his church reveals a lot about himself. It is amazing how these pastors I have been visiting with love their churches even in the midst of sustained frustration. The frustrations aren't typically with the size of their church although they all want more people to come. They aren't frustrated with their facilities even though all of them have dreams of expansion and remodeling. Their frustrations lie with the fact that people today won't let their pastor love them enough to allow him to discipline them. In our consumer driven culture, if something happens that I don't like there is another church around the corner that will allow me to attend and they will be happy to cash my contributions. As a result, we have many churches where people stay as long as nothing bothers them. They are looking for a warm fuzzy, not spiritual growth. They will pay well for a good service. The pastor feels that he is faced with a dilemma; either cater to the desires of the congregation and know that he is falling short of what God has called him to do, or to preach the whole counsel of God and risk a churning attendance of people who won't stay for the unpleasant parts of the Bible instruction. Some churches churn pastors instead of people.
Church is people. Without people there is no church. But preaching is a high calling. There are eternities at stake. Both in the church and in the neighborhood.