The Lord's Anointed, Pt. 3

“And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me. But he said to me, ‘Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers the prophets and of all who keep the words of this book. Worship God!’” (Rev. 22:8, 9).

This series began with a consideration of the concept that laity “cannot touch the Lord’s anointed.” In this final post of this series we come full circle to look at the dangers of this mindset.

The first and most obvious danger is that it confuses the messenger with the message. God’s message is holy and perfect. His messengers, presumably, strive for holiness and seek to set a good example for others, but no one is going to fully achieve that goal this side of heaven. Even the sinless angels shied away from being equated with the messages they carried to humans, as seen in the text above.

“Again: those who do accept the truth naturally expect that the one who presents it to them is right in his ideas of general principles and of what constitutes Christian character. When associated with him, they incline to do as he does. If his practices are wrong, they almost imperceptibly become partakers of the evil. His defects are reproduced in their religious experience. Often, through their love and reverence for him, some objectionable feature of his character is even copied by them as a virtue. If the one who is thus misrepresenting Christ could know what harm has been wrought by the faults of character which he has excused and cherished, he would be filled with horror” (Review and Herald, April 12, 1892, par. 5).

The best defense against this danger, quite simply, is to not put the messenger “up on a pedestal.”

The next danger is that this mindset encourages people to let the pastor do their thinking for them. To bring this home to the situation at Takoma Park, a member of the Ministries Board was once asked why she did not speak up to correct the pastor when he misrepresented the results of a meeting of the committee she represented. Her response was, “I’m going to do what the pastor wants.” The committee had decided something very different than what the pastor claimed, but this individual thought that the pastor’s opinion was more important than that of the committee, and accepted it without question.

“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18).

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12).

God doesn’t accept a borrowed relationship with Him. He insists that each of His followers seek Him and know Him for themselves. This includes thinking through matters for themselves rather than blindly accepting the opinion of the pastor. It is, fundamentally, a difference in the level of knowing. A child can know that it isn’t good to touch a hot stove because their mother told them so, or they can know because they actually touched the hot stove and experienced that it wasn’t good. In matters like hot stoves it is not only acceptable but preferable to get by with a lesser level of knowing—the mother’s warning. In the matter of knowing God nothing less than a first-hand knowing, experiencing, and understanding is acceptable. This sort of knowing cannot happen unless each individual thinks through these matters for themselves.

The third danger inherent in this mindset builds on the second: if individuals rely on their pastors to do their thinking for them they can be led astray.

“Many will show that they are not one with Christ, that they are not dead to the world, that they may live with Him; and frequent will be the apostasies of men who have occupied responsible positions” (Review and Herald, Sept. 11, 1888).

"Men whom He has greatly honored will, in the closing scenes of this earth's history, pattern after ancient Israel. . . . A departure from the great principles Christ has laid down in His teachings, a working out of human projects, using the Scriptures to justify a wrong course of action under the perverse working of Lucifer, will confirm men in misunderstanding, and the truth that they need to keep them from wrong practices will leak out of the soul like water from a leaky vessel” (Manuscript Releases, Vol. 13, pp. 379, 381).

And how does all of this relate to the situation at Takoma Park?

Takoma Park has seen many instances of an overreaching of pastoral power in order to facilitate, and in the wake of, the change in governance structure. This list includes overriding the decision of the business meeting that the change in structure not be included in the vote on the Paul Borden Report, choosing not to recognize motions made by members in business meetings, telling members not to meet to informally discuss church issues without pastoral approval, reassigning subcommittees from one committee to another, and appointing lay leadership instead of following election protocols. These actions have gone unchallenged by many in the congregation because of the mindset that the “Lord’s anointed” cannot be touched.

As we pointed out in part two of this series, God intends that the church utilize a representative form of governance in which all members have a voice to contribute to the collective wisdom which guides the church. All of the pastoral actions listed above fly in the face of the nature and function of representative governance as well as realizing the dangers of allowing the pastor to do the thinking for the congregation and the resulting risk of being led astray.

The events detailed at the end of the Epic, Pt. 37 are a perfect example. Just to refresh everyone’s memory, at the end of a business meeting on Sept. 28, 2008 Pastor DeSilva announced a plan for conducting a spiritual revival within the church during the final quarter of 2008. This revival was to include the visitation of every active member by a pastor and/or elder during the quarter. The plan further called for a day of fasting and prayer at the end of the quarter to determine whether the spiritual renewal of the congregation had been successful. If the answer was “no,” the program was to be continued a while longer until the answer changed to “yes.” The visitation program fell apart about as soon as it began, with only a handful of members ever receiving visits. This failure didn’t stop the pastoral staff from declaring great success during the day of fasting and prayer at the end of the quarter.

Now, we got slammed in the comments after describing the failure of the visitation program because it was supposedly a personal attack that had nothing to do with governance. If a serious illness was misdiagnosed, or an implement left inside a patient during surgery, or a prescription written for the wrong medication, would complaining about such things be a personal attack against the doctor? If a lawyer were lazy and inattentive during a trial, would complaining about this behavior be a personal attack or a professional critique? Being a pastor is as much a profession as being a doctor or a lawyer. If a pastor sets a goal in his work for the church and fails to reach that goal pointing this out is a professional critique, not a personal attack. With that in mind, there were several aspects of the failure of the visitation program and the way the pastors dealt with it that pertain to governance and the way clergy and laity relate.

First, there was no public analysis of success as was promised when Pastor DeSilva initially described the effort. Rather than asking the congregation whether it felt spiritually renewed, as they had promised to do, the pastors made the judgment. Whether or not they needed to make such a promise in the first place they chose to do so—and then broke it—preferring instead to once again do the thinking for the congregation.

Second, the pastors put on a front of success which did not reflect reality. The failure of the spiritual renewal campaign was not limited to the incomplete visitation program. The congregation was in just as much of an uproar after the campaign as before but the pastors, knowing that the Group was in communication with the Potomac Conference, were desperately looking for anything they could claim as evidence of their evangelistic progress and good leadership. So they claimed that the spiritual renewal campaign had been a grand success even though it hadn’t. In doing so they misrepresented the true state of things to both the congregation and the conference.

Third, the accountability board failed to do its job in holding the pastors accountable for failing to complete the visitation program. Pastor DeSilva himself has said many times that if a church leader or department fails to complete a goal they set out for themselves that it is the job of the accountability board to ask why the goal wasn’t reached and to look for ways to facilitate the accomplishment of that goal. In the case of the failed visitation program we would have expected the accountability board to consider the matter and ask questions such as, “Were people too busy to receive visitors because of the holidays? Were there just too many people to get to in that amount of time? Did some emergency come up which diverted the pastors’ attention?” No such investigation took place, nor was there any effort to facilitate completion of the goal.

Having a panel devoted to accountability sounds good in theory, but it is useless if it doesn’t actually do what it is supposed to. As we have discussed in numerous previous posts, Takoma Park’s accountability board has the senior pastor as a member, which makes it impossible for that body to render impartial decisions regarding pastoral performance. Further, the accountability board meets only when the senior pastor asks it to and on the agenda the pastor puts forth. And here we truly come back to the starting point of our circle, because the reason for this lack of independent thinking is that the accountability board chairman is of the “Lord’s anointed” mindset.

Failure to adhere to the Church Manual, particularly in matters of governance, is the problem the Takoma Park Church faces. The “Lord’s anointed” mindset is what enables this problem.

“How to Exercise Authority.--God will not vindicate any device whereby man shall in the slightest degree rule or oppress his fellow man. The only hope for fallen man is to look to Jesus, and receive Him as the only Saviour. As soon as man begins to make an iron rule for other men, as soon as he begins to harness up and drive men according to his own mind, he dishonors God, and imperils his own soul and the souls of his brethren...

“He [God] expects His workers to be tenderhearted. How merciful are the ways of God! (See Deut. 10:17-20; 2 Chron. 20:5-7, 9; 1 Peter 1:17.) But the rules God has given have been disregarded, and strange fire has been offered before the Lord...

“If a man is sanguine of his own powers, and seeks to exercise dominion over his brethren, feeling that he is invested with authority to make his will the ruling power, the best and only safe course is to remove him, lest great harm be done, and he lose his own soul, and imperil the souls of others” (The Publishing Ministry, p. 139).

Accountability is needed—real accountability, not mere lip service. This can be done without deviating from the system of governance stipulated by the Church Manual, but only if everyone concerned is serious about making it work. This requires letting go of the “Lord’s anointed” mindset and requiring that pastors do, indeed, practice what they preach. Failure to hold pastors to the same standard of behavior that they require of others carries the greatest danger of all—that prospective new citizens of the kingdom will be so turned off by this duplicity that they will refuse to accept the God we claim to be following.

“The Highhanded Use of Power.--A man's position does not make him one jot or tittle greater in the sight of God; it is character alone that God values. The highhanded power that has been developed, as though positions had made men gods, makes me afraid, and ought to cause fear. It is a curse wherever and by whomsoever it is exercised. This lording it over God's heritage will create such a disgust of man's jurisdiction that a state of insubordination will result. The people are learning that men in high positions of responsibility cannot be trusted to mold and fashion other men's minds and characters. The result will be a loss of confidence even in the management of faithful men. But the Lord will raise up laborers who realize their own nothingness without special help from God....” (The Publishing Ministry, p.127).