Pastor Lex Luthor

Like begets like...

Ten years ago I wrote an academic paper about how a person becomes a pastor. One of the “uncomfortable truths” that researching that paper led me to was that neither the Bible nor tradition has given us a single, accepted, clear description of the role of a pastor/elder in the church over time. I think that’s a good thing. As culture changes over time and our systems of government, economics and religion morph and develop, the role of a pastor/elder should be flexible enough to meet the challenges and needs of people as they change. What makes it an “uncomfortable” reality is the absence of a “thus sayeth the Lord” means we have and have had some horrendous, hurtful, abusive forms of church leadership.

Whenever there is a gap, there is always someone with an opinion who is ready to fill that gap. The emergence of the evangelical industrial complex exacerbates this tendency. We easily adopt the standards of success and failure that are presented to us without question when they fit the pattern or story we’ve already come to believe.

Bigger is better.

More beats less.

Conquest is our mission.

Expansion is winning.

Conformity for the sake of unity.

The biggest giver should have the biggest voice.

Fear of the others in our us vs them world.

Fear of scarcity in a world of abundance because those who don’t have want to take what’s yours.

Loyalty to leadership is our primary virtue.

We assume this describes our preferred reality and rarely do we question these assumptions because they seem self-evident. They seem like an obvious, universal truth. And in the Church, we often find a way to christen them as “biblical.” Scot McKnight writes, “Culture socializes us into what is considered proper behavior. For Christians, this is true in our churches as well as in society at large.”

(A Church Called Tov) When our Church system looks like the world political system or economic system, we don’t question this, we think of it as normal.

When there is widespread systemic failure that leads to abuse, we rarely question the system, we look for the bad actors. The rotten apples. Even though it is widespread and it keeps happening repeatedly, rather than dismantling a dysfunctional system we replace people, shuffle people, throw people under the bus and we circle the wagons around our institutions and systems to make sure we preserve the evangelical industrial complex for ourselves and future generations.

In the book of Revelation, chapter 6, there’s a moment where the vision recognizes the reality that the Church isn’t always the safest place to be. The Revelator tells us, “When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of all who had been martyred for the word of God and for being faithful in their testimony. They shouted to the Lord and said, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you judge the people who belong to this world and avenge our blood for what they have done to us?” Then a white robe was given to each of them. And they were told to rest a little longer until the full number of their brothers and sisters—their fellow servants of Jesus who were to be martyred—had joined them.” Let’s take a second and reframe who these martyrs might be.

I’m not suggesting the Revelator had the same thing in mind I do, but it’s hard for me not to read this passage and see in this text the voiceless who have found themselves used and abused by those in leadership who live by the Church system in our Evangelical Industrial Complex. Their blood is on our hands. They are the “little ones” we’ve caused to stumble. We’ve created a system that produces leaders who “pile bodies under the bus” and we pretend we don’t see the bodies until the pile is too big for the bus to get over anymore. And then we close shop, move and start it all over again. It feels like an endless number of people that we have sacrificed on the altar to our own success and church growth. That a movement or a denomination can gather for anything but lamentation when children, women and men have had their lives and vision of God forever spoiled for the sake of our image and damage control, seems morally reprehensible.

There is a desperate need in our times for a reformation of leadership.

I love a great taco place. In a perfect world there would be a great taco place in every strip mall in the world right beside an amazing pizza joint that excels in making Donair pizzas. Experience has led me to believe that there are a lot of people who love these two things as much as I do but not that many of us who want to open and run either one of them. I don’t need to be in charge of either one – in fact, I prefer not to be – but I do want them to be good and do good and I will give them my presence. Experience has also led me to believe that there are a lot of people busy with life who have a desire to belong and share life together with others. We don’t want to have to be responsible for the day to day but we very much want to belong to a place and a people who do good and who prioritize goodness in their culture. So there are people gifted to provide leadership for the rest of us.

In his newsletter in 2021, Scot McKnight wrote, “In listening and learning and watching and reading we find four terms help us think about what drives toxic leaders. Toxic leaders may well believe the right things and teach the Bible well, but their drives turn such theology and Bible off the path into toxic, septic fields.” (Scot’s Newsletter) He goes on to list these four drives:

Ambition

Success

Greed

Glory/Fame

I can’t overstate how much I agree with McKnight’s observations about these four drivers of toxic leadership. But if we’re honest, these are four aspects of our North American culture that we have normalized in the Church as much as in our culture. We would hardly consider someone for a pastoral staff position in many of our evangelical churches if they didn’t exhibit ambition, a drive for success, a drive for – let’s say – more. We also want OUR pastor to be someone other pastors want to listen to, people will turn out for, platforms will be provided to – we want a social influencer.

After more than 40 years of following Jesus in this evangelical space, I’ve become convinced that a lot of us wouldn’t follow Jesus if it wasn’t for the book of Revelation. If we didn’t have that picture of Jesus riding in on a giant white horse looking angry and ready for war with a sword literally coming out of his mouth and slaughtering his opposition, we’d have little room in our hearts for a lamb looking like it had been slain. Mark Driscoll has certainly confirmed he feels that way.

To reduce it down to a slogan – “if we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always produce what we’ve always had.”

I saw Superman this week. I thoroughly enjoyed it. James Gunn deserves most of the credit for this and for redeeming my love and appreciation for comic book movies. But at the end of the movie I couldn’t shake what I already know about the comic book world that Superman inhabits. Lex Luthor will rise again and again and again and again, no matter how many times Superman “saves the day.” And there will be casualties along the way. Many, many casualties. Lex himself will be among them. What the world needs are ordinary people who will behave in an extraordinary way and choose peace over violence and a simple life over greed and wealth. If no one goes to work for Lex, his plans won’t even get a start. His success, and he is successful and admired and an influencer - is predicated on everyday people like you and me wanting the sizeable crumbs that might fall from his table. If we all said “no” to Lex, Superman could take a day off.