Revelation 12:4

The sad tale of the family who ran my last church continues.

As you know if you’ve kept up, my former pastor is going to trial to determine whether he is guilty of molesting a little girl over a period of years. After he was arrested, his wife developed a brain tumor, and she is dying. The church is long gone.

Here is something their only son put on Instagram the other day, with my redactions:

I want to be honest about his kid without being self-righteous or angry. It’s a hard line to tread, because he is a real button-pusher. He’s very obnoxious, especially to older people. He has never accomplished anything in his life, yet he looks down on individuals who are more intelligent and who have done much better. I’ll be blunt. He’s not bright. He ought to have a little humility.

When I knew him, he couldn’t hold a job. He was not in college. He had problems with the police. He seemed determined to convince people he was a thug, although he was really a soft, chubby mama’s boy who lived with his parents. A friend of mine told me he spent too much time in Liberty City, around true thugs. He was afraid one day this kid would turn up on a sidewalk naked after a thorough beating.

I think the reason he hasn’t been beaten half to death is that no one takes him seriously. Or maybe God is watching over him.

Certain other kids like him in spite of his off-putting personality and unproductive lifestyle. Maybe he is willing to say the things they secretly feel and believe.

I think that if he is determined to air his toxic views, he should wait until his mother dies. She doesn’t need to have his problems on her mind right now.

The two people who “liked” his picture and his ranting, and whose usernames appear under it, are church kids. One is a beautiful girl who was part of the dance team. The other is the stepdaughter of the church’s late head deacon. This man had breast cancer, and he died in spite of all our praying and fasting. He was very proud, and he refused to discuss repentance and confession.

The girl from the dance team is now a professional tattoo artist. God does not like tattoos, which is why Satan inspired the Nazis to tattoo Jewish prisoners.

I can’t tell what’s in people’s hearts. A lot of folks say they can “read people.” They can’t. We can only guess. Anyone can be fooled. I admit, one of these girls didn’t seem very committed, but I did’t expect her to fall away completely. The other–the deacon’s daughter–went to a Christian high school and seemed perfectly solid. Now she’s out there in public, backing up an endorsement of atheism.

When I think about the pastor, the first thing that comes to mind is distress over what has happened to him. I should be more moved by the damage his niece has sustained, but what happened to him is scary, so I suppose it affects me more. I would want to die if I were in his shoes. Barring a technicality, he will be in prison for decades. Bearing that prospect must be extremely difficult, and he has to do it while he watches his wife wither and die.

I think too much about a proud man who doesn’t believe in confession. That’s because I also have guilt. I can relate to the guilty and the threat of God’s punishment. I don’t think enough about the people he hurt.

The church did a lot of good. God manifested himself in the services. He spoke through the pastors. God will speak through an active pedophile! That’s something I never expected. The church attracted a lot of young people, and had the pastor not been destroyed, they might have gone on to have excellent, powerful relationships with God.

Who knows what would have happened, had the pastor repented? Maybe he and his family would have handled things privately. Maybe God would have healed him, his niece, his children, his wife, and his sister. I’m not saying a pedophile is good choice to pastor a church, but God does miraculous things in people who humble themselves.

The pastor waited until God’s patience ran out, and he was exposed by other people. The church crumbled. People who relied on the pastor scattered.

There’s the problem. Reliance. We worship men and women. We put too much trust in them. Pastors heap glory on themselves. They have a VIP mindset. They speak of themselves and other preachers as though they were celebrities. An informed Christian never exalts a man. They don’t talk about their buddies, name-dropping in order to convince people there is a special group of anointed individuals on a higher level. There are only two levels in God’s kingdom: his, and ours. God is only one rank above me. No human being is above me. No one.

At New Dawn Ministries (might as well name the church), we treated the pastors and their silly son like royalty. I didn’t like it, but it’s how things were. We kept having pastor appreciation days. We paid for them to go to spas and resorts. The pastor wanted us to give money to his son, who would have been better served by a foot in the butt and a month on a chain gang. We were supposed to honor the son simply because his dad was the pastor.

I think I gave some money to one of the birthday collections for the pastor, but I stayed away from the other offerings. These people worked three hours a week, and they took whatever they wanted from the church’s donations. They couldn’t be bothered to show up before services or for prayer meetings. I didn’t see any reason to shower them with massages and free dinners.

The church had ranks and positions. One position was “minister.” We had a minister named Sal. He was a lot older than the pastors. One day, he stood in front of church members and put the pastor’s arm over his shoulders. He stooped and told us the pastor was over him. He said something about the pastor being his “dad.”

He was showing us we should be completely submitted to the pastor. Crazy. That’s not in the Bible. Nobody groveled before Paul or called him “father.” Paul was in the business of connecting people with the Holy Spirit. He didn’t build little armies with multiple tiers of authority, putting barriers between men and God.

When a hundred people worship a man, and Satan wants to get those people, he doesn’t have to corrupt all of them one at a time. He corrupts the man they worship, and that man leads the rest of them to destruction. If you are directly connected to God, who can come between you? No one is going to corrupt God.

I don’t like Christian celebrities. I don’t care how many orphans they feed or how many CD’s they sell. They almost always end up glorifying themselves and making others feel as though they were gods. A celebrity is just a person a lot of other people know about. They’re not special. Jeffrey Dahmer was a celebrity.

You can be as good a Christian as Paul and Peter, and if no one knows who you are, it’s irrelevant. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Don’t exalt your pastor. He may teach you error. He may go to hell. If he’s still alive, he has time to fall away.

Sometimes I tell God, “I will stick with you even if everyone else on earth goes to hell.” I don’t mean I don’t care about other people. I mean I am not going to let their nonsense affect my relationship with God.

If you go to a church where the same 5 or 10 people keep showing up on the stage to teach or heal or whatever, your church is a failure. Everyone in a church should have power, and they should have testimonies. If the power and righteousness aren’t spreading, the church has gangrene.

I no longer pay any attention to people who don’t have testimonies. If God is working in your life, you, like every Biblical figure who knew God, will have something to show for it.

I don’t care how many books you’ve read. I don’t care how many mission trips you go on. I don’t care how many orphans you’ve posed with on Instagram. I don’t care if you’re fluent in Christianese. I don’t care if your pastor gave you a black belt in intercession. I don’t care about your nonsensical validations that might as well have come out of cereal boxes. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. Paul reached people by demonstrating God’s power, not by opening a yeshiva and holding classes. If you can’t demonstrate God’s power, you have nothing whatsoever to teach me, because you don’t really know anything.

It’s hard to think of anything more worthless than a theology degree.

I got an “Abishai award” from the pastors at Trinity Church in Miami. I burned it and used the frame for something else. I was an idiot to go onstage and accept it.

The pastor’s son’s Instagram post underscores something for me: I am surrounded by people who are full of it, and I can’t tell who they are.

I remember my days at Trinity Church. I used to wonder what the parking lot would look like if all the liars left. We wouldn’t have had hundreds of cars any more. How many would we have had? Ten? Five? Three?

People puff themselves up to look bigger than they are. Think about debt. Imagine driving through a neighborhood and seeing all the cars and houses that aren’t paid for disappear. What would remain? How many people are really homeowners? How many people own their cars? That’s what Christianity is like. If God put us through a sieve, most of us would fall right through.

About 80% of America’s homes are occupied by people who rent or have mortgages.

The pastor’s son and his friends were just theater props. There was nothing inside them to give them permanence. Maybe if the pastors hadn’t failed, these kids could have been changed.

It has to be hard to grow up in a pastor’s house, knowing he’s a fraud. It has to affect your view of God himself. We always end up blaming God for what human beings do.

I think about these young people, but I also think about the sincere ones (the ones I think were sincere, anyway). We had kids who got up early on Sunday and waited for the church van. They rode to church without their parents. I suspect that at least some of them were serious. What are they doing now? What do they think about church? What do they think about God?

Maybe they were liars, too. Maybe they only went to church so they could socialize. In any case, they were abandoned. Their parents abandoned them, and then the church followed suit.

Is the son really an atheist? He used to fall on his knees in front of the church and sob as hard as he could. He shook and wailed. He cried for about 45 minutes once. He was completely out of control. That wasn’t an act. Something was going on. But people are irrational. There are people who have seen God manifest himself, yet who act like it never happened. I’ve known people who spoke under the influence of the Holy Spirit in church yet had a different mindset at home.

Many atheists aren’t really people who don’t believe in God. They are people who are trying to punish God by insulting him and pretending he doesn’t exist.

What’s the upshot of all this? I suppose it’s this: confession and repentance are important. The pastor is going to prison. His wife will be dead soon. His son is a punk. Many people who relied on the pastors are in trouble. Confession and repentance could have prevented this from happening, but they are the two things the pastors hated most.