Ask Lot

I had an interesting revelation today. I hope it was from God and not my own imagination.

There are basically two types of people. Givers and takers. Builders and destroyers. If you’re a Spirit-filled Christian, and you’re trying to improve your own life and the lives of others, you’re a builder. If you’re a carnal believer who has no understanding and no maturity, and who mistreats builders, you’re a destroyer. Churches are full of destroyers.

If you’re full of the Holy Spirit, and God helps you and listens to you, you are an asset to any organization. God will bless a group to which you belong, for your sake, and you will bless others by sharing your faith, praying for them, and doing things for them. We can see this in the example of Lot. Sodom and Gomorrah couldn’t be destroyed while Lot and his house were in the area.

A builder will bring what the Bible calls “peace.” In Hebrew, this is “shalom,” and it means more than lack of conflict. It means health, success, abundance, and contentment. In the New Testament, we see the Greek word “eirene.” In Greek, this means “peace,” but from the context, it’s pretty clear that it’s the same thing as shalom.

Here is what Jesus said, in Matthew 10:

Now whatever city or town you enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and stay there till you go out. And when you go into a household, greet it. If the household is worthy, let your peace come upon it. But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And whoever will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet. Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city!

Here is what I take from that. This is my revelation. If you go somewhere, and the people treat you badly, leave and take your prosperity and God’s blessings with you. Such people deserve to fail, and failure may bless them by opening their eyes to their own stupidity.

If you think on the Bible, you will recall many examples of blessed people hitting the road. Abraham left Ur. Jacob left Laban. Moses left Pharaoh. Jesus left a whole bunch of places and spoke ill of some.

I believe this is consistent with the admonition to refrain from casting your pearls before swine. Fools will waste your time and take your peace and joy, and they won’t learn a thing from it. If you wouldn’t waste time speaking pearls of wisdom to them, why would you live or work among them? There are plenty of receptive people out there. They’re the ones you should be dealing with.

I am thinking about this in connection with my church. I was asked to make pizza for the cafe, and God gave me tremendous success. The pizza was incredible, if I say so myself. I was starting a ministry with young people, teaching them to cook and trying to help them advance in God’s kingdom. My pizzas cost $3.00 each to make, and we sold them for $12.00. They made the church money. But the pastor in charge of the cafe was a self-described hothead, and he made my job impossible by refusing to cooperate in observing basic professionalism in the workplace. He also treated me me more disrespectfully than any employer ever has, and he did it in front of other volunteers.

I quit, and the next time I was in the church, I walked to the cafe for the purpose of shaking the dust off my shoes there. I literally did that. Since then, the cafe has gone to pot. It’s so bad, it’s hard to understand why they haven’t closed. Well, they have closed, actually. At the moment, it’s open again. The food is pretty bad. Wings and chicken nuggets. People keep asking me why I’m not working there.

They wanted me to sell two types of pizza, plus rolls, from a single pan in a steam tray. Meanwhile, they were using several trays to serve several types of deep-fried Sysco chicken which were virtually the same. They refused to commit to keeping my work area clear, so when I came in at 8:00 a.m. or earlier, I could expect to find boxes and equipment piled several feet high on the pizza table. The pastor and manager screwed up the food orders over and over; sometimes I had to wait until 10:30 for ingredients, because they didn’t bother to get them during the week. I couldn’t get a key out of them, so when I did the shopping myself, I couldn’t get in the cafe until I found someone to let me in. When I finally got a key, they installed a new latch a week or so later which prevented the door from opening, even after I opened the lock. There was a lady chef who threw out things I stored in the freezer, perhaps out of jealousy. It was like working in the Bizarro world from DC Comics. They seemed to be busting their humps in a determined effort to fail. And they succeeded. At failing.

I don’t even want to get into the mouse problem they failed to address. The last time I cooked there, I had volunteers clean out several drawers full of silverware (hundreds of totally unneeded pieces, unused), which were covered in mouse feces and urine. We had to bleach everything. I would say it’s a wonder we never made anyone ill, but the fact is, we probably did. How would it be traced back to us? It wouldn’t.

How hard is it to get rid of mice? You clean everything ONCE, with BLEACH, and then you put down traps and poison. Get a crew of eight people. Do it in four hours. Obvious, right? I would gladly bet a hundred dollars the mice and the feces are still there today. The manager’s young son used to have mysterious fevers of something like 106 degrees. They weren’t mysterious to me.

If I had stayed, I would have been getting up at 6:00 in order to sell two pizzas, in a dangerously filthy kitchen where I was supposed to teach kids while being undermined and insulted by the staff and management. While working for NOTHING. And because the people I was dealing with were unbelievably proud and sure they knew it all, there was no way to change them.

They were hopeless. True stupidity is something you can work with, as long as it’s coupled with humility, but how do you teach someone who is completely incompetent AND has absolutely no respect for the opinions of others? I have a law degree and a physics degree, and I couldn’t get basic respect from people with very little education and no business sense, who were indisputably, publicly, notoriously failing at what they did. I don’t mind being treated as an equal, but how can an uneducated person talk DOWN to me? In a law office, none of these people could make it, even as paralegals. Surely they should have realized I deserve to be heard.

When I quit, the pastor treated me like I had been unreasonable. Like I was a girlfriend who had flown off the handle because he looked at someone else at the mall. He tried to get me to come back. No apology. No hint that anyone other than me had done anything wrong. He clearly wanted me to say I was wrong. A person with management skills like that couldn’t get hired anywhere, except in a church or a socialist country.

My experience at the church has been disappointing in other ways, too. I’m a lawyer and a writer, but they put me to work as a security guard. I’ve enjoyed it, and I’ve gotten a lot out of it, but I think that says more about my attitude toward the job than the wisdom of giving it to me. At one point I was doing writing for the church, but they hired someone who lacked professionalism and did not appreciate what I could do for them, and that person was put in charge of me, so the whole thing fizzled, in spite of my efforts to cooperate. This person gave me projects on short notice, and I never complained. This person insisted on conferring by cell phone while driving, which is a very poor way to collaborate on writing. This person could not stick to a project or define goals, which is very sad, since I can meet any writing goal extremely quickly, once I know what it is. This person was irritable and unpleasant, regardless of how accommodating I tried to be. Now the pastor has no books, the magazine they tried to publish died after one issue, and not one stage production has had the benefit of my help. I never write anything for them, and if I did, they wouldn’t have any idea how good it was, and they wouldn’t be grateful.

Does the head pastor know anything about this? I don’t know. He’s so busy, it wouldn’t matter. He’s always on a plane. I’ve taken problems to him in the past. Nothing happens.

Anyway, when I quit the pizza job, one person told me he had been “treated like a dog,” too, and that I should stick it out and pray. He’s a good man, but he’s mistaken. Jesus said one thing, and this man said another. Jesus was right.

If we were listening to the Holy Spirit and doing things God’s way, the church would run well. The church does not have God’s blessing, so it’s chaotic and unsuccessful. Trying to help them is like running on a treadmill. Lots of work. No progress. When God puts holes in a bag, there is no point in trying to fill it.

The church is starting to feel like a cult. They keep pushing us to do more, yet they don’t provide for us. We’re not getting counseling, prayer, or good teaching. We have no lounge for our hundreds of volunteers. We often have to bring our own drinking water. People feel used. I keep hearing disturbing things about the demands they make on people. And when you point out a problem–even a problem which is going to hurt the church leadership–you may be criticized for speaking “negativity.” The prophets and Jesus were extremely negative, but we’re supposed to pretend everything is fine.

On the other side of the coin, I have many rewarding relationships at the church. I know a lot of the kids, and I have been able to encourage them and give them guidance, which came as a surprise to me. I have wonderful friends with whom I pray and talk. I build amps for the musicians, and I fix their equipment. If I move to the new church I’m trying out, I’m going to feel like I’m abandoning people.

There are so many people at my church who could be powerful in faith and prayer, if they only had someone to tell them the truth. But I can’t do it, because I don’t have the platform. And neither can the current crop of pastors. They seem to have more faith in Obama money and Steve Munsey’s wacky offering doctrine than they do in the Holy Spirit. If you’ve never been to a place, you can’t guide someone else.

I am secure in the knowledge that it’s okay to leave, and that there is no future in the work I do there now. We have a conference coming up, and they’re going to expect us to pay for tickets AND work, commuting to Miami Beach in the process. I don’t think I want to be on the team when that conference starts.

I guess we’ll see what happens Sunday. My friends who have already moved to the new church say good things about it, and I have a lot of respect for their judgment, so I am hoping for the best.