I, King Laugh, your brother and partner in the affliction, kingdom, and endurance that are in Jesus, was on the isthmus called Pine County to support my family in its hour of need. I was searching for a church at which to worship, and I took a notion to write in seven Substack posts what I have seen in seven archetypes of disease within the Evangelical churches of this locale: Edifice 69, Outside Baptist Church, Non-Dairy Creamer Bible Fellowship, Leavenedhole First Baptist Church, Presbyterian F.C., Rockefeller Baptist Church, and St. Napoleon Anglican Church.
To the church gathered apart from its denominational brethren because they are “racist”,
Did you fail to notice that the private Christian school you started was founded right about the time that public schools in the county were racially integrated? I suppose you think that the two black kids on each sports team fill God’s quota for the less fortunate at your private sports facility that teaches math and music in its spare time and rooms.
Nor is this hypocrisy the end of your shameful dealings in education. You pay your faculty poverty wages and justify the theft by calling it “a ministry”, fail to maintain the buildings in which they work, require volunteer hours of them that none of their peers in secular education would do and certainly not without compensation, take a pound of flesh the school cannot afford to prop up the church’s finances, and meddle in their administration.
It has come to my attention that you permitted the ceiling in the band room to mold so badly that nothing short of a shady intervention by a government official friendly to the school saved it from financial crisis—saying nothing of the ongoing crisis of health. What is far worse is that a former elder brought this to the attention of the school board before it became a crisis and was told to stay out of the room in question. God may have freed that elder from the torment of your belligerence, but he may well have taken a lampstand with him.
Leaving aside the gross mismanagement of “a ministry of the church”, the core mission of the church has been made lukewarm and impotent, at best, by the fecklessness of its leaders. From a man whose lust led him to sin, to a man with so little life experience relevant to the congregation that he might as well be Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss, to a seminarian who preaches solely from his own fever dreams and hallucinations, the elders responsible for how they were chosen, retained, and dismissed have demonstrated a lack of qualification either to judge or to govern, exemplifying nothing so much as Eli’s inability to discipline Hophni and Phineas—and even his baffling response to their deaths.
Did you tell the congregation why the first pastor left the church? No, instead of bringing things into the light, they were swept under the rug to avoid embarrassment—and accountability. Are you God or His servants? Why do you presume to know better than He how His house ought to be managed? When discipleship training occurred, did you take the lead in implementing what was learned? No, you condemned it to the fate of a nursing home hermit, doing just enough to support life that you can’t be credibly accused of having killed. When the Ph.D.ipshit you hired from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary had you open your Bibles only to close them slowly as he prattled on about his haphazard “vision” for forty-five minutes, did you guard the sheep? No, out of fear that you would split the church you let him drive off the faithful saints who had given decades of service to build its ministry into a place of sweet fellowship, whatever its other flaws might have been.
You ignored at least one deeply flawed marriage—one within the core volunteers of the congregation, no less—disciplining the wronged party when they—tired of waiting for Godot—sinned out of desperation and despondency, and then putting the offender over the divorce ministry. In this way you baked a dough ball of sin into a loaf and then made French toast out of it. It was the French toast of decadence and shamelessness, and it cannot hide your barbarous nakedness from the piercing fire of God’s Spirt. How many opportunities did you squander to salvage their marriage or to discipline the offending party? Have you repented of your ministerial negligence? No, you appeal to the mystery of God’s will as though the plain evidence of yours has not already condemned you before the God you have the temerity to blame.
Nor are women or more liberal Christians treated as equal members of the body of Christ. I know of one saintly and wise woman—the work she does to counsel burned out missionaries out of sin and suffering too offensive to the church’s sense of propriety to acknowledge has saved ministries, marriages, missionaries’ lives, and those of their children—ignored because her politics and hermeneutics are left of hard right. Not that the men are strong, just that they prefer to chauvinize their passivity over activity which welcomes, encourages, supports, and empowers the bulk of the congregation. Lukewarm men may not be brutes, but they are also not leaders. Do you really think that you can have authority without leading? Give me Deborah over Barak any day of the week!
I genuinely wonder how you have limped on for so long alone. Your building is an albatross around your neck, so I dare not even pray that your shell is found by another crab, lest they be likewise burdened. What a shame to think of the pagans cursing God as they tear down your hideous building and its meandering corridors, contemplating the tax dollars you pissed away on a fairy tale. Perhaps God will take pity on the coyotes, owls, and kinkajous and give them a ruin to inhabit; at least when people look at them, they might consider nature and God thereby.
A Product of Your Educational “Ministry”,
King Laugh
There are my cup of tea. This is what the apostle Paul would sound like if he were an Alkaline Trio fan.
I see why you wish to remain anonymous…
To pastors, you may appear a cranky congregant. In fact, you are a bit of an apostle, or for that matter, a prophet.