I have thought a lot about my three posts on church politics this past week. Even though my hardest experience with them happened over four years ago, it still feels very real even to today. I guess that is the problem everyone has with politics in church.
Church needs to be more than a business environment. There are people, that if I saw right now, I don’t know how I’d react. I like to think that I could be cordial and leave the past in the past, but I thought a lot this week about that. I still think church politics exist in every church, but I hope I didn’t come across as hardened by my experience. Such as simply thinking that they exist and we just need to deal with it. Partially, this is true. But also, everyone deals with emotional hurts and pains different. Some people never recover from being hurt by church leadership or even in a small group and they allow this hurt to wreak havoc on their relationship with Christ.
The bottom line for me is that if you are expecting church to be a bubble from the crap of life, you are fooling yourself. If you put yourself into church ministry whole heartedly, you will get hurt at some point. The saying goes…better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. This applies to church politics because you can only get out of ministry what you put in. If you never put your whole self into it, you will never get everything out of it that you can.
Only CHRIST can be that safe haven from life’s crap. He is our comfort. Him alone.
