What ever happened to the Church!?

April 22, 2010 | Posted by drrick

These past few weeks I have encountered many ministers who are in serious marital distress. It appears that these marriages have been in slow decline for years. It is only now that their issues have gone public and now it appears there is little to help them. We had one minister who informed his wife that the only needs she met for him were “sex and tea.” Another group of ministry couples were not at this level of coldness and indifference, but, be it all the same, their marriages are headed for divorce court. These marriages began in a house of God and will end in a court house!

This has caused me to seriously think through something I heard a little while back about we ministers. There are two primary skills for a pastor, teach and manage his home. It appears we only hold them to one condition and not the other. It is so bad that the term PK is a euphemism for a problem child!

“I’m leaving you. I don’t like this town or this life and I don’t love you!” The conversation took longer but it was what she meant. Within a few days, my wife of fifteen years had packed her clothes, half of our furniture and many of our memories in a borrowed pickup truck and moved away to start over. Left behind were two crying children, an emotionally wrecked husband and a confused church community. (Quote from a minister on a website I found)

A Newsweek article states: “In recent years the divorce rate for protestant clergy has risen to match the general population.” In other words, clergy and their families are not immune to the human tragedies that infect us all. The Bible explicitly describes how pastors should treat their families: “You must manage your own family well, with children who respect and obey you. For if you cannot manage your own household, how can you take care of God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:4-5) Good question!

Charles Stanley is divorced. Benny Hinn is getting a divorce. Other lesser ministers are getting divorced. With so much family fragmentation in the Body of Christ, how can the unchurched look at us and assume the faith we say we believe is real? They will know you by their fruit! What kind of fruit are we bearing?

Am I frustrated? Yes. Satan will never defeat the Church. He can not. He only needs to emasculate it. Why not through broken marriages and families?

Antonio Gramsci, was an Italian communist who died in prison under Mussolini. The ten years he was in captivity, he wrote a few thousand pages of his view of why communism failed and what would have to happen for it to succeed. I wont go into the details here. Except to say that in his reflections he blamed Christianity for communisms failure in Italy. He argued that since Christianity is a counter-culture movement it must be weakened so that the children raised in these homes would not accept the faith they were taught. Gramsci surmised if you weaken Christian marriages and families, the children of these homes would not embrace Christianity and this would allow the culture to teach them and indoctrinate them into socialist ideals.

I think Gramsci was right. The cultural transformation of the USA into socialism is well documented back to the 1950s.

Fight for your marriage. Support your pastor. I think it was Andy Stanley (who learned from watching his father) who said that if you are going to cheat something, cheat the church not your family.

Lord, may I be a better lover, husband, friend, father, listener, communicator, and example of your heart to my wife, my kids, and then to the world around me.

Categories: Marriage | Tags: crisis marriage, Divorce, divorce rates of pastors, gramsci, Marriage, Richard Marks, Rick Marks | No Comments »