Killed By Attitudes
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Back in the days when I was a "boy preacher" still in high school, I spent the weekends speaking at different congregations, visiting each place one Sunday per month. I went regularly to one small group which never grew either in number or zeal. Perhaps my messages were not calculated to motivate, but I do not think my ineptitude was wholly to blame.
The little band of saints was under the leadership of a stern and inflexible elderly brother whose wife was as unbending as himself. I stayed with them even though it made me as uncomfortable as the long woolen underwear we had to don each autumn. They were obsessed with the idea that the world was "going to the dogs" on a toboggan sled, urged along by the young people and their evil ways. So determined were they to "avoid the appearance of evil" that they would not even drink orange soda pop out of a bottle, lest someone passing along the street see them, and think they were guzzling strong drink.
One thing that bugged them was the style of dress. The elderly sister insisted on wearing a drab gray or black outfit with a skirt which reached to the soles of her high laced shoes. She was bitterly opposed to "low-cuts" as she designated oxfords. She was convinced they had been designed in the pattern-room of perdition to show off the ankles of women and serve as a titillating device of the devil to lure men into extremes of passion.
When women first began to cut their hair, both thought it betokened the approaching end of the world, and expected Jesus to come soon and snatch them out of the whole sinful mess. Regardless of what part of the scripture the old brother was teaching on Sunday morning, he soon worked the lesson around to where he could belabor women and girls who trimmed their tresses as being in the same class with prostitutes and street-walkers. If a woman got up and stalked out during one of his dissertations he rejoiced that the word had lost none of its power when proclaimed by a faithful servant. If someone protested that surely the law, the psalms and the prophets were not all written simply to set forth a divine standard for hair culture, he said you could always tell the dog that was hit when you threw a brick into the pack. It was the one that howled. It made him feel good that he had not missed.
The congregation grew smaller each passing year, eventually consisting of those who had grown old and senile, and of a few others who endured it as an alternative to the outer darkness which would be the fate of those who did not "attend church" regularly. This did not trouble the old brother and sister. They took comfort in the fact that the way was both strait and narrow and "few there be that find it." They were happy they were among the few. When they died the little group struggled along about three more weeks and then decided it was no use. The people of the community avoided the place as if the sign read "Smallpox" instead of "Church of Christ." A padlock was put on the door and the house was abandoned to the mud-daubers which flew about in the musty interior.
The work did not die. It was killed. And the murder weapon was an attitude wielded as a club by those who thought they did God service. I have thought about the old brother and sister often and
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A lot of things get blamed when our human attitude is the real culprit. I knew a preacher a few years ago who "took to preaching" because it was the easiest way to "make a living." He was too lazy to work, so he traveled through the country subsisting off the brethren while he saw the scenery. The six or seven talks in his repertoire were not bad and a lot of congregations in rural areas and small towns accepted him when he wrote them and worked up an itinerary.
He had all kinds of quirks about eating and was a real problem to the good sisters in the Lord in whose homes he stayed, as they would have to prepare his food in a special way. I know of one place down in the Ozarks where the old brother who put him up also put him down. He took the preacher home with him after the night meeting and the next morning called him to come down for breakfast. He offered him coffee but he couldn't drink coffee. He passed him the fried eggs but he couldn't eat fried eggs. He passed him the bacon, but he couldn't eat bacon. He passed him the homemade biscuits and gravy, but he couldn't eat either. In desperation the head of the house said, "I've passed you everything we've got on the table but the pepper sauce. Have some pepper sauce." No one made a move to fix anything else, so pretty soon the preacher allowed he would try an egg. He ate two and used a couple of biscuits as a chaser.
He always landed in a community with a suitcase full of dirty shirts, socks and underwear, and the first thing he did was to ask the lady of the house when she planned to do the laundry. Inevitably she would stop everything else she had planned and put out his washing. She would rather have put him out and she always saw that her husband never invited him back. When he had about made the round of "the faithful churches" which was the kind I worked with in those days, he came to ask me what was the matter with the brethren that they never arranged for his return. Even when he wrote them, as he generally did, and told them he was coming through their area and would like to stop off and give them the benefit of his knowledge for a few nights, they either did not answer or "all with one accord began to make excuse."
I suggested that when he went to a place he should eat like other folk or carry his pablum with him and fix it himself. I also suggested that he get a pair of overalls, and put them on and go to the fields with the men and work with them, as most of us did in that day. If he did not want to do that he could at least hoe the garden, get in the wood, or take a scythe and cut out the growth in the fence rows. But he said he had a weak back, and besides that, he thought it did not look good for a preacher to come into a community and engage in menial tasks like that. He thought it might cheapen the gospel and he was afraid he might lose the respect of the brethren. He did not know that he was already being regarded as a "brotherhood tramp" and a kind of spiritual hobo. He was being strangled by his own attitude.
A few weeks ago I had a long distance call from a preacher who wanted to know what was wrong with the brethren. He said he was disheartened and discouraged but I think he was really disgruntled. He claimed that after a lifetime of service and sacrifice he was now being rejected and thrown on the scrap-pile. He was being turned out to pasture like a worn-out fire-engine horse. He had hoped to supplement his income from social security by "picking up a little preaching on the side," but instead he had been "put on the shelf," and was never invited to speak.
I have known him for a long time and
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In spite of that, I feel sorry for him. I have the same kind of feeling for him that I do for one who is physically blind. It is sad when one thinks everyone else is wholly mistaken while he is holy and right. This brother is hung up on two or three little matters of interpretation which do not amount to "a hill of beans," but to him they are the most important things on earth. Wherever he goes he trots out his hobby and climbs aboard and rides it around while others grit their teeth. He has harangued and harassed the brethren until he has painted himself into a corner from which he surveys the church with baleful glance and jaundiced eye, still wondering what is wrong with everyone else but himself.
Can such a person change from a bitterly critical disposition to one of loving concern for and understanding of others? I am sure he can, but he must first become deeply convicted of the sinfulness of his present state. It is difficult for one who is proud and arrogant to realize his true state. When he equates kindness with softness, and concern for compromise, and feels called of God to be a swashbuckling, gun-toting sheriff to see that everyone else obeys the law, he is not liable to alter his unfortunate stance.
One can mouth the words of Jesus all of his earthly sojourn and never really allow them to filter down into his inner being and transform him. I suspect this is one of the real temptations of the clergy in any sect. The word of God is a commodity to peddle to others. It is something that you lay upon the shoulders of your fellowmen without considering too deeply what the implication is for your own life. I think this goes for our own "clergy" even while they vociferously deny they are clergymen and protest to high heaven that they are the only people on earth who are not sectarian.
Of course you must not draw the conclusion that preachers are the only offenders, or even the worst ones. Fortunately, there are a great many of them who are loving, open and kind. They exhibit lives filled with the fruits of righteousness. Others would do the same were it not for the fact that they labor with and are financially dependent upon brethren who are often intolerant and even quite bigoted. They have subtle ways of conveying to the preachers that they expect them to "draw the line" against all who do not conform, and when they pipe the melody of factionalism, the one who does not dance to their tune will suffer banishment.
We have a tremendous message and a thrilling mission. It is regrettable indeed that we hamper both by our prejudice and unconcern, and by our apathy toward those who look to us for direction in their dire desperation. Perhaps nothing is quite so important in this age in which our lot has been cast as to identify with people in their sheer agony and to bring the dynamic of love into their shattered and tormented lives. We should remember that Jesus did not get people out of the state in which they were to love them, but He loved them and they came out of the state in which they were.
The kind of selfishness which manifests itself in Pharisaic disdain and indifference has no place in the lives of those who are followers of Him whom the Pharisees joined in condemning before the Roman procurator. Benjamin Franklin asserted, "There are no ugly loves nor handsome prisons." Ill fares the congregation which restricts its love to its own membership for in so doing it confines those whom it loves to prison. Love needs to run free and unhampered, and when it does, it will free the one who exercises it. It will also free the one who is the recipient of it.