CGC: Postmortem of our church

What follows is my own take on the last year-and-a-half. This should be viewed as the self-absorbed ponderings of one man, and nothing more.

Abner started at the church back around Easter 2001. I don't remember how much earlier than that we voted for him, but it wasn't much earlier. To a large extent I voted for him because he was recommended by people whose opinions I value highly. And to tell the truth, if we were in the same situation now and they recommended somebody, I would still value their opinion quite a lot, though I might ask a few more questions.

For me, the trouble started soon after Abner came on, though to call it "trouble" probably isn't fair. I started developing reservations about what he was preaching. There are different views of what a sermon is for, some good and some bad. One is teaching, which is I've encountered primarily at mainline denominations. This is long on doctrine and biblical exegesis, but short on application. Another is the fire-and-brimstome approach, with its variants "You're all going to hell unless you repent now" and "Society's going to hell, but we're okay." And so on. I guess that's a little off the subject.

Abner's teaching struck me fairly early on as prosperity-oriented, or aimed at the self; i.e., how can I get more out of God? He's had a number of sermons along those lines -- How can I avoid financial ruin?, How can I experience the fullness of God's plan for my life? and what else. It's the sort of teaching reflected in popular books like "The Prayer of Jabez" and has the heart-warming message that God loves us, wants us to be happy and successful, and there's nothing wrong with asking God to give us health, wealth and happiness.

I don't quite see the gospel that way. As I understand him, Jesus calls us to self-denial and to service of others, and he promises pain, suffering and heartache in this life. Self-actualization doesn't seem to rank very high on the list of things he promises followers; in fact, his exact words are "Unless you take up your cross daily and follow me, you cannot be my disciple."

To the rich young ruler, he said, "One thing you lack: Go and sell all your possessions and give everything you have to the poor" and remarks "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven."

So I had problems nearly from the start with the content of Abner's sermons. I talked with a few other people, but they preferred more of a wait-and-see attitude, arguing that he was using those things as a hook to draw people in. And so, as Gandalf says in "The Fellowship of the Ring," my doubts slept, but uneasily.

As time went on, I found I pretty much ignored what Abner said during his sermons because I found them dull and uninteresting. I either was in the nursery with my daughter, in the hallway with a friend, or busy writing something unconnected with the sermon while he preached.

The sermons I did listen to struck me as wrong in a number of ways. Often they were what one friend of mine calls a "vending-machine faith": If you do X, then God will do Y. Anyone who's followed Christ for a while knows it's not that simple; worse, this presentation of things can be a brutal stick for young Christians to beat themselves up with. "I'm not experiencing this, so God must not love me because I haven't ...."

After a while people we knew started to leave or at least to talk about leaving. Everyone listed the preaching as a problem, but many of them also were complaining about broken confidences, insensitivity and broken promises. I didn't have any of those experiences because I never felt close enough to Abner to confide my private demons to him.

What I did see in Abner was a lot of pride. Last December, we were chosen to be the recipients of the church's Christmas gifts for the needy among us. This bothered us for two reasons: We learned from Jenny McGrath that the homeless shelter CGC had been working with for years had been cut off with no warning (which Abner denied), and secondly, people who had bought gifts for the giving tree had done so with the understanding they were helping needy people who wouldn't have had much of a Christmas otherwise. I was unemployed, but we were well in the black and had bought Evangeline plenty of presents.

When I called one of our elders, he agreed that maybe the church had erred and would need to rethink its mechanism for distributing gifts. Abner wouldn't hear of it. It took me something like five minutes to get him to listen to me and understand that I wasn't attacking anyone, and was sharing an honest concern about resources being misallocated. (For the record, the gifts we set aside what we were given to donate to a homeless shelter to make needy children happy at Christmas.)

That was his response toward any criticism, I found: Pride and an inability to recognize the validity of a viewpoint other than his own. As people started to leave in droves, he started to use the pulpit to criticize people who were leaving and he often said that people could get on board with what God was doing at Crosspointe, or leave.

In the end, I decided that what God appeared to be doing at Crosspointe was getting people out. So that's what we did.