When you are friends of both liberals and conservatives, the Democrats and the Republicans, and you try to build bridges to Catholics and Charismatics and Calvinists and fundamentalists and everybody all at the same time—you’re trying to treat everybody with love—people in different groups are not going to like that.
At one point I wondered, “Lord, how come I get so much criticism?” Then when I got on social media, I discovered something:
It’s the number one fear of pastors—the fear of criticism. And it’s their number one pain.
I thought, “Well, OK. If God will allow me to take on maybe a little bit more criticism than others, then I can learn how to deal with it and I can help these guys.”
So it’s about redemptive criticism. In other words, bring it on, because I’ve been writing it down. Someday I’ll write a book on 500 Things I’ve Learned About Dealing With Criticism. One of those little books with one sentence on each page [laughter]—because the only way you learn redemptive criticism is to just get in the middle of it.
