Imagine when you show up for work tomorrow, you’re immediately directed to the Human Resources office.
Not a fun way to start your day!
It turns out you’re not in trouble, but the HR team is meeting with every employee to inform them of a new practice that will be implemented the following Monday.
As it turns out, the company is switching to a new practice of doing an employee review with every employee every Monday morning.
That’s right, instead of your boss conducting a job review with you just once or twice each year, starting on Monday you’ll go through an employee review where your work is scrutinized by your boss every single Monday morning throughout the calendar year.
How you would like to have an employer who practiced such intense scrutiny of your work?
Most people would probably dislike such a practice to the degree many would change jobs in an attempt to avoid such smothering criticism.
Welcome to the world of pastors!
Did you know the way many Christians treat their pastors is just like going through a job review every Sunday?
For example, instead of listening to and learning from each sermon, you play Sunday Morning Critic, making sure you let the preacher know after the service whether his sermon was (in your opinion) good, just okay, not so good — in some way imparting a critique of the quality of that morning’s sermon.
In addition to that, you play critic on the selection of songs for the worship service, the quality of the Communion meditation, the appearance of the church facilities, and the overall comfort of the “experience” … and you place all of that squarely on the pastor’s shoulders.
It’s no wonder so many ministers leave vocational ministry every month, and about 50 percent of ministers leave ministry altogether by their fifth year in ministry.
Nobody wants 52 job reviews in a year! (and that’s per member!).
Instead of playing Sunday Morning Critic, try replacing that negative role with these eight BE-attitudes for “going to church”:
BE grateful.
Believe it or not, it’s not your role to sit in a pew or padded chair every Sunday morning and critique the preacher’s sermon; it is your responsibility to learn from it. Every week, you have the opportunity to learn from someone who spends the bulk of their life studying scripture just to be able to correctly and effectively teach it to you! Be grateful! Not only that, but God has adopted you into His family and you have the chance every week to gather for fellowship with your brothers and sisters in Christ to worship God together, be taught from the Scriptures, and much more. If you approached a weekly gathering of your local church with the gratitude we all should have for such an opportunity, then the idea of playing critic every week wouldn’t even come to mind.
