Dealing with the Sons of Diotrephes
In the church where I served as a staff member (referred to in the previous article), the strongest lay leaders, the ones who ruled and insisted that the pastor deal with them, were a handful of business leaders in the city. Some were related to one another. To me personally, they were sweet and friendly and a pleasure to fellowship with. However, I was a lowly staffer and hardly a blip on their radar. It was the pastor who was in their cross-hairs.
Quick story. A new pastor arrived and quickly ran into the reality of this small cadre of Diotrephes-clones (the SODs). After a few difficult years, the weary pastor bailed out and relocated to another state. Some years later, when the pastor who succeeded him got into moral trouble and had to resign abruptly, the pastor search committee wanted the former pastor to return. They were surprised by his response.
“Before I agree to talk with your committee,” he said, “I want Mr. Diotrephes (he named him, of course) to fly out here and ask me personally to become the pastor. If he doesn’t, I’m not interested.” When Diotrephes showed up at the pastor’s office, hat in hand, asking him to return, the pastor let him know that if he came back to that church, things would be different. Otherwise, no soap. He returned and led that congregation through many years of ministry and growth. To my knowledge, his influence and leadership and authority as pastor were never seriously threatened thereafter.
I’ve never forgotten that lesson. Unfortunately, his was an unusual situation, not easily duplicated by other pastors.
Question: How would a pastor deal with the Sons of Diotrephes in the new church where he has gone to serve? Very carefully. Extremely prayerfully.
A wise pastor will find out before he goes to a church how decisions are made there and whether unelected, self-appointed laypeople call the shots. A little investigating (such as talking with the previous pastors or the local denominational leadership) will tell him whether he wants to proceed further with the pastor search committee.
The former pastor made no bones about it with me. “Joe,” the older gentleman said, as he put his long arms around my shoulder, “twenty of the most miserable years of my life were spent in that church.”
That is exactly what he said.
“A little group was organized against me. They fought me on every decision. Whenever they got word that we were going to be presenting anything for a church vote, they burned up the phone lines organizing their people to oppose it.”
And yet, I still went to that church. I went in knowing that I could expect opposition from a small, powerful group of members. Sure enough, they were on the job. As we’ve written elsewhere, I found out later that some decided I was too conservative for their liking and decided before the moving van was unloaded that I would have to go. Instead of staying 20 years as I intended, I stayed three.
In our case, we called in a church consultant. He spent many weeks studying our situation and faulted the church for having no constitution and bylaws which left a leadership vacuum to be filled by strong-willed laypeople. He found that while I was not responsible for the church’s division, I had become its focus and recommended that I move to another church so the congregation could create a constitution and start fresh with a new pastor.
It hurt to walk away. But I realized later that doing so probably saved my life. The stress of that pastorate was slowly killing me.
Something inside us probably would like God to deal with the SODs the way he protected Moses against them. From Numbers 16….
Now, Korah the son of Izhar (and a number of his buddies) rose up before Moses with some of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty leaders of the congregation, men of renown. They gathered together against Moses and Aaron, and said to them, “You take too much upon yourselves, for all the congregation is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?”
When Moses heard it, he fell on his face, and he spoke to Korah and all his company, saying, “Tomorrow morning, the Lord will show who is His and who is holy, and will cause him to come near to Him…. You take too much upon yourselves, you sons of Levi!”
Moses said to them, “You and all your company are gathered together against the Lord.” (Numbers 16:11)
The next day, the ground split apart under (these men). The earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, with their households and all the men with Korah, with all their goods…. The earth closed over them, and they perished from among the assembly.
Wasn’t this a little harsh? Well, God did it, not Moses. And God being God, He can do as He pleases (Psalm 115:3).
By the way, one day one of the SODs came to me at church and said, “Joe, does it not matter to you the caliber of the people who are opposed to you?” At the time, all I muttered was, “It does.” Only later did the Lord call Numbers 16 to my mind where the “men of renown” opposed Moses.
In Moses’ case and in my case, God dealt with those men. Dramatically in Moses’ case, not so much in mine. As far as I can tell. And that’s an important point.
I stood in front of a church I had been serving for seven years and told the congregation how a small group of SODs were making life miserable for me. They did not represent the larger membership, I said and was glad to know, but they were a constant drag on my ministry and a thorn in my flesh. From the pulpit I addressed that group: I need you to know two important things: One, God is using your opposition to purify me and make me stronger. So I am grateful for you. Second, you will stand before the Lord one day and give account for what you are doing to His church and the man He has sent as your pastor. And friend, I wouldn’t be in your shoes for anything in the world. I thought of the line, It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31).
Toward the end of that sermon that day, I told the Diotrephes clan, “From now on, I’m serving you notice. We will love you, we will listen to you, and then we’re going to ignore you. But we are going forward.” The congregation burst into applause. Some asked later why it had taken me so long to kill that snake.
The answer was that I was still in recovery from the turmoil in the previous church (the one referred to above where the older pastor had spent 20 miserable years, to which I devoted only three years). Furthermore, it took seven years in this church to gain the confidence that the congregation looked to me as pastor and would support me in a stand against the SODs.
