The Cost of Sentiment

An assistant pastor everybody considers to be very humble.

He speaks with everyone respectfully with his hand clasped behind his back.

He bows his head curtly whenever he addresses any member of his congregation.

The church members were a mixture of college graduates and non-college educated.

The non-college educated were his people. Like them, he was a high school dropout

The college-educated folks he saw as a threat.

Not because of anything they did or said but because he felt they were more educated than he was and, therefore, naturally would look down on him.

He was the assistant pastor for several years.

The pastor was a college-educated engineer who was working for a top engineering firm.

He relates with everybody perfectly well.

He didn’t treat the college-educated folks differently from the non-college-educated folks.

It was not even an issue under his leadership.

Nobody knew there was a line because there really shouldn’t be a line relating to such in Christ.

The college-educated pastor was transferred to another branch.

He was told to present his two assistants for promotion into his shoes.

The Youth pastor of the church was college-educated.

He had a good rapport with the entire congregation and treated them as one, but he was younger than the assistant pastor.

The Pastor presented him and the assistant pastor who didn’t have a college degree.

In terms of ordination, the assistant pastor had been ordained officially as the assistant pastor while the youth pastor had not been officially ordained.

It was meant to be a no-brainer. The ordained one should take up the role while the non-ordained one assists him.

The Pastor however, told the national committee in charge of church leadership that he does not recommend his ordained assistant for the role.

He preferred the non-ordained one because he had noticed the inferiority complex exhibited by his assistant pastor on several occasions.

The thing about “Inferiority complex” is this: once a man or woman has it, it is very difficult to eradicate. An inferiority complex is an unrealistic feeling of general inadequacy caused by actual or supposed inferiority in one sphere, sometimes marked by aggressive behavior in compensation.

The pastor explained that the pastor of a church should be able to carry all the members along without tilting to one side, he noticed that his assistant liked to be the smartest in the room and, as a result, would usually eliminate all threats to that assertion in every group where he had functioned within the church.

When he was asked to lead the church’s prayer department, he found a way to freeze out all the college-educated members of the group and worked only with those who were not college-educated.

When he was supposed to pick a wife, he had several college-educated ladies who were willing to marry him, but he settled specifically for a lady who dropped out of school in JSS 2 because he dropped out in SS1, so that it can be on record that he was more educated than the lady was.

After they got married and the lady couldn’t measure up to the position of leadership, she was supposed to hold since she was married to him, he began to treat her like the enemy of his progress because she didn’t know how to dress like the college-educated ladies or read like the college-educated ladies. She couldn’t read and write, despite all the efforts put in by many to help her with adult classes and personal coaches.

The pastor felt his assistant would only freeze out the college-educated members and with time those ones would leave the church. Ironically, it was the college-educated members who were responsible for the major financial donations to the church.

While the church does not use this as a criterion to determine how to treat individual members, it was important to the sustained growth of the church that whoever would lead the church be able to carry all the members along.

The pastor also stated that on several occasions in which he had tried to pair his assistant pastor deliberately with anyone who was college educated regardless of age, sex, marital status or financial strength to handle a task or solve a problem, the pairing had always been unproductive but every time he paired his assistant with a fellow drop-out, they somehow seem to make it work.

The church’s national leadership committee considered all the pastor had said and decided it will be best for the church if they ordain the youth pastor and give him the mantle to lead. When the file got to the table of the head of the committee, she said the matter did not sit well with her. How do you promote a younger brother who was non-ordained above an ordained brother from the same parish?

If you were transferring a pastor from one parish to another where both ministers would be strangers to each other, maybe it would work but there would still be questions asked.

One was just a brother while the other was already ordained as a deacon and then as an assistant pastor.

How do you make a brother the pastor and the Assistant Pastor his assistant?

She decided she would like to hear from both ministers. The date of the interview was set. The assistant Pastor was invited and told to arrive at 10 AM. The Youth Pastor was invited and told to arrive at 12 pm.

The Head of the Committee grilled the assistant pastor for two hours and then she grilled the Youth Pastor for two hours. At the end of the meeting, she told the youth pastor, “We should go with you, if we want what is best for that parish. We should be resolute with what the Lord has told us and what we have seen of your work in that parish and the interest of the people of God. I have prayed and God told me you are his choice. Your pastor, who is being transferred, also recommended you. The committee recommended you. I will, however, not choose you. This Assistant Pastor must be given the opportunity to swim or sink. If he swam and I seriously and sincerely doubt that he will, it would be the greatest miracle since the raising of Lazarus from the dead. If he sank, it will be seen by all that he was given an opportunity that he was due for and he misused it. You are yet young, other opportunities will come for you, but I will have to go by the books on this.”

The Youth pastor thanked her and left.

The following Sunday, the National Committee sent a very senior pastor to the church.

The pastor preached and formally announced that the pastor of the church had been transferred, and the assistant pastor would be stepping in to lead the church. The senior Pastor also announced that the youth pastor would now be the assistant pastor of the pastor. He prayed for both the new pastor and his assistant.

After the service, the new pastor called for a meeting service. During the meeting, he announced that since he did not have a car of his own yet, no minister or worker of the church should park their car in the designated minister’s car park of the church henceforth.

He demoted the heads of departments who were college-educated from their positions and replaced them with the ones who were not college-educated in the departments because according to him; after praying extensively, God told him those whose spirit could work with him and those whose spirits will not work with him.

He sacked the church accountant and announced that he would henceforth handle the church’s finances with the assistance of his wife. By the time the meeting was over, all the college-educated members were sending text messages to one another. Later that evening, they all met in the house of a member and decided to leave the church.

The following Sunday, the population of the church plunged from 205 to 65. Instead of building bridges, the pastor had burnt bridges and isolated himself on Priggish Island. The assistant pastor couldn’t leave because he was assigned a duty by God to assist this pastor.

The pastor didn’t see anything wrong in the decisions he made, he said “They were not meant to be with us, that was why they left. If they were meant to be with us, they wouldn’t have left”

Within a month, the church’s bills became a struggle to pay. Musicians were the first to leave, followed by the church sexton and cleaners. Buying fuel for the generator became an issue, and paying the electricity bill became a herculean task. The non-college-graduates of the church began to feel the burden of the church was too much for them to bear and they began to leave one by one

By the end of the second month in charge, the population of the church was down to twelve. The assistant pastor of the church got a job offer in another state and took it. He resigned and moved on with his family.

The national committee of the ministry swung into damage-control mode at this point. They transferred this pastor to the provincial headquarters as a minister and brought in another pastor to replace this pastor.

The pastor refused the transfer and opted to leave the church altogether because they didn’t give him time to turn things around after the rebels left the church and God was about to vindicate him by putting them to shame for leaving.

At that point, the church was long gone. The new pastor tried to use the addresses of former members to trace them and invite them back to the parish. None of them returned

The church was shut down completely.

One year later, the church opened another branch just a few houses from where the previous parish was and gave it the same name. The new parish started afresh and is still on that street today.

PS: Sentiment is very expensive

-GSW-