Abducted by Aliens

“And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them.

But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city.” – Matthew 22:6-7

Every year, hundreds of pastors with their families suddenly go missing. It’s never reported, and strangely enough no one in their congregations seem to know what happened to them.

No one, that is, except for those who sent them packing.

No, they weren’t abducted by aliens. Instead, some church power-brokers decided they were no longer wanted. The conversation went something like this:

“Last Sunday was your last day in your position. You can resign or be fired. If you choose to resign, a severance will be provided for you over the next several months. If you keep your mouth shut, the money will keep coming and you can feed your family. But if you breathe a word of what we did, we’ll cut you off without a cent.”

The power-brokers know a few strategic things about pastors. They know they are considered self-employed and NOT eligible for unemployment benefits. You read that right – zero. So instead of fighting for himself and his calling, the pastor moves along and tries to support his family any way he can.

I’ll never forget when this was done to us. It was many years ago, but the memories still sting…

I was a worship leader brought in to a church that had been in decline for over 12 years. I was told up front I was the pastor’s last hope of reviving the church, that what they needed was more contemporary worship. I should have seen the folly in that premise, but I was young. Flash forward two years later, and no surprise: my new style of worship had not stopped the church’s hemorrhaging numbers.

One Tuesday I was called into the church board room, and told I could resign with severance or be fired on the spot. I had done nothing wrong, had no moral failing. I was merely inconvenient. I sat there holding my wife’s hand, staring into space, wondering why God had abandoned me.

The executive pastor at that church had come straight from the corporate world, and he knew how to minimize any “blow back”. His goal was to cut off all communication from the former “employee” so the only story going out to the congregation was the “company line”. So he has the minister sign a “non-disclosure agreement” in order to get his severance. Signing means you still have an income for a few months, but if you speak to any friends from the church about what happened, you get nothing. So with the minister quietly limping away with no word, it will appear to everyone they must have done something wrong. All their church friends will feel betrayed when their calls to the minister go unanswered.

The church members finally stop calling and move on with their lives. Meanwhile, the minister and his family try to pick up the pieces of their lives, alone.

When a minister is fired, he’s not just losing a job. Immediately our family had lost our entire local support system at the church. My kids lost their playmates and my wife lost most all her friends. Our friends thought we’d just walked away and thoughtlessly abandoned them. What they didn’t know was that we’d been threatened to lose our severance pay if continued our relationships with them or breathed a word of what had happened.

So just like that, every relationship in our lives, except for relatives, was gone. It was like grieving a death, but instead of you dying, everyone you know dies. Or at least that’s how it feels.

Just a few weeks later, we’re living in a small apartment over my in-laws’ garage. We’d lost everything except each other. In fact, I almost lost my faith in God as well and felt my life was over. Being a pastor was part of who I was, and I thought I’d never get to serve a church again.. For weeks, I was either a non-responsive zombie or an angry, wounded victim around my family. I still don’t know how my wife survived during that bleak season. I was utterly lost: defeated and feeling like a criminal, though I’d done nothing wrong.

I feared I would never function again in the ministry God had called me. That’s because once a pastor is fired by a church, it’s terribly hard for him to find a new one. Prospective churches assume he must have done something wrong to be so bluntly dismissed. So he usually ends up in some secular employment making much less than he did before, and now unable to follow his calling.

Of course the church leaders will never say he did anything wrong. In fact, if someone asks, they’ll say they can’t speak about it. They know if they say something incorrect, they could be open to a law suit. But they won’t have to say anything. People will assume from the quick exit and lack of communication there was an indiscretion of some kind. Church members assume no one is talking about it because they don’t want to embarrass the pastor…at least that’s the impression they’ll leave. And that impression is intentional. They know members would never believe a church would be so cruel as to fire a minister who’d done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, the pastor and his family struggle with feelings of betrayal, loneliness, and being forsaken by God. Is it any wonder so many pastors’ deal with depression and suicidal thoughts, and their children leave the church when they come of age, never to return?

In my bitterness over being terminated, I remember writing a little limerick about my experience:

If your pastor disappears, don’t you worry for the parson. There’s a strategy behind his sudden loss.

If your pastor disappears, don’t investigate for martians. It’s clear they don’t abduct men of the cloth.

What you probably didn’t know is that some bullies got together, deciding it was time for him to go.

So they wrote up an agreement, threatening shoes they made with cement they’d attach to him unless he signs below

If your pastor disappears, never fear he’s been abducted. It’s probably just the deacons at his throat.

Some bullies get together and decide to change the weather. And the pastor merely serves as their scape goat.

Friends, we have to stop this. We must stop doing church like the world. We must stop treating spiritual leaders like nothing more than employees. I know the logical question to ask here is, “Then how do you terminate a pastor?” I don’t know that there’s one easy answer for the “right way”. But I do know this is definitely the wrong way.

As a pastor, I’ve only fired anyone this way once, when there was sexual misconduct.  But even then, we payed for him to enter a counseling program and get help. If he’d had a family, we would have gotten them help as well. 

But the ruthless way many churches terminate pastoral staff is a tactic of a ruthless world and shows zero compassion for them as brothers and sisters in Christ. And it presumes there is no spiritual component at work in their positions, no holy bond between the shepherd and the sheep.

We say we are Christians, but in the church we often do business like atheists.

Do we seriously think this is the way the Apostle Paul would have done it? Paul reserved this treatment for the man living in sin with his father’s wife (1 Cor 5), not for a pastor who is fired for no spiritual reason. There isn’t a single Biblical exhortation to ever do anything like this, except when there is known, disqualifying sin involved. And even then, the ultimate goal should be for the spiritual restoration of that person, even if they cannot serve in ministry again. No one should ever be abandoned never to be heard of again.

What’s not surprising is that I wasn’t the only minister fired in such a way by that church. Also not surprising is that the church struggled for years after. It took almost 10 years before God used that church in a positive way, despite their vast amounts of money and resources. 

If it’s true that “judgment begins at the house of God”, how severely will God judge the devastation left by these practices? Do we really expect God to bless a church that operates in such a hateful manner? How many of our dying churches are actually being judged by God for how they treated His shepherds?

If this has happened to you, I do have some good news for you. Within three months of being fired, I had a new church position and my family entered into a season of the greatest financial blessing we’ve ever experienced. Within the next year, I was making double what I had made at my former church, proud as they were of their financial assets and position. I look back now and can see the hand of God working, in spite of how we were treated. Just like Joseph, every attempt to destroy us only served to put us in position for God to bless us even more.

So I want you to trust God right now as you wait on Him. Despite other people’s faithlessness, God is faithful. And He WILL take care of His servants.

But God’s faithfulness does not absolve the abusers of pastors for the destruction they’ve caused. Remember, the Church is supposed to be the Bride of Christ. May we never allow ambitious, worldly men to remake her into the Bride of Frankenstein.

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If you have experienced the trauma of forced termination from a church, there are some wonderful people with resources to help. The PASTORS’ HOPE NETWORK is ready to come along you and your family members with advice, HR resources, and a listening ear, among many other things.

Don’t go through this alone. Please reach out to my friends there today!

PASTORS’ HOPE NETWORK WEBSITE