The Crisis of Character

Pastors and other church leaders often seeking the silver bullet for successful ministry. We attend the conferences, read the books, and listen to the podcasts, hoping to find that thing that will energize our ministry.

As a pastor I understand this very well. We feel the pressure to increase attendance, have a healthy budget, improve the quality and quantity of our programs, and so much more.

The problem is that we have focused so much on these measurable outcomes that we have often forgotten one of the most important aspects of Christian leadership: character.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines character as:

the particular combination of qualities in a person or place that makes them different from others

Character itself is morally neutral. It needs an adjective to tell us what kind of character we have. Are the qualities that make up who we are something that is positive or negative?

The challenge with this is that we do not know the answer to that until we see it over time. If you start attending a church, you may see the outward gifts of a pastor but have no idea of their character, even after several years.

But nothing remains hidden for long.

I remember a time when people thought this was a Roman Catholic problem. Stories of abuse came out and Protestants shook their head in disgust.

But then the stories from the Protestant side started coming out. Evangelicals and Anabaptists, it seemed to cut across denominational lines. There was a crisis of character.

But we were so busy worried about the measurable goals that we often looked away or even covered up when there were failings of character.

Here is one of the difficulties with this. A focus on good character does not necessarily bring about immediate results that people can readily observe. Not only that, there are things about bad character that might actually bring about measurable success quite quickly.

And yet there is always a day of reckoning. Look at some of the names of pastors and other Christian leaders from fifteen years ago who were so looked up to because of their success and yet have fallen so hard. Success without good character can only last so long.

The church needs to focus on character, starting with the leadership. This means a redefinition of success. It is better to be a pastor who never has a congregation of more than twenty-five people who is of strong character than a pastor of a megachurch who is shown to be of weak character.

The church is in crisis and we need to begin to respond with an emphasis on good character.