Transcription
God loves the church. That is the starting point of everything being said here, and it needs to be the ending point as well. Because without that foundation, what follows could easily be mistaken for an attack on something that is deeply precious to the heart of God.
The church is the body of Christ. It is the community he bled to create, the family he called every believer into, and the vehicle he chose to carry the most important message in human history to every corner of the earth. It matters to God with an intensity that goes beyond what any of us can fully comprehend. And it is precisely because it matters so much, precisely because the stakes are so enormous, that what is happening inside certain churches right now cannot be left unnamed, cannot be softened into comfortable vagueness, and cannot be allowed to continue without someone standing up and saying clearly what the word of God actually says about it.
Loving something does not mean approving of everything it does. A parent who loves their child does not look away when that child is heading toward something that will destroy them. A watchman who loves the city does not stay silent when he sees danger approaching the walls. And a teacher who loves the church does not stand before it and tell it only what it wants to hear when what it needs to hear is something considerably more difficult. Ezekiel 3:17 gives the sobering weight of that responsibility when God says, "Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me."
That is the spirit in which everything here is written, not condemnation, not superiority, not the cheap satisfaction of finding fault with something that has genuine beauty underneath its brokenness, but the honest, painful, necessary work of naming what God himself has already named so that the church can become what Jesus died to make it. There are seven things happening inside churches right now, things that have been normalized and sometimes even celebrated and defended with scripture, that God has not changed his mind about. And the word the Bible uses for some of these things is not mistake. It is not weakness. It is not an area needing improvement. The word God uses is abomination, and that word deserves to be taken with the full seriousness it carries, rather than quietly translated into something more palatable for a modern audience that has largely lost its tolerance for uncomfortable truth.
The first thing is what happens when the house of God is turned into a commercial enterprise, when the primary focus of a ministry has quietly shifted from the glory of God and the salvation of souls to the generation of income, the construction of a brand, and the accumulation of financial and institutional power, all of it wrapped in the language of faith and covered with the vocabulary of ministry. John 2:13 through 16 records one of the most physically dramatic moments in the entire earthly ministry of Jesus. A moment that should permanently settle any question about how God feels about this particular corruption. Jesus walked into the temple courts, observed the merchants and the money changers who had set up their commercial operations in the space that was supposed to be a house of prayer, and he made a whip out of cords, drove every one of them out, overturned their tables, scattered their coins across the floor, and declared with an authority that could not be misread, "Take these things away. Do not make my father's house a house of trade." This was not a gentle pastoral conversation about financial priorities. This was the Son of God in righteous fury physically clearing out of his father's presence what had absolutely no business being there.
Now, this is not a teaching against churches receiving offerings, paying their staff, or building the infrastructure they need to function. 1 Corinthians 9:14 clearly establishes that those who preach the gospel should make their living from the gospel, and that principle is not the problem. The problem is something entirely different. It is the church that has been so thoroughly restructured around revenue that the decisions about what gets preached, what gets taught, which topics get addressed, and which ones quietly disappear from the pulpit, and who gets welcomed and who gets pushed to the margins, are driven not by the word of God and the leading of the Holy Spirit, but by what will generate the largest financial return. It is the church where the gospel has become a product to be marketed, the congregation has become a customer base to be managed, and the pastor has become a CEO whose primary accountability is to the growth of the institution rather than to the God who called him to serve it. Malachi 3:5 records God pronouncing judgment on those who exploit people through the structures of worship. And 1 Timothy 6:5 warns with striking directness about people who suppose that godliness is a means of financial gain, identifying that entire orientation of mind as a corruption that has lost touch with the truth. When a church is more consistently concerned with your financial contribution than your spiritual transformation, when the pressure to give feels more regular than the genuine invitation to encounter God, when financial campaigns generate more energy and urgency than calls to prayer and repentance, something has gone profoundly wrong beneath the surface of what looks like a thriving ministry, and God, who sees past every religious covering to the actual motivation operating underneath it, is not impressed by the size of the building that was built with it.
The second thing is what happens when the gospel being preached from a church's pulpit has been deliberately edited to remove the call to genuine repentance, replaced with a smooth, comfortable, crowd-pleasing message that tells people God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their life without ever telling them that sin has created a genuine separation between them and that God, and that genuine turning away from that sin is not an optional add-on to the gospel, but is placed by scripture at the very heart of it. Proverbs 17:15 says, "He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord." When a preacher stands behind a pulpit and consistently delivers messages that effectively justify people in their sin, that tell people God receives them exactly as they are with no expectation of genuine change, no honest confrontation of what the Bible clearly and repeatedly identifies as sin, and no call to the repentance that runs from one end of scripture to the other as a non-negotiable element of genuine salvation, that preacher is doing something God calls an abomination, regardless of how large their congregation grows or how genuinely good their sermons feel to the people sitting in those seats. 2 Timothy 4:3 and 4 describes this pattern with a precision that reads less like a prophecy about a distant future and more like a description of a present reality when it says, "The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." The dynamic that Paul describes there is one where the congregation's appetite for comfort drives the preacher's content, and the preacher's desire for a growing crowd drives them to satisfy that appetite rather than confront it. It is a feedback loop that produces enormous churches filled with people who feel spiritually affirmed and are spiritually unchanged. And it is not just poor theology. It is the most serious kind of spiritual negligence. Because a doctor who tells a genuinely sick patient that they are perfectly healthy in order to avoid a difficult and uncomfortable conversation has not been kind to that patient. They have been cruel in the most consequential way possible. And a preacher who removes repentance from the gospel has not made it more loving or more accessible. They have made it lethal because they have handed people a message that produces the feeling of salvation without the reality of it.
The third thing is what happens when church leadership operates from a foundation of pride, personal ambition, and the desire for individual glory rather than from the genuine servant-heartedness that Jesus both modeled and commanded as the only legitimate basis for spiritual authority. Proverbs 6:16 through 19 lists seven things that are an abomination to the Lord, and two of them speak with devastating directness to what has become a widespread and largely unchallenged feature of modern church leadership culture. A proud look and one who sows discord among brothers. Both of these characteristics have become not just common, but in some circles almost celebrated as signs of a strong and confident leader. When what they actually represent is a direct inversion of everything Jesus taught about what genuine spiritual leadership looks like. Jesus addressed the pride problem in church leadership directly and repeatedly. And Matthew 23:11 and 12 records him saying, "The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." The entire culture of spiritual celebrity that has grown up inside modern Christianity, the leader who travels surrounded by an entourage, who cannot be approached directly without going through multiple layers of handlers, who speaks more frequently about the unique level of their anointing than about the Christ they claim to represent, who builds a following that is personally loyal to them in a way that mirrors a fan base more than a congregation, is the precise opposite of the servant leadership model that Jesus both demonstrated and required of everyone who would lead in his name. 1 Peter 5:3 instructs church elders not to lord it over those entrusted to their care, but to be examples to the flock. And the word translated "lorded over" in the original Greek describes the exercise of dominion and control over people. That spirit in church leadership does not just grieve the Holy Spirit, creates the exact conditions under which spiritual abuse, manipulation, and the systematic exploitation of vulnerable and trusting believers becomes not just possible, but inevitable. And the division that proud, self-promoting leadership sows through its competitive posture toward other ministries, its disparaging comments about other churches, its cultivation of an us-versus-them culture that gradually isolates the congregation from the broader body of Christ is taken with equal seriousness by a God who in John 17:21 prayed with everything in him that all his people would be one.
The fourth thing is what happens when financial dishonesty enters the house of God, when funds are misrepresented, when false promises are made to donors about what their giving will produce spiritually or financially, and when deceptive fundraising practices are used to exploit the genuine faith and sincere generosity of people who are trying with real hearts to honor God with what they have. Proverbs 11:1 says, "A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight." The image of secretly rigged scales that misrepresent the true measure of a financial transaction is the Old Testament picture of financial deception. And God does not apply a different standard to that deception when it occurs inside a church building or under the covering of a religious mission. He calls it what it is, regardless of the context. The specific form this most commonly takes in church settings today is the manipulative use of giving promises, the claim that if you give a specific amount, God will return it multiplied in financial blessing, often with manufactured urgency and emotional pressure applied to ensure the gift is made immediately before the moment passes. 2 Peter 2:3 describes false teachers by saying, "In their greed, they will exploit you with false words." And the word "exploit" in the original language means literally to make merchandise of people, to treat human beings as raw material to be processed for personal financial gain. When a church uses emotional manipulation, false spiritual promises, and manufactured urgency to extract money from people who are genuinely trying to honor God, that is not ministry operating with some financial irregularities. That is exploitation wearing a religious costume. And Acts 5:1-11 records with sobering clarity what God thinks about financial deception inside his house. When Ananias and Sapphira brought a dishonest financial report to the apostles, and Peter said to them simply, "You have not lied to men, but to God." Financial dishonesty in the church is not an accounting problem or a governance failure. It is a direct offense against the God in whose name every dollar was solicited, and in whose presence every transaction was made.
The fifth thing is what happens when the church silences, marginalizes, and systematically attacks the genuine voices that God sends to call his people back to truth, the honest teachers, the genuine prophets, the men and women who carry a word that genuinely challenges the comfort, the culture, or the entrenched leadership structures of the institution. The pattern of rejecting genuine truth-tellers is as old as the people of God themselves. Throughout the entire Old Testament, the prophets God sent to call Israel back to faithfulness were not welcomed by the religious establishment. They were rejected, persecuted, imprisoned, and killed. And Jesus addressed this tragedy directly in Matthew 23:37 when he said, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it." In the modern church, this silencing rarely takes the physical forms it took in the ancient world. It takes the form of character assassination, where the person carrying the uncomfortable message is publicly discredited so that the message can be dismissed without ever being genuinely examined. It takes the form of institutional pressure, where the authority structures of the church are used to sideline anyone whose truthfulness creates discomfort for leadership. It takes the form of theological gatekeeping, where genuine biblical conviction is labeled as divisive, negative, or spiritually immature simply because it addresses things that powerful people in the building would prefer to leave unaddressed. 1 Thessalonians 5:19 and 20 commands believers not to quench the spirit and not to despise prophecies. A church culture that has learned to automatically dismiss every uncomfortable word and every message that does not align with the preferred narrative of its leadership has not protected itself from false teaching. It has closed itself off from the very corrective voice of God that would keep it on the right path. Proverbs 29:18 says, "Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint." A church without genuine prophetic voice is not a safe church. It is an unguided one heading in whatever direction feels most comfortable to the people currently in charge.