A Ministry or a Monarchy
There is something inside a number of Protestant churches that really bothers me. That thing is nepotism. I’m all for pastors passing on their passion for “full time” ministry to their children. I’ve got no beef with a pastor who is a pastor’s son. But I really don’t like to see pastors hire their own children on at their church.
The news of the family break down and struggling minstries at Crystal Cathedral having me biting my tongue. I’d really like to say “I told you so” (oops, I guess I just did).
The potential for problems out weighs the benefits as far as I can tell. The first problem is that it emphasizes the personality-driven dynamics of the church. The father’s larger than life personality starts to reach its tentacles out of securing himself a job and starts to insure his children their jobs. If the pastor’s child proves to be incompetent or immoral it’s difficult for the church to remove them without seriously risking the father’s relationship with the church or the father’s relationship with the child. It’s just messy and as the events at Crystal Cathedral demonstrate it has the potential to take out a church and a family.
The second is that it communicates to the world that a church is a business that the father builds to hand down to his children. It’s not God’s ministry, it’s the pastors. It’s not intended to feed God’s sheep, it’s intended to feed the pastor’s children. It by no means may be the pastor’s intention but it communicates exactly that to those outside the church.
The third problem I see with it is that it builds an unhealthy homogeneity into the church that fails to bring in new ideas and builds a power base that shuts out new ideas. Having like minded people around you can be a good thing, but having people with the same mind of you can really induce corporate neurosis. The same things are tried over and over again because no one can think of anything new.
I once read a Marilyn Von Savant column where she extolled the virtues of nepotism in business. It can make a lot of sense for people to hire their family members. Von Savant stopped short at nepotism within corporations though. She said that at the point stock holders are invested, the family’s needs are no longer the priority for the company. In my view a church is more like a corporation than a family owned business. It exist to serve its chief stock holder, not it’s pastor or his children.
