Few people are truly aware of the constant requests, complaints, and criticisms pastors and other church leaders receive. I must admit, however, I was surprised when I asked church leaders on Twitter to share some of the more unusual comments they have received. I was first surprised at how many responded. But I was most surprised at the really strange things people tell pastors and other church leaders.
Many of the comments related to using the Bible too much or to being too evangelistic. I should make those a blog post by themselves.
I narrowed my selection to twenty-five, but it could have been much higher. I left off many great comments to keep this post manageable. I’ve only made minor wording changes to some of these. For the most part, I received these quotes just as you are seeing them. The parenthetical words after each comment represent my off-the-cuff commentary.
- “We need a small group for cat lovers.” (I guess they could serve Meow Mix as a snack.)
- “You need to change your voice.” (Yes ma’am. I’ll try to have that done by next week.)
- “Our expensive coffee is attracting too many hipsters.” (Yep. You don’t want too many of those hipsters in your church.)
- “Preachers who don’t wear suits and ties aren’t saved. It’s in the Bible. (I should have known that’s what Jesus and Paul wore.)
- “Your socks are distracting.” (I understand. I’ll stop wearing socks.)
- “You shouldn’t make people leave the youth group after they graduate.” (It’s going to get really weird by the time they turn 70 years old.)
- “I don’t like the color of the towels in the women’s restroom.” (I don’t understand. They match the towels in the men’s restroom.)
- “We need to start attracting more normal people at church.” (So, you will be leaving the church, I presume.)
- “I developed cancer because you don’t preach from the KJV.” (Major medical announcement! New carcinogen discovered!)
- “Your wife never compliments me about my hair or dress.” (There could be a reason for that.)
- “Not enough people signed up for the church golf tournament. You have poor leadership skills.” (I’m so sorry. I expected more since most of the deacons play golf on Sunday morning)
- “I think you are trying to preach caffeineism.” (Probably Reformed theology with an extra kick.)
- “If Jesus sang from the red hymnals, why can’t we?” (I think you are mistaken. He sang from blue hymnals.)
- (To a pastor who married interracially). “You are living in sin. You shouldn’t be married to each other.” (That one is not worthy of commentary.)
- “I don’t like the brand of donuts in the foyer.” (It’s better than Meow Mix.)
- “You didn’t wrap the hot dogs in bacon for the church picnic.” (I understand that one. Bacon rules.)
- “You shouldn’t drink water when you preach.” (At least not simultaneously.)
- “The toilet paper is on the wrong way in the ladies restroom. It’s rolled under.” (My guess is that it is still functional.)
- “Why don’t you ever preach on Tim Tebow?” (Be patient. I will be preaching a six-week expository series on him in the fall.)
- “You don’t have ashtrays in the fellowship hall.” (Yes we do. They are right next to the spittoons for your chewing tobacco.)
- “Did you see me waving in the back of the worship center? You preached too long. It was time to eat!” (Who needs a clock when I have you?)
- “The eggs were not scrambled enough at the senior adult breakfast.” (We thought you could jump up and down after you ate them to finish the job.)
- “You don’t look at our side of the worship center enough when you preach.” (That’s because you are on that side.)
- “We are leaving the church because you have a red cross on the building. That’s the color of the devil.” (I understand. It’s in the same verse that describes his pitchfork and horns.)
- “Your sermon needed more calories.” (Okay. I’ll feed it one of those donuts in the foyer.)
Pastors and other church leaders must have great patience and strength. They are faced with these and many other comments and demands every day. I love these church leaders, and I thank God for them.
Share with me what comments you have received. And tell me what you think of the twenty-five comments that were shared with me.
Posted on August 19, 2015
With nearly 40 years of ministry experience, Thom Rainer has spent a lifetime committed to the growth and health of local churches across North America.
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I had a comment about me asking people to pray at the altar when the service begins. I pray out loud for our service and asking to being surrendered to God. This person came to me and said, “You need to not say anything for a while during the altar prayer time so I can pray. You talking distracts me from praying.” It is amazing what people will say.
Pastor’s wife here. I’ll limit myself to two – the first made me guffaw and the second, God forgive me, made me quite angry.
1. We were discussing church growth in a committee meeting (why yes, I’m Presbyterian; how did you guess?), an elderly member was asked what kind of people he would envision the church reaching outto and including. “Oh, you know, just people. People like us, but younger.”
2. A comment made directly to our 10-year-old daughter by her Sunday School teacher, on the day my husband announced from the pulpit that he had accepted a call elsewhere: “You know why your parents are leaving, don’t you? It’s because they’re too liberal. They should go back to where they came from.” Had she said it to me or my husband, that would have been fine.
If people are cowardly enough to pick on your kids, I would say it’s time to leave. Many pastors’ kids leave the faith because of the way they have been treated by church members. That’s not a price I’d be willing to pay.
While preaching at my first church for no money (the church had 10 people other than my family the first time we were there) and working in a factory 58 hours a week I was confronted by the meanest, most controlling, hard-hearted man I have ever known in a church. He wanted the preacher to live at the parsonage and take the $200 a week they wanted the family to live on (in 1999) so that he could control them by threatening to take it away. He said “You shouldn’t work so much, you can’t put in enough time with the church!” I turned and said to him “Well, my family has this bad habit of eating which is hard to do if I don’t earn a living.” Stumped on that he said “Well your wife should get a job!” My wife, who is normally quite reserved unless someone really gets at her, turned to face him (she had been facing the other way talking to someone else) leaned in to him eyeball to eyeball and said “I DO have a job and it’s none of your business!” The man was so flustered by not being able to cow us with his berating that he actually stopped.
A number of years ago, I was asked to candidate for a position as a senior minister at a church on Hilton Head. I met my first legitimate billionaire at this place, okay?
During the process I noticed a number of inconsistancies between what they said they wanted, and what they actually wanted. When they finally offered me the job and showed me the compensation package, I just sat there for a minute, trying to figure out how to respond.
There was a whiteboard in the room, so I walked to the board and divided the board into the categories on the call sheet they had given me. Things like visitation, sermon prep, etc. Then I asked them for each category what they thought was a reasonable amount of time to spend on each area. Then, below their numbers, I rode in the amount of time it actually took me to do some of those things. My point was twofold: first they wanted great sermons, but thought that a reasonable amount of time to spend on sermon prep per week was just three hours (I was expected to preach twice on Sunday, and once Saturday night).
When I was done I pointed out that the actual amount of time that it would take me to do all of the things that they wanted me to do was in excess of 90 hours a week.
They wanted to pay me $21,000 a year.
They didn’t see any problem with that.
Only once have I turned down a church because they didn’t pay enough. Actually, that church’s salary package was quite a bit larger than what I get paid now, but for what I’d have to deal with, it wasn’t enough!
I had a person say to me after church one Sunday, “Look, I don’t come to church to have you preach to me.”
obviously.
Had a prospective member ask me if I preached “topical” or “suppository” sermons. Probably, according to some, the later would be correct!
Oh where do I start!?
* I was once asked, in a straight-forward rude way, if I had considered speech classes because good speakers don’t preach long. I had only been preaching for 25 minutes, which was already a crunch.
*A member insisted our church be KJV-Only because they had only used the KJV. The member left the church because I wanted to have a study on how scripture is translated, though we continued to use the KJV. Ironically, the hymnal, which was over 20 years old, had verses translated in NIV. Also, the previous pastor gave out baptism certificates with HCSB translation. Oh, and they had given out tracts in previous years with NIV translation.
*A family complained about the hotdogs that were served during VBS and stated “I wouldn’t feed these to a dog”, while they continued to eat them….
*Same family said they were no longer going to tithe because we wouldn’t move the date for VBS (the year after the hotdog comment) so their grandkids could attend. Even though we asked for people to give input for 2 months before setting the date and they requested this a few weeks before VBS began.
I had a few good ones in my first pastorate:
Said to my wife: You don’t open the parsonage blinds often enough.
Said to me by a deacon: Maybe you should go somewhere that your education is valued.
Said to me by a deacon’s wife: You having Bible study instead of helping me setup the fellowship hall for a reception is just Satan trying to trip me up.
Said to me by a deacon: Use a styrfoam cup instead of plastic bottle to drink water in the pulpit, the bottle is distracting. Also, why do you need water at all? The last pastor didn’t drink anything and he had cancer!
I could go on and on…
“You don’t open the parsonage blinds often enough.”
My response would be, “What’s in there that you think you need to see?”
After 16 years of youth ministry, my favorite is when (as the Youth Pastor) you say something and hear the reply, “Wow, that was really intelligent.” Shows you what they think every other time your mouth is open or of youth workers in general! Second favorite- every year (ish) as school approaches someone says to the youth pastor, “So are you ready to get back to work now that school is starting?” Which tends to induce multiple thoughts/feelings at once- twitching because they obviously missed the 5 weeks you were away from the church throughout the summer and must’ve missed the share services/pray requests/church newsletter/bulletin inserts from every month since March, hysterical laughter because you haven’t slept a full night in the better part of three months, or abject anger and a deep desire to punch them in the face in Jesus’ name (since adding those words always make things spiritual and church appropriate!). Just a few of my favorite times as a youth guy…
While greeting people at the door following a service, I was approached by a man who was very excited about the service and the sermon. As he shook my hand vigorously he said, “I just love the way you preach the suppository sermons!”
I’m not a pastor or pastor’s wife, but in a church business meeting many years ago we were discussing how much of a raise to give our pastor. One of the members made this comment “He doesn’t need a raise, his wife works”. I asked him how he would like it if his boss came to him and said “You don’t need a raise your wife works”. We gave our pastor a raise.
My husband is a pastor. This is his first church as head pastor. We’ve been there less than 2 years and have already heard plenty of crazy things! Here are a couple of my favorites:
1) Since your not going to change the date of VBS to a week when our grandkids can come we may just have to quit tithing.
My husband told me he didn’t even know that they normally tithed.
2) I wouldn’t feed these hotdogs to my dogs (the same couple complaining about the apparently low quality hotdogs we were serving at VBS the year before).
My husband told them they were more than welcome to buy the snack for the following night. And I thought the hotdogs were pretty good actually.
Hey, I didn’t know you posted here and you stole my stories 🙂
Oh the stories we can tell. In my very first pastorate I didn’t have as much of a comment as I did an activity. I had 2 older gentlemen who I guess wanted to train me well. I was 24 years old. Every Sunday that we got out before 12:05, they would give me cash tips at the door! It took me a while to put together what was happening, but when I did I almost fell over laughing because I was being trained.
Then in another pastorate, I had been serving in the church for almost 6 years. We had come through some problems, and we had our problem member. One year as we returned from vacation, we were blindsided by a secret meeting that was had that decided they didn’t want us anymore. It nearly split the church so I decided I would resign in order to not completely destroy the work God had been doing. Two days after my public resignation, a woman came to my house and said, “Well, we’ve really enjoyed you teaching our Sunday School class, but as a pastor you should have been gone 3 years ago!” I bit my tongue and politely disagreed, but after closing the door I said, “And as a church member you should have been gone 15 years ago!” After this encounter, I looked at the church records and found that in the church’s 120 year history, there were almost 40 pastors, and 4 of us took up 50 years of that history. They evidently wanted 3 year pastors…