The Pharisee Factory

Is the Church Producing Pharisees or Disciples?

Glenn Garvin

• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781098000530
• eBook ISBN: 9781098000547
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A factory produces, but what if the product was not what the manufacturer ordered? In this book, The Pharisee Factory, Glenn describes where the church has drifted off mission""choosing rules, knowledge, and power over God's glorious reflection of himself. Like the Pharisees, who started out trying to protect the words of God, they move toward controlling the words of God. Powerful leaders chose to operate much like the very ones that Jesus called "white washed sepulchers."Who is responsible for the condition of the modern church? It lies with us, the local church leadership. We may know about the New Testament leadership model, yet we continue to sustain and promote practices that Jesus hated. Church leaders and church attenders have always known there is something off with our current model of "doing" church. They just didn't know exactly what went wrong and why.We now realize the modern model is too top-heavy, hierarchical, and authoritarian when held up next to the flattened, gift-rich, and flexible style of the New Testament church. We may even know the historical damage that our modern models have caused. But have we actually looked at the results of our systems and structures over the past couple millennia? The book just asks a simple question: have we produced more Pharisees than disciples?

Chapter 1

Building a Gen-Gap Bridge

What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either.

—Matthew 23:13

Young people need models, not critics.

—John Wooden

A Church without Youth is a Church without a future. Moreover, Youth without a Church is Youth without a future.

—Pope Shenouda III

Sociologists tell us that we see the world differently and behave differently because of several factors. One of those is when we were born. The era, the culture, and the context of the world we came into. I was born in the sixties but consider myself a seventies generation in style and culture. Why? Because as a child, I barely knew what was going on in my little neighborhood or at school. Outside of that—zilch, zero, nada. Even at the mind-numbing, hormone-driven, self-absorbed age of thirteen something, I was barely scratching the surface of wars like Vietnam or scandals like Watergate. All I’m saying is that I didn’t tune into politics, education, business, or even religious culture until I hit high school.

Each generation comes with its own dreams, difficulties, and baggage. I’ve yet to hear of one generation that just loves the music, movies, clothing, furniture, or hairdos styles of their parents. None of us wanted to be “them” until we had to become “them.”

So what does each generation bring to the discussion of the culture of the church in America? It turns out a lot!

The life expectancy in America has drastically changed everything from politics to business. In 1900, the life expectancy was 46.3 years for males and 48.3 for females (only a slight difference between gender).4 By 1950, those numbers skyrocketed with a life expectancy of 65.6 for males and 71.1 for females (a greater 5.5-year difference between gender).5 That is a eighteen-year jump in just fifty years. Although we have steadily seen the life expectancy number grow, it has not been as rapid as it was in those fifty years. What was it? Healthcare? The economy? Quality of food? Happiness? I’m sure there are a lot smarter people than me that can give you their theories. All I know is that America’s culture in religion, along with socio-economic status, has gone through enormous transition.

The authority and power structures of our American society in politics, education, business, and religion have all had tremendous highs and devastating lows in terms of effectiveness and in the amount of trust the American people have in their leaders. Since 1950, we have increasingly distrusted those who lead, and we have seen both the personal and public erosion of that trust through media. I didn’t live in the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s, but I can almost guarantee you that it wasn’t as innocent and pure as my older family and friends have suggested. I am hardly convinced that manipulation and corruption didn’t exist somewhere in government, education, business, and religion. Maybe times were so hard that just living well and leisure were luxuries, but I know the human heart is what it’s always been—evil. So how does all the generational and cultural changes affect the church today? I believe just the life expectancy alone is a good place to start.

Churches were smaller before 1955 when “explosive growth [was] experienced by the megachurch congregation.” And in the 1980s, these megachurches became more of the norm than the outlier. A megachurch was defined as a minimum weekly attendance of two thousand.6 It may even be said that although the term “megachurch” didn’t exist, the concept of church attenders had reached over two thousand in quite a few churches throughout the United States.7 However, what can be stated is the leadership and pastoral style in megachurches was radically different than it was, say, in the 1950s.

Shockingly, Lyle Schaller, a prominent leader in the church growth era of the church, went on record and said, “The emergence of the mega-church is the most important development of modern Christian history. You can be sentimental about the small congregation, like the small corner grocery store or small drugstore, but they simply can’t meet the expectations that people carry with them today.”8

I completely disagree with Schaller’s statement. The biblical calling of being a pastor soon took on a far more broad definition of being a superstar. They were no longer expected to know how to parse Greek words and “homileticize” (the art of preaching) in every situation from birthday parties to city-wide facility dedications. The modern pastor is supposed to know everything—literally everything! The pastor is now supposed to be a leader, a visionary, an entrepreneur, crack-shot financial advisor, and auto mechanic or home-remodel expert. They should be able to speak eloquently, never step on toes, fix people and societal issues—all in a single bound while wearing a cape instead of a skinny-jeaned Canadian tuxedo. Have pastoral styles and expectations changed? Absolutely! And it’s out of control.

There are far too many church cultural changes from the 1950s up to today to discuss in detail the way those changes continued to lean toward and lend itself to propagating pharisaical teachings. The one change I wanted to highlight in this chapter is this: there are four distinct generational influences vying for authority and control over how the church should function and what it should look like in the future. Those generations are the greatest generation: traditionalists, 1930–1945; the boomers, 1946–1964; Gen X, 1965–1981; and millennials, 1982–2000.

Traditionalists

There are fewer pastors still leading churches who are seventy-plus years old. However, there are far more board members, elders, and influencers (financial and spiritual) in the church today. The traditionalists are still viable and very vocal in today’s older churches. They clearly make their needs, wants, and desires known in classes, meetings, and informal gatherings of the church. They are constantly known to site several moves of God, outpourings of the Spirit, blessings on the church, anointed music of their era, and I-still-miss-the-hymns style of church. They have not exhausted their disposable income because they were savers and spend thrifts to begin with. Many of them had pensions and company retirement plans that are still (somehow miraculously) paying out their income.

Boomers

I like to call them “builders” because this group really gets excited about buildings, building programs, expansion, opportunities to buy property, and “expand” the church. This group is post world war, post Depression, and the beginnings of several cultural revolutions that have taken place in America. Their music is known worldwide, their entrepreneurial appetite is unending, and they believe that they were the first generation to really experience the American dream. Think about it, this is the generation who most benefitted from the previous generational sacrifice (physically and financially). This is the generation that is healthy enough and wealthy enough to not just think about leisure time, they can pay for it (or go into debt) to make it happen.

However, in the church, this group was the real beginning of reactionary steps to make the church not just spiritual, but successful! This is the generation who brought the quiet little church lady forward to become a nationally known speaker and marched Christian women’s rights to the forefront of American culture. This is the church group who taught women to get married, birth children, launch a career, and push to be elected for eldership in the church.

Generation X

This is the group who looked deeper at the programs of the church and the richness of relationships. It wasn’t just about the class or the event; it was about the connectivity of friendship and building family together. This group respected the hist...

Table of contents

• Chapter 1 - Building a Gen-Gap Bridge
• Chapter 2 - Factions and Denominational Divides
• Chapter 3 - What We Need Are Some More Rules
• Chapter 4 - Three Big Cultural Wars We Lost
• Chapter 5 - Bigger Better Buildings
• Chapter 6 - Christian Consumerism
• Chapter 7 - Trinket Gospel
• Chapter 8 - Church: American Style
• Chapter 9 - Absolute Power and Money Corruption
• Chapter 10 - Breaking The Bruised Reed
• Chapter 11 - Assembly Line Converts
• Chapter 12 - Big C, Little C: Gimme Unity
• Chapter 13 - Last Thoughts