Pissing People Off: The Wrong Litmus Test For Faithful Ministry

I had a Youth Pastor in high school who once told me that "the world doesn't hate Jesus enough... because we're not telling them about him."Since then, and in light of Scripture, I've always been perplexed by this statement. I've come to believe that there might be a speck of truth in it, but mostly I've just been confused by it. You see, the presupposition behind a statement like this is that Jesus is just not likable, that if people actually knew about Jesus, they'd hate him. But that was never my experience. When I first heard about Jesus, it was good news to me.... it was the gospel. Sure, it shook things up, but not for the sake of shaking things up. It shook things up because its goodness far surpassed the habits and patterns I'd previously constructed for myself. I found God's presence in my situation, and I could never be the same. The point of the gospel is never to get people to hate Jesus, never to shake things up for the sake of shaking them up.... 

This is the difference between Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Westboro Baptist Church. For King, the point was the gospel and the gospel caused conflict. For the folks at Westboro Baptist, conflict seems to be the point and the gospel is its medium. 

Christian discipleship will likely piss people off... but pissing people off is never the goal of Christian discipleship. Shaking things up will be inevitable if you're focused on Jesus, but it's always a secondary outcome of another primary objective. If nothing is getting stirred up, we should think twice. But we should not use that as our litmus test for true ministry... that's proven to be a bad source for analysis for the Westboro Baptist Church. If your goal is to shake things up, you're doing it wrong.

Your goal should be the gospel and then to trust God to do whatever shaking needs to be done. Ministry is nothing to be taken lightly. It must be handled with great care. There is a frivility in the objective of shaking things up. The assumption carried by someone who wants to piss people off is that they've got something that the people to whom their ministering don't already have. They think they know better, so they need to bring down fire on everybody else. I can't think of a better word for this than arrogance. And that's not participation in the ministry of God in Jesus Christ. 

Ministry involves reciprocity. Christian ministry is participation in God's ministry and God's ministry is the ministry of the cross, where God shares in our situation. There is reciprocity. There is sharing. The minister is the one who needs ministry just as much as the people to whom they minister. They are the wounded healer. The minister assumes that they are as guilty as their congregation. So whatever condemnation they give is condemnation they receive. If the world should hate Jesus, then so should you. 

And it's as important who you piss off as it is who you please. The fact is, you'll never make everyone angry. Someone will always be on your side. The question is, who? Is it actually Christ? Or is it the angry people who agree with you? If you're trying to make people angry, then I bet I can guess who'll be pleased with your "ministry."

The point is, whether or not you're pissing people off is a very bad litmus test for faithful discipleship. It's just unreliable. 

A much better source for measurement is whether your ministry looks like the cross. Are you entering into the situation of others? Are you sharing in person-to-person relationships with the people to whom you're ministering? Is your sermon coming from outside their situation or from within it? ...Lemme take it a step further and ask, are you receiving ministry from the ones to whom you're ministering? That's not to ask if you're "getting something out of it"... but it is to ask, are you able to discover the presence of God in the face of the other? Even the prophets spoke not as outsiders but as people who identified with the ones to whom they prophesied (this is true with the exception of Jonah... but remember that Jonah really wanted to shake things up... he wanted fire to come down and he was disappointed when it didn't... he wasn't on the same page as God). Do you love them? That is a good way to know if your ministry is taking the shape of Jesus' ministry, because Jesus' ministry was all about affirming God's presence in the places which needed it most—on Golgotha—where God should have been nowhere to be found. 

Reciprocity... relationship.... affirmation... these are much better tools for discerning the faithfulness of Christian ministry than whether or not you're pissing people off.

It does not say, "the fruit of the Spirit is that everyone will get really angry with you and you'll lose all your friends." It does say, however, "...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Gal. 5:22-23a).

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