Thank You’s and Complaints

This week I received several thank you’s in the mail from church and community people. While they were beautifully written they gave me pause. Some were for things that I actually had done - and thus the thank you was meaningful. Some were for things the lay members of the congregation had done but I was being thanked for. That made me much more uncomfortable, as if I was getting credit for their hard work. But how do you send a thank you back and say “sorry, it really wasn’t me”?

This lead me to think about the unparalleled number of times I have been complained to and about. Sometimes rightly so. Sometimes for things that other people have done. This is not the type of authority we discussed pastors having in seminary. Being thanked and blamed for things that they did not do, but are associated with them by virtue of their leadership in the church. 

Let me start this next thought off by clearly stating that I do not think that pastors are Jesus, but I wonder if this is the same type of blame that Christ gets when his followers behave badly. When Christians give Jesus a bad name. How can we teach people to separate Christ from Christians during those times when the two just don’t jive together?