I recently approached a friend that is a pastor and told him that I was sad that weren’t spending time together.

My friend offered this explanation: “I’ve made mistakes before in ministry—given too much energy to the church and had none for my family.  So now I make sure I give my family what they need.  But I only have energy for them and the church, not for friends or even my family of origin.”

While disappointing to learn I could no longer spend time with my friend, it was also troubling and made me wonder if this was related to the phenomenon of tribal churches.  Several points are relevant.

First, the chief value in a tribal church is uncritical acceptance (of certain people, practices, and ideas).  Such a church is naturally averse to conflict, though this is typically expressed as valuing “Christian unity.”

In tribal churches ‘unity’ is maintained by avoiding contentious situations, so anti-intellectualism wins out (over critical investigation) as does conformity (over diversity).  Further, as anti-intellectualism and conformity become normative, such churches both cultivate and attract dullness and a lack of creativity.

Second, because in a tribal church members already have all the answers (and so have no need of truth-seeking), and because the prominent role of acceptance means that dialogue (and the contentious issues it can raise) is eschewed, the tribe can only approach outsiders in one of two ways.

The typical approach would be charitably to condescend to outsiders: “We have the truth, will you not listen?”  However, tribal churches also use another method: overwhelming outsiders with ‘goodness.’

Now arrogance is understandably problematic, but goodness?  Surely this is just the orientation that one would look for in a church.  What issue could be taken with it?

Take my pastor friend for instance.

My observation is that he exerts so much effort for new and existing church families that he effectively “spends himself” on their behalf and has nothing left for his parent, his siblings, or even close friends.

Now love is the epitome of ostentaciousness, and love  functions according to an “economy” of superabundance: of giving, and giving more.  Yet my friend’s actions deviate from this example.

On the one hand, “superabundance” does not mean that I have to reduce my love for X so that I can give some to Y, just as parents do not love their first child less when the second arrives.  Rather, their love grows so that they love all their children more.

Also, even where the other is incapable of meeting my needs (e.g., infants cannot understand a parent’s need for a break), loving another is based in self-love.  So I take breaks, enjoy my friends and family because I love myself as part of loving another!

On the other hand, selfless exertion has more in common with the freneticism of need: the need to prove (or prove oneself worthy of) something.  It thus makes the other into an instrument—an object—that I use to obtain my real goal, rather than the person being a goal in him/herself.

In such situations a person’s identity does not matter—even the special people that God may put in our paths, like one’s parents, one’s siblings, and one’s closest friends are not prioritised.  Instead, it is their conduciveness to my goal that counts.

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If you walk into my friend’s church, the word you see most is “relationship.”  But if this is the goal, what does it mean that he has no peer relationships (with friends or siblings) and that he stands atop the hierarchy of all the relationships within the church (i.e., he is ‘pastor’ to everyone)?