A Pastor’s Experience in the Trenches

Whenever I review a book that I’ve stopped reading, for whatever reason, I feel the urge to explain why I feel it’s important to share my opinions. I don’t always start this way, but I learned from an excellent book on reading by Tony Rienke (Lit!) that it’s useless for a reader to force himself to finish a book he doesn’t like, so long as he gives it at least “100 pages minus his age.” For me at present, that means I need to read at least 63 pages of a book before I can judge whether I should complete it or not (and for anyone 100 years or older, that also means they’ve earned the right to judge a book by its cover).

Why I Couldn’t Continue

I made it 77 pages into this book, but had to finally put it down when, in the midst of a book on godly leadership, Pastor Scudder shares how would call people “idiots” from the pulpit. That little anecdote was the clincher for me, after I’d already jotted down a whole list of cringe-worthy lines, a few of which I’ll share shortly. I might get emotional in this review, so reader beware.

I really don’t want to criticize a pastor, but I do feel it’s important to share with potential readers of this book that Pastor Scudder, while from the Baptist tradition, is not cut from the same cloth as other Baptist pastors. He seems to come from the old Fundamentalist school—the Hyles-Anderson type—where leaders who ascend that holy pillar of righteousness have earned the right of power and will wield their authority as they see fit…that is, until they fall from their glorious heights (which seems to happen a lot). It’s a dangerous (and in my opinion, unbiblical) school of thought that has embittered many a Christian over the years and has all but destroyed the concept of “Fundamental Baptist,” for it keeps the pastor standing high and mighty on a pedestal rather than stooped on the floor washing his congregation’s feet (metaphorically speaking): it keeps him on the verge of being a whitewashed tomb full of dead men’s bones.

I was raised in an Independent Fundamental Baptist pastor’s home, and throughout his life, my dad has led both his family and his churches with integrity, sacrifice, and solid Bible teaching. He’s no megalomaniac. He’s no weirdo. And when he’s riding his Harley-Davidson, you probably wouldn’t be able to pick him out of the crowd as a Fundamentalist…because again: he’s not a weirdo. He’s just a solid Christian man who developed his standards from the Word and has faithfully kept those standards without forcing them on others. That’s a true Fundamentalist. If I’ve said here before, forgive me, but the best thing about my parents is their consistency in their Christian walk, even though I don’t agree with them in everything.

Authoritarian Leadership

Pastor Scudder, on the other hand, displays in this book a very authoritarian model of leadership which should never be the focus of a book on pastoral leadership! I recently did a heavy study into the allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct in Fundamental Baptist churches in the U.S., and it’s a disheartening abyss of pain and suffering most often empowered by autocratic leadership such as what’s espoused here. Please understand, this is in no way an accusation of any such misconduct at Quentin Road Baptist Church which Pastor Scudder founded, but it is a declaration of how the autocratic leadership which Pastor Scudder models in this book can lead Fundamentalist pastors into thinking that they’re above the law, that their members are their subjects, and that their apparent greatness will eventually outweigh any deviant flaws they might secretly coddle.

What young pastors or Christian leaders need more than anything (besides doctrine and theology) is training in servanthood, not a book describing how to be the Big Man on Campus, which is totally the feeling one gets from reading this book. I’ll just share a few lines from the book that deal with Scudder’s apparent concept of leadership, his failure to grasp and teach biblical leadership, and his overemphasis on pastoral sin while lacking any concept of restoration.

First, Pastor Scudder writes that “a pastor is not a dictator, but he is a leader” (43). Great to have the slight distinction, but does that initial sentence even need the word “but”? Just the allowance for the contrast suggests, “Lots of what I’m saying probably sounds like the pastor’s a dictator, but….” and that’s exactly how the book feels.

Pastor Scudder also struggles, it seems, with the application of biblical leadership. He tells, for example, how healing it can be to call out members’ sins from the pulpit (54). Where’s that in the Bible? Certainly not Matthew 18, and I’d argue not even in 1Corinthians 5. Publicly shaming people into repentance without first confronting them personally is the opposite of Christian love.

When discussing pastoral qualifications from 1Timothy 3, he also describes what his culture has come to accept as pastoral qualifications, not what the Bible actually says: “He must not drink alcohol” and “he does not have to have an amazing presence or a high level of fitness” (29). Really? Does Paul actually say any of this? On the one hand, Scudder draws his line of personal standards further afield than even God commanded (which is fine), but then also makes it a rule for everyone else (a classic Pharisaical/Fundamentalist quality). On the other hand, he excuses from the silence of Scripture the obesity of many pastors, suggesting that, since God doesn’t say they have to be thin, they don’t have to care too highly for their physical fitness. What other pastor do you know adds “don’t worry about your weight” as a qualification of leadership?

Sin and Repentance

Pastor Scudder also writes often in these early pages of other pastors, sometimes even his own mentors, who “blew it”, who “fell”, or who “sinned” (65), thereby destroying their churches and ministries. So many ministries in his slice of Christianity, it seems, have been destroyed because of pastoral sin, most often of a sexual nature. Now, I fully understand that this can be common: sexual sin can and does destroy ministries! What I can’t understand, though, is how it happened so often in his networks, when it has almost never happened in my own.

Not all Fundamental Baptists are the same! Even if such a scandal were to take place within my own church network, we would not treat it as coldly as Scudder describes in his writings. He might as well have written: “Well, it happens. Repentance is impossible.” He writes of these former pastors as lost causes, men who are now useless for the Lord, which can only mean that these men were never God’s in the first place. If repentance and at least a modicum of restoration is out of the question, then how could these men have been such godly leaders and mentors in the first place? What kind of leaders have this school of thought been raising?

Sin happens, and all pastors are sinners. I totally get that. But as noted above, sexual sin is a deviance that’s been secretly coddled for years, and for a pastor to let that grow in his heart and then act on it (for who knows how long, until he finally gets caught) means he’s been deceptive, hypocritical, fake, and all those other things long before he ever “falls.” The pastors I know are men who uphold each other, who are honest with each other, who keep each other accountable, and who can recognize a wolf within their midst. Only those autocratic pastors who have no equal, who treat their wives as mere helpmeets and not partners, who treat their members are subjects, who are accountable to no one but God—those are the pastors from whom Scudder has learned his leadership techniques, these are the pastors to whom he’s writing, and these are the pastors who should NEVER be allowed to shepherd a church.

Conclusion

This book should never have been written as it was. As a biography, no one can argue with the man’s experiences “in the trenches.” But as a how-to book on pastoral leadership, it’s flawed at best and dangerous at worst. I simply can’t recommend it.

©2020 E.T.