Too Much of a Good Thing
Most occupations have verification or credentialing standards: adjudicatory bodies, licensing boards, national exams, and other regulatory measures. Those in sales, engineering, law enforcement, civil service, accountancy, physical therapy, or telecommunications, for example, no doubt encounter their fair share of rogue impersonators or harmful, subpar colleagues. Yet checks and balances still exist to help govern those fields and bar individuals engaged in illegal or unethical practices, or both. Ministry, I’m sad to say, is a wholly different world. Systems are in place, but often without much standardization or universal rigor.
Someone can claim to feel called to ministry tomorrow and, without any schooling, training, background check, psychological assessment, or further preparatory screening, be pastoring an existing or newly founded church by 2:35 pm the next day.
The same is not true of many vocations. You can say you want to be a lawyer, airline pilot, or school administrator all you want, but you will face significant obstacles, or even unmovable barriers, if you have not fulfilled the profession’s governing requirements. The pastoral life is very different, a reality I address in the essay “There’s No Union for Ministers” from my book Tell the Truth: Shame the Devil: Stories about the Challenges of Young Ministers.
I find this to be one of ministry’s harshest realities to accept: a bevy of manipulative opportunists and clever cowards are mixed in among those with noble commitments. And even if you are one of the good ones, you’re liable to be misidentified or blindly treated with the same deserved contempt as those doing dirt like Rev. Curtis Black and his megachurch associates in Too Much of a Good Thing by Kimberla Lawson Roby.
The novel likely contains even more unsavory incidents than the previous installment in the series, but as I tell my graduate students, “Hey, we’re all fully grown adults here!” Being crass or overly graphic for shock value is one thing—which I do not believe Roby does. However, she just honestly depicts behavior that we already know, or should know, at times occurs when adults reject caution, moral guardrails, and the imperatives of holiness. If the material comes across as sleazy, I think that’s only because the conduct associated with Rev. Black is exactly that. Although it is common, it is nonsense to criticize the messenger.
Every occupational context has its own version of Curtis Black wreaking havoc. Plenty of bad things happen behind restaurant counters, through hidden spreadsheets and secret accounts, in office cubicles after hours (think of that scene from the 1991 film Jungle Fever involving the first rendezvous of the characters played by Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra)—and on work trips that are about pleasure, not business. However, we, rightly so, expect the visible body of Christ to uphold not only a different, but a higher standard.
“Curtis is good at what he does. He’s a manipulator, and he’s used to getting what he wants whenever he wants it,” Black’s ex-wife Tanya tells his current wife (for now), Mariah, when she asks for more clarity about his past. It is not how things should be—and most pastors are not living this way—but some clergy maintain a dogged loyalty to misconduct. They see nothing wrong with it. Godly pastors, however, are not tyrants, gigolos, or thieves. That’s the brass tacks of it.
In a 2007 interview, the legendary pastor-scholar Gardner C. Taylor, who led Concord Baptist Church of Christ for 42 years, observed: “I think one of the problems of ministry is vanity…escaping that awful temptation to push the Lord Christ out of center in his church; which won’t work.”
We all have so far to go and so much to do.