I gave up preaching

 Last moth, August, I finished a sermon on Sunday and began to worry about my son. He is lost in his school activities going from bad to worse in his test scores. I am quite sure that just few people listen to my sermons. Anyway, the Lord reigns and He can touch the heart of anyone He wants without my help. I was given just the privilege to participate in spreading the gospel, however, I began to question: "what is more related to love - preach or help my son?". 

I concluded that the correct answer is "help my son". Basically, I don't see this church as a church that anymore fits my family needs and I prioritize my family over the church. I see my own family as the main church and the local church we attend as a "second church". There are many problems in our local church:

• Our little church is diminishing and we practically have no friends there.
• The pastor became very old and another pastor took charge. 
• The new pastor pretends to be preaching the Word. He uses the pulpit to defend the former church leaders who scandalized a lot of people by requesting a great compromise (for instance, taking all possessions of some people) with the church despite committing immoralities. As he can't openly talk about it, he uses the Bible urging the congregation to forgive one another's sins. For me, he is saying: forgive these leaders that weren't sincere enough to repent before the congregation. Therefore, his message is not clean. 
• The new pastor looks to me as a great threat to the congregation. He says that my message is condemnatory instead of loving. He can't see that I am preaching to lead people to Christ, but instead, he thinks that I am pointing the problems instead of pointing to the solution. So, in his view, my message brings despair and not salvation. Obviously, I see the opposite about myself. I believe that the Word set me free and it can set anyone free not only from the consequence of sin - the death - but also from the power of sin over the believer. So, for me, it is imperative that the preacher loves the Word and submits to it. If the Word condemns, the preacher must follow it. Anyone who read the Bible knows that there is no lack of condemnation there.
• The new pastor says that he abandoned the world, his company, to support the church that now he is the leader. It seems to me that he denies reality: he won't accept any derogatory commentary about his (our) church because he can't accept that he may have committed a big mistake in his life. For instance: when I told him that our little church is the Titanic leading to the iceberg, it sounded him as a curse. So, in his view, I was some kind of evil man because I said a simple observation.
• What is craziness? It is some disparity between reality (the church is fading, dying - due to lack of vision, of the Word) and a dream (the church will pass by the valley of death but will not die; by opposite, it will flourish despite whatever is happening). A church whose leader can't see reality is far from healthy (because the Lord is not so much concerned about the survival of a local church, in my opinion). It reminds me the prophet Jeremiah foreseeing the fall of Jerusalem when false prophets were foreseeing whatever pleases the king. The lack of seeing the reality yields lunatics due to the disparity between what the Bible says and how it is applied. I want my family in a healthy church.
• Therefore, it is better to help my son than preach in this church. Not only that, but it is better to leave this church and search for some healthier one.

I suppose that you want a healthy school, a healthy place to work, etc. but in some circumstances, you must get along with an unhealthy place. 

When speaking about church we have the following:

• in general, no one is so committed to a church that can't depart from it because, a church requires its members to sacrifice time and money to it (a percentage of your income, not all your wealth). So, in general, a church takes resources from its members, which makes each member not financially dependent of the church, unless, obviously, the member is the one who takes resources from the church. It happens with a pastor who abandoned everything to conduct it. In my case, I am fortunate that I am not a pastor, and I am not paid to preach. By opposite, I pay to preach because I contribute financially with the church. So in my case, I can go away, financially speaking.
•  if the message of a church is not focused on the Bible but instead, it is focused on the organization, flee from it because it may enslave you psychologically. I have seen churches that try to keep their members by menacing their members (in the name of the Lord). Something like: "if you leave, the Lord will deal with your unfaithfulness". This kind of church is unhealthy and should be avoided because you may venerate people (as if they are gods that really the power to bless you and curse you) and not the Lord (who really has the power).
• the Bible brings the good news: a new life in Jesus. If the church don't urge its members in becoming more and more like Jesus, flee from it: it doesn't deserve your time and money.

So, we may tolerate some unhealthy places depending on how we need them, but I am quite sure that we don't need to tolerate an unhealthy church. If your church doesn't preach the gospel as it is, search one which does. You may say: "You fool! There is no such thing as preaching the World as it is, because we all have some deficiencies in our theology". Ok! I agree, but some churches do have a better theology than others, besides, some preachers are more reverent in learning from the Bible than others. A healthy church is the one who listens to what the Lord says and not one that exalts a preacher or an organization above the Lord. 

If you can't locate a healthy church easily, at least, nowadays, you may listen to good preachers such as R. C. Sproul, John MacArthur and Tim Keller. I suppose it is better just to pray, read the Bible and listen to these teachers than to be attached to an unhealthy church. I am quite sure: there is no need to be connected to an unhealthy church nowadays. Another observation: you may think of your family as your main church and you (the man) as the priest.

We are called to love the Lord and to love others. Love means service and sacrifice. Even though, I am leaving this church; in many ways I pity this new pastor. He seems to me obstinate in defending the organization due to familiar ties, and in doing so, I think that he is harming himself and perhaps his family. I think that he really sees that the Lord must keep our little church alive, because the church is of the Lord. He also believes, that despite a lot of sins from former leaders, these sins that happened decades ago must be quietly forgotten or forgiven by the nowadays members. I make no presumption: the Lord may rise and destroy whatever church He wishes. Could be there any greater church than the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem? The Lord made Jerusalem the city where all jews should join, three times a year. Yet, everybody knows what happened to the Temple in 70dC. So, I can't believe that the Lord must keep  any local church alive.

The preacher must love his congregation and deal with its imperfections. I am not saying that a healthy church is a sinless church because I really don't believe on it. I am saying that a healthy church is guided by the Word, otherwise, it will easily become a club devoted to prestige their leaders and not Jesus. The problem is that all (real or pseudo) christian churches declare they are following the Word. So, a good indicative is to pay attention how the Bible is read: to impose heavy burdens on the congregation or to set them free by the Truth? Despite many problems in this little church, I really tried to stay there saying to myself that I was some kind of light in the darkness; so it was imperative that I should preach there once a month. However, I couldn't see any difference in the congregation. Funny that in Romans 2, Paul says: "9 if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, 20 an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth— 21 you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? ". 

When I read it, it seemed that the Lord was saying that He would take care of the church. I don't need to see myself as THE (read "a" in Romans NIV) light for those who are in dark.