A July 30, 2024, article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram caught my attention. It is titled “Ex-TCU football player who worked at Gateway church has a lot to say about Robert Morris.” See here.
The ex-football player is Kam Hunt. I was moved by his comments.
He said:
Gateway…had a marketing department. That’s part of the problem…When you have a business, other practices get entered into the business of the church. I am not anti-marketing, but God is not business…
Pastors are not meant to be celebrities. They are not meant to be on the throne that God is supposed to be on. If you are a Christian, the celebrity is Jesus Christ. Your celebrity is not the person talking about the Person you should be worshipping. Don’t worship the middleman.
It is not unusual for big churches to have big problems. The article I cited is immediately followed by an article from the Austin American-Statesman titled “A list of Texas pastors who resigned in 2024 after accusations of misconduct.”
The list, along with short explanations, is shocking. In just the first seven months of 2024, the following pastors, all in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, have resigned due to moral failure: Robert Morris (Gateway Church, Dallas), Luke Cunningham, “charged with sexual assault of child” (former youth pastor in Lubbock, most recently with Lakeside Baptist Church in Granbury before he was fired due to these allegations), Robert Goines, “charged with sexual assault” (Koinonia Church, Arlington), Tony Cammarota of Stonebriar Church in Frisco, “let go due to ‘moral failure,’” Tony Evans of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas “resigns over unnamed sin,” and Josiah Anthony of Cross Timbers Church in Argyle “resigns over ‘inappropriate and hurtful’ conduct.”
Recently I was talking with Dix Winston, who is involved in helping plant house churches worldwide. He said that you can’t fulfill all the “one another” commands in a church much larger than fifty people. Fifty people? I think he is right. If all churches had under a hundred people, we’d have much better accountability and fellowship.
Megachurches often have mega problems.
I was with Zane Hodges for over a decade (starting in 1992) at a small, mainly Hispanic church in Dallas. The average Sunday attendance was around thirty people, counting the children. Zane was there for about fifty years. I learned that in the early years, he would often preach to only one audience member. Rarely in those years was the attendance over ten.
I sometimes wondered, Why isn’t Zane pastoring a church of a thousand? He gives such wonderful messages. He shepherds the flock.
I have now been in lots of small churches over the years and have found that it’s good to serve in a small church. Small churches need you, whereas big churches don’t.
Had Zane sought out a large church to pastor, he would likely have been called upon to compromise his teaching in order to keep the attendance going. He’d have had to follow directions from the marketing people and consultants. But Zane would never have comprised his teaching or given in to ideas not found in Scripture. He might have been hired by a big church. But he would not have been able to stay since he would not have been willing to compromise.
Those who pastor large churches face many pressures and temptations. As the articles I’ve cited show, pastoring a large church may be very dangerous to one’s spiritual health as well as to the spiritual health of the congregation. When a pastor falls, the congregation suffers.
