No More Lies

The one thing that I think that followers want and expect from their leader is honesty. The truth and nothing but the truth. They want transparency. They want to see our humanity. They want to know that we sometimes struggle with the same things that they struggle with. Things such as occasional lapses of faith where we give in to doubt, moments of discouragement, and times of questioning God.

The problem with this is that we as leaders many times feel that we have to always look good and put up a positive front. We never want to show any weakness. We walk around with a mask on so that no one sees the real us or really know who we are. We do this with those that we lead, the audiences we speak to, and even to each other as leaders. If there is one place we should be able to be honest is with other leaders who understand the challenges of leadership and what each of us deals with as leaders. Yet, we still wear the mask of untruthfulness.

This quest for positive presentation has in my opinion has become outright lying. This became clear to me a few years back when a pastor friend called me on a Monday morning just to chat. As I normally I do when talking to a pastor on Sunday evening or Monday morning, I asked him, “How did service go yesterday.” He answered, “Great, service was really great. It was off the chain. God moved greatly.” Then he asked me, “How was your Sunday service?” I replied, “It was terrible. The crowd was off. The people were dead like they didn’t want to be there. I was struggling in my message. At one point, I wanted to stop in the middle of my sermon and say let’s take the offering and go home and come back next week and try it again. I felt like a failure. I was almost depressed. So our Sunday service was horrible.”

After I was finished with my reply, he said to me, “Now that you put it like that mine was the same. Our service was not good either.” To which I replied, “Why did you lie? Why did you not tell the truth from the beginning?” He said, “That is what all pastors say about their services. Every time I talk to one he is telling me how great things are going so I decided to do the same. You are the first guy that ever told the truth. I feel relieved. You have set me free. I thought that I was the only one who had bad services from time to time.”

I can relate to my pastor friend’s predicament. We always want to look good and show that we are doing well. Especially when everyone you meet is talking about how well their church and ministry is going and then you look at the turmoil you are dealing with. It makes you feel like the lone ranger because it seems that everyone else is doing great and having great services and you are not. So the tendency is to lie about your situation just like my pastor friend did to me.

I use to do the same thing he did until I came to the realization one day that guys were lying to me. In a fallen world dealing with fallen people, things don’t always go well. It is the fallen nature. Church services, although done in the name of the Lord don’t always go well. The reason why is that whereas God is perfect and infallible we are not perfect and very fallen. Therefore, I was not alone in the sometimes it didn’t go well category. The next thing I did was to get off of the lying bandwagon. Along the way, I have helped a few more pastors start telling the truth and they have found so much freedom because they don’t have to pretend and wear the mask anymore.

How about you? Will you join us? I’m offering you a ground floor opportunity to join the “No More Lies Movement.” Help us set other leaders free. We could us a good leader like you. We are not many. It’s only a few of us, but remember that every great move of God started with a remnant. Come on leaders, be a part of the remnant and do something great; start telling the truth.

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