The Church Answers Podcast
“The Day the Church Died" How Moral Failure Affects the Future of Churches - An Interview with Kevin Mills
Welcome to the Church Answers Podcast presented by Chaney & Associates. Chaney & Associates are the accounting firm for the Church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local Church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here is the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. If you did not listen to the previous podcast of this, if you're a faithful listener of Church Answers Podcast, you know that we do three podcasts a week, very brief. Sometimes we'll cover one issue per each of those. Sometimes we'll spread it out over all three of them for a week. If you did not, here are see the first one you need to go back and get introductory material, because we started talking about the book that Kevin Mills has written the day the Church died. And you need to hear the background of that. So I'm Tom Rayner, I'm with my co-host, Jess Rayner. And Kevin Mills is our guest and the author of a book called "The Day the Church died." It's a fictional book, but it is a book that has a lot of truth in it. And so you need to get it, you can see it in the show notes, you can link right on it, and we're going to encourage you to get that book. And I quite frankly think it would be a great study book for some groups in churches as well. So I don't always recommend that for fiction books, but this one has a lot of information that you can just go and take your word, take the Bible, and begin to study it. So order several figure churches as well. And we are always grateful to Chaney and Associates every time I mention them. I say they are the accounting firm for the Church. They're cloud-based, they got over 1,100 churches. My friend Steve Chaney out in California is indeed a good friend. And I love what they're doing for the Church. We love working with organizations that love the Church. And that's how we do things. So Jess, welcome back as co-host. - Thank you. It's great to be here. - Welcome back as our interviewee, particularly with Gratitude for the book you wrote, "The Day the Church Died." So it is fiction. And what kind of fiction did you say to call it? Kevin, let's try to remember what you said. - Yes, speculative fiction is, I believe, the category. So it's speculating based on current trends, what the future could be like. - Well, it's scary because there's so much truth and foundation in it from which you get your projections for which you write the book. I want to do one aspect of this. There has been a lot in true life. And then it is noted in your book, "moral failures." Do you see that as a major reason, a reason? How do you play that into why churches are doing poorly as you indicated in the first time? So talk to us about this issue of moral failures. - Yeah, so if your listeners listened to the last episode, I talked about the fact that there are 12 reasons listed in the book, that the Church dies. And one of those reasons is moral failures among pastors, among ministers and churches. And I don't know that I would say, I believe this is the number one reason for the decline of churches and Christians in America. But I had no problem putting it in the book as one of the reasons. And we can all think of stories. There have been a number of high-profile pastors who have had moral failures recently. We know what's happening out there. And so I just had no issue putting that in as a reason. I will say, however, I don't think that the high-profile pastors falling are really the main reason for the death of the Church. I think it's the moral failures among the patchers of the average churches. So my church, Justice Church, Sam's Church. That in the book is really the main reason that these churches end up struggling and declining and dying. In fact, I do not know of a single case. There may be one out there of a church where the pastors had a moral failure and five years later that church is thriving. There may be some stories about that, but I don't know of them. And I probably need to take a moment just to find moral failure. Most often when we say that, we're talking about an extramarital affair. There are a few cases where it's stealing from the church, maybe even fewer where it's something like substance abuse. Most often it is some kind of extramarital affair that's involved. Passers aren't perfect. They don't need to be expected to be perfect. However, we're talking about serious moral issues here. And I certainly think it's contributed to the decline of the church. And one of the reasons is when that happens in a church, that becomes the sole focus of the church. Not worship, missions, evangelism, reaching the next generation. All of that goes out the window and the church focuses on what do we do now? Our pastors have this moral failure. So I would add to that in the moral failure. Sometimes pastors are involved in it and sometimes they're not, is sexual abuse, particularly children. But sexual affairs of pastors, not only with other people, but sometimes with younger ladies in the church as well. So we have seen the sex abuse issue become not always younger ladies. So let me just say ladies in the church. We have seen that become pervasive as well. So you had all that up and it's a bad testimony for the church. And again, we're talking, we're talking to Kevin Mills about the day the church died, a fictional book that is fascinating. You need to get it. You just need to go get it. Go to the show notes, click on the link or just go to a place like Amazon and put in the day the church died. And you'll get that book, but it's, it's sobering. It's just sobering to read it. Yes, yeah, sobering. That's, that's exactly what was on the forefront of my mind. And I think for the longest time, the idea of, of this aspect of moral failures within the church, especially within the leaders. I have felt that as a church leader when I, when I see it happening in other churches, in fact, the conversations I've had with my leadership team over the years has been, oh my goodness, you all hear about this. And it's that sobering reality of it happening. What I've seen even in just the past year, and you want to talk about speculative and what can be with the church. What I'm starting to see is it affect my members and my church. When they hear about other pastors, even if they're not local, if the high profile, no normative sized church, whatever it is. How do you think the members of churches as this has become, sadly, become a more frequent topic of conversation? How do you think that's affecting church members? And how do you think it will affect church members in the years to come? Yeah, it certainly affects them. I don't think in our church, when they read or hear about a high profile pastor in Dallas or Atlanta or Nashville or Chicago that has a moral failure, I think they talk about it for a moment. I do not think it has a major effect on them. However, if I had a moral failure, it would have a major effect on them. Now, again, I think there are sometimes expectations of pastors that are unreasonable. We are not perfect. I was on a mission team with church members in Guatemala last week and I got food poisoning. And it was the worst case I'd ever had in my life. And Paul says to do everything without grumbling complaining, and I did not live that out. My church members saw that. They saw me at a weak moment. I'm not talking about expecting your pastor to be perfect all the time. However, that is much different than having an affair or stealing $25,000 from the church. And if I did something like that, it would severely affect our church members. Now, just to your point, what you mentioned about all these news reports. What effect I think it does have is on non Christians. It gives them one more reason, one more excuse to not go to church. It increases their level of cynicism. See, all Christians are just hypocrites. And they read this story and they say, yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to try church because look, you know, here's what Christians are like. Hmm. Yeah. Now, I definitely, it adds that other layer to the world, to non Christians as well. So the big, the big looming question, I think, if, if I'm listening to this podcast going. What do we do to combat this one? You know, it's, it's kind of hard to say because it's, it is individualized, you know, maybe, maybe on a bicycle. What can a church start to do to help their pastor or what can pastors do for themselves? Just maybe, maybe not see this speculative fiction reality. If I could say that come, come true. Yeah, and you, in your question, what you said was exactly right. There's not a one size fit to all the individual stories that we've heard are individual stories and, and, but certainly there are some general principles that pastors can put in place that churches can put in place. You know, things like the Billy Graham rule, certain guardrails that you can put up. I mean, I, and the Billy Graham really needs to be expanded to the digital world and I think that's where we're seeing a lot of issues right now. And so if, if I text a female who is not my wife, most, most of the time, my wife is included on that text or the spouse of that female, the husband is included on that text. I do not direct message or Facebook message. But if I did, I would make sure that my wife had access to all of that. My wife has access to check my text. Just to make sure that there are certain boundaries in place, but I think you and I know that even with those boundaries in place. If, if we want to, we can get around them. And so it's a heart issue that we need to be careful to make sure that we are guarding our heart. One of the prayers that I pray almost every day is Lord help me to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ do not let my mind go down that trail. And, and ultimately, if we will guard our hearts and make sure we're doing those things, then it will protect us from a lot of pain, which is probably the last, the last thing that we as pastors need to do is just to consider the damage that will be done. If we go down that path to our families, to our children, into our church as well. So we are listening and viewing with Kevin Mills hits about his book the day the church died it's a fictional account of so many things that feel true that are true that are real. And of course the moral failure issue was one of those and that's why we highlighted it in this podcast and if you're not familiar with the Billy Graham rule the Billy Graham rule is simply this. I am not going to be alone with someone of the opposite sex. I mean that's the essence of it where there's a car is in a conference room hotel whatever the case obviously hotel but whatever the case may be. And we do know that the late Billy Graham was many tried a few times they tried to entrap him in such positions and it did not work because he had, he was determined that it would not work. And you, your whole idea of bringing this up in the digital world is a good fast forward of this year 2024 and on about not having those types of relationships in a digital sense, just like we don't have them in an in person sense. Well, this has been heavy. First, the first episode go back and listen to it. Watch it. First episode was about the book itself how the church, the day the church that the fictional account that has so much truth in it. The book so go back to listen to episode one of that is not episode one but the first time that we recorded this and then go back and review what we've done in this particular episode about the moral issues. We're going to go a little bit lighter in the next episode that we have downloaded we're going to talk about how much fun did you have writing a fiction book was it. It's not fiction before but this was his first fiction. We have a number of people who listened to this podcast or watch it on YouTube that are authors or would like to be authors. And we'd like to hear from you on this fiction book that you wrote so thank you for being a part of the church answers podcast. Kevin, thank you for being here and glad you're going to be here for one more. Now we'll we'll be we'll be back we're going to talk about writing a writing a fiction book and what is until there. Once again we thank chain and associates for their sponsorship. We thank you, the listener, our viewer at YouTube or listener's favorite podcasting up for being a part of this audience this tribe this family continue to listen because we got this whole idea writing a fiction book coming up next. We'll see you in the next podcast. You have been listening to the church answers podcast presented by Chaney and associates. Chaney and associates are the accounting firm for the church. You need to focus on ministry. Chaney will focus on finances. Also please subscribe and give a review to the church answers podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)