Hello,
Over the past few months, really more like 8 months now I have had a growing bitterness toward one of pastors. There is two reasons for this. First is the community group he leads, the second is over a discipleship/accountability group he used to lead that had me in it.
The community group is a group geared specifically for young adults, meaning those in college and early adulthood. You wont find many if any young adults in any of the other community groups. The group started last year and it consisted of me, my pastor, 2 other guys, and 7 girls. The pastor started the group with the strict plan of having it follow the discovery bible study questions They basically look like this:
We followed this structure pretty religiously, and it worked pretty successfully. We went through Ephesians with and our numbers grew all the way to 28 people, and this was during covid last summer, and consisted of mostly people who were new to faith, so the fact that we achieved that was pretty amazing. We were the biggest community group in the church. Eventually my pastor included the question, "Initial observations" before any of the others. This acted as a good kind of warmup to the passage before jumping in, but overtime it became more and more of the study. Eventually it got to the point where we were not longer doing any of the actual questions, just going through initial observations for the entirety of the study.
Now it is at the point where they don't even discuss the passage they read. They'll read the passage and it will just kind of go all over the place and not even have anything to do with the passage. I cannot even describe how it goes because it is mostly just rambling and touching a million things at this point. I find it very unhelpful and hard to follow, I cannot even contribute because every person that says something, changes the entire direction of the study. I cannot see how this style would be beneficial to someone new to the faith and to scripture, or even someone who is older and wants depth like me.
I talked about these issues I was having with the other guys that were going, to see if they shared my frustrations, and they did. Three of us met with the pastor privately and laid it out. We told him how it was extremely hard to follow and we felt like we were not getting anything out of it, and that we wished he would go back to the discovery bible study structure, or at least some kind of structure. He crossed his arms and pouted and said "We'll everyone else likes it, so that's a YOU problem." I pointed out to him that there were several others who were not there that felt the same way, but we left that meeting with no real changes made.
After that it continued to decline. The group became mostly women. Sometimes there would be a guy come and visit, but he would usually only come once or twice. There was one guy who slept through it every week, and another that stopped going all together. This made the group more of a women's group that was lead by a male pastor. Sometimes the studies would become therapy sessions where one girl would talk about some life problem for a large part of the study, which has its place but just does not work when you have 20+ people there. Most people I talk to admit the study sucks and only go for the fellowship and smaller group prayer which are before the study.
At one point he said something in a study that really upset my girlfriend, and they had a meeting, and she wanted me there for support. To be honest, I think she was just being over emotional and took something he said out of context, but she shared the same frustrations as me and the issue with having no structure came up again. This time he told us that we should just not go to the bible study. He said that he had tried to add structure but it just did not work because people rejected. I do not recall him ever trying to reimplement the structure. It felt like a complete slap in the face. I was his right hand guy in a sense. When he was not able to lead, I would take over. I was older in the faith than almost everyone else who attended, and he threw my advice, thoughts and frustrations, right out the window. It was especially frustrating because most of the people that go do not go to church and so if I want to make friends my age, and meet people who visit, it has to be through that group, and I can't go. It has made me quite lonely as the guys who were with me in that group ended up moving away, which leaves me as one of the only single young adult guys at the church.
As far as the discipleship group goes, we had a group that he lead, with me and two other guys. We were going through the book, "discipleship essentials" by Greg Ogden, and we each had to go through the chapter each week and answer the questions ahead of time. This whole idea was our pastor's. Two weeks in, he lost his book and stopped doing the questions. He said he did not need to worry about it because he already knew everything.
We were supposed to do one chapter per week, but since our leader was not doing the chapters it became easier to just do accountability and prayer. Eventually it just stopped, he did not want to do it anymore because he was busy. I texted our group and asked if there was a time that would work better and he said that he was busy 24/7 which I don't know how is possible. Our group was all of the guys and there were no mixed groups, so I can't just join another. We only ended up doing 9 chapters out of 30 in the book.
I have this anger and bitterness against him that I just cannot seem to get over, and I know it is sinful and wrong to have and it makes me guilty of murder. I don't want it in my life. But every time i see him or hear of another discipleship group going super well I get heated.
I guess I just need prayer and advice to deal with this. Should I go to him again? Or Should I keep trying to push the anger I have down and get over it like some others I have talked to said? I don't know. Thanks in advance for any replies or prayers.
Grace and peace
Over the past few months, really more like 8 months now I have had a growing bitterness toward one of pastors. There is two reasons for this. First is the community group he leads, the second is over a discipleship/accountability group he used to lead that had me in it.
The community group is a group geared specifically for young adults, meaning those in college and early adulthood. You wont find many if any young adults in any of the other community groups. The group started last year and it consisted of me, my pastor, 2 other guys, and 7 girls. The pastor started the group with the strict plan of having it follow the discovery bible study questions They basically look like this:
We followed this structure pretty religiously, and it worked pretty successfully. We went through Ephesians with and our numbers grew all the way to 28 people, and this was during covid last summer, and consisted of mostly people who were new to faith, so the fact that we achieved that was pretty amazing. We were the biggest community group in the church. Eventually my pastor included the question, "Initial observations" before any of the others. This acted as a good kind of warmup to the passage before jumping in, but overtime it became more and more of the study. Eventually it got to the point where we were not longer doing any of the actual questions, just going through initial observations for the entirety of the study.
Now it is at the point where they don't even discuss the passage they read. They'll read the passage and it will just kind of go all over the place and not even have anything to do with the passage. I cannot even describe how it goes because it is mostly just rambling and touching a million things at this point. I find it very unhelpful and hard to follow, I cannot even contribute because every person that says something, changes the entire direction of the study. I cannot see how this style would be beneficial to someone new to the faith and to scripture, or even someone who is older and wants depth like me.
I talked about these issues I was having with the other guys that were going, to see if they shared my frustrations, and they did. Three of us met with the pastor privately and laid it out. We told him how it was extremely hard to follow and we felt like we were not getting anything out of it, and that we wished he would go back to the discovery bible study structure, or at least some kind of structure. He crossed his arms and pouted and said "We'll everyone else likes it, so that's a YOU problem." I pointed out to him that there were several others who were not there that felt the same way, but we left that meeting with no real changes made.
After that it continued to decline. The group became mostly women. Sometimes there would be a guy come and visit, but he would usually only come once or twice. There was one guy who slept through it every week, and another that stopped going all together. This made the group more of a women's group that was lead by a male pastor. Sometimes the studies would become therapy sessions where one girl would talk about some life problem for a large part of the study, which has its place but just does not work when you have 20+ people there. Most people I talk to admit the study sucks and only go for the fellowship and smaller group prayer which are before the study.
At one point he said something in a study that really upset my girlfriend, and they had a meeting, and she wanted me there for support. To be honest, I think she was just being over emotional and took something he said out of context, but she shared the same frustrations as me and the issue with having no structure came up again. This time he told us that we should just not go to the bible study. He said that he had tried to add structure but it just did not work because people rejected. I do not recall him ever trying to reimplement the structure. It felt like a complete slap in the face. I was his right hand guy in a sense. When he was not able to lead, I would take over. I was older in the faith than almost everyone else who attended, and he threw my advice, thoughts and frustrations, right out the window. It was especially frustrating because most of the people that go do not go to church and so if I want to make friends my age, and meet people who visit, it has to be through that group, and I can't go. It has made me quite lonely as the guys who were with me in that group ended up moving away, which leaves me as one of the only single young adult guys at the church.
As far as the discipleship group goes, we had a group that he lead, with me and two other guys. We were going through the book, "discipleship essentials" by Greg Ogden, and we each had to go through the chapter each week and answer the questions ahead of time. This whole idea was our pastor's. Two weeks in, he lost his book and stopped doing the questions. He said he did not need to worry about it because he already knew everything.
We were supposed to do one chapter per week, but since our leader was not doing the chapters it became easier to just do accountability and prayer. Eventually it just stopped, he did not want to do it anymore because he was busy. I texted our group and asked if there was a time that would work better and he said that he was busy 24/7 which I don't know how is possible. Our group was all of the guys and there were no mixed groups, so I can't just join another. We only ended up doing 9 chapters out of 30 in the book.
I have this anger and bitterness against him that I just cannot seem to get over, and I know it is sinful and wrong to have and it makes me guilty of murder. I don't want it in my life. But every time i see him or hear of another discipleship group going super well I get heated.
I guess I just need prayer and advice to deal with this. Should I go to him again? Or Should I keep trying to push the anger I have down and get over it like some others I have talked to said? I don't know. Thanks in advance for any replies or prayers.
Grace and peace
