When Leaders Go Bad

I grew up at a summer camp and for the majority of my life ate all of my summer meals alongside the operations staff members. In an effort to lower expenses and manage food costs, certain meal items were up-cycled from one dish to another. Last night’s taco meat, might become a part of tomorrow’s marinara sauce. Now most of the time this was a great way to keep waste down and not force counselors to have the “starving kids in Africa” talk with their students during each meal. But every now and again, something went dreadfully awry.

Not all of the up-cycled items were served to the kids, some were especially created or held back for the staff. One of those special items was milk.

If you grew up in the 1980s, I am positive you remember the fascination with milk. It seemed that every school cafeteria would offer red or blue milk at a discounted rate of $0.10, or if you were in a position to splurge, you would cozy up to the lunch counter and plop down another nickel to secure yourself a brown mustache. The world of summer camping, taking their cues from the public school system, would serve the campers 2% milk at breakfast and dinner, in slender, one quart containers.

These slender, one quart containers would be collected at the end of the meal and returned to the kitchen. At this point the half empty cartons would be combined to create full slender, one quart containers. We called them re-pours. Pretty straight forward… right? However when you add to the equation a table full of junior high boys… Lets just say things get real, real fast. You might as well have been providing them all of the active ingredients in a Molotov cocktail.

The kitchen staff would regularly find all sorts of things in these repours:
Forks, Chips, Carrots, Hot dogs, you name it. Anything that could fit into the one inch triangular opening was fair game.

Thankfully, the majority of these items were quickly identified and the entire carton was discarded. However, if you ever pulled a “mom isn’t looking, drink straight from the carton” you were playing Russian roulette, lactose style.

The more common (and safer) way to drink from these repours was in the old school amber or red colored, clear(ish) plastic glasses. This way you could locate any large particulate that made it through the initial screening process.

While most of the foreign objects were identifiable to the naked eye, it was generally impossible to spot expired milk. The hidden danger of the repour. It was very easy for one of the kitchen staff members to put expiring milk in a good carton. So when it came time for the staff to drink it, the date on the carton didn’t necessarily have any relationship with it’s contents.

This was Jesus’ main contention with the religious leaders of his day. They looked the part, had the title, were outwardly pious, and yet, the contents of their life had very little in common with their position. Remember the 23rd chapter of Matthew? Jesus pronounced all sorts of “woe” on the religious leaders. He says in verse 25, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.” In verse 27, he “woes” them again by calling them coffins. The outside of the coffin looks nice and shiny, but inside it is full of death. There are actually seven different “woes” he pronounces on these church leaders, as the contents of their carton had no relationship with the position they held. I wonder, at what point did these leaders pass their expiration date?

They were supposed to represent and speak on behalf of God. The things they told people and the way they lived their lives either brought people closer to God or pushed people farther away. This remains the single greatest problem in the church today. When a church leader goes bad, the potential generational effects are devastating.

There is only one way to make sure that this doesn’t happen to us. We need to make sure that the outside label matches the internal contents.

Transparency is not enough. The amber glass can still give the appearance of health and yet be a month old.

Sometimes you don’t know something is bad until you experience it. Haven’t you ever tasted something that had turned and then asked someone else to taste it? “Dude, this milk is so bad… you have to try it!” or “I think this is bad… Does this smell bad to you?” Why do we do that? Why do we need others to validate our experience? It is a little weird, but in order to maintain our inner health, we need to do the same thing. We need to give our lives over to another person, who is also following after Jesus, and allow them to consistently check our expiration date and make sure that we haven’t gone bad.