Ten Ways You Know You are Looking at a Bad Church.

Disclaimer: all of these things are true in some form or fashion.

The church calls you to come and preach, deliberates for two months, and then give you four days to pack and move.

Upon your first business meeting, you find that the vote to call you was actually twelve to nine.

Your job description includes mowing the lawn.

The offering plate repeatedly contains slot machine tokens.

Members of the church all have keys to the building, and the parsonage.

Classrooms were painted twenty years ago, and still are not finished.

You still don’t have a website.

The former pastor has left you several sheets of fine linen resume paper.

Copies of Watchtower magazine are in the church library.

Upon finally receiving a copy of the bylaws and constitution you realize that it is the twelfth copy from an old mimeograph.

Your church treasurer’s grandson has slot machine tokens.

You throw away copies of Watchtower magazine, only to find them reappear on the library shelf. Your only consolation is that no one reads.

You return from a mission trip to Mexico and a matriarch of the church asks “Pastor, were there many foreigners there?”

The former pastor still attends services.

The financial secretary counts the offering at home.

The good old days the members refer to were the days of the former pastor.

The baptistery is rusted out.

A staff/volunteer keeps threatening to leave, and never does.

Search committee personnel swear they will support you but all leave in the first six months.

Your best friends are outside the church.

You approach business meetings wondering if you will be voted off or if you still have the immunity idol.

Classroom blackboards are consistently found with cryptic messages of doom.

You have to have plainclothes policemen in your service, packing heat. These same policemen escort your wife and kids from the car to the sanctuary.

While in the interview process you call the local director of missions to inquire about the church, he says “Its got potential”!

Several pews are marked with doilies, quilts, pillows, and unread Bibles.

The search committee says they want a “young energetic pastor”.

Your deacons do nothing but give you projects.

Before the worship service you can find half your deacons smoking on the front porch.

In a preliminary interview the church tells you they have 400 members on roll. Upon arrival you look into the records to find that eighty of these members only have a first name listed and thirty others have been deceased for up to twenty five years.

Once you are moved in, the finance committee tells you that health insurance was not part of the package.

While cleaning out a closet you find Sunday school literature older that you are.

They will have a Vacation Bible School, but no one will teach children on Sundays.

People compare you to Joel Osteen.