Mega-Tent Church Pastor Greg Locke: Physically Disabled People Lack Real Faith

this is Greg Lock And he says if you're in a wheelchair it's your fault this is Church's lame we're going to talk about how this breaks a church and what we can do to fix

it like not just like your fault because you're in a wheelchair but it's collectively the church's fault like unbelievable leap of logic that this genius came up with it's a fantastically stupid thing um and like there's there's like like

words is hard so so you know like this this little thing happens to us by way of a a quote on or a little short video on Twitter and no I'm not going to call it by its new name it's freaking Twitter that's right it has been always will be yeah fight the power Mark yeah I feel like you you're calling it X like x.com should be like a straight Ed website cuz you know like how they put the black a in the back of their hands so y to me X will always be kind of like that alt rock band from the 80s uh like a King's X yeah that's another one King's X was a cool band yep yeah but to get to get on the real problem of Greg L and I find it funny that you know some like a little while ago right like he went through all this effort to try to sanitize his Facebook and YouTube feeds or whatever from like all the you know controversial over-the-top stuff like he was trying to present himself as a as a gentler friendlier Greg lock yeah like a mainstream Greg lock yeah and then this this video it's it starts off with him just kind of like generally complaining about how much ramps cost because you know accommodating uh you know people according to the the Ada the American with Disabilities Act is just expensive and it's like okay well like that's not like a very encouraging beginning but then like he goes into saying like well like churches just aren't faithful enough cuz they're not healing these people and getting them out of these Wheelchairs and in a way I mean he just kind of also inates that it's the people's fault who are in the wheelchairs right and it's just kind of icky and disgusting and of course he says well I don't care if I'm offending you like eight times in a video it's like well no you don't care because you're a jerk right hey I've got the video here let's go ahead and play it so we don't have to paraphrase him all right here let's do it you know one of the largest expenses we have in buildings the amount of handicapped parking and handicap accessibility that we have in our churches now let me make you mad for a minute and I don't really

care why is it you pull up to a church that says they operate in faith and you have 50 handicap parking spots ain't nobody laid hands on them handicapped folks yet I don't care what Twitter says you can get mad all you want to fold your arms stick your lips out Pooch them out I don't care I'm so unafraid of what anybody in this tent thinks about me right now in my life I could care

less all right that's enough of that hey by the way he he ends that little bit of phrase saying I could care less what anybody thinks about me right now did you notice did you notice a security guard sitting on the steps right behind him uh no I did not yeah it's like no you don't have to care because you've got like three armed guys within 20 feet of you like ah dude drives me yeah but where where were those bodyguards when he was buying that shirt well I mean I don't like I'm not like trying to say that he's a bad person because his because of his shirt but the shirt was maybe the more offensive thing to me about that video yeah I've I've got something to say about that a little bit later on but let's talk about how this breaks the church so so I mean like where I'm coming from and I me tell me if you agree or disagree is just that like he's just the being the same old a-hole like that he's been um and and like he needed to be stopping this stuff a while ago um but right like the worst part of it is like he's sitting there saying well these churches you know like they need to be laying on hands like they need to be having faith so people are getting healed it's like well you know where's the army of people in wheelchairs or that were in wheelchairs that you've healed exactly right like where's this this incredible flood of people that have that can say Greg lock made this change in my life and and it's a double-edged sword because on the one hand you say well where are these people but like if if he starts producing these people then all of a sudden he becomes Benny hin right or something equally as stupid right oh I don't even want to think about that so I don't know I don't know which I don't know which is worse having him criticize handicap people for not having faith or for having him go around fraudulently Faith healing people you know it's like I don't know I I think I mean if we look at you know just the the history of the church you know it's like we don't see you know like Faith healing being a normative practice in the church for most of its history so he's coming in now like oh you know I know better than everybody else and and this is the norm and it's like well it's not the norm in your churches it never has been so shut up but secondly it's like you you're trying to see that you are like something different than like the last you know 1900 years of the church that's a little bit of a of a difficult pill for me to swallow right and I like I like how he um kind of dissembles it like it's not my problem as a pastor that people aren't getting healed it's your problem as a congregation that people aren't getting healed and your problem as a disabled person person that that you're not willing to have have the faith enough to step out of your own um I don't even want like I not disability like to to step out of your own reality you know yeah and it's just like the whole thing with faith healers I mean like how many you know T evangelists or you know these weird big tent revivalists that are just nothing but shills you know have we seen in history so it's like this is just kind of making this is making like at least him if not you know the entire church I mean just looking like shields for sure like with without a doubt it is when you take this weirdo cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs shill version of Christianity and you and you put it with a a Sprinkle of islamophobia you know and then you throw on some you know some hot fudge of God Bless America it starts to look like a like it really starts to look like a cartoon instead of looking like a a true movement of Faith that's supposed to change the world you know and and I think his his whole shtick I mean because I think it really is a shtick I mean I I I hope that he doesn't believe what comes out of his mouth because that would just be horrifying but like but but his entire thing I mean it's like you know going back to the beginning of Co where like he was basically telling people that if they were going to wear a mask in his church and they had to leave cuz they weren't welcome there and it's like so you you're tough enough to like w like to wag your gun around in front of you know the flag in in your church service which should have nothing to do with guns or flags of anything uh but but a mask is is that offensive to you and like the guy doesn't care about people he doesn't love people he's not there to serve anybody in his congregation he's there to make himself feel big and tough at least that's my take not to me no you're absolutely right but you forgot the part where he makes himself obscenely Rich yeah I did I did forget about that right like there's a pillar there right where you've got to like you've got to satisfy the ID and the ego and the wallet right you've got to satisfy all those things or else or else it's an incomplete picture yeah but because I feel like that whole like well I don't care you know if I offended you or whatever like that's that's like the battlecry of the egoist it's like you should care if you're offending people that means that you're not communicating effectively thank you I was just about to say that it's like why are you a pastor if you don't care like what Shepherd does not care about the Sheep you know especially the lost sheep you know if your contention is that disabled people are disabled over a lack of faith then those people are quote unquote more lost than others so wouldn't you care about the most lost he's just the worst kind of contrad ition because it's all so easily explained by the love of money and the love of notoriety I made a little note here um cuz you referred to like the shirt he was wearing this clip this two-minute three minute clip it was made for social media consumption you know look at his outfit look at just how perfectly he pulled off this whole performance in these couple minutes um he knew that this thing would go viral and with it you know Legions of new eyballs and new donations and and you know more feeding of his ego because of all everybody talking about Greg lock um if you don't know there was another story in the news this week about the former pastor of Hillsong New York I don't even remember his name but he was fired uh because he had an affair and because he got fired there their law the rules of that churches if your wife's on staff she automatically gets fired too so they they both get fired which is fine like that's what should happen but now in the middle of nowhere like there's there's real news happening in the Middle East we just elected um another Maga whatever guy for the H for the house speaker and this guy decides it's time for me to come out of hiding and make video to thank his wife by sticking for sticking by him like why and the reason I bring that up is because it's the same thing with Greg lock there is this this Nar narcism that that needs to be fed you know like and I kind I got to keep asking myself over and over again like what is this backwards world that we live in that the church only exists so that its leaders can feed their narcissistic needs instead of actually going out and caring for the people that God has called us to care for yeah it's absolutely ridiculous I mean we we should be seeing you know these celebrity pastors you know doing like all this wonderful works out there but like they they don't I mean and like when scripture like you said earlier about like you know if if if these people in wheelchairs are there because their lack of faith they should be getting taken care of even more because of like like the weakness of their faith like you're just saying what like the Apostle Paul writes in scripture you know it's like that's what you're supposed to do um you know like whoever wants to be the greatest must be servant of all you know like right Jesus sort of said that so it's like you know people like you know these these celebrity pastors are very often not the you know the servant of all they don't try to be the servant of all and you know uh like we talked about before in the past about narcissism being a system because a narcissist can only be allowed to stay in that position if the system around them allows it to happen exactly and so you know I think a big part of this is just that the people that are around him are the kind of people that are happy to feed a narcissist yeah because yeah that's a whole different thing like when we talk when we try to deconstruct the psyche of the person who needs to be a follower like you need to be like the disciple who asks Jesus who's your favorite who's going to sit at your right hand in heaven right there's a specific psyche to that person too that like I mean I think that Jes just like pretty clearly kind of went really like this is what we're doing you know that you think most Christians would kind of identify that in themselves and kind of go yeah probably I shouldn't do that but that's a whole another topic yeah okay so how do we fix this mess of of these off-the-wall theologically crazy narcissistic attention [ __ ] oh that's that's that's such a wonderful question um of course it's the question we ask um every episode every week

um I we don't we don't always call them attention whes but you know just generally speaking um right I think like a first step is that you know within our churches our congregations or you know our Bible study groups you know wherever like we do need to address this kind of a situation and we need to kind of work out for ourselves just the absurdity of it um and make sure that we're all on the same page that like this guy you know complaining about building ramps for people in wheelchairs um cannot be allowed to be the norm um and then we kind of need to come together well what can we do in our churches to demonstrate a different Norm a different reality exactly absolutely I couldn't agree more with that like and yet that statement about the the cost of it is especially offensive because it's simply not true right like okay we're going we're going to build a building and so we need a parking lot how much much does it cost to put some blue paint down with a with a wheelchair on it you know it's literally the same cost or a wheelchair ramp it's a couple pounds more of cement you know and it's baked into the mortgage it's baked into the mortgage so it doesn't even matter because your mortgage and your interest rate were set at the very beginning and it's going to be the same until you pay the darn thing off or more likely if you're Greg lock you're going to use that mortgage to say hey I've got something of value so me an even bigger ginormous personal loan against my church's collateral you know it's oh my God I I now I've just made myself doubly mad because of the financial perversion of this all oh yeah somebody just shoot me and put me out of my misery yeah and I'm I'm hoping that you know at least one person watching this is a city planner and they're yelling at the screen right now about how in most you know jurisdictions it's the legal code that determines how many parking spaces you have and how many handicapped parking spaces you have have based on the square footage of your obscenely oversized Church yeah all right let's move on yeah let's let's keep going here and then I just like my bigger hope would be that you know pastors that are in a position to call Greg lock out would actually stand up and call him out I mean we've got the the John Pipers the um what's his name John MacArthur um we've got I mean Franklin Graham's never going to call him out you know because he's a piece of J you it's maybe Francis Chan canke his head up out of the out of the hole been hiding in and and say something you know or like I mean there's there are good pastors out there that that that could speak up and have the power to address him and I think they should do it instead of just like allowing him to go off in wacko land and absolutely like when when you get into the world of super celebrity Pastor the way Greg Glock is the only person who's going to talk any sense into your life is another equ equally or more famous celebrity Pastor right yeah and that's that's sadly just the way it is the only thing I had to add and I agree with everything you said is I think we are beginning to maybe realize or see the limitations of celebrity pastorship right yeah like it's great like if you want to build a big church that's great so you have this guy who who What's the phrase he's good for all time zones this guy guy or gal they're good for all time zones they don't offend anybody they they found a stick that works for them right Purpose Driven best life now I I forget what the Willow Creek thing was for a long time right but but everybody finds a thing they they're able to use it to grow right and and so celebrity Pastor has its usefulness up to a point but then then you then you have to ask eventually ask the question what's it all for what did we grow for what did we make you know this money-making Powerhouse for what did we make this 20 multicampus multi you know um worldwide Ministry for what was it made for was it just made so we could vacuum up as much money from as many people as we could or was it actually did we create this thing so we could actually do some good in the world you know and I think when you look at all these mega churches with celebrity pastors you can't point to a whole lot of good in the world and that's what makes me say like this kind of Bozo ship like Greg lock it just needs to end needs to be time for that to die to go back to like little local churches that actually have like fish fries and bake sales so that you can raise money and and give it to the the the local homeless shelter you know that would be a much better use of church resources than than you know building your fifth fitness center you know yeah and you know and it's it's a tough one for me because like I look at Paul in scripture but like he was much more of a church planter and you know kind of a like a mediating factor in in a lot of them um like there was other leadership and there was a lot of itinerancy in the early church and that's leadership um but then you had like you know Christianity was growing and it was spreading um I think today it's like we don't really need that kind of thing um in pastors um as much you know it's like um you know pastors need to be focusing on their own congregation or if you're a church planter you need to be focusing on planting churches and letting those churches leadership you know you can mentor them but letting them run the show um so like this whole thing where you have like these pastors that have like you know multiple uh like locations like their Starbucks and it's the same sermon you get at each one is kind of a weird thing to me um I mean maybe there's a virtue to it but I don't see it but I'm I feel like with that celebrity like all the problems of celebrity come with it I I don't think there's any use we as a church anymore can get out of it so I think I'm I think I think I'm 100% with you on

that nice all right well we are Church's Le and you may have watched this episode and think Man Mark and Scott really have it out for the church they really hate the church nothing could be further from the TR truth words is hard uh we love the church we serve in our churches we want the church I would say it this way return to its former glory we'd love to see Jesus glorified throughout this world we are just sure that things like Greg lock and these kind of nutty banana statements that he makes uh paint the church in its worst light and we collect these stories and put them in video format so that when somebody finally asks the question why are churches irrelevant here you go you're welcome yep um so if you got something to say by all means leave us a comment uh we're highly engaged on on uh YouTube uh but you know Twitter Facebook all the things you can meet us at um if you're listening to my podcast give us a rating and a review and if you really want to take us to town with a long form letter uh send us an email to churches Lan podcast gmail.com and with that go in peace serve the Lord amen and hey if you especially got something out of this episode and would like to see more content just like it somewhere up around me is going to be a card uh called leadership lunacy uh with a playlist of similar videos and by all means feel free to click on that thanks a lot