Authentic #8

Introduction

I’ll never forget the day I got the call. I was in my early 20s and home from university for the summer. One morning, my pastor rang me up and told me that there was a message on the answer machine from a young guy who said that he and his girlfriend were in trouble and wondered if the church could help him. My pastor at the time wanted to know if I would give him a call since he sounded a similar age to me. Of course I agreed.

I range the number I was given and a guy named Ashley answered the call. He told me that he was in extreme financial difficulty, his girlfriend was pregnant, but they were booked into for an abortion the next day because they could not support a baby in their current situation. He told me that they didn’t want to do this but having no family or friends int he area felt like they had no choice. he went on to tell me that living on the same street as our church decided to call us up in a last ditch attempt to get the help they needed.

Perhaps a few of you can already see where this is going. However, as a second year bible college student who already knew everything their was to know about pastoral ministry failed to spot the warning signs. I assured him, that of course the church would be willing to give him they needed. That people would be delighted to help in anyway they could.

So I called my pastor and explained the gravity and urgency of the situation. Trusting my judgement (!), he agreed to provide a weeks worth of food for the Ashley and his girlfriend, but didn’t feel comfortable giving them money without meeting and getting to know them first. Obviously this put me in a bit of a sticky situation.

Nevertheless, I called Ashley a second time and explained the situation thinking that he would be pleased with the help we had suggested. But he wasn’t. In fact he become very angry. Food, he told me would not help them pay their rent, or their bills. Food would not help travel to find a new job. Food would not be enough to prevent he and his girlfriend from having an abortion and with that he put the phone down.

Over the hours that followed I received increasingly aggressive text messages accusing me of everything from lying to him to being responsible for the death of his unborn child. He told me that God hated me and would be very angry with me. And that when my church found out what I had done they would be angry with me too. Of course, none of these things were true and I was sagely advised by my pastor to end all contact with ‘Ashley’ immediately - if that was even his name.

You see it quickly became clear that Ashley was the real deal. He was using the story of his financial difficulties and his pregnant girlfriend to try to manipulate me into securing money for him from the church. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to get his own way he became more and more abusive in an attempt to guilt me into giving him money.

Whilst at first he appeared (at least to my 20 year old self) to the real thing, he was not. His actions were motivated by a desire to manipulate me and the church I attended into giving him what he wanted. To make matters worse, their is no way of knowing how many churches he had tried this same story on before us.

In a similar way, in their attack on Paul’s right and credentials as an Apostle. After all the easiest way to discredit Paul’s message was to discredit Paul as a genuine messenger of the gospel. Sure he might be timid and chummy up close but when he can’t get his own way he said harsh manipulative letters from a far.