Camouflaged Church Steeples and Micro-Deceptions

What cell phone towers in church steeples might have to teach us…

Why does adding a camouflaged cell phone tower on this church steeple bother me?

I saw my first camouflaged cell phone tower (that looked like a huge tree) in Johannesburg in the early 2000s. Only recently did I discover that churches have gotten clever and allowed cell phone towers to be placed in their steeples (for a nice price, to be sure).

Since I pastor a non-denominational church without a “traditional” church building and steeple, my excitement around this dimmed rather quickly. No way to burnish our budget there.

The whole concept did, however, get me thinking about integrity and authenticity.

What are we comfortable concealing for personal gain? Or where do we behave one way as presented to the public and another way in private? And is that ok? Normal? Or a sign of trouble?

It’s just a church steeple. That is hiding a cell phone tower. It is a beacon to the community inviting them to a place to connect with God. And it’s also (more secretly) a beacon to digital life, offering a better cell signal to the neighborhood and some extra cash to the church.

But is this a problem? And why does it bother me?

Consider: some people cheat on taxes, hiding some income in order to keep more of the wealth. If the IRS comes calling? Oh, we just forgot and, yup, we found it now and can happily report it.

Others (*raises hand) speed on the highway but slow down as soon as they spot a cop with a radar gun. Was I going 78mph? That’s weird - I had the cruise set to 76mph, errr um I mean errr, 70mph.

We behave in a certain way until faced with potential scrutiny of that behavior. We live one way in private and present ourselves another way in public.

Here’s an example: Lots of pastors don’t drink alcohol in public (usually due to denominational rules or other well-intended commitments they’ve made) but do in private. I’ve got no issue with this for them. There are justifiable reasons for the rules that are in place and lots of heartache is probably saved by just eliminating a stumbling block or nonessential, potentially troubling behavior. But what does it say that something we’re ok with in private is less acceptable in public?

(Full disclosure: If you see me out with my wife on a Friday night, you might just find me enjoying a cocktail from our bartender friend Ashley in Bowling Green. I am who I am.)

So, listen - I’m not making moral judgments about taxes or speeding or ministers drinking in public.

I am just noticing (and maybe starting to connect) that we are pretty uncomfortable with deceptions and pretty hard on deceptive people (living in a “gotcha” culture that cancels all who fall short of whatever the definition of societal perfection is that day) until we are those people and the micro-deceptions benefit us. (And, yes, I think I just coined a term - micro-deceptions.)

Big deceptions? War crimes and racial injustice and presidential failings and pastoral infidelity and college football recruitment violations and celebrities cheating to get their kids into good colleges?

Easy. Take to the streets! Add a filter or flag to your social media avatar! Virtue signal and publicly shame! Commence the witch hunt and burn them all, we say (as long as they weigh the same amount as a duck, obviously).

But our own micro-deceptions? It’s just a little bit of unreported money I made on DogeCoin or a few miles per hour over the speed limit. It doesn’t hurt anyone. It doesn’t mean anything. Keep moving, people. Nothing to see here.

“Micro-deceptions” - minor behavioral concealments that can be argued “aren’t hurting anyone” but serve as evidence a lack of integrity, a division between who we are for others to see and who we are in reality.

Perhaps the problem that I’m sensing is not that going 73mph in a 70mph is actually a legitimate problem in the grand scheme of things. It is that when we allow for micro-deceptions in our lives, pretty soon we can’t trust ourselves to spot and correct the larger deceptions that are looming.

War criminals don’t start with chemical agents and cluster bombs. College boosters don’t start with six-figure payments to star quarterbacks. Pastors don’t have extra-marital affairs because their loins catch fire in a lightning strike of sexual passion one random Tuesday. They fall because they allow the little lies, micro-deceptions, to fester and become normalized until the big lies are indistinguishable from the little ones.

So come back to the cell phone tower/church steeple. Why does it bother me?

It doesn’t bother me for any practical reason. Instead, this whole idea bothers me on a metaphorical level.

It bothers me because a cell tower is ugly, jagged, grey metal disrupting the landscape and stabbing into the sky. And instead of acknowledging what is ugly, we want to hide it, conceal it, and hope it blends into something beautiful. Maybe we think it’ll even BE beautiful by association.

But that’s not reality. That’s the slippery slope of deception creeping into our lives in one more space. It’s another example of how nothing is quite what we think it is in our world these days.

Is that a child’s educational program or an insidious way of indoctrinating a generation to some cloaked set of cultural beliefs? Is that a sport we love or simply an advertising vehicle designed to separate fans from their money? Is that social media for sharing my life with friends or just a way for a gazillion-dollar company to monetize my attention?

Is that my friend? Father? Brother? Pastor? Or is that just the part they want me to see?

Am I the friend/father/brother/pastor that I present myself to be? Am I offering my whole self, unvarnished? Or am I just a series of cleverly-disguised micro-deceptions, a camouflaged version of myself hoping that the ugly parts of me will remain unseen?

- KB

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