One.
“Our state convention has money set aside to help people in your part of the world,” the e-mail said. The executive went on to say they had reserved these funds to assist their own churches that were heading this way to meet expenses. However, he said, none of our churches have drawn on this fund lately, so we decided we would just go ahead and send the balance of the money to your association.
He sent that e-mail to me and to one of our leading pastors, a longtime friend of his, asking us to come up with a list of needs locally, from which he and his staff would choose the ones they wanted to devote the funds toward. We had fun doing that.
Monday, the email came from the financial officer of that state convention. She needed our tax identification number and for us to sign some papers. And, she said, you will be interested in knowing that the money coming your way will be $158,000 and some change.
Stunned? Indeed. Blessed? Absolutely. Excited? More than I can tell you.
That wonderful executive of that generous state convention–they shall forever be blessed around here!–will be sending a letter alongwith the check, saying what they want done with the money. (Just in case anyone reading this starts thinking of ways to use the money.) The fact is we have individual churches that could absorb the entire amount and still need more to be rebuilt. Still, it’s a great encouragement.
Two.
I sat in a meeting of seminary students and pastors Monday and, listening to the give and take, the reports and blessings, did something I often do: wrote down captions for cartoons. Six of them, in fact. I don’t have the cartoons yet, just the captions. Thought you’d like to read them.
1. “Bobby is the first person I’ve ever met who lists his mother on his resume.” (A reference to Bobby Wood, seminarian working with the FBC of Westwego. Good for you, Bobby.)
2. “The assistant pastor’s theme song is Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man.'” (Loyalty in staff members is a trait greatly to be desired.)
3. “You cannot be a prophet to your people if you take profit from them.” (A line from Bill Taylor about integrity.)
4. “Don’t ask a preacher if his stories are true; don’t make him lie twice.” (I forgot who said it, but it is priceless.)
5. “All my stories are true; some parts are truer than the others.” (A line I sometimes use.)
6. “This is the perfect church for me. Everyone is as dysfunctional as I am.” (One of our guests said that about the eclectic mix of our Monday group.)
Three.
Perhaps the most exciting thing to come out of this bizarre period in Baptist life in post-Katrina New Orleans is the Unlimited Partnership project dreamed up and put into play by Dr. Bill Taylor. I’ve talked about it on this blog previously, but basically it’s matching up a gifted seminary student with one of our churches struggling to get its educational ministry back up and running, under the leadership of the pastor of that church, all of which is sponsored (and paid for) by some outstanding church somewhere in the SBC. Churches like Prestonwood, FBC Dallas, Forest Hills in Nashville, and others have sponsored the “first generation” of seven U.P. students who are serving churches such as FBC Norco, Highland-Metairie, Memorial-Metairie, and New Covenant-Harvey.
The first class of the Unlimited Partnerships got underway March 1, and is slated to run at least a year, but possibly more. The second generation has just started. Monday, September 17, the new class of seven students joined with the first group in the Leavell Center on the seminary campus and spent the day building relationships with each other and learning from gifted outside pastors/leaders whom Dr. Taylor brought to the meeting. Usually, it’s all day, the third Monday of the month. The pastors of our U.P. churches come, the seminary students come, a professor or two will attend, Freddie Arnold and I will be there, Bill Taylor, and then two or more outside dignitaries to listen to the students and then share from their particular expertise.
Since March 1, some members of this class of seven have started Sunday Schools in their assigned church. Almost all have started Sunday School units, a number of the churches have begun new ministries such as sports camps and weekday Bible classes, and have doubled or tripled their baptisms over previous years.
This may be the most revolutionary idea–and thus, the simplest and the clearest–to come out of this era. Some people who know Bill Taylor are telling him that this could be his most significant contribution to Christian education, and bear in mind, this refers to a man who has been the leading Christian educator in our denomination for the past generation. Already, other seminaries are inquiring about the plan. Bill has enlisted Bethany Hales from the first group to represent him, to be his liaison with all the U.P. members, and to fill in for him when he’s out. Eventually, Unlimited Partnerships may exist in numerous places across this country, with each one having a local alumnus of the first generation to lead out under Bill’s tutelage.
This second class of seminary students in the U.P. program will be working with churches such as West St. Charles-Boutte, FBC-Avondale, the N.O. Chinese Baptist Church, and others, including two congregations on the Northshore.
Four.
In Monday’s class, we talked about creativity. Dr. Taylor keeps stressing to pastors and students alike that in post-Katrina New Orleans, business as usual is not going to get the job done. We have to do what he calls “blue sky thinking,” meaning we should look above our present situation with its limitations and weighty conditions and imagine what God wants done and what we would do if money and personnel were not factors. Dream big. Outside the box, to cite an overused metaphor.
Bill Taylor is the right person to talk about creativity. He and I are near the same age–late 60s–and he is as creative a person as I know. At one point, he opened Walter Isaacson’s new book on Einstein and read passages about the revolutionary spirit that allowed this genius to focus his mind on areas foreign to most of us and to travel farther down that road than anyone else ever had.
I thought, “This is one of Bill’s techniques for creativity. He reads widely. Not just religious material. He picks the brains of every achiever he ever meets. And he never loses a friend; he’s a keeper of significant people.”
Then, Bill singled me out. “You draw cartoons. You’re creative. What’s the source of your creativity?” I said, “For one thing, creative people who think in unusual ways bring it out of me. I used to have a staff member–Dionne Williams, who now serves the Gulf Coast Baptist Association in Gulfport–who did that. I’d throw out a subject and within five minutes, as we brainstormed, we could come up with a dozen great ideas. But that’s a rare gift. When he left and I tried that on other staff members, they would usually just stare at me as though I were trying to get them to speak Swahili.”
I told the class something from Robert Shrum’s book, “No Excuses,” the subtitle for which is “confessions of a serial campaigner.” John F. Kennedy had a political adviser he valued highly. He said the man had 10 new ideas a day. Of those, three didn’t matter, five were disasters, two were brilliant or even transformative. Shrum says, “The trick was to figure out the right two.”
That’s a great point about creativity: it’s related to volume. The more ideas you produce, the chances are one of them will be brilliant. The more sermons a pastor preaches, the greater the chance he will come up with a few outstanding ones. The more cartoons I turn out, the greater the possibility one or two will be real winners. However, the novelist who wants to write only one book and it be the “great American novel” is fooling himself. Or herself, since Harper Lee actually pulled that off with “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As did Margaret Mitchell with “Gone With the Wind.” The exceptions that prove the rule, let us say.
Robert Shrum has this to say about creativity: It matters, “as long as it (isn’t) an end in itself, but a vehicle for a message.”
Somewhere I heard of a young preacher who declared, “I will be original or nothing.” He ended up both.
Five.
“Write on a piece of paper one person who greatly influenced your ministry. Just one.” Bill Taylor was attempting to get our pastors and seminary students to analyze why particular people are so special to us, hoping that in the process we all may get the bright idea to influence others as they did us.
I wrote down, “George Harrison.”
As we went around the room giving a brief synopsis of why our person was so important to us, I said, “Dr. Harrison was my first Hebrew and Old Testament professor in this seminary. I had been around brilliant people throughout my educational career, but usually they were so focused on their narrow field, they could not see anything beyond it. However, when this professor prayed at the start of the class, he talked with the Lord about what the New Orleans city council was doing today, and frequently brought up some issue the country was facing. I was stunned. This man had actually read the paper this morning.” I said to the class, “He forever became the role model for me in this regard–the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other.”
I didn’t say more, but I confess here, I am frequently perturbed to learn how few of our pastors even take the daily paper. One said, “I read it on-line.” Yeah, but only a smidgen of the total newspaper is placed on the internet. Pastors who cannot afford the cost of having the paper delivered to their door each morning should drop by the local library a couple of times a week. They’ll let you read theirs free.
Besides, they don’t put the crossword puzzle or the Sudoku on-line. And even if they did, those only work when you spread them out on the breakfast table in the morning with your coffee just off to the right.
And now you know. That’s one of my blessings, too.