The first prayer I criticized, I was in college. Eventually, I became quite good at it.

It’s not a skill to be desired.

A church across Birmingham had invited me to speak to their young people that morning. I was the guest of a leading church family for the service and lunch to follow. Their pastor was out that day, so the minister was a college professor who taught the Bible.

At the sermon time, the guest preacher strode to the pulpit, looked out at the congregation and led us in prayer. I was struck by the way the last sentence of his prayer and the opening sentence of his sermon lay back to back, separated only by the “amen” of the prayer.

Here is what he said:

“Bless us, O God, as we come to worship Thee—for we are here for no other reason. Amen.”

He took a breath, looked out at the congregation, and began:

“People come to church for many different reasons!”

Instantly I reacted. Wait a minute. You just told the Lord we were here to worship Him and nothing else, and told us we had come for a variety of reasons.

He was not being honest to someone, either the Lord or us, I reasoned. And I think I know who it was. He was telling the Lord what He felt the Lord wanted to hear, it seemed, but knew he could not get by with that with us. So he had to tell us the plain fact of the matter.

It occurred to me his view of God was severely lacking.

My criticism was valid, I believe, but unfortunately that little event started me on my life of crime.

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On Tuesday, July 14, my wonderful Mom, Lois J. McKeever, reaches age number 93. Far from keeping it a secret, she’s justly pleased to have attained this pinnacle. I think this makes her the oldest member of her (Kilgore) family in memory. Also, probably the oldest living member of her church (New Oak Grove Free Will Baptist). She still lives on the home place, across the hill from the house where she was born. Each day, she reads the newspaper, reads her mail and her Bible, watches the TV news and “The Price is Right” and “Wheel.”

Thanks to all who have sent (or are sending) birthday cards or notes to her. At last check, she has received 70 or so. However, anyone who would still like to send one, Mom loves getting mail, so go right ahead. The address is 191 County Road 101, Nauvoo, Alabama 35578. Thanks!

Mom says so many of the cards she is receiving are from my friends (from this blog and Facebook) who all say things like, “You must be a wonderful person to have raised such a fine son.” She laughs and says, “I have three fine sons–which one are they talking about?”

You can see why I like her to get these notes!

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(This concludes with a short Bible study from Luke 6; don’t miss it.)

A good question to ask ourselves: what subject or issue could my pastor speak on–and disagree with me concerning–that would send me over the edge?

What trips my cord? What provokes my wrath? Invites my hostility, stirs up my rage, arouses my ire?

Nothing tells the tale about us like the answer to this.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a rather uncomplimentary piece concerning Rush Limbaugh. The editor of our state Baptist paper asked if he could reprint it. I agreed, but came to question that decision. All the mail the editor received (and forwarded to me) was not just negative, but hostile. I was a raving liberal, a satan, unworthy to call myself a preacher or even a Christian.

I had touched a nerve. Stepped on some toes.

Ann Landers or Dear Abby–one of the advice-giving twins–used to say, “Throw a rock among a bunch of dogs; the one that hollers is the one that got hit.”

This week, it was the Michael Jackson thing.

On this website–and nowhere else, not in any newspaper anywhere, but in the blog which I personally pay for–I wrote about the memorial service which was going on at the time. I started by pointing out that the expected crowd of a million did not materialize, quoted Sean Hannity and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on the MJ phenomenon, and then commented on Rev. Al Sharpton’s glossing over of the MJ child abuse in his sermon. He assured the Jackson children (and said to the world), “There was nothing strange about your father. What was strange was the way he was treated,” or something to that effect.

The fascinating thing about cyberspace is you put something on a website and it’s gone. The world has it now. It gets passed around and people find it by googling and your thoughts are in the public domain.

It’s great and it’s terrible.

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In my early-to-mid-teen years, for two weeks each summer, the Chadwick family rescued me from the farm in north Alabama and made me their honored guest in Birmingham. We were kin. Our mothers, Lois and Ruby, were sisters. Ruby was married to John Chadwick, a Birmingham policeman. The McKeever and Chadwick children were closely matched in age.

My brothers Ron and Glenn matched up with Bill Chadwick, the oldest of Johnny and Ruby’s four. I thought they were all daredevils.

Nelda Chadwick and I were almost identical in age. In between came Betty and Barbara Chadwick, lovely older cousins whom I idolized. (In case they read this, just a tad older, not much!)

Going from the drudgery of the farm to the excitement of the city–the soda fountain at the drug store, the street cars downtown, movies with Nelda, bike-riding, going to VBS at Calvary Baptist Church, carpet golf, but particularly, this wonderful loving family–made this the high point of my year.

To Bill Chadwick, perhaps 6 years my senior, I must have appeared as a little squirt. A nuisance. But he never made me feel that way.

In fact, he did some things that minister to me even today, over a half century later.

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First.

The crowd of a million expected to jam the streets of Los Angeles for Michael Jackson’s memorial service at the Staples Center did not materialize, they’re announcing on the radio. My guess is they were scared away by–what else–predictions of a crowd of a million.

The best way I know to kill a high attendance is to talk about all the traffic, parking, seating and crowd control problems one can expect. Most people will choose to stay home.

Sean Hannity said today, “If you think this is the last of this (the Michael Jackson business), you are wrong. This is just the beginning. They’re already beginning investigations of four doctors.”

The editor of a newsmagazine whose staff rushed to put together a special edition on MJ pointed out that the pop star’s life conveniently divided into three sections: a) the Jackson Five (his life with the family group), b) the rock star years, and c) Jocko (the last 15 years of weirdness).

At the memorial service today, the last segment of Jackson’s life does not exist. The children he hurt along the way do not exist. The program is all about Neverland.

In this morning’s Times-Picayune, the New York Times’ Bob Herbert gave his take on “Michaelmania.” Meeting the star back in the mid-1980s was “one of the creepier experiences of my life.” He says he knew that MJ was unable to make small talk. “Lots of people have trouble with that.” But Jackson had a child television star with him and for all the world, they seemed to be two little children playing around the furniture.

Herbert, who is African-American, mentions the reality of MJ with these words: “Behind the Jackson facade was the horror of child abuse. Court records and reams of well-documented media accounts contain a stream of serious allegations of child sex abuse and other inappropriate behavior with very young boys.”

Finally, this sentence: “One case of alleged pedophilia against Jackson, the details of which would make your hair stand on end, was settled for a reported $25 million.”

Now, in light of that, consider the accolades being thrown his way by the parade of preachers and celebs at the Staples Center today.

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Google that–the number one sin of the church–and almost all the responses will be the same: Jim Cymbala, pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle telling Mark Buchanan the church’s leaders are not on their knees crying out to God for the outcasts of this world–the prostitutes, the gang leaders, the druggies.

Included among all the Cymbala citations, I found only two other mentions of the church’s primary sin.

Scott Peck said the number one sin of the church is its arrogance and narcissim, the attitude that we have God all sewn up, that all truth resides with us.

Another pastor said it is “tolerance to the point of obsequious stupidity.” Obsequious: “fawning,” a “servile attitude,” “sycophantic.”

Each of those makes a great point. But here is my candidate for the primary failure of the church in our day.

The greatest sin of the church today is that it does not take itself seriously enough.

By that I mean, it does not take its Lord, its message, its identity, and its role seriously.

Go into almost any city in the land and drop in on church after church. You will find some great congregations and hear the occasional excellent sermon, to be sure. However, again and again, you will walk away shaking your head, convinced that instead of visiting the power center of the planet, ground zero for the actions of Almighty God, you have just sat in on something akin to a family reunion, a civic meeting, or a community improvement session.

A weak sister of the Oprah self-improvement society.

Instead of a sense of urgency, you saw half-heartedness on every side.

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First, let me tell you what my pastor said and then what he did. It’s what he did that bordered on the outrageous.

In his sermon this Sunday, Pastor Mike Miller told the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Kenner, Louisiana, that Jesus’ message in Luke 14 has a direct application to us today. (My disclaimer: I did not get Mike’s permission to give a representation of his sermon; so consider this a 25 minute message from a great communicator filtered through the mind of a senior preacher who was sometimes distracted by his grandchildren and at other times by his own untamed imagination.)

In the parable of the great supper, Luke 14:16-24, the order of the invitations that went out is significant:

1. Friends first.

2. Outcasts next.

3. Then the strangers.

You’d think telling our friends and family about Jesus and inviting them to know Him as Savior and Lord would be the simplest thing in the world. Often, it’s the hardest.

Outcasts are those rejected by “respectable people” and would not normally feel accepted in church. Yet, our Lord seemed to have a certain affinity for them, and so should we.

Strangers are anyone and everyone outside the family of God.

Mike challenged the congregation to invite five family members/friends, outcasts and strangers to church in the next week. He ended the service with a video making that point and a benediction reinforcing it.

Now, what Mike did.

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This Sunday morning at the men’s breakfast, it was announced that Houston and Eleanor Glover have moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to be near their son. This move is all about advancing age, declining health, and the absence of any family members down here. The Glovers have rented a small apartment and are putting their house on the market and starting life in a state which we call “the north” and Wisconsonians call “the midwest.”

A request went out to the men for assistance in loading the truck next week. “Everything left over will be given to Goodwill,” church administrator Danny Moore said.

When I commented that this has to be traumatic for the Glovers, easily some of the nicest people on the planet, Danny said, “They’ve lived here 61 years. Moved here in 1948.”

Houston was a life deacon in the First Baptist Church of Kenner and Eleanor served as wedding director for years. Classy, loving, gentle people. Low maintenance for a pastor; high returns of faithful service and dedicated labor for the Lord.

When Eleanor expressed that they would probably not find a church home there, Pastor Mike Miller made some calls, talked to a pastor in Madison, and located them a church family.

Still, the transition has to be extremely difficult. Danny said, “Eleanor is from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has family there.”

But after 61 years, New Orleans is home.

Or to be exact, River Ridge and the Kenner/Metairie community is home. As locals will tell you, even though we are part of metro New Orleans and you can hardly tell when you drive from one into the other, it ain’t the same.

As the morning’s benediction was spoken and we gathered up the clutter of breakfast to toss in the trash, someone said to Danny Moore, “This is our future. Every one of us.”

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We pastors are always looking for ways to make our wedding ceremonies more interesting and more helpful.

Friday afternoon, an hour before time to head across Lake Pontchartrain for the 6:45 wedding of Steven and Laci, on a whim, I typed the following into my Facebook page and posted it:

“Give me your best ONE SENTENCE advice on marriage and I’ll work the best of them into the wedding for Laci and Steven tonight. Funny is good, inspiring is great, true and catchy is best.”

An hour later, I had a half dozen responses. Fifteen minutes before the wedding was to begin, I called son Marty in North Carolina and had him go to my Facebook page and read off every entry. There were 20 by that time. I jotted a few down and used them.

So. Here is the setting. There are 200 people sweating it out (the temperature at 7 o’clock was still in the 90s) on the back deck of Palmettos-on-the-Bayou in Slidell, Louisiana. Most are sitting on white plastic chairs, but a number are standing in the back near the giant blowers. Six gorgeous bridesmaids and an equal number of handsome groomsmen line the front. There’s no microphone so we have to speak up to be heard.

I’ve known Laci since she was a child. She is the granddaughter of one of our deacons and related to more of our church members. She is bright and creative and cute and never meets a stranger. Steven, I met for the first time when they drove over for pre-marital counseling. He’s handsome, bright, and adores Laci. They both are young Christians and making a genuine effort to live for God. I was honored to be asked to do their wedding.

Early in the proceedings, I said, “Two hours ago, I asked my Facebook friends to give Laci and Steven advice about marriage. Here are some of the responses….”

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Dr. Chuck Kelley has more nerve than I. A lot more.

On March 3 of this year, the president of our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary gave his analysis of the Southern Baptist Convention–our family of churches–concerning the 89 percent of our churches that have either stopped growing or are in decline. He made this statement:

“We are the new Methodists.”

What he meant, he went on to say, is that this major denomination–the United Methodists–once set the pace for the Christian church in America, both in reaching large numbers for Christ, and teaching the rest of us how to evangelize. “What Baptists know about evangelistic harvesting,” Dr. Kelley said, “we learned from Methodists.”

Gradually that great denomination lost its zeal and is now in serious free-fall, declining in numbers of members at the fastest pace in the history of the American church.

Southern Baptists are following in their footsteps, Chuck pointed out.

President Kelley’s statement and his analysis have been reported and quoted far and wide by news services and countless blogs like this one.

No one has reported (to my knowledge) how the Methodists took that. It’s no fun being pointed out to the other children as the wrong kind of example.

That’s why I say he has nerve.

He’s right, of course.

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