Category Archives: Articles

The biggest problem preachers and teachers face

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Try this sometime. You have an image in mind of a person you have thought up. Now, find someone with some art ability and describe your creation to the point that they sketch him/her exactly as you envision them.

Good luck with that.

It’s almost impossible.

And yet, this process goes on all the time.  Here’s the way it works….

A friend contacts me. “Will you illustrate my book?”  I hem and haw, give non-answers (“Well, tell me what you have in mind.” “What exactly do you need?” “When do you need it?” “How many drawings will it be?”), and look for ways–true confession coming up here!–to get out of doing it.

Tackling such an assignment is guaranteed to age you prematurely, an exercise in frustration.

As I explained to an author recently while we were in the process of going back and forth with her descriptions and my attempts to capture them on paper, like a bad tennis match, “It’s this way with every writer who asks someone to illustrate her book. She begins thinking it’s going to be simple. ‘Just draw me a warrior holding a sword.’ Then, she looks at his sketch and wants him just a little taller. Next time, could you put a scowl on his face and not make him look so nice.  And could we change his clothes? And put armor on him.  Brown hair. Green eyes. Oh, and he’s wearing a cape.”

Multiply that times the number of characters the writer wants drawn and you see in a heartbeat the difficulty.

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How to discriminate against “those other people”

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“You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly…. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:15,18)

This is not a good story and I apologize in advance.

In between my sophomore and junior years in college, I worked the call-in desk for the Seaboard Railroad ticket office in Birmingham.  Located downtown on 20th Street South, this was an attractive office with pleasant people.  The year was 1960 and during the hey-day of Jim Crow laws. The police commissioner in the city was named Bull Connor, a man destined to make headlines a couple of years later when he turned the fire hoses on blacks (and maybe a few whites; I’m not sure) protesting the harsh laws and customs in our city..

My job was taking reservations over the phone.  My instructor, a pleasant fellow named Andy, said to me, “Now, we have a little system here.  It goes like this.”

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The Lord has built a redundancy into the Christian life

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“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing….” (Ephesians 1:3)

You want someone to drive you to town and both my brother and I show up at the same time in separate cars. You can ride in only one car; the other is redundant.

The word “redundant” means something unnecessary, maybe just a little too much.

In design and engineering, redundancy is the act of building in safeguards to compensate for the failure of the primary system. The backup system you installed as a redundancy may never be used. But if it’s needed, it’s there in place, just waiting.

Say for instance, if an automated system of some type goes out due to a power failure, but there’s a hand-crank to work with. It’s slower but gets the job done.

I’m thinking today about the redundancy the Father in Heaven has built into the Christian life.  He saves us, writes our name down in Heaven’s book, we are adopted, and born again. He promises that He will never leave us, that nothing can ever snatch us from His hand, and that the life we now possess is everlasting.  He indwells us, overshadows us, goes before us, comes behind us, and undergirds us.  He gives us the Bible, the church, assignments to accomplish in this world, and teachers to show us how as well as colleagues to accompany us.  He tells us we are saved forever, that we have become “Sons of God” even, and that we shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever.

The Father fully plans for us to arrive at His home safely.

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Something we know about the church’s troublemakers

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I’m reading my journal from over 20 years ago and being reminded of a lot of things–the grace of God and His sovereignty, the sweetness of many of God’s people, and also the sheer hypocrisy of some.

After I left one church under a great deal of duress, the business manager of the church and I had lunch together one day.  This is from my notes written that night. I’m eliminating the names, because identifying these people would serve no purpose. Many of them have gone on to their (ahem) just rewards and what’s done is done.

What the business administrator said was stunning.

“You’re no longer the pastor, so I’m telling you this now. So many of the people who worked against you gave almost nothing to the church. If (the chairman of the personnel committee) tithes, then he’s on welfare.  And (assistant pastor) gives zero to the church. Not a dime. And his wife a piddling.”

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I can’t wait to get old so I can do my best work!

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“They will still bear fruit in old age” (Psalm 92:14).

“My name is Joe and I am old.”

I know, I know. Some of you think I’m bragging. And maybe I am. But, even though it has a few drawbacks and as some have said, “Growing old is not for sissies,” there is much to be said for the golden/silver (leaden?) years in service for the Lord.

You have lived through many decades on this planet, you have seen things few around you have experienced (and have the scars to bear witness), your lessons learned are solid and sure, and your reasoning powers have not abandoned you.

You have much to offer, senior saint.

Psalm 92:12-15  “The righteous one will flourish like the palm tree, He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon.  Planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God.  They will still yield fruit in old age; they shall be full of sap and very green, to declare that the Lord is upright; He is my Rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”

Those four verses are keepers, such memorable lines.  I love this little text but in no way have I mastered the content.  Here are some random thoughts….

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The funniest thing in the Bible

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“And He told them a joke: ‘Two scribes went into a bar mitzvah…”

Okay. There’s nothing like that in the Bible.  And that is all good, believe me.

The Holy Scriptures are not about the humorous side of life and was not given to entertain us. It deals with issues grander, more urgent, deeper, more lasting.

But, since God is the Author of the human personality, and since He used humans to pen the Scriptures, we are not surprised to find humorous–if not outright funny–incidents and aspects to this great book.

Here are a few of my favorites….

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When the church gives sanctuary to its enemy

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“I came to Jerusalem and learned about the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah, by preparing a room for him in the courts of the house of God; and it was very displeasing to me. So I threw Tobiah’s household goods out of the room. Then I gave an order and they cleansed the rooms….” (Nehemiah 13:7-9)

My story starts with a dream. It ends with someone else’s dream.

As a rule I don’t dream, and when I do, I usually attach no importance to it. (Good thing the kings in the Bible called for Joseph and Daniel to interpret their dreams; had they summoned me, I’d probably have said, “Dreams are just your mind trying to settle down from a stressful yesterday. Go back to sleep.”)

One hour after waking up, the Lord showed me what this dream meant.

In the dream, I was in a hotel room. As I entered the bathroom, I spotted a hole in the wall. Inside lay a huge boa constrictor, curled up.

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The dumbest thing we pastors do

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We preachers sometimes torture the faithful with our complaints about the unfaithful.

We don’t mean to do that.  It’s just something that happens, usually as a result of our frustration.

Listen to the typical pastor or staffer addressing the congregation:

“A little rain never hurt anybody! And where is half our congregation?  But oh no, they couldn’t make it today. They had no trouble sitting through the ball game yesterday in freezing temperatures! Or playing a round of golf in the rain. But let a little sprinkle drop out of the heavens and they can’t make it to church today!”

Or this one:

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What I needed as a young preacher

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At 73 and no longer pastoring churches, I’m going hither and yon to preach as the Lord leads and the invitations arrive.  It’s a satisfying life, the kind of retirement (if you insist on calling it that) I would have dreamed of had I known such was available.

Observing my host pastors as they lead the congregations, I remember so vividly experiencing the same life they know with its delights and demands, its burdens and blessings. My heart goes out to them.  (In case anyone wonders, I do not arrive at a church handing out advice to host pastors, acting as some kind of inexhaustible fountain of wisdom to these good men. I come to do whatever they ask–to teach or preach or train, draw my pictures, or tell my stories–and if the Lord chooses to turn it into more than that, well and good.)

And frankly, looking back over my own lengthy pastoral ministry, sometimes my heart aches for the young McKeever, the pastor I was in my late 20s and 30s.  I wish I could go back and give that eager young man a good pep talk, a needed bit of advice, a big hug, and a swift kick in the pants.  The young Joe needed all of these at one time or other. (A few friends who have stayed with us from all those years will read this and smile and think, “At last, he gets it.”)

1) I wish I could tell that young pastor (which I was) to quit living and dying by the numbers from each Sunday.  You know about those numbers–our attendance today, what the offerings were, did we have any additions, and how all this compares with last year.

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Beating the pastor-blues on a Saturday

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(I’ve worked on this piece for several weeks, can’t get it right, but keep coming back to it. Maybe I’m having trouble because the subject itself is depressing. A friend of mine, Dr. Larry Kennedy, once wrote a book he titled “Down With Anxiety.”  I loved Larry–he’s long in Heaven now–but could not help but think the title itself was a downer.  At the moment, I’m almost through reading George Orwell’s first book “Down and Out in Paris and London,” a little paperback novel in which he tells how it felt to be desperately poor in the 1920s in those major cities. I am so ready to be finished with this book and to watch a Marx Brothers movie or something! Anyway, on this Saturday, for what it’s worth, I am sending this little article on its way with a prayer that it will connect with someone who needed its word.) 

Saturday is the worst of all possible days for a preacher to be down emotionally. He is about to tackle his heaviest assignment of the week–to stand before the flock and declare the counsel of the living God–and for that he will need all the strength and energy he can muster.

To prepare himself for tomorrow’s challenge, he needs his faith intact, his vision clear, and his confidence strong, and he needs it today, Saturday.  He needs to be free of pain if possible, free of worry if practical, and free of stress if that is achievable.

But what if he has the blues? What if the preacher is down in the dumps, is sad, feels something called an angst, which I take to mean a free-floating anxiety?

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