Category Archives: Church Leadership

Why is it so easy to mislead God’s people?

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“See to it that no one misleads you….. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many” (Matthew 24:4,11).

Our Lord knew His people.  He knew that there was something about their makeup which would make them susceptible to being misled.  By “being misled,” we mean being conned, scammed, hoodwinked, deceived, tricked, lied to, fooled, and abused.

In Old Testament days false prophets came through the land, preaching half-truths and whole lies and filling God’s people with false expectations and pagan ways.  The New Testament church, just beginning to find its way and choose its methods, quickly became the target of these scammers and con-artists.

In Matthew 24, our Lord cautions His people to keep their guard up concerning prophecies about end times: His return, signs of the end, fulfilment of certain prophecies, apostasies, portents and omens.

And yet, the false teachers keep arising and God’s people go right on swallowing their poison. Now, I have little confidence in those who build their ministries around interpretations of prophecy.  Generations of these teachers have published their books, drawn their charts, persuaded entire segments of the church, and taken no prisoners from those who disagreed with them, only to be shown by time as false teachers (that is, when their interpretations proved wrong). And then, a few minutes later a new generation of prophecy experts steps up to fill the gap left by the departure of the last group.

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Solitary conceit: “I can do this by myself! I don’t need help.” (Famous last words)

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C. S. Lewis was fielding questions from his audience. Someone asked how important church attendance and membership are to living a successful Christian life. From his book “God in the Dock,” his answer:

My own experience is that when I first became a Christian, about 14 years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; and then later I found that it was the only way of flying your flag; and of course, I found this meant being a target.

It is extraordinary how inconvenient to your family it becomes for you to get up early to go to church. It doesn’t matter so much if you get up early for anything else, but if you get up early to go to church it’s very selfish of you and you upset the house.

If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament (John 6:53-54), and you can’t do it without going to church. I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it.

I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t worthy to clean those boots.

It gets you out of your solitary conceit. It is not for me to lay down laws, as I am only a layman, and I don’t know much.

Yeah, right. C. S. Lewis doesn’t know much. Oh, that I knew as little as he.

Solitary conceit. That one has snagged my attention and will not turn me loose. I see it in Christians who stand aloof from church attendance, in pastors who will not associate with other ministers, and in myself.

The Christian who stands aloof from identifying with a specific church suffers from solitary conceit.

“The churches today just don’t meet my need.” “They aren’t as warm and welcoming as churches ought to be.” “I find I can worship better at home with my Bible sitting in front of a blazing fire in the fireplace with a cup of spice tea at hand.”

Then you are smarter than God.

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Nostalgia: Not all it’s cracked up to be!

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A few years back, a young friend in our church became hooked on Happy Days, the television series. She envisioned the 1950s as the golden age in American life. She thought it was all Elvis and sock hops and soda fountains.

Finally, I did something really mean.

I popped her bubble.

I said, “Melissa, I became a teenager in 1953. In the ’50s, America fought the Korean War, then went through the Cold War. Our people feared being bombed by Russia every day, and racism was rampant. We were poor, cars were completely undependable, and there were no interstate highways. I wouldn’t go back there for anything.”

Okay, I should have left her alone to her daydreaming. She wasn’t hurting anyone.

The truth is I’m as much into nostalgia as anyone I know.

Nostalgia: Fantasizing about an earlier time in a way that denies the reality. That’s my definition, not one you’ll find in a book somewhere.

The passion for Sherlock Holmes owes its popularity to an idealized love for the 1890s as much as to an admiration for the observation and reasoning skills of the great detective, I wager. This fictional creation of Arthur Conan Doyle is more popular today than ever, and that’s saying something.

In The Sherlockian, Graham Moore plays to the fascination for all things Sherlock.  The protagonist of his story, Harold White, sizes up the nostalgia thing perfectly.

At one point Harold says to his friend Sarah:

I understand. There’s something….incomplete about our vision of Holmes’ time. I know it’s not real. I know that in the real 1895 there were two hundred thousand prostitutes in the city of London. Syphilis was rampant. Feces littered most major streets. Indian immigrants were locked up in Newgate on the barest suspicion that they had committed a crime. So-called homosexual acts were crimes, and they were punishable by years in prison. It was a racist culture, and a sexist one, too.

Harold takes a deep breath while he thinks of how to proceed with this line of thought.

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That printed material that your church office churns out

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“Your words have helped the tottering to stand; you have strengthened feeble knees”  (Job 4:4). 

Speak clearly.  Enunciate. Use simple, active language.  Avoid wordiness. Never try to impress the audience with large, unfamiliar words.

Encourage people with your speech.  She opens her mouth in wisdom, and the law of kindness is on her tongue (Proverbs 31:26).

Take with you words, said the prophet to God’s people, and return to the Lord (Hosea 14:2).

Words.  They matter so much.  You’re reading a compilation of them right now.  Ideally, I have so arranged them as to make sense and convey a message.

The major reason writers edit their writings is to find the culprits that would hinder communication.

It’s essential not to use a word that would impede, stun, or detour the message.

The newspaper’s food section carried a huge article on how a good salad can improve a meal.  The headline said: “Ameliorate any meal with a simple pasta salad.”

Ameliorate?  The word means to improve, to enhance, to make something bad better.  But ameliorate?!!  When was the last time you used that word?  And why would a newspaper–where reporters and editors presumably work at effective communication–use such a word?

A friend points out the irony of finding ameliorate and simple in the same sentence!

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Should we encourage the pastor? Yes, let’s!

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You are a member of the Lord’s church and you support your pastor, right?  Okay. I have a suggestion.

Write him a letter.

Handwrite it. Make it two pages, no more. Make it positive and uplifting.

And when you do, I can tell you several things that are true of that letter once it arrives at the pastor’s desk….

—It will be a rarity. He gets very little first class mail these days. Everything is done by computers.

—He will keep the letter for a long time.

—It will bless him (and possibly his family) for years to come, particularly when they come across it years from now.

Case in point. While perusing my journal of the 1990s, I ran across a letter from Christy dated July 15, 1997. Here is what this young lady–perhaps a high school senior–wrote to her preacher.

Dear Brother Joe,

I’ve been saying for some time that I was going to write my pastor a letter of encouragement. So here you go. Do you feel encouraged yet?

You really do a good job in passing on God’s Word to us. Would you like to hear some good news?

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Christians have no one to blame but themselves

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The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…. (from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  Act I, Scene 3.)

We did it and we are to blame.

Christians are forever complaining about the increasing secularization of America.  To listen to them in the year 2024 one would think the “old days”–say, seventy-five years back–were the golden time of perennial revival.

The only problem is I lived through those days of the ’50s and 60s.   I can tell you the preachers were constantly railing against the decline in religion, the weakening of the churches, the surrendering to the world.

There has never been a golden age of faith in this country or any other that I have heard of.  Men have always loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  The narrow way is always trod by the few while “broad is the way that leads to destruction.”

Don’t be overly impressed–or too discouraged–by statistics and percentages showing the swings of church attendance, the number of Christians in Congress, and such.

The greatest mistake of the past generations of Christians in this country was trying to Christianize the culture without evangelizing the people.  We put prayer in the schools, made the church the social life of the community, instituted blue laws so that no liquor could be sold on Sundays, and basically shut down secular life on the Lord’s Day.  We protected the morality of the cities and towns.  The citizens were no more Christian than previously, but we were making them behave like it.

It is indeed true that we managed to keep drugs out of our communities, kept a lot of bad movies from being aired in our small Bible-belt towns, and relegated bad sin to the back streets.  But we were forcing Christian behavior on a world of lost people.

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How to spot a non-leader a mile off

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“So Moses arose with Joshua his servant, and Moses went up to the mountain of God” (Exodus 24:13). 

Always referred to as the servant of Moses, Joshua was used to taking orders but not giving them.

That’s why, when the day arrived for Moses to announce that his earthly work was finished and God was recalling him and that Joshua would have to carry on (“Get these people into the Promised Land!”), he, Joshua, must have panicked.

For four decades Joshua has been warming the bench; now, he’s being sent into the game as the clock ticks down and everything is on the line.

What would he do without a supervisor, someone telling him what to do and how to do it, someone to whom he could report, a veteran who would grade him and pat him on the head when he did good or chew him out when his work fell short?

Throughout his life, as far as we can tell Joshua had never taken the initiative in anything, but had obeyed as he was instructed.  In Exodus 17:9, the first mention of Joshua in Scripture, he leads a rag-tag army of ex-slaves against the Amalekites. However, on a distant hill, Moses was overseeing everything and giving guidance.

No one wants to follow a non-leader.  Readers will want to check out the final chapters of Deuteronomy and the early chapters of Joshua and count the number of times Moses, God, and the Israelites urged this surprised newly chosen leader to “be strong and of good courage.” (Okay, I’ll tell you:  Deuteronomy 31:6,7,23 and Joshua 1:6,7,9,18.  That’s fairly impressive!)

A leader must be strong to forge a path and take the heat and must be of good courage to endure the problems, headaches, and backstabbings.

It goes with the territory. As the saying goes, it’s why they pay the leader the big bucks.

Non-leaders are a sure recipe for defeat.

Imagine this….

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Five church members with no fear of God

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We said on this website that the problem with “preacher-eaters and trouble-makers” in the church is that they do not believe in God. That generated some reaction.

I stand by the statement, although it requires a little clarification.

Theoretically, they do.

Those members who are determined to have their way regardless of the cost to the fellowship of the church, the unity of the congregation, the continuance of the pastor’s ministry, or the sacrifice of programs of the church are not without religious convictions.

They may have even had religious experiences.

The problem is they are now living godless existences. Their work in the church is being conducted in the flesh and for their own purposes.

They are no longer seeking God’s will or interested in working to the glory of Christ.  Their will is paramount.

The shame of it is they are almost always unaware of these conditions. They have fallen into a shameless pattern of seeing nothing but what is in their own field of vision, of wanting only what they see as important, and advocating nothing but their own program. They are not knowingly mean-spirited people. They are self-deluded.

They are atheists in the strictest sense.

Whatever belief in God they possess is theoretical. God was in Christ, yes. He was in the past. And He will be in the future, they believe, when He takes them and others like them to Heaven.

As for the present, alas, they are on their own.

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What to do when God gives you a burden for something

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When the prophets Nahum, Habakkuk, and Malachi stood up to preach, they began with the words, “The burden of the Lord.”

That was a dead giveaway this was not going to be a sweet little devotional filled with funny stories and touching vignettes. The men of God were about to drop a heavy load from their hearts into the laps and onto the shoulders of their audiences.

It took me a long time laboring in the Lord’s vineyard to figure something out. The burden God gives His preacher for some problem, some people, or some cause is every bit as much a gift from Him as the blessings of salvation. And it becomes my starting place.

Starting place for what? I’m glad you asked.

The burden God gives you, pastor, is your beginning point for three things….

1. The vision God will give you for your work begins with a burden.

I like to think of the time we wrestle with a problem (i.e., the burden) as the equivalent of digging downward for the foundation of a mighty building. The deeper we dig–the more the problem burdens us, the longer we struggle with it, and the more it pains us–the greater will be the structure that eventually gets erected there.

You’ve seen the signs: “Watch this site. A new office building will be erected here.”

Well, post one of those signs on the burden God has given you: “Watch this site. A new visionary structure will go up here.”

What is your burden, pastor? What bothers you most in your community, your church, your world? What robs you of sleep at night and will not leave you alone?

–For Bill, a seminary student involved in our church, it was a run-down trailer park near the airport where he had spotted a number of needy and neglected children.

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No independent churches, no self-sufficient Christians

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“I planted, Apollos watered, God gave the increase” (I Corinthians 3:6). 

“Even in Thessalonica you sent aid once and again for my necessities” (Philippians 4:16). 

I have no patience with signs in front of church buildings that read “Independent (whatever) Church.” There is no such thing as an independent church. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ and we need each other.

Some more than others.

The believer or the church that believes he/she/it is independent and has no need of all those others is going against everything Scripture teaches and contradicting what they see happening all around them every day.

Every church depends on the power company for the lights and a/c, on the water works for water in the building, on the sewerage department, on the streets department and on the guy who cuts the grass and the lady who cleans the toilets. They depend on the Bible, on the Holy Spirit, on those who brought the Gospel to them, and they depend on each other to be faithful. The pastor depends on the congregation to attend and serve and give and pray.  Everyone depends on the preacher to lead well.

An independent Christian is a contradiction in terms.  An oxymoron.

There is no such animal.

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