Category Archives: Healthy church

How to solve church problems before they happen!

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The number one reason most church problems do so much damage is that the people in the know, those charged with leadership, have not anticipated these things and done the hard work necessary to head them off.

Good preparation will end most church problems before they arise.

Here are 10 rules–principles, suggestions, guideposts, lifelines, call them whatever you wish (call them anything except “laws”)–which, if implemented, can stop the next church split in its tracks and allow this healthy church to go chugging on down the tracks while the devil sits there scratching his head, wondering, “Wha’ happened?” (Old comic book image there)


1. Get your people to praying. 

Prayer is not brackets with which we open and close meetings. Prayer is not tipping our hat to the Almighty to let Him know we are aware He is eavesdropping the proceedings. Prayer is not a formality to be gotten out of the way so we can get on with the good part.

Prayer is calling on the Lord of Heaven and earth to help us, to guide us, to protect and fill and use us. Prayer is accessing Heaven’s power and God’s wisdom for earth’s work.

Once a war breaks out, it’s not too late to pray. But it almost is. It’s never too late to pray, but far better to have been earnest in our praying when matters were in hand and nothing ominous loomed on the horizon.

Prayer for believers is like weight-lifting for athletes: you do it faithfully in the inner room so when you face the opponent you are strong and ready.

This is not a one-time act by a preacher to turn his church into a prayer/powerhouse. It will require many sermons, his example, changes in the order of worship, constant teaching and reminding, and creative plans and challenging reminders for his people.

2. Update your church constitution and bylaws.

These documents are not a strait-jacket to limit the church. Not a shackle to hamper a congregation from doing what it wishes. And definitely not simply a legal document to be turned over to the lawyers in the congregation.

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If you enter the ministry, bring a healthy curiosity!

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I came by it honestly. My dad, a coal miner with a 7th grade education, was interested in everything. He read and learned and talked to us of all kinds of subjects.

In college, I changed my major from physics to history because the professors in the science building were focusing more and more on tinier and tinier segments of the universe. But history deals with it all, every person who ever lived, every civilization, every lesson learned. Nothing is off limits to history.

That did it for me.

I’m reflecting on a life-changing week I enjoyed. On a Monday afternoon, I was among a busload of preachers and spouses from across Europe who spent several hours touring the ruins of Pompeii, the Italian city devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius in August of A.D. 79. It was truly unforgettable. So much so, that….

After my arrival home in New Orleans 36 hours later, I was in our public library reading up on Pompeii. I checked out a Robert Harris novel Pompeii, and finished it the next night. (Note: I recommend anything Mr. Harris writes. The best historical novelist ever.)

I felt like I had been living in Pompeii that week.

I returned to the library and checked out everything I could find on Pompeii.

Okay.  The question is…

Why? Of what possible use is this in my ministry?

Answer: I have no idea. Maybe no use at all, maybe a lot.

A strong curiosity is a wonderful thing for any Christian to have, but particularly preachers. Why?

Well, several reasons….

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You are somebody in Christ. But who exactly?

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“I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3).

“But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).

We are loved. We are winners.

“I’m me and that’s good. Cause God don’t make no junk.” –from a poster by a child in a ghetto.  (source unknown)

The man said, “I think my wife’s health problems go back to something in her childhood, as to how she was treated.  She seems to have trouble accepting who she is in Christ.”

It’s always fascinating to consider what gives us our identity.  And what conditions robbed us of the same.

Smart Aleck is the biography of Alexander Woollcott, drama critic for the New York Times a long time ago.   Woollcott is said to have been a master wordsmith, which is what made me order the book in the first place.

Woollcott came from an impoverished background and carried enough personal hangups and oddities to set him apart for the rest of his life.  He was overweight, oddly shaped, and egotistical.  And those, goes the old joke, were his good points! When the New York Times hired him, that newspaper was one of 8 or 10 competing in that market, and not particularly distinguished.  His pay was $15 a week, and yet he was thrilled.  The author says he loved being “Alexander Woollcott of the New York Times.”

“At last,” writes author Howard Teichmann, “the sense of belonging began to set in…. Being somebody was infinitely better than being nobody.”

This may be why while unemployment is difficult for everyone, but men in particular have a problem with it.  Their identity is so often bound up in their jobs.  When men meet, they often begin with “What do you do?”  The answer helps to define us, we feel, whether accurately or not.

Ministers who find themselves unemployed experience the same weightlessness, the sensation of not belonging and thus being nobody. For a long time, the minister had introduced himself as “Pastor of Central Baptist Church” or “Assistant Pastor of First Church.”  Suddenly, that goes away.  Now, who is he?

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Playing these little games with Scripture

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“John to the seven churches which are in Asia….” (Revelation 1:4).

Did you know if you take the seventh letter from the 7th chapter of each book of the Bible, it forms a secret message?  I didn’t either.  But it’s no weirder than some of the schemes people come up with to make Scripture say more than it was intended.

The cults are notorious for finding secret messages in Scripture.

God’s faithful children must be careful not to fall for such schemes and not to try to read hidden messages into God’s Word.

His Word is sufficient.

I’ve been studying the first three chapters of Revelation, for the umpteenth time in my life.  There is so much here.

This introduction to the entire book of Revelation opens with seven letters from the ascended reigning Lord Jesus to the seven churches of Asia Minor.  The cities were real, the churches were genuine, and the messages are solid.  And yet, over the years, that was not good enough for some of the Lord’s expositors.

Surely there is more there, they said.  And proceeded to insert things never found in Scripture and I believe, never intended by the Author.

For reasons only the Spirit of God can discern, some enterprising teachers decided that these seven letters actually represented seven ages of the Church through the centuries. And yet, there is not a word in Scripture–not one–indicating God had this in mind.

According to this so-called pattern, it all began with the Ephesus age which had lost its first love, it continued with the Smyrna age which was a time of persecution, and so forth.  And guess what age we are in now?  That would be the Laodicean age, of course, since everyone knows that our generation is the culmination of everything the Lord had in mind, that we are the apex of His hopes and dreams and prophecies, that all the world has been waiting for you and me to arrive on the scene.

That, as much as anything, is what makes me reject this interpretation of those seven letters as seven ages of the church:  We are the final age.  We respond: “Oh yeah?  Who said?  What if the Lord has planned another thousand years before His return?  What will those poor people of the future do without a church age of their own?”  I can hear them now:  “Poor us! We had hoped to have a special term for the church in our time, but the church in the 20th-21st centuries fulfilled it.

Forgive my rant here. The more I read and study of Revelation, the more convinced I am that this final Book of the Bible has been the victim of a host of unhealthy teachers with their kooky interpretations.   I definitely do not want to encourage people who do not have patience with God’s Word the way it was given and who keep reading into it  their own thoughts.

The book Revelation: Four Views, Steve Gregg, editor, outlines this problematic interpretation for us…

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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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If I were a deacon just starting out

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Those who serve well as deacons obtain for themselves a high standing and great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus (I Timothy 3:13). 

If I were a newly ordained deacon, I would be eager to learn my craft, to honor my Lord, and to serve my church.  So, here are some of the things I would do:

–I would stay on my knees, asking the Father to purify me, to grow me and make my motives holy, and give me a heart to serve.  I would ask Him to teach me and to send godly people into my life to instruct me in this new avenue of ministry which He has opened up.

–I would read Luke 17:7-10 again and again until it became part of my DNA.  I would resolve never to seek appreciation or expect honors.  Deacons are servants. But, while I would not seek honors, I would be quick to express appreciation to others around me.  That is no contradiction, as it’s found all through Scripture.

–I would seek out the godliest, most effective deacons now serving our church and latch onto them.  I would pick their brains, and ask if I could work with them until I learned all they could teach me. I would accompany them on their visits and take notes (when I returned home) of all they said.

–I would read the scriptural passages about deacons again and again.  The primary two are found in I Timothy 3 and Acts 6.  Then, I would study the four gospels for every reference to servants and find what they are to do, how they are to behave, the attitude they are to project, and so forth.

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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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How God’s people undercut their best efforts and fail Christ

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“Welcome the stranger within your gates. For you were foreigners in Egypt.” — The thrust of Leviticus 19 (see verses 10, 18, and 33-34)

This is one of the greatest frustrations and painful aspects of pastoring.  You try to do well–to prepare sermons blessed of God, to lead your team to present effective ministries, to build powerful worship services, to develop disciples, and reach those in darkness–and then your best people fail to do the smallest thing.  In so doing, they end up negating a thousand good things they do.

They fail to think of the outsider.  They look right past the newcomer.  They give no thought to the first-timer.

My blog from Monday, March 22, 1999—

“I made a number of visits tonight.  Left notes at three homes (no one there) and visited with Carol and Bob Coleman.  They’ve been visiting our church several weeks.  She said, “We love it.  Great music, etc etc–but only three people have greeted us!”

“Three!  Our people think they are friendly but in truth they are friendly to each other.  Bob told me he had volunteered to help Clyde with cooking the wild game supper at church.  Was brusquely turned aside with ‘We already have enough help.’  Then Bob came on to the dinner and brought a friend.  One hour later, they were back.  Said not a soul spoke to them.  So disappointing.”

That church, you will want to know, had a reputation from the previous decade as strong on evangelism and soul-winning.  In fact, when I had asked the congregation to do something heroic and go the extra mile–more than once, our people opened their home to mothers from Third World countries bringing critically ill infants to our Children’s Hospital in New Orleans–they always responded well.  So, they were not uncaring.

They were not uncaring.

They were unthinking.

They were preoccupied with their own plans, their own families, themselves.  They were thinking about everything in the world other than the strangers and newcomers who needed some slight indication that they are welcome and wanted in this place.

It’s scary being a newcomer or first-timer.

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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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Questionable things we pastors do–for which we shall give account

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“Lord, we saw someone who does not follow us casting out demons in Your name, and we forbade him because he does not follow us” (Mark 9:38).

Robert Schuller died in April of 2015. This founder of the Crystal Cathedral in California and founder/host of television’s Hour of Power broadcast was the “media pastor” to countless millions who would never have entered my church.  He wrote books, did a lot of good, did much that was questionable, and drove us traditionalists out of our collective minds.

A few days after Schuller’s passing, I posted this on my Facebook page:

My favorite Robert Schuller story: When he was a kid, his mother taught him piano lessons.  Once, in the middle of a recital, his mind went blank and he forgot the rest of the piece he was playing. There was nothing to do but walk off the stage in humiliation.  Later, his mother gave him some great advice. “Honey, any time you mess up in the middle of a piece, always end with a flourish and no one will ever remember what you did in the middle.”  Schuller would look at his congregation and say, “Some of you have messed up in the middle of your life.  But my friend, you can end with a flourish if you start now.”

It’s a great story, one I often use when speaking to senior adults.  It fits perfectly.

In 2015 when I posted the story, I suggested Facebook readers restrain from giving us their judgments of the man.  “He has One who will judge him, One far more qualified than you or I.  And since we will be needing mercy when we stand before Him, we want to show mercy toward everyone.”

The comments poured in quickly.

Most expressed appreciation for something Dr. Schuller had done or said, a few remembered visiting the Crystal Cathedral and gave us their lasting impressions, and several thanked me for the tone of my note.

None judged.

But the first time I told that story–I was the new pastor of that church–the reaction was entirely different.

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