It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. For the past several months, I had been the weekend clerk-typist for the Pullman Company, dispatching porters and conductors to various runs in and out of Birmingham, Alabama, and keeping up with the whereabouts of all sleeping cars in the state. It was a great job and usually so quiet I was able to get a lot of studying done for class. Mac Chandler, passenger agent for the Seaboard Railroad, had invited me to work for him that summer, taking ticket reservations over the phone in his downtown office. There were only three other people in the office, all of them veterans of that work, and professionals.

I wish I knew what Mr. Chandler had noticed. He was a quiet man who took in everything around him, while speaking little and, alas, chain-smoking. One morning he walked over to my desk and handed me a little booklet. “Joe,” he said, “I thought you would enjoy this. It has some excellent points in it.”

The booklet was entitled “Tact.” Mr. Chandler was the personification of the virtue.

Today, I cannot recall a single point the booklet made. But I remember distinctly reading its pages, feeling “this is so right,” and taking to heart its points. There’s a line in the Proverbs about “a word fitly spoken” being like apples of gold in a silver setting, which I take to mean “of great value.” (Proverbs 25:11)

Undoubtedly, I was just right for a great lesson on tact and Mr. Chandler’s act in matching me up with the booklet was one of the most helpful things anyone has ever done for me.

Yesterday, as I write, our daily newspaper reported on two men of prominence. The first is featured on the front page as the recommended candidate to become president of a major university in our state. The other was president of a local department store chain and is described in his obituary. The contrast is worth noting.

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Pastor Roy said to me, “I have it on good authority that Pastor Tom has come into my church on Sunday afternoons and nosed around, trying to find who visited our church that morning and if any of his members joined us.”

We both called that taking insecurity to the next level.

There’s a lot of insecurity in the ministry, unfortunately. Some pastors forget their assignment to take the gospel to the world and shrink their field of ministry to the neighborhood around their church. If someone else starts a church inside what they consider their territory, they resent it. If the new church prospers, they feel jealous. If they lose members to that church, they become deadly enemies.

I know from personal experience how it happens. You’re leading a church that has been dying for years and you’re looking for any signs of life and revival. Suddenly a family joins your church. The fact that they are moving their membership from another congregation in the same town matters very little. All that counts is that someone thought your church was attractive enough, that your ministries were important enough, and that your preaching was successful enough that they wanted to join you. Sometimes that is the only encouragement you get in a month.

Meanwhile, the pastor of the church that just lost that family may take the loss personally, depending on a lot of things. If his church is otherwise healthy and prospering, he will take it in stride. If he also is struggling to stay alive, an entire family jumping ship can be a death blow. If it turns out that you were guilty of enticing them in any way, the pastor understandably takes it personally and feels insulted.

Just so easily do neighboring pastors, even of the same denomination, become competitors.

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The year our church decided to spend two weeks constructing a new plant for Calvary Baptist Church of Matawan, New Jersey, our youth minister was in charge. Bryan Harris–now pastoring in Vallejo, California–was gifted with administrative abilities and experienced in leading construction teams, so we all followed his leadership. Within two weeks, a new sanctuary and educational building rose on that spot and everyone had the experience of a lifetime.

Two years later, when our church in Columbus, Mississippi, opted to erect our own educational building instead of contracting it out, we put Bryan in charge and the members all worked under his leadership.

The year we took our youth choir and some 20 adults to England for a two-week-mission of concerts and ministry, our minister of music Wilson Henderson was in charge. He was experienced at leading these trips and was close friends with David Beer, the British pastor who was our host in Tonbridge, England. Even though I was the pastor and technically his “superior,” I took orders from Wilson.

Sometimes you are the leader, sometimes a follower. But no one is the leader in every situation. Whatever the occasion calls for, a faithful follower of Christ will want to set the example for those coming after you.

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I’ve previously mentioned the lengthy conversation I had with C. C. Hope, Jr., some years ago when his wife was in surgery and we sat for hours in the waiting room of the Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem. At the time, he was one of the three F.D.I.C. commissioners in Washington, D.C., and past president of the American Bankers’ Association. I told him I had heard of him before becoming his pastor.

In the summer of 1986, when I announced our move from Mississippi to become pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charlotte, NC, a Starkville banker friend, John Mitchell, told me about Mr. Hope. He said, “You have a deacon in that church whom I really respect. C. C. Hope was president of the ABA. We had him down here to speak at a bankers’ function. My wife had just broken her leg. The next time I saw him was five years later. He called me by name and asked about my wife, remembering that her leg was in a cast the last time he’d been here. I was stunned.”

C. C. laughed when I told him that. “That’s actually what did it for me,” he said. “Remembering people’s names.”

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This morning as I write, while walking on the levee by the river, I chatted with a neighbor I’ve frequently seen but had never met. He has an unusual morning routine. Instead of walking a long distance up and down the levee, he has marked off 1,000 feet and goes back and forth. “I do eight laps,” he said. “That’s 16,000 feet. About 3 miles.” I congratulated him. It’s the same distance I get in each morning, and I know what an effort it can be sometimes.

The man said, “I’ve lost 70 pounds up here.” I was impressed, and this time I really congratulated him. Losing 5 pounds can be difficult, but imagine losing seventy!

I thought of a woman I met in Nashville this Spring. In the cafeteria at the Lifeway building, I was chatting with and sketching a number of church secretaries in town for their annual conference where I was a speaker. Several women walking by called greetings to the ones at my table. The lady I was drawing said, “See the one in the purple sweater? She works in our office.” I glanced at the cluster of ladies exiting the doors. The purple-clad was a large person and easy to spot.

“She has lost over a hundred pounds,” the woman said. She added, “There’s an interesting story behind it. She was desperate to lose weight and felt she couldn’t do it by herself. So, she looked into having stomach-stapling surgery. When the doctors examined her, it turned out she had a heart condition, and they refused to do the surgery until she lost a lot of the weight she was carrying.”

A classic Catch-22 situation: she cannot have surgery to lose weight until she loses weight to make the surgery safer.

“Anyway,” said the secretary, “she put herself on a diet and has lost half the amount she needed to get rid of. And she’s decided to skip the surgery. She discovered she’s strong enough to control her appetite without the aid of the doctors or drastic surgery.” I call that a wonderful discovery.

Self-control is one of the bigger issues in this life. There are many facets to it. Here are several.

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I invited Adam to lunch with me, planning to speak to him about his relationship to Christ. His wife Christa appeared to be an active Christian and their two daughters were full participants in our church’s youth program. Perhaps Adam just needs a little encouragement, I thought.

After he agreed to meet me, I asked Adam to choose the restaurant. “How about Jimmy C’s,” he said, and had to tell me where it was. I was new to the New Orleans area and hardly knew one restaurant from another in this city noted for great eating. We would meet at noon on Thursday.

We greeted each other, were seated in a booth, and gave our orders to the waiter. I went straight to the subject on my mind. “Adam, can I ask you about your relationship to Jesus Christ?” He was friendly and open and did not mind at all telling me his thoughts. Somehow along the way, he had studied under humanist teachers and they had provided a steady diet of atheistic reading for his young vulnerable mind, and it was my assignment, it appeared, to try to counter some of that.

The waiter brought our lunch, I said a short blessing, and we dived in. That’s when the young woman showed up at our table.

She was dressed–or not dressed would be closer to the truth–in a flimsy, see-through shortie pajama thing that showed far more of her than it ought. I would not have been more stunned than if she had walked down the aisle of my church dressed like that in the middle of my sermon. Glancing around the restaurant, I saw she had company. Other attractive young ladies were similarly unclad and were visiting at the tables and chatting with diners.

Adam and I had visited Jimmy C’s on the day of their weekly lingerie show.

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Two cars met on a narrow one-way bridge. One man leaned out of his window and yelled, “I never back up for fools!” The other called out, “I always do,” as he reverses his automobile.

Question: which of those two men is the stronger? Obviously, the one who gave in to the other.

Here’s another.

The interstate traffic was heavy, fast, and aggressive. This was no place for timid drivers if they wanted to survive. Suddenly, a speeding car cut in front of two others without giving a signal and almost clipped the bumpers of both vehicles. The two drivers were shocked, then frightened, and then enraged. One driver took out after the offender, the adrenalin of his anger fueling his determination not to let the culprit get by with such behavior. The second driver calmed himself down and reminded himself that his goal was to arrive safely at his destination, and most definitely not to get revenge, not to teach other drivers a lesson, and not to let his anger get him into trouble.

Now, which of those two drivers is the stronger man? Clearly, the one in control of his spirit.

How does that line go from Proverbs? “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city.” (16:32) The point is made in the opposite way in Proverbs 25:28, “Like a city that is broken into and without walls, is a man who has no control over his spirit.”

The little church had decided that the two leading women of the congregation would get together and select the new carpet for the auditorium. Eloise wanted a neutral color. She said, “We’re still not sure what color they’re going to paint the walls and we don’t want to clash with that. And, this color will go well with the choir robes.” Evelyn, however, had her heart set on a bright red. “We had red in our last church and it brightened up the place so much. I’m not going to budge on this. It has to be red.”

Church fights and congregational splits have been built on differences as slight as this. But Eloise was determined not to let that happen. She said, “Let’s do it your way, then. I’m sure red will be fine. It’s not as if this were the most important matter in the world.”

Good for Eloise.

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I dropped by the governor’s office before leaving town. He was a member of the church I’d been serving, and now that I had been called to another pastorate several hours away, I wanted to thank him for his encouragement and ask for an autographed picture. He was more than accommodating and effusive in his praise of my work.

Pulling out a poster-sized photo, the governor picked up a magic marker and wrote across the bottom, “To Joe McKeever–the greatest preacher in the world!” I thanked him and slipped out.

In the hallway, I bumped into an old friend who worked for the governor. I showed him the poster and said, “I can’t hang that in my office! It’s too ‘over the top.'” He smiled and said, “Joe, he does that for every person who walks in the office. But the people who work for him are dying for a word of appreciation from him.”

I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

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I’m thinking about two deacons, both warm-hearted effective men of God. It wasn’t always that way.

“I don’t want him on the deacons,” I told the committee assigned to recommend the next group to be elected by the church. “Trust me on this. He has no business bearing this responsibility.”

I hoped they would drop the matter there. The man in question, I’ll call him Malachi, had been a deacon for several terms, was inactive at the moment and was being considered for re-election.

Pastors know things about church members few others do, as a rule, and yet we don’t want to talk about these things in open forums. Or anywhere else, for that matter. (I once asked in a personnel committee meeting, “Can we speak in confidence here?” The chairman said, “Pastor, I wouldn’t say anything in this room you don’t want repeated.” That was good advice.)

After the committee adjourned, one of the men followed me into my office. “I have to know,”he said. “What is this secret about Malachi that disqualifies him from serving as a deacon.” When I hesitated, he said, “He’s meant a lot to this church through the years. There may be something we can do for him.”

I said, “He’s being seen regularly at the casino, gambling. It appears he’s going there every day and staying for hours.”

The leader said, “You know this for a fact?” I told him of a certain church-member-in-name-only whom I bump into occasionally, who had told me this. “And you believe him?” I said, “Oh yes. He has his faults, but dishonesty is not one of them.”

“Then, let’s talk to him,” he said. Talk to Malachi.

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I was the minister of evangelism at the FBC of Jackson, Mississippi, in my early 30s. That would be the early 1970s. My pastor, Larry Rohrman, was frequently invited to speak out of town and sometimes he would invite me along. I think he wanted a driver more than company. On one of those occasions, he said something that has stayed with me ever since.

“See that little church,” he said as we traveled down a country highway. “In many cases the pastor of that little church can preach just as well as or better than the pastor of the big, growing church. But the difference is that he can’t turn loose of jobs. He has to do everything himself. The other guy, however, puts people to work. He matches the right person to the right job and everyone wins. They get satisfaction from doing their job in the church, the work gets done, the pastor is freed up for other things, the church grows, and the Lord is honored.”

Some pastors can delegate; some cannot. One pastor sees a task that needs doing and starts thinking of who has a gift or the aptitude or at least the willingness for this and he enlists them. The other pastor sees a job and does it. Both are godly, dedicated men of the Lord, but only the first is being fair to his people.

Along about the same time as that conversation with my pastor, I attended a national conference on church management in Atlanta. There were 700 of us packed into the auditorium of that downtown hotel. In the middle of the opening session, as our host was presenting the schedule of the week, a hotel employee approached the platform pushing a vacuum cleaner and proceeded to clean all around the speaker.

At first, the speaker ignored him. Then the employee said, “Sir, can you move over here and let me clean under your feet?”

Our leader was visibly perturbed. He said, “Buddy, could you do that some other time? We’re trying to have a meeting here.”

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