My pastor friend told me this.

“From time to time, members of my old church–the one where I came to know the Lord and was baptized, was ordained as a deacon and later to the ministry–will tell me they want me to be their new pastor. That is, they do, just as soon as they get rid of the one they’ve got.”

He said, “I will confess that I’ve thought from time to time maybe the Lord might send me back there to pastor. It’s just a thought, you understand.”

“But when people say that to me, I tell them, ‘Okay, here is the only way I would want to become your pastor. Go see your present pastor. Tell him that you are going to support him 100 percent, that you are going to pray for him every day and be his biggest encourager. Then, if and when the Lord leads him away, if God tells me to become your pastor, I would be honored.'”

“Invariably, though, they say to me, ‘But he’s not giving good leadership. The church is suffering under him. He needs to go.'”

“I tell them, ‘Maybe he would if you would love him and encourage him and pray for him. If you would go out of your way to assure him you are supporting him and that he can count on you a hundred percent. You’d be amazed what that does to a pastor.'”

“Frankly,” my friend admitted, “That is not what they want to hear.”

Maybe not. But it’s the wisest counsel possible to God’s people in that circumstance.

Here’s why.

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It sounded cruel, but he was not a believer and his assessment of the former pastor was an honest statement of how he felt.

After hanging in with a church of their denomination for too long–watching the pastor drive people away by his lack of ministry, his poor leadership, and a neglect of everything that makes a church a church–the entire family reluctantly moved to a church a few miles away. What they found there was striking in its contrast.

The congregation was warm and friendly, the church was thriving, and the pastoral team was outstanding. The minister’s sermons were powerful, biblical, and convicting. When a grandchild went into the hospital for surgery, the pastor left home before 5 am and met the family in the medical center. After praying with them, he stayed until the medical staff reported that the surgery had ended and the child was doing great.

After he left, the son-in-law, father of the child who had just come through the surgery, offered his assessment of the contrast between this new pastor and the old one who was still in the former church. “The other one was a joke,” he said.

A joke.

The family member who reported this to me observed, “We would not agree with Bobby that any minister is a joke. Remember, Bobby is unsaved and was not raised in the church. This is his honest reaction.” Then she said, “But no one in our family can help but be struck with the contrast in the sermons of the two men.”

How were they different? The former minister filled his sermon time with jokes and funny stories then ended with a short devotional thought. The new minister preaches a powerful message direct from God’s Word, the kind of sermon that cuts and convicts and inspires and blesses.

When a conversation (or story or scripture or quote) lodges itself in my heart and will not leave me alone, I know the Holy Spirit has sent me a message. That’s the case with this.

The contrast between those two preachers and those two types of sermons need closer investigation. Let’s attempt to do that here.

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I sat in your church and heard you preach. You did not know I was in the congregation because we never had the opportunity to meet.

Now, I was visiting in your part of the state, and the next day moved on to the next city where I’m ministering. So, had we met you would not have greeted a prospective member and probably would not have remembered it the next day. That’s fine.

What concerns me is that I had with me some friends who have moved to your city. I was hoping they would make some kind of connection with you and your church. That did not happen.

Watching what you did and failed to do concerns me. One reason it has persisted in my thoughts is that I’m certain at various times in my six pastorates, I made the same mistakes as you.

Since we do not know each other, I’m assuming you will not read this. So this is not for you. Rather, we post it on this website in the hope that other pastors will look at their own Sunday ministries in view of the newcomer sitting in the pews.

Here is what you did.

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People say it all the time, “I’m praying for you, pastor.”

I suppose they are.

My question to you, as a minister of the gospel, is: Can you tell?

I think I can. And I’m guessing you can also. Particularly if you have ever been the focus of genuine, heart-felt intercessions.

One president of the Southern Baptist Convention said the next day after he turned over the leadership of the denomination to the preacher who succeeded him he felt the difference–people were no longer praying for him. It was a sad day for him, he said.

My friend Bill Hardy tells of the farewelll reception Woodland Hills Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi, was giving him and his family as they prepared to move an hour up the state to the First Baptist Church of Kosciusko. An elderly lady went through the line to greet them and said, “Brother Bill, I have kept you at the top of my prayer list all these years.” Bill thanked her and said, “I hope you will keep me there.” “Oh no,” she said. “I’ll be praying for our new minister. Let the people in your new church pray for you.”

Little dose of reality there for my friend Bill.

Over the last few months, I have noticed the difference prayer makes in my own life.

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“Pastor, some of our members are concerned.”

That gets his attention, believe me.

You can say all you want about how the minister is God-called and God-protected and that sort of thing, but he would not be human if he did not want the people he’s serving to be supportive and responsive. After all, since he’s sent to help them, he will want some kind of evidence he’s accomplishing his purpose, otherwise, he feels that he has either failed them or God. Or both.

He is vulnerable as a result.

What makes him more vulnerable to negative influences from the congregation is that he has a family to feed and look after the same way you do if you work at the post office, drive a delivery truck, teach school, or extract teeth. The fact that he needs this job means he opens himself up to pressure from his constituents.

As a result, he reacts–at least emotionally–when he hears some of these lines that have been used on preachers since the beginning of the church.

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I’m a little irked with the younger generation of preachers who get all their news from the internet…or from the Jon Stewart show! Buy a newspaper, friend! You’ll find a hundred things a week that will fascinate you, instruct you, inspire you, and mortify you.

Here are three from Saturday’s “Times-Picayune” which are great preaching values.

“Transocean failures called systemic”

This refers to the explosion a year ago of an offshore rig operation for British Petroleum by Transocean. “The rig was finishing up its work drilling the Macondo deep-sea well for BP when oil and natural gas blew out from the ocean floor a mile down and ignited in fireballs.”

A Coast Guard report has just been issued (Friday) that lowers the boom on Transocean. “Unlike previous reports on the catastrophe that killed 11 rig workers and polluted the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard’s report says almost nothing about the raft of decisions and mistakes by BP personnel that led to the blowout.”

“Instead, it looks at actions and systemic failures after the Deepwater Horizon had already lost control of the well–all in the realm of Transocean and its crew.”

Notice the word “systemic.” It is the key.

The report faults that company, not for a few mistakes or errors in judgements, but for an entire culture of bungling, corner-cutting, safety-negligence. The problems were throughout the system, from top management down to the lowliest hand.

Pastors and teachers, take note of this please. That’s the problem with humans these days. That’s what original sin is all about. Sin is “systemic” within us.

Sin is not a misstatement. Not misspeaking. Not a lapse in good judgment. Sin is not a slipup, not an error, a failure to adhere to otherwise good principles.

Sin is throughout our hearts and lives. It is not a small segment of our lives that needs to be salvaged, healed, redeemed, helped, bandaged, treated. It’s all of us. Throughout.

“Why should you be stricken again? …The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faints. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; They have not been closed or bound up, or soothed with ointment.” (Isaiah 1:5-6)

Second thing from the newspaper.

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What started this for me was a fascination with the fourth of Jesus’ seven parables found in Matthew 13. As I often do when faced with a 7 or 8 hour drive from my hometown in north Alabama back to New Orleans, I picked a scripture that intrigued me and thought of it from every angle.

This may be the most neglected parable from all those taught by Jesus, methinks.

The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened. (Matthew 13:33)

I had been working on a message–now posted on my blog–on how Christians hide themselves inside their church buildings when the Lord wants us permeating the community with the gospel. This parable seemed a natural.

The way I was interpreting it was with an emphasis on “a woman took and hid” the leaven in the dough. She had some leaven and wondered where to hide it. “I know,” she thought. “I’ll hide it in this dough.” But a few hours later or the next morning, the world knew where she had put it. The power of the leaven to affect everything around it changed the dough and thus gave the presence of the leaven away.

That speaks to Christians wanting to remain secret disciples of Jesus, I was thinking. A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer has stuck with me for decades and works here: Secret discipleship is a contradiction in terms. For either the secrecy will kill the discipleship or the discipleship will kill the secrecy.

Then, I called a friend on my cell phone (yep, I was on the interstate and making a cell phone call; sorry for the bad example!). Mike knows his Greek. I wanted to know what the Greek New Testament could contribute to my understanding of that fourth parable.

He called me back. “The word in the Greek is ‘hid,’ all right,” he said. “But the commentary I checked said we should not make too much of the fact that she hid the leaven. She just put it inside the dough. The emphasis is not on her hiding it but on the way the leaven influences everything it touches.”

Well, all right, I thought, reluctantly. I had thought I was on to something with the emphasis on the “hid” word.

Then, next morning, with my office next door to the church library, I started pulling out commentaries.

Not a good thing.

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Churches build these great ministries and put on outstanding programs, then fail in one critical area: they hide them inside the walls of their buildings.

Then a leper came to Him, and on his knees, begged Him: “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

Yet he went out and began to proclaim it widely and to spread the news, with the result that Jesus could no longer enter a town openly. But He was out in deserted places, and they would come to Him from everywhere. (Mark 1:40-45)

I’m always struck by the incongruities–the oddities–in people’s behavior, particularly in biblical stories. Consider these unexpected aspects of our Lord’s encounter with the leper:

–The leper felt free to come to Jesus. The law specifically forbade that (Leviticus 13:45-46). Lepers were to shy away from others and to call out “unclean,” lest they be accidentally touched and therefore unclean.

–Jesus reached out and touched him. Our wonderful Lord did the unthinkable and touched the untouchable. As always, He was driven by compassion.

–Then, after the man was healed, the Lord told him to keep it to himself. These were the early days of the Lord’s ministry and the last thing He needed was crowds mobbing Him as a cult hero.

–The man disobeyed Jesus and told everyone he met. We can hardly blame him. I’ve sometimes felt half-seriously that the only unfair command our Lord ever gave was telling this fellow to keep the news to himself. Like he could! And like no one would notice.

Those are four strange aspects to this wonderful little story. But they suggest an even greater oddity about the Lord’s people today: Jesus told that man to be quiet, but he went out and told everyone he met. He tells us to tell the world and we go home and sit down.

We keep the most wonderful news in the world to ourselves.

Something bad wrong with that.

Even the finest Christian workers in today’s churches have a tendency to clam up rather than share their faith with the outside world. We love the Lord, we’ve been saved, we are grateful for His grace and power and mercy, and we love to worship Him and sing and talk about Him.

To one another.

What we are not doing is telling the world.

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(Note from Joe: this is a variation on the same subject as our recent article “What the Godly Elderly Can Expect.” As with most pastors, I’m just trying to find the most effective way of getting the message across.)

…the time of my departure is close. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. In the future, there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me, but to all those who have loved his appearing. (II Timothy 4:6-8)

I wish you could have known Ed Logan. The Saturday morning that will forever stand out in my mind, he got up early and left Mary Ellen asleep while he drove across town to Shoneys. The Gideons were having their monthly meeting to plan for more Bibles to be handed out in local schools. When Ed got home, he told Mary Ellen, “I didn’t take any money with me, and those pancakes sure smelled good.” She made him pancakes and they sat there and visited while he ate.

“I’m going over and plow Mr. Everett’s garden,” Ed told Mary Ellen. Everett Beasley lives a couple of blocks from our church. I imagine the two men were similar in age, but Mr. Beasley had numerous medical problems. Ed cranked up his tiller and went to work in the back yard.

That’s where they found Ed Logan. Dead of a heart attack.

That’s the way to go out. In the saddle, with your boots on. In the harness. Hard at work. In the trenches. Choose your metaphor.

The Apostle Paul had been given a gift. He knew his departure was eminent. “I am already being poured out as a drink offering,” he said. “The time for my departure is close.”

So, he reported in. He filed his final report, announcing for anyone interested that his work was done and he had finished the assignment given him by the Lord on that Damascan Road.

They tell me that the trapeze artist and tightrope walker are most vulnerable when taking their last step or two to safety. They’ve been out there above the circus ring, defying death, thrilling the audience. Now, their routine has ended, the crowd is applauding, they’ve done well. If they are not careful, they’ll let their guard down. That final step to safety is critical.

Ty Cobb was one of the great baseball players ever. Over a 22-year-career with the Detroit Tigers he set records that still stand. But he may have been the orneriest, the surliest, the rudest player ever. He lived the last years of his life in a small town in Georgia. Someone told me recently that a few weeks or months before his death, Cobb gave his life to Jesus Christ and was saved.

He sent a message to his teammates. “Tell them I got into the Kingdom in the bottom of the ninth.” Then he said, “I sure wish I’d come in at the top of the first.”

My question for you today is: What inning is it for you? If life is thought of in terms of a baseball game, what inning are you in?

The answer is: There’s no way to know.

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This is for pastors and other church leaders in particular.

When Jim went to his church as the new pastor, he told me, “They have a bad history. Every two years they run the preacher off.” He paused and said, “Let’s see if we can change that.”

He didn’t. Two years later, in spite of the wonderful growth the church was experiencing, a little group informed him that his work there was done and it would be better if he left.

I served one church where a small group of leaders–some elected and some not–met from time to time to make important decisions for the church. The poor pastor had little or no say. When I, the new preacher, suggested that this is the type of thing a congregation needs to know about and make the decision, the spokesman said, “We don’t like to upset the congregation about these things.”

These days, since I’m in a different church almost every Sunday, I see all kinds of arrangements in congregations. In one, the pastor seemed to be an appendage and was considered irrelevant by the lay leadership. In another, he was the good old boy expected to not make waves.

Since my ministry in a church (as the guest preacher) is usually confined to preaching a sermon and extending the public invitation, I try to find out certain things before the service begins:

–what is the congregation expecting from me today?

–are they responsive during the sermon? If they are, I see that as a great compliment to the pastor. No congregation suddenly begins listening and responding to a sermon when a new dynamic (ahem!) guest preacher arrives. If they are listening to me well, I decide they listen well to their pastor too.

–are the people responsive during the invitation? Do they get up and come to the altar area to pray without coaxing from the preacher? If so, that’s a great sign.

–are the people glad to be alive, to be in church, to be with each other? Or are they just enduring this hour.

I do not usually ask anyone about these issues, but just observe. I’m trying to get the temperature of the congregation.

I’m trying to assess the culture of this particular church.

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