The most blessed period for pastors is usually the two weeks or so just after the last Christmas program has been completed at church and the arrival of New Years.

Think of it. Your church members are out of town, there are no committee meetings, nothing is on your calendar. You are free.

Now, if you have small children, chances are your spouse has plans that involve lengthy driving to see grandparents. No way out of it; you have to go.

However, the good news is the kids will grow up quickly and you’ll be staying at home over the holidays.

What that time comes, I have some suggestions on how to make the most of the down-period between the last of the Christmas events at church and the start of the New Year.

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My first pastorate was the most frustrating of the six churches I shepherded. But I made a discovery that was like striking oil or stumbling over a gold vein.

Here’s what happened.

Just after finishing college, we married and I took a job. The plan was to work for two years and pay some bills, save what we could, and then head to seminary in New Orleans. That, incidentally, is precisely what we did, I’m happy to report.

In the meantime, I wanted to pastor a church. The problem was I was Southern Baptist and had just graduated from a Methodist college (Birmingham-Southern) with a degree in history and political science. My training in preaching, in church leadership, and in theology were practically non-existent.

Not exactly the kind of credentials an SBC pastor search committee was looking for.

Thanks to the recommendation from a preacher friend of my brother Ron, a tiny church some 25 miles north of the city invited me to fill the pulpit. After a couple of Sundays, they apparently decided to live dangerously and made me their pastor. I was elated.

I would remain there for the next year and two months. My short tenure furnished one of the most forgettable periods in that church’s long history. But it taught me a hundred lessons more precious than gold, lessons found only in the school of experience and nowhere else.

The most inspiring moment in that pastorate, however, came the day something hit me which had never occurred to my untutored mind. It came with such force that I laughed out loud at the prospect:

I could resign this church and they would call someone better. I would be free and they would go forward. It was a win-win proposition.

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This is a word for pastors and other church leaders concerning the activities your church sponsors during the Christmas season.

I wish I could tell you how to slow down and enjoy the season. Christmas for ministers is a little like the Thanksgiving meal for mom. She spends so much time planning and shopping, baking and serving, that when she finally gets a chance to sit at the table, she’s too tired to enjoy the feast. She does it for the family.

That’s the ministers. They have a hard time enjoying all the services and ministries of Christmas since they themselves are spread so thin.

Following are a few suggestions–urgings, even (that’s stronger)–as to how to make the most of these events in your church, pastor.

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A few years back, we would hear panicky reports that the attention span of Americans was shrinking to the point that sermons should be down-sized severely and immediately. Whether anyone did that or not, I’m not able to say.

I know for a fact, however, that in some of the largest churches in the country, the pastors regularly devote 45 minutes to their sermons. That should belie the earlier fears.

However, look at Facebook. They give FBers something like four lines to say what you want to say. “Status,” they call it. I imagine that the original thought was people would sign in and actually reveal their “status,” that is, where they happened to be at the moment and what they were doing. However, that got old real quick. There are few things more boring and annoying that reading that “I’m in the car wash” and “On my way to the cleaners.” I mean, who cares?

What Facebook has become for most of us is two things: a means of sharing photos/goings-on with a large circle of friends and family and a platform for our views and convictions.

If I were a pastor, I would get on Facebook immediately and would do the following….

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I sit there listening while my pastor friend tells what he’s going through in his church. And sometimes all the alarms go off. I realize he is in a dangerous place in his ministry.

Not always, but sometimes, I can tell him this. If I sense a leading from the Holy Spirit or if he and I already have a close enough relationship, I’ll interrupt him.

“Brother Bob, can we pause the narrative here a moment? I need to point something out to you.”

“My friend, you are exposed. You are a sitting duck. Life has drawn a target on your back. Satan has his gun-sights on you.”

“You’d better do something big in a hurry or you’re going to get in bad trouble.”

He sits there stunned, without a clue.

“What do you mean? I’m doing everything I know to work my way through this.”

I say, “I’m not talking about what you are going through. I’m talking about where you are personally at this moment. You are in a vulnerable spot and you need to move before something bad happens.”

Older, veteran pastors have learned the hard way to tread softly through this dark valley they have entered. They have seen the carcasses of their peers strewn about, brought down by ego or depression or temptation.

It’s the young minister who is more likely to try to brave it out alone. It’s the young pastor who is more prone to end up a victim instead of a victor.

Here are 10 danger zones for the pastor to watch out for.

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I asked a pastor friend for this story. He was unable to tell me his source. I don’t think that means he made it up; only that he clipped it out of something without noting where he got it.

Two hundred years or more ago, the British Navy arrived in the Canadian waters near what is now Quebec. They were instructed to wait for reinforcements before attacking the city, then held by the French.

Two hundred years later, Quebec is still a French city, because the British decided to fire on the saints instead of the enemy.

In military parlance, “friendly fire” is when soldiers fire on their own buddies by mistake.

It happens in churches far too often.

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It is true that the Bible identifies a number of sexual practices as wrong and to be shunned by the Lord’s faithful. It is true that homosexuality is among these. It is likewise true that the New Testament sees homosexuality as no worse than adultery and other kinds of transgressions.

However.

Those other areas do not pose as great a problem for the pastor who wants to address them. He can preach against adultery and lust and pornography all he wishes and he will not enrage anyone.

However.

The subject of homosexuality (gay, lesbian, bi-sexuality, however we wish to phrase it) is a minefield for the man of God. Almost anywhere he steps, he takes a chance of stirring up something from one direction or the other.

As the new pastor of a church, I was pleased to get a phone call from a local television station inviting me to speak. New preachers are always glad to get before the community; it helps get their ministries off to a roaring start. But this one I turned down.

“We are putting together a panel to address homosexuality,” the news director said. “We’ll have two gay/lesbian speakers and two ministers. Would you be willing to be one of the ministers?”

No thank you. Not in a hundred years.

There are indeed a few Christian leaders around who can pull that off, but I’m not one of them. This had all the makings of a shouting match or worse, an opportunity to hold the Christian message up to ridicule. Both are to be avoided.

This week, a friend of mine emailed to get my input on a discussion her denomination is conducting on this subject. Here is her note to me and my response.

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One day last week, I found myself across the table at a fast food place from a friend who ministers to college students. Before taking this position, he was a student minister in various Southern Baptist churches, and from all reports, was a roaring success in each one. So, for no other reason than curiosity, I posed a situation to him.

“Alvin,” I said, “let’s say I’m the new student minister at a church. And let’s say I have only a handful of young people, maybe ten. Tell me how to build a great program.”

He was ready for me. You’d have thought we’d planned this. I imagine he’s done it so much the response is second nature to him. Like asking me how to drink a glass of iced tea!

Focus on middle-schoolers. If they buy into your vision, they will grow your ministry.

He does not mean to neglect the older high-schoolers. But two realities affect the new student minister coming to a church: the youth often have a hard time changing their allegiance from the former minister to the new one, and soon, these will graduate and move on to college and no longer participate in the work. So, common sense dictates that focusing on the younger teens is right.

Put people around you who are better than you.

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My friend’s story last Monday could be told by every preacher in the land.

“When I stepped off the platform Sunday morning, I knew I had laid an egg. The sermon seemed to have been still-born. It just didn’t work. I felt awful.”

“But the most amazing thing. People were down at the altar praying, and ever since a number of people have come up to me saying how it ministered to them.”

Just goes to show, I said.

Goes to show what?

I raised that question on Facebook this week. I asked pastors who have felt that they bombed and then heard from church members that the sermon had special meaning to them, what they learned from the experience. The answers were all of one theme: “That God can use anything.” “God can speak through a donkey.” “How unimportant the messenger is.” “Christ is everything.”

Recently a friend and I visited another church. She was visiting in our home and there is a pastor she loves to hear, so I drove her there. That day, the sermon was not up to his usual standards, I felt. He is normally one of the finest expositors anywhere.

In the car, on the way to lunch, my friend said, “That was a wonderful sermon. Just what I needed to hear today.”

Goes to show.

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From time to time, as I’m sketching at a church or school, the question arises: “So, have you had training for this?” Or, maybe, “Are you self-taught?”

I don’t answer what I’m thinking.

What I say is usually a variation of, “I’ve had some formal training. But mostly, I’ve just worked at it. And I’m still trying to figure out how to draw better.”

But what I think is, “So, you think my stuff looks so amateurish I could not possibly have learned this from anyone?”

Can you imagine someone saying to Picasso, another artist of some renown (!), “Did you take training for this?” Or to Pavarotti or to Frank Lloyd Wright?

Today, my friend Mary Baronowski Smith told me how she made herself learn to sight-read a hymnal so she could play anything she wished on the piano. Even though she was taking lessons, this skill was self-taught.

Here’s what happened.

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