A 10-year-old girl said something two weeks ago that has had me thinking about passion ever since.

Interesting word, passion. It gives us compassion, passive, dispassionate, and a host of related concepts. At its core, from the Latin, “passion” means “to suffer.” It’s opposite, passive, or impassive, means “unfeeling.”

I was teaching cartooning to children in the afternoons following vacation Bible school. At one point, I had to take a phone call and turned the class over to my teenage grand-daughter who was assisting me. Ten minutes later, I told the children about the call.

“One of the editors of a weekly Baptist paper in another state called about using a certain cartoon. I found the drawing in a file and scanned it into the computer and emailed it to her. Next week, that cartoon–which is still in that file cabinet in my office–will be seen in 50,000 newspapers in homes all over that state.”

Then I asked the question on their minds but which none dared to raise.

“Now, how much money do you think I made doing that?”

Some kid said, “Thousands.” The rest had no idea.

“Zero,” I said. “Not a dime.”

“Very few cartoonists make much money doing this. Almost all have to have ‘day’ jobs to pay the rent.”

“So why,” I asked, “do we keep drawing cartoons when it doesn’t pay much money?”

That’s when the 10-year-old girl raised her hand and said something I had never really thought of.

“You do it for the passion.”

Wow. Exactly right. Pretty insightful for a child, if you ask me.

I confess to having a passion for certain things in my life, from my grandchildren to cartooning to writing. I’m interested in a lot of things that cannot be said to be my passion. These might include the New Orleans Saints, the Atlanta Braves, my car, the appearance of my yard (that will come as a surprise to my wife who thinks I have little interest in it!), and the clothes in my closet. I care about them, but do not lie awake thinking of them.

We preachers often tell our congregations that “the meaning of this word in the Greek is such-and-such” as though we have just solved the riddle of life. The fact is, the root meaning of a word can be of little or no help whatsoever in telling us what we need to know about a word.

If the root of “passion” is “to suffer,” we would veer off track if we then asked, “What makes us suffer in our lives?” No one I know uses passion to mean suffering.

(However, I remind myself of the grand works of music and art commemorating the sufferings of our Lord as “The Passion of Jesus.” So the word is honorable with a noble tradition.)

My Greek professor in seminary, Ray Frank Robbins, used to remind us, “Words do not have meanings. Words have usages.”

The “usage” of “passion” is more related to a compelling drive, an inner urge that keeps us at something sane people would have quit long ago.

The thesaurus lists a hundred synonyms for passion, including zeal, ardor, eagerness, fervor, hunger, enthusiasm, mania, obsession, and energy.

Sean Payton has a passion for football. In season and out, colleagues say this coach of the New Orleans Saints championship football team is first in the office in the morning and the last one to leave at night.

Consultants tell businessmen and pastors alike that to achieve the highest level of success, one must have a passion for growing his business or his church.

Let’s speak to that, pastor.

What is your passion? What drives you? What springs you out of bed in the morning and still has you going late in the evening when normal people would be watching television?

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There was a time when it was easier to pastor a church than it is today. There was a time when churches running 1,000 on Sunday were considered mega. There was a time when churches took what they had in the way of pastoral leadership and pretty much went with it without a lot of complaints.

Those days are no more. It’s a different world we live in.

People demand strengths and excellence and results from their leaders. They look for power in the pulpit and skills in relationships. They want degrees and winsomeness and it wouldn’t hurt if you looked sharp either.

They want to be fed in sermons and challenged in programs. They want input in decisions and no longer hand the keys to the kingdom to the new preacher.

What they do not want is to be embarrassed by the preacher, for their church to become the laughingstock of the community, for the attendance to drop, or for the financial situation to become dire.

If they could, they would like the church to reach the unchurched and make a difference in the poorer section of town, but without changing the nature of what their church has always been.

If they could, they’d like to become a mission-minded congregation where members go overseas and return with glowing reports of work done, but without they themselves being asked to go.

They want good sermons and effective leadership from a pastor who has earned their respect and whom they like.

Just don’t bother them too much in accomplishing this.

Poor preacher. Someone ought to encourage him. Lord knows there are enough forces out there overwhelming him in the other direction.

Today, let’s encourage him. Let’s “give him heart,” as the word “encourage” actually means.

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While researching a subject on-line the other day, I found myself reading some preachery attacks on other ministers. These men of God, assuming that’s what they are and I’m not saying they’re not, were taking no prisoners.

“That pastor is a liar!” “Preachers lie to you when they say….” “Ten lies preachers tell you.” “That preacher is an agent of hell!”

That sort of thing.

When those sent by the Father to be shepherds of His sheep use such blistering rhetoric, we fail our assignments in many ways: we dishonor the Lord, we shame the church, we needlessly slander our brethren, we set poor examples for the people in the pew, and we hold the gospel up to ridicule by the world.

How about a little sweetening, I wonder. And then I remember something.

Waylon Bailey, beloved brother who pastors the First Baptist Church of Covington, Louisiana, says there are two kinds of preachers: those who enter the ministry whole and those who enter in order to become whole.

Give me the first kind any day of the week. The second group can be scary and dangerous.

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A church asks you to preach at the last minute and you pull out a tried-and-trusted sermon you’ve given several times and feel strongly about.

Another church asks you to preach months in advance and you preach that same sermon.

What’s going on here?

Some would say you are taking the easy way out by recycling an old sermon. “Grabbing something from the barrel.” “Preaching your sugar sticks,” they call it.

They are dead wrong. You are doing exactly what you ought to be doing and here’s why.

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During the years I served as director of missions for the Baptist churches of metro New Orleans, I must have received a hundred or more resumes from aspiring pastors. Some simply wanted to relocate, but most planned to attend our Baptist seminary and hoped to find a local church to pastor.

The resumes ran the gamut–everything from multi-paged mini-biographies to one-page skeletons. When I responded with a suggestion or two on how to make the bio more helpful to a search committee, the minister would sometimes answer that this is how he was taught to prepare a resume.

My response was: In the business world, maybe so. But sending a resume’ to a church is a different ball game.

Pastor search committees are rarely composed of professionals with a great deal of experience in combing through stacks of resumes. Most are salt-of-the-earth laypeople who do not understand the complexities of denominational abbreviations or the different types of seminaries and theological degrees. They are often easily misled by the unscrupulous.

You will want to be crystal clear, absolutely honest, and as helpful as possible in the way you compose your resume.

The “Jobs” section of our local Sunday paper frequently runs hints on preparing effective resumes. This week, the suggestions ran along the lines of: Length (one page is preferable), Priorities (leave out the insignificant stuff), Keep it Professional (do not list hobbies, numbers of children, etc), and Prepare Multiple Versions for different companies.

Almost none of that is applicable to a minister.

No doubt someone somewhere is advising young ministers on how to prepare helpful resumes. But knowing none of them personally, I will offer my take on the subject.

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I confess. I am a bookaholic, a bibliophile. New books, old books, it doesn’t matter. Turn me loose in a convention hall where the public library is selling off their excess and I’m in heaven for two hours.

In Cincinnati, I discovered a used bookstore that filled several floors of an ancient downtown building. I could have moved in.

I know where the best used bookstore is in Jackson, Mississippi, and in Birmingham, Alabama, and never pass either city without a brief stop-in.

But there is reason to this madness. And it’s far more than a nostalgia kick. (There is that too, but it’s not the major thing.)

Take the 1943 book I finished today. Purchased for 5 bucks somewhere–I forget where–“They Call It Pacific” is an eyewitness account of the opening days and months of the Second World War by Associated Press reporter Clark Lee.

Reading the book was a delight simply because it was not history. Lee was there, he saw it, he told of the conversations, described the people, and let us feel what he felt.

And like a preacher ought, I received several good sermon illustrations from the book. But more than that, these are “life” illustrations, not just grist for the sermon-making mill.

But first, a little background….

In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s Lee worked out of Japan. He saw the build-up to war first-hand and was friends with a number of government officials and military officers who later became our hated enemies. He escaped the country in November, 1941, just ahead of Pearl Harbor and full-scale war.

Clark Lee was in the Phillipines when MacArthur was forced to flee and the Japanese captured the country. Along with other leaders, he relocated to the island of Corregidor and went back and forth to Bataan to interview American soldiers who were fighting alongwith the Filipinos. Then, as those last bastions fell, he hopped a boat to Australia. He arrived back in Hawaii six months after Pearl Harbor and described the recovery going on. Then, he was assigned to an aircraft carrier that took part in the fight for Guadalcanal.

The book ends after the first full year of American involvement in WW II. I found it fascinating on several levels, some of them because of illustrations the book provides.

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“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have.” (I Peter 3:15)

Sometimes you know when your moment is coming but most times you don’t.

Later this morning–what started me thinking about all this–I’m to be interviewed for a national Christian radio hookup. Readers of this blog will recall the “Christian Bucket List” from late April and early May. (The list of 50 required five articles over a two week period.) Someone at Moody Radio saw them and asked if they can interview me concerning them.

Far from “condoning” or “enduring” such interviews, I love them. No one who goes into the Lord’s work does so hoping to keep their ministry a secret. So, let’s do it.

I have no idea what they will ask. But, in preparation, I went back last night and looked over the five articles. And made a little discovery. One item of the fifty is mentioned twice. But this can be edited and corrected, thankfully. One of the blessings of blogging.

For the last week, I’ve had a post-it note beside my computer: “Monday. Interview. Moody Radio. 10 am. Deb.” A reminder to pray for the Father’s presence in this and a prompting to be near the home phone at that time.

It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been interviewed, so it’s not about my having the jitters. (At this point, anyone else would pause to list some of the radio and TV stations/networks I’ve done interviews with. But let’s pass on that. Suffice it to say there have been several. This is not about me.)

What this is about is the need for a minister or any follower of the Lord Jesus to be prepared for that moment when the microphone is poked in his face and he is asked to account for something important.

I recall an article from a newsmagazine in which a consultant was prepping politicians and Fortune 500 big-shots for their moment in the spotlight, for good or ill. Some of his points have lingered with me to this day.

Then yesterday, seeing the CEO of Massey Energy appearing before a Senate committee on C-Span to explain the deaths of the coal miners a few months back in his West Virginia mine brought it all home.

I expect the CEO of British Petroleum has conferred with consultants on how to come across to the public as believable, confident, and yet contrite at the same time. Admit what you can, explain all you must, but do or say nothing to play into the hands of the lawyers who are lining up to clean out your bank accounts.

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Some years back Gene Smith wrote a book about the final years of Woodrow Wilson with the intriguing title, “When the Cheering Stopped.”

Smith told how at the end of the First World War, Wilson was the most popular man on the planet. When he and his presidential entourage traveled to Europe for the Versailles Conference, crowds acclaimed him everywhere. He was hotter than the Beatles or Elvis ever were. That enthusiasm lasted about a year.

Woodrow Wilson suffered a paralyzing stroke on October 3, 1919, and was incapacitated for the remaining five years of his life. His party lost in the 1920 elections. And Congress refused to ratify membership in the League of Nations, a cause dear to Wilson’s heart.

His star had ascended and flared brightly, then had burned out and fallen to the earth. One wonders what he thought about during all those months in which his mind was working but little else. He had much to regret and surely must have suffered great remorse.

The Second World War, it has often been noted, resulted from the botched up job the Allies did at Versailles and over the next few years. (I’m halfway thinking of inserting an apology here for the extended historical allusion. But hey, this was my major and some of my best college papers dealt with this period in American life! But, back to the subject….)

The question before us is “What does a leader do when he comes to the end, hands the reins to his successor, and goes home? When he/she looks back and thinks of the mistakes made, the people hurt, the jobs left undone, how does one handle this?”

Sean Payton, the Super-Bowl-winning coach of the New Orleans Saints football team, has a book coming out at the end of June. “Home Team: Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life” will give Payton’s take on coming to our city and, particularly following Katrina, rebuilding his team and recapturing the hearts of the WhoDat Nation.

In Friday’s Times-Picayune, reporter Mike Triplett provides an advance peek at the book with something Payton did to fire up the team during the week prior to the February 7 championship game in Miami.

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“My chief objection (to the Christian faith and the church today) is that ninety-nine percent of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull!”

The critic, Frank Shallard, was a preacher himself, so he knew whereof he spoke.

Except he wasn’t speaking for himself. Shallard is a fictional character in the 1927 novel “Elmer Gantry” and, I’m confident, was voicing the views of author Sinclair Lewis himself.

That line, the final sentence in chapter 28, must have elicited a million cheers and “amens” from across the landscape as readers “heard” the renegade preacher voicing their own gripe about the church.

Boring preaching and dull Bible lessons are no recent phenomenon.

However, knowing that tiresome, uninspiring preaching has always been around does not make it any easier to take or to deal with.

You know what the problem is in addressing boring sermons, don’t you? That one will be boring in doing it. I’ve already started, deleted, and restarted this piece for that very reason.

Google “boring sermons” and pull up a chair. The internet has plenty on the subject.

Here is my little contribution to the discussion. I’ll try not to bore.

Boredom in anything–whether preaching the revolutionary gospel of Jesus Christ, playing third base for the Yankees or Red Sox, or being married to the most beautiful woman in the world–is part of the human condition.

The human being is constitutionally unable to stay excited all the time. The adrenalin would burn up our nervous system and we would be dead in six months from sheer exhaustion and sleeplessness.

God has created us so that the human brain adapts to every situation. The preacher of the world-shaking gospel settles down into a routine he can live with, the third-baseman grows accustomed to the adulation of the crowds and the television lights and the overflowing bank account, and the fellow married to (insert name of your favorite starlet here) finds that one day is pretty much like the next.

That’s why preachers grow lazy, third-basemen drop the ball, and husbands of starlets stray.

But we’re talking about the preachers here.

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You are about to encounter some of this pastor’s and I suspect every pastor’s pet peeves. These are comments from church members that irk us, get our goat, try the limits of our patience, drive us up the wall–and a whole bunch of other metaphors for provoking us.

Ready? We’ll get right to it….

1) “I’m not being spiritually fed.”

2) “I have a right” or “I deserve….”

3) “Lord knows I’m not one to gossip but….”

4) “I’ve been paying my tithes for years and I think I’m entitled….”

5) “Sorry. I just don’t have a gift for that.”

6) “Why don’t they do something about that?”

7) “The pastor is a dictator.”

8) “Before we do that, let’s have a word of prayer.”

9) “There’s no use trying to talk to the preacher. He won’t listen to you.”

Some years back, Pastor (also Evangelist, Author, and a lot of other things) Jack Taylor wrote a book he titled “Which Being Interpreted Means.” His thinking was that, just as Scripture sometimes will give a Hebrew or Aramaic word and then tell the reader what it means, we should do that with a lot of expressions we use around the church. It was all tongue-in-cheek and a lot of fun.

Since Brother Jack had me illustrate this creative little book, I spent a lot of time with each point, so I remember a number of them.

A friend greets you with, “Hey, I’ve been praying for you.” That, being interpreted, usually means, “I haven’t prayed for you at all, but on seeing you just now I sent up a quick ‘Lord, bless this brother/sister!'”

Someone at church says, “The Lord just isn’t leading me to do that.” Which being interpreted means, “There is no way under God’s heaven I was planning to do that and nothing you say will ever change my mind!”

(I still see Jack’s book available from online book sources in case you’re interested in getting a copy.)

So, let’s apply the little “Which being interpreted means” rule to the above expressions which I hope to never hear in church again.

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