I stood in front of the class of seminary students and said, “Here are two words which I’d like to suggest you completely remove from your vocabulary. Do not ever, ever use them in conversations with people or in sermons.”

“People who do not know these words will misunderstand them and the result will not be good.”

I could almost have saved my breath. It turned out most had never heard of these words. So, perhaps I did them no favor by a) introducing them to these words and b) then suggesting they never use them.

Isn’t this like telling someone not to think about pink elephants for the next 10 minutes?

The forbidden words are “succor” and “niggardly.”

These are good words with solid meanings and excellent pedigrees, but they can get you in a ton of trouble.

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I’m not quite to the point of suggesting that every pastor ought to subscribe to Sports Illustrated–that swimsuit issue coming to your house might not be a good idea–but almost. Every time I pick one up, it seems, I find a great sermon illustration or idea for a message.

The February 1, 2010, pre-Super Bowl issue carries articles on the Saints and the Colts. I bought it more as a memento, but will keep it for its account of the way Saints Coach Sean Payton inspired his team to win the game that would send them to the Super Bowl.

Football coaches are saddled with one of the toughest assignments possible. In addition to preparing their soldiers for the big battle–one that gets repeated against a new enemy every week during the warring season–they have to come up with a motivational speech or inspirational gimmick for that last minute burst of energy. A few pre-game or half-time speeches are legendary. Every fan knows about Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” speech to the Notre Dame players.

In high school, it’s hard to do. In college, it gets tougher. But in the pros, the NFL, where every player is a multi-millionaire and many are celebrities with huge followings, the challenge to come up with words to inspire a team before battle is off the charts in difficulty.

We pastors are motivators–or should be. We can learn from the masters of the craft. In Coach Sean Payton, the New Orleans Saints have a leader who has motivaton-of-his-troops down to a fine art.

On Saturday night, January 23, Coach Payton met with the team at their hotel in downtown New Orleans. Twenty-four hours later, the Saints would go head-to-head against the tough Minnesota Vikings for the NFC championship. The winner would represent the NFC in the Super Bowl against the Indianapolis Colts on February 7.

For their entire 43 year history, the Saints had never won an NFC championship game. In fact, only one other time had they played for the championship, in 2006, a game they lost in a frustrating, frigid, snowy Chicago stadium.

The Saints were in uncharted territory. They had never been here before. Win this game against the Vikings and earn a ticket to the big show.

What would Payton do to motivate the team?

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(This is part 2 of a two-part article, 6 through 10 reasons on why small churches usually do not grow. Click here for part 1)

6. No plan.

The typical, stagnant small church is small in ways other than numbers. They tend to be small in vision, in programs, in outreach, and in just about everything else.

Perhaps worst of all, they have small plans. Or no plans at all.

The church with no plan–that is, no specific direction for what they are trying to do and become–will content itself with plodding along, going through the motions of “all churches everywhere.” They have Sunday School and worship services and a few committees. Once in a while, they will schedule a fellowship dinner or a revival. But ask the leadership, “What is your vision for this church?” and you will receive blank stares for an answer.

Here are two biblical instances of church leaders who knew what they were doing.

In Acts 6, when the church was disrupted by complaints from the Greek widows of being neglected in the distribution of food in favor of the Hebrew widows, the disciples called the congregation together. They said, “It is not right for us to neglect….(how they would fill in this blank reveals their plan)…in order to wait on tables.” And then, as they commissioned the seven men chosen, the disciples said, “We will turn this responsibility over to them and give our attention to….(fill in the blank).”

In the first instance, the disciples saw their plan as “the word of God” and in the second as “prayer and the ministry of the word.”

How do you see your ministry, pastor? What is your church’s focus?

Earlier, when Peter and John were threatened by the religious authorities who warned them to stop preaching Jesus, they returned to the congregation to let them know of this development. Immediately, everyone dropped to their knees and began praying. Notice the heart of their prayer, what they requested: “Now Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to…..(what? how they finished this is how we know their plan, their chief focus).”

“…to speak your word with great boldness.” (Acts 4:29)

When the Holy Spirit filled that room, the disciples “were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” (v. 31) Clearly, that means they spoke it into the community, the world around them, and not just to one another.

When I asked a number of leaders for their take on why so many small churches do not grow, several said, “They need to focus on the two or three things they do best. Not try to be everything to everyone.”

Some churches need to focus on children’s ministry, others on youth or young adults, young families, or even the oldsters. (Tell me why it is when a church is filled with seniors, we look upon it as failing. It’s as though white-haired people of our society don’t need to be reached for the Lord.)

Some will focus on teaching, others on ministry in the community, some on jail and prison ministries, and some on music or women’s or men’s work.

One note of explanation: this is not to say that the church should shut down everything else to do one or two things. Rather, they will want to keep doing the basics, but throw their energies and resources, their promotions and prayers and plans, into enlarging and honing two or three ministries they feel the Lord has uniquely called them into.

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(This is part 1 of a two-part article, the first 5 of 10 reasons on why small churches usually do not grow. Click here for part 2)

First, an explanation or two, then a definition.

I know more about getting smaller churches to grow than larger ones. I pastored three of them, and only the first of the three did not grow. I was fresh out of college, untrained, inexperienced, and clueless about what I was doing. The next two grew well, and even though I remained at each only some three years, one almost doubled and the other nearly tripled in attendance and ministries.

By using the word “grow,” I do not mean numbers for numbers sake. I do not subscribe to the fallacy that bigness is good and small churches are failures. What I mean by “grow” is reaching people with the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you reach them and start new churches, your local church may not expand numerically, but it is most definitely “growing.” If you are located in a town that is losing population and your church manages to stay the same size, you’re probably “growing” (i.e., reaching new people for the Lord).

There are not “ten reasons” why small churches tend to remain small. They do tend to stay that way, you’ve probably noticed. But there must be hundreds of reasons for this, and no two churches are alike.

This is simply my observations as to why stagnant, ungrowing churches tend to stay that way. I send it forth hoping to plant some seed in the imagination of a pastor or other leader who will be used of the Lord to do great things in a small church.

I have frequently quoted Francis Schaeffer who said, “There are no small churches and no big preachers.” I like that. But it’s not entirely true. We’ve seen churches made up of just a few people and stymied by lack of vision and a devotion to the status quo. And here and there, we may encounter a preacher with the world on his heart and the wisdom of the ages on his lips; that for my money is a “big preacher.”

But this is not about being such a preacher. We’re concerned with not being one of those churches.

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“…and in that law he meditates day and night.” (Psalm 1:2)

One writer says that word “meditates” reminds him of something he saw his dog do in the Northwest woods where they were living. One day his dog dragged a huge bone up to the house. Clearly, it came from the carcass of an elk or moose, he said, and that little dog had certainly not brought the animal down. But that pup sure did enjoy that bone.

What he did was to gnaw on it day after day, eating it away little by little. Sometimes, the canine would bury the bone under leaves and later dig it out and resume its worrisome process of ingesting that huge bone. Eventually, he had consumed the entire thing.

That is what the believer is to do with the word, the writer said. Think about it, consider it from every angle, take in all he can today, then lay it aside for the moment, only to bring it out later and gnaw on it again until it has become his.

In every church a pastor will quickly find two groups: those who enjoy being prodded into thinking by his sermons and those who refuse to think and insist that their spiritual food be predigested so it goes down smoothly.

My observation is that only the first group will grow spiritually. The unthinking group is content to be spiritual infants and to remain that way.

The unthinking member demands simple sermons, easy lessons, no gray areas, all Scripture interpretation to be neat and orderly with no room for differences of interpretation, and no challenges to his beliefs, his position, his world.

The unthinking has a difficult time with Jesus. He refuses to abide by their demands, just as He did with every group He ministered to in the First Century.

The pastor’s challenge is to move members of the fallow group into the first category–to show them the delights of reflecting on God’s Word, thinking about His message, studying their Sunday School lessons, and examining most everything else in lives, and then to incorporate God’s truths into their lives.

Consider this example.

“Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered that way?'”

The Lord proceeded to answer his rhetorical question with a “No, but unless you repent, you too will all perish,” but clearly, He wanted them to think about this.

“Do you think?”

Then, stressing the point, Jesus called to their mind a similar tragedy with an identical truth. “Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them–do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:1-5)

Well, Lord, pardon me, but…well, you see…we don’t actually like to think about these things. Can you just lay it out there in black and white and we’ll simply quote you and run along.

Sorry. He refuses to play into our laziness, to cater to our inertia.

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The reason many of us pastors keep returning to the same few quotes is that they are definitive for us. They so imbed themselves in our consciousness that they manage to define who we are.

Somewhere I read–wish I could remember where–of a friend who accompanied Abraham Lincoln to church. Afterwards, the friend asked how he had liked the sermon. The future president’s answer was something like: “He may be a good man, but he’s not a good preacher. A good preacher would have asked us to do something great, and he didn’t.”

(If I’m able to run down the exact quote, I’ll insert it here.)

Sometimes a preacher needs a comeuppance like that from a layperson–calling us back to reality, insisting we remember our calling, that we not get so caught up in the minutiae of our work that we forget to issue the clarion call to God and righteousness.

It might even be appropriate to call Lincoln not a layperson, since that implies he’s an active member of a church other than the clergy, but an outsider. He never joined a church, claimed to have a deep reverence for God and Scripture, but always seemed to see no personal need for involvement in a local church. So when we analyze a critique of a preacher from him, it’s coming more from the outside than within the body.

But this is not about Lincoln. It’s about his comment, and his excellent statement that a good preacher calls on people to do great things.

I completely agree, and am betting most pastors would also.

Now, my opinion is that the typical pastor does not call on people to do little things in place of “great” ones. That’s not what Lincoln heard, I’m guessing. The pastor did not issue an invitation for people to sign up for janitorial work, volunteer to teach the 3rd grade boys, or bring casseroles on Wednesday nights.

Instead of being that specific, that detailed, and that minor, the preacher did something else.

He issued a broad invitation to do general things without ever making himself clear on what they ought to be doing.

One of the cardinal sins of sermons is to issue fuzzy calls for people to do nebulous things.

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The number of really creative people is far lower than it should be.

Not that there is a line drawn somewhere to say who is and who is not creative. Such a dividing line would be subjective and blurred. I suspect that creativity is like art: I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.

I’ve been accused of creativity.

Maybe it has something to do with being a cartoonist. You see things a little differently. Or, if the left brain/right brain scenario is correct, it could be that right-brainers (the artsy people) are naturally more creative. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg, the brain-half dominance or the interests and skill?

My strong conviction is that since every pastor is expected to be a leader–it goes with the territory–in the same way, the shepherd of the Lord’s flock should also be creative in the way he thinks, leads, and speaks.

If the Holy Spirit at work in the lives of believers is likened to new wine that is never static, but always expanding, growing, and changing, and if the wineskin is required to be flexible and pliable in order to contain that new wine, then an important requirement is that the Lord’s people should be flexible and adaptable and creative.

A church that is wed to the status quo is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron.

The question then is: whence cometh creativity?

The good news is: there is an answer to that.

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The talk in my city concerns the surprising resignation of the area’s most successful politician, Aaron Broussard.

Here is a man who has made a career of local politics, beginning at the age of 25 when he was elected to the Jefferson Parish School Board. He was re-elected two years later. In 1977, he won a special election for a seat on the parish council, and a full term two years later.

In 1982, he became mayor of Kenner. I came as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Kenner in 1990 and Mr. Broussard was in church to welcome me my first Sunday. An ardent Roman Catholic, he often prefaces his talks to religious groups with, “I am a born again Christian. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour at age (whatever).”

He was re-elected mayor in ’88 and ’92, then in 1995 became chairman of the Jefferson Parish Council and was re-elected in 1999. In 2003, he succeeded to his final position, parish president.

This word of explanation: Jefferson is the most populated parish in Louisiana. Its affairs are run by the parish council. The chairman presides over the council, but its president runs the day-to-day operations.

By all reports, Aaron Broussard is a good man. He’s certainly a smooth operator, never meets a stranger, and seems to live to make the parish a better place to live.

The one major blip on his career–other than the last few weeks–came when he evacuated the pump operators from the parish as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the coast in August of 2005. Consequently, some neighborhoods were flooded. Broussard became Public Enemy Number One for residents who paid the price for his bad decision. A recall petition was begun, but never got the required signatures to bring it to a vote. When Broussard built safe houses for pump operators for future hurricanes, the furor died down. He was re-elected in 2007, although a couple of unknown challengers almost did him in.

Tim Whitmer has been the chief administrative officer for the parish for years. He served under Broussard’s predecessor and Aaron kept him on. Everyone admits that Broussard is not a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy, but Whitmer is.

And therein lay the origins of the problem. No one was watching Whitmer.

On the side, Tim Whitmer formed a company he called Lagniappe, Inc., an insurance brokerage firm, to serve as a go-between for customers and insurance agencies. It helps customers find the right insurance company and oversees the policies.

Now, Whitmer was pulling down almost $200,000 a year in his job as CAO for the parish, which for most of us would be plenty. But, for those who love money, no amount is ever enough.

Soon Whitmer began working deals with other parishes to throw their insurance requirements his way. He suggested insurance companies to local government officials, and earned hefty fees from those companies.

Now it comes to light that in his capacity as a lawyer, Broussard handled some legal work for Lagniappe and was paid for it.

The feds are investigating Whitmer and he has been forced to resign. Interestingly, had he remained on the job until February 1, he could have drawn a pension of $172,000 for the rest of his life, even though he’s only 49 years old. Nice work if you can get it.

Resigning early, as he was forced to do, means he’ll not be able to draw that pension for another five years. So it cost him dearly in one way. In another way, he may be going to prison, so it may cost him far more dearly.

For the longest, Broussard defended Whitmer and refused to fire him until the pressure became unbearable. The public attended every parish council meeting, clamoring for Aaron to do his duty and fire the guy.

And now one more financial revelation about Broussard has been turned up.

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I write in books. I mark up the stories and circle the insights I want to be able to find later. I argue in the margins and sometimes warn future readers away in the front.

The books I write in most are the ones I plan to keep for future reference. “Know Doubt” by John Ortberg is one of those. The subtitle is: “The Importance of Embracing Uncertainty in Your Faith.”

It’s a mother lode of great quotes and insights.

Ortberg, pastor of a Presbyterian church in Menlo Park, California, is turning out best-sellers at a Max Lucado pace. The first one I read was “If You Want to Walk on the Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat,” and I’ve recommended it far and wide ever since. (In fact, I seem to remember that the Dean of the Graduate Faculty at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary at the time, Perry Hancock, gave me that book. He’d used it in some of his classes, I think.)

Anyone who gives you a book by what turns out to be a favorite author has done you a great favor.

Growing up on the farm, the nuts and fruit we ate came from our trees and not from Sam’s Club or a grocery store. The best nuts on our farm were black walnut, partly, I suspect, because the “goody” was so hard to get at.

Black walnuts are mostly wood. The shell is hard and thick and must be broken with a hammer. The payoff–what we kids called the goody–was small, but delicious.

I’m not suggesting you skip purchasing Ortberg’s “Know Doubt” by telling you some of the “goodies” in it, but rather hoping to whet your appetite for the whole thing.

What follows are some of what I marked in his book….

1. “Every child is a testimony to God’s desire that the world go on. Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who doubts sometimes, has written that the reason so many babies keep being born is that God loves stories.” (p. 18)

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ESPN Sports Network has a feature on their shows they call “C’Mon, Man!” They run clips of football players in the middle of games doing things that make absolutely no sense and are detrimental to their team. Sometimes it’s the coach making the foolish decision–like facing fourth-down-and-four and “going for it” on their own 30 yard line when they are ahead in the score and the clock is winding down–and once in a while it’s a fan pulling the bone-head play.

“C’mon, man” is something of a combination groan, “duh!” (remember those?), and “are you kidding me?”

A dad in Lacombe, Louisiana, did something truly foolish earlier this week and is paying for it dearly. (Note: I do not know the guy and have removed his name. This is all from the December 31, 2009, issue of the Times-Picayune.)

The man had driven to the Texas line to pick up his 12-year-old daughter and bring her home. Along the way–they were on Interstate 12 just east of Baton Rouge, not more than 50 miles from home–dad and daughter decided they would play a trick on the other motorists.

What they did was to duct-tape the daughter’s mouth and hands and make it look like he was kidnaping her.

Well, they succeeded. That’s exactly what the other motorists thought when they called 911 to report them. Then, while waiting for the Louisiana Highway Patrol to arrive, other motorists boxed in their pickup truck so they could not get away.

“It’s just a joke,” the dad and his daughter protested.

The police did not laugh. And neither did the judge who set his bail at $3,000. The dad was charged with criminal mischief and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The daughter was charged too and released into the custody of an uncle.

Now you know why mothers don’t want to let the kids go off with dad.

The rest of the world would like to shake this father and say, “C’mon, man! What were you thinking? Even if your daughter was bored, all 12-year-old girls are bored! And even if she suggested doing this, you are supposed to be the adult in this relationship! You are the one who thinks about consequences. It’s up to the adult to say, ‘I don’t think so, honey. Why, what if (such-and-such) happened?'”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about people in the Lord’s work who provoke a “c’mon, man!” reaction from the rest of us.

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