Category Archives: Pastors

Pastor, you’ve been scheduled to preach on a big program. My advice: Find out whom you follow.

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After the death of comic genius Robin Williams, someone was reminiscing about the time he preceded Bob Hope on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.

For some reason, Bob Hope was late arriving at the studio that night. So, instead of Robin Williams following him, which had been the plan, Williams went on stage first and did his hilarious knock-em-dead routine.  People were beside themselves with laughter.

The great Bob Hope arrived and had to follow that.

Robin Williams said, “I don’t think he was angry, but he was not pleased.”

As Bob Hope walked out onto the stage and settled into the chair, Johnny Carson said, “Robin Williams. Isn’t he funny?”  Hope said, “Yeah. He’s wild. But you know, Johnny, it’s great to be back here with you.”

“Let’s talk about me.” I smile at that. Even the great Bob Hope could not handle this situation.

No clear-thinking person would voluntarily follow Robin Williams on the program.

Sometimes we preachers find ourselves scheduled to speak on a big program.  Woe to the one who has to follow the most popular preacher in the land.

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The pastor wasted some time today. The problem is…

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You do not know the way of the wind….  You do not know the works of God who makes everything….  You do not know which will prosper…. (Ecclesiastes 11:5-6).

In a typical day, the pastor does a hundred things, some of which are eternal and some not.  Some are gold, silver, and precious stones, while others are wood, hay, and stubble (a reference to I Corinthians 3:12).

Some things he did were eternal; some were anything but that.  And that’s the problem: How to tell which is which.

In the moment, it’s almost impossible.

We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).

Today in the hospital, the pastor visited with three patients and talked to strangers in the hospital lobby, to nurses in the hallway, and to people he met along the way.  Back in the office he studied for his sermons, dealt with administrative issues, reprimanded the church custodian for doing a poor job of cleaning bathrooms, and returned six phone calls. He wrote something for the church website, accepted an invitation to speak at a civic luncheon, and had lunch with his wife.  A neighboring pastor ran by for a few minutes to confer about a project they’re working on for the association, he answered someone’s on-line query about tithing, and he took a walk around the block.  He leaves the Bible open on the table in his back office and stops by for a few minutes from time to time to read the text of next Sunday’s message or to look something up.  He prays there and often, throughout the day.

When his head hits the pillow at night, he has a hard time remembering what he did or knowing what was accomplished.

How much of what he did was eternal and how much was just so much busy-work?  It’s impossible to tell.

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What to do when God gives you a burden for something

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When the prophets Nahum, Habakkuk, and Malachi stood up to preach, they began with the words, “The burden of the Lord.”

That was a dead giveaway this was not going to be a sweet little devotional filled with funny stories and touching vignettes. The men of God were about to drop a heavy load from their hearts into the laps and onto the shoulders of their audiences.

It took me a long time laboring in the Lord’s vineyard to figure something out. The burden God gives His preacher for some problem, some people, or some cause is every bit as much a gift from Him as the blessings of salvation. And it becomes my starting place.

Starting place for what? I’m glad you asked.

The burden God gives you, pastor, is your beginning point for three things….

1. The vision God will give you for your work begins with a burden.

I like to think of the time we wrestle with a problem (i.e., the burden) as the equivalent of digging downward for the foundation of a mighty building. The deeper we dig–the more the problem burdens us, the longer we struggle with it, and the more it pains us–the greater will be the structure that eventually gets erected there.

You’ve seen the signs: “Watch this site. A new office building will be erected here.”

Well, post one of those signs on the burden God has given you: “Watch this site. A new visionary structure will go up here.”

What is your burden, pastor? What bothers you most in your community, your church, your world? What robs you of sleep at night and will not leave you alone?

–For Bill, a seminary student involved in our church, it was a run-down trailer park near the airport where he had spotted a number of needy and neglected children.

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10 things the inexperienced person does not know about speaking in public

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As one who has a great deal of respect for godly laymen and laywomen, I’m always glad when one rises in church to deliver a sermon or a testimony or a report. And since, as a retired pastor, I’m in a lot of churches throughout the year. So, I get to see a good bit of this. And sometimes….

Sometimes I want to applaud them. “Good job. Well done.” (In fact, I often say it to them following the service.)

But at other times, I want to shake them. “Pay attention to what you are doing! You can do better than this!”

I say this fully aware that we all had to start out somewhere, sometime, someway, and that no beginner came to the speaking craft full-grown. We crawl before we walk and do that before we run.

However–and this is what prompts this diatribe today–what gets my goat is when the lay speaker or preacher is mature in years and should know better and still makes glaring mistakes.

Here is my list of ten things the beginning (or rusty or occasional) speaker seems not to know, but needs to learn quickly in order to be effective.

1. How to begin your message.

First, how not to begin:

–“When they asked me to give my testimony this morning, my first thought was….”

–“I don’t know why they asked me to do this, but….”

–“When I told my wife the preacher had asked me to speak today, she said….”

Don’t do that.

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Pastoring with the personal touch

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“I just called to say I love you…” –Stevie Wonder

My journal for the 1990s records something I never want to forget.

We were trying to line up 15 freezers of homemade ice cream for a church fellowship the following Sunday evening.  My assistant always had trouble getting enough freezers because he tried to do it by making a promotion from the pulpit.   A general appeal like that makes it far too easy for people to ignore.

The most effective way is to ask people individually and personally.

In order to make that point with my assistant, I took on the task myself.  I made the phone calls.  In the process, I ended up making a huge discovery.  Or possibly a re-discovery.

Here is the Journal notation from a couple of days later, awkward syntax and all.

This week, as I’ve called church members to line up 15 ice cream freezers for the fellowship August 15, was struck by how many pastoring conversations resulted.  People told me of coming surgeries, coming marriages, even a divorce.  I prayed with lots of people.  And came away from the phone with this odd exhilaration from having rendered pastoral ministry.  And so, today, Thursday, I’m making a few more calls and having the same experience, and have decided to take the church directory printout and just start calling church members, particularly those I’ve not talked to lately.

I’d say, “Hi Bob…this is Brother Joe…. As you know I’ve been gone so much this summer (the church had given me a six weeks sabbatical) and I’ve been so out of touch, I was just wondering how things are with you?”  And I let them talk.  I gave this maybe 90 minutes tonight and have struck the mother lode.  Such response. And such a strong inner feeling that this is it!

I recall my friend and mentor James Richardson saying once, “Isn’t the telephone wonderful?”  meaning it’s not necessary to always be running by to see someone.  Just call them.

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How God’s people undercut their best efforts and fail Christ

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“Welcome the stranger within your gates. For you were foreigners in Egypt.” — The thrust of Leviticus 19 (see verses 10, 18, and 33-34)

This is one of the greatest frustrations and painful aspects of pastoring.  You try to do well–to prepare sermons blessed of God, to lead your team to present effective ministries, to build powerful worship services, to develop disciples, and reach those in darkness–and then your best people fail to do the smallest thing.  In so doing, they end up negating a thousand good things they do.

They fail to think of the outsider.  They look right past the newcomer.  They give no thought to the first-timer.

My blog from Monday, March 22, 1999—

“I made a number of visits tonight.  Left notes at three homes (no one there) and visited with Carol and Bob Coleman.  They’ve been visiting our church several weeks.  She said, “We love it.  Great music, etc etc–but only three people have greeted us!”

“Three!  Our people think they are friendly but in truth they are friendly to each other.  Bob told me he had volunteered to help Clyde with cooking the wild game supper at church.  Was brusquely turned aside with ‘We already have enough help.’  Then Bob came on to the dinner and brought a friend.  One hour later, they were back.  Said not a soul spoke to them.  So disappointing.”

That church, you will want to know, had a reputation from the previous decade as strong on evangelism and soul-winning.  In fact, when I had asked the congregation to do something heroic and go the extra mile–more than once, our people opened their home to mothers from Third World countries bringing critically ill infants to our Children’s Hospital in New Orleans–they always responded well.  So, they were not uncaring.

They were not uncaring.

They were unthinking.

They were preoccupied with their own plans, their own families, themselves.  They were thinking about everything in the world other than the strangers and newcomers who needed some slight indication that they are welcome and wanted in this place.

It’s scary being a newcomer or first-timer.

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Write a book, change the world!

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This will be written for the generation to come, that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord.  Psalm 102:18

A friend said, “Pastors who write books are on ego trips.”  I begged to differ for a lot of reasons.  For one thing, I’ve just finished my eighth and am now working on the ninth book!

In my opinion…

In one sense, people who write books are paragons of faith. They have no proof anyone will ever read what they write or if they will recoup the investment of their time and money.  And yet, they write on.

Aren’t we thankful for people who write books!

After all…

When you write a book–any kind of book!–you give away a piece of yourself.  You have spent countless hours secreted away laboring over a pad with a pen or typing away on the laptop.  If you’re like me, you have wept and fussed, stopped to look something up, asked your spouse if this is the right word, and sent up periodic prayers that this would work and make a difference in someone’s life. You have abandoned the project for a time, returned to it when something was burning inside you and just had to come out, and eventually you decided “that’s enough” and sent it out to the world.

When people hold the book in their hands, they’re holding a piece of you.

When you write a book, you touch parts of the world you will never travel to, people you will never see, and make a difference you will not learn of in this lifetime.  This is a faith venture of the first sort.

When they hold the book in their hands, they touch the fruit of your life.

When you write a book, you touch the future.  Perhaps your book will live forever and never be out of print–does C. S. Lewis in Heaven see this and smile?–or someone will come across your book a century from now in some obscure storage and read it as a lark and find themselves being blessed.  Either way, fruit massive or miniscule, you are sending your witness into the future.

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No independent churches, no self-sufficient Christians

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“I planted, Apollos watered, God gave the increase” (I Corinthians 3:6). 

“Even in Thessalonica you sent aid once and again for my necessities” (Philippians 4:16). 

I have no patience with signs in front of church buildings that read “Independent (whatever) Church.” There is no such thing as an independent church. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ and we need each other.

Some more than others.

The believer or the church that believes he/she/it is independent and has no need of all those others is going against everything Scripture teaches and contradicting what they see happening all around them every day.

Every church depends on the power company for the lights and a/c, on the water works for water in the building, on the sewerage department, on the streets department and on the guy who cuts the grass and the lady who cleans the toilets. They depend on the Bible, on the Holy Spirit, on those who brought the Gospel to them, and they depend on each other to be faithful. The pastor depends on the congregation to attend and serve and give and pray.  Everyone depends on the preacher to lead well.

An independent Christian is a contradiction in terms.  An oxymoron.

There is no such animal.

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Something the new pastor is going to be needing from you

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The new pastor looks out at the congregation.  He’s acting confident and looks the part. The search committee did a good job from all appearances.  The pastor speaks well and seems to know what he’s doing.

But wait….

Has someone removed the pulpit from the platform?  And is that a rowboat the preacher is standing in?  What is going on here? Am I in the right church?  Have we entered the twilight zone?

I know of a pastor who did that on his first Sunday. (And not everyone received it well.)

Is the new pastor not wearing a suit? Oh my, is he wearing jeans and sneakers?  Does he have a long beard? It makes him look like an old Civil War veteran! Whatever is our church coming to? What was the search committee thinking to bring in such a person to pastor our great church?

Sound familiar?

Was the new pastor right in introducing some changes immediately? I don’t know.  It depends on a hundred things.  Suffice it to say, most times the new pastor gets it right.  However….

Sometimes new pastors goof up. They get off on the wrong foot. Sometimes they misspeak.  Or they call an important person by the wrong name. New pastors have been known to introduce change abruptly when a more thoughtful thing would have been to prepare the congregation and transition slowly.

In every case, beginning pastors need one huge thing from the congregation.

They need space. 

They need time.  They need slack.  Some room. They need a lot of understanding.

New pastors need time to adjust, to learn you, to make connections, to find the path, to hear the heartbeat of the congregation, to learn the history of the church, to decide what God wants, to receive the vision from Heaven, and to make a few mistakes.

How’s that?  New pastors make mistakes?

Yes. The new pastor needs time and room–the freedom, actually–to make a few mistakes.

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How to know you were called into the Lord’s work. (Or if you were not)

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My pastor friend was about to conduct the most difficult funeral of his nearly-twenty year ministry. He and I had discussed it and I had prayed for him. His heart was breaking for the young family that was laying to rest two close loved ones.

In a private moment, I said to him, “Pastor to pastor, I want to ask you something. Even though this is tearing your heart out, do you find yourself thinking, ‘I’d rather be here doing this than anywhere else in the world’?”

He said, “I do! I really do.”

I said, “That’s how you know you are really called to this work.”

He was quiet a moment, then added, “I tell my wife–pastors’ wives understand these things–that my favorite part of pastoring, what I do best, is the funeral of a Christian. It’s hard, it can be gut-wrenching, but this is our moment to shine, the event which brings together all the great stuff we believe so strongly.”

God-called pastors understand.

I have stood at the graveside of a two-year-old who had fought a valiant fight against leukemia, my heart almost as torn as the parents’, and thought, “Thank you, dear Lord, for calling me into this work. I’d rather be here than anyplace else on earth.”

Only the called will understand.

A friend and I were having a lengthy discussion about a pastor who had almost ruined his last two churches and in both cases, left under a cloud. My friend said, “The guy was in the ministry, he has seminary degrees, but honestly, I do not think God called him into this work.”

In a meeting with leaders of our denomination, one subject we discussed out of great concern but for which we had no solution, was “helping pastors know if they are called (or not) into the ministry.”

There ought to be a way to help uncalled ministers recognize their situation, so they can step away from this work and find something else to do.

Some will ask why, what difference it makes.

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