Category Archives: Pastors

There are hurting people in your church today, pastor.

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“A leper came to Him, beseeching Him and falling on his knees before Him, and saying to Him, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean.’ And moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed'” (Mark 1:40-41).

Some of the people who sit before the pastor on Sundays have open, untreated wounds on their souls.

The church can really help them by today’s ministries. Or, it can damage them to the point that they will never recover.

Your work is so critical, church leaders.

If you are the pastor, your sermon can make a world of difference. If you are worship leader, the choices of hymns and choruses and scriptures, and the manner in which they are conducted, can be a balm to those in great pain. If you teach a Sunday School class, ask the Father to go far beyond the lesson you will be commenting on and do something miraculous in the hearts and souls of all who will sit before you.

There is so much hurting in your pews, in the class, in the choir, even in board and committee meetings. In the pews and in the classrooms, in the hallways and in the kitchen, hurting people have arrived at church today.

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The tsunami bearing down on your church

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Pastor, your church is about to receive a major blow.

My friend Barry Allen of Louisville knows about churches and finances.  Barry, who heads up the Kentucky Baptist Foundation, had this to say recently in The Western Recorder:

“It is likely that thousands of churches and ministries will (join Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in going) bankrupt within the next decade or two.”

Why? Barry says the major factor is that the older members in every church are the heavy givers. “Did you know that people over age 75 give four times as much of their income as 25 to 44 year olds?”

He said, “Although older members account for only 19 percent of the membership of churches in the USA, they give 46 percent of the donations.”

In case you haven’t been paying attention, that generation is dying off at an alarming rate.  In fact, through the estates they leave behind, Barry says they will be passing 41 trillion dollars of wealth to their children, grandchildren, and other heirs–as well as to the government in taxes.

The effect of this generation of heavy givers leaving the scene, Barry says, will be like a tsunami clobbering our churches.  He adds, “Most churches and ministries are unprepared.”

That should give you something to think about today!

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Why some preachers have oversized egos. What to do about it.

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A pastor friend who serves a large church pulled together a half-dozen preachers who serve some of the largest Protestant churches in his city. He had a burden for unity within the Christian community and felt a good place to start would be with these shepherds to whom everyone else looked up.

He opened by saying, “I’m going to ask you to leave your egos at the door.” He paused a moment, then added, “And there are some mighty huge egos in this room!”

They laughed, no one was offended, and they did business together.

Now, before anyone reacts to that, we need to say that not all ego is bad.

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Don’t lie to us, pastor

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“Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices” (Colossians 3:9).

“Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 12:22).

Lying is almost unforgiveable in a pastor.

1. Do not lie to us about your resume.

If you say you went to school there or pastored that church, we want to believe you.  If you earned a degree, say what it was. If the degree was honorary, but not earned, say that also. What you must not do is give the impression you attended a school which you did not or served a church which you did not serve or possess a degree you  don’t..

Why would anyone lie about their resume? Obviously, to enhance their prospects for a job. But any position acquired as a result of a falsehood is worthless in the long run.

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How to discriminate against “those other people”

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“You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly…. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:15,18)

This is not a good story and I apologize in advance.

In between my sophomore and junior years in college, I worked the call-in desk for the Seaboard Railroad ticket office in Birmingham.  Located downtown on 20th Street South, this was an attractive office with pleasant people.  The year was 1960 and during the hey-day of Jim Crow laws. The police commissioner in the city was named Bull Connor, a man destined to make headlines a couple of years later when he turned the fire hoses on blacks (and maybe a few whites; I’m not sure) protesting the harsh laws and customs in our city..

My job was taking reservations over the phone.  My instructor, a pleasant fellow named Andy, said to me, “Now, we have a little system here.  It goes like this.”

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Three mistakes the beginning pastor can expect to make

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“Let no man despise thy youth.” (I Timothy 4:12)

You’ve finished your formal schooling or you’re trying to continue your education while pastoring. Whether the congregation is fifty people or five hundred, your plate is full and you wonder how you could ever pastor a larger church since there are not enough hours in your day.

But you’re excited.  This is what God called you to do.  You can barely restrain yourself.

Here are three things lying in wait for you, young pastor.  Three potholes? Three comeuppances?  Three lessons you may expect to have to learn the hard way.

1) The beginning pastor can expect his sermons to be too massive as he attempts to cram into them everything he has learned on the subject.

The young pastor cannot yet bring a sermon on one word in the Bible or even one verse. Not yet.  So, in order to fill the allotted sermon time, somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes, he overstuffs it.

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I met a pastor who does not smile.

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“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy….” (Galatians 5:22)

“Now, look me in the eye and give me a smile. I want to see your teeth.”

That’s my typical request of whoever is sitting before me for a quick sketch.  If they hesitate, I explain that everyone looks better with a smile on their face, that a smile lifts the sagging face, changes the shape of the jawline, and adds a gleam to the eye.

“I don’t smile.”

Usually, the one saying this is an insecure teenager who has been warned off smiling by the mirror, an unkind friend, or a critic.  That’s one thing that pulls me onto middle and high school campuses, to do my program and try to get across to them that “there is not a person on the earth who does not look better with a smile on their face, including you.”

One man told me, “My grandmother told me when I was fifteen that I did not have a nice smile. I went twenty years without smiling.”

I said, “What a mean old lady.”

We can understand teenagers having esteem problems that often make them withdraw and want to hide.

But a pastor?

More than once, I have been drawing at denominational gatherings where most of the subjects are pastors. And I confess to being knocked speechless by those who say, “I don’t smile.”

If they have time and are not rushed, I’ll speak to that.

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Something we know about the church’s troublemakers

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I’m reading my journal from over 20 years ago and being reminded of a lot of things–the grace of God and His sovereignty, the sweetness of many of God’s people, and also the sheer hypocrisy of some.

After I left one church under a great deal of duress, the business manager of the church and I had lunch together one day.  This is from my notes written that night. I’m eliminating the names, because identifying these people would serve no purpose. Many of them have gone on to their (ahem) just rewards and what’s done is done.

What the business administrator said was stunning.

“You’re no longer the pastor, so I’m telling you this now. So many of the people who worked against you gave almost nothing to the church. If (the chairman of the personnel committee) tithes, then he’s on welfare.  And (assistant pastor) gives zero to the church. Not a dime. And his wife a piddling.”

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Parasitical goings-on in church

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Have you ever heard of an insect called an ichneumon? Me either. But George Will wrote about it in his syndicated newspaper column this week in analyzing why Detroit declared bankruptcy a few days ago.

The ichneumon insect inserts an egg in a caterpillar, then the larva which hatches from the egg proceeds to gnaw the insides of the caterpillar. Eventually, it has devoured almost every part of the worm with the exception of the skin and intestines, while it carefully avoids injuring the vital organs.  The ichneumon seems to know that its own existence depends on the life of the insect on which it feeds.

George Will writes that government employees’ unions have been living parasitically on the city of Detroit. They were not as smart as the ichneumon insect, he says,  because they ended up devouring their host.

One way the Holy Spirit calls my attention to lessons He has placed in front of me is I find the story (the article, the fact, whatever) fascinating. If I cannot get it out of my mind, if it will not go away, if it keeps returning to bug me, then  all the signs are present.

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How to write boring articles and preach dull sermons

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My friends who read the title will think, “Well! Finally something he knows a little about!”

Every preacher, I imagine, knows about dull sermons. Anyone charged with turning out multiple sermons a week over decades will certainly produce his share of messages that are dead on arrival.

I’m thinking of a Christian writer of past years who turned out book after book and built a reputation as a leader/writer/professor of note.  He was off the scene by the time I was thirty, so I never saw him when he was in his prime or I in mine. But, repeatedly, I came away from his writings thinking, “How dull. Why was he considered such a wonder?” My quick answer is that the standards were different in the mid-1900s. Denominational publishing houses turned out books not for their sharp content or even sales figures but for other reasons. In a word, he was “safe.”

Now! The challenge on penning something about dull writings and boring sermons (or vice versa!) is to keep from being dull myself. But, always one for a challenge, let’s see how this goes.

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