We’ve all heard of the pastor–seems like it was Henry Ward Beecher–who received an anonymous letter with only one word: Fool. Next Sunday, the preacher shared that with the church. He said, “I’ve received many an unsigned letter in my time. But this was the first time I’ve ever had someone sign his name and fail to write the letter.”
If you want to devastate a writer, that would do it. But I suspect most of us don’t want to do that.
We just want it to stop.
Every pastor gets them. In my last church, my assistant and I worked out an arrangement that if a letter had no return address, she opened it. She read it and then decided whether I should or not. If it was negative and ugly, she destroyed it without my ever seeing it. Once in a while, the anonymous letter was good and refreshing. But that was rare.
Every pastor wonders what to do with such letters. Here is the best answer ever.
Don Wilton, pastor of Spartanburg’s First Baptist Church, tells how he handled the anonymous letters in his book, See You at the Finish Line.