The best thing a boss can do for his worker

Posted on by
Reply

If I work for you, I expect you to protect me when I’m attacked unfairly and defend me when I am accused unjustly.  Your failure to do this means I lose confidence in you and the quality of my work begins to suffer immediately. In most cases, I begin looking for a better environment in which to work.

Let a good supervisor–the manager of a business, principal of a school, or pastor of a church– learn this most valuable lesson. 

I was a year or two out of college, newly married, and pastoring a tiny church up the highway 25 miles.  During the week, however, I was the secretary to the production manager of a cast iron pipe plant on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama.

My boss was 65-year-old Clyde Hooper, a cigar-chewing Methodist layman who could teach sailors a few things about plain speaking.  He had paid his dues in coming up the hard way, and was so tightly bonded with the 300 men working in the foundry that they would have died–or killed–for one another.  Mr. Hooper wore a crisp, starched white shirt and beautiful tie to work every day.  I adored the man.

I also emptied his spittoon in the corner of the office.

Continue reading →

The day you started to die

Posted on by
Reply

I was reading the bio of a British entertainer whom you might know but who will remain anonymous here because his name does not matter.

The celebrity was a regular on British television for over three decades.  When the network decided his work was declining along with his audience, they  canceled him.  Within three years, the man was dead, even though he was still in his 60s.  This sentence remains with me: “The day they canceled his contract is the day he began to die.”

We’ve all heard of people who died shortly after retiring from their life work. I’ve done the funerals of some of them.  Whether retirement caused the death, hastened it, or was a contributing factor is something no one can know. But we each have our own suspicions.

Continue reading →

Joe’s next 10 rules for success in ministry, slightly more spiritual than the first 10.

Posted on by
1

(These follow an earlier article on “Joe’s 10 ironclad rules for success,” which were mostly silly and intended to provoke a hearty laugh.  Now, we get just a tad more serious. But, not to worry, not much more serious.)

11.  If you study hard for your sermons and eventually get to a big church, you can hire research assistants to do your studying for you. Success brings its privileges.

12. If you look at the ceiling while you preach, you may overcome your shyness but you will end up preaching over the heads of your people.

Continue reading →

What hatred does to a soul

Posted on by
18

“Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him” (Mark 3:6).

The Pharisees were not normally murderers.

They were highly religious, faithful keepers of the flame, staunch defenders of orthodoxy, and determined champions of conservatism.  If there had been a Tea Party of their day, they were it.  They hated modernism, treasured the heroes of their past, and wanted to return the nation to the glory days of centuries past.

But their hatred for Jesus trumped their devotion to God.

Hatred is a toxin, which when introduced into the soft, vulnerable and defenseless soul of mankind, wreaks havoc, destroys everything it touches, and sends its host spiraling ever downward toward the lowest pit of hell.  Hatred corrupts and perverts, sabotages and undermines.

Saddest of all is watching good people fall into its grasps and never come up for air.

Continue reading →

Remedial studies in the work of the Lord

Posted on by
1

“By this time you ought to be teachers (but) you need someone to teach you again the first principles…” (Hebrews 5:12).

Sherrie Waller, a member of our church and wife of one of our deacons, teaches math at the local Baptist seminary.

She’s training the next generation of preachers and missionaries how to count the offering, I suppose.

One “school” in our seminary is Leavell College, where people can get a four-year bacculaureate degree.  And one aspect of that, as with any college in the land I expect, is that students/graduates have to have a certain amount of proficiency in a wide range of disciplines, math being among them.

I can appreciate that.

Most of what Sherrie covers is taught in high school, had these future preachers and missionaries been paying attention.

Continue reading →

A healthy church: Well-balanced.

Posted on by
1

“These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone” (Matthew 23:23).

Ask the acrobat about balance.  Walking the tightrope far above the circus ring or bouncing around the “balance beams” without a strict attention to balance, nothing works.

The lever is about balance.  Riding a bike demands balance.  Standing upright and walking. Weighing out gold on a scale.

A business will want a balance between credits and debits, income and outgo. It will try to find the right balance between research and development, between product and personnel.

Before our plane left the gate, the pilot made an unusual announcement.  “Ladies and gentlemen, since we have so many empty seats, it’s important that we balance our load.  We need ten of you to get up and move toward the rear of the plane. Take any seat past row number 15.  Thank you very much.”  (In nearly 50 years of air travel, I heard that announcement one time.)

Balance in nature is vital to survival of life on the planet.  Plant and animal life must be kept in relatively constant proportions, we are told.

“There needs to be one more Beatitude: Blessed are the balanced.”  –Warren Wiersbe

Continue reading →

On finding yourself in a burning building (or on a sinking ship)

Posted on by
Reply

“Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be…” (2 Peter 3:11)

The issue of faith–to believe or not to believe–says John Ortberg, “is never just a question of calculating the odds for the existence of God.  We are not just probability calculators. We live in a burning building.  It’s called a body. The clock is ticking.”  (“Know Doubt,” p.32)

Ortberg doesn’t mind mixing metaphors.  We live in a burning building; the clock is ticking.

So true.

Yes, and the Titanic which we call Earth is sinking (with too many people occupied with re-arranging deck chairs). The universe is winding down.  The sun which supports life on earth and is the center of our solar system has an expiration date, scientists say.

The physical creation has a known shelf life. (Note: “Known” refers to the shelf life, not to the expiration date.)

Continue reading →

Your sermon offended? Good. It was supposed to.

Posted on by
4

“Lord, do you know the Pharisees were offended by your sermon?” –Matthew 15:12

Let me say up front that no church can long endure a steady diet of negative preaching.  No Christian, no matter how faithful, can withstand an unending barrage of sermons directed toward straightening them out. On a regular basis, we need messages reminding us we are loved, God is faithful, Heaven awaits, and there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.

But sometimes the minister enters the pulpit with a burdensome task: to attempt a diagnosis, surgery, and amputation all in a 25 minute message.  At those times, the sermon must cut deeply.

At those times, the message hurts.

How the Lord’s people ever came to expect their pastors to declare the riches of His Word without offending wrong-doers is beyond me.

It cannot be done.

“Offenders will take offense.” Remember that. As columnist Dear Abby put it, “You throw a rock in among a bunch of dogs. The one that hollers got hit.”

Delivering the commands of Scripture on how to live and think, how to re-prioritize our lives and change our behavior, and bring every detail of our existence under the Lordship of Jesus Christ without treading on anyone’s toes is expecting a little much of the preacher.

George Whitefield, the great British preacher of the 18th century, gave us an unforgettable line on this….

“It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.”

Continue reading →

Setting new records in the ministry

Posted on by
2

What follows is a blend of the funny and the serious, what some call “peanut butter and jelly,” the PB for nourishment and the J for delight.  Please bring a sense of whimsy and expect to receive no sermon ideas from this! Thank you. –Joe

In the January/February 2015 issue of Preaching, executive editor Michael Duduit (and my longtime friend) tells of a fellow in Florida who carved out a slot in the Guinness Book of World Records with a sermon that lasted 53 hours and 18 minutes.  Well, actually, it was 45 of his old sermons stitched together, not just one.  Michael says the guy used 600 PowerPoint slides and basically covered the entire Bible, from Genesis to the concordance.

All of that tickled Editor Michael’s funny bone, as oddities in the ministry usually do.  This started him thinking, “What other record-breaking attempts could be made by preachers?” After relaying his suggestions–with some parenthetical notes from moi–we will have an idea or two of our own.

Okay.  Michael suggests the Guinness people might want to look at:

Continue reading →

Where do we find all these church jobs in Scripture?

Posted on by
Reply

A friend messaged asking for my “take” on all the different pastors in the church these days. Senior pastor, student pastor, worship, adminstrative, children’s, and executive pastor–the list is endless.

He said, “Why don’t we have just one pastor?”

The quick answer, of course, is that pastor means shepherd, and these various ministers are shepherding a part of the flock. The larger the flock, the more shepherds are needed.  It’s a noble concept and has the full support of scripture.  Whether one could blame the Bible for the “senior” business or “executive pastor” thing is another question. (But if a church wants to label its ministers that way, personally I’m good with it.)

I do think it’s almost funny how the pastor of some tiny flock somewhere will list himself as “senior pastor.”  But we laugh only to ourselves.  It’s his business and not ours.

An angry commenter–responding to something someone wrote about the “administrative assistant” in their church–took off on the unscriptural nature of that position.  “Show me an administrative assistant in the church,” he said, with the complete confidence they couldn’t do it.

He didn’t ask me, but I could have.

Continue reading →