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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The Lord has built a redundancy into the Christian life

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“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing….” (Ephesians 1:3)

You want someone to drive you to town and both my brother and I show up at the same time in separate cars. You can ride in only one car; the other is redundant.

The word “redundant” means something unnecessary, maybe just a little too much.

In design and engineering, redundancy is the act of building in safeguards to compensate for the failure of the primary system. The backup system you installed as a redundancy may never be used. But if it’s needed, it’s there in place, just waiting.

Say for instance, if an automated system of some type goes out due to a power failure, but there’s a hand-crank to work with. It’s slower but gets the job done.

I’m thinking today about the redundancy the Father in Heaven has built into the Christian life.  He saves us, writes our name down in Heaven’s book, we are adopted, and born again. He promises that He will never leave us, that nothing can ever snatch us from His hand, and that the life we now possess is everlasting.  He indwells us, overshadows us, goes before us, comes behind us, and undergirds us.  He gives us the Bible, the church, assignments to accomplish in this world, and teachers to show us how as well as colleagues to accompany us.  He tells us we are saved forever, that we have become “Sons of God” even, and that we shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever.

The Father fully plans for us to arrive at His home safely.

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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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Why we don’t like grace

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Anything that puts us down, we automatically shy away from. For many, grace does that.

Oh, we don’t mind singing about it, but the concept of grace itself is repulsive to our natures and offensive to our pride.

Something in me wants to be self-sufficient, to believe that whatever comes up, I’m able to handle, that as the poem says, “I am the captain of my soul.”

The cry of a four-year-old–“I can do it myself!”–is the insistence of the stubborn will of the adult child.

That’s why, even though we sing about it and say we love it, something inside us resists the idea of grace. That same something insists that I am sufficient for my needs, that my good works will accomplish everything necessary to land me in Heaven, that the rest is just so much religious talk.

The sinful heart of man is an atheist, an egotist, an idolator.

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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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