Dear young pastor: May I make a few suggestions?

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(All of what follows, young pastor, concerns your pulpit presence.  We’ll be back from time to time discussing other facets of pastoral leadership.  And, I might need to say, this is directed toward no one particular pastor of so many I’ve worked with in 2013.  Each is a winner, a dear brother in Christ, and it’s been a privilege. What follows is a series of impressions which linger long after my visit to your church. I send these with the prayer the Lord will bless your ministry beyond anything you ever dreamed of or asked for.)

You are clearly called to this ministry by the Lord, pastor. Visiting in your church, I saw evidence of His hand upon you, both in the seriousness with which you view your task and the acceptance and trust with which your people hold you.

You did not ask me to critique what you do, and I’m not doing so now. However, knowing how a few well-placed suggestions can tip the scales as we struggle to become more effective in our ministry, I offer these to you.

1)Presentation: May I say a word about your clothing?

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10 things about conflict you need to know

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“It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” Somewhere in the Psalms.

In USA Today for Thursday, May 9, 2013, Jeffrey Katzenberg talks about movie-making lessons he learned from Walt Disney.

“Walt believed that an animated movie was only as good as its villain. I never forgot that.”

Think about that for a second. Villains make movies work. Villains turn ordinary people into heroes.  Villains rivet our attention on the story. Villains keep us fixated on the plot until justice is served.

The greatest drama of the Twentieth Century was the Second World War. Think about its villains–Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and then Joseph Stalin, too. Now, consider that without that war and those villains, we would never have heard of heroes such as Generals Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, Montgomery, etc.  That war made Winston Churchill arguably into the man of the century.

Now, as the leader of a church, you have encountered your own set of villains. You’ve noticed that they fall into two camps. One is the devil himself and all his cohorts. The other are people who are supposed to be on your side but instead of helping the program, they seem to spend their days and nights scheming and searching for ways to bring it down.

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7 things pastors should tell their people often

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“Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift that is in you….” (II Timothy 1:6)  “Of these things put them in remembrance….” (II Timothy 2:14).

Today, I spent the morning hours in a school in North Carolina giving my little presentation we call “Lessons in self-esteem from drawing 100,000 people.” I sketch a lot of students, then segue into the talk which, among other things, urges the kids to stop comparing themselves with others, accept themselves as the persons God made them to be, and to smile. Then it happened again. 

Only five minutes after the talk, we invited the students to crowd around and I would sketch as many as possible in the remaining time. “Look at me and smile,” I said to the first teenager. “I don’t smile,” he said. I stopped, looked at him sternly and said, “You didn’t hear a thing I said, did you?” 

In truth, he had heard, but the lesson had not penetrated.

I said to the young teacher, “My telling the students these things once is not enough for them to get through. The only way to change their behavior is for you to say it over and over again. Eventually the lesson will ‘take’ with some of them.”

Some lessons have to be repeated ad infinitum.

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Something pastors cannot do and we should quit asking.

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Those of us who counsel pastors and teach future preachers sometimes caution them to “study the Bible for itself, just to receive the Word into your heart, not to prepare sermons.”

We might as well tell Sherlock Holmes to enjoy crime scenes for the beauty of the occasion and stop looking for criminals, tell Albert Pujols not to worry about actually striking at the baseball crossing the plate but to relax and take in the inspiration of the moment, or tell Joan Rivers to give up on plastic surgery.

Some things you do because this is who you are.

When a pastor reads a great insight in the Scriptural text, does anyone think for one minute that he is going to file that away in a personal-edification file, never to be shared with others in sermons?

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10 of the best things Jesus ever said.

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(I actually started this article thinking I could sift all the Lord’s wonderful statements down to the Top 10. Now, I see how naive that was!  I couldn’t even get through Matthew’s Gospel with ten, much less the other three gospels. Therefore, here are 10 of the best from Matthew, presented in order of their occurrence.)

“You are the salt of the earth…. You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14).

In these two brief statements, the Lord forever set the pattern for believers: we are to be different from the world and change agents in it.  We are against the world in order to be for it. Without salt, putrefication sets in; without light, darkness.

You are severely needed in your part of the world, Christ-follower. But only if you are willing to be salt and light: different, consistent, influential, cooperative with others of like values and identity, and sometimes a little lonely.

“When you pray, do not keep babbling like the pagans, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him” (Matthew 6:7-8).

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Must the preacher accept every invitation that comes his way?

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A few months ago, the pastor of a small church in the far northeast emailed me. He had read something I had written, found it helpful, and after talking about the issue, he said, “What would be involved in getting you up here to preach for a weekend?”

He was not inviting me, please notice.  He was trying to see if inviting me was something he could do and make work.

I replied something to the effect that in most cases, a host pastor will want to provide air fare, put the guest up in a hotel, and pay him some type of honorarium.  If the church is small, this means the pastor must lead his people to anticipate such an event and set money aside for it. If the guest drives, the government allows ministers to be reimbursed at something like 56 cents per mile or more.  For a small church, I pointed out, going to such expense to bring in a preacher only for a Saturday and Sunday might be more than it could handle.

Some weeks later, he replied that he had given it much prayer and thought and agreed that he should look for someone closer to home.

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“I recall your tears.”

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“I constantly remember you in my prayers night and day, longing to see you, even as I recall your tears….” (II Timothy 1:3-4)

You either cry or you don’t. You either value tears or you scoff at them.  You either wish you could cry more or didn’t cry as much.

Few are  neutral on the subject of tears.

I have a friend who could read the phone directory and the tears would flow.  They are always a half-inch below the surface waiting for the simplest opportunity to spill.

I’m the opposite. Only rarely do I shed a tear, and when I do it’s more likely to be in private while praying or going over a sermon the Spirit and I are working on.

I recall the first time I wept in the pulpit.

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The blessing of a clear conscience

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“I thank God, whom I serve with a clear conscience, the way my forefathers did….” (II Timothy 1:3).

A clear conscience is like a clean windshield: You notice it only when something has marred its surface and spoiled your vision. Until your conscience smites you and accuses you of sin, you are hardly aware of its existence.

A clear conscience is a wonderful thing to have. And fairly rare, too, I surmise, if by that term we refer to a blameless life that finds nothing in your past with which to accuse you of–no hypocrisy, insincerity, or double-mindedness. And, may I say, who among us has no failures on our record, no stains of iniquity, no guilt of sin?

“There is none righteous, no, not one.” “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  “If the Lord should mark iniquity, who would stand?” (Romans 3:10,23 and Psalm 130:3)  Who indeed? Not me, that’s for sure.

Question: Why does Scripture make such a big deal over a clear conscience?

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What the cowardly pastor does

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The preacher knew he should clean up his act, get right with the Lord and apologize for his past laziness and start taking his ministry seriously. Instead, he took the cheap way out.

He used his sermons to slam anyone thinking of leaving the church.

“It would be a sin against the Lord for you to leave this church at a time like this when it needs your faithfulness so much,” he said. “And I can promise you this, if you do this rebellious act, you will never find happiness in another church.”

When someone asked me what they should do–stay or leave such a church–after learning that the lay leadership had no intention of doing anything, I said, “Whenever a church decides it will accept shoddy pastoral leadership and refuses to abide by scriptural principles, unless you have strong reasons for staying, I would ask the Lord for permission to leave.”

“And,” I added, “if He does lead you to join another church, I can promise you almost anything will be an improvement over what you have there.”

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Why Paul didn’t tell us certain things

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“A thorn in the flesh was given me….” (II Corinthians 12:7).

For two thousand years people have speculated on the nature of Paul’s thorn. But their efforts come to nothing. The Lord clearly did not intend for us to know what Paul’s handicap was.  For good reason…
“Well, Paul had this same problem too, so if he did you surely can’t expect me to conquer it.” You can just hear some husband justifying his failures (and unwillingness to deal with them) to his wife in those words.

“At least I don’t have Paul’s weaknesses.  His were awful and yet God used him.” Just so easily we would excuse our problems and cling to them.

We can be glad we do not have a clue what his problems were.

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