You’re a Skeptic? That’s Good.

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Last evening, I stepped inside a diner a few blocks from my house to pick up the sandwiches I’d just called in. The place was busy–it was Friday evening and suppertime–and I spotted two kids at a table with their mother, so took my sketch pad inside.

“Ma’am, may I draw your sons?” showing her my pen and sketchpad.

“You’re an artist?”

I said, “Cartoonist.”

“Sure. That would be fine.”

The first one, a boy about 9 or 10, looked up with a killer smile and eyes aglow, so I drew him first. It takes 90 seconds. Then, I sketched his big brother while we made small conversation. Last, I drew the mom. She was friendly and trusting and we talked about that. I get a lot of skepticism when walking up to complete strangers asking, “May I draw you?”  People worry that someone is going to try to con them into something. It’s understandable.

A few minutes later, while in the line to pay for my order, the mother came over to give a takeout order, and we continued our conversation. One of her sons goes to a local Christian school, but she does not go to church anywhere.

“I’m skeptical of religions and churches,” she said.

Our visit was cut short at the counter, and she promised to check out my website, so I want to continue the discussion with her on the blog. Had we had longer to chat, this would have been my next statement:

“That’s good. There are so many weird religions today, so many churches of every type imaginable, and so many unfaithful ministers, it’s good to be skeptical. It’s good to have a healthy skepticism.”

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Things The Church Forgot to Remember

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This notice appeared on the front page of the July 4, 2004, issue of the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader:

It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.

When that newspaper’s staff decided to prepare a special edition commemorating the 40th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act, they began combing through their archives looking for local material. That’s when they discovered a complete lack of such information. The newspaper had simply not covered the civil rights movement, period.

A local African-American leader said, “The white community just prayed that rumors and reports (of the civil rights movement) would be swept under the rug and just go away.”

As odd as it is that a newspaper would fail to cover a world-changing movement going on throughout the world and happening in its own hometown, it will not come as a surprise to many of our readers that churches lived through the same revolution in this country without the first mention of it being made from the pulpit. (And we wonder why outsiders found our sermons irrelevant.)

Churches are prone to forget the things they do not want to acknowledge.

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Reforming the Deacons (19): “The Ultimate Test”

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My friend, Pastor Rob, resigned. He called to inform me and to say I would not be leading the revival we had scheduled in his church.

“What happened?” I asked.

The story Rob related was the back end of what he had told me some months earlier when he became the pastor of that church. A couple active in leadership roles had been living together as man and wife for several years, but without having ever married.

Scripture calls this fornication.

When my friend Rob had agreed to become their pastor, he did so on the condition that the deacons would deal with this issue and not foist it off on him as the new shepherd. They agreed to do so. Less than a year into his ministry, nothing had been done and the pastor was being attacked by the man and woman as a trouble-maker. They and their supporters in the church griped that all was well until this new preacher came, and he’s stirring it up.(Understand that I’m abbreviating the story and omitting a great deal.)

When the pastor asked the deacons if they intended to act, the chairman said, “Preacher, I guess we’re just cowards.”

So, my friend resigned and moved away with no new church in sight.

He did a courageous thing.

Those who allowed this situation to fester did the cowardly thing. (One could make a case for the previous pastor being a coward too, since he left that situation intact for the next preacher to deal with.)

The ultimate test of a deacon is whether he has the courage to take a stand against a hypocrite who is doing great damage in the Lord’s church; whether he is willing to stand up for his church, for his Lord, for the calling of God. (Granted, this is true also of pastors. But we are addressing deacons here.)

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The Summer of My Eleventh Year

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(This is an experiment to which I’ll be returning from time to time and editing, adding to, trying to turn into something. Readers may ignore it or visit it to see how it has changed. I don’t see it as a journal so much as trying to make sense of the most critical 3 months of my young life.)

I was never very good at introspection, trying to figure out why I said something or did something or how I got to be the person that I am. Most men are said to have the same limitation.

However, looking back over a life that has lasted nearly three-fourths of a century, it’s hard not to notice a few life-intersections that felt minor at the time but turned out to be major game-changers.

The summer of my eleventh year was just such a time.

In mid-1951, my world changed. Our family moved from a West Virginia mining camp into the home of our maternal grandmother on the remote Alabama farm where my mom had been raised. To my mind, we had moved from civilization to Mars.

We went from living in a mountaintop community with swarms of children to a farmhouse 13 miles from town and nearly that far to the nearest friend my age. It felt as if I had been sentenced to solitary confinement.

From a life preoccupied with playing and enjoying myself, I moved to one focused on the life of a working farmhand. Ball games and fun times with buddies were replaced by long afternoons in the field alongside my brothers and sisters.

In leaving West Virginia, I traded an exciting new school with terrific teachers and great classmates for an old, barren, two-room Alabama school 10 miles from the county seat, presided over by a small-time dictator-principal and his wife. Mrs. Johnson taught the first 3 grades; Mr. Johnson had the other three. I wondered if the county school board even knew they were in the system.

For the four years we’d lived in West Virginia, our Alabama cousins seemed to find my Yankee brogue fascinating and on summer visits south, would gather around just to listen. When we moved back to Alabama and it became apparent that I was going to be a classmate at Poplar Springs, my strange speech pattern quickly went from exotic to an embarrassment;

That summer, in the annual revival at New Oak Free Will Baptist Church, the small church where our family had worshiped for generations, Jesus Christ came into my wife and saved me. .

Finally, toward the end of that summer, Mrs. Boshell, our elderly neighbor one mile up the highway, was murdered. Before the sheriff arrived, some of us children stood on her front porch and stared down at her mutilated body.

It was years before I gave thought to the effect such a sequence of major events arriving in wave upon wave could have upon an 11-year-old boy.

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About Your Prayer…I’d Like to Apologize

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If you look over the 20 or 25 articles on prayer in this blog, you will see I have sometimes taken people to task for their faulty prayers. I’ve teased them about silly prayers and laughed at their funny mistakes and grown exasperated at what I considered foolish, Pharisaical prayers.

May I apologize?

After all, a prayer is directed to the Father not to the children. None of us has been commissioned to or gifted for the task of correcting the prayers of our sibling

I’m impressed by how little criticism of actual prayers we find in Scripture. In Luke 18:10-14, our Lord did say that the tax-collector went home “justified” (forgiven, made right with God) that day. But He did not say a word about the Pharisee and his prayer. Granted, it was implied that the boasting prayer was rejected, but the Lord sure let that fellow off easily, I’ll say that.

And in James 4:3, we’re told that some prayers are offered from wrong motives, resulting in silence from Heaven.  And Isaiah 59:1-2 says our sins separate us from the Lord and prevent our prayers from getting through. But in neither case did they criticize actual prayers.

I hereby promise to stop criticizing prayers.

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Reforming the Deacons (18): “What Unity Means Within the Deacons”

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I’ve seen this happen.

The deacons studied a proposal, discussed it at length, found they were divided, and took a vote, resulting in a split decision. The majority decided to go forward and brought the recommendation to the congregation in the monthly business meeting.

After the chairman of the deacons had his say, another deacon stood to oppose it. This opened the door for a floor fight between the two factions within the deacon body, while the congregation sat and watched in stunned silence.

As the new pastor of that church, I had been caught off guard by this. At the next deacons meeting, I brought up what they had done and tried to analyze it with them. And succeeded in making almost all of them angry at me.

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Your Poor Prayer

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….We do not know how to pray as we should…. (Romans 8:26)

I find it liberating to know that the great Apostle Paul was dissatisfied with his prayer life. At least, that’s how I read Romans 8:26. And if he could admit that “we do not know how to pray as we should,” it’s a dead-on cinch that you and I don’t either.

One thing almost everyone in your congregation has in common on a typical Sunday morning is a dissatisfaction with their prayer life. That is not to say that all are doing poorly, only that none of us feels we have got it down right, that we are praying with the effectiveness we’d like.

In this life, we are always going to be doing things partially. “We know in part,” Scripture says. “We prophecy in part” (I Corinthians 13:9,12).

Good music, they say, is music that is written better than it can be played. The Christian life is like that: written better than any of us can hope to attain in this life. The standard of God is still the same: “Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). We will not attain it in this life, but that’s how it’s written.

So with your prayer life. You and I mumble in our prayers, like a child still learning to talk. It frustrates us and disappoints us, but–do not miss this–is oddly pleasing to the Father in Heaven.

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Questions to Ask, Pastor, Before Taking a Public Stand

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The pastor stands in the pulpit, clears his throat, and waits for the undivided attention of the congregation. His silence signals the membership that something big is up, that what the preacher is about to say will be long remembered.

He begins, “As most of you know, the local school board has decided that Gideons International will no longer be allowed to distribute New Testaments to the children in this district. This greatly concerns me. I will admit that I am angrier than I have been in a long time.”

Seated in his congregation are three of the six members of the local school board. As the preacher continues, they can feel all eyes turned in their direction. They become fidgety and wish the pastor would “just preach the Bible.”

In another community, the pastor announces his opposition to the United Way budget which devotes a portion of its income to the local Planned Parenthood office. A few miles up the interstate, the pastor is wrestling with whether to speak out on corruption inside the police force.

These are major decisions leaders of the Lord’s churches must make. The stakes are high, the issues are important, and the ramifications may be severe. Going public on controversial matters can make or break a pastor’s ministry in a church.

Here are questions to ask, pastor, before you take a public stand on an issue that is facing your community.

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Enjoy Your Glory and Stay at Home.

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“Do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them….” (Jeremiah 45:5).

“Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor my eyes lofty. Neither do I concern myself with great matters, with things too profound for me.” (Psalm 131:1).

We’ve been having this little give-and-take on Facebook. As one who enjoys stirring the pot or provoking comment, I often throw out a subject just to watch people spar. But this time I got in a little deeper than I’d planned.

All last week, I worked at the Muskogee Children’s Camp, held at Kiamichi Baptist Assembly in remote Oklahoma. I spoke twice a day and sketched all 500 attendees. It was a full week, and the weather was scorching. With no newspapers, no radio and television, the only news any of us heard came from our cell phones. (What about our laptops? Getting the internet required jumping through too many hoops, so I left mine in the car all week.) The point is: no news at all last week.

That’s why, when I returned to (ahem) civilization and heard about the Chick-Fil-A thing in the news, I was unaware as to what had taken place. Apparently, the head of the company, Dan Cathey, had said something in a news conference that ignited a firestorm of reaction from gay activists, and Christian activists got involved. It will not come as a surprise to anyone on Facebook to learn that a lot of the Lord’s people have strong feelings on such matters.

And that’s when I got in trouble.

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