Why Are You Still in That Church?

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I’m about to raise a question I have no answer for.

A friend whom I’ve not seen in decades called yesterday. In the course of the conversation, when I asked what church he attends, he said, “There’s a tiny church near my house. I’m not sure why I still go there, they’ve had so many fights and splits over the years. When someone asked why I stay, I told him, ‘The Lord hasn’t led me to leave.'”

Why is he still there? Why hasn’t everyone left?

Up in the country, in the land of my youth, a number of longtime friends attend a historic church that meets only Sundays at 8 o’clock. The building has no heat or air, as I recall, and maybe no electricity–not sure about that. Yet, the crowd packs out the little building. They have their service and adjourn to their homes or to some breakfast restaurant. No Sunday School, no evening service, and nothing else as I understand it.

Why do they keep coming? What’s the attraction?

This week, a minister from another state introduced himself over the internet as a bi-vocational pastor of a country church. “Sunday morning only” is how he put it. The people stay for lunch–dinner, they probably call it–and go home. The pastor named another church, with membership in the thousands, where he attends Sunday nights and Wednesday nights.

I find myself wondering why the members of his church aren’t coming to the big church with him. What is the attraction to the small church with very little to offer?

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Sometimes the Salt of the Earth Needs Sweetening

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While researching a subject on-line the other day, I found myself reading some preachery attacks on other ministers. These men of God, assuming that’s what they are and I’m not saying they’re not, were taking no prisoners.

“That pastor is a liar!” “Preachers lie to you when they say….” “Ten lies preachers tell you.” “That preacher is an agent of hell!”

That sort of thing.

When those sent by the Father to be shepherds of His sheep use such blistering rhetoric, we fail our assignments in many ways: we dishonor the Lord, we shame the church, we needlessly slander our brethren, we set poor examples for the people in the pew, and we hold the gospel up to ridicule by the world.

How about a little sweetening, I wonder. And then I remember something.

Waylon Bailey, beloved brother who pastors the First Baptist Church of Covington, Louisiana, says there are two kinds of preachers: those who enter the ministry whole and those who enter in order to become whole.

Give me the first kind any day of the week. The second group can be scary and dangerous.

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The Toughest Job in the Church

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There are few easy jobs in the typical congregation and plenty of really difficult ones. My candidate for the hardest “elected” position is chairman of deacons.

The absolute toughest and most critical, of course, is the position of pastor. He’s the point man and so much rides on his faithfulness. A close second to that is the deacon chairman.

I say this in full recognition that in our denomination at least–the Southern Baptist Convention–deacons are a varied lot. What they do and how they minister is strictly up to the individual church. Some function as boards of directors, some are teams of servants, some work as a steering committee composed of chairs of every committee in the church, and some are true spiritual leaders.

But there is one thing true in 99 percent of our churches: the chairman of deacons is the number one lay position within the congregation.

On paper, the deacon chair is simply the moderator of the monthly meeting of his group. But in actuality, he (and in the rare instance, she) is the go-between for the pastor and the congregation.

The congregation is having a major problem that involves the pastor. Someone has to visit the shepherd for a confrontational sit-down with him. It falls to the deacon chairman.

Someone or some group within the congregation is out of line. They are attacking the pastor unfairly. For the shepherd to confront them seems self-serving and puts him on the defensive. Someone else needs to do this. The chairman of deacons inherits the job by default. There is no one else better situated.

When you are nominated by the church as a deacon, they convene a council to examine you, then the church ordains you. It’s a big deal. We need to do something just as significant when the deacons choose their leader. The job is the weightiest in the church when done well.

A deacon chairman needs four qualities; if he misses even one, the church could be in trouble.

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Don’t Call It a Sugar Stick!

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A church asks you to preach at the last minute and you pull out a tried-and-trusted sermon you’ve given several times and feel strongly about.

Another church asks you to preach months in advance and you preach that same sermon.

What’s going on here?

Some would say you are taking the easy way out by recycling an old sermon. “Grabbing something from the barrel.” “Preaching your sugar sticks,” they call it.

They are dead wrong. You are doing exactly what you ought to be doing and here’s why.

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Pastor: What to Put On Your Resume’

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During the years I served as director of missions for the Baptist churches of metro New Orleans, I must have received a hundred or more resumes from aspiring pastors. Some simply wanted to relocate, but most planned to attend our Baptist seminary and hoped to find a local church to pastor.

The resumes ran the gamut–everything from multi-paged mini-biographies to one-page skeletons. When I responded with a suggestion or two on how to make the bio more helpful to a search committee, the minister would sometimes answer that this is how he was taught to prepare a resume.

My response was: In the business world, maybe so. But sending a resume’ to a church is a different ball game.

Pastor search committees are rarely composed of professionals with a great deal of experience in combing through stacks of resumes. Most are salt-of-the-earth laypeople who do not understand the complexities of denominational abbreviations or the different types of seminaries and theological degrees. They are often easily misled by the unscrupulous.

You will want to be crystal clear, absolutely honest, and as helpful as possible in the way you compose your resume.

The “Jobs” section of our local Sunday paper frequently runs hints on preparing effective resumes. This week, the suggestions ran along the lines of: Length (one page is preferable), Priorities (leave out the insignificant stuff), Keep it Professional (do not list hobbies, numbers of children, etc), and Prepare Multiple Versions for different companies.

Almost none of that is applicable to a minister.

No doubt someone somewhere is advising young ministers on how to prepare helpful resumes. But knowing none of them personally, I will offer my take on the subject.

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Old Books and New Insights

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I confess. I am a bookaholic, a bibliophile. New books, old books, it doesn’t matter. Turn me loose in a convention hall where the public library is selling off their excess and I’m in heaven for two hours.

In Cincinnati, I discovered a used bookstore that filled several floors of an ancient downtown building. I could have moved in.

I know where the best used bookstore is in Jackson, Mississippi, and in Birmingham, Alabama, and never pass either city without a brief stop-in.

But there is reason to this madness. And it’s far more than a nostalgia kick. (There is that too, but it’s not the major thing.)

Take the 1943 book I finished today. Purchased for 5 bucks somewhere–I forget where–“They Call It Pacific” is an eyewitness account of the opening days and months of the Second World War by Associated Press reporter Clark Lee.

Reading the book was a delight simply because it was not history. Lee was there, he saw it, he told of the conversations, described the people, and let us feel what he felt.

And like a preacher ought, I received several good sermon illustrations from the book. But more than that, these are “life” illustrations, not just grist for the sermon-making mill.

But first, a little background….

In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s Lee worked out of Japan. He saw the build-up to war first-hand and was friends with a number of government officials and military officers who later became our hated enemies. He escaped the country in November, 1941, just ahead of Pearl Harbor and full-scale war.

Clark Lee was in the Phillipines when MacArthur was forced to flee and the Japanese captured the country. Along with other leaders, he relocated to the island of Corregidor and went back and forth to Bataan to interview American soldiers who were fighting alongwith the Filipinos. Then, as those last bastions fell, he hopped a boat to Australia. He arrived back in Hawaii six months after Pearl Harbor and described the recovery going on. Then, he was assigned to an aircraft carrier that took part in the fight for Guadalcanal.

The book ends after the first full year of American involvement in WW II. I found it fascinating on several levels, some of them because of illustrations the book provides.

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The Pastor’s in Trouble–So He Prays

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Nothing jerks our prayers out of their “blessed generality” stage like a crisis. The best kind of crisis for that is for a close loved one to get in serious trouble–car wreck, cancer, emergency surgery, that sort of thing.

But a close second is a personal crisis, the kind where someone is making life miserable for you and it’s taking all the reserves you can muster to get out of bed in the morning and walk into one more day. You either quit praying altogether, the worst possible choice, or your prayers lose their vain repetitions and meaningless phrases and get down to business.

Yesterday, going through a stack of notes from the 1990s, I found such a prayer of mine, written in the thick of church conflict. It’s undated, so there’s no way of determining what particular struggle was going on then. We went through so many, the first six or seven years of my 14-year pastorate at the last church we served.

The prayer was written in longhand and filled two pages. It’s about as specific as one would want a prayer to be. No more “bless him” and “help her.” But on the other hand, it does not call names and I’m glad to report, it’s not as harsh as some of the Psalms where David or whoever is praying for the children of his enemies to not live to see that day’s sunset.

Here is the prayer, along with a few comments. I send it forth in the hope that some servant of the Lord in the fight of his life may find encouragement to hang tough and be faithful.

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How to Spot a Fake

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In the latter months of World War II, as the Allies were closing in on Germany, the Nazis developed a ruse that worked well for a while.

They would find German soldiers who spoke English well and dress them as Americans. They would arrange for them to be “lost” and to rejoin the Alllied forces as they moved forward. Their task: to infiltrate the American troops and assassinate Generals Eisenhower and Patton.

In time, the good guys developed some tests for exposing the fakes. One German was cut down by the Americans when they saw how he was walking. He was ramrod straight whereas all our troops slouched when they walked.

Another group learned to address the soldier using “pig Latin.” If he was stymied by that, he was exposed.

And they developed questions. Two, I recall, were: Who is Betty Grable? and What position did Lou Gehrig play?

The answers were: movie star/pinup girl and first base for the Yankees. It was understood that every GI in the world would know this.

If you have been in the warfare against the forces of righteousness and the enemies of all that is good and holy for any period of time, you have come up against counterfeits and pretenders, fakes and shams.

The question is, how do you tell? And what should we do about them?

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Why I Am A Southern Baptist

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When I turned on the computer this morning, there was the question. A friend-at-a-distance from many years back with whom I have reconnected on Facebook–FB is great for that very reason–laid the matter before me:

“Why are you Southern Baptist?”

It did not appear that she has an agenda and she didn’t sound angry. She sounded like she wanted my take on this matter.

What I said to her in the brief space which Facebook allows was something like: “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. The Lord captured me there as a sophomore in college and did such wonderful things in my life in this family of churches, I’ve never looked back. Its emphasis on fellowship, the Word, and bringing people to Jesus does it for me.”

That’s pretty much what I said, but what I thought was, “It would take an hour to answer that adequately.”

Let’s see if I can do it in less than that.

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Preparing for Your Moment

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“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have.” (I Peter 3:15)

Sometimes you know when your moment is coming but most times you don’t.

Later this morning–what started me thinking about all this–I’m to be interviewed for a national Christian radio hookup. Readers of this blog will recall the “Christian Bucket List” from late April and early May. (The list of 50 required five articles over a two week period.) Someone at Moody Radio saw them and asked if they can interview me concerning them.

Far from “condoning” or “enduring” such interviews, I love them. No one who goes into the Lord’s work does so hoping to keep their ministry a secret. So, let’s do it.

I have no idea what they will ask. But, in preparation, I went back last night and looked over the five articles. And made a little discovery. One item of the fifty is mentioned twice. But this can be edited and corrected, thankfully. One of the blessings of blogging.

For the last week, I’ve had a post-it note beside my computer: “Monday. Interview. Moody Radio. 10 am. Deb.” A reminder to pray for the Father’s presence in this and a prompting to be near the home phone at that time.

It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been interviewed, so it’s not about my having the jitters. (At this point, anyone else would pause to list some of the radio and TV stations/networks I’ve done interviews with. But let’s pass on that. Suffice it to say there have been several. This is not about me.)

What this is about is the need for a minister or any follower of the Lord Jesus to be prepared for that moment when the microphone is poked in his face and he is asked to account for something important.

I recall an article from a newsmagazine in which a consultant was prepping politicians and Fortune 500 big-shots for their moment in the spotlight, for good or ill. Some of his points have lingered with me to this day.

Then yesterday, seeing the CEO of Massey Energy appearing before a Senate committee on C-Span to explain the deaths of the coal miners a few months back in his West Virginia mine brought it all home.

I expect the CEO of British Petroleum has conferred with consultants on how to come across to the public as believable, confident, and yet contrite at the same time. Admit what you can, explain all you must, but do or say nothing to play into the hands of the lawyers who are lining up to clean out your bank accounts.

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