It is said that when Maureen Stapleton won the Academy Award, she gushed into the microphone, “I want to thank everyone I’ve ever known!”

That got a laugh, I’m sure, and everyone understood the sense of gratitude that threatened to overload her nervous system. It’s a grand feeling, no doubt, although few among us have ever been in the position she was at that moment.

But does anyone think that Ms. Stapleton’s friends and family members, her co-stars and colleagues, her producers and directors, immediately felt appreciated and properly thanked by that statement? Surely not. No one took it as a personal word of appreciation.

Impersonal, general, generic one-size-fits-all thanks does not do the job. A message on the sign-board in front of a place of business saying “Thanks for your patronage” does not communicate thanksgiving.

There are ways to say “thanks” effectively and also ways to say “thanks” when you’re wasting your breath.

Continue reading →

In the Jimmy Stewart movie, “Rear Window,” Grace Kelly stands at the back of his apartment soaking in the lovely music drifting in from a penthouse across the way where the composer is slaving away. She asks, “Where does a person get the inspiration to write such beautiful music?”

Stewart answers, “Well, he gets it from his landlord the first of each month.”

Motivation comes in all shapes and sizes.

Every captain works on finding ways to motivate the crew. It comes with the job. The coach looks for ways to fire up the team for one more game, the sales manager for one more contest, the pastor for one more service, the major for one more battle.

Driving south on the interstate recently, I was reflecting on my assignment for that evening. An association in South Alabama was gathering its leaders–its troops–for what they call “M Night.” The M, most people have long forgotten even though this event has been around for 50 years, once stood for Mobilization. The idea was to get the churches revved up in the area of discipleship.

I’ve attended a bunch of these annual evenings over the years and been the featured speaker at quite a number. To me, however, the M always stood for Motivation. It’s a kissing cousin to Mobilization, I figure, because if you get the team motivated, they will mobilize, meaning they’ll get out there and do the job.

The radio was on, tuned to a station that was dying with its waning signal. I heard only this part of the interview.

Interviewer: “You are nationally known for these speeches. I suppose you call yourself a Motivational Speaker.”

Subject: “No, never. The way I look at it, motivation doesn’t last. Strategy lasts. I call myself a Strategist.”

Out of range, I lost the station. But that was enough. A word from God? I’m not sure, but it sure set me to thinking.

Maybe it was not sufficient to talk to the Baptists of Geneva County, Alabama, about their motivation, not if it would last only a few hours and then vanish with the dawn. There ought to be something heavier, more solid, longer lasting.

So, I spoke on strategy.

Today, something in the Times-Picayune sports pages jerked me back to motivation, however. Saints Coach Sean Payton motivates his team week in and week out to face yet another foe, some fearsome and some almost laughable. The fact that their record is now 9-0 says something about his success.

How Payton gets his teams up is worth a look.

Continue reading →

There’s nothing dull going on in New Orleans. Never. Not in politics, entertainment, religion, or sports.

You ready for this?

Start with the new Disney movie, “The Princess and the Frog.” You can see the trailer for this–and that’s all I’ve seen so far; I think it’s out today–at www.nola.com. What makes it fascinating is that this cartoon flick is set in New Orleans.

The city has been beautifully drawn again and again over the centuries, by some of the world’s finest artists. But never more strikingly–and may I say, more idealistically–than in this movie. Don’t look for dirt on the streets or trash in the gutter. This is Disneyland-come-South where nary a speck of dirt can be seen.

It’s gorgeous.

Mike Scott, movie critic for the Times-Picayune, refers to the “loving treatment” of New Orleans, “which ends up being a character in the movie.” He says that when the Disney people came to town last week and showed the first 30 minutes of the movie, “if the rest of it is as good as that first portion, they’ve done it again.”

A local church is in the news. The Church of Christ on Elysian Fields has gone to court to oust their pastor, accusing him of egotism, one-man rule, and money-grabbing. Elders produced an affidavit from a church in Waxahachie, Texas, formerly served by Pastor Jarvis James, as evidence that he’d racked up the same misbehavior there and they too had had to kick him out.

The article by reporter Katie Reckdahl was so sensitive to the religious issues involved and so knowledgeable about scripture’s admonitions about believers going to court against one another, that I wrote a letter to the editor complimenting her. We grieve over the situation; we’re grateful when the media covers it graciously.

What did it for me, however, was nothing Katie Reckdahl wrote. It was a photo that accompanied the article.

Continue reading →

I am surely the least introspective person you know. Something happens to me, I find it a little odd, I move on. Anyone else would analyze it and dig out whatever messages or lessons the event contained and learn from it.

I ignore it, go forward, and make the same mistakes the next day.

One day after many years in the ministry it finally dawned on me that when all those friends or co-workers or colleagues in various denominational offices invite me to lunch where we can a) work on a problem, b) settle a difference, or c) plan a meeting, there is a reason my spirit drags its feet. (Does a spirit have feet?)

I hate working lunches.

Let’s do lunch or have a working meeting, but not both please.

Most definitely, I do not want to go to lunch to work on a problem in our relationship. If I have offended you or you have trod on my sensibilities, then let’s get together and clear the air. But not over lunch.

Lunch is a time to enjoy food and relax. It is an event that calls for happy chatter and good fellowship.

What it does not call for–what intrudes as obviously as a stomach-ache at a banquet or gossip at a concert–is work. We spread out our notebooks, stress out our minds, slave over the problem–all while a waiter is asking whether we want a salad or soup.

No thanks.

There is a reason for this dislike of mine for working mealtimes. A few horror stories in fact.

Continue reading →

Many of us pastors have trouble staying out of the ditches and onto the road.

A scholar friend says, “Truth is a ridge on either side of which are vast chasms to be avoided at all cost.”

It’s one thing to love word-study and to delight in finding a particular word in Scripture that turns out to be a well-spring of insights and applications, and a far different thing to fight over the meaning of some obscure Greek word.

Somewhere in my past I encountered a translation of I Timothy 6:5 that warns God’s leaders of “word-wrangling.” This morning, looking that passage up in various translations and commentaries and other study helps, no one has it that way, but more as “constant striving” and “chronic disagreement.” (The Greek word—ahem, here we go now–is ‘disparatribai,’ a double compound word which according to Thayer, means “constant contention, incessant wrangling or strife.”)

“Thayer” refers to a well-respected Greek-English lexicon used for generations. In the above quote, he used the word “wrangling”. Maybe I got it from him.

What started all this in my mind was two things.

The image of wrangling suggests a cowboy roping a dogie, jumping off his horse, and wrestling the animal to the ground.

Some of us do that with words. We capture them, hogtie them, and put our own brand on them. The result may be to make the word mean something entirely different from the writer’s original intention.

And since our audiences–that would be the men and women of our congregations–are not knowledgeable about the Greek and Hebrew (most don’t have a clue what a lexicon is!), when we start parsing (ahem) these words in sermons, they either shift into neutral intending to catch up when we return to the main highway or they stand in awe, assured we must know what we’re talking about since we use phrases like “the original Greek says” and “my Hebrew professor used to say this word means.”

Why our people put up with this stuff is beyond me.

They shouldn’t.

The other thing that drove me to turn on the computer this morning and drive down this particular lane was Acts 2:40 where Peter told the Jerusalem crowd to “save yourselves.”

Yep. That’s what he said.

Continue reading →

Critics say when President George W. Bush appeared on that aircraft carrier with the words “Mission Accomplished” emblazoned across a banner, he was just asking for a continuation of the war in the Middle East. And when he defiantly said to the enemies of the USA, “Bring it on,” that did it.

He came to regret both.

In this morning’s USA Today, the discussion is whether Bobby Bowden should retire from coaching Florida State’s Seminole football team. This year’s record was 5-5, a vast difference from the championship calibre teams he has usually fielded over his 35 seasons at that school. His 387 victories over 44 years of coaching puts him second on the all-time list, behind Penn State’s Joe Paterno, another octogenarian who arguably needs to hang it up.

Bowden is 80 years old. The FSU fans and alums are calling for him to retire. But the decision is not theirs to make, although they can bring incredible pressure on the president of the university and the athletic director who will be making the call one way or the other soon.

What struck me–I’m no FSU fan and have no dog in this fight, but am always interested in the strangeness of human behavior–is the way Bowden is insisting the school is going to have to fire him to get him to leave. No one knows but the coach, but since the university brought in Jimbo Fisher as his assistant a year or two ago with the understanding he would succeed Bowden, guaranteeing him $5 million if he’s not the coach by January 10, 2011, it would appear that Bowden is maneuvering for one more year, after which he would step down.

Here’s what Bowden said, and then a quote from his wife Ann.

“You can figure it out. Here I am, 80 years old and I’m just as excited now as I was 50 years ago as far as going on the field and looking at film and making decisions here in the office.”

“They’ll have to fire him for him not to go another year….If they’ve got guts enough to do it, let them do it.”

That did it for me.

Continue reading →

One of the online sermon sources is offering a CD containing “30 years of sermons on one disk.”

No thanks. And I wonder who is purchasing these things.

Might as well offer a collection of “what I have said to my wife over 47 years of marriage.” One is as personal as the other.

The sermon I preach today–well, sermons, because I’ll be delivering three–are all things between the Lord and me. Jeremiah 23 warns God’s preachers against getting their sermons from each other.

That’s not to say it can’t do some good to study other people’s sermons. In fact, we can gain a lot from it.

From other people’s sermons, I learn:

Continue reading →

Some twenty years ago, when I was between churches for a solid year, I briefly considered becoming a vocational itinerant preacher. In other words, a traveling evangelist.

The idea excited me for a whole day. Then I talked to one.

Jim Ponder of Orlando, Florida–now with the Lord–was a dear friend who was enjoying a lengthy and effective ministry of itinerant evangelism. If anyone could provide the counsel I needed, it would be Jim. I picked up the phone and reached him.

A half hour later, when the conversation ended, I knew the Lord was not calling me in that direction. In fact, anyone who goes into this work and stays with it for any time deserves our greatest respect and support.

Two cautions in particular from Brother Jim have lingered in my mind all these years.

1) Don’t go into evangelism if you cannot handle being away from your family and alone in a distant hotel room night after night after night.

2) Don’t expect to be able to live on the offerings you receive. You will need a strong board of supporters to supplement your income.

From 1990 until 2004, I pastored a Southern Baptist church in metro New Orleans, then served for 5 years as the director of missions–the SBC version of a district superintendent/bishop–for the 100-plus churches in the same area, before retiring on June 1, 2009.

That’s when I hit the road.

Continue reading →