God’s Leadership Development Plan I

Posted on by

Who wants to be the leader?

Ask that in any classroom on the planet and two-thirds of the hands will go up. Every child in the class wants to be the leader.

The leader determines the direction. The leader walks out front. The leader becomes the role model for everyone else. The leader issues orders to the rest of the troops. The leader is well-known and highly visible. The leader gets interviewed by the media, shown on television and quoted by the paper. The leader receives the accolades when it’s all over. The leader takes home the choice rewards.

It’s fun being the leader.

Because he’s the most visible, the leader also gets shot at first and most often. The leader gets criticized by outsiders and insiders alike. The leader is the first to be arrested and executed if the movement fails. The leader bears the blame. The leader was at fault. The leader has to keep up appearances even when he is hopelessly discouraged or lost at sea. It all falls on the shoulders of the leader.

You sure you want to be the leader?

At this very moment, a future president of the United States of America is in high school. He/she may know very well that this is their destiny or, more likely, not have a clue. Some future president is a toddler in diapers.

It’s possible and even likely that the pastor-after-next who will be coming to lead your church is in middle school right now, without the slightest idea what lies ahead.

You hope someone is training these young people well. You hope they don’t have things too easy, that they learn the lessons only hard work can teach. You want them to know the positive values of struggle, of overcoming obstacles, of reaching deep down inside and summoning inner strength.

You want them smart and strong and solid.

The question is: where do we get such leaders? And how do they get that way?

Here’s how God did it.

Continue reading →

Drawing the Line in Advance

Posted on by
5

The line defining what is moral, ethical, and biblical–and just as important, what isn’t–is almost impossible to discern close up. Only from a distance can that border be seen clearly.

That’s why the time to make those moral, ethical, and biblical choices is when you’re not involved in a crisis, not when the devil is banging your door down, and before you are beset by excruciating temptation.

If you haven’t settled these matters in advance, once the temptation arrives, you are sunk before you start.

The news this week told of a young pastor who was shot to death by the cops in a drug crackdown. From all reports, he was not buying or selling the stuff. So how did he get involved and how in the world did it lead to his death?

Everyone wants to know; every pastor needs to know and to learn from this guy’s mistakes.

Cops say they were monitoring the behavior of a few suspicious characters who were indeed dealing dope. They spotted a young man with a woman in his car nearby. Recognizing the woman as a druggie, they approached the car with guns drawn. Now, bear in mind, these are undercover cops and not wearing police uniforms. So, in a panic, the car speeds away and almost hits one of the narcs. The law enforcers interpret that as assault with a deadly weapon, we’re told constantly by police departments. It’s like handing them a license to kill. So, they did. They shot the young man who turned out to be a pastor. He died in the hospital later.

Preliminary reports, as I recall–I couldn’t find the article in my newspaper or on the internet this morning, so I’m going by memory here–indicate that no drugs were found with the man of God or in his system. The woman in his car tested positive.

The pastor’s sister was quick to defend him. “He would never ever touch drugs or alcohol. He had to have been there to try to save that woman’s soul. I’ll believe that to my dying day.”

Personally, with no information otherwise, I have no trouble accepting that. What I do have trouble with, however, is this: what in the sam hill was he doing there with a woman in his car in the first place?

Continue reading →

This Preacher’s Dilemma

Posted on by

Every pastor I know is held by two scriptures at opposite poles–and also torn between them.

On the one hand, “The laborer is worthy of his hire.” That word from I Timothy 5:18 is a quotation of several Old Testament references. The New Testament will not let the super-spiritual among us dismiss the idea of compensating the minister with something like, “The Bible teaches that the ministers should get out and hold jobs like everyone else; there’s nothing in there about paying the preacher.”

Bad wrong. Read your Bible.

But on the other hand, the other reality that Scripture nails down as a line the minister must not cross says, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (I Timothy 6:10).

On one side, the minister must never put a price on the work he does. He must look to the Lord as the Source for his needs.

On the other side, he should be adequately compensated. The church must do the faithful and responsible thing in providing for these the Lord has called, equipped, and sent into His fields to labor.

He has a hard time saying this. So, I’m saying it for him.

Some thirty years ago, Dr. Bill Prout was a professor of religion on the faculty of Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, MS, where I served the First Baptist Church. I was Bill’s pastor, but he himself was a former pastor of Southern Baptist churches. He often supplied pulpits in the area for absent ministers and took interims when churches were between pastors.

I wrote an article for the old Baptist Program (the wonderful Leonard Hill was editor) based on a conversation Dr. Prout and I had. Fifteen years earlier, when he arrived in the community and began to fill the pulpits, he told me the average check to the visiting minister was 50 dollars.

“It’s still 50 dollars,” he laughed.

A friend who worked at a local bank ran the numbers and informed us that 50 dollars in, say, 1960, would have to be about 125 dollars fifteen years later, in order to have the same buying power. I quoted him in the article and urged churches to be more generous and faithful in taking care of their visiting ministers.

And now, that truth has come full circle for me.

Continue reading →

Making Believe This is Real

Posted on by
3

What started this for me was something a friend said Sunday morning.

We bumped into each other at a restaurant after church. He said, “I’ll miss your sermon tonight. I’ll be in such-and-such a city.” Oh? what’s going on there?

“Fantasy football. Our statewide meeting.”

I said, “You have meetings for these things? If they’re fantasy, can’t you just fantasize you’re there?”

He could tell in a heartbeat that I have no knowledge of how fantasy football works and absolutely zero appreciation for the sport. After all, is it a sport if it exists only in the fantasy world?

He smiled, “I have to be there. I’m the reigning champ.”

Might as well have remarked about weather conditions on Mars.  He lost me.

Readers will understand if I say you fantasy-football people have lost your cotton-picking minds.

Now, real football–well, that’s something else!

Or, then again, is it?

Continue reading →

Question Everything on the Internet, Including This!

Posted on by
13

I made a preacher mad at me the other day. I apologized and he forgave me, but I don’t regret what I did.

Here’s what happened.

I received an email from the man of God telling how a group of liberals is petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to end religious programming in the United States. This would stop Charles Stanley, David Jeremiah, and a whole host of religious programmers from broadcasting their messages.

The e-mail was a “forward,” of course. My friend had not written it, but merely read it with alarm and forwarded it to dozens of his friends.

I clicked on “reply all,” which sent my response to everyone who had received his note.

I said, “My dear brother, where have you been! This is a hoax! It has been around for nearly 40 years. The FCC never was petitioned to stop religious programming and couldn’t if it wanted to.”

I added, “This meaningless petition has been circling the earth for all these decades, causing gullible, although well-meaning, Christians to tie up God’s resources and their time in bombarding the FCC with thousands and thousands of pieces of mail every year.”

“Christians of all people should not pass this stuff along when they can’t verify it,” I said.

That’s how I hurt his feelings. So, I apologized.

Then, last week, that same petition arrived again.

Continue reading →

Forget Feelings; Love is Something We Do

Posted on by
5

“But I say to you who hear, ‘Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you.” (Luke 6:27)

Put yourself in the place of the Lord. You want to get across to your people the importance of fellowship inside the body, how to keep relationships strong, and how to correct them when they get out of whack. So, what do you do?

Do you tell your people to love their children? to love their parents? their sweethearts?

They already do. Jesus said even bad people love their own.

Instead, Jesus tells us to love our enemies—the absolute last people on earth we would think of loving. We tend to think of our enemies as completely unlovable, the guy who did us wrong and is planning worse, the kind of people we want to hate or fear or resent and are thinking of getting back at.

Love my enemies? Are you kidding, Lord? I don’t even like them.

The good news is He does not tell us we have to like them. Some of them He doesn’t like very much either. ‘Like’ has nothing to do with it. It’s about love.

We have to love them.

This is not an option. The command to love our enemies is found three times in the gospels–Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27 and 35. The principle, however, is planted all through Scripture. We’re stuck with it. This is something our Lord Jesus Christ fully expects from His disciples.

Continue reading →

Before the Sermon Preparation Begins

Posted on by

A friend who teaches seminary students the art and craft of sermon-building and delivery sent out an SOS the other day to a lot of his pastor friends. “What is the single most important piece of advice you would give to beginning preachers?”

What I said was important, but certainly not “the most important piece of advice.” What I said was that once he gets the sermon, he should go for a walk or a drive and preach it to himself. And not one time, but several times over several days.

The advantage of this is that by preaching it aloud, he is able to see where the message is weak, where it dies, where it needs strengthening, and where he has to close an exit because he was about to chase a rabbit down that dead-end lane.

The reason I chose that piece of advice, it should be clear, is that I wish someone had told me that when I was beginning to preach.

Instead, what I would do is labor over a scripture, hammer out an outline, work some subpoints into it, and then hope for the best. However “the best” never came along. It was always mediocre.

In the weeks since my friend asked and I gave that piece of advice, I’ve thought of something far more urgent in preparing a sermon. In fact, what I’m going to suggest comes before the sermon even begins to be prepared.

Continue reading →

The Pastor’s Secrets About Those Stories

Posted on by
6

Under the influence of the tabloids at the super market checkout, I toyed with the notion of calling this “What Pastors Don’t Tell You About Those Stories They Tell.”

It’s all of that. In fact, what I’m going to say about stories we pastors tell from the pulpit is not universally accepted as the right thing to do. Some might accuse us of dishonesty or worse. I beg to differ.

Read it, then give us your assessment at the end.

1) Some stories the pastor tells as happening to someone else actually occurred to him.

Case in point. Last Saturday morning, while leading a deacon retreat for a church I once pastored, one of the men volunteered a testimony that gave me far too much credit for his coming back to Christ and getting active in the church. He’s in insurance, and was the agent for the fellow who had hit me and injured me slightly. At one point, he said–I have no memory of this–I asked if he thought the insurance company would be willing to replace my broken glasses. Something about that, evidently, impressed him, that I was not greedily grabbing for all I could squeeze out of the insurance company, and God used it to get his attention.

As I say, I have no memory of any of it; I barely remember the accident.

When I arrived back home, my wife said, “You can’t tell that story, though.” I agreed. In a sermon, it would appear self-serving or self-promoting, as in “look how wonderful I am.” So I won’t tell it.

Oops. I just told it, didn’t I? But it was to make the point: if I ever put it into a sermon, the story would work better camouflaged. I would tell it as though it happened to “a good friend of mine.” It did, of course; I’m a good friend of me.

That little technique–relating a personal story in the third person–allows a minister to make excellent use of some of his best illustrations without appearing to be boasting.

2) Some stories are composites.

Continue reading →

Pastor, Leave the False Humility Behind

Posted on by
5

We’ve all seen it and some of us have done it.

The pastor strides to the pulpit, opens the Bible, reads his text, announces his subject, then begins with an apology. “I have no right to speak to you on this subject.” “Many of you know more about this subject than I do.” “I’m not sure why the Lord laid this on my heart, but I’m going to give it a try.”

That sort of thing.

It feels to the well-meaning pastor like transparency, like he’s leveling with his people, admitting what they already know–that he’s human and fallible. A fellow struggler. One of them.

It feels to most of the congregation like, “Well, if you don’t know, we sure don’t. Get it over with and let’s go home.”

I rise this evening, pastors, to say to you that this kind of false humility has no place in the Kingdom of God. It most certainly has no place in the pulpit where God expects His servant to be bold and His people expect their pastor to be faithful.

What it does is cut the ground out from under everything the minister is about to share. It diminishes the authority with which God fully intends him to proclaim His Word. He ties his own hands and weakens his effectiveness before he even begins.

Continue reading →

Teaching’s Habitual Vision of Greatness

Posted on by
3

One day in 1965, John Steinbeck sat at an outdoor cafe in San Francisco with Howard Gossage, a friend in the advertising business. He said, “Yesterday in Muir Woods, Charlie lifted his leg on a tree that was fifty feet across, a hundred feet high, and a thousand years old. What’s left in life for that dog after that supreme moment?”

Gossage was quiet for a moment, then he said in his slight stutter, “W-w-well, he could always t-t-teach.”

At this time of the year when school has resumed, half the people I know are talking about teaching and teachers. Some friends are themselves teachers and another large segment are the students, everything from pre-K to post-doctoral. Some are thrilled to be back in school, others feel they have been sentenced to Angola for another nine months. That period is ideally suited to bring forth new life in other realms, however in the classroom nothing is guaranteed.

It can be time well invested, life-changing even, or it can be a prison-sentence.

As a lifelong student with two full decades in classroom instruction and the rest in the laboratory of life, learning and teaching have been two of my most enjoyable pursuits.

In fact, I’m signing on to teach a couple of classes at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2010, one in worship leadership and the other in interpersonal relations, both skills absolutely required in those who would shepherd the Lord’s flocks. Both subjects are dear to my heart. Both classes will be shared with another professor–a real one, I’m tempted to say–to give the students two perspectives and, since the classes are several hours long, to give the teachers some rest.

I’m excited. But I’ve done this before, actually–taught seminary students–and know that it’s real work.

If you think being a student is hard, and my grandchildren do, the teacher’s assignment is far more difficult.

No one lives by faith to the extent teachers do. If they judged the value of their work and the effect of their teaching by what they see sitting before them in the classroom, many would slip quietly into the faculty lounge and slit their throats.

Continue reading →