Being a pastor since 1962, I’ve not had to do something most of my friends have accomplished numerous times over these decades: look for a church home. Until last week.

On vacation, I spent a long weekend–Thursday night until Monday morning–with our daughter and her three girls in a lovely town in New Hampshire. One reason for staying through the weekend was to help them find a church. It is not necessary to go into all the reasons why they had not done this on their own, but the granddaughters in particular were ready and willing to attend church and I know how fleeting these moments can be and felt the need to act now. Before making the journey northward, I enlisted the prayer support of a number of friends.

Immediately, I found myself facing the same question as many another church-seeker: how can we quickly find a church, the one suited for our needs, without taking the atheist approach?

Not that an atheist would be looking for a church, but if he/she did so, they would most likely do it on the basis of location, appearance, program, the various services it offers, the compatibility of its membership, and so forth. In other words, exactly the approach 90 percent of church seekers use.

I had no time for this. In town for one Sunday only, I would have one chance to get this right. That reason more than any other drove me to serious prayer.

Several choices appeared to hold possibilities. My oldest granddaughter, now almost 19, had joined the Catholic church some two years earlier. From her parents, she had received no religious instruction or leadership, and when her boyfriend’s mother invited her to attend the Catholic church with them, she did so eagerly. She took the instruction classes and was baptized and loved everything about it, she says. But her younger sisters, ages 10 and 17, had attended only Baptist churches the few times they had gone, so with Grandpa being a Southern Baptist preacher and preferring something along that line, all three indicated a Baptist church would suit them fine.

The question was, which one.

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I don’t exactly write books; I tell other people to write books.

The story behind that cryptic comment is this: when Rudy and Rose French left New Orleans nearly a year ago, after an incredible two years in our post-Katrina city with so many ups and downs, I suggested Rudy write his experiences down. My initial thought was it would be therapy for him, help to “get it out of him.”

The British have a saying that one handles tragedy by “tea and talk.” Putting his experiences in writing became a form of talk for Rudy. The tea, well, Rose has to take care of that.

To my pleasant surprise, Rudy not only wrote his experiences and testimony down, he published it in a book. “You Can Learn A Lot From A Hurricane: My two years in New Orleans following Katrina” is Rudy and Rose French’s story.

Now, Rudy and Rose are missionaries. They are missionaries everywhere they go, not just at some site where the denomination might send them. Recently, he went to Korea as a short-term missionary. Right now, they’re living in Springville, Tennessee, and are missionaries there. For two years, they were missionaries to New Orleans.

Regular readers of this blog have heard some of my stories about Rudy. Some you didn’t know it was Rudy I was writing about, because I didn’t want to embarrass someone he was bumping up against in his service for the Lord. Rudy is the guy who left Canada, selling his gun collection to pay expenses, and drove to New Orleans to help us following the hurricane of August 29, 2005. When we didn’t put him to work, he volunteered at one of our churches that was feeding state troopers from across America–and the ladies in the kitchen put him in charge of the garbage detail. Now, Rudy began to have a little attitude problem.

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Following Katrina, as groups re-entered the city and began to organize for ministry, quite a few gravitated to the name NOAH as their title. Southern Baptists did, then found a United Methodist group already had staked it out, so ours became Operation NOAH Rebuild, the NOAH standing for “New Orleans Area Hope.”

As we reported here recently, it now turns out the City of New Orleans had its own version of NOAH, the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corporation. Established as a non-profit outfit to supplement the work of volunteers who were being overwhelmed by the scope of the rebuilding yet to be done, NOAH has become a front page story for the worst of reasons. Thursday’s headline reads, “Volunteers did the work but NOAH contractors got paid.”

Two years ago, Mayor Nagin said he wanted the city to offer gutting services because the faith-based and grassroots organizations just couldn’t do it all. This was the centerpiece of his 2007 budget, funded with several million dollars which, no doubt, came from the federal government directly or indirectly.

The NOAH agency was headed up by Stacey Jackson, who has resigned in the last couple of months. The office worked with sub-contractors who then gutted out houses assigned to them, turned in an invoice and were reimbursed by NOAH. That was the plan, at any rate, and it appears to have worked. Sort of. Somewhat. To a certain extent.

The fact is no one knows. No one from the city’s NOAH agency checked to see that the work was done, we now learn.

So, among the scandals now coming to light is the fact that at least 90 homes which NOAH paid contractors to gut out were untouched by those companies, but volunteers from around the USA did all the work.

(We cannot emphasize too strongly this controversy has NOTHING to do with Operation NOAH Rebuild, which has never charged anyone a dime to gut out or rebuild a house. This is a ministry of God’s people helping our people in need for the glory of Jesus Christ.)

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Friends. They make life so much fuller, fun so much deeper, work so much easier, and burdens so much lighter.

I urge young pastors to “find yourself some friends; you’re going to be needing some.” Not all pastors know this or believe it.

Amazing how much independence and isolationism one finds among pastors. They will stand in the pulpit and exhort their members on the virtues of fellowship with one another. They will illustrate the point by the well-worn story of the pastor who sat in the living room of a straying church member and with the tongs, reached into the fireplace and moved a burning coal off to one side where it proceeded to die. The enlightened member told the pastor he got the point and would be in church the following Sunday. “We need each other,” the preacher tells the congregation.

Pastors believe that for everyone except themselves.

The average pastor seems to believe that fellowship with other pastors is time wasted. Whether this is a personality quirk or some theological snag formed from a misreading of Scripture, I’m not prepared to say. But it’s dead wrong.

The Lord thought the preachers needed to get together. He chose twelve–make no mistake, they were chosen to be preachers–and kept them together for three years. When He sent them out, it was in pairs. When God called missionaries, the first went forth as a team, Barnabas and Paul. The second generation was made up of Paul and Silas, plus Barnabas and John Mark. No one went alone.

On Paul’s final trip to Jerusalem for Pentecost, he sensed a deep need to visit with the leaders of the church at Ephesus. A messenger traveled to that city to round up the church leaders, bringing them to the coastal town of Miletus for a day with Paul. Acts 20 describes the meeting and uses three terms for the leaders: elders, shepherds (pastors), and overseers (episcopos). We moderns would do well to note that the head of that congregation was not one hot-shot know-it-all man, but a number of people working together as a team.

How does one find a special friend? First, you won’t find them in clusters, but one at a time, slowly, carefully.

My own plan is simple: ask God, then pay attention.

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This land is far from being overpopulated. If you doubt that, take a drive and notice how mile after mile is woodland and farmland. Even New York State–which I crossed this week and will do so again Monday on my way South–is mostly one big city and a lot of rural countryside.

The corridor from Washington, D.C., northward through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City has the worst mishmash of interstates and toll highways imaginable. If you doubt this, get down your atlas and stand in awe. Some of the interstate segments are so scrunched in with the others, the pages have no room for the numbers. I missed a sign in New Jersey and went 10 miles out of my way before turning around and at the last minute finding the correct turn. The tolls coming up (from Washington to New England) figured out to something like 20 bucks.

One of the best traits of human beings is our adaptability to difficult situations. Drive through any of the interstate corridors in and around Washington, D.C., and be amazed that people who grew up in “normal-land, USA” can adapt to such killer traffic patterns and go on to deal with it every day. That’s one of the most admirable traits of the human animal—and the fact that we put up with it one of the worst.

You’d think that after a while, a person would decide, “The stress of driving in this traffic is destroying my nervous system and dooming me to an early grave; I think I’ll move to a quiet town somewhere.” The fact that we don’t, that we hang in there for the sake of a job and money, speaks volumes about us, and none of it is good.

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Thirty-two years ago–that would be the summer of ’76–my wife and I took the children on a Bicentennial vacation up the East Coast. We were combining trips to the Southern Baptist Convention and my first session as a trustee of the Foreign Mission Board with our own personal travels, and decided on a theme for our journeying.

We visited presidential homes. Starting in Columbis, TN, we called on President James Polk. In Nashville, it was President Andy Jackson. In Staunton, VA, Woodrow Wilson was not at home, but we went on in his house anyway. We visited with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and went through the White House (if Jerry Ford was at home, no one was saying). Later, we drove north and saw the hometown of Calvin Coolidge, Hyde Park where FDR came from and returned to, and in New Hampshire, the home of Franklin Pierce. I think that’s all.

This time, I’m making pretty much the same journey, except this is not about presidents, but calling on some of my preacher friends. Of course, the main idea is to visit our grandchildren in Charlotte, NC and in Laconia, NH, but it’s a great opportunity to see some old friends.

If any of the preacher-friends I’ve visited are reading this, they can relax. I’m not telling a thing. What happens in McDonalds stays in McDonalds (or the Waffle House in Spartanburg or Nordstrom’s Cafe in Charlotte). Still, the experience is proving to be quite a blessing to me personally.

I’m always surprised on encountering ministers who never connect with their colleagues in the Lord’s work, for whatever reason. That might be a good subject to pursue for a future article here–why so many pastors are loners.

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1) We never take vacations, but visit families. I expect you know how that is. The last real vacation we had was the Spring of ’04 in between pastoring FBC Kenner and this job with the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans. Tomorrow, though, vacation begins.

It was to have been a driving trip to South Dakota to meet up with Margaret’s sister and brother-in-law, our beloved Susan and Jim from Seattle. Alas, their health problems forced them to cancel, and we’re not going without them. I insisted to Margaret that we take some kind of vacation, and she suggested that if I want to get out of town, then I should drive to New Hampshire to see our daughter and three granddaughters–as well as our son and his family in North Carolina–and visit with friends along the way, one of my favorite activities.

So, Sunday, July 27, that’s the plan. She doesn’t feel up to accompanying me, so I checked out several recorded books from the library to take along, and after a wedding today and a going-away thing for Dr. Ken Gabrielse tonight at a church member’s home, I’m packing and pulling out tomorrow morning.

I’m leaving a few things for my son Marty to post in my absence.

2) Do you know the name Maria Shaw? I didn’t either. Evidently, she’s a psychic of some notoriety, said to have a call-in show on the CBS radio network, which is available here only on the web. Anyway, she has moved to New Orleans and was interviewed in Friday’s paper by columnist (formerly, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, we would have called him a humorist, but the hurricane knocked all the bluster out of him) Chris Rose.

One question he asked her was: “What do you see for the Saints this season?”

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Sometimes when I sketch someone, I’ll ask their name so I can write it at the bottom. Most often, it’s a normal name, but once in a while, I’ll hear, “Arkadelphia Sue” or “Tae-D’Antonio” or some such. I ask how they spell it and, “Have you ever met another person by that name?” Usually they haven’t.

I wonder what in the sam hill the parents were thinking, saddling a child with a name like that! They have guaranteed that he’ll go through life spelling his name for everyone he meets.

Maybe carrying a name like Joe makes me think about things like that.

I was named for one of my Mom’s uncles, Joe Noles, and a family friend, Neil Barker. Interestingly, with the internet, the daughters of both these terrific men read this blog and occasionally respond. Myrtle, daughter of Uncle Joe, lives in Houston. Mary Frances, daughter of Neil, lives in Rome, New York. (She says he spelled it “Neal.” Too late, M.F.)

This was in Saturday’s news….

“A family court judge in New Zealand has had enough with parents giving their children bizarre names here, and did something about it. Just ask ‘Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii.'”

Yep. That was her name.

The judge allowed the 9-year-old girl to choose another name. He should have allowed her to choose other parents!

The paper isn’t saying what her new name is, adding she’d been so embarrassed she had never told her closest friends her real name.

In the judge’s ruling, he cited some of the unfortunate names he’d run across in his court. How about a man named “Fish and Chips,” one named “Yeah Detroit,” and then, “Keenan Got Lucy” and “Sex Fruit.”

There oughta be a law.

I’ve previously mentioned my “present favorite” Western movie, “Open Range,” starring Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner. In the story, Duvall, known as Boss Spearman, reveals to Costner that his real name is Bluebonnet. Now, he made him swear never to tell a living soul, but the cameras were rolling and we all heard, so the secret is out.

I could fill several pages with odd names I’ve encountered through the years. Mary Lee Sumrall, welfare officer in Columbus, MS, was filling out papers on a client who gave her name as “Ninthamay Terry.” When asked how she came by such a name, the woman replied, “I was born on the Ninth of May.”

Which makes us wonder what if she’d been born on September the twenty-third.

I met Auburn waiting tables in a restaurant in Birmingham and made a little joke about her name. “Bet you have a sister named Alabama.” She said, “I have two sisters, Tulane and Cornell.” Surely, I thought, she was putting me on. “I have four brothers–Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Duquesne.” I said, “Lady, I don’t believe a word of this.”

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