Anyone who watches sports–football, baseball, you name it–sooner or later will hear the announcer say about a ball thrown by the pitcher or the quarterback, “Boy! I’ll bet he’d love to have that one back.” But it’s gone, for better or for worse.

One of the best features in having a website is being able to go back into something you’ve written and posted for all the world to see–and brother, do we mean all the world!–and edit it.

What we call tweaking. Fine-tuning. Improving, amending, correcting, fixing. You get the point.

I suppose the process is similar for others who do this sort of thing, but sometimes you reach a point where you feel, “That’s all I can do for this article,” and you quit tampering with it and go ahead and post it. My son Marty showed me how to post these things a couple of years ago, thus cutting out the middle man (himself). It’s good to be able to do that. (If I sound like a 1940 model pleased that he knows how to do something in this technological age, I plead guilty.)

Then, once it gets on the website, the writer is able to read it as others do. That helps the writer see it more objectively and it’s how the flaws often stand out. A sentence doesn’t read right. I used the wrong word. Used a word twice in the same sentence; need to find a different choice for one of them. What did I leave out? What did I include that should have been left out?

The process of editing calls for me to back out of the blog and go through another series of clicks to enter the editing room. I read back over the manuscript (so to speak), and tweak it. Add a comma, shorten a sentence, and so on. At the end, click “save,” wait until it assures me the changes have been made, and voila! the article on the website has been improved.

At least, that’s the plan.

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The church I belong to is expecting.

Finally, they are nearing that long anticipated day when the pastor search committee will present the man they believe God has led to us. Last Sunday morning, I made a few suggestions at the monthly men’s breakfast about this crucial time in our church’s existence and encouraged our guys to pass this along to other members.

1) This is no time to quit praying.

Over a year ago Pastor Tony Merida resigned to become assistant professor of preaching and dean of the chapel at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. One of the first acts of the leadership was to call the congregation to prayer.

Over the past several months, each Sunday morning, interim pastor Mark Tolbert has called a member of the search committee to the platform and led in prayer for their work.

Now that the committee has announced a date at which they will introduce the prospective pastor, there is a tendency on our part to feel a great sense of relief and thank God for answering our prayers, then to stop praying. But if anything, this is the time to intensify our intercessions.

I’ve heard that tightrope walkers find the most hazardous part of their routine to be the last step or two. They’ve been out on the rope, they’ve performed their death-defying act, and the crowd is cheering. A sense of relief floods over them as they step toward safety. This is the danger zone. Veterans learn to be vigilant and cautious at every point until they are safely on the ground.

2) This is the time to trust your leaders.

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This most dreaded of all seasons begins June 1 and goes through December 1. Weeks ago, the National Hurricane Center or a department of the University of Colorado or someone came out with their forecasts for this year. The fact that their predictions for the past two years have been dramatic failures does not stop them from issuing a new sets of prognostications and the news programs and papers from reporting them. But no one I know pays much attention to them. There have to be better ways of predicting these storms.

As though they are finally getting the message, the hurricane “experts” are hard at work in search of more reliable indicators. We hear of attempts to measure the temperature of the ocean underneath tropical depressions and of robot airplanes which will be sent into the storms closer to the ground, something the weather service’s airplanes cannot do safely.

Such information would be no help in predicting the number and intensity of storms but could give us advance knowledge of what a storm already formed might do.

Are we safe? Is New Orleans protected from a storm? Has the relentless levee-building which the U. S. Corps of Engineers has been engaged in since Hurricane Katrina, nearly three years ago, produced stronger, more reliable levees?

Good question. The only sure answer is: we won’t know until a storm hits.

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“We need your help,” the caller said. “Our church is having a financial crisis.”

As a veteran pastor, I’ve heard that a few times and said it more than once. In the caller’s case, his church is relocating and trying to find millions of dollars, they have a pretty hefty ongoing budget, and his church gives generously to missions.

“How can I help?”

The answer was surprising.

“We would like a cartoon on the subject.”

“What do you want it to say?”

“Something about giving to the Lord over the summer.”

I said I would see what I could do.

The result turned out better than I expected. What we ended up with a couple of days later–I have a day job so it’s not like I could drop everything to get to this–was three cartoons.

We e-mailed the toons to the church administrator who had asked for them, alongwith a couple of suggestions.

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Forget the gimmicks. What builds great churches, the kind that endure and influence the world for Jesus Christ and leave a lasting impression on their generation, is fellowship. The living work of the Holy Spirit within the lives of the members–bonding them with one another in worship, energizing their labors together, deepening their love for each other–authentic Christian fellowship makes the difference.

Being non-observant, we pastors tend to see Christian fellowship as the product of a great church. We bring in a super pastor with excellent preaching skills, work up a powerful and balanced program of ministries for all age groups, erect an impressive building on the ideal location with lots of parking and plenty of publicity–and bingo! The community comes to see, many stay to join, and because you’re doing some things right, the fellowship in the congregation–that is, the spirit, the joy, the love–prospers. And you think that fellowship resulted from the great building with good location, your powerful preaching and the attractive programs. That’s how we think.

Being impatient, we pastors prefer to skip the preliminaries such as building a great fellowship among the members and go straight to the gimmicks. Here’s a program that worked for a California church, a plan that built a mega-church in Georgia, a book that promises to put your church on the map if you follow its principles. Two years later, with an exhausted congregation, a busted bank account, and a pastor who has used up all his credits with the leadership, we have little to show for our efforts.

One wonders how long it will be before pastors and other church members figure out that the church-growth method the Lord has ordained calls on us first of all to build up the inner life of the congregation and make it healthy. A healthy church will reach into its community, will send out missionaries, will grow and do so without the aid of gimmicks and trick programs. But before we initiate programs to reach into the town, mobilize missionaries, and grow, before any of that, we need to work on the foundation.

Build the fellowship.

Now, all we need here is twelve easy steps to do that and we would have the latest gimmick for church growth. Doubtless, I would also have a best-seller on my hands.

Alas, it doesn’t work that way.

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First, the Scott McClellan book.

Am I the only person on the planet who has never, ever thought the press secretary–any of them–had the first inkling of what he was talking about? Listen to these guys at their daily press briefings. They hem and haw, fill the air with words of little or no meaning, promise to “get back to you on that,” and justify whatever it was the administration has just done, no matter how asinine.

I think of Ron Zeigler, Nixon’s mouthpiece. Was there ever a worse press secretary? Then, run through the dozen others to hold the position since. You might come up with two or three who seemed to have had some integrity of his own, who brought credibility to the position–Tony Snow comes to mind–but they didn’t hold the job long.

The other thing I wonder is didn’t they know when they took the job the nature of the beast was that they were hired as window dressing, sent to prettify what the president does?

I wonder if there has ever been a press secretary who stood up to the president and threatened to “go out there and tell the truth,” instead of meekly caving in to the occupier of the Oval Office.

And the book. Which I haven’t read and don’t intend to.

There is no way on earth to know whether McClellan is lying now to sell a book or was lying back then to keep his job. Why is the administration surprised by what he has written? Did he not have the integrity to tell them of his concerns, of his disagreements, of his plans at any point in the past? Did they not know this man?

I realize the loyalty bit can be overdone. The mafia don stresses loyalty to his henchmen, the heads of Enron and World.com no doubt emphasized loyalty to their underlings, and a dictator makes a big deal of loyalty to his party hacks. But that does not negate the importance of the genuine article.

A church staff member exercises loyalty when he stands up to the pastor in private to resist a wrong direction the minister is taking or a faulty doctrine he is promoting. If it costs him his job, then he is free to tell others what happened. He leaves with his integrity intact and the higher good being served.

If he keeps quiet to hold his job, then you have found the price he places on his own soul.

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My mom, soon to hit 92 years, says in old age you forget what you ought to remember and recall what you ought to turn loose of.

Remembering has always been a problem for God’s people. “When you come into the Promised Land,” Moses warned the children of Israel, “and move into houses you did not build, take over crops you did not plant, and eat victuals you did not grow, then beware lest you forget the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 6:12)

The theme of half the sermons from Old Testament prophets was the same: “Remember, O Israel.” A classmate of mine at the seminary wrote his doctoral paper on the Hebrew word “Zakar,” “remember.”

But there is a lot to be said for forgetting, too. Much in our lives does not need to be retained.

Now comes the story of 42-year-old Jill Price, a California woman who remembers everything. Not that she wants to. Ever since she was 8 years old, beginning in 1974, her mind appears to have switched on some feature the rest of us do not have and wouldn’t want in a thousand years. From 1980 forward, she has “near perfect” recall on everything.

By “everything,” we mean what she had for dinner, what she watched on television, the news that night, the temperature, conversations, everything.

Jill Price’s story is told in a new book–Newsweek of May 19, 2008, calls it “the weirdest book of the year”–by the title “The Woman Who Can’t Forget.”

A professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, James L. McGaugh, has studied Jill Price for five years, giving her every kind of scientific test imaginable, and coined the name for her condition: “hyperthymestic syndrome.” It means her memory is over-developed. Which is like saying the Eiffel Tower is tall. Is it ever!

Over these years, Professor McGaugh has found two other persons afflicted with the same inability to turn loose of yesterday. One of them, Brad Williams, 51, a radio announcer, remembers everything back to age 4, and like the other two, is a compulsive collector of memorabilia (beanie babies, “Flintstone” junk, etc).

Jill Price admits she was a pain to grow up with. “I was always correcting my parents about things they claimed I had said, or that they had said to me, which, as you can imagine, didn’t go over very well.”

Newsweek reporter Jerry Adler writes, “But the sobering thing about Price’s book is how banal most of her memories are. The days go by, lunch follows breakfast, 10th grade turns inexorably into 11th and a lot of the time, as McGaugh says, you just hang out.”

My hunch is not a single soul reading this has given thanks lately for the ability to forget. I know I haven’t. But I will from now on.

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Austin Tucker ran into some guys at a prayer breakfast who didn’t care for their storytelling pastor. “He doesn’t preach the Bible enough,” said one. “I want preaching, not stories.”

Austin, ever the teacher, pointed out to them that in the ministry of Jesus, the one thing that stood out above everything else in his sermons was His use of parables. “Jesus was the quintessential storyteller.”

He says at least one of the men began to rethink the issue.

“The Preacher as Storyteller” is the title of Austin Tucker’s latest book. Several months ago, he sent an early draft this way for me to read. I was most impressed. It’s not necessary to have heard me preach to know how much I value a well-placed story in the sermon. Instead of just bragging on the practice and inserting some of his own tales–which is probably how I would have approached the subject–Austin really opens up the subject and deals with it from all sides.

Prediction here: seminaries are going to use this as a text, and the next generation of preachers is going to be greatly indebted to this dear brother.

Years ago, when Austin Tucker was a seminary student, he wrote the pre-eminent Bible teaching pastor of that generation, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones of London’s Westminster Chapel, asking for his opinion on sermon illustrations. “He responded graciously with a note about his ‘strong views on the subject.’ He reminded me that he had always been a critic of a man like W. E. Sangster, who used to carry a little notebook in his pocket to take down any stories he heard and who had a ‘card-index of illustrations appropriate to various subjects.’ Lloyd-Jones said, ‘I always described that as the prostitution of preaching!'”

Lloyd-Jones has company in his dislike for sermon illustrations and stories. John MacArthur is quoted as saying, “I am not into storytelling…. Stories tend to shut down the level of intensity that I prefer people to maintain.”

But on the other hand.

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Recently, in the article “Why We Came Today,” I shared on the subject of Fellowship inside the congregation, suggesting it draws 90 percent of first-time visitors to your church. They’re looking to worship God, yes, and they want to learn the Bible and have a safe place for their children to grow, all of that. But if you stripped away all the other considerations, all the secondary concerns, what you would be left with is that most are looking for friends, people who are genuine and Christlike and loving, the kind of family they would choose for themselves.

They’re looking for fellowship.

1) They probably have never articulated it in so many words. They’re likely to say, “We’re looking for a church home.” And how will you know when you find it? “It’s something you just know in your heart. It’s like being in love. You can’t explain it, but you know it when it hits you.”

How many churches have you visited before ours? “This one is the fourth.” Or fifth or tenth.

And you’ve not found what you were looking for? “Some were unfriendly. In two, no one spoke to us. And not a single one has contacted us since. That shows they don’t want us, and if they don’t want us, we certainly don’t want them.”

Is that too harsh a judgement? “Maybe for you.”

They’re looking for fellowship.

2) The members of your church do not know that’s what the newcomers are looking for. Consequently, in our desire to woo them in, we provide all the wrong programs.

They want ministries and activities for their kids, so we hire a college boy to come in and get them going. They want children’s programs, so we provide them. They want a nursery for their little ones and a gymnasium for the family. They want a great music program and impressive sermons.

We buy robes and organs and drums and carpets and cushions. We do all these things and still they do not come. And we get angry at them. “The people today just aren’t spiritual like they used to be.”

One pastor told me, “If we could just get carpets on the floor, I know the community would come.” He did, but they didn’t.

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