My friend Verona Cain and I have been exchanging e-mails regarding tithing and stewardship, and she told me a story that knocked my socks off.

What follows is all hers with only a tiny bit of editing…

“I teach my children to tithe. My oldest is seven years old and we have had a bank for her for years. The bank has three sections–a church, a savings bank, and a store–which is intended to teach the child to tithe, to save, and to spend.

“When the time came to purchase a similar bank for my middle child, now 5, I drove to the Christian store and could not find one. I described it to the clerk who thought she remembered something like that from years ago. She plundered in the back and came out with it. However, it was so old, the labels that represented the windows for the buildings had peeled off. When I asked if she could order me a newer model, the clerk said, ‘Do people still teach tithing?’

“I could not believe my ears. “Now, my older two children are from a prior marriage. Their father, Robert, left me because of my Christian faith. He came back later and gave me a choice. ‘I will come home if you back off this whole God thing.’ Well, First Corinthians chapter 7 tells us to let the unbelieving spouse go and I knew I could not turn away from the One who promised to never leave me or forsake me in favor of one who had already left me once.

“So, I told him that I was sorry, I just could not live up to those terms.

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This morning I ran across a sermon the wonderful Frank Pollard preached a dozen years ago with the intriguing title “Forget my sin; remember me.” The text, Psalm 25:7, says precisely what the title conveys:

“Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your lovingkindness remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O Lord.”

Forget my sin. Remember me.

Some of the best news ever encountered for sinners–that would be people like you and me–is that when God forgives a sin, it is forever erased from the eternal record.

I called the cell phone company the other day to ask if they could retrieve a message I had deleted by mistake. “No,” the man said. “Once you delete it and close that transaction, it’s gone.” Gone where? “Just gone. Like it never existed.”

“Your sins and iniquities I will remember no more.” That outstanding promise from Hebrews 10:17 can also be found in Hebrews 8:12 and in Jeremiah 31:34. By recording it in three places, God clearly meant us to get that message.

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Next week, with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention going on in Indianapolis–one of our favorite cities for this sort of thing–I’ll be away from this blogging machine. I may or may not send something to son Marty so he can post here, but readers need a vacation from this constant barrage of our stuff. Enjoy it while you can.

On the way back south from the convention, I’ll be leading a deacons retreat for Five Points Baptist Church in Northport, Alabama (Tuscaloosa is its suburb) that Friday night and Saturday morning, then preaching for the two Sunday morning services. Not sure of the times of the service, but if you’re in the area, we’d love to have you present.

As you know, we do not do promote anything or sell stuff, or for that matter, send forwards to you. (You’re welcome.) However….

This is a good time to call to your attention some special friends with fascinating ministries you might want to check into.

1) Kathy Frady may be the most creative person on the planet. Check out her website at www.thecreativedramatist.com. She’s a local lady and, with Rebecca Hughes, leader of the women’s ministry of our association. What she does is don outlandish disguises–wigs, outfits, etc–and assume the role of various women you will meet at church (in your dreams/nightmares!) and a few who lived in earlier generations (Lottie Moon, Annie Armstrong, Georgia Barnette, these girls). She is so funny it’s not funny. How in the world she can be so off-the-wall crazy and so wonderfully-sweet-and-sane-and-spiritual at the same time is beyond me. She writes her own material and will knock your socks off.

Kathy’s husband John Frady is a staff-member at Celebration Church in Metairie and her biggest supporter. I figure it was either support her or kill her. (That was a funny, Mom.)

Many of our readers have seen Kathy on denominational programs and know what I’m talking about. This week I have sent out letters to some of the leading pastors/churches in Louisiana about Kathy, asking them to check out her website, and to consider inviting her to their church for special events, banquets, women’s day services, and the like.

2) My son Marty has a young friend with a unique website which invites your prayer requests and enlists the participation of readers in praying for needs posted there. Check out www.iwalkwithhim.com.

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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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