No Longer Big Nor Easy

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1. We’re told that 40,000 Louisianians still live in FEMA trailers, down 50 percent from a year ago. Most of our people still in these boxes are having their homes rebuilt and will not be needing them much longer. And what of the others? That would be people who had been living in subsidized public housing for the most part and who have no place to go other than the FEMA trailer. We’re told the federal government has workers doing nothing but seeking out rental property and matching it up with the trailer dweller. Trying to get them out and on their own.

The FEMA trailer has been a lifesaver for a lot of people and a royal headache for the government. We have not reported it here, but formaldehyde has been found at high levels in many of the trailers, creating a health concern for the residents. Watch for the lawsuits.

Somewhere I read about a city employee–not one of ours thankfully; this must have been in the Reader’s Digest–who was backing his city truck up and crunched an automobile. The driver got out and discovered he had backed into his own car. So, naturally, he sued the city. After all, the city must have been at fault since a city-owned truck driven by a city employee was responsible. No word as to the outcome.

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LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE NO. 21–“Tell the Truth.”

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Nothing undermines the loyalty of your team members so much as them watching you lie to outsiders. They know better; they know you are stretching the truth or creating it from whole cloth, and to the extent you do that, you shrink in their eyes.

To our everlasting shame, perhaps no body of people on the planet plays fast and loose with the facts like preachers. You would think that we who deal with the Gospel Truth, whose Savior called Himself “The Truth,” and who have as one of our basic tenets “Thou shalt not lie,” that we of all people would hold to the facts as no one else. But it is not so.

In a conversation with a group of pastors about this, the stories flew, as each one thought of examples he had seen.

One said, “You get these flyers from preachers who want to come to your church. ‘One of America’s greatest evangelists!’ it says. ‘Pastor of some of the largest churches of our time.’ And yet, you know the churches he has pastored and there’s no way.”

Another said, “And some of them report the hundreds of decisions that were made in their recent meetings. Why, Billy Graham would be hard-pressed to match those numbers. And if you check with the pastors where they held those meetings, they can’t find all those converts.”

“I had a preacher tell me that he actually did not know how many people attended his church on Sunday morning. He said they engaged in a bit of creative counting. He said it for a joke, but he was serious.”

“I heard a staff member of one church say that when they counted the crowd on Sunday, they added 10 percent in the chance they had missed someone.”

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The Churches of New Orleans — Two Years After The Fall

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(Note: I wrote this report on the status of our N.O. churches at the request of the Baptist Message, our weekly newspaper for Louisiana Baptists. It will appear in the August 30 edition, one day after the second anniversary of Katrina.)

Before Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29, 2005, the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans (BAGNO) could count some 140 churches and missions. One month later, when we re-entered the area, we were able to identify 35 still operating. Today, two years after this life-changing event, we

Heavenly Service at the Fast Food Place

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Each Monday afternoon, I meet with three or four of our young pastors at a fast food cafe near my house. We sit there for an hour or more, drinking coffee or soft drinks, and sharing about our lives and ministries. Invariably, one of them will groan when I ask, “So, what are you preaching next Sunday?” He will say, “It’s only Monday, man–how would I know that?” and everyone laughs.

Today, I threw out as a conversation starter: “Give us your life-verse, the Scripture that explains you.” I started with mine, Job 4:4, “Your words have stood men on their feet.”

Carl’s verse was Acts 18:9-10, “Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you…I have many people in this city.”

“I was struggling with moving to New Orleans,” Carl said. “I had requested an assignment to one of several cities, none of which were offered to me. Finally, the company said, ‘How about New Orleans?’ Well, I had been here several times when I was a partying college student. I knew nothing but the French Quarter, and that was not a happy memory. Now that I was living for the Lord, I did not want to even be exposed to that lifestyle anymore. But as I was praying, the Lord spoke those words to me. I moved to New Orleans–to Kenner, actually–you came to visit me, I joined First Baptist Church, and God called me into the ministry there.”

“Yes, and you met your wife at our church,” I said. Evidence aplenty God was in it. He agreed.

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CONVERSATION WITH THE DIRECTOR OF MISSIONS: Get Thy Act Together

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The pastor who reads only the New Testament to get his assignment, see his field, and understand the nature of his work will miss a great deal of vital information. The Old Testament is a book of illustrations of New Testament teachings.

Case in point.

Two passages from the 6th Century prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel take pains to show us the failures of the shepherds–i.e., the spiritual leaders–of their day. It’s impossible to read Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34 without seeing a reflection of ourselves and our situation in that mirror.

(Warren Wiersbe says when we first start reading Scripture, it’s a window to us. We gaze through it to see the characters of the Bible, how they lived, what they did. Eventually, however, if we stay with it, the Word becomes a mirror. As we gaze into it, we begin to see ourselves, our world, our situations.)

The passage from Ezekiel 34 rails against the failures of the spiritual leaders of that day. Bible students recall what days of crisis those were, with the nation of Judah being pulled on one side to trust in Egypt and being called by God to surrender to Babylon, with false prophets calling one way and true prophets another. The poor people had no idea where to turn. Eventually, the Israelis were defeated by the Babylonians, the population was carted off to foreign lands, and the city of Jerusalem was demolished. Thousands of God’s people died from war or starvation or other cruelties.

In the middle of this national crisis, a time when the preachers should have been at their best, they failed miserably. Ezekiel 34:1-10 lists five great failures of these so-called shepherds.

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What to Say Now

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A generation ago, Houston’s John Bisagno and E. V. Hill of Los Angeles were featured speakers at a conference I was attending. Hill, an eloquent fiery preacher in the best tradition of African-American stemwinders, had blown the windows out of the church with his message and left the congregation of a thousand on their feet cheering and shouting. As order settled in on the auditorium, our host introduced Bisagno. Brother John walked to the pulpit and softly related the most appropriate little story I’ve ever heard.

“Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Linus were lying in the grass gazing at the puffy white clouds. Lucy says, ‘If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formation…What do you think you see, Linus?’

“Linus said, ‘Well, those clouds up there look to me like the map of the British Honduras in the Caribbean….That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor…and that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen…I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side….'”

“Lucy says, ‘Uh huh…That’s very good… What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?’ And Charlie Brown answers, ‘Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind.'”

Bisagno looked out at his audience and said, “I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but after that sermon from Dr. Hill, I don’t think I’ll say anything now!'”

But he did. He was equally wonderful and just as enthusiastically received–ask anyone who heard Dr. Bisagno in his prime–but I’ve never forgotten his description of that comic strip from Peanuts.

In the comics for today, Sunday, August 19, 2007, that was the Peanuts strip that was reprinted. I’ve clipped it out, It’s a real keeper.

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What Were They Thinking?

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The paper this Saturday morning tells of a lawsuit filed in Iowa over a 1939 experimental program conducted at the state university in which researchers worked to induce stuttering in the speech patterns of children by abusing them. Setting out to prove that this speech defect is a learned behavior that can be created, these so-called scientists focused on 22 children from a state-controlled orphans home for their research.

For a period of six months, Dr. Wendell Johnson and his staff of pioneers in speech pathology brutalized these children verbally. “Some were subjected to steady harassment, badgering and other negative acts in an attempt to get them to stutter….” One of the children, 84-year-old Hazel Dornbush, said, “It was awful…We had nobody to lean on to help us out.”

The state of Iowa is shelling out nearly a million dollars to these victims. Those that are still alive. Those who can be found.

The program was kept secret for many years and only revealed in a 2001 investigative story published in the San Jose Mercury News. The university apologized, and two years later the lawsuit was filed.

Much too little, way too late, far too awful.

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LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE No. 20–“Watch the Money!”

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Nothing will tempt the servant of God like the large amounts of money that flow into the coffers near the place where he labors. As the money comes into the offering plates–or through the mail or via bank drafts–his reasoning powers become tainted by those large numbers. He thinks to himself, “When I do well, the money comes in. When I do poorly, the money dries up. This is about me. The money is mine. I have earned it.”

That, or some variation of it.

My family was living in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the late 1980s when Jim and Tammy Bakker of PTL fame (or infamy, depending on one’s point of view) got in trouble and lost their multi-million-dollar ministry, with Jim serving a term in prison. Those who lived through that period may recall the sexual aspect of the downfall involving a young woman named Jessica Hahn. While that may have been the part of the story that caught the public fancy, it was the misuse of money which sent Jim Bakker to prison.

In most cases involving ministers, misuse of money does not end up with the man of God going to prison, but rather losing his ministry and his influence. The ongoing problem reminds me of the political corruption in my city of New Orleans–it is revealed so often, one would think the word would get out and the perpetrators would cease their lawbreaking; but it seems to go on and on, as though people are not paying attention and refusing to learn the law of nature which Paul pointed out to the Galatians a long time ago: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (Galatians 6:7)

A pastor I know served as a trustee of one of our denomination’s boards, requiring him to journey to a distant city a half dozen times a year for two days of committee meetings. On his return, he would turn in his expenses to that agency’s business office, which would issue him a check a few days later. I served on the same board with him and followed the same practice. It was standard procedure. But then he did something else.

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LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE NO. 19–“Provide for Feedback”

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Team members need a mechanism for telling you what they have found. Your co-workers must be allowed to tell you what’s not working. Unless you arrange a method by which they can voice their gripes and get their suggestions before the proper personnel, the entire system is in jeopardy.

Without such a system, they will still gripe and belly-ache and criticize, but not to you. They’ll do it behind your back and you will feel threatened and be tempted to respond harshly and it’s all downhill from then on.

You can spare yourself a lot of grief by working out a system by which your church members, your employees, your team members can talk back to you.

The design engineers need to hear from the salesmen on the road who can tell them the customers’ experience with the new gadget–what’s working and what isn’t.

At the end of one play and before the next one, the wide receiver must be able to tell the quarterback that he thinks he can beat the cornerback, that he’s noticed something that fellow does which will allow him to outplay him. On the next play, the quarterback throws deep to the receiver who beats his man and scores.

The employees need a method for giving feedback to the foreman or the office supervisor.

The pastor needs to hear from his team members–the ministerial staff, the office staff, the custodial staff, everyone–as well as from the church members.

Make no mistake, if members of the team see something that isn’t working, they’re going to talk about it among themselves. But it does no good, and may even undermine what good they are doing, unless they are allowed to bring the criticism to the person who needs that information and can act on it.

I said to the church, “We’ve put a blank sheet of paper inside your bulletin handout today. Write down any question you have about how things are being done around here, or any suggestion you’d like to make. Next Sunday night, I’m going to take a half-hour in the evening service and respond to as many of your points as possible.”

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Three from 1945

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Leslie D. Weatherhead was a well-known British pastor, who served famous City Temple of London for many years. In 1945, he published a book of the sermons he had delivered to his people during the war that was just concluded. Only the first sermon had this as its title, but the entire book was named “The Significance of Silence.” The book is available online, which is where I found it and learned quickly to treasure its content. (My favorite source of old books– www.alibris.com.)

A pastor friend told me one day that he finds great sermon illustrations from this website, for which I am grateful. Waylon Bailey is going to love these three short vignettes.

About Gratitude

Weatherhead repeats a story Prime Minister Winston Churchill had recently told in a speech, about a sailor who dived into the waters of Plymouth Harbor to rescue a drowning child. Not long after, the sailor bumped into the little boy and his mother in the streets of Plymouth. The child nudged his mother and she stopped the sailor. “Are you the man who pulled my little boy out of the water?” The sailor was glad to acknowledge that he was, and thought possibly the mother might have in mind some kind of reward. “Yes, madam,” he said proudly.

“Then,” said the mother, with fire in her eyes, “where’s his cap?”

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