Someone from Williams Boulevard Baptist Church in Kenner called the other day and asked me to speak to their men’s breakfast next Sunday morning on “how to encourage a pastor.” I like that assignment. I believe in affirming these men who are called of God to do the most exciting, most difficult work on the planet.

A few years ago when Mike Miller of Lifeway wrote a book on “Honoring the Ministry,” my church fed steaks to 125 pastors and deacons from all over New Orleans and we brought in someone to teach that book. Encouraging pastors is a longtime passion of mine.

Now, I’ve noticed something. When the Lord knows what I’m going to be speaking on the following Sunday, He likes to help me get ready. (Ahem.) That’s why He sent Charlie and Karen Tackett to the church where I was speaking last Sunday.

The pastor of Highland Baptist Church in Metairie, Scott Smith, was on vacation with his family, seeing our nation’s capital for the first time, and I was filling in for him. Someone approached me just before the service and said, “We have some missionaries here today. Could we give them a few minutes in the service?” You bet.

Charlie Tackett told the congregation, “My wife and I are missionaries to pastors. We go all over this nation, seeking out pastors especially of smaller churches. Some of them feel isolated and lonely and they have no one to talk to. When you have a problem, you call a pastor. Who does he call? Some would say, ‘He calls God.’ Well, that’s right, but sometimes a pastor would like to have a sit-down with a human being. That’s when we show up. We take the pastor and his wife to a nice restaurant, and we listen to their concerns and love them and pray for them. Our whole lives are devoted to encouraging pastors.”

All of which raises a good question: how would you go about encouraging a minister and his wife? I know lots of ways that people have used with us over the years, some better than others.

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I don’t think of myself as overly sentimental, but twice in three days, I’ve found myself almost in tears. The strange thing is what set it off in each case was the simplest of comments.

The first was the other morning when the Space Shuttle Discovery landed. I was watching on television alongwith a nervous nation, and we heard the NASA announcer talk the plane in to Edwards Air Force Base in California. “Discovery is at 5,000 feet….5 miles out….3,000 feet….landing gear is locked…”

Then as the shuttle touched down on the runway, the announcer said, “It’s on the ground…Discovery is home.” That’s what did it for me. I teared up, noticed a lump in my throat, and came close to losing it. “Discovery is home.” It had been a tense week from the oft-delayed launch to the scary space walks to repair the tiles, and there had been a question whether the Columbia disaster of two and a half years ago would be repeated. Our neighbors who work at the Michoud Facility east of New Orleans, builders of the booster rockets, were especially biting their nails. Now, the shuttle was home.

A couple of days later, I saw the World War II movie, “The Great Raid.” A true account of the rescue of over 500 Americans held in a Japanese POW camp deep inside the Philippines, the movie depicted the harsh conditions inside the facility and the barbarous ways of the captors. Then, as the Rangers storm the death camp, taking out over 500 of the enemy while losing only two of their own, they arrived inside the barracks where the weakest of the prisoners lay on cots. Some pulled back in fear as though facing the enemy, while others stared, unable to comprehend. A ranger said, “It’s all right now. We’ve come for you. We’re going home.”

And that’s what did it for me. “We’re going home.” Those men had walked the Bataan death march early in 1942 and had seen hundreds, even thousands, of their buddies die along the way, one corpse for every 20 yards, according to one historian. For the duration of the war, they had barely existed in the Japanese camps. And now they were going home.

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The worst advice I ever received as a pastor came at the front end. It’s so obviously wrong it makes me wonder if I heard the man right. It was November of 1962 and I sat in the chapel of our home church, West End Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama. Pastor Bill Burkett had assembled a council of neighborhood pastors and a couple of denominational leaders to question me and then make a recommendation concerning my ordination to the ministry. The men were giving advice on how to succeed in the ministry when one of them fixed himself firmly in my memory with this strange counsel.

“Joe, study hard until you are forty years old. After that, lay your books aside and just preach out of the overflow.” If the others in the room found anything bizarre in that counsel, they didn’t say. A buddy of many years once heard me tell this and asked the obvious question: “What overflow!?”

I’m sixty-five now and still studying. When I left the pastorate last year and became director of missions for the 135 churches and missions that make up the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, I joking said to a friend with the same job in another part of our state, “Since I’ll be preaching in a different church every Sunday, I suppose one sermon will last me two or three months.” He said, “Two or three years!!” We laughed.

I try not to do that, to preach the same sermon every Sunday in different churches. Since the Heavenly Father knows precisely who will be present and what their needs are, the right thing is to ask Him what He would have me preach. So far, it seems to have worked out.

Which leads me to this.

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I’ve learned to be leary of anonymous letters. In fact, when I was pastoring, we devised a strategy to minimize the impact of such orphaned missiles. If the letter had no return address, I handed it to my secretary who opened it and looked for the closing signature. If there was none, the letter was torn up and discarded without either of us reading it.

So how this letter got through our lines of defense, I’ll never know. It’s dated March 17, 2003, which figures out to almost exactly one year before I resigned that pastorate to move across New Orleans into the Director of Missions office for the Baptist Association.

It’s actually a good letter. I had kept it and ran across it today while clearing out some old files. Here are some excerpts.

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My granddaughter says she would like to become a schoolteacher. Why? “I love to teach,” she says. With two younger sisters, she gets lots of practice.

That’s great, and it’s probably the fundamental reason anyone goes into teaching. However, I wrote back to Leah with a list of 10 additional considerations she should take into account before deciding on the teaching profession. You will think of additional matters and as always, we invite you to leave your comments and suggestions at the end of this article. Leah reads it each week (she’s almost 16 now) and will appreciate your input.

1. Do you love people? Here and there on this planet you will encounter people who love to teach science or math or history, but they do not love to teach people. Remember, it’s not lessons we are teaching. It’s people.

2. Do you enjoy learning? Good teachers devote themselves to a lifetime of learning. Without that, they fossilize. The old joke goes that a teacher claimed to have twenty years of teaching experience and someone replied, “No, you have one year of teaching, twenty times.” The only way to stay fresh in the ministry or in the classroom is to be continually growing and studying and learning.

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Warren Wiersbe, the pre-eminent Bible teacher, says when you first start studying Scripture, you’re looking into a window. You see how people lived in biblical times, what the prophets did and said, what Jesus said, and how the people behaved. Eventually, Dr. Wiersbe says, stay with the Scripture and in time you see that it’s more than a window; it’s a mirror, through which you see yourself and your world.

Joe Joslin and I were serving on staff together at the First Baptist Church of Charlotte a few years back, and had run into the Smokies to spend the night with a group from our church who were on a weeklong retreat. The next morning as we headed back south, we ran by the town of East Flat Rock to see Carl Sandburg’s home. Called Connemara, this lovely home is open to tourists year round and is well worth the visit. In front of the home lies a picturesque lake with a small bridge on which one can walk across. Joe and I were standing on that bridge gazing down into the water.

It was a gorgeous August day, with the sky a deep Carolina blue and the clouds so radiant they almost seemed radioactive. As we stood there drinking it in, the reflection of the sky on the water was so brilliant, I said to Joe, “Isn’t that amazing?” He said, “Yeah, and I’ll bet some of those babies would dress out at 3 pounds.”

I said, “What?” What in the world was he talking about? Then I saw what he saw–down in the water was a world of fish, large and impressive. Joslin is the fisherman, you might have guessed, and not me.

Joe was looking through the window of that lake, beholding all it contained. I saw the lake as a mirror, reflecting the world above. Two ways of looking at the same thing.

This is a plea for not rushing through Scripture, but staying with a passage and reflecting on it again and again until you see things you did not know were there. It’s how the Holy Spirit seems to prefer to teach, through marinating and not microwaving, as the old line goes.

Case in point.

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1. When you go to Las Vegas, Times Square, or New Orleans’ French Quarter, it’s to minister to people in the name of Jesus.

2. When you hear about a church fight, you say, “So, where’s the news?”

3. When you hear of a foreigner thrilled at getting his first Bible, you feel guilty. You own 33 of them.

4. When someone tells you that old joke about the sinking ship and the captain asking someone to do something religious and so the Baptist took up an offering, you say, “So, what’s the joke?”

5. You know at least a dozen funny things that happened during baptismal services.

6. You complain about the pastor’s long sermons, but you would feel cheated by one under 20 minutes.

7. You have at times envied the Episcopalians because their adults don’t have to go to Sunday School.

8. You have sometimes felt superior to the Episcopalians because you know more of your Bible than they do.

9. You think a church building ought to look like a church building.

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Six-year-old Matthew believed his mother totally, and that’s what caused the problem. He had swallowed whole all the stories of Santa and elves and the North Pole which she had fed him ever since he was a baby. Now, he’s a bright child and he listens to the other kids. That’s how he found out that not only Santa and the elves, but the whole gamut of childhood companions–the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, etc.–are all figments of someone’s imagination. Fictions. Fantasies.

“You lied to me,” he said to his mother. Caught red-handed, she hemmed and hawed and tried to put the best face on it. “Honey,” she said, “these are childhood legends, every parent tells them, my mother and dad told them to me. It’s part of growing up.”

“You lied to me,” said Matthew.

The lady who told me about this child, the son of one of her co-workers, also informed me that he has recently prayed to receive Christ as His Savior and has joined the church. Most of us are a little older when we take these steps. But, as she said, he’s not your average kid. Which explains what he did a few days later.

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When George Gravitte showed up on campus, everyone noticed. Now Berry College, near Rome, Georgia, in those days was geared to students from the rural and small-town South, but even among this bunch of unsophisticated youth, George stood out. He was six feet, five inches tall, weighed 165 pounds, and he wore a straw hat–the kind the rest of us used in the fields but only the securest guy on the planet would be brave enough to walk out onto the college quadrangle with it on his head. But there he was. He was who he was. And what was that? Think Gomer Pyle.

Now, if you know me at all, you know that’s not a putdown. The reason we all loved Gomer Pyle on the old Andy Griffith show was that, hailing from small town Alabama as he did, he came across as genuine and authentic and solid gold. There was a purity about him, a childlikeness. George always made me think of what our Lord said about Nathaniel, “An Israelite in whom there is no guile.” (John 1:47) That was my friend George Gravitte.

As soon as we could work it out, George and I became roommates. I still remember him slaving at the desk in front of the window, looking up and saying, “Joe, how do you spell ‘from’?” You can see one reason I adored him is he asked easy questions to which I readily had the answers. Years later, they discovered he had dyslexia. He also had leg cramps. Often in the middle of the night, he would come off that top bunk with a crash, jumping and hopping around the room until the muscle spasms quit. The first time he did it, we thought he had been shot.

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As a pastor, I used to get so tired of people jumping in and out of marriage just because they fell in love or fell out of it. I said to one, “You sure are doing a lot of falling!”

The best thing I’ve read on the subject of love in ages is a small booklet which Margaret and I have used for our newlywed (and nearlywed) Sunday School class. “Romantic Love” has as its subtitle: “Using Your Head in Matters of the Heart.” Since it’s by Psychologist James Dobson, you know it’s filled with straight talk and biblical common sense. And a great story, which I’m saving for last. (No fair scrolling to the end!)

The trouble starts, says Dr. Dobson, when boy meets girl and the entire sky lights up in romantic profusion. “Smoke and fire are followed by lightning and thunder, and alas, the starry-eyed couple find themselves knee-deep in true love.”

At least, that’s the modern perception.

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