The day your church begins to die

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My preacher friend lives in a new home provided by the ministry he heads. “They had to tear down the old one,” he told me. “Mildew was everywhere and after years of trying to cure it, they gave up.”

A friend in that city told me the previous tenants–my friend’s predecessor and his family–were constantly sick for no reason anyone could find. Workers repainted the interior of the house every year.

“When they tore the house down, they found the culprit. There was a pipe underneath the house–not in any of the architect’s original drawings–that was constantly leaking water into the foundation.”

The minister said, “At one point, in an attempt to cure the problem, the ministry head had storm windows installed throughout the house. He was sealing the house, but it had the opposite effect of what he intended.”

“An architect told me, ‘That day the house began to die. With the windows sealed, it could no longer breathe.”

The day the house began to die.

An intriguing line.

Churches also begin to die when they can no longer breathe.

I’ve seen churches die, and I’ve seen them in the process of dying. The culprit–the killer, the perpetrator, the murderer–is suffocation. An inability to breathe.

1. Churches begin to suffocate when they no longer welcome change.

Change is life. Our bodies are always in the process of sloughing off old dead cells and replacing them with new ones.

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How could you not feel special?

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He who did not spare His own Son–but delivered Him up for us all–how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things?  (Romans 8:32)

Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called the children of God! And such we are!  (I John 3:1)

First story.

I was doing a revival in Jerry Clower’s church.

The year was 1990 and we were in East Fork Baptist Church between McComb and Liberty, Mississippi.  Anyone who has ever heard the inimitable Jerry Clower tell his stories will have heard of this church where he grew up.

That week I was staying in the Clower camphouse, a block through the woods from Jerry and Homerline’s mansion.  We had morning services each day that week at 10  and evening services.  The Clowers did not miss a service.

The organist was Clyde Whittington.

Mr. Clyde had one arm.  You read that right; the church organist was playing the hymns with one arm.

We were at lunch one day–Jerry, and Clyde and I—and Jerry said, “Clyde, I want you to tell Brother Joe how you lost that arm.”

He was baling hay, he said.  The baler was the same kind we had used on the Alabama farm where I grew up.  You pull the baler over to the pile of hay, then uncouple it and turn the tractor around and use a conveyor belt from the tractor to the baler to operate it.  (Sorry, that’s as good as I can describe the process.)  Usually, baling hay would require several people. Mr. Clyde was doing it alone.

You feed the hay into the baler, then get out of the way of the huge arm with a claw slams down upon the hay driving it into the bottom area, then packing it and sending it down the tube to be tied off into bales.  Mr. Clyde was doing it all himself.

And somehow–I’m unclear on this–the huge arm with a claw caught his arm and drove it down into the bottom area.  Breaking it badly.

Not only was his arm now crushed, Mr. Clyde was stuck.  He couldn’t extricate himself from the baler.

And he is alone.  A half mile from the house.

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You need some resistance in your life

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“Where there’s no friction, there’s no traction!”  –Overheard from an elderly Baptist preacher in North Carolina 30 years ago

Tim Patterson, executive of Michigan Baptists, had a great insight about catfish and codfish–natural enemies–on Baptist Press.

In the northeastern part of our country, codfish is a big deal. However, shippers discovered that freezing the fish to ship destroyed the flavor.  So, they tried shipping them alive in tanks of seawater.  In addition to that being too expensive, for some reason the cod still lost their flavor and arrived soft and mushy.  Something had to be done.

Eventually, someone hit on a solution. After the codfish were placed in the seawater tanks, one more thing was added:  catfish.  Their natural enemies.

“From the time the cod left the East Coast until they arrived at their destinations, those ornery catfish chased the cod all over the tank…. When they arrived at the market, the cod were as fresh as the day they were caught.  There was no loss of flavor and the texture was possibly better than before.”

There’s a lesson there.

All sunshine makes a desert, the American Indians used to say.  We need the rain and the occasional storm.

My friend George Bullard wrote a book by the title Every Church Needs a Little Conflict.  He leads conferences by that title.  It’s a great truth, and the point of this little article.

What a “little conflict” will do for a church–or an individual believer–is worth our consideration:

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The report from Bethlehem: A shepherd signs in

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“Now there were in the same country shepherds abiding in their fields by night….” (Luke 2)

(Herewith we present a report from the youngest shepherd of that fateful night in the field outside Bethlehem, with the editor’s occasional remarks in italics.)

I was not supposed to work that night, it being a school night. My friend Elihu asked me to fill in for him.  Now, my father is not real thrilled with me hanging out with some of these characters who work night shifts with the sheep.  Shepherding is the ultimate unskilled labor and only those who can’t do anything else–or hesitate to show their faces in public in the day–need apply.

But Father knows I’m a good student and agreed that we could use the money.

Anyway, that’s how it happened that I had the most amazing experience of my young life.

Did I say I’m only 15? So, it’s not like I have seen everything, but this is surely the high point of my life so far. I can’t imagine it getting any better.

Shepherding anytime is no fun, but at night it is the most boring work imaginable. The sheep are not grazing and not even wandering around. They’re asleep. Even dumb animals know night-time is when you shut down and get some rest.  But, I’m not complaining. It’s a job, and there aren’t many of those around for people my age.

Mostly, we were there to protect the flocks from the wild animals. Several small flocks were intermingled across the meadow. It’s too much trouble to herd the sheep back and forth from their farms each evening and morning, and labor being cheap, there we were.

There were four of us on duty there that night. What were we talking about? I ‘ve almost forgotten. Something about Elihu’s real reason for missing work, I think. Yitzhak seems to think he has a girl somewhere and she sneaks out to meet him when her father isn’t looking. Since Yitzhak has done that a time or two, we teased him about being such an expert on the subject.

Scholars say shepherds in First Century Judea were notoriously dishonest and often disreputable.  It says something interesting about the Heavenly Father that they were chosen as the very first welcoming committee for the Lord Jesus. In a similar fashion, in our Lord’s parable about guests in the royal wedding banquet of Matthew 22, those who accepted the invitation were “both evil and good” (v.10). Clearly, the Heavenly Father is no Pharisee!

The night was dark. I mean, black dark. Then all of a sudden, it was like the noonday sun decided to pay a surprise visit. The world lit up. And this fellow–an angel we realized later, but it wasn’t obvious at first–was standing there in midair about 10 feet above our heads. I mean, just standing there, suspended in space.

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Lies the enemy whispers as we worship

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“We have come to worship Him” (Matthew 2:2).

The devil’s first plan of attack is to get us to worshiping him.

Most people are too smart for that kind of foolishness.

Satan tried that with our Lord, as recorded in Luke 4:7. “All these things will be yours if you will worship me.”  He soon found the futility of that.  Not then and hardly at all since has anyone wanted to bow down and worship this wicked, fallen angel.

Such a persistent enemy always has a backup plan. Plan B is to interfere with our worship of the living God.  Satan will do anything to throw a wrench into the works and shut down or hinder our daily submission to the Lord Jesus and all that involves (prayer, commitment, study of the Word, service, and such).

Not long ago, while sitting in church listening to the sermon, I made a list of the lies Satan whispers to God’s people who gather to worship Him….

–“This isn’t working.  You’re wasting your time here.”

It’s true the pragmatic mind–I think of Martha in Luke 10–cannot see the point in our sitting for an hour at the feet of Jesus, doing nothing productive.  Here was her sister Mary, for instance. She was just sitting there on the floor, listening and adoring and thinking.  The Lord said to Martha, “Mary has made the right choice, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).

—“Nothing they’re doing is inspiring.”

Pity the worship leaders.  They’re in a no-win situation.  They get criticized for putting on a performance and criticized for not performing well enough. They cannot do our worship for us, but we demand that they sing and preach and lead so well, our worship is automatic.

–“You don’t feel the song you are singing and so it’s pointless.”

Some of them are pointless, I fear.  But whether I “feel” the song I’m singing is beside the point. I do a lot of things that count with the Lord which I may not “feel.”

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The singer is nervous. Here’s what we told her.

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“Sing unto the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96:1; 98:1; etc).

She has a marvelous voice, one anybody this side of Juilliard would be proud to own.  When she sang in church with her musician husband, they blended wonderfully and blessed the congregation.  But she undermined her own effectiveness by her timidity, that paralyzing self-consciousness which froze her in place and refused to let her enjoy the moment.

Stage fright, we call it.

Who among us is unacquainted with that monster?

Most of us know precisely how she feels.

That’s why, on the final night of our revival meeting, as I expressed appreciation in private to this couple, I spoke to her quietly. “Can I tell you one thing about your presentation?”

She smiled shyly. “I know what you’re going to say.”

And she did, to a point.

I said, “You have a beautiful smile. Look at the sketch I did of you this week. You were smiling.  But I want you to use that smile when you sing.  It will double the effectiveness of what you share.”

Don’t ask me how I know that or whether it’s true.  I just believe it.

Nervousness.  Shyness. Fear. Stage fright. Self-consciousness. Fear of public performance.  However we phrase it, it’s a frightful thing that many of the Lord’s most-gifted servants have to contend with on a regular basis.

Now, we have all learned we can make ourselves smile.  You just turn your lips up.  But commanding our knees not to knock, our voice not to flutter, or our spirits not to panic is another matter altogether.  Anxiety does not respond to commands, otherwise I’d have long ago left behind that tension I feel before doing certain things (which will remain nameless here for the simple reason that they do not matter).

So, readers will want to understand that in talking to the young singer, I was speaking to my own inner self as well.

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Where is God? she asked. He had the answer.

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Patty Duke’s autobiography is Call Me Anna.  One evening last week Bertha and I caught the last of the movie The Miracle Worker, in which Patty Duke played a young Helen Keller.  For her amazing performance, she became the youngest person to win the Academy Award.

We were so touched by her performance, I went online and found her autobiography and ordered it that night.  It was delivered two days later.

Patty Duke’s childhood was a mess by any standards.  You read of how she was treated–used, abused, manipulated, lied to–and you feel some people are going to burn in hell for this.  I’ve not finished the book–I read a couple of chapters and lay the book aside for a day or two–it’s difficult.  And today I came across this…

Patty Duke became involved in the Muscular Dystrophy Association.  She says, For someone my age who had not been trained to deal with seriously ill people, (this work) was initially traumatic.  It takes an enormous toll to see these exquisite-looking, bright children who are withered and tortured in their little bodies.  You might be bright and cheery in front of them, but inside it hurts and you’re enraged.  You’re saying to yourself, ‘What the hell is life about? Where’s this just God I keep hearing about?’  It’s tough stuff to wrestle with, especially when all (the parent-substitutes) would give me were trite answers to serious questions.  

I have read further, but cannot get past this outburst in which she blames God for the suffering.

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The first chapter of our book “Pray Anyway”

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At the end, we will tell how to order the book.  Here is chapter one...

HAVE TROUBLE PRAYING?  NO PROBLEM.  JUST PRAY ANYWAY.

While others spring from the bed each morning eager to spend an hour with the Lord in prayer, do you feel like the only one who has to drag yourself over to a chair and open the Bible and force yourself to think spiritual thoughts?

Welcome to the club.

Others pray smoothly and eloquently and always know what to say; but you are the only one who stumbles along haltingly as though you were just learning to speak or were trying out a foreign language.

Sound familiar?

Others are never plagued by doubt and offer up these magnificent sacrifices of praise and intercession that Heaven welcomes, values as jewels, and immediately rewards; you’re the only person who fights back the doubts as you pray and wonders whether the whole business is accomplishing anything.

Others see answers to their prayers as a matter of routine; you’re the only one who doesn’t.

Yeah, right.

It does feel that way sometime.

But it’s wrong.

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The elements of thanksgiving

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Everyone agrees gratitude is a wonderful thing. We know it when we see it.We appreciate it when someone extends it in our direction. We miss it when it’s gone. We resent the absence of it in our children and co-workers.

What we have trouble with is nailing that sucker down.

What exactly is thankfulness (gratitude, an appreciative spirit, etc.)? Several sermons on the subject in my library dance all around the subject, blaming it on this, attributing it to that, everything but identifying what exactly it is.

What follows will not be the final word on this subject. You knew this, but I wanted to make sure everyone knows that I’m aware of it too.

As the expression goes about art, “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it.” Seems to me a justice once said that about pornography. No doubt, it applies to a wide assortment of subjects, including gratitude.

Here is one snapshot of thankfulness.

To be candid with you, I have drifted in and out of this attitude of gratitude in years past. But it’s all different now in my life. Every day is a gift. Every moment is a precious treasure. If you haven’t been through something like cancer, you can’t know what I’m talking about. –David Jeremiah, “God in You,” p. 105.

I’ve had cancer. Twice.  Surgery twice. Once in 2004 and again in 2021.

Cancer on the tongue.  Yes, the tongue.  If you want to hurt a Baptist preacher, that’s the place! (I went through radiation and chemo, and at the age of 85, they say I’m cancer free.)

I’m grateful.

Here are the four elements of my gratitude, and perhaps of yours.

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So, what do you think about in the middle of the night?

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Here is my answer. It’s from this website fifteen years ago.  (I’ve tweaked it a tad.)

The mind is a funny thing. It can be creative in the small hours of the morning and solve your problems. As a high school algebra student, I had that happen more than once. I’d go to bed puzzled about a problem, then wake up with the answer.

Great when your mind solves a problem without actually involving you in the process!

The mind can also be anxious in those hours. Half the people I know who wake up between midnight and dawn tell me they are worried about unidentified problems. Anxiety is a sleep-stealer.

Once in a while, I have awakened with a great article that just cried to be written. On one occasion, I got up and wrote it down. Next morning, far from being disappointed, I was impressed. Good stuff, I thought. I worked with it over the next few days and then sent it off to several magazines to see if the editors had a use for it.

InterVarsity Press’ His magazine bought the article and ran it in a choice place–the inside back cover. Over the next 15 years, from time to time I would receive small checks in the mail from other magazines that ran it. Several notes from editors in foreign countries like Korea and New Zealand advised me they were running the article.

So, I learned that when something is hammering on my brain in the middle of the night, to get up and write it down.

So, one morning this week, I was lying in bed thinking about this world we’re privileged to live in. About this planet we are privileged to live on. This is the result…

NO VIBRATIONS.

Here we are on this globe we named Earth, hurling through space at so many thousands of miles per minute. The most amazing thing to me is the absence of vibrations.

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