Rescuing the sermon from dead outlines

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Skeletons in the pulpit and cadavers in the pews.  –Warren Wiersbe

Have you ever read something and all the bells went off inside you? The author has been reading your thoughts.

That happened to me.

Dr. Warren Wiersbe’s  book Preaching and Teaching with Imagination is autographed to me, but I have no memory of the occasion when that happened. Mostly, I wonder why I delayed reading this incredible book.

Briefly, what he told was this:

Grandma Thatcher sits in church with a number of hurts and spiritual needs. Although she’s lovingly known throughout the congregation as a saint, she gets nothing but harassment and trials at home for her faith. When she gets to church, she needs a word from God.

On this particular morning, the pastor stood at the pulpit and preached from Genesis chapter 9, the main thrust of which was his outline, with all the points beginning with the same letters. The outline — pastors take note! — was excellent, as those things go:

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Got time for a good story? How about a silly one? Good. Here goes…

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A story about people who refuse to grow up

Robert Smith, a writer with the Minneapolis Tribune, told about his daughter who was approaching her third birthday. As they were planning a birthday party for her, she began to rebel. “I’m not through being two yet!”

Dad went through the calendar with her, explaining how life works. “When we get to that day,” he said, “you will be three.”

She stood there with arms crossed and said, “I don’t care what that calendar says. I’m not through being two yet.”

So, the Smith family canceled the party and went on treating their daughter as a two-year-old.

Like this child, some people refuse to go into the future. The Israelites under Moses (Numbers 14) recoiled from the future because they were fearful, forgetful, and fretful.

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Star-trekking for the Lord

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Star Trek started this trend. Then it was Star Wars and we were off.  There seems to be no end to the fascination we earthlings have with space travel, exploration, and all things extraterrestrial.

Most of our astronauts say their interest in space exploration was whetted by the television show “Star Trek,” either the original with William Shatner (Captain Kirk) or the “next generation” bunch.

A writer for a more recent televised version of these explorers who “go where no one has ever gone before” has let us in on inside information which I find fascinating.

Over forty years, the six TV series of Star Trek comprise 726 episodes. For the 198 episodes in the series this writer was part of, they employed a total of 155 writers, a staggering number when you stop to think about it.  So much for continuity, uniformity, theme development, character consistency.

The fact that some people soak up episode after episode and live and die by this stuff I find amazing. And more than a little depressing.

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What churches can learn from good restaurants

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My wife Margaret and I had been discussing various restaurants. We enjoyed the food in each place and found the staff sufficiently friendly. But several aspects loomed large in our conversation, provoking me–ever the preacher–to reflect on the way churches could benefit from studying what these eating establishments are doing and are not doing.

1. I wish churches put as much emphasis on friendly greeters at the front door as great restaurants do.

Often they are teenagers, perhaps college students. The kids are fresh-faced, sweet-spirited, well-dressed, and friendly. The graciousness appears genuine.

However…

Have you ever walked up to an unfamiliar church and saw no one at the doors, no greeters or welcoming team anywhere on the premises? It happens to me frequently (and I’m the guest preacher!).

Are restaurants more interested in welcoming paying customers than churches are interested in showing hospitality to people arriving to worship the living Christ?

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Why retired pastors hang on to become a problem

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The longtime pastor was given a great send-off.  Lots of honors and festivities, a nice gift, and a couple of plaques for his wall.  Great things were said of him and spoken to him. Only one thing was wrong.

He didn’t leave.

He held on.  He stayed in his house, kept running by the church office, continued inviting church members to his home, kept his ear to the ground to learn what was going on with the new pastor, accepted lots of funerals and weddings, and in general, made a nuisance of himself.

Meanwhile, the new pastor is having the dickens of a time settling into his proper role in the church.  It’s not the ghost of the old preacher that haunts him, but the man himself.  The old guy is everywhere.

Then, as church members called or dropped by to complain about the new preacher, the oldster listened sympathetically.  Their unhappiness confirmed his suspicions that the new pastor would not be as loving, as dedicated, as gifted, as attentive, as compassionate, blah blah blah, as he.

Lord help us.

Question: Why would a retired pastor want to hang on and stick around and become a problem for the new preacher?

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A slice of my journal: October 18-20, 1993

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“When you take time to journal each day, it’s like snipping out 30 minutes of your life now and sending it ahead far into the future.”  –Joe McKeever  (Hey, if I don’t quote myself, who do you think will?)

“When was your daughter born?” I asked the mother of the bride.

“October 18, 1993.”

I said, “Was I there?”  “Yes, you were,” she said. “We still have the cartoon you drew for us when you came by the hospital.”

Then it hit me: I have that day in my journal.

Back in the decade of the 1990s, I kept a hand-written, daily journal, requiring a full half-hour of writing each night.  In time, it filled 56 volumes. For reasons long forgotten, I gave it up after the year 2000 arrived.  (Probably because it took up so much space.)

The journal says I did indeed go to the hospital when her daughter was born.  I photocopied the two pages and sent to her.  And decided someone might appreciate reading about that time in my ministry.

So, here goes….

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The former pastor may not be able to help his successor. But he can sure hurt him.

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“May those who come behind us find us faithful.”  –Steve Green

The pastor who follows me at a church is pretty much on his own there.  Which is to say, there is little I can do for him, other than to pray for him.

The best thing I can do for a new pastor is to have served well during my tenure and done my level best to disciple God’s people, leaving behind a healthy congregation.  But after I leave, there is little more I can do for that church or its new shepherd.

My words of affirmation to the new guy are nice, but nothing more.  My words of commendation to friends in the congregation are basically meaningless since the pastor is on site and they are getting to know him for themselves.  From here on in, he will be having to find his own path, set his own agenda, work out his own relationships with key leaders, and find ways of dealing with those who want to exert influence they do not possess.

I can pray for him.  But there’s very little more I can do.

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Retiring pastor, it’s not your church, your pulpit, your office. Be faithful!

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A pastor friend was serving a large church in a metro area.  Even though his staff had half a dozen ministers, he handled all the hospital visitation himself.  Every bit of it.  I said to him, “My brother, you are making life impossible for the pastor who will follow you.  Because no pastor is going to want to do all the hospitals, not when he’s got plenty of help. And the congregation is going to be unhappy with him.”

He smiled and said, “This is what I do.”

I know the rest of that sad story.  He retired, remained in the church, and the congregation called as pastor another friend of mine.  I watched from two states away as the congregation turned on the new pastor and criticized him mercilessly for not pastoring them the way they’d been used to.  The retired pastor friend wallowed in their misery, indicating, he was convinced, that he was so well loved no one could follow him.

He sabotaged a great preacher’s ministry.  (They’re both in Heaven now, so the Father will be sorting this out, but I’d hate to be in his shoes.)

Once when I announced my plan to write about retired pastors who stay on to make life miserable for their successors, people began sending me their horror stories.

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Some necessary things about prayer

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I had led a family to Christ.  They soon joined our church and were baptized the following Sunday.  My notes remind me of something the grandfather said.  He was chairman of deacons in a church 3 hours away, and of course, they were excited about what had happened.  He said to me, “We’ve been praying for this family, but one by one.  We had no idea they’d all get saved at the same time!”

Dale Caston, deacon in my last pastorate, told me something that took place in a high school class when he was a teen.  The teacher asked the students, “What do you expect to get out of this class?”  She looked at one student: “Eddie, what do you expect?”  Eddie said, “Well, I’ve had you before–and I don’t expect nothing!”  Dale tells it with a laugh because he knows the part expectations play in a thousand aspects of life.

What do you expect when you pray?  The curse of modern Christianity is that we expect little from the Lord, too much from the pastor, and nothing from ourselves.

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Fearmongering: The cheapest kind of preaching

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“Men’s hearts will be failing them from fear” (Luke 21:26).

“Wherefore comfort one another with these words” (I Thessalonians 4:18).

When I was a kid–sometime in the early 1950s–I recall attending a revival meeting with my grandmother in Birmingham.  The preacher scared the living daylights out of everyone with his prophecies about the future, his warnings about Russia and Communism, and his forecasts about what was about to happen.  Later, as Grandma and I walked down those dark streets to her apartment, every plane going over seemed to be carrying an atomic bomb with our address on it.

Scary preaching is foreign to the New Testament.

The great apostle actually thought teachings of the Lord’s return and the believers’ victory over and escape from this world should comfort us.

But listen to the typical prophecy preacher.   So many will use passages about the Lord’s return and the end times to strike terror into the hearts of the faithful.  They speak of the martyrdom of millions of the faithful, of the havoc to be wreaked throughout the world by the Lord’s death angels, of the Beast and the Antichrist and the desolation of abomination.

Matters of which they understand little.

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