1) What’s a Pastor to Do When Those Anonymous Letters Start Arriving

Don Wilton, pastor of Spartanburg’s First Baptist Church, tells how he handled the anonymous letters in his book, “See You at the Finish Line”(Thomas Nelson, 2006).

From Wilton’s description, these hostile, anonymous letters were not like any I’ve ever received. The writer went to a great deal of trouble to make them, cutting out every letter from magazines and pasting them into words and sentences on a page torn from a religious publication. At first, the letters came to the church, then they started showing up in the mailbox at the Wilton home. As time went on, their tone became more and more critical, more and more hostile.

Early on, the Wiltons decided to tell no one and to do nothing but pray for the writer of the letters. One day, as Karyn returned from the mailbox, she was laughing. They had received another hate letter, but this one was different. “You will not believe what our friend has done,” she said to Don. “He forgot to take the mailing label off the magazine before he sent it!” There it was–the writer’s name and address on the back page.

The Wiltons knew this man. He was a veteran member of the church, a family man, and a deacon. From that moment, they began to pray for him by name, asking the Lord to show them how to handle this.

One day, Don called the deacon and asked him to come by his office for a few minutes. When he arrived, the pastor told him that someone had been sending critical letters to his home, making ridiculous and untruthful accusations. The man’s face reddened, and his fists clenched as though for a fight. He said, “Pastor, are you accusing me of sending those letters?”

“Oh no,” Don said, gently. “I’m not accusing you at all. But I do think you need to know that the writer sent the letters on a page torn from a religious publication. The last one he sent still had the mailing label on the back. And it had your name on it.”

As that soaked in, Don continued. “This person must have taken your magazine. Maybe someone is trying to set you up.”

“I asked you to come here today,” he said, “so we can pray for this person. We need the Lord’s direction on how to handle this.”

The man was shaken. He stood up and said, “I’ll find out who’s doing this, pastor. I’ll not have someone using my name like that!”

The letters stopped. For several months, that deacon was absent from church. The Wiltons continued to pray for him and his wife. Then one day he showed up at the church office.

“Pastor,” he said, “I wanted to let you know I found out who was sending those letters to you. I’ve dealt with him and he has left the church. I’d rather not tell you who it is. He wants you to know he’s deeply sorry that he caused you pain.”

With that, the man turned and walked out of the office. The matter was never mentioned again and the letters ceased. Don writes, “That man was a faithful and loving member in my church for many years to come. I love him, and to this day I know he loves me.”

The enemy would have the pastor retaliate in anger and vindictiveness. God is glorified when we seek His guidance through prayer, then wait for His leadership.

Nothing tells the story on us better than how we handle criticism. Nothing says maturity like praying and waiting on the Lord.

2) When You Feel No One Understands, Pastor…

I was reading Eric Lomax’ account of his World War II experiences in “The Railway Man: A POW’s searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness.” Born and raised in Scotland, Lomax joined the British Army’s “Royal Corps of Signals” just ahead of the draft in 1939. Before long, he was in Singapore, helping to protect this anchor of the British Empire in the Far East. A few weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they took Singapore. On February 16, 1942, Eric Lomax became one of the thousands and thousands of British soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese for the duration of the Second World War.

From that day in 1942 until the POWs were liberated in August of 1945, Lomax was tortured and beaten, subjected to every kind of imprisonment and psychological torment, starved, isolated, grilled for days on end while deprived of sleep, and nearly killed on several occasions. He weighed just over 100 pounds when the Allies entered the prison.

Now, here’s what I wanted to tell you….

As they were being returned to their homeland, the transports stopped off in Calcutta at a huge residence that had been converted into a reception center for returning POWs. The center (Lomax calls it a “centre”) was run by a group of women volunteers whom he describes as “brisk self-confident women used to servants and to getting their own way.” One afternoon, as Lomax and a friend were resting on the veranda with their tea, one of these take-charge dowagers approached. “Well, gentlemen,” she said, “I am certain that since you were prisoners-of-war during most of the fighting, you surely will be eager to get back into it and do your bit for the country now.”

Lomax says, “There wasn’t a trace of irony in her voice.” No doubt she was picturing these men as laying up in camps bored and restless with nothing to do. The ignorance of the woman was overwhelming. Lomax writes, “We held the sides of our chairs tightly and said nothing.”

There was nothing to say. Such ignorance defies an appropriate rejoinder. The woman just didn’t understand.

Now, the Apostle Paul. The text is Second Corinthians chapter 11. The almost inconceivable is happening. This church in Corinth, Greece, which he personally began and whose leaders he selected and trained, this congregation that has been so dear to his heart, is rejecting him in favor of a group of flashy, shallow, smooth-talking pretty-boys who have arrived on the scene in Greece ready to “put this church on the map.”

Oh, Paul was all right in his day and effective in his way, they said. But we’re here to take the church to the next level.

They called themselves Super-Apostles.

Paul writes these powerful letters, they said, but in person there’s not a lot to him. You will recall that no matter how much authority he claims to weild, he was not one of the original apostles. He’s new on the scene and shouldn’t receive any more respect than anyone else. What makes him think he’s an apostle, anyway.

So Paul answered them. His response is not meant for the so-called Super-Apostles so much as for the church members. Paul hopes to prick their conscience and awaken their sense of decency.

“You want my credentials?” he asked. “Here they are.”

What follows is portions of II Corinthians chapter eleven from Eugene Peterson’s “The Message.” I love the way he puts it.

“You have such admirable tolerance for impostors who rob your freedom, rip you off, steal you blind, put you down–even slap your face! I shouldn’t admit it to you, but our stomachs aren’t strong enough to tolerate that kind of stuff.”

“Since you admire the egomaniacs of the pulpit so much (remember, this is your old friend, the fool, talking) let me try my hand at it. Do they brag of being Hebrews, Israelites, the pure race of Abraham? I’m their match. Are they servants of Christ? I can go them one better. (I can’t believe I’m saying these things. It’s crazy to talk this way! But I’ve started and I’m going to finish.”

“I’ve worked much harder, been jailed more often, beaten up more times than I can count, and at death’s door time after time. I’ve been flogged five times with the Jews’ thirty-nine lashes, beaten by Roman rods three times, pummeled with rocks once. I’ve been shipwrecked three times, and immersed in the open sea for a night and a day. In hard traveling year in and year out, I’ve had to ford rivers, fend off robbers, struggle with friends, struggle with foes. I’ve been at risk in the city, at risk in the country, endangered by desert sun and sea storm, and betrayed by those I thought were my brothers. I’ve known drudgery and hard labor, many a long and lonely night without sleep, many a missed meal, blasted by the cold, naked to the weather.”

“And that’s not the half of it, when you throw in the daily pressures and anxieties of all the churches. When someone gets to the end of his rope, I feel the desperation in my bones. When someone is duped into sin, an angry fire burns in my gut.”

Paul brings this section to a close with this: “If I have to ‘brag’ about myself, I’ll brag about the humiliations that make me like Jesus.”

It’s what I call a reverse resume’. Instead of naming his degrees and awards–and he had them, believe me–he showed them his scars.

I would have given anything to have sat in the Corinthian congregation when this part of the letter was read, just to have seen the faces of the self-appointed superapostles. I can hear the church members as Paul’s words sink in and an awareness dawns over them.

“We didn’t understand. How could we have been so foolish. We didn’t understand.”

Now, finally, Pastor Bob. He lives in your city.

Here’s what happened to Bob this week.

Monday morning, he held a three-hour staff meeting. He rushed from the church across town to a hospital where the wife of a deacon was having surgery. In the hospital cafeteria, he bought a thin turkey sandwich and ate it in the car on his way to a committee meeting at the associational office. The churches are planning an evangelistic crusade in their county and Bob is chairing the subcommittee on spiritual preparation. The commmittee ran overtime and he was late for dinner. When he walked in the house, the phone which had been quiet all day, began ringing. His wife knows what’s coming next. An hour later, after dealing with a church member with a family problem, Bob sits at the table eating his re-heated dinner. The kids are gone, one to a play practice at school and the other to his ball game. Bob has a two-hour session ahead with three deacons who are trying to re-write the church personnel policies.

Tuesday morning, Bob tries to study for his sermons. He blocks off the morning hours and asks the secretary to interrupt only if it’s urgent. It was urgent three times today. When he walks out, the mail has arrived and much of it requires his attention. Six phone messages ask for him to return the call. Two staff members need “just a minute” of his time. Finally, by mid-afternoon, Bob gets to the retirement/nursing home where his mother and several church members are residents. He visits each one, and makes it home in time for dinner. This time the children are present. For the first time in four nights, they have a quiet evening at home together, although the kids are doing homework and Bob’s wife is studying for a class she will be teaching the next day.

Wednesday and Thursday seemed to be an unbroken sequence of counseling sessions, problem-solving with staff and church leaders, planning meetings, important phone calls, drop-in callers who ran by “just to say hello” and who take 30 minutes, a little time for study here and there, letters dictated, e-mail answered, a funeral and a pre-marital session with the couple who are getting married Friday night.

Friday is Bob’s off-day. By now, he is exhausted. His wife has a dozen jobs around the house she would love him to work on, and with their anniversary coming up Sunday, tonight would be a great time for the two of them to have a date. But she can see the fatigue in Bob’s face. So, today, she tells him the day is his. She takes his cell phone and will answer his calls.

Bob feels liberated. He throws on some old clothes, the kind just right for relaxing, gets a big glass of iced tea, and takes his book into the back yard. The birds are singing, the flowers are aglow, the air is wonderful. The book Pastor Bob opens has set by his bedside for a week. He’s been trying to get into it each night before drifting off to sleep. So far, he’s up to page 10.

“Pastor, there you are! They wouldn’t tell us down at the church where you were.”

It was a little group of church leaders, some by election, some by seniority, and some by merit of their positions in the town.

An hour later, when they left, Pastor Bob was no longer pastor. He had been fired.

The church just wasn’t growing enough to suit them. There was a malaise in the congregation, they said. They felt there was a mismatch between pastor and the leaders. The church needed to go in a different direction.

“Israel does not know. My people do not understand.” (Isaiah 1:3)

Pastor, take slight consolation in this: they have never understood. No one can.

There is only One who does. And remember….

They didn’t understand Him either.