Category Archives: Pastors

When preachers say really dumb things and why

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“Remind them of these things, charging them before the Lord not to strive about words to no profit, to the ruin of the hearers” (II Timothy 2:14).

The desire to be clever has tainted many a good minister, sabotaged many an excellent sermon, and probably messed up a few marriages along the way.

On the way home from somewhere, I was listening to a radio preacher. He was local, sounded “live,” and was clearly a biblical conservative, meaning I liked most of what he had to say.  Then, he spoiled it all.

He mentioned a well-known Southern Baptist evangelist who once preached in his church. “I asked him, ‘Brother, how long does it take you Baptists to disciple a new believer?’”

“He answered, ‘I don’t know. We’ve never done it.’”

Then he, the radio preacher, said, “Shameful!”

From that launching pad, he proceeded to disparage churches for not discipling people while telling how it ought to be done.

I found myself wondering two things.

Why would the evangelist say such a patently dumb thing–that Baptists have never discipled anyone!–and then, why would the radio pastor repeat it?  Both are foolish statements, and reflect poorly on everyone involved–the speakers, the churches, and even the Lord Jesus Christ.

I suspect I know why the evangelist said it and the radio preacher quoted it.

The evangelist said it for shock value.  He got the reaction he wanted by making an absurd statement.

Had we said to him, “Do you mean to tell me no one in any Baptist church has ever become a disciple of Jesus Christ?” I’m confident he would have back-tracked and said that was not what he meant, then turned it into something other than the moronic statement it was.

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Twelve things I tell deacons

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No one is more surprised than I that the Lord has me leading all these deacon training conferences and retreats these days.

I love deacons and treasure the relationship with quite a few from the six churches I served over four decades.. My oldest son is the chairman of deacons in Mobile Alabama’s “West Mobile Baptist Church.”

But I have a few stories about some deacons.

I carry scars from battles with deacons.  I encountered a dozen or so along the way with mental health of the worst kind, some with stunted and deformed theology, and one or two who thought they were rightfully entitled to rule over the universe.   This website carries many articles on the ministry of deacons. Frequently, those painful experiences and harshest collisions produced the  best lessons and, of course, the most interesting stories.

This list of principles is not something set in stone, handed down from Sinai, but represents the gist of the conferences I hold. See what you think.

1. PRAYER: Nothing you will ever do is more about faith than praying.

Our Lord said, “My house shall be a house of prayer.”  Everything we do should be undergirded by strong prayers, seeking God’s will and His power, protection, and provision.  And we’re not just talking about handing Him our laundry list, but praying prayers of faith, asking God for what we believe to be His will and doing so in Jesus’ name, for Jesus’ sake, by Jesus’ blood.

Prayer is need-driven and faith-powered.  The needs will drive you to your knees, but faith will connect you with the Heavens.

Deacons should be the best pray-ers in the church.

2. CHANGE: If you do not like change or cannot deal with it, you’re going to have a tough time following Jesus.

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Some preachers give us substitutes for the Gospel. Not good.

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I like to encourage embattled pastors who may be preaching to people who despise them and are working to remove them from the pulpit.

I’ve been there, done that, in two churches. It’s a lonely feeling, one you would not wish on your enemy.

I encourage such pastors to remember why the message of Jesus is called “good news,” and to preach that.

This is so elementary, such a no-brainer, that one might wonder why I made a point of saying it.

Here’s why: We pastors sometimes feed our people fiber instead of protein, filler instead of nourishment. I’m not saying they do it consciously–“I will now cut corners on my preaching”–but sometimes it happens as a result of neglect, fatigue, or discouragement.

Someone needs to recognize that this is happening and call us back to our God-given task of preaching the gospel. Again, you would think this would be a no-brainer. But I cannot tell you how many times pastors have told me they model their preaching after an Elijah or Jeremiah or Amos. One said his role model was John the Baptist. Personally, I don’t see it. We are called to proclaim the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 1:16), and not to address every sinful failing of Washington, D.C. or whoever happens to be the current occupant of the White house.

Having been in active ministry since 1962, I am well aware of those substitutes for the gospel that have a way of creeping into our messages. Here are several I’ve seen in myself and noticed in you. (Consider that a friendly wink at the pastors who read this.)

1. Rather than deliver the gospel, we sometimes deliver theatrics.

Theatrics are the dramatics which often decorate sermons. Usually they involve bodily motions–walking, waving, pointing–and emotions: raising the voice, lowering it, getting tearful or excited or angry or compassionate.

It’s like a Supreme Court Justice said of pornography: “Even if I cannot define it, I know it when I see it.”

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Words have power to knock you down. Or to pick you up.

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Everyone needs a verse of Scripture to call his own. Here is mine.

Old Job was having a time of it. After the death of his children and the loss of his wealth, disease racked his body, leaving him covered with sores. Then, three friends showed up to comfort him–with accusations and blame. He needed a defense attorney and got instead three prosecutors!

The first speaker begins to set Job up for a fall. He’s going to accuse him of having sin in his life which has brought the judgment of God. But first, he reminds him of the way God has used him in the past.

Your words have stood men on their feet; you have helped the tottering to stand. (Job 4:4)

Tell me if that is not one of the finest attributes one man could ever pay another. It has become something of a goal for my preaching, that my sermons would be so filled with life and faith that the falling and the fallen would hear and stand up again and get back into life.

What power words have…

–When Eric Plumb entered the fourth grade, he missed the first two weeks due to a case of the mumps. As a result, he never caught on to the math they were studying that year. The teacher was a crabby, negative, cruel woman who was retiring at the end of that school term, the worst possible representative of her profession. She pounced on Eric and held him up to ridicule at every opportunity. When he missed an answer in arithmetic, which was often, she would say, “Eric is dumb. Eric Plumb is dumb. Eric Plumb is plumb dumb.” The students laughed at her put-down, no doubt glad someone else was her target for a while. To no one’s surprise, Eric grew to hate school.

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Preaching on finances. Pastor, you need to do that.

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This is an untouched reprint of an article from this website some years back.  

Barry is the treasurer of his church. A few days ago, he sat in my office and told me of the financial trouble his church had found itself in. They are running some thirty thousand dollars behind their million dollar budget. I said, “Do you have unpaid bills?” “No,” he said. I said, “And your church is without a pastor?” “Right.” I said, “Friend, you don’t have a financial crisis. Your church is doing just fine. Besides, you’re going to get a new leader. The offerings will go up once he arrives and begins his ministry. Stop worrying.”

On the other hand, a new pastor told how his church is not responding to his sermons on stewardship. “In fact,” he said, “the Sunday after I preached on giving, the offerings actually went down. I’ve been in the pastorate a long time, but never had that happen.”

I said, “I think I know what happened.” He was all ears. I said, “Not all churches are alike. Some have members with deep pockets. When the church gets behind financially, the pastor brings it to their attention, and they bring in the money, and the crisis ends. However, I’ve known your church for many years. You don’t have wealthy people. So, they’re not going to be able to respond immediately to your stewardship lessons. But just stay the course. Keep telling them. They’ll come through.”

A few weeks later, I was in his church and picked up the Sunday bulletin, and noticed that the offering for that day was 50% above the weekly budget requirements. His people are giving.

“I don’t like to preach on money,” a pastor told me. As the Director of Missions for the Baptist churches in the New Orleans area, I sometimes serve as a sounding board for our pastors. I listened as he continued. “My people resent sermons on giving, like I’m trying to invade their bank account or steal out of their wallet. So I just don’t do it. If the money comes in and the bills are paid, then everyone is happy and I’m spared having to preach on it. After all, that’s the point. Right?”

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Serving the Lord emphatically

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“What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light; and what you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim upon the housetops” (Matthew 10:27).

“The disciples went on their way from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name” (Acts 5:41).

“Nobody ever enjoyed the presidency as I did…. While president I have been president emphatically.”  –Theodore Roosevelt, quoted by David McCullough in “The American Spirit”

“The Lord does not want your spare time and loose change.”  –Pastor Brent Thompson, Heflin (AL) Baptist Church.

The Lord wants His people to live life emphatically.  “Whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might,” says Ecclesiastes 9:10.

We are to seize the day, live each moment, and to delight ourselves in Him.

Listen to Paul as he seeks to motivate and energize young Pastor Timothy:

“You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.  And the things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, these entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also…”

“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth….”

“I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom, preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction….”

“But you be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”  (all quotations from 2 Timothy)

Timothy was preaching to God’s people at Ephesus (I Timothy 1:3).  So, his father in the ministry, the esteemed Apostle Paul, was telling him to “pastor those people emphatically.”

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Tell the truth, preacher. Or find another profession.

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I knew Lawrence well and spent a lot of time with him.  He pastored some sizeable churches and was often in demand as a guest speaker.

I must have heard him give his testimony a dozen times or more.

Lawrence did not come from a Christian family.  He was around 10 years old when his family moved into that neighborhood in some east Texas town.  As the family was still unloading the truck and setting things up, a man knocked at the door.

Introducing himself as a deacon in the local Baptist church, the man told Lawrence’s mother that he taught a Sunday School class of boys. “Did I see a tow-headed boy running around here somewhere?”

“That would be Lawrence,” she said as she called for him.  “This man wants you to go to Sunday School with him.”

As the deacon extended his invitation, Lawrence listened and nodded. He would say later, “I had already learned the way to deal with church people was to agree with them.”

He had no intention of going to that or anybody else’s Sunday School class.

The man said, “Now, Lawrence, I’ll be by in the morning around 9 am to get you.  You be ready.”

The next morning at 8 o’clock there was a knock at the door.  The deacon said to a sleepy-headed boy, “Good morning, Lawrence.  Get some clothes on and eat some cereal and I’ll be by in an hour to get you.”  And he left.

“Now, what are you going to do with a fellow like that?” Lawrence would ask his audience.

And that’s how it happened that Lawrence began going to a wonderful church where he heard the Gospel and came to know Christ and eventually received the call to preach.

One Sunday some years later, the pastor asked members of the congregation to go to the individual who had invited them to church or had had the most to do with their coming to Christ.  Lawrence spotted that Sunday School teacher in the choir and started toward him.

That’s when he noticed a long string of men, young and not so young, like stairsteps, lined up to shake that man’s hand and thank him.

It was a good story.

Too bad it wasn’t true.

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Let’s you and me pray for our pastors. Seriously.

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There was a time when it was easier to pastor a church than it is today. There was a time when churches running 1,000 on Sunday were considered mega. There was a time when churches took what they had in the way of pastoral leadership and pretty much went with it without a lot of complaints.

Those days are no more. It’s a different world we live in.

People demand strengths and excellence and results from their leaders. They look for power in the pulpit and skills in relationships. They want advanced degrees and magnetic winsomeness and it wouldn’t hurt if you looked sharp either.

They want to be fed in sermons and challenged in programs. They want input in decisions and no longer hand the keys to the kingdom to the incoming preacher.

What they do not want is to be embarrassed from the pulpit, for their church to become the laughingstock of the community, for the attendance to drop, or for the financial situation to become dire.

If they could, they would like the church to reach the unchurched and make a difference in the poorer section of town, but they want this without changing the nature of what their church has always been.

If they could, they’d like to become a mission-minded congregation where members go overseas and return with glowing reports of work done, but they’d prefer this without themselves being asked to go.

They want good sermons and effective leadership from a pastor who has earned their respect and whom they like.

Just don’t bother them too much in accomplishing this.

Poor preacher. Someone ought to encourage him. Lord knows there are enough forces out there overwhelming him in the other direction.

Today, let’s pray for him. Let’s “give him heart,” as the word “encourage” actually means.

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Pastors, get it right or be quiet!

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So, I’m sitting in some huge meeting with hundreds of the Lord’s people representing churches across our state or country. A large number of preachers are in the audience. The speaker is sounding forth on some subject of importance to us all.

Suddenly, the speaker comes out with a statement that gets a hearty “amen,” something that sounds profound and undergirds the point he is making. He goes on in the message and every person in the room but one stays with him. Me, I’m stuck at that statement. Where did he get that, I wonder. Is it true? How can we know?

If social media has taught us anything, it’s to distrust percentages and question quotations.

A Facebook friend’s profile contained a quote from President Kennedy. I happen to know the quote and while I cannot prove JFK never uttered those words–how could we prove that about anyone saying anything–I know how the line got attached to the Kennedys. It’s a quotation from a George Bernard Shaw play.

Some see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I see things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’

In 1968, at the funeral of his brother Robert F. Kennedy, Senator Ted Kennedy spoke that line as applying to him. It’s a terrific depiction of vision. And, I imagine it was the first time for most of us to hear the quote. As I recall, the source was not given in the oration, which may have led some to believe Senator Kennedy made it up.

One thing we can be sure of, however, is President John F. Kennedy is not its source. Nor is any Kennedy. And yet, keep your eye out for that quotation. Half the time, its source will be listed as one of the Kennedys.

Accuracy is important for all of us, but particularly those of us called to preach God’s truth.

Unfortunately, because we speak so often–some pastors deliver three or more sermons per week, fifty weeks of the year–we go through a lot of material.   It figures that sometimes we are going to get our stories wrong.

That’s why something a preacher said hit me so hard and drove me to do a little fact-checking.

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How to detect a fake

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In the latter months of World War II, as the Allies were closing in on Germany, the Nazis developed a ruse that worked well for a while.

They would find German soldiers who spoke English well and dress them as Americans. They would arrange for them to be “lost” and to rejoin the Alllied forces as they moved forward. Their task: to infiltrate the American troops and assassinate Generals Eisenhower and Patton.

In time, the good guys developed some tests for exposing the fakes. One German was cut down by the Americans when they saw how he was walking. He was ramrod straight whereas all our troops slouched when they walked.

Another group learned to address the soldier using “pig Latin.” If he was stymied by that, he was exposed.

And they developed questions. Two, I recall, were: Who is Betty Grable? and What position did Lou Gehrig play?

The answers were: movie star/pinup girl and first base for the Yankees. It was understood that every GI in the world would know this.

If you have been in the warfare against the forces of righteousness and the enemies of all that is good and holy for any period of time, you have come up against counterfeits and pretenders, fakes and shams.

The question is, how do you tell? And what should we do about them?

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