Last week, as we completed the fourth article in this series, I put on Facebook that we were yet to decide on the fifth IRS, and invited suggestions. They were–as you might expect–all over the map: love, humility, kindness, honesty, and so forth.

Those are all good ones. To be sure, there are NOT “five” interpersonal relationship skills which supersede all others in importance. There are more like five hundred. But, given the limitations of life and this blog, we settled on five.

Yesterday, in a conversation with my pastor, Dr. Mike Miller (Kenner LA’s First Baptist Church), I realized what the fifth one should be: vulnerability.

I’ll tell you why in a second. It’s the story Mike was relating to me, something embarrassing that happened to him not long ago. But first, let’s see if we can find a workable definition for vulnerability.

To be vulnerable is to open yourself to be wounded. Going into battle without proper armor, you are vulnerable. Walking into a lion’s den–think of Daniel–with no visible protection but God, and Him invisible at that and given to not telling us everything He has in mind for a given situation, you are being vulnerable. Standing in the pulpit of a church on Sunday morning, admitting to your error, your humanity, your weakness, your own sense of deep need, you are making yourself vulnerable. You are putting yourself in a position where you can be criticized, opposed, attacked.

I say to you that vulnerability is one of the greatest assets (skills, strengths) one can bring to relationships with other people.

To be vulnerable, then, would mean an openness, an honesty, a lack of hypocrisy or pretense. These qualities are standard equipment in all believers, but particularly in those called as shepherds of the Lord’s flock.

Okay, here’s Mike’s story. He gave me permission to share it.

Mike has been preaching through the entire Bible, one sermon per book. “Route 66” he calls this series. The foulup came when he was giving the message on Daniel a few weeks back.

“I was preaching about the various visions Daniel had, one after another, and doing it all from memory. That’s when I realized that I had gotten something wrong. I had combined two of the visions into one.

“There was nothing to do, but to tell the congregation. So, I said, ‘Guys, I have completely messed this up. Some of you may have picked up on what I got wrong here. I apologize, but there is nothing to do but to start over!”

He laughed and said how embarrassing that was. I said, “And completely endearing.” He said, “Well, here’s what happened.”

“We had a couple who had started coming to our church. This was their first or second Sunday. The next Sunday, the wife came up to me.

“She said, ‘Pastor, we were in church last Sunday when you fouled Daniel up.’I thought, ‘Oh no. She’s going to really let me have it now.’

“She said, ‘When you did that, I looked around and said, ‘Are we in the right church?’ We have been going to church for years, but that was the first time we have ever heard a pastor admit to getting something wrong!'”

“They loved it. She said that is what brought them back. They’ve been coming ever since.”

Pastor Mike being the age of my sons, I’m guessing this was a first for him. It’s a wonderful lesson on the power of vulnerability. Being a grizzled veteran in the Lord’s work, I could have told him that far from weakening his ministry, this kind of unintentional foulup only strengthens a pastor’s bonds with his people.

But not with all of them.

There are in most churches a substrata of church members who want their ministers to be perfect, to have never sinned, to have strung together a flawless record of achievements unbroken by doubt or slipups or weakness.

For those members, let the pastor stand in the pulpit and admit to a failure–he doubted the Word, he lusted in his heart, he was (“gasp!”) tempted, he and his wife went through marriage counseling, he lost his temper, he goofed in a sermon–and they are forced to come to terms with their own flaws, something they refuse to do. These people have been projecting onto the minister some kind of clerical sainthood, attributing perfection to him and expecting pristine behavior, and now they find he is a lot like the rest of us.

I have a friend who says there are two kinds of church members: failures and liars. The failures admit to having sinned and come short (that would be Romans 3:23). The liars are all the others, those who deny that they are flawed creatures in need of a Savior. Pity the pastor with a ruling board heavily staffed by the liars.

Hopefully, there are very few of those in your church and those who are have little influence. However, if they are present in number and power, you the pastor are in for major trouble once they uncover your robes to see the clay feet.

But–and this is the point; I hope we haven’t strayed too far afield–to the great mass of humanity far and wide, for the minister to foul up and admit it is endearing. This means he understands a miserable failure like me. I will listen to him since he knows how I feel much of the time.

In March of 1981, my wife Margaret and I took the Sunday evening worship service in our church to tell the congregation the story of our sometimes rocky marriage and how we had gone through a year of marital counseling to try to repair it. The reactions from the congregation were of two types.

A few were upset that we dared admit to having argued, to having discussed divorce, and to have undergone a solid year of therapy. They would rather we had kept that kind of revelation to ourselves. “People need to think of their minister as having it all together.”

But to our pleasant surprise, the great majority were appreciative. In fact, my phone rang off that week with couples calling the church office to ask if I would be willing to counself with them.

Once they learned that we understood problems in marriage and failures in relationships, people gravitated to us.

I don’t mind having a few friends who have been winners from birth, whose achievements and awards can fill a small warehouse. But those are not my best friends.

My best friends understand failure. They have gone through doubt. They know what it is to struggle in a relationship, to be depressed, to be tempted. They have been there, done that, as the saying goes. And they have emerged on top as winners.

That’s the kind of man I want as my pastor, too.

These days, Pastor Mike Miller is speaking in chapel at our seminary on a weekly basis. Recently, he shared with the faculty and student body the two times in his ministry when he came close to quitting. To his surprise, he has had an outpouring of response.

I said, “You might need me to interpret the reason for that, since you are so close to the woods you might be missing the trees.”

Mike is a winner, something everyone sees quickly. He is young and handsome, dynamic, athletic, lean, and winsome. He has it all together. And get this….

By the time he was in his early 20s, Mike was piloting jet planes for industry. And now, 20 years later, he possesses two doctorates, a Doctor of Ministry from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a great student of the Greek language, and specializes in apologetics.

Mike is the type of preacher who could intimidate his listeners in a hurry, particularly ministers who do not know he has struggled along the way just as we have. So, when he speaks of his struggles and failures, far from driving away his audience, it connects them to his message like few other things.

There is a strong sense in which this is true of our Lord Jesus. Here are two things from the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him…. (5:7-9)

For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but was in all pionts tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (4:15-16)