I Saw A Giant

Now, those of you who know me have probably noticed that I am a pretty big guy.  I am not NBA tall, but I tend to be kind of obvious in a crowd.  Well the other day I saw a real giant.  Not a physical giant, but a spiritual giant is.

I am a kind of interim pastor filling in for our lead pastor, Rev. Earl Wheatley, as he battles pancreatic cancer.  A couple of weeks ago I preached a message in preparation for National Back to Church Sunday.  I talked about some of the ways that the church turns people off.  Particularly, I talked about how we tend to put people in categories and we are often seen as judgmental.  I closed by challenging the people to strive to be known for loving their neighbors, co-workers, and others who don’t know Christ. 

At the close of the service I invited people to come forward to pray at the altar rail for people they know that need a relationship with Christ; for ways they might show Christ’s love for them; and for openings to invite them to join us in worship.  The Spirit was moving among us and many people came to pray for their own attitudes, and/or people they might be able to reach out to.

The first person at the altar rail was the pastor I am subbing for.  He felt well enough to be in worship that day and sat on the front row with his wife.  The following Tuesday he was scheduled to undergo some tests that would tell what progress the cancer was making and if the very uncomfortable chemotherapy treatments were helping.  Right away, I figured Pastor Earl wanted us to pray for him and about the test results he would get that week.  I moved over to join him, but before I got there I could hear him praying.  To my surprise, he wasn’t praying about the tests, or his pain, or his cancer.  He was praying for people in his neighborhood that need to know Jesus, and asking God for guidance in how he could best approach them.  Of course, I agreed with him in prayer.

After his wife helped him back to his seat.  I just sat down on the steps to the platform.  I have to admit I was stunned.  Here was a man in a fight for his life and his prayer was for his unsaved neighbors.  I was in awe.

When everyone had finished praying and returned to their seats, I said to the congregation while still sitting on the steps, “I want to be Earl Wheatley when I grow up.”  Then I told them of Earl’s prayer.  We have a giant among us.  His body is emaciated, but his spirit is huge.  I am proud to know him, call him friend, and know him as a brother in Christ.  He challenges me to put the first thing first.  Call it what you want: making disciples, filling up heaven, or seeing people saved.  It is all about sharing the love of Christ.  It is this love that gives a man like Earl the sweet assurance of his own salvation and the deep desire for others to experience it too.  I want to be like that.  How about you?

Mile Marker: on the Road to MLK’s Dream

These days I am working at a church in Meridian, Mississippi. A friend of mine who is the lead pastor at an exciting growing church has been stricken with pancreatic cancer. In June he called me to come help out as a kind of interim pastor as he fights for his life against the cancer. I was honored and, of course, accepted the invitation.

Aside from driving through Meridian a few times last winter, I had not heard of the place except from news reports when I was a child. The news Meridian made in those days was not good. They told of horrible racial troubles. From what I remembered of the reports, Meridian represented some of the worst of the prejudice and bigotry the South had to offer. When I came to help my friend and his church I decided to try to keep an open mind toward the community. After all, the 1960s were a half-century ago.

I was surprised and pleased to find that the congregation, while it is predominately made up of white people, included several black families. It so happened that one of those families had a 14-year-old boy who was desperately ill with cancer. He had come home from spring football practice complaining of a sore knee and a bump on his leg. By the middle of July he was dead. The church had prayed fervently for the healing of this young man and they were devastated by the news of his passing. The youth group was particularly hard hit. The heart of everyone went out to his family. 

The boy’s family chose the church as the scene for the viewing and funeral. It would be the first funeral in the new sanctuary building. The whole church rallied around the family, offering the traditional family meal after the service. That was a big offer as it turned out, because the family members at the funeral numbered 100 or more.

The funeral was a sad, beautiful time of both sorrow and hope. After the funeral and the committal, I stood in the multi-purpose building and watched as the family shared the meal that the church provided. I have attended many such funeral dinners. This one was fairly ordinary. The family served themselves buffet style and women and youth assisted by some of the men made sure the serving bowls stayed full, walking among the tables filling and refilling glasses with tea and lemonade. I’ve seen this many times, but suddenly I saw special significance in this one. The family was African-American, and those doing the serving were mostly Caucasian church members. Big deal? Yeah, big deal. This is Meridian Mississippi. Not far from here three “Freedom Summer ” civil rights activists were murdered while trying to educate and register black voters in 1964. 

The amazing thing was that the people at the dinner that day were taking it all in stride. This congregation was simply taking care of one of its own families, with no notice about the skin color. They just wanted to do what they could to lighten the load of this family and honor the memory of the sweet young man who had lost his brave battle. If this can happen in a place with the bitter history of Meridian, Mississippi perhaps, it can happen anywhere. I quietly rejoiced with some tears in my eyes as I watched.

Now, I know the relationship between the races in America still has many problems. We have a long way to go to reach the promise of the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal,” and Martin Luther King’s dream that one day his children and all people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But, I rejoice because we have made progress. At the funeral and the dinner, I saw a mile marker on the journey. It was a place to look back and see how far we have come, as well as to look forward with resolve to finish the journey.

What Pastors Must Never Forget

The interview was going very well.  The old pastor had regaled the young seminary student with great stories in answer to questions about his long life and ministry.  He told how he began as a teenager in the 1920s, traveling by train, carrying a circus-type tent from town to town with a brother and two sisters to preach and sing at revivals.  When he took his first church, it was in desperate need of painting.  He found a deal on white paint, so they painted the little building white.  When finished, it almost glowed in the dusty central California town.  The whole town noticed, so he took advantage by renaming the church White Chapel. 

Later, when he pastored in a small town in southern Indiana, he put large loud speakers in the church’s bell tower and blessed the whole neighborhood with his sermon each week.  Later he was the first pastor in his denomination to try a weekly radio program.  The only available air time was late on Sunday evening.  He decided that people were preached to enough during the day on Sunday.  He felt that something other than a traditional worship service was needed to end the day.  So, he created a program that included music that was easy to listen to, the Gospel spoken in a conversational voice as if he was visiting with his listeners in their living room.  The program was syndicated and reached millions in the 50s and 60s.  Always an innovator, he was also one of the first pastors to dabble in television.  If he thought a method would reach people with Christ’s message, he was willing to give it a try.

All these things he told the younger man with great humility, giving God all the credit.  It was really quite a story.  The old man had been cutting-edge in the mid-20th century.  The younger man was impressed with his record.  Many people had already reported the great things that this elderly man of God had done: churches built, people healed, broken lives mended. This man had a knack for putting everyone at ease and being able to relate to people from all strata of society.  He had always been a consummate storyteller and his messages were richly illustrated, because he wanted to make sure the people could understand and remember the message God had for them. 

Though he had very little formal education, he read widely and could converse with the farmer and the factory worker, as well as the doctor, lawyer and professor.  Upon his retirement from pastoring, a college awarded him an honorary doctorate. 

Finally, thinking he almost had enough information for the paper he was writing, the younger man asked the finishing question about the growth of the churches the older man had pastored.  “What strategy did you use to produce the growth in your churches?”  The old man thought for a moment, then a smile creased his face as he replied, “Well, you know I only went to school until the fourth grade.  I once passed the tests to get into Bible college, but the week I was supposed to start there, a church begged me to come help them with a revival, and I just felt I couldn’t let that church or the Lord down.  So I just never got around to school.  I was never taught much about strategy.  What I tried to do was just love the people, and do what God led me to do.”  For a moment the student was stunned.  He had become so wrapped up in studying the church and analyzing how it worked, he had almost lost sight of the most important thing, the very thing the older man had never forgotten.  The student also realized that wisdom trumps knowledge.  He had asked a question about knowledge, but the old pastor’s answer was one of wisdom.  

It is nearly 40 years later and that young student is now an old pastor.  I have always tried not to forget the lesson I learned from Rev. Ross H. Minkler all those years ago.  Often, I have had to remind myself what the most important thing is: loving the people and doing what God leads me to do.  Whatever vision and strategy the Lord gives us for his church, and no matter how hard we work to plan, the key remains what Pastor Ross said—Love the people and do what God tells us to do. I don’t want to forget that, and I hope that other pastors never forget it.

Names of Churches

What’s in a name?  What’s in a name for a church?

A new church is meeting at a high school near my house.  It is called Kingdom Come.  Interesting name.  I haven’t yet found out why this name was chosen, and I am sure there must have been a good reason, but I am having fun thinking about what that name means.  It probably has to do with a verse from the Lord’s Prayer, or about wishing Jesus would come back.  But what do people driving by the sign in front of the school think it means.  Most people use the words “kingdom come” in a sentence like, “The tornado (or hurricane, or explosion) blew that house to kingdom come.”  So, is this church explosive, or the aftermath of an explosion? Or, perhaps the church members know that the Hebrew word for spirit is the same as the word for wind, so they are very poetically thinking that the Spirit is blowing in the church until the Kingdom comes.  The problem is that the Bible says:

Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20-21, NIV).

To me that says the Kingdom is already here.  

Anyway, I don’t want to argue Kingdom of God theology at this time; instead, this post is about church names. 

I find them very interesting.  Historically, we have named churches for a saint or other leader, for a biblical place, for a doctrinal position, or a combination of these.  Some churches are named for the area or the street on which they are located.  Sometimes, that creates problems when the church relocates.  When I was a young student minister in Louisville, KY, the biggest church in town was Walnut St. Baptist Church: it was located on Broadway and had been for many years.  The First Church of God in Wichita, KS was pretty much in the middle of town when it changed its name to Central Community Church.  A couple of years later they moved to what was then the west edge of town and kept the name.  (Central Community has a sister church named West Side.  West Side is now 5 miles closer to the middle of the city than is Central—confusing.)  It has also long been the practice for churches to use numbers to identify themselves.  Usually, the only number they use is First, but I have seen a few Seconds.

Some churches that started in the 70s and 80s, perhaps inspired by 7Up’s uncola commercials chose to use an unchurch name.  They took names like Christian Fellowship, or Koinonia, or Ekklesia and left out the word “Church” … I guess to show they were different from your Grandma’s church.  Also, in that period lots of churches put “Community” in their names:  Faith Community, Fellowship Community, Ourtown or Our Neigborhood Community.  Many of these were inspired by Robert Schuller who chose not to name the church he founded Reformed Church of Garden Grove, but instead, Garden Grove Community Church.  His purpose was to identify with the people of the town.  Of course, when they built an amazing building, the name was changed to Crystal Cathedral.  Hmm … that church, which for decades was one of the most influential ones in the country, recently declared bankruptcy.  I wonder if the emphasis, like the name, turned from the community to the church.  I don’t know about that particular case, but I know that a lot of other churches have turned inward, which has led to their downfall.

In the last 10 or 15 years the fad has been for churches to choose a one word name that somehow describes the mission, so we now have churches named Journey, Catalyst, Discover, Hope, or _______pointe (fill in the blank with Life, Bridge, Faith, Touch). 

There are also some very unusual names for newer churches.  Last week I heard a speaker from Australia whose church is named Small Boat, Big Sea.  It’s located in a depressed area and wants to bring God’s rescue to the people there, at least that’s what I think it means.  Also, there is a church in Denver, CO that is called Scum of the Earth.  No kidding.  They are targeting people who feel rejected by everyone.  A good thought, but I think it might limit their clientele. Perhaps that’s the idea, and they are only interested in reaching that niche which they feel is being rejected by other churches.  I can’t help being reminded of a youth pastor friend of mine who, when we were young, was fond of saying he was going to move to Beverly Hills because he felt called to minister to the filthy rich.  I wonder how the name Church of the Filthy Rich, or Rich and Famous Community Church would have worked out.  Maybe it’s just as well he never went there.

Some church leaders are saying churches should think about changing the name every five years.  I don’t know about that.  It seems to me if a church has a reputation for being a loving community that welcomes and accepts new people, a name change is probably unnecessary and may be counterproductive.  However, if a church which has been declining or on a long plateau because it has become inward focused is choosing to turn over a new leaf, repent, and seek to have an outward focused future, then a name chance should be considered.  The new name can reflect the new life the church is now living.  Changing the name won’t change the focus, but if the focus is changing, then changing the name can make sense. 

Naming the church is a big decision.  I had the privilege of naming a church that I planted.  It was the middle 80s and I wanted to name it Hope Community Church.  (Basically, because we had little money, little training as a church planter, no people, and hope was the only resource we had.)  When I shared the name with the congregation, which at that point was my wife, my 6-year-old son and myself, the vote was 2 to 1.  My wife was fine with Hope, but my little son, being wise beyond his years, said, “Name it Jesus’s Church, because it’s His church anyway.”  I learned right then that naming a church causes controversy in any size church.  Of course, Jarad’s statement was correct, but Dad and Mom won and we named it Hope Community anyway.  As I think about it, perhaps Jesus’ Church would be a pretty good name.  Maybe it would help a body of believers to remember who is in charge and keep the focus on Him and his design for His church. 

What’s in a name?  For a church there can be a lot, especially in this day when people are less and less impressed by denominational and doctrinal names.  I think the name should reflect what the church aspires to be and the mission it hopes to accomplish.  Is your church living up to its name?  Beyond that, is it living up to the mission that Jesus gave it?

Making Disciples is What the Church is All About

The last words of Jesus that Matthew records are a command to His followers to make disciples:
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age"(Matthew 28:19-20, NIV).

Yet, is that the first priority of your church? Is it your first priority in regard to your involvement in the church? If it is not your priority, it’s probably not your church’s priority, no matter what the mission or purpose statement says. I think this scripture, along with Luke’s last words of Christ from Acts 1:8 indicate that everything that the church is and does should be targeted at making disciples. I’m afraid our churches do a lot of things that have very little to do with making disciples. Some traditional church programs probably began as means to bring people to a saving relationship with Jesus and help them grow in that relationship, but as the years have gone by the programs have become an end in themselves. Churches also are victims of what the military calls “mission creep.” By that, I mean the church starts with the very simple mission God gave it, but other things get added. For some, the unspoken mission becomes protecting the building, or reaching only a certain kind of people, or preserving the past, or even putting on a show.

Don’t get me wrong. I am amazed at how much many people do for their church. People give generously of their time. I applaud their efforts, but some of them work very hard at church doing things that don’t have anything to do with what Jesus said was the main thing. What do you do at church? Does it contribute to making disciples? Make a list of the ministries, programs and activities of your church. Are there any that don’t contribute to making disciples? Then why is the church doing them? Often the answer is, “Because we’ve always done it.” Churches are not very good at stopping things. Old programs that no longer make disciples need to be stopped to make room for new more effective ones.

There are a lot of churches that are declining. For many, the reason is that they have chosen to make other “churchy” things more important than making disciples. Christians get comfortable with churchy things and would rather do those things than do what is necessary to help people find Christ’s love and grow in it. A lot of churches are all for making disciples as long as they can do what they have always done. The truth is there is only so much time and so much money. If your church devotes only the time and money that is left after the church does all its churchy stuff to making disciples, it is probably not doing very much. Folks, Jesus said the point of the church is to make disciples. If that isn’t the point of your church, is it really a church?

Is Your Church Flexible Enough to Survive?

It was sad to see. The church that my parents attended literally died. Largely, the people who made up this congregation got old and passed on to the next life. When they did, they left no one to pass their church on to. The church attendance had been dwindling for many years. I visited there about a year before the denomination finally pulled the plug. It was like I stepped into a time machine back to my childhood in the early 60s: the order of worship was just as I remembered, the songs we sang were the same, the choir had new robes, but many of the members were the same, the same nice lady still played the organ, and the same people (the ones who were still living) sat in the same pews. This churched thrived in the post WW II era. As the men who fought that war came home and started families they brought them to church, built a beautiful little building, and expected things to go on like that forever. The only place they went on like that was in the church building. The neighborhood changed as the children of those men grew up and moved to other parts of the city. Eventually, most of the old-timers moved out of the neighborhood, too. Because they loved their church, they would drive back to the old neighborhood each Sunday, but their children wouldn’t. Finally, the congregation got old and died off. When there were only a few of them left, the denomination stepped in and gave the debt-free building to another of their local churches to use as a satellite campus. Of course my 90-year-old parents and the other members were invited to continue attending, but everything changed and they couldn’t accept so many sudden changes. It was no longer their church.

A similar thing happened in another denomination in another state. The church grew down to ten attenders. Their congregational polity required that they vote to turn the building over to the denomination. It looked like they would make that decision so that the assets could be used by the denomination to build the Kingdom in the area. However, at the last minute the last 10 members voted to keep the building so that they could use it for a small group Bible study on Sundays. (There was no mention of reaching out to the community.)

From time to time, both of these churches had been challenged to make some changes that would help them stay relevant and reach people for Christ. Both churches went through a lot of pastors, some of them were incompetent, some of them had great ideas, but the congregation was stubborn. They wanted the church the way it was, and that’s the way it stayed. Their concern was pleasing the people they already had, instead of trying to reach those around them who needed the good news. It had not always been that way. At one time these churches worked hard to affect the world for Christ, but that was long ago.

On the other hand, there are churches today that are growing like crazy. Many new church plants struggle with facilities and meet for years in high school gyms, warehouses or abandoned big box stores. I know one new church which has yet to have its first publicly advertised worship service that already has a larger attendance at their Sunday evening sessions than the national average church attendance. They crowd into a small office.

What’s the deal? Why do many churches find themselves with a building and no people, while other churches find themselves with a growing number of people and a desperate need for a building? I have puzzled over this for years. It excites me to see people crowd in to make-shift church buildings because they want to hear the message of love, hope and forgiveness. At the same time, it breaks my heart to see nearly empty churches that seem to care only for self preservation and are not concerned about the deep spiritual needs of those around them.

I think I found the answer as I was reading in Mark. It has to do with wineskins.

“And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins" Mark 2:22 (NIV).

Jesus warned the disciples that their new relationship with him would not fit with the old temple religion of the Jews. Maybe it’s the same thing with some of our churches. They are only a little less into tradition and preserving the way things have been than were the Jewish authorities. Many congregations might well be as snobby about who is admitted to the “inner circle” as the Pharisees and Sadducees.

In Jesus’ day in Judah wine was often stored in wineskins. When the juice fermented to become wine, it gave off gases that stretched the skins. Old skins that had lost their elasticity couldn’t stretch to accommodate the process. They would break open and be ruined and the wine would spill out and be lost. I think this is the problem of many declining and plateaued churches. They have become too inflexible to accommodate the changes necessary to reach a new generation, so many are apparently being discarded. The great Bible scholar William Barclay commented on a similar passage in Luke: “No business could exist on outworn methods – and yet the church tries to. Any business that has lost as many customers as the church has would have tried new ways long ago – but the church tends to resent all that is new.” (It’s interesting to note that he wrote those words in 1953.)

The difference between churches and wineskins is that churches have a choice. They can choose to change. They can remain flexible. It all depends on the culture of the church. If the culture of the church is to be committed to the way things were, then no matter what the leadership does, the church gets old, and brittle, and eventually worthless to God’s plan to build the Kingdom. If an old church can maintain a culture that is committed to being a means the Lord uses to love people and bring them into His Kingdom, then it can continue to be a great beacon of His light in the world.

Sadly, even when declining and plateaued churches know they need to become flexible and make changes in a changing environment, they choose not to. Then, the only recourse God has is to make new wineskins (new congregations) that He will fill with his new wine (new believers).

What’s your church like? Is it an old wineskin—inflexible and no place for new believers? Or, is it willing to do whatever it takes to help new people become followers of Christ? How about you? How is your flexibility? How set are you in the way it has always been?

Finding Success

“Success: a favorable result; wished-for ending; good fortune” (World Book Dictionary)

Just about everyone wants to succeed at whatever he does. We want other people to think of us as successful and, more importantly, we want to think of ourselves as successful. Success by the standard of our society is elusive. Often it’s a sliding scale. For example, when I started in ministry in the early 1970s, a church with an average worship attendance of 300 was considered large, and I thought I would be a success if I was ever pastor of a church that size. I made it. I had the privilege of leading a church that grew from about 120 to a little over 300. Yeah me! But not really. By the 2000s, when our church had grown, the standard had changed. Three hundred is no longer considered a particularly large church. It’s often called middle-sized, and some people would consider it small. So, was I really successful. If success was accomplishing my goal to pastor a church of 300, then yes. But, if my goal was to pastor a large church, I failed miserably. If you ask me these days if I am a success, I will answer either yes or no depending on the kind of day I’m having. The point of this is to say that if we rely on society, or even ourselves to define success, very few of us will ever be secure in knowing ourselves to be successful.

So how can you and I ever know success? Do we take our society’s standard, which is commonly seen on t-shirts, “The one with the most toys wins?” That goal leads to frustration, because someone always has more than you.

Or you can do what I did and set your eyes on a goal, then work hard to reach that goal. That may work, unless the goal line moves or is not precisely defined. Beyond that is the truth, that reaching your goal may well lead to a let-down as you think that perhaps your goal was too small, or you don’t know what to do after the goal is reached.

The other possibility is to live by God’s standard for success. Jesus gives us the clues we need to discover God’s standard of success. We find this in “The Parable of the Talents” found in Matthew 25:14-30. Jesus told of a man leaving for a long journey who trusted three of his servants with money (talents: <$1,000) according to their abilities. To one he gave five talents, to another two, and one to the third servant. When he returned, he congratulated the five/ten talent man and welcomed him to share the master’s happiness. It was the same for the two/four talent man. But, the one talent guy was rebuked by his master, stripped of his talent and sent away.

Here is God’s standard of success: Use what God has given you to do what God has assigned you to do. He expects you to produce fruit in keeping with your gifts. Notice that the reward for the two/four talent servant was the same as for the one with five/ten talents. That’s a comfort to me. I have to do my best, but I’m only expected to do my best. My best is my best. Someone else may be able to do better, and others may not be able to do things as well as I can, but that should be neither here, nor there to me. I just have to be the best me I can, and use what I have for the Lord.

There are then two keys for my success:
1.) I must know what God’s assignment is for me.
2.) I must do my best to complete that assignment.
Whether or not others think of you as successful, and whether or not you think of yourself as successful is not really important. The important question is: How successful are you by God’s standard?

Jesus went a step farther. He not only gives us God’s standard of success, but He also tells us how to act as we strive and achieve that success. He said, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all" (Mark 9:35). To illustrate this principle, He washed the feet of the disciples. We are to be accommodating, helpful, and humble to others as we seek to fulfill our assignments from God. Arrogance may be the mark of successful people in the world, but it’s not to be so in the Kingdom of God. We are to be marked, as was Jesus, by our humility.