What people are saying about …

Letters to a Young Pastor

“Young pastors today crave direction in their calling, looking to older pastors for sage advice and asking, ‘What do you know now that you wish you knew when you first began your ministry?’ As a young pastor, I was delighted when I heard about this book. When the experience of a seasoned pastor intersects with the potential of a young pastor, it is good soil for healthy fruit to flourish. Spending a week with Calvin Miller would be ideal; reading this book is the next best thing.”

J. R. Briggs, blogger, pastor and cultural cultivator of The Renew Community (Lansdale, Pennsylvania), and founder of The Epic Fail Pastors Conference

“Calvin Miller is passionate about ministry, and in Letters to a Young Pastor, he is transparent as he offers wisdom born out of experience: the struggles, frustrations, times he wanted to quit, joys, victories, failures. Laced with his wonderful sense of the ridiculous—even in himself—his authenticity comes through loud and clear. This book is a treasure of practical wisdom and insight and should be read by anyone in ministry: young or old, experienced or novice, man or woman, pastor or layperson.”

Ruth Bell Graham, speaker, founder of Ruth Graham & Friends, and author of In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart

“We need more mentors who are weathered, not jaded, by the journey of ministry. Calvin Miller honors the centuries-old model of an experienced Paul speaking to a pastoral profession teeming with Timothys. Burnout, denominationalism, sexual integrity, the pressure of preaching, difficult people—Calvin speaks openly to it all! He offers proof that one can both survive as a pastor and thrive as a child of God.”

Deron Spoo, lead pastor of First Baptist Church of Tulsa

“Calvin’s new book is a gift to a generation of young leaders who are palpitating with zeal and are absolutely desperate for knowledge. This book is earthy, practical, and filled with the kind of transcendent wisdom that is only earned in the trenches. Calvin Miller is a sage, and his Letters to a Young Pastor is must-reading for anyone with a ministerial call.”

Johnnie Moore, vice president and campus pastor at Liberty University and author of Honestly: Really Living What We Say We Believe

“Calvin Miller is a gift to the church, and in this book, he gives a gift to young pastors. This collection of letters will make you smile and challenge your heart. It’s a great read from a great thinker, bringing decades of experience to those who need it most.”

Ed Stetzer, www.edstetzer.com

“In a day and age when consumer ideology, business language, and competitive ambition are prevalent in the church, this book is an important defense and an invaluable help in the shaping of a biblical pastoral imagination. Calvin Miller sends a clarion call to keep the church centered on Jesus in both message and practice. My hope is that I—and every pastor young and old—heed his sage advice.”

Aaron Stern, college and twentysomethings pastor at New Life Church, founder of the LEAD Network, and author of What’s Your Secret?

“There is something in this book to offend almost everyone, from John Piper to Brian McLaren. But there is also a lot of gospel truth and hard-won wisdom from a pastor-professor who loves Jesus and His church with all his heart. This is the irrepressible Calvin Miller at his best.”

Timothy George, founding dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and general editor of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture

“There are only a handful of literary stylists writing in Christian circles today. Calvin Miller stands at the top of that list. This little book is destined to become a classic, not just required reading for every pastor, but a devotional classic for the priesthood of all believers. Once you’ve read it, you can’t imagine life without it.”

Leonard Sweet, Drew Theological School, George Fox Evangelical Seminary, sermons.com

“‘My age,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘is as a lusty winter / Frosty, but kindly.’ ‘Old,’ echoes Calvin Miller, ‘is good, and very self-protective.’ To his renowned gifts of eloquence and intellect, Calvin Miller now adds a new element: the old man’s curmudgeonly privilege of saying exactly what he thinks! Here the reader will find pulpit clarity devoid of political correctness and ruthless honesty that fears neither deacons nor denominations. Miller skewers the foibles of the faithful even as he undergirds his tough lessons with a tougher love. His honesty with his calling and with himself both alarm and disarm his fellow pilgrims through ministry’s ‘slough of despond.’ His humor is not a punch line tacked on for entertainment but a lifeline tied on for survival. In these pages, young pastors will find instant experience, and veteran pastors will find a voice for their own frustrations. It is Richard Baxter with a sense of humor, fastball theology with a knuckleball delivery.”

Dr. Doug Jackson, assistant professor of spiritual formation and director of programming for the Corpus Christi, Texas, campus of Logsdon Seminary

“Those who have read Pagan Christianity? may be wondering how I could endorse a book that tries to help pastors survive the modern pastorate. My answer is twofold. First, even though countless pastors will leave the modern pastor system out of personal conscience (or for some other reason), many will not. It is to the many in this group that I heartily commend this book because I believe it will help them. Second, Calvin Miller is one of the greatest writers this century has produced. So not only is it an honor to endorse a book of his, but more, the writing alone makes this work a pleasure to read.”

Frank Viola, author of Revise Us Again, From Eternity to Here, and Reimagining Church, www.frankviola.org

“These letters from Calvin Miller to young pastors grab my attention because three out of four new seminary graduates seeking a pastorate find themselves in town and country churches. Young rural pastors: These letters are like having a seasoned veteran sit beside you, discussing your new life and ministry with you—candid, unvarnished, transparent yet folksy and laced with humor. Read slowly and digest carefully!”

Dr. Ron Klassen, speaker, executive director of Rural Home Missionary Association, and author of No Little Places

“Letters to a Young Pastor is warm advice from a preacher come clean. Miller distills fifty years of pastoral experience into a collection of letters that addresses topics from the hallowed halls of anticipation to the dusty pews of realization. As a storytelling genius, Miller avoids flat prosaic propositions and offers instead a glimpse into a lifetime of ministry disappointments and triumphs. Finally, a book on pastoral theology and leadership for the rest of us.”

Tony Celelli, Bill McGregor Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Leadership and president of The South Texas School of Christian Studies

“Every young pastor needs a mentor. Calvin Miller becomes a wise and experienced guide to all who will read his thought-provoking letters at the beginning of their pastoral journey.”

David W. Hull, pastor of First Baptist Church, Huntsville, Alabama

“Calvin Miller writes letters of encouragement, wise counsel, and hard-earned advice to young or newly graduated ministers. Each letter develops a theme important to young pastors trying to find their way through the challenges of leading congregations. Calvin offers insights about ministry from small rural churches to megachurches, from traditional to emergent. In the Miller style we have come to know and enjoy, he creatively synthesizes stories, quotations, and personal vignettes to introduce and illustrate the point of each letter. Miller’s use of images and metaphors provides a model of creative communication. Every minister will find nuggets of gold for leading their people in a closer walk with Jesus.”

John C. Ketchen, PhD, director of master of arts in New Testament and preaching at Johnson University

LETTERS TO A YOUNG PASTOR

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no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form

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The website addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to you. These websites are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of David C Cook, nor do we vouch for their content.

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc™. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. (Public Domain); and NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

LCCN 2011930766

ISBN 978-0-7814-0577-5

eISBN 978-0-7814-0765-6

© 2011 Calvin Miller

Published in association with the literary agency of WordServe Literary Group, Ltd., 10152 S. Knoll Circle, Highlands Ranch, CO 80130.

The Team: John Blase, Sarah Schultz, Nick Lee, Jack Campbell, Karen Athen

Cover Design: Amy Konyndyk

First Edition 2011

To all my students who have chosen to wear the prophets’ mantle over the armor of their courage.

Define your times. Treasure your calling. Pray without ceasing. The terrors of the age are less than the grandeur of the Christ within you.

Contents

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Introduction

Section One

Letters on Locating Your Life

Letter 1 Seeing the Significance of Your Call Whatever the Congregation’s Size

Letter 2 Keeping the Passion in Your Call

Letter 3 Where’s Waldo?

Letter 4 Reputation

Letter 5 The Despondency Trap

Letter 6 Agape and Eros

Letter 7 The Pastor-Parent

Letter 8 The Art of Self-Forgiveness

Section Two

Growing a Large Worldview on a Shrinking Planet

Letter 9 Come, Let’s Make the World Rounder

Letter 10 The Rule of Jude 3

Letter 11 Avoid Any Word That Begins with “Neo”

Letter 12 The Emergent Emergency

Letter 13 Standing at the Corner of Orthodox Avenue and Political Boulevard

Letter 14 What Does Your Church Offer That’s Missing at the YMCA?

Letter 15 When You Can’t Find God

Letter 16 When Idols Fall

Letter 17 When Bishops Quarrel

Section Three

Never Cast a Vision in an Empty Sanctuary

Letter 18 The Player-Coach

Letter 19 Breaking Your Bondage to the Success Syndrome

Letter 20 Image or Vision: It’s Your Choice

Letter 21 Never Resign till Tuesday

Letter 22 Vitality: The Art of Not Snoozing through a Revolution

Letter 23 Nets Allow Aerialists to File for Social Security

Letter 24 Coping with Difficult People

Section Four

Sermons: Great Introductions and Conclusions

Kept as Close Together as Possible

Letter 25 Grumpy Homiletics

Letter 26 The Candidate Sermon

Letter 27 Preaching to Hansy and Betsy

Letter 28 To Entertain or Not to Entertain?

Letter 29 Keeping in Touch with the Arts

Letter 30 Whatever You Want Me to Remember, Be Sure It Starts with “Once Upon a Time”

Section Five

Come into My Heart, Lord Jesus … Please

Letter 31 Nonconformity: The Art of Submissive Individuality

Letter 32 Confession: The Art of Telling It Like It Is, However It Makes You Look

Letter 33 Touch: The Delicate Art of Leaving Your Fingerprints on Human Need

Letter 34 Self-Crucifixion: The Art of Looking Good on Wood

Letter 35 Humility: The Art of Doing Good Stuff and Giving Jesus the Credit

Introduction

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Walk with me, young pastor, and let us speak of things that are not included in the treasury of all you learned in seminary. Make no mistake, I am pro-seminary. In fact, I am pro-a-lifetime-of-study for every pastor. Treasure all you have learned on your way to your seminary degree. Those were good and usable things that will serve you for the rest of your life. In those hallowed halls you learned how to wade through the language of Moses and St. Paul, to read their words in the very way they wrote them down. Because of seminary you can give this authority as welcome counsel to those in need. You learned the counselor’s lore, the leader’s savvy, the lives of the saints, the fire of the Reformers. You learned evangelism, the art of eternal life and kingdom enrollment. You tracked the flame of Acts 2 through the incendiary trails of the Great Awakening. But beyond all these items still await the more elusive articles of survival.

This is where I may be able to help you. I have lived for seventy-four years upon the earth. I have held the hands of children as they breathed their last breaths and as their grieving parents tried to make their way through the justice of God. I have preached the funerals of gallant saints who left our congregation, taking so much of their light with them. I have walked the minefields of congregational gossip. I have held the demons at bay in a thousand church-business meetings and have exorcised these dogs of hell from the breasts of denominational troublemakers.

One reason you should take this walk with me is that I am most imperfect. I have made so many mistakes, but these errors all held lessons of their own. And the mistakes are but the dark threads of success it takes to complete a tapestry. Walk with me and I will show you how you can use those dark threads to put artistic shadows and depth into your lightsome life.

Don’t avoid this walk because I have so often tripped up. This is all the more reason you should share the road. Tripping is embarrassing, but I have learned that where we stumble is the place we dig for gold—where we trip is where the treasure lies. So walk with me, and I will tell you the whole truth. I have nothing to lose at this stage of life. I have suffered no embarrassment that I will hold from you, if there is any profit to be gained.

I’m hoping as you read this that here and there you will say, “Wow, I have done many of the same stupid things as Calvin Miller has.” As Yogi Berra might remind us, these letters will be “like déjà vu all over again.” Don’t forget that déjà vu is the word that when you look it up the dictionary says, “You’ve looked this up before, haven’t you?” You probably did, and I certainly have. Most of our mistakes are pretty categorical. And I have learned that even the greatest of souls have their stupid moments.

Not only do we have stupid moments, but we have a lot of ordinary ones too.

I will always remember visiting the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University. There, in that set of holy archives, are the works of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett. One leisurely afternoon I became intrigued and pulled out section after section of their poetry. I read all afternoon. My intrigue was not in reading and rereading their great poems but in realizing how much ordinary poetry they had written. While I read their works, I wondered how many poems Elizabeth Barrett had written on the way to her epic sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?”

So, here is Calvin Miller’s repository of the ordinary.

When people ask me how my writing career is going, I always say, “Swimmingly”; but I generally manage to add that while I live and die to do it, I never have felt I do it very well. “I am a third-tier artist,” I tell them. I feel a certain has-been-ness about my desire to do it well. “I was better at it yesterday,” I tell them. After all, I was the Max Lucado of the eighties; unfortunately for me, Max Lucado is the Max Lucado of today.

But of my years as a pastor, I have never been so apologetic. As Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” And while stupid uses only the lower rotting part of the cerebellum, it is a more thorough teacher than the inerrant brilliance at the front of the brain. As a witness, let me call up these witches of weird. Evangelicalism has always been a little too “hula hoop” in the attention it has given to theological fads. But in my time I have examined every fad and even tried a few of them.

When the charismatic movement was gaining steam throughout America, lots of people were trying tongues, and the reception given to the idea was troubling and even divisive among many evangelicals. Our particular congregation was not so much affected by this sweeping movement. But about the same time, pyramid selling through Amway and such companies was taking over many churches. This fad moved into every level of our church’s program. Between glossolalia and Amway, the whole kingdom of God was being inverted. It seemed to me that whenever anyone called me and said, “Pastor, the most wonderful thing just happened to me,” they were either about to tell me they had just spoken in tongues or become an Amway representative.

Next fad: the demon years. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist spawned a lot of movies about demons, and the resulting emphasis in the church was very marked. More than a few times in those years I was asked to help with (or conduct singly) an exorcism ritual. I witnessed many eerie things that I believe were actually demonic. I also saw in those years a kind of mass hysteria that created demons that were not so real.

Regarding theological fads, I was once motivated to have a bus ministry. Like some of the independent Baptist pastors of America, I envisioned a whole fleet of buses named after the heroes of the New Testament. But we bought only four buses: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We sent them flying over the streets and alleys of our cities to bring in boys and girls. Unfortunately, our part of the city was an upper-income area where children preferred ballet programs and sports camps. And their parents despised seeing our old Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John buses in their driveways. Matthew had a bad differential, and Luke suffered from an asthmatic carburetor that wheezed all through the winter. None of the four could really hold its oil, and all of them tended to spot the driveways of rich suburbanites like untrained puppies. At last, we sold them all for junk and got out of the children’s Sunday school bus program for good. I was young at the time, and it should have been a sign unto me. But alas, many of my most noble dreams ended up in the faddish junkyards of evangelicalism.

Then, I went through my revivalistic period. I had come to believe that if only I had more revivals God would bless our church with better growth. It really seemed to work the other way around with me. The more revivals I had, the more people tended to go to the Lutheran church across town. I now think it was the evangelists themselves who cursed our revivals. They were all Southern Baptist evangelists with spiffy wardrobes and ducktail haircuts. They often had great posters of themselves and printed their revival titles right on the posters. “Forty-eight hours in hell” was one title that was printed in red and designed to terrify the listeners into heaven. Now, Don Piper has spent some time in heaven and found it a profitable sojourn, but in my early days most evangelists had spent some time in hell and found it profitable as well. In those days there were a lot of sermons on hell, and even those that were not on hell sounded like hell. These evangelists were undaunted harbingers of terror and brought with them lots of luggage made heavy by jewelry and hair spray. Alas, not all their fire could produce a good and stable church.

Well, enough about the things I did wrong. I did some things right, too.

I will try to wrap these in some humility, but I will not work overly hard at humility. Was it Yogi Berra or Vince Lombardi who said, “If you done it, it ain’t braggin’”? I don’t know if this is entirely true. I think you can do it, actually do it, and still be braggy about it.

The number one thing I did right was to instill throughout our church a vital, personal evangelism program. I suppose I am proud of the program mostly because across my two and a half decades as pastor our church did grow. But it wasn’t just that it got bigger. It was a church with a lot of vitality. I have always agreed with the late Findley Edge, a Baptist scholar and personal mentor, who said, “People will endure anything in a church except an absence of vitality.” So many times I was asked by those who visited our church, “What produced the dynamic spirit of worship I felt while worshipping in your services?” There was only one answer: People were being added to the church day by day, or as Acts 2:47 says, “The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” These constant additions to our membership produced a great vitality in our worship services. I think it was Martin Buber who said, “All living is meeting.” Any organization is more alive when it is constantly adding new people to its constituency.

I have always been possessed by a zeal to see the unconverted come to Christ. I know it is done differently today—not as many “invitations” and less “door to door”—but back then I had an honest passion, and my methods were fit for that day. From the very time I founded either of the two churches I planted, I really worked at this, but it was lightsome work that ended in interviews of joy where those who never knew Christ came to know Him. In turn, the joy of these new converts furnished the church, season after season, with congregational praise and a positive sense that it was for this cause that our church was being born. So I traveled the neighborhoods, looking for the lost lovers of Christ. I ran from house to house, like a Jehovah’s Witness with a thyroid problem, all in the interest of seeing men and women come to Christ.

New converts keep old converts alive and reminiscent of their own wonderful moments of conversion. Beginning with only ten members, we added at least two new members by baptism every week for twenty-five years, for a grand total of twenty-eight hundred baptized members. I realize that measuring church success these days isn’t always a matter of baptisms, but again, for a pastor back then, it was a wonderful thing. In all of this, I never saw myself as anything extraspecial. We have some “big-church pastors” in the Baptist Convention who baptize that many converts over their lunch hour. And if that doesn’t cause me to be humble, Peter and the boys baptized more than three thousand on the day of Pentecost.

But what it does say is that constant dripping wears away stone. I forever reminded my students that the beauty of what happened was the “ordinary” thing I did. I was the “duffer’s role model.” I led only a couple of people a week to Christ. Anyone can do that. And it all happened not because I did anything extraordinary but because I did something very ordinary over a long period of time. The secret of what I accomplished was a simple formula: 2 (or sometimes more) people baptized per week x 25 years of tenure = 2,800 members. Not everyone seems to believe it, but at the center of this minor formula for success is tenure. So many of the letters in this book focus on the long haul and the power of sticking to one thing: tenure.

One other thing our church did was to begin a television ministry to our city over the NBC affiliate station on Sunday mornings. I had never cared much for religious empires on cable, but this local telecast turned out to be a big boost to our attendance, and our telecast was sensible enough that we made many friends throughout Omaha in the attempt. In our entire city, only our church and the large Lutheran church across town had local telecasts at the time. Our services were more evangelical in their appeal and became a favorite source of how people found out about our church. We remained on the air for years and gained a sensible following and good community relationship because of it.

One other wise effort came when we decided to use digital technology to enhance our congregational worship. When jumbotrons appeared in the first half of the 1980s, I suggested to our building committee that we add these technomarvels to our sanctuary. By that time our church had a couple of thousand people a week attending, and the jumbotrons seemed to signal that at least we were technologically “with it.”

As odd as it sounds, I believe this was another one of the things I did right. In the mid-1980s, I sent our associate pastor to look at some large churches that were considering installing jumbotrons, and since we were in the middle of our building program, it seemed an ideal time to add them—if we could determine they actually would enhance preworship and worship services. They were really digital-video projectors, intensely powerful enough to display strong images onto the two twenty-foot screens that flanked the elevated baptistery of our new building. It was not long afterward that most who came to the church grew to appreciate and love the technology we used for hymns and litanies and liturgies of all sorts. We also used them for preservice announcements and gained almost instant approval from the congregation. And for good reason. They really were an addition to the togetherness we felt. Further, I think that when people began to lift their heads out of the hymnals and sing the hymns off the screens, they paid more attention to the church musician. With their faces up, they actually began to sing better too. Well, if not better, at least louder. Yes, we sang hymns back then. How archaic! Now that I think about it, there was more power in the blood back then than in the current onstage percussion.

But the all-time great reason that you should listen to me is that much of what I write about in this book is written from the edge. Ministry is not for sissies, and the requirement of the tough times brings us to the edge of our commitment. Would it surprise you to know that I almost resigned the long-term pastorate after my second year at my church? Would you further be surprised to know that I genuinely believed I came very close to burnout in my twenty-fifth year in the church? These kinds of experiences are what I am speaking of when I talk of letters from the edge. If you have not encountered such dark times in your leadership, you are fortunate. But the truth is, if you haven’t, these experiences are likely ahead of you. Perhaps I can help you build up a trove of courage for the times ahead.

At any rate, there are a lot of reasons we should talk to each other, and given what I need to share with you, letters seem the best way to get it done.

So let’s talk.

Perhaps the real formula that drives this book could be: my experience plus your future might equal an encounter of survival. Or if that is too hopeful, at the very least: my years plus your need might equal a loaf of bread for the journey.

Calvin Miller

Birmingham, Alabama

Section One

Letters on Locating Your Life

A Layman in Search of Authenticity

Life is hard when you don’t know who you are.

I’ve been a part of this church for a long time. A couple of preachers back, we had a pastor who never seemed to find out who he was. He preached other people’s sermons. He copied other people’s programs almost entirely. There was this big church up in the windy city, and he felt like if he could duplicate it exactly, our church would be just as big. He even dressed like that preacher too.

All of us on the board kept peeling back the layers of his ego, trying to find out who he really was. We never could find out. I expect because he didn’t know either.[1]

1 Calvin Miller, The Empowered Leader (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1995), 21.

I know who I was

And

I know who I am

And

I have become convinced

That this double foundation

Dictates the form of

Who I will be.

Calvin Miller

Anyone who listens to the word

But does not do what it says

Is like a man

Who looks at his face in a mirror

And, after looking at himself,

Goes away and immediately forgets

What he looks like.

James 1:23–24

Letter 1

Seeing the Significance of Your Call Whatever the Congregation’s Size

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“For all the usual evaluative purposes, the large and global churches are obviously the most important. But for deep spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe, the small, local church serves every bit as well. Perhaps, they serve even better. In my history of small, local gatherings, the rooms were full of characters—divorced bankers, cantankerous physicians, drama queen choir members, faithful janitors. Characters. I have never been able to look upon people in any other way since. I hope I learned something from praying with the same lady who taught me English, from singing with the same man who bagged our groceries, from listening to the same preacher who also tucked me in at night. A small church like that, one big enough to house the people that you meet each day, can be both lonely and grand and simple. It is as good a place as any for the experience of learning to be content in any and every circumstance. Save a piece of locality like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a couple of hundred people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value; a theography of hope.”[1]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Sum up reality and opt for hope.

At the turn of the last century (1900) there was a ratio of 27 churches per 10,000 people, as compared with the close of the century (2000) where we have 11 churches per 10,000 people in America! What has happened?

Given the declining numbers and the closures of churches compared to the new church starts, there should have been over 38,000 new churches commissioned to keep up with the population growth. The United States now ranks third following China and India in the number of people who are not professing Christians; in other words, Americans are becoming an ever-increasing “unreached people group.” Half of all churches in the United States did not add any new members in the last two years.

I’m hard but honest when speaking to graduating preachers. I always say something like this to them: “Most of you will be taking churches of 100 members or less. Twenty years from now, 80 percent of you will no longer be a pastor, having chosen another profession primarily because the pain of hanging on was greater than the risk of letting go. The 20 percent of you who have continued preaching will still be in churches of 100 members or less.

“Happy graduation!”

The work is hard, and the pastoral survival rate is scary. Every year 4,000 churches close their doors forever, compared to just 1,000 new church starts. Between 1990 and 2000 the combined membership of all Protestant denominations dropped 5 million members (9.5 percent), while the US population increased by 11 percent. Each year 2.7 million church members fall into an “inactive” status. In probing for a reason for this dropout rate, the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute of Church Leadership Development found that these people were leaving because they were “hurting and wounded victims—of some kind of abuse, disillusionment, or just plain neglect.”[2] The Schaeffer Institute did not comment on why pastors were leaving, but it is probably for “abuse, disillusionment, or neglect” also. Since both pastors and laity are abandoning the church, we can infer that churches are not just dying; they’re dying unhappy.

It is this inference that bothers me.

Doctrinal differences are not the only thing that is killing evangelicalism. We are dying from a deep infection in our own group dynamics. We don’t love each other enough to cling to each other and survive. Forget love. We don’t even like each other. That’s the core reason we are dying. And into this painful cauldron of ill will we drop young preachers and expect them to save the church. But most soon leave behind the notion of trying to save the church and commit themselves to trying to survive the church.

Here are the reasons we give up on Christian ministry:

First, we die because we suffer from congregational social schisms that result from huge doses of unforgiveness between jealous, wrangling laypeople.

Second, we have too many pastors who compete within their denominations and fire at each other with blitzes of resentment.

Third, many preachers who resent each other’s success within their city limits participate in sanctimonious name-calling: “Easy gospel church! Calvinist Mecca! Bible-free preaching! Social gospelers! Modernists!” Most of these churches rarely say these things out loud, but they do say them. Even statements like “Come to our church; it’s the largest church in the city” say it. Or as I saw painted on the back of one church bus: “Follow me to Exciting WestBrook!” All such labels divide and destroy.

In 1970, Francis Schaeffer wrote a thirty-five-page book titled The Mark of the Christian. In a little more than a hundred paragraphs he gave us the only possible solution to the dying of evangelicalism:

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:34–35).

“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21).

What then shall we conclude but that … we as Christians are called upon to love all men as neighbors, loving them ourselves.… We are to love all true Christian brothers in a way that the world may observe. This means showing love to our brothers in the midst of our differences—great or small—loving our brothers when it costs us something, loving them even under times of tremendous emotional tension, loving in the way the world can see. In short we are to practice and exhibit the holiness of God and the love of God, for without this we grieve the Holy Spirit.[3]

It took me years to understand what Francis Schaeffer meant when he said that grieving the Holy Spirit was a direct result of our failure to love. But now I do understand: Grieve is a love word! This is what Paul meant when he said, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30). When we sin, we do not infuriate God, our Lover. We only hurt Him. We grieve Him! Until pastors and churches come to understand this, evangelicalism will continue its decline. When we fail to love each other, there is an empty ache that runs throughout the halls of heaven. And people who wanted more from us and expected more out of us will leave the church hurting, and we who are pastors will leave the church hurting, all because we have read the Bible all our lives—even knowing it in Greek and Hebrew—and never caught the connection between John 13:35 and Ephesians 4:30.

This is not a truth that can ever be sold on a group basis. You can solve the dilemma only within the singular, narrow place that is your soul. And you can solve it there. Here’s your chance to turn things around.

Christ is on the mound.

You’re at bat.

Save the game!

1 John Blase, “Theography of Hope,” The Burnside Writers Collective blog, 2008.

2 Richard J. Krejcir, “Statistics and Reasons for Church Decline,” Schaeffer Institute, www.intothyword.org/articles_view.asp?articleid=36557&columnid= (accessed April 15, 2011), par. 7.

3 Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of the Christian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1970), 34–35.

Letter 2

Keeping the Passion in Your Call

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“[General William Booth founded the Salvation Army in 1878.] His approach was a militant assault on the social evils of the day, and his movement specialized in addressing the needs of the poor and laboring classes. He most famously expressed his creed as follows:

While some weep as they do now, I’ll fight; while little children go hungry, I’ll fight; while men in prison, in and out, in and out, as they are now, I’ll fight; where there is a drunkard left, whilst there is a poor, lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight! I’ll fight to the very end!

“He did fight, until he died on August 21, 1912, and 150,000 mourners attended his funeral. The poet Vachel Lindsay immortalized him in a poem, ‘General William Booth Enters into Heaven,’ in which, among other things, he said:

“Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod,

Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.

Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief,

Eagle countenance in sharp relief,

Beard a-flying, air of high command

Unabated in that holy land.…

And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer

He saw his Master thro’ the flag-filled air.

Christ came gently with a robe and crown

For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down.

He saw King Jesus. They were face to face,

And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”[4]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

The call to preach is a compulsion to serve God by writing and delivering sermons. It is a holy, healthy compulsion. Every call makes one statement: One preaches because one must.

When your call comes, distrust the grand omen. The story is thumb worn, but remember the rural parson who saw “GPC” in the sky and immediately believed God wanted him to “Go Preach Christ.” God was really telling him to become a farmer and “Go Plant Corn!”

My own call to preach did not occur when I was frightened at worship by a six-winged angel like Isaiah was. Unlike Paul I wasn’t on the road to Damascus or even on a red shale road anywhere in Garfield County, Oklahoma, where I was born. And I was born again in a Pentecostal assembly where all visions and the epiphanies were welcome. Still, I didn’t receive a call there.

Not in wind or earthquake did God speak to me but in that still, small voice. In my heart of hearts, I was presented a list that none could see but me. This list was composed of every single vocational calling I might consider. The list was alphabetical and ran from architect to zoologist. And God said to me, in words unheard and written in light that never left my inner life, “Choose from this long, long list only that one vocation where all you do will last unto the farthest reaches of eternity.” And so I began to stalk my life vocation. I paused at the very first word on the list: architect. I thought how wonderful it would be to design great buildings, but even if I did, that great building would someday fall apart; time would tear my talent into broken stones, and what I had designed would die. I moved on to biologist, but I could see there was nothing in that science to which I could contribute that would last until eternity. Architect, biologist, chemist, doctor … on and on ran the ABC’s of vocational possibilities. But none I considered seemed to have anything eternal about them until I came to P. What about preacher? If all that Jesus or St. Paul said was true, when I held the souls of men and women in my hands, then all those I brought to the Master would be with me and Him for all eternity.

I didn’t study the list for long after that.

I didn’t have to.

Once I saw the truth, the only thing left was to obey it. And somewhere near that time I heard a pastor use the illustration of a great English preacher who told his son, “Son, if God calls you to preach, don’t condescend to be the prime minister of England.” That was a good word for me. Why? Because there have been times in my ministry when things were tough, when I thought to myself, If God gave me a choice between being the minister of a church and the prime minister of England, I’d pick the easy job. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had it so easy. Living in that cute little house at 10 Downing Street and having my own horse and learning to play polo and dropping in at Buckingham for tea would be like living at the dessert table at a church casserole dinner. Being prime minister would be a snap compared to moderating the church’s annual business conference. But I never did quit, and so Margaret and Tony were kept safe for doing the simple things. Nevertheless, I have remained rather passionate about that heartfelt list of occupations God gave me on that wonderful night when He said, “Think it over and pick one!”

Young minister of God, keep that little sparkle in your eyes, and then write down how your call came to you, and when you’ve written it down in fire, defend it that way. When your defense is expressed in the hottest flame you can engender, only then will your definition be strong enough to last a lifetime.

Robert Service’s great poem “The Law of the Yukon” defines it all for us:

This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:

Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane—

Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore;

Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;

Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,

Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.

Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;

Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;

Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat.…

And I wait for the men who will win me—and I will not be won in a day;

And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,

But by men with the hearts of Vikings, and the simple faith of a child;

Desperate, strong and resistless, unthrottled by fear or defeat,

Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat.[5]

4 Peter J. Gomes, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 170–71; Vachel Lindsay, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.”

5 Robert Service, “The Law of the Yukon,” in Collected Poems of Robert Service (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1940), 10–13.

Letter 3

Where’s Waldo?

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The Art of Pinpointing Your Location in a Postdenominational World

“You Are Here” is a wonderful part of mall maps. Once you locate yourself, you can reach for your cell phone and quickly call your mate, who is on the other side of the mall, looking at a “You Are Here” notation on her mall map. Then there is nothing left to do but move steadily toward each other like radar blips in love.

But when you want company after a long doctrinal absence, and there is no religious map, where do you find a place to snuggle in for company? You go to your denominational map and look for a “You Are Here” sign … OOPS! What happened to your denomination? It shrunk! And if you should happen to find it, the huddles of commonality have formed, and then you discover your group isn’t there anymore.

///

Dear Young Pastor,

In these days, which some believe are the last days of American evangelicalism, you may find yourself, as I have, wishing that the postdenominational era wasn’t so “post.” As American denominations have increasingly turned inward and hastened their own decline to powerlessness, we may wish we could live without them. When Jesus established the church in Matthew 16, He seemed to make no promise about denominational endurance.

Can you live without your denomination?

Probably, but who wants to? More and more parish pastors are being isolated from the structures that produced them. It’s frustrating because they know they were called to preach, but to relate to a structure that is often unfeeling and remote seems sometimes impossible. As a result, independent churches are springing up all across the nation and the world, and denominations are dying. I am writing you to say two things: There are things about denominations worth saving, and we should try our best to make it happen. But if it cannot happen, then we must go on preaching. And then only if the horse is truly dead should we dismount.

I am a Southern Baptist. Woe is me. What does that mean? It means that I have lost a few friends in a big structure that includes, they say, sixteen million people. But where are they? Some are here and some are there. Some of the liberals say, “Look to your right, and you will find those narrow-minded fundamentalists who have walked away so they can practice premillennialism on their own.” And the conservatives are saying, “Look to your left, and you will find all of your old friends who left the denomination so they can ordain women as deacons.”

In looking for my “You Are Here” position on my postdenominational map, I have fallen into the bad habit of liking everybody. This is so sad. It is much easier to find yourself by agreeing to hate those who are in the camps you don’t favor than to like those who are in the camps you do.

The first and most popular of the new translations, the NIV, came out only three years before our denomination began breaking up in the late ’70s. We were still pretty much all using the King James Version then, and that was nice. There is something about everybody saying “Thee” and “Thou” in a world where most people are saying “you” that holds our world together. But that’s all gone now. Southern Baptists have their own translation of the Bible called the Christian Standard Bible. I served on the translation committee that created this Bible and have a strong admiration for its very fine translation. Still, only some of the Southern Baptists use it, primarily because those in our denomination who don’t like the people who translated the Christian Standard Bible have shifted to the ESV or some other version. This pretty much leaves all us Baptists testy about our views of Scripture translations.

On my way in to church the other day (my SBC church), I saw a man carrying a Tim LaHaye prophecy Bible, which is sort of like the NIV except it glows in the dark. “Do you like that Bible?” I asked him. He got this dreamy, romantic gleam in his eye—a look that always terrifies me—and said, “It’s wonderful. Jesus is coming again, you know.” I did know it. Every Southern Baptist knows it, and many of them can even pinpoint the date to the nearest decade at least. I watched him enter the sanctuary and take his seat on the right side. Somehow, after our exchange, I wanted to sit on the left side—that’s the Max Lucado Bible side—of the congregation for that morning.

I have spoken a time or two at Cooperative Baptist Fellowship meetings of one sort or the other. But now and then I will have someone from the Southern Baptist Convention side call me to speak at something; before they secure me, however, they will sometimes ask, “Now, have you spoken at any CBF meetings? If so, we will not want you to speak at ours.” I am usually honest about this and therefore sacrifice a would-be honorarium on the low altar of integrity.

I am saving a lot of money by not attending any of the various national Baptist gatherings these days. But I miss them somehow. I liked going to the national convention way back in the twentieth century, because twenty thousand preachers would attend and it was wonderful all getting together and singing and praying and preaching. Oh sure, we knew that here and there within the mix of thousands was a liberal seminary professor or two, but back then we all felt that even liberals somehow deserved to live and so we ignored them. Then there were also the funny fundamentalists. While we all agreed that fundamentalists were not much “fun” and very rarely “mental,” we understood that and forgave the “dam” part. The point is, we were one.

At those conventions we always sang “I’ll Fly Away” to include the narrow-minded right and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” to include the open-minded left. We got along. We lived and related. Jesus was coming again. For those who thought it would be within the hour, we always had the Monday pastors’ conference just before the main convention started. If Jesus did come back, it would be easier to get Him on at the pastors’ conference program than at the convention, where not even the second coming would be allowed to interrupt the agenda without a motion for time extension. For all those who thought Jesus might tarry, we waited to take up the love offering till after the foreign missions focus on Thursday night.

I used to know who the president of the SBC was. More important than that, I used to care. The annual convention attendance has moved from twenty thousand preachers to five thousand. A variety of reasons has caused this drop in attendance. And this erosion of denominational health seems to have succeeded only in further fragmentation. It’s all so discouraging.

My frustration is that I would really like to be a part of the SBC; I just don’t know where it’s located. I haven’t attended a Southern Baptist Convention for thirty years, and I now no longer know anyone in the upper structure of the convention. I have worked at one of our sixty-two universities for the last decade, and I really do like our education system. It is the finest in the world. I have found myself there. The motto of the university where I teach is “For God, for Learning, Forever!” The motto is simple. The school is wonderful. We all seem to love God, and nobody is much in favor of burning witches.

I despise the art! Witches are not very combustible, and they take a long time to burn. And the stress of the events makes religious arson most undesirable. Salem, Massachusetts, is the only place it really caught on, and now nobody much even goes to church there, and all the Salem Baptists have somehow turned into Democrats. It was a bad idea!

But witch burning originates in doctrinal suspicions, which turn into viewpoints, which turn into prejudices, which turn into lynchings, which turn into massive divisions. Then the whole thing begins to fray. Someone once asked Dr. Criswell, the longtime pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, if he believed the Southern Baptist Convention would split; he replied, “No, Jell-O don’t split!” I think he’s right. It don’t “split” but it do “splatter” and it do “fragment.” And it do get really messy and really make it hard to find which is your particular hunk of gunk.

Now we just continue to splinter, splinter, splinter. Viewpoint, viewpoint, viewpoint. Some Baptists are of Calvin and some are not so much. We get so red faced about it. The Southern Baptist Calvinists go to Southern Seminary. The Southern Baptist Not-So-Calvinists attend Southwestern Seminary (Baptists, never thinking much of the saints, have always named their seminaries after points on the compass). The undeclared pick one of the other points. Other young scholars, who are only out for an education, tend to go to one of the other twenty-eight divinity schools that have started up since the splintering began.

Many of you who are reading these letters are living alone out there. And most of us, if our ideas were welcome by the big wigs, would like to offer them and try to bring it all back together. But that’s not likely to happen, and so we study the charts, crying, “Where’s Waldo?”

Waldo.

Remember him? He was so popular in the early ’90s. Remember the “Where’s Waldo?” game that you played by studying an extremely congested picture of a thousand people, trying to find him? He was easy to spot … eventually. Blue pants, a red-and-white-striped long-sleeved polo shirt, and a red-and-white stocking cap with a pom-pom on top. He was always waving with his right hand, arm crooked at the elbow. Still, it was nearly impossible to find him, for the picture was so busy. Alas, I am Waldo. I have studied a thousand denominational charts over the last few years, trying to find myself. Most of the time I’m just not there.

Letter 4

Reputation

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As Iago professes:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.

Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;

’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him,

And makes me poor indeed.…

And Cassio laments a little earlier in the play:

Reputation, reputation, reputation!

O, I have lost my reputation!

I have lost the immortal part of myself,

and what remains is bestial.[6]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Here’s a list of things I don’t do, and I don’t do them for one simple reason: The people I know and love don’t think I would do them. What people? Well, to begin with, my wife and children, then after that people in the church, and after that all the people of the world who happen to know me. I don’t

cuss, drink wine, or chew

smoke, steal, or commit adultery

covet, take God’s name in vain, or dance … very well

watch porn or take drugs or play cards or gamble

The worst thing about offering you this list is that I do sometimes lie.

Why don’t I do these things? Well, originally because Baptists who gossip were always somewhere in my life keeping track of my sins. But now I don’t do these things because—as I said—people don’t think I would do them, and I find a kind of wholeness in being who people think I am.

In short, I am interested in reputation.

Reputation is everything to the person of God. Lose even a shred of it, and you can be ruined for a lifetime. To lose control of your temper or any one of the values related to the list above, and your usefulness to God, as well as the protection and care of your family, may be damaged. Your salary will be lost never to be regained in any real way.

Let us consider names like Ted Haggard or Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker. The cost for their caprices was lost empires. I never knew any of this famous trio of lost reputations, but I have known many others who could not keep safe the smaller moments of their lives. Reputation is not a treatise you write on your own behavior. Other people write it, and other people keep it. Of course if Haggard, Swaggart, and Bakker had only drunk wine, they would still be in charge of their empires. Alas, they erred more grievously and got caught at it.

Now, you will have to decide how to give your reputation for others to keep. In the list of sins with which I started this letter, I mentioned that I don’t drink wine.

I am probably the last troglodyte Christian on the planet who doesn’t drink. People are always trying to get me to take a drink. I feel like the Recabites whom Jeremiah tried to spoil. It was probably at a Super Bowl party when Jeremiah set bowls of wine before the Recabites and said, “Drink some wine!” But the Recabites said, “We do not drink wine, because our forefather Jonadab son of Recab gave us this command: ‘Neither you nor your descendants must ever drink wine. Also you must never build houses … but must always live in tents’” (Jer. 35:6–7). I am still pretty libertine for a modern-day Recabite, for while I don’t drink, I also don’t live in a tent. But I feel comforted since I found this scripture. At least I know there were others who didn’t drink and were fairly dogmatic about it.

Like the Recabites, I don’t drink wine.

Never. Not even a little bit for my stomach’s sake.

Not even if the water supply is polluted. Is this because Baptists think it’s wrong or because Jesus thinks it’s wrong? The obvious answer is that Baptists do think it’s wrong. Jesus drank wine and even made some of it. And I don’t think He ever sinned. I’ve known Baptists who are mixed on the subject. One nineteenth-century sister who was a member of a twentieth-century church was castigating her libertine Baptist friends who were drinking wine when one of them asked her, “Why do you speak against our drinking wine? Don’t you know that Jesus drank wine?”

“Yes,” she said, hanging her head, “but I would think a lot more of Him if He hadn’t.”

Well, for my part, I couldn’t possibly love and esteem Jesus more than I do. I don’t drink wine because I believe that at least some people I know and love don’t do it and that, above all, they don’t think I would do it. Are they narrow minded? Perhaps, but my reputation must sometimes snuggle into their narrowness, and I want it kept as a kind of trust between us. If you offered me a drink, I would really like to take it if I thought it would please you. But even if it did please you, it wouldn’t please them. And I just can’t please everybody.

Now, I am not overly proud of this fact. I don’t think it would be a sin to do it, nor an act of high morality to not. I would prefer wine at Communion, but since Baptists think Jesus served Welch’s in the upper room, I have dedicated my life to grape-juice Communions. There are other abstinences I am more proud of than this one: I keep the lid up while standing for any biological need. I don’t like making my wife cry. I also don’t spit on people, scare little children, hate any people groups, or eat meat offered unto idols (this would have pleased St. Paul). In fact, I don’t even know where to buy meat offered unto idols.

I just don’t drink wine for one simple reason: Other people are the keepers of my reputation. And my reputation makes my ministry possible.

Besides, I like iced tea better.

6 William Shakespeare, Othello.

Letter 5

The Despondency Trap

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“Pastor Sam couldn’t help feeling that the reason for his boring homilies was that he had lost something more important than mere sermon preparation. He had laid by something more fundamental. He had lost the rapport he once felt with God. There was a hole in the center of his relationship with God. He needed back that old zeal he had mislaid. But try as he might, he just had no idea where he had mislaid it and therefore no idea how to pick it up again.

“The week moved on. Tuesday was nicer to Sam. It was always nicer than Monday. Tuesday gave Sam reason to hope. God always seemed more compassionate on Tuesday. Wednesday was even better than Tuesday, Thursday than Wednesday, and so on. Then dawned Saturday. Saturday was the day when sermons wouldn’t finish themselves. When preachers doubted. Saturdays and Mondays were Sundays’ bookends. On Saturdays preachers were neurotic planning what they would say, and on Mondays they were neurotic for having said it.”[7]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

We preachers often suffer from despondency, which for most of us amounts to a kind of low self-esteem. In this we are rather like movie stars. Despondency often arrives after a period of glorious congregational rapport, like a great, well-applauded sermon. I suspect most of this bipolar psychology is the result of strong self-esteem trying to find itself in the vacuum of no applause. Marilyn Monroe overdosed trying to hold on to her surges of self-esteem. So did Elvis.

I believe there are three stages of pastoral depression, and all three are procedural. This means that you move from one to the next and often without realizing you are making the move. These three stages in order are the blahs, the mopes, and burnout. The blahs come from flat, unvictorious living that goes too long without a victory. My own blahs were always triggered by simple things, like meeting one of my critics who always began with something like “Pastor, you may not be aware of this, but …” or “Preacher, I feel it’s my duty to tell you …” Following these little phrases comes a criticism that nags at me until I have the blahs. When the blahs hit, I skip my daily devotional and then find myself in those odd circumstances that have me hating my calling.

The second stage of spiritual depression is a bit more serious, what Uncle Remus (Joel Chandler Harris) called the mopes. The mopes are usually a bit more barbed than the blahs and are often triggered by a critical spirit that comes at you with some serious criticism. Usually it is accompanied by “Pastor, a lot of people have told me that …” or “Preacher, you are not going to like me for saying this, but I feel it’s my duty to tell you …”—then comes a kind of criticism that is much harder to shrug off. When the mopes set in, we’re best defined by those three little words: poor little me.

Then there’s burnout, and burnout is serious depression.

Many of the strongest biblical heroes suffered from burnout. Take Elijah, for instance. After his stunning victory on Mt. Carmel, he fled from the wrath of Jezebel, who was infuriated over the death of her favorite preachers, the priests of Baal, whom Elijah had killed by the hundreds when he called down fire from heaven. Elijah felt pretty good about carving up her ministerial alliance the way he did, and Jezebel was so ticked off she spoke to Elijah in that extrasassy way she often expressed herself: “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.” It was then that “Elijah was afraid and ran for his life,” the same kind of fight-or-flight syndrome that accompanies us when we are eluding the clutches of the personnel committee. When Elijah finally reached the scalding hot plains at the foot of Mt. Sinai, he took refuge under a broom tree.

He had burnout! Big-time! “Take my life, God. I’d rather you do it than Jezebel. I am no better than my ancestors.” Of course, nobody had ever told him he was better than his ancestors: people like Moses and David and Jacob. But under his sweltering robust thyroid-driven self-esteem, he had put himself right up there with the big boys. Of course, Moses and David had their own seasons of the mopes too. They were God’s heroes in the past, and past heroes never do anything wrong, as we see them. History gives them such tall pedestals, we can’t see their flaws.

Burnout and the mopes often operate at the same time. As if Elijah didn’t have enough burnout pain, the mopes had camped out in his soul. The mopes presage the “poor little me’s,” which promptly begin: “Oh dear, what can the matter be!” he wailed. “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

God then put a little reality into the prophet’s mopes: “Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal.” All of this was taken right out of 1 Kings 19, except for “Oh dear, what can the matter be,” which is from an old English nursery rhyme. The point of it all is that victories in life are often followed by mopes, and the mopes derive from how good it feels to feel bad. And self-pity is a wonderful way to tell God what you think of Him. After all, you’ve given up everything to answer His call, and just look how He’s treated you.

Lots of famous preachers have suffered from spiritual depression. R. C. Sproul said in his monthly newsletter that the condition grown severe enough is called the “dark night of the soul.” He no doubt borrowed this term from St. John of the Cross, who wrote in the early sixteenth century that this kind of condition, once endured, serves as a bridge of light—a kind of effulgent brightness—that ends in a bright joy that settles when we enter once again into the fullest fellowship with the Almighty. In the same vein Sproul spoke of it as a rather natural course in the living through of any Christ relationship that every person of God will experience:

The dark night of the soul. This phenomenon describes a malady that the greatest of Christians have suffered from time to time. It was the malady that provoked David to soak his pillow with tears. It was the malady that earned for Jeremiah the sobriquet, “The Weeping Prophet.” It was the malady that so afflicted Martin Luther that his melancholy threatened to destroy him. This is no ordinary fit of depression, but it is a depression that is linked to a crisis of faith, a crisis that comes when one senses the absence of God or gives rise to a feeling of abandonment by Him.…

The presence of faith gives no guarantee of the absence of spiritual depression; however, the dark night of the soul always gives way to the brightness of the noonday light of the presence of God.[8]

In the September/October 2000 edition of Physician Magazine, Dr. Walt Larimore, vice president of medical outreach at Focus on the Family, reported, “Surveys indicate that 80 percent of pastors and 84 percent of their spouses are discouraged or are dealing with depression from time to time. In addition, more than 40 percent of pastors and 47 percent of their spouses report that they are suffering from burnout.” These statistics are more than ten years old now, and one can only imagine that the situation is even worse. The condition may be subtle: A great many preachers don’t understand that they are spiritually under the emotional weather. A lot of them may feel they’re suffering from burnout when the honest truth is they are in the clutches of depression.

Burnout and spiritual depression are not identical twins, but they are relatives. When the ministry goes too long without any marked feelings of success, our dull hearts begin to act like there will never be any more successes … ever again. Burnout and the mopes are very different in their severity. The mopes can be cleared up with a simple round of golf. But burnout camps in the soul and is paralyzing in its intensity. It takes professional help to break it up.

I handle each of these three states—blahs, mopes, and burnout—quite differently. I handle the blahs just by indulging in a little grumpiness. In the throes of the mopes, however, I have a tendency of saying to Barbara, my wife, that I am “unfulfilled.” This state is usually remedied by going out to breakfast or a movie and distracting myself so I can downgrade my condition from the mopes to the blahs. Once back to the blahs, I am on the threshold of a better mood and can usually achieve it.

But when my psychology declines from the mopes to burnout, I know I am in trouble. This mental state can be of quite a long duration. When this condition falls upon me, I am done for if I can’t pray my way out of it. Usually I need at least a three-day trip to whip it. Oftentimes even this doesn’t take care of it. I experienced long-term burnout during my final year of pastoring. It seemed as if I never heard or read anything good about myself. For almost a year, this blue funk continued. By this time the church was very big, and I found just the administrative side of pastoring contributed to my hopeless feeling that I was locked up in an eternal state from which I would never be free. My wife bore this grouchy condition with grace, and in some ways I think she not only understood but actually participated in this condition with me. Pastors and their spouses who have a close relationship often spend a lot of time commiserating about their common woes. Overall, such sharing can be a cul-de-sac of pain, a pit dug deeper and deeper by two people suffering from the same joint condition at the same time. But most of the time I feel it is good to have each other’s ears when ears are so hard to find. Mouths are common, with lots of advice, but ears …

This all took place in 1991, more than twenty years ago now. But I will never forget it. After thirty-five years of being a pastor, I was in this dark, seemingly unredeemable state. Then one day the phone rang. It was the president of Southwestern Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas. There was a job offer! Suddenly I came alive. And I have never been in such a burnout state since then. But I never forget that a lot of pastors I meet on lecture tours or in DMin courses are on the edge, hanging on by the slenderest of threads. Some make it. Some don’t. The dropout rate for seminary-trained pastors is estimated to be as high as 80 percent. So I am committed to being an ear. I want to listen to the good men and women who lead our churches. If I can help them, I want to. If I can’t help them, I want to. But among these, my wounded brothers and sisters, I feel free to admit that we have all been chafed by hate and abandonment till our souls are raw. We all bear in our bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus (Gal. 6:17). It’s time we take off our shirts and talk. I’ve found there is healing in just showing each other our scars.

7 Calvin Miller, The Sermon Maker (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 19.

8 R. C. Sproul, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” Ligonier Ministries, www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/dark-night-soul (accessed April 4, 2011), pars. 1, 8.

Letter 6

Agape and Eros

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“Hellfire and damnation! Not for just a little while but through all eternity! Not some mystical, allegorical fire … it never stops. Never! … For two thousand years sweet Jesus has been begging you, pleading with you, to accept from Him that for which He died in agony on the Cross to give you. So, once you are burning in that fiery Pit … don’t go whining about how dreadful it hurts.”[9]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

I have a theory that I am anxious to put to rest. Either I want to confirm it or find it false and disregard it. It is my belief that while C. S. Lewis is right about the four kinds of love, he may be totally wrong about the gulfs that separate them. They bear an odd allegiance, these four kinds of love. They march along together, lust and brotherhood and eros and agape. I think eros and agape pass very close. So do lechery and the adoration we give to God. Just when you are thinking about philos and your obligation to humanity, storge arises, and bam! There you are, a low-thinking predator who only recently was loving God.

But to my way of thinking it was not C. S. Lewis who best discussed eros and agape. It was Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry. The thing I love about this book is that it taught me how to properly see the minister. Gantry was a typical minister in many ways: He loved his flock, and he preached to them and cared for them until he found the gulf between his eros and agape not so greatly fixed. C. S. Lewis kept his Greek nouns too often in separate pockets. Sinclair Lewis saw them passing as more similar. And yet the thing that was most terrifying to me was that Gantry was not presented to the reader as an abnormal man. He was capable of loving and serving God, but he was also a man whose humanity gave him a lot of space to carouse his appetites. It’s a book I would personally encourage every young pastor to read. There are a lot of pastoral definitions in the book.

Do pastors lust? Yes. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu said that men think about sex 75 percent of their waking time. Sometimes I think that figure is a little low for seminarians. Frederick Buechner is closer to the truth when he calls lust “the ape that gibbers in our loins.” Storge is the universal ruin of those who feel themselves exempt from the possibility. Eros is only agape waiting for a chance to spoil itself.

It is this proximity of opposites that leaves ministers so vulnerable.

Decades ago, back in the late ’60s I believe, a West Coast Baptist minister was in his study when he was interrupted by a woman who came to see him. The minister could tell the woman was deeply distressed even as she entered his study. Her eyes appeared to be red from weeping. She was trembling as if her whole soul was under judgment. The kindly pastor had her take a seat and asked, as any pastor would, “What on earth can I do to help you?” She began to pour forth her woes, and they were considerable. He tried to console her, as from time to time during her story she would break into tears. Finally, when she seemed as stable as she might under the circumstances, he prayed for her, assuring her of the love of God, and then she left.

The next day she came again under the same sort of bludgeoned spirit. Again he consoled her, tried to stanch her tears, prayed for her, and assured her of God’s love.

On the third day, she didn’t come in; she called in, telling the pastor she was in no emotional shape to get out and wondered if he could possibly come by her house and talk to her. Of course he did. He had but crossed the threshold when she fell against him in tears, and he lovingly consoled her and hugged her, telling her God loved her and so did he. But just as eros and agape pass close, so do hugs and embraces. Soon the pastor embraced her, and before he could stop himself, they were in bed together. Then someone stepped out of the closet and took their picture.

Realizing he had been duped, the pastor dressed and left, driving directly to the police station to report the incident. While he did the right thing after the incident, he was left a man without reputation. He who had always been the very symbol of agape to his congregation suddenly became the object of pity. Those who knew him said his resignation party was one of mixed tears and sad loss.

I remember thinking of the fallen pastor with a sense of pity and yet fear. Was I not also a man? Could my own love for God be as susceptible to betrayal as his was? Could I, who had been a minister for only a few brief years, do something like this? Was it possible that in a few moments of unguarded living I could betray my own wife and children for such a dark bargain? I made no pretense in the matter. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And then the oddest of circumstances befell me. That morning, I was in my study working on a sermon when the phone rang. It was a woman whose life was wrecked by circumstances. She was crying. She wondered if I would come to her home to talk to her. I assured her that I loved her but that it was not my practice to make house calls in such situations. I told her that our church would pay her cab fare if she would come to the church, and I would be glad to listen and do what I could for her. She continued weeping and said she just couldn’t go out in public and begged me to come to her home.

I insisted I would not. But I did continue to tell her that I loved her.

Then suddenly it hit me that there was a big revival going on in town and that the featured evangelist was preaching in a conference room at the local Holiday Inn. I informed her of the event and asked if she would like to attend. I told her that I would be going and could meet her there. She continued weeping but refused to meet me there. Still, I left the invitation open, assuring her of the love of God and telling her how much I loved her.

When I got to the Holiday Inn that night, I looked all around the lobby for anyone who I thought might possibly be her. We had never met face-to-face. I didn’t see anyone who looked distraught nor heard anyone who sounded at all like the woman. After the service was over, I went home disappointed that we had not connected. I went to bed unusually early that night, yet I was awakened by an awful realization. That’s when I shook my wife and woke her up.

“What?” she asked rather groggily.

I told her the whole tale about the woman who had called me and how I had looked for her around the lobby of the Holiday Inn just a few hours earlier.

“Well, why wake me up to tell me that?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “I just keep thinking that several times I said to her, ‘Please meet me at the Holiday Inn,’ and several other times I said, ‘I love you.’”

“And …”

“I just keep thinking how that would sound edited on a tape recorder. And I was thinking about that poor man out in California who was duped into the sheets because he wasn’t more careful.”

“That’s crazy,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

So I did.

Then at about two o’clock in the morning my wife woke me up far more seriously engaged in my earlier dilemma. “You know, that would sound kinda funny … edited I mean. Why don’t we call Gray Thompson.”

Gray was the district director of the FBI and a good friend and a great church member.

“Gray,” I asked, “were you asleep?”

“No,” he replied, “I had to get up to answer the phone.”

Starting from the beginning, I told him the whole story and ended with “… and I just keep thinking how that would sound edited on a tape recorder.”

“Pastor,” he said kindly, “I suppose blackmail is a possibility, but get real! Blackmail usually happens to very wealthy people. Go back to bed!”

I did.

Yet I still to this day wonder about what that woman had in mind. And even if she decided I was too poor to really make much off a blackmail attempt, I still say it is good to exercise a lot of discretion before you end up with an indiscretion.

But most pastors who fall from grace sexually are not involved with strangers; they get involved with someone right in their own church. So be extracareful in this regard. I once had a secretary who surprised me by telling me on a nameless Tuesday that she couldn’t live without me. I don’t know what kind of reply she expected from this, but I said, “You’re fired!”

“Fired, why?”

“Because I really like your husband, even if you don’t. He really is a nice guy. Try saying to him what you just said to me ’cause I have this feeling you haven’t been saying that kind of thing to him for a while. Clean out your desk!”

I might have seen this whole thing coming if I had done what I am now going to give you as a great principle for keeping your eros hidden under several thick layers of agape: Listen to your wife. For instance, in the case of the secretary I just described to you, my wife had given me little hints about the woman. She never came right out and said, “Watch the hussy!” but she did say, “Can you tell me why she bats her eyes every time she looks at you?” I hadn’t noticed. Barbara asked me on another occasion, “Doesn’t she have any nice little button-up Oxford blouses? Is her whole closet full of little pullover sweaters with plunging necklines?” I had thought about that one. She made Dolly Parton look like the muffler queen. I never thought about why she didn’t have any blouses; it took my wife to point it out to me. Oaf that I am, I just never put two and two together. If I had been brighter, I might have, but honestly I was just plain stupid. But then pastoral stupidity is sometimes the friend of pastoral chastity.

Watch the simple parts of your deportment. Again, your wife can help here. I remember one Sunday after service I was shaking hands with a lot people—actually I was hugging a lot of people. I am asexual in my deportment, never making any attempt to hug the lookers any more frequently than the homely. I hug the ugly and the lovely with equal fervor. But on this particular Sunday, a woman came by and hugged me with intention. Her koinonia was all but crushing. And then, while I didn’t see her do it, she went back and got in line again. When she reached me the second time, I started to hug her again, but my dear wife was nearby, wagging her finger. With some finality she said to the love-greedy parishioner, “One time a Sunday, honey!”

One other thing I might suggest to you: Let the church know how much you love your spouse and kids. Keep your family close. A fun afternoon at the zoo with your children will remind you how much your family means to you. But then lust is always of the instant. Lust sometimes floods into life all at once before you can even get to the zoo.

So use your brain. Your brain alone, and no other part of your anatomy. Keep your brain out of the gutter by a simple process of thought replacement. When you notice an attack of storge coming on, quote Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. (KJV)

9 Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice (New York: Ballantine, 1985), 321–22.

Letter 7

The Pastor-Parent

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“What would I do differently if I could do it all over again? I would put more emphasis on being a better husband and father. To the church or the university I would whip out a lot more noes, and a lot more yesses to my family. I would eradicate almost all of the ‘Daddy’s-too-busies,’ and the ‘later, darlings,’ from my vocabulary. If the church suddenly came up with a critical meeting on circus night, I’d go to the circus.”[10]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Having just rounded the corner of my fifty-second year of marriage, I may finally be ready to offer some advice on the pastor as a family man. I don’t wish to bring up the subject of Bill Gothard, that pre-Dobson, fundamentalist troglodyte who lectured widely on marriage while retaining his bachelorhood. It is true that in many ways what he taught about gender relationships was a lot like Muslim submission—minus the burka—for women and a lot like Genghis Khan triumphalism for men. But let me just say there was one Gothardesque term I think was a good metaphor for men in ministry. The term was Father-Priest. I like the term, because a priest in my basic definition is a little patch of ground on which a person of God may stand to connect with anyone seeking a relationship with God.

A priest is nothing more than a patch of consecrated soil on which God and a disciple may stand at the same time, locked in accord. The word mediator comes to mind. The priest is the one who stands between God and His children and establishes and confirms all of their relationships with Him. So it is with a Christian father, or in this case a pastor and his offspring. Since parenting for a pastor is extremely complex, the work of being a priest to the family means the pastor must hold his office with God on a daily basis.

Being the family priest is rooted in the little things, like the first day of school or a sports injury. But it also bears in mind the daily burden of education, employment, the counsel of vocation, drivers’ licenses, and love, courtship, and marriage. It teaches our children the heavy art of decision making. It manages the defense of the child when church criticisms or school challenges arise. Always the father is there, playing the priest and representing what God may actually want with the child—the directions God wants to see him or her go in life. It is the constant job of the father-priest to remind first himself and then the child that the only obligation in any life is: Parent or child always belongs to God first.

The father-priest steps between the child and every preventable pain that arises. It begins with the first heartbeat, the feeling of the chubby little fetal legs kicking against the womb wall. Then, still way back there at the start of things, there is the avatar pastor-papa, blowing and sucking in a Lamaze class, just so everyone understands that while men can’t really feel the pain of an eight pounder passing through the birth canal, everyone should do as much as they can to show they understand. Then come the nursery years at the church. Pastoral babies are supposed to be cherubic, but when they turn out to be enfants terribles, like ordinary laybabies, they can begin to attract criticism.

My son was one of the “terrible infants.” He was prone to biting—not backbiting, mind you, just biting. The nursery workers asked us if we would try to break him of the habit, just in case he came down with rabies. We tried to talk to him about this, but he was hard to reason with; he could bite long before his mind was fully functional, and so it was most hard for him to understand. The nursery workers lined up tiny little children’s chairs and draped baby blankets over the backs to form a natural barrier between my son’s infant molars and the throats and limbs of other children. It became obvious that he was incorrigible and that they would soon put his picture up in the post office. There were just too many children who left the nursery after services with little chomp marks on their arms or legs, all inflicted by the Miller baby.

It was a tempest in a teapot, but I found myself resenting my child being under attack by the nursery workers. I wondered if they had bitten him first and he was merely acting self-defensively. Perhaps I had been a victim of Baptists nipping at me in so many business meetings that I felt some unconfessed pleasure that my son had found a way to get back at them.

Still, we did try to stanch his canine tendencies. One method we tried was to “bite him back.” This was discipline before Dobson, fifty years ago, and at the time considered to be an effective method of stemming the cruelty. But even back then if a child was taken to the authorities with chomp marks on their arms or legs, the parents could be arrested. So we had to be too thoughtful about how firmly we bit. Occasionally our baby would bite a worker who was somewhat of a gossip or church problem, and at those times, we experienced a mild sense of justice. But most of the time we genuinely felt badly about his bite marks—this “mark of the beast” that he had grown so good at.

Years later when we visited that church, I walked through a room that had once been the nursery area. In that little room a small wall with a Dutch door had been built. I always wondered if our aggressive child had instilled a kind of fear in nursery workers who had, perhaps without even knowing it, built a bulwark to protect themselves.

The thing that always seemed to bother me was that while we were expected to keep our children in tow with discipline, the deacons’ children had no such judgment against them. When our little boy was five years old, he was playing “tail-end position” on a column of young Baptist hoodlums who were playing “crack the whip.” The game isn’t around much anymore, but it’s played rather simply by forming a group of children into a long line, holding hands with one another. Then the “center man” allows the children to run around him in a long line that circumscribes a great circle with the center man holding the runners somewhat in place as they all run. Then at a moment (at a signal from Satan I’m convinced), the center man stops the on motion and reverses the torque in the opposite direction, creating a g-force from hell. Then as the torque works its way to the end of the line, the last person in the queue is often thrown through the air as a result of the force. The last child in line on that particular occasion was our little boy. He flew through the air and landed on his arm, which broke in two places and ended oddly in an S shape.

I could hardly rebuke the deacons for their wild children who were guilty of destroying my son’s arm, though some probably felt it was recompense for our son’s nursery biting habits a couple of years earlier.

After the arm had been set for four weeks, we took him back to the outpatient office to ensure his break was healing properly. After the doctor took some more pictures, he came back in with a long face. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is the bones are healing very nicely. The bad news is that the bones are not in alignment; the arm is healing crookedly. I’d like your permission to break your child’s arm and reset it to keep it from a lifelong malformation. Will you give me permission to break his arm and start over?”

I looked at the doctor. He was a big man with big meaty hands. I was appalled at what he was asking. When I studied him, I could imagine him taking my son’s tiny little arm between his huge paws and breaking it over his knee to start over. Just the idea of this therapeutic brutality made me want to say, “Sure, I will give you permission to break his arm and start over. Will you give me permission to break your neck? It looks to me like your head could be on a little crooked.”

But I held my peace, and he broke Tim’s little arm and reset it.

I learned that so often a good father must never allow other people—even people who appear to be good, godly people—to hurt or malign his children. Such children would mature with feelings of inferiority or abandonment. And within some reason, the pastor should let it be known throughout the congregation that his or her children are not to be disciplined by any other set of parents than his or her own.

I found this especially true when my children became teenagers. Should I allow my children to go to the high school prom? I determined I would. This may sound odd in our more liberated age, but Baptists have only recently felt that any dancing should be permitted. So, it was with some courage that I allowed our children to go to their proms.

Once, my children confessed to me that they had gone down behind the local gas station to smoke a cigarette. It was nice of them to confess their sin and easy for me to forgive it. I told them that smoking behind a gas station carries its own risk of incendiarism. And also that they might have to face up to the reality that smoking could cause lung cancer, as it said on the package; but as long as they saw no deacons back there smoking, their secret was safe with me. As far as I know this led to no lifelong habit in either of them. And in the current day when so many Calvinist pastors are becoming cigar aficionados to announce their freedom from legalisms, the whole issue just doesn’t seem to destine nicotine believers for damnation.

My children both got speeding tickets on the way back from the college they attended in Oklahoma, and those citations got their names published once on the court docket in Seward County just west of Omaha. People who saw their crime in print seemed to grant them the right to be teenage drivers. It might have helped them that at about that same time I had my name printed in the arrest column for shooting the rapids of the Niobrara River without a life jacket. I paid my fine, as well as theirs, and maybe the congregants never knew of it; or maybe they just figured we Millers were the godly lawless, and if God forgives our sins, maybe they should forgive our illegal lifestyles.

It is impossible to serve a church for many years and not here and there reap the scorn of congregational gossip. But generally there is enough sin in the congregation to keep things in balance. I don’t know if God wants either laity or clergy to break the laws of the state, but open sin sure keeps self-righteousness at a minimum. And it sure helps the pastor, even a corrupted pastor, to mediate, protect, and fight for his or her family.

10 Calvin Miller, Life Is Mostly Edges (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 364–65.

Letter 8

The Art of Self-Forgiveness

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“One quality a leader must cultivate is a spirit of forgiveness. All sin from time to time. The story of David illustrates that it is good for us to forgive others just in case we someday need them to return the favor. There is an old Sanskrit saying that reads:

“The anger of a good man

lasts an instant;

that of a meddler two hours;

that of a base man a day and a night;

and that of a great sinner until death.”[11]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Abraham Maslow said that self-actualization is rarely achieved by anyone; perhaps as few as 3 percent of adults ever achieve it. Alfred Adler said that most of us never leave adolescence.

Forgiving others is not just medicine you give your parishioners but a tonic you take yourself. If you do not drink deeply of the forgiveness you extend, your grudges will in time poison your soul. Your leadership will be crippled at last by a narrow, stingy humanity. Eugene Habecker advised us: “A leader who has not learned to be a good forgiver will not be as effective as one who has. Leadership affords too many uncomfortable incidents, too many inaccurate accusations, and too little time to keep track of everyone who has ‘wronged’ you.”[12] So the only way to self-actualization is to forgive yourself for what you have done wrong. We all make mistakes, but the healthy parson is the parson who can actualize his or her leadership enough to admit, “Here’s what I’ve done that’s good. Here’s what I’ve done that’s bad. And I accept them both as parts of myself.” The difference between the ordinary non-Christian who is self-actualized and the Christian who manages the same actualization is that the Christian is the one who seeks God’s forgiveness before he or she seeks self-actualization.

Aye, there’s the rub!

For all their dependency on God’s forgiveness, Christians have never been too good at practicing what they so count on God to do: forgive. In my book on leadership, there is a chapter called “Surviving a Visible Mistake.” Here is an excerpt from the chapter.

Dear Leader:

I don’t know if you heard about that preacher down in Payton County. He had one of them consolidated country churches containing about an equal number of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Well, he took the Sunday offering and ran off with his secretary and went dancing. Just as you’d expect, he got fired. The Episcopalians couldn’t forgive him for stealing the offering. The Presbyterians couldn’t forgive him for running off with the church secretary. And the Baptists couldn’t forgive him for dancing. But, you know, those Unitarians forgave him for all three things. They even hired him as their preacher. He turned out to be the best pastor they ever had.…

Well, Pastor, I just heard that you made a mistake—not bad enough, mind you, to hand you over to the Unitarians, but bad. I don’t know why you did it, but some people here feel you oughta be fired. Not me. I think people should be forgiven for their mistakes as long as they’re not great big mistakes and they don’t do it very often.[13]

This is good advice, but it doesn’t go near far enough. I don’t know many pastors who have sought and been forgiven by their flocks. But I know many who have lived with Maslovian guilt because they can’t get over their need to forgive themselves.

I was taught this valuable lesson when I was quite a young pastor. We had a church member whom we’ll call Gary, partly because I want to be discreet and partly because that was his name. Gary ran a used-car lot and was guilty of selling cars that were on the brink of the wrecking lot. He also lied to potential buyers just to unload the crates. Gradually his reputation for bad business practices became known around our little town. But Gary’s ethics never prevented his desire to win as many of his customers to Christ as he could. All of them knew he was a member of our church. Many of his converts to whom he sold cars came to trust Christ, but most of them veered away from trusting Gary. One day one of his converts who felt swindled called me on the phone. She was irate. “Is Gary a member of your church?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said tentatively, not knowing what was coming next.

“Did you know that he is the biggest liar in this town?” she said.

“No, ma’am,” I replied, “I knew only that he was in the top ten!”

I made a mental note to talk to Gary to point out that few if any of his converts were actually joining the Baptist church and that while it was noble of him to love Jesus, it would be equally valuable for him to act like Christ. Eventually I took Gary out for coffee and described his inconsistent business practices. I encouraged him to change his ways and sell cars like Jesus would. But seeing Jesus as a used-car salesman was difficult for him to get his mind around. So he changed the subject.

“Pastor,” he said, “have you ever noticed that you never laugh very much. You always seem so guilty over the sins you have just sinned or the ones you’re getting ready to sin that you’re miserable all the time.”

Gary was happy, at least. If he was short on ethics, he was never short on good times. He was full of humor, and people who didn’t buy cars from him really seemed to like him. Even those who bought his cars would often laugh with him right down to that last happy moment they drove one of his heaps off the lot. I never bought one of his cars, so I had no personal long-standing grudge against him. But all of a sudden he was a moralist and a judge with some advice for me. His counsel took root, and I determined to learn to confess sin and let God deal with my ill-produced holiness.

He kept on selling bad cars as good ones, but his words to me I remember to this day. I think he really had my number. I had a way of emphasizing the confessional life that never produced any real guilt-free living. A scoundrel may inform a saint, especially a frowning saint, that joy really is the most infallible proof of the presence of God.

I have known a lot of pastors whose overserious piety has never been informed.

So, I must confess that between Maslow and a used-car salesman, I have learned that to carry what God has forgiven in my life is unnecessary misery. Set down your neuroses and walk away from them. What God has forgotten, we have no call to remember.

Here are three steps I passed on my way to deliverance.

First, force yourself to live in openness.

One of my first rules for leading the church was “Let there be no secrets!” The janitor should know what the chairman of the finance committee knows regarding the future plans for the church. I know of all the things I have said about self-actualization that this will be the hardest. It seems in life we are all set genetically to either live wide open in the world or by our very natures to be more guarded. Nonetheless, it is wonderful when leaders are open. Such a life encourages congregational openness, and this transparency clears up a lot of ambiguity or mystery throughout the congregation.

Emphasizing openness is just avoiding all cover-ups. When you make a mistake, make it out in the open. During the Nixon presidency, the whole nation got some great lessons on the sins of covering up. I’ve always wondered if there would have been any problem at all if the Watergate Hotel had been opened to all the public at once. People don’t like to be hoodwinked by half-truths and dimly lit corridors filled with demons of things that the pastor or trustees weren’t open about. Live the transparent life; anything else is just storing up doom for the moment when you may have to find yourself defending not only what you did but also why you did it in such a manner.

Second, practice forgiving other people.

This will help you learn the art and apply it to yourself. Forgiving people on the spot is a good idea. The longer you wait to forgive, the more you allow cynicism to build within you. If you wait a long time to forgive the mere carrying of your grudge, you will not forgive at all. You are more likely to say at every request for forgiveness, “Yeah, I’ll bet you’re sorry.”

Remember, he who sets out on a course of vengeance must first dig two graves. Vengeance doesn’t just kill the person you can’t forgive; in the end it also kills the killer. This is a tragedy. Can you imagine Jesus on the cross saying, “Well, Father, forgive them if You must, but wait till after I get the chance to knock them about a bit”?

Trust me. The advice I give you here is not squeaky clean. Some you forgive—even those who seem to accept your forgiveness—will not be as eager to change their ways as you would like. And this can further your cynicism about your desire to be like Christ.

Third, inform all the parish that you are a person in progress.

This is the most difficult one to remember of all three of these critical steps. I remember one of the evangelical clichés of the ’70s was PBPWMGIFWMY. I have never liked bumper-sticker Christianity, but this motto has served me well: Please Be Patient with Me, God Isn’t Finished with Me Yet.

In facing our incompleteness, we also have to admit that we can only be complete tomorrow. And the only way we can get to tomorrow is to live our way into it. One of Gandhi’s disciples came to him in a snit: “Mahatma, I don’t understand you. How can you say one thing one week and something quite different the next?”

“Because,” said Gandhi, “I have learned something since last week.”

In this sense we are all answering in our incompleteness. We will answer any question better in May than we did in April. There is no use asking God to help you grow up faster; He won’t do it. He will complete you only in time, and time He does not dispense simply because we demand it.

11 Robert D. Dale, Pastoral Leadership (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986), 158; as quoted in Miller, The Empowered Leader, 184.

12 Eugene B. Habecker, The Other Side of Leadership (Wheaton, IL: Victor, 1987), 103; as quoted in Miller, The Empowered Leader, 184–85.

13 Miller, The Empowered Leader, 182.

Section Two

Growing a Large Worldview on a Shrinking Planet

The Inquisitor: My child, it seems that God has blessed our modern astronomers with imaginations. It is quite alarming!

Do you know that the earth—which we old fogies supposed to be so large—has shrunk to something no bigger than a walnut, and the new universe has grown so vast that prelates—and even cardinals—look like ants. Why, God Almighty might lose sight of a Pope.[1]

1 Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, act 1, scene 6.

Is this big enough to be our home?

This little planet, three orbits outward from its star.

Drenched in blue

And forest flooded.

It wears the zip code of the race.

Who would believe this tiny rock

Is the object of His affection,

For it serves as a home to the children He adores.

Calvin Miller

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? …

On what were its footings set,

Or who laid its cornerstone—

While the morning stars sang together

And all the angels shouted for joy?

Who shut up the sea behind doors? …

Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea

Or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Job 38:4, 6–8, 16

Letter 9

Come, Let’s Make the World Rounder

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“Something will have gone out of us, if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.… For at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to domesticating ourselves.… It has brought us increased comfort and more material goods, and it threatens now to become the Frankenstein that destroys us.… It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such a wilderness as Christ and the Prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn till its bones are exposed.… It can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”[1]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Perhaps a good place to start making the world round again is to examine what it was that made it flat. In his outstanding book The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman began by naming the ten forces that flattened the earth in the twenty-first century. Four of those sources have to do with the Internet directly; the others also have to do with the Internet but in more indirect ways. Friedman said that the computer age, which all of us have come to depend on, has blended individual corporations and institutions into a dull soup, eliminating all solid differences by grinding them into a kind of puree that lacks form and interest.

During these years of imitating cultural history, the entire church experience has also become a pureed form of spiritual sameness that all evangelical churches own while all the time believing in their own uniqueness. Godly ambition and creativity have not been increased by cyberchurch. In fact, the evangelical world has flattened out. Friedman in his book quoted from an email written to him by a professor of his acquaintance: “I taught at a local university. It was disheartening to see the poor work ethic of many of my students. Of the students I’d taught over six semesters, I’d only consider hiring two of them. The rest lacked creativity, problem-solving abilities and passion for learning.”[2]

Friedman was talking about the global industrial and corporate complex, but as I read through the book, I kept thinking about the evangelical world I know.

The fact that you are reading this book leads me to believe you are not a megachurch pastor. I am guessing this for a couple of reasons. Reason number one: Most megachurch pastors are not well read, and when they do read, they tend to read from a list of sources that directly relate to church growth—namely, their own church growth. They do this to borrow methodology they don’t have at the moment or to compare their influence with others. Reason number two: The overwhelming number of church pastors are “small” church pastors who never in their lifetimes will pastor a large church. I confess to the sins of most pragmatic seminary professors: One of our chief sins is that we school our students in the works of preachers with large churches and then brutally send them into the world of small churches where they remain until retirement. During their actual years of ministry, they cope with declining memberships, low wages, and, in some cases, live all their years in manses owned by the church, finally retiring with nothing much above social security and the thin annuities provided by their constantly thinning congregations.

So much for the fate of most pastors.

What’s happening among their more flamboyant, megachurch, highly successful brothers in the part of the church world that seems to be succeeding? Is the evangelical world really flattening out? And if so, what is flattening it? Friedman’s quote above indicts the world of commerce and industry. But I believe a similar trend is now indicting the computer-addicted evangelical world. The computer-savvy technoministers keep running back to their www addresses to gobble up insights and the electronic goo-gaws of humor and interest. PayPal-ing their way through SermonSpice and various preacherly electronic sources, they patch together homiletic shows around a pinch of exegesis. Then Sunday comes, and the jumbotrons glitz their way through announcements and liturgies, biblical verses and sermon outlines complete with blanks for the faithful to fill in. Punctuated by the clicking of ballpoint pens, the Holy Spirit does what He can to get involved in the day, but more and more the flatlined videos keep a visual agenda that all but exclude any part of the invisible Trinity.

But does all this really furnish the church with “creativity, problem solving, and learning”? The answer of course is no. Does it furnish the church with growth and evangelistic clout? Once again the answer is no. Evangelicalism is quickly eroding. The Francis A. Schaeffer Institute of Church Leadership Development points out that in the 1980s church membership dropped almost 10 percent. In the ’90s it fell another 12 percent. Every year more than four thousand existing churches close their doors and only about one thousand new ones are planted.

What is causing this visible sickness and death to so many churches? Well, of course, there are lots of answers. One of which may actually be that the dying church has not been electronic enough in the digital age. There are at least three kinds of churches that are dying. The first two are the small church that is so small it is easy to see that it’s passing away and the large church whose immense popularity has created faults among its community. The death of the small church is likely resulting from heavy traditionalism that is stodgy and nonprogressive. These old, small churches die rather quietly, and we can’t remember the time of their passing, but suddenly we notice they just aren’t there anymore. Time outran them, that’s all. But what about the large churches that die? For the most part they diminish year by year, passing away by slow attrition while maintaining a semblance of vitality. I live in an area of the South that is filled with big churches, most of which are dying. It doesn’t seem like they are dying because of their size: They can lose a couple hundred people a year and still seem as big as ever. Alas, they are just slowly dying. Even though over a single year they seem to be the same size, the decades force them to be honest. Over a period of years it gets easier for them to see that they are clinging to empty imitations of life.

The third kind of dying church is the hardest to track: the megachurch. These churches’ memberships are so fluid that people come and go by the masses. And although they often show a growth in numbers, when you subtract the people who only temporarily flow through them, these churches are often staggeringly ill, all the while appearing to be healthy. They generally fail in building community, a failure that in part has resulted in the formation of thousands of house churches across the land.

But enough of these dismal statistics.

What I want to ask you as a young pastor is, have you noticed the flat worlds of even the most successful evangelicals? What do the most successful of these churches have in common with each other, and what are the forces that are flattening their worlds? First, there is the success mystique that often drives the hysteria of their sort of church growth. They all know the national pecking order in which each of them finds their place. They all keep track (at least in their minds) about who has the most people and who is the second largest, third largest, etc. They all remind me of that little rhyme I learned so long ago, which must be the rhyme of church-growth competition: “Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em. And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.”

For the most part these megachurch pastors live in a highly competitive world that is unpublished but resembles the Forbes 400 list.

They often have pastors who are “visionaries” and are adept at “vision casting.” They are interested in getting bigger, and while they generally believe in sin, the only real sin in their worldview is “not getting bigger.” Why is this important? Because other churches are getting bigger! When they have filled up their first local parish, they will build satellites and put in closed television circuitry so they can preach in two locations at once. Or three, or more. The main idea here is that it is better to have a famous pastor at three locations than two nonfamous pastors at the other locations. This way everybody has a chance to touch these cultural visionary heroes. This is the age of the hero and the fifteen-minutes-of-fame generation.

Back in the 1970s Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for writing The Denial of Death. The thesis of the book is that people survive death—that is, become immortal in a sense—in one of two ways: Either they decide to be a hero (which is what made Elvis build Graceland in Memphis), or they decide to worship the right hero (which is what keeps three million people a year visiting Graceland in Memphis). The hugely successful pastor becomes a cultural hero. When people attach themselves to his or her parish, they don’t need to explain why they are not doing all that well in their own lives. They have taken on an identity bigger than themselves.

But overall, this cultural-hero business in megachurches is not saving evangelicalism. It is generally flattening the world. But how?

First of all, it flattens the world by creating the illusion that each of these churches is unique. A battery of creative electronics has fostered this illusion, and yet for the most part there is a glitzy sameness to it all. What amazes me is that the electronic revolution produces little authentic creativity. Much if not all of it is stolen from a variety of sources, which in reality have very little variety. Thus the world of faith is flattened by a copycat mentality.

Second, megachurches flatten the world by creating the notion that they are saving Christianity. In reality they are destroying it. They foster the notion that evangelicalism is growing when the exact opposite is true. They still preach evangelism, but it often has less to do with accepting Christ than accepting the church. In such a diminished view of its importance, evangelism like evangelicalism is in a slump.

Third, megachurches are a bog of lost concern. Pastoral care has all but died. The main reason for this is that the megapastors do not live in the circle of their congregations. They live always to one side of the crowd. An invisible line exists between the pulpit and the thousands who attend megachurches. These pastors believe they love their people, but in reality they love them only as the lonely crowd they rarely intersect with on any one-on-one basis. The vast majority of these pastors—and I emphasize the word vast—have never had a meaningful conversation with anyone in their congregation. Eugene Peterson’s pastoral job description is this: Live in the middle of your congregation and love God. The sheer numbers in megachurches render this definition impossible. Many of those pastors emphasize being a pastor-teacher, claiming that it is better to feed people the Word of God than to try to get to know them personally. Still, there is much to be said that we should rather eat with people we know than eat alone all our lives because the tables are crowded with people we have never met.

This brings me to my fourth and final flattener of the evangelical world: the loss of the word parson. This word evolved from the notion that the parson was the person of the parish. He was the local scholar who knew and understood the lives of the people. When they had a problem or a question, they went to their parson. The parson could then answer their questions and touch them with prayer. He too was a hero of sorts. But he was not a hero because he was a man of fame or power. He was a hero who knew and understood the art of personal care and touching. He was an interruptible hero who knew God in a personal way and knew the people as family. He was the people’s padre. It was enough for them, and it was enough for him.

Now that we know the flatteners of the world, how are we to pursue the forces that make it round again? One of the megachurch pastors said it correctly: We must focus on church health rather than church growth. The real question is, what does this mean? The New Testament gives us the blueprint for a healthy church, yet we are suffering from a toxic addiction to success. If we are healthy, will we be big? Will we be bigger? The lives of the most gallant missionaries would likely say not necessarily. Faithfulness is step one in making the world round again. The final three steps are all from Richard Baxter (I really hope you know of Baxter).

Step two in making the world round again: Be content to be the parson, even desire it. “What a happy thing it would be, if you might live to see the day, that it should be as ordinary for people of all ages to come in course to their ministers for personal advice and help for their salvation, as it is now usual for them to come to the church to hear a sermon or receive the sacrament. Our diligence in this work is the way to bring it about.”[3]

Step three: Every pastor must become the role model of the life he encourages for others. This idea was what Baxter conceived to be the heart of pastoral care.[4]

Step four: Never have more members than you can know personally. “We must labor to be acquainted, not only with the persons, but with the state of all our people, with their inclinations and conversations … being thus acquainted with the flock, we must afterward take heed to them. One would imagine that every reasonable man would be satisfied of this, and that it would need no further proof. Doth not a careful shepherd look after every individual sheep?”[5]

I confess this is a bit formulaic on how to make the world round again. But it seems to me that we should try it or something very much like it. And it could be that, whether or not our churches ever get large, maybe at least we parsons could find our souls again and, in turn, help our people find theirs.

1 Wallace Stegner, “Wilderness Letter,” 1920.

2 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Picador, 2007), 355.

3 Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1999), 182.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., 90–91.

Letter 10

The Rule of Jude 3

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“There are two dominant stories alive in our culture today.…

“Story one goes like this: Once upon a time, the universe banged into being for no apparent reason and with no apparent purpose. Someday it will end and there will be no one left to remember it ever existed. In the meantime, we live and die. And that’s about it.

“Story two begins with a Creator who designs the universe to produce life. The Creator cares about everything he has made, including us. The Creator reaches out to us in many ways, constantly inviting us into a relationship of trust. When we die, we enter into the Creator’s presence, so that in some sense this life we now live is a prelude to a dimension of life that never dies.”[6]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

The quote above suggests the two theories of creation, only the second of which is biblical. The excerpt is taken from A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. The book has been out for over a decade now, and its influence along with that of its author have skyrocketed. In another of these letters to you, I deal with my own impressions of the emergent church, and I will not repeat those here. But I would like to ask you to consider in what way, if any, you would be tempted to move in the directions that are hinted at in McLaren’s book. The summary doctrine of the emergent church is that orthodoxy should be made more convenient, more generous. There should be no harsh affirmations of faith, and the Apostles’ Creed should not become a barrier to anyone joining the great conversation. So says McLaren through Neo, his philosophical conversationalist, “The old notions are being questioned. New understandings of truth and knowledge that might improve on them haven’t been fully developed yet.… Truth means more than factual accuracy. It means being in sync with God.”[7]

There is a great deal of ambiguity in A New Kind of Christian, and McLaren would say that’s because life and faith are ambiguous. The crux of what makes a faith valid, I think, is this statement by Abraham Heschel: “Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.”[8] Heschel stacked these adjectives one on top of the other—dull, oppressive, insipid—because I think he wanted to say what I mentioned earlier from the wisdom of Findley Edge: “People will endure anything in a church except an absence of vitality.” Religion lacks vitality when it wears Heschel’s adjectives.

You can tell if you’re open to the relational truths of McLaren’s Neo, a hodgepodge kind of creedalist who is in the process of mending his creeds and who is chatty and meandering sometimes beyond endurance. He is always talking and sort of in the faith, and sort of in other faiths too. This is not a book of either-or but of both-ands. The important thing, it seems, is to be a sojourner in the land of searching. As long as you are ardently looking for truths, you don’t have to be able to state the unequivocal truth. Whatever you’re struggling with can be admitted even if it isn’t what you learned in a catechism. To believe anything makes you a believer, and that counts big-time as long as you are a searching believer.

The choice you have is this: The Bible is the Word of God and may be affirmed as that. Or you may believe that the teachings of the Bible must be harmonized with your own existential journey and accepted as it may be with your faith condition in the present plateau of your God trek. From the time you are little, you are taught the doctrines of Christianity and are encouraged to recite, believe, and live by them. In the same way—and this comparison is weaker than I want it to be—you are taught the flag salute a long time before you come to know constitutional law, but your allegiance still lies in sync with all you earlier memorized in the pledge. Except I think if A New Kind of Christian were called A New Kind of Patriot it would have been written about all your misgivings about democracy and would have presented that to be really happy with yourself you need to live for a few years contemplating Marx, Machiavelli, and Plato. The Pledge of Allegiance would be under the microscope as you did your best to live baffled about political theory.

We have become the revisionist society. We rewrite history in favor of viewpoints. We rewrite ethics in favor of “what’s right is what makes you feel good after.” Political correctness puts Jesus and Buddha on the same low shelf. Gender inclusivity has us tied up in proper pronouns. Since God goes undefined, His expectations have been missing for some time, and sin is what you do that hurts others. Most everybody these days serves some kind of revisionism.

The big question is, what’s wrong with the flag salute? Is there any place left for a joint proclamation on patriotism that everybody can agree to? At what point do we start running everybody through the ambiguities of revisionism? Can you have any kind of statement on allegiance that takes in everybody who has wallowed through political theory and come out on the back side no longer able to cry when they hear the national anthem?

Let us remember that there is something in the right that always moves left. The Harvard Bible College that was is now as much in favor of Buddha as it is Jesus. All institutional history is a story of pure creedalists who moved away from their creeds. But the trade-offs are always immense. As any entity moves left, it moves away from Heschel’s adjectives. It trades real vitality for the ill health of talking about the symptoms of sickness. It trades proclamation for conversation.

It is also true that vitality and ignorance do go together. In South America and Africa, where theological seminaries are still largely in their formative stages, there is wholehearted vitality but not much in the way of academic excellence. Most times learning and vitality vary inversely. The explosion of early Christianity attests to this. Religions tend to die as they grow more informed. But keeping these reversed polarities in mind, vitality still owns the day. And this means that you, young pastor, have a decision to make. One way is to choose orthodoxy, and the other is to choose to take a conversational trek through a wilderness of ideas, some of which keep a distance to all things traditional.

Make your choice, and settle your faith upon that decision. Jude says there was a faith once delivered to the saints. We know the content of that faith, and in confession of the impossible things of our faith, we repeat these truths to define ourselves. Jesus was born of a virgin. Really? On the third day He rose again from the dead. How’s that? He’s coming again? Get real! God’s Son? The only way to the Father? If this is the faith once delivered to the saints, it will behoove us to ask ourselves: Is this the Christianity that was to be or the Christianity that is? To believe these things a priori, to take them as fact, is to endorse the faith once delivered to the saints. To believe anything else is to say the a priori confession you made is a stand that is open to amendment. It is, in a sense, to be constantly creating nuances to make the faith just right for you. It is fluffing your own pillow with Derrida and deconstructionists. It is to say no matter what the Reformers or apostles believed, no truth is true for all people. You are helping with the fragmentation of faith. You are doing this by building a faith that’s true for you.

I bring this up for only one reason: Heschel’s adjectives. For me, they have become the adjectives of the day. I believe they will preside over the church in the next few decades. I pray that you are an advocate of Jude’s idea that there was a faith once delivered to the saints. I also pray that you want that very faith to become so much the center of your confession that you will not bypass the Apostles’ Creed, saying, “No, thanks. I have written my own more reasonable doctrine.” For those who want to be sure the exact teachings of Christ never die, it seems to me to demand this confession: Behind the historical church, there is a great body of nonnegotiables. To privatize your creed is to confess you are syncretizing your way into a gnostic conversation; you’ve snuggled into a Procrustean bed.

Remember Procrustes? He was the Greek host who always kept a bed, affording hospitality to his guests. But for Procrustes, he had a bed of only one size. So if his guests were too short for his bed, he put them on the rack and stretched them out to fit it. If they were too tall, he chopped them off to fit it. He tailored his guests to fit the bed.

Let us label the myth. The bed is privatized doctrine. The guests are searchers after amendment to Jude’s faith once delivered. Once the guest has agreed to spend the night, he has joined a new kind of conformity. He is deconstructed and made ready for a new kind of congeniality. He does not believe quite as much, but he fits into the meandering borders of faith a lot better.

I have chosen.

You must too.

Confess what the centuries have labeled the historical faith, or, well … follow the crowd of those “new kind of Christians” who arrive at the old kind of nothing yet still believe themselves faithful.

6 Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 86.

7 Ibid., 61.

8 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 3.

Letter 11

Avoid Any Word That Begins with “Neo”

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“My Easy Christ Has Left the Church …”

He’s gone—the melancholy Messiah’s gone.

I saw him by the beltway mega-temple

circled by its multi-acred asphalt lawn,

blanketed with imports and huge fat vehicles

nourished on the hydrocarbons of distant oil fields

where the poor dry rice on public roads

and die without a requiem in unmarked graves.

Is it certain he is gone?

It is.

We saw him in the slums of Recife

telling stories of old fools,

who kept on building bigger barns,

oddly idealistic tales of widows with small coins

who out gave the richer deacons of the church.

I saw him sitting alone in a fast-food franchise,

drinking only bottled water and sorting through

a stack of world-hunger posters.

He couldn’t stay for long.

He was on his way to sell his old books

on Calvin and Arminius to buy a bag of rice for Bangladesh.[9]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Let me encourage you to avoid the prefix neo since the very sound of it seems to say, here comes somebody’s new take on somebody else’s old idea. Since I graduated from seminary in the olden days, the neos have arisen like a flock of little red minions to divide us all one from another in every area of philosophies, worldviews, and politics. In The Oxford English Dictionary there are forty-six neo words running from neoclassicism to Neoplatonism, and this list doesn’t even mention the two neos I want to warn you away from: neo-Calvinism and neo-universalism.

What’s wrong with neo words? Just this: Neo suggests adulteration. Neo words speak of amendment and revisionism. Be a Calvinist if you must, but don’t be a neo-Calvinist. Be a Pentecostal but not a neo-Pentecostal. Be a Platonist, classicist, or orthodox but not a Neoplatonist, neoclassicist or neoorthodox.

But I must warn you of neo-Calvinism and neo-universalism. Neo-Calvinism is a tulip with a pansy grafted on the bottom. It is deterministic like its parent, but it has been amended in such a way as to accommodate the disciple who wants to walk with the Reformers while keeping in step with a worldly-wise discussion club.

Neo-universalism is the old universalists remade to accommodate political correctness. It footsies around with old objectors: Will God really send anyone to hell? No, of course not. The only two people who might be there are Hitler and Lucifer, who spend their days playing cards and drinking liquor.

A neo-universalist has one of the four following definitions of hell:

1. Hell is annihilation where dying unbelievers simply perish as indicated in John 3:16.

2. Hell is but a temporary purgatory where bad people go to be purged of sin and thus fitted for heaven.

3. Hell is in this life—if you have it here and now, you won’t have to have it later.

4. Hell is the old-fashioned kind—a fiery torment for people who aren’t as nice as your dear old grandmother.

Neo-universalists also think there are many ways to God. You may walk along with Buddha, or Muhammad, or Confucius and arrive at the pearly gates as surely as though you were walking with Jesus. Christ was simply wrong when He said He was the only way to God. Robert Schuller recently said, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy.” The broadness is really a resurfaced six-lane pike with convenient exit ramps where you can move in and out of biblical faith, and making your salvation is a generous orthodoxy where anyone of any persuasion may join in.

Within neo-Calvinism and neo-universalism lies the worst of all neos: neo-inclusivism. In this word is the great congeniality of “you go to your temple and I’ll go to mine, but we’ll walk along together.”

Not only does this particular neo eradicate salvation, but it also eradicates Christian discipline, and worst of all, it eradicates mystery. In a religion where logic alone rules, there is no power. Mystery is composed of things that cannot be understood and never can be measured. Only when there are powerful mysteries does believing have a point.

So step over your attempts to fathom what cannot be understood, and God will grow to a size where He may actually be of some use to you.

9 Calvin Miller, “My Easy Christ Has Left the Church,” The Unfinished Soul (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2004), 11–12.

Letter 12

The Emergent Emergency

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Pastoral care is the crying absence that never ceases its disconsolate wail. The hurting never come to church looking for emerging church or ever have the slightest interest in what it looks like.

“Pastoral care is a world of unbearable pain. However high we lift our spirits in personal or public worship, it is good to remember that many in our congregations come and go from our worship with broken hearts. In some ways this is what is most wrong with public invitations. We ask all those who are shrinking back from life to come forward. But they are refugees from sociability. They want to hide; they do not want to come forward. They want to hide out, so pastors must go to their hiding places. We must come down from our soaring worship and agree to enter the world of unbearable hurt.”[10]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

The emergent church is emerging. Half of those who can spell emergent can’t define it.

And the half who can define it do so in different ways. The only thing they all agree on is that it is emerging, and its emergence is evidence to them that the church is coming of age. It has found a way to fit into a new world that the stolid, old-fashioned church, entrenched in its cumbersome orthodoxy, could never fit into. It is a blending of postmodern values and the most unpalatable parts of orthodoxy. It is a cry to deconstruct both doctrine and values so they can be reconstructed in such a way as to welcome congenial skeptics into the multiplexity of doctrineless faith.

The emperor is pretty much naked. But those who hang at the center of the movement hang their anger at tradition over the nude king and say that they’ve outgrown the old-fashioned, mainline, traditional, out-of-step Jesus, and that the Christ at the center of their esteem is more Eastern, less Western, and somewhat more resurrected if you want Him to be. The key thing is to “enter the church talking.” Opinion has become the maker of doctrine.

In joining the emergent church, you’re not joining a creed or a covenant; you’re joining a discussion. The emergent church holds no form except to make it clear that building the kingdom with structural forms is too rigid to allow the shrinking agnostic to find a place in the whirligig of political correctness and religious acceptance. Like Bob Squarepants, it is a little spongy. It is a sugar-free Jell-O into which you insert your own fruit. But there is only one doctrine of the movement, and that doctrine is simply “new,” which is always to be preferred over old.

It is a heresy without any arguing points, yet is not so unique as its adherents claim it to be. In every era of the church there have been heresies. This was true from the very beginning of the church. Jude the brother of Christ wrote near the end of the first Christian century, “Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3). Jude, like Paul, was ever on the lookout for those aberrancies that diluted or confounded the church.

But the emergent heresies can’t be cured with Christian apologetics. There is no dialectic. It is a monolectic. It cannot be debated, for there is no yin to this yang. No yes to this no. No teeter to this totter—it is only “maybe” on both ends. Its doctrines shift and shift and regather only to shift again. It is theological jabberwocky heavy on the jabber. It builds upon the philosophies of deconstructionism, that no truth is true for more than one person. All truth that would provide any kind of constant and would apply to all must be deconstructed and reassembled in each believer so as to accommodate the person’s values and dogmas.

The great question “What do you believe?” is best answered, “I dunno. What do you believe?” Thus the emergent church has no binding creed. It is really a universal conversation. You can believe as much or as little as you would like about God or any other centrum of thought. Come on in. You are welcome. There is no such thing as saved or lost, truth or falsehood, heaven or hell. The nice thing about it is that you can’t really quit the church; you can only leave the discussion. Faith is a journey, and only the traveler can define where he or she wants to end up or what stops he or she will make in the journey that is defined by only one traveler at a time.

In the emergent church’s furthest extension, you may not believe that Jesus was virgin born or resurrected. All such ideas are but personal viewpoints for some particular stage of your journey. The emergent church is but a conversation to be joined. A place where you talk about things. Your things. You can never be wrong, only right within your context. The Bible is not your authority for faith. You are. The emergent church is a conversation of accommodation. Every topic from Oprah to Shinto, as long as you are sincere and in a talking mood, is welcome.

The church of Christ emerged in the first century. It was not a conversation of accommodation. It was the way. The only way. This kind of exclusivism burns into the permissive chitchat of the emergent church as it now is emerging. What are the exclusive claims that were not to be altered from the first-century church’s time? It didn’t emerge; it was founded. It believed things, unalterable things, about God. Its unchangeable, eternal truth was a body of doctrine. The Apostles’ Creed was the charter of Christ’s church. Here were the great truths that were never offered as part of a discussion. God was one, yet mysteriously triune. Both heaven and hell existed. Jesus was the virgin-born, resurrected Son of God. He was crucified and buried, and on the third day He rose again. He is coming again to gather the redeemed of all the ages unto Himself and welcome them into the ongoing life everlasting.

The emergent church is in an odd sense “missional.” The wordless word must get out. The sincere must have a home where they can talk about things. “Go ye into all the world and talk about stuff” is pretty important to the emergents. What has made it so popular? Like neo-Calvinism, it can’t be wrong. Neo-Calvinism issues from such a tight system of logic that it can answer all questions. Every proposition is drawn from some “proof” text and therefore is tightly tied to the whole corpus of infallible thought. Bye-bye, mystery and art. The emergent appeal also doesn’t risk being wrong. The categories do not exist. Nothing is risked by any statement. Every right statement is sort of wrong, and every wrong statement is sort of right. Black is not entirely black, and the most brilliant white is at best dingy.

One of the great gifts any pastor can give his or her congregation is the power of the positive answer. Let your yes be yes, and your no be no, said Jesus. I think Jesus meant, learn to be a person of information where there exists an answer. When Pilate asked Jesus, “Are You the Son of God?” Jesus said, “You have just said so … of course I am.” The slightest lie here would have saved Him, but Jesus didn’t lie, and He didn’t say, “Let’s talk about it.”

The world is looking for answers. If you have some of them, for goodness’ sake spit ’em out. The world is looking for servants of God whose yes is yes. How elementary, how refreshing.

Do you believe Jesus is the Son of God? Yes.

Today? Yes.

Tomorrow? Yes.

Do you believe in the Holy Trinity? Yes.

Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead? Yes.

To answer the questions of faith with a sure answer leaves you better able to locate your flock, and it leaves your flock able to locate their shepherd. You can each find the other in the darkness. You go to bed knowing there is something firm in the feathers.

Have you been born again? Yes.

Is Jesus coming again? Yes.

Do you believe that Jesus is the only way to God? Yes.

Do you believe in miracles, angels, demons, and creation? Yes, yes, yes, and yes!

Is your church emerging? No, my church was founded.

On the rock, I suppose? No need to suppose. Yes. On the rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Your faith is wonderful! Would you like to come to our discussion club and talk about it? Better that you come with me to the rock that rises from the clarity of our confession. See it there, rising off the iron substance of Matthew 16:16? Thou art the Christ the Son of the Living God. Apart from this great surety, nothing is important and nothing is enduring.

Nothing is redemptive.

So what is there to talk about?

10 Calvin Miller, O Shepherd, Where Art Thou? (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2006), 88.

Letter 13

Standing at the Corner of Orthodox Avenue and Political Boulevard

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“Jesus cannot be separated from His teachings. Aristotle said to his disciples, ‘Follow my teachings.’ Socrates likewise said to his disciples, ‘Follow my teachings.’ Buddha said to his disciples, ‘Follow my meditations.’ Confucius said to his disciples, ‘Follow my sayings.’ And Muhammad said to his disciples, ‘Follow my noble pillars.’

“But Jesus says to His disciples, ‘Follow Me.’

“In all the religions and philosophies of the world, a follower can follow the teachings of its founder without having a relationship with that founder. But not so with Jesus Christ. The teachings of Jesus cannot be separated from Jesus Himself. Christ is still alive, and He embodies His teachings. This is what separates Him from every great teacher and moral philosopher in history.

“This is not to say that other religious traditions don’t focus on a person. Buddhism can’t be imagined without Buddha. Islam can’t be imagined without Muhammad: ‘Muhammad is his [Allah’s] Messenger,’ say the Muslim people. Judaism doesn’t so much focus on a person as on a nation—the Jewish people as a whole, and the religion they follow.

“Yet in all these religions, a follower can abide by all the teachings of its founder without having a relationship with that founder. Not so with Jesus Christ.”[11]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Many years ago—sixty or so—I made up my mind that there was only one way to heaven. I did not do this just on the basis of my intuition alone. The New Testament says over and over again that there is only one way to God (Acts 4:12; 1 Cor. 3:11; Rev. 5:9). Jesus Himself said so (John 10:9; 14:6). We have often been labeled as narrow minded if we act as though we really believe the Jesus-only doctrines. After all, there are Muhammad, Confucius, Mary Baker Eddy, and Ron Hubbard. These Messiahless sorts take turns in giving their heroes a rotating niche in the political temple. We Christians all have such a neurosis about speaking of our allegiance to Christ that we don’t speak of Him at all for fear of being judged for our viewpoints. We have entered the age of the gelatin, low-calorie Jesus. Like Jell-O, Jesus has only the content of whatever diced goodies we throw in the mix. We wouldn’t want anybody to think we were narrow, so we’ve widened the Jesus-only way to eternity and included the Kwanzaa pilgrims along with the Branch Davidians.

Pressurized by political correctness, we have blended Jesus into the ecumenical wallpaper. With Him has gone a host of biblical terms: Nobody gets saved anymore. That’s because we don’t have a Savior anymore. Hell is pretty much gone too. It was such a medieval idea anyway and part of a three-story universe—with hell in the basement, earth on the mezzanine, and heaven in the attic—that we outgrew with Cape Canaveral and deepwater drilling. The second coming is a new kind of fiction, the stuff of scary novels. It is horror reading for evangelicals, while secularians get their kicks out of chainsaw massacres and vampire flicks.

One prominent theologian says there have been no significant books on hell written in the last one hundred years. I don’t know if he’s right or not. But I haven’t heard much of perdition—an odd word, isn’t it?—in recent years. I confess I miss hell … a lot! What Jesus saved us from is no longer perfectly clear. And worse than all that, what He saved us to has become fuzzy. Hats off to Randy Alcorn, who at least has given us a clear word on heaven. We have a lot of fluffy stuff on angels. Christy Lane at least croons about them, even if Harvard Divinity School doesn’t. But the absentee Jesus is the main sticking point. He is just missing from the scene. To speak of Him is to confess your yesteryear biases.

His teachings are also considered yesteryear. The media over and over again speak of evangelism as a reprehensible proselytism. People should be left believing what they do as a natural part of who they are. To try to convert people derives from a kind of bigotry that says what they currently believe is wrong or at least inferior to what Christians believe. So it is better to speak just about God rather than Jesus. Invocations are generalized references to the amorphous Christ. You can talk to God in public all day long; just don’t let on that you actually believe He had a Son.

The odd thing about this is that the Bible awards no kudos for believing in God. The Scriptures say, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1). But the Bible never says those who believe in God will be saved; only those who believe that He had a Son who rose from the dead can be saved (Rom. 10:9). Talk about narrow doctrine; we who have accepted Christ as the only way to God have a real problem, as the world sees things.

Muslims may speak of Muhammad.

Jews may speak of Jehovah.

But we Christians may not pray to or speak of Christ, even though His name is in our name, for the name of Jesus carries an offense at places like NBC or the New York Times.

Some years ago, I climbed to the top of one of the four minarets that mark the corners of the Friday Mosque in New Delhi. I climbed barefoot, as is required by the curators of the mosque, who have determined the pilgrims who visit must show respect for the holiness of Allah. When I reached the top completely out of breath, I met a young imam who was looking out over the city. He abruptly asked me, “Are you a Christian?” In a moment—too sudden for me to think up some more political reply—I simply owned up to the question.

“Yes,” I said, “… have been for years.”

I wasn’t sure what would come next, but his face broke into a smile, and he congratulated me for my openness.

I looked down. It was a long way, and I wasn’t altogether sure what such an immediate answer might lead to. I knew minarets were used to call Muslims to worship, and I had been wondering if they were also a high-altitude way to dispose of Baptists. But what happened was a long conversation about where Jesus (they call him Isa) stood in their scheme of things.

The first time I ever ran into Jesus as an issue of political correctness, I was asked by the regents at the University of Nebraska at Omaha to deliver the invocation at spring graduation. When all the officials, faculty, administration, and students were aligned in the processional and ready to march into the stadium where the event was being held, one young graduate came up to me and identified himself as the university’s student-body president. He seemed pleasant enough, and we shook hands warmly. Then all of a sudden he spoke up rather brusquely and asked, “How are you going to pray today?”

Not being exactly sure what he meant, I took a guess. “Out loud!”

“No, I don’t mean that,” he said.

“Oh, I’m going to pray in an extempore fashion. I don’t intend to read my prayer.”

He still looked perplexed.

“I’ll be removing my hat,” I guessed again, “and this will be a sign for all the program personnel to take off their hats. It’s customary at graduation prayers.”

Once more he offered me a critical look. Then I got it. “Are you asking me if I am going to pray in the name of Jesus?”

His eyes lit up! “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, finally glad to get the right answer.

“Well, sir, I wish you wouldn’t. You see, I’m Jewish and there are a lot of Jews here.”

“Well, you see, I am a Christian, and there’s a lot of us here too.”

“Well, those of us who are Jews wish you wouldn’t pray in the name of Jesus, when it would be just as easy to pray in the name of God.”

“Well, there are some places in the Bible—our particular half of the Bible—where Jesus told us to pray in His name. And so we Christians do this; we pray in Jesus’ name because He likes it that way.”

I could see he was not to be convinced.

“Look,” I said, “the university asked me to say this prayer, understanding I was a Christian minister, with all the allegiances and doctrines that go with my office. If they want a minister who only prays in the name of God, next year they should ask a rabbi. I know several I’ll be glad to recommend to them if they wish.”

“Pomp and Circumstance” began to play, and the procession started to move. When it was time to pray, I prayed in the name of Jesus and the Father and the Holy Ghost. That was about as inclusive as I could get.

That was all of some forty years ago now, when political correctness was just starting to get heavy handed. But more and more, Jesus has become less and less a part of anything formal, even in the center of a nation where 65 percent of the people are members of some church. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we had a huge civic prayer meeting in which the only people asked to say prayers were imams. I felt a little gypped. All the Christian clergypersons in the city were present, but none were asked to pray. I suddenly realized how far we had taken the sin against Jesus. Only Rick Warren’s inaugural prayer for Obama seemed for a moment to give the Savior any right to the nation of faith He forged at a terrible price.

11 Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola, Jesus Manifesto (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 82.

Letter 14

What Does Your Church Offer That’s Missing at the YMCA?

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“‘Religion,’ says Richard Rohr, ‘has not tended to create seekers or searchers, has not tended to create honest, humble people who trust that God is always beyond them. We aren’t focused on the great mystery. Religion has, rather, tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy, glib answers. That’s why so much of the West is understandably abandoning religion.’ We shall not in the end be able to continue the great church growth trend. The YMCA tried this approach 150 years ago. While they succeeded as a community entity, they failed as a Christian movement.”[12]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Community is essential, but the fundamental calling of the church is global. Still, community is the keeper of the global enterprise the church owns. My greatest admiration for the teaching style of Christ is that He managed to take ordinary people—fishers, prostitutes, and the like—and forge them into world citizens who died as martyrs miles from the parochial little villages where He met them. This is Jesus—the globalizing Christ! It is only for this reason that there is Christianity. Had Jesus just taught them to play basketball and build little gyms to keep the local families busy, He would not have mattered much in the course of history.

Here is the thesis of this letter: Churches that ignore their communities will not grow, and churches that will not globalize don’t matter much. Hence there is a delicate balance for survival: Vital Christian churches must care about their communities even as they call those communities to care about the fallen world. To fail in either emphasis is to be “unchristian.” To fail at serving the community is to lack relevance, and to fail at globalization is to strangle on your own parochialism.

From year to year when I was a professor, I would tell my graduating students about taking their places in ministry and making their churches “big.” You do this by evangelizing all the people in your community. But if you are called to a very small community where growing a big church is not possible and your church can never be great numerically, then globalize your parish with cross-cultural style. Take your people—those who will go—on mission trips. Get Dorothy and Toto out of Kansas. Show them Tanganyika or Ulan Bator. Let them see that Jesus is in love with the whole world at once. Once they see Christ among the masses, they will openly confess that they’re not in Kansas anymore, and sooner or later they will go back to Kansas with a real worldview.

I wouldn’t be so dogmatic about building big people if I had not read so many church bulletins. While the Bible has remained the same size for quite some time now, bulletins have gotten ever larger. Sometimes I have left church with as many as fourteen inserts on things the church is doing. They have become herniating documents just to lug to the car when the service is over. Each of the enclosures is pushing someone’s kingdom, and almost all the focus is on nothing farther than six or eight blocks away from the church.

I often feel that I am a walking contradiction in this matter. I continually harp on how the church should provide community for all its members, yet I constantly emphasize that the things that forge this community should be a global dream that reaches back to Christ’s last earthly appearance on Olivet and reaches forward to His coming again. And between the two historical points should be a global obsession, that everyone who lives or ever has lived will dream the dream of Christ for all ages and nations.

It is global outreach with the gospel. It is evangelization of the nations. But it is also so much more. It is the knowledge that much of this world’s charitable institutions have come with Christianity. It is a desire to see this world’s bread multiplied to the hungry. It is a desire to see healing come to the nations. It is a recognition that wherever Christ has been taken by His globalized community, orphanages, hospitals, schools have gone too. This largesse for the poor and ignorant has always been the hallmark of the globalized communities of the West.

It is an international concern that was spawned, I think, by the church but came to attend the nation, which waits with science and compassion. Where there is need we are there, not because we are all part of local churches, but because churches over the centuries have laid down the mandate that God loves this broken world and that we who have so much are under obligation to love all those who have less.

This noblesse oblige is our calling.

I speak in a lot of churches. I see a lot of congregational bulletins. I read them. I am amazed at how cooking them down reveals so much of who the churches are. Ball leagues, bowling nights, skating parties, even summer camps and Boy Scouts often reveal that many churches are just community centers. But here and there, I see little communities with the world on their minds. My son-in-law is a pastor of a large church but not a megachurch. What astounds me is the church’s outreach to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Africa. In some ways he seems a kind and ordinary man, but he never lets his church members forget that they have a global assignment, and they are always talking about the work they have to get done five thousand miles from where they live. They have built a powerful community, but they are far more than a community center. They have important work to do elsewhere on the globe, so important that they have not managed a lot of bridge clubs and bowling ladders. In a way they feel that same calling that permeates the ministry of Christ when He said to His disciples, “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd” (John 10:16).

I was once teaching in the Philippines, and there I met a wonderful brother who was an Ifugao tribesman. He was well educated and had enrolled in a class I was teaching on leadership at the Baguio City Seminary. He, like most Philippine pastors, was bivocational. He invited me up to preach at his church in Banaue, where he was a farmer with his own rice patty that numbered among the beautiful fields of that magical land, where at night the moon cuts the lovely mountains into shredded ribbons of platinum that fall down the mountainsides in silver terraces. Like other farmers, he dried his rice on the asphalt roads of his world and then stored it in huge pots for his winter food.

I envied him for all he knew about rice and about how you can take a few square feet of land and make it feed your family all year.

But other than that he had very little to live on. I had never seen myself as wealthy till I visited his parish. I was struck by the overwhelming contrast that they were all poor by comparison to me and yet they were unbelievably happy. When I went to his concrete-block, roofed-in-corrugated-tin church, I noticed they had electricity and lightbulbs. There were even a couple of what we would call plug-ins along one wall. But they had no hymnals, and so they were writing out their hymns on huge sheets of newsprint and hanging them up for all to read.

After the services, I asked him why they didn’t just buy an overhead projector to display the hymns instead of lettering them so crudely on newsprint.

“Do you know how much those things cost?” he said.

“No,” I replied, thinking they must have been exorbitant.

“Eighty dollars!” he blurted out. “How could we ever afford such a thing?”

He seemed to be sweltering under hopelessness by just naming the price.

“I only make half that much in a month!” He seemed ashamed.

At seeing his demeanor, it was I who felt the burning shame.

The next day I went into Baguio City, bought an overhead projector, and sent it to his church. When he came back to school the following week, he thanked me far more than was necessary. But he also told a few of his other pastor friends at the seminary about my gift. This led to overstated rumors of my wealth and generosity. I bought several more overhead projectors and sent them all the way up to their individual parishes.

It was such a small thing that I feel guilty even mentioning it, but through it I sensed a bond grow between me and my students, and it wasn’t because of anything I had given them. All I had given them came from my abundance. All they had given me came from their need, and yet they esteemed their gifts as nothing.

Another missionary to Indonesia once told me that he had led a wonderful but poor little family to Christ many years ago. In gratitude for this conversion they invited him over for dinner on his birthday. He said their little hut was filthy, not because they hadn’t thought of cleaning it up, but because hygiene itself is a rather unnecessary notion in a world in which filth is a way of life. What impressed him most about the meal was that his hostess had “squandered” half a week’s living on a pint of ice cream that was to be his dessert. When his grateful convert served the ice cream, the tin cup in which she served it was so filthy that little brown trails of dirt melted around the dessert and flowed down around the dip of vanilla ice cream.

“What did you do?” I asked him.

“I silently asked God to galvanize my consumption, thanked her graciously, and ate it.” He paused and said, “I never got sick.” He beamed. “And I honored her sacrifice; it had been considerable.” And then he added, “I love being a missionary. I would never do anything else for a living, but my whole life is often torn between compassion and revulsion.”

As an old pastor to a young pastor, let me counsel you: Teach your people they have an obligation to the world. Don’t take them to the Holy Land where they will all stay in five-star Western-style hotels and walk “where Jesus walked.” When Jesus walked there, they didn’t sell olivewood statues of Him. He walked among the sick and dying. He looked over the city and wept. The closest you can approach where Jesus walked when He was here is probably in Calcutta. Go there and walk where Jesus walked with Mother Teresa.

I used to wrangle with Isaiah 52:7: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” The scripture became most real to me when I saw the body of Mother Teresa lying under the flag of India, with her bare feet sticking out from under the flag. Feet are not generally considered beautiful, I think, but as I saw them, I was struck by the Isaiah passage. Calcutta is one of the 80 percent of large world cities with no central sewer system, and for thirty-nine years those faithful feet of hers had walked through one of the filthiest cities in the world, always carrying her to the proclamation of peace.

I don’t recall seeing any pedicure parlors in Calcutta. There are lots of them near our suburban church in Alabama. And wealthy women—sometimes wealthy Christian women—crave owning abnormally red toenails. They live and die in these parlors, never aware of the Isaiah passage or how feet can be transformed for the advance of the gospel. But this transformation can happen only in churches that have been courageous enough to globalize.

Pastor, consider this: Church members have a way of emulating their pastors. Only when the pastor cares will the people care. Only when pastors are big of spirit will their people be. Did you notice the epigraph to this chapter? The YMCA in 1850 said, “Come to the church, be converted, and play basketball with us.” Now YMCAs 150 years later are simply saying, “Come play basketball with us.” When you read your church’s bulletin and determine the invitation you offer, you will know whether your church is a community center or the globalizing, wounded arm of the Savior.

12 Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs (New York: Crossroads, 1999), 33; as quoted in Miller, O Shepherd, Where Art Thou?, 30.

Letter 15

When You Can’t Find God

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It is a common matter of observation that,

so far as we can judge here below,

the better is the life of the preacher,

the greater is the fruit he bears,

however undistinguished his life may be,

however small his rhetoric and

however ordinary his instruction.

For it is the warmth that comes

from the living spirit that clings;

whereas the other kind of preacher

will produce very little profit,

however sublime be his style and his instruction.[13]

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Dear Young Pastor,

When you can’t find God, play God to someone else.

I have never known a minister yet who died of terminal agnosticism. But I have known plenty who from time to time doubted God. More than doubted, they have stalked Him to the edge of their existence, demanding that He give them any evidence that He is real. They just wanted some little phenomenon—a solar eclipse on Halloween, a toothache for their board chairman, an appearance of the Savior to personally tell them they are on the wrong track—and they would have the courage to try the ministry for one more month.

John Bunyan once ordered God to demonstrate His reality and, looking down at a mud puddle, cried out, “God, if You are real, dry up this mud puddle.” It seemed to Him a trifle, I am sure. Nothing much for a God who split the Red Sea with a strong east wind (Ex. 14:21). Yet, God is not at our whim to demonstrate His godhood. So Bunyan’s puddle stood firm and unchanged. I think for most of us if just now and then God would give us a bit of lightning or spit up a thunderstorm or kick up an earthquake, it would be so handy, and we would get a lot of respect from the deacons as well.

But lo! Our outcry for God to show Himself doesn’t happen. And we find ourselves like Jeremiah in a dungeon, with no good reason for believing that the God who called us is any longer interested in our affairs. Finally the darkest of moods comes when we can’t find His fatherhood as easily as His godhood. Then we, like the despairing philosopher, cry out, “I have looked into the abyss and cried, ‘Father,’ but I heard only the eternal sighing of the empty winds, ‘You have no Father. We are all orphans in the universe.’”

How are we to handle ourselves when God retires early and the night is entirely without light?

At Urbana University in 1977, I gleaned a truth that has delivered me from my momentary flights into agnosticism. A beautiful woman named Helen Roseveare gave it to me. On the night of October 29, 1964, Helen was attacked during the Civil War of Zaire and repeatedly raped and brutalized. She wrote:

On that dreadful night, beaten and bruised, terrified and tormented, unutterably alone, I had felt at last that even God had failed me. Surely He could have stepped in earlier, surely things need not have gone that far. I had reached what seemed to me to be the ultimate depth of despairing nothingness. Yet even as my heart cried out against God for His failure and my mental anguish taunted me to doubt His very existence …[14]

But it wasn’t her physical suffering that most attracted me to her message that evening. It was the fact that she had doubted God and would say so right out in front of thousands of college students. But the real gift she gave me has served me all the rest of my life: When you can’t find Jesus, just play Jesus for someone else, and you’ll soon have all the Jesus your errant heart can hold.

I pass this truth along to you, young pastor. When your doubts have God at sword point, instead of trying to run Him through, get up from the earth on which you lie and go minister to someone who needs you. Ministry is the first, last, and best possible antidote to temporal agnosticism that I know. Believe me, I know whereof I speak. Every time I have found myself under the pall of spiritual depression, I know there is only one way out: ministry!

On that night in 1977 when Helen narrated her tale of abuse, she had placed on the arena stage a “tree” made of a large limb covered with green construction-paper leaves. This tree was to help us hold her focus on the travail of her ministry. As she told of her continual persecution, with each new atrocity, she would tear a leaf—sometimes rather brutally and dramatically—from that tree. When at last her narrative was through, the tree stood bare, and she confessed that she stood alone with no feelings of support from God. That moment in time has riveted itself to my own heart. The strength of her testimony continues to be my reply when God seems silent and far away from my need.

Helen said even as her heart “cried out against God for His failure” and her own mental anguish doubted “His very existence,” she heard God say, “You asked Me when you were first converted for the privilege of being a missionary. This is it. Don’t you want it? These are not your sufferings: They are Mine. All I ask you is the loan of your body.”

She continued:

I tried to say: “But of course, Lord, You know it’s true.” “No,” He quietly rebuked me. “You no longer want Jesus only, but Jesus plus … plus respect, popularity, public opinion, success, and pride. You wanted to go out with trumpets blaring, from a farewell-do that you organized for yourself: with photographs and tape recordings to show and play at home, just to reveal what you had achieved. You wanted to feel needed and respected. You wanted other missionaries to worry about how they’ll ever carry on after you’ve gone … Jesus plus … no, you can’t have it. Either it must be Jesus only or you’ll find you have no Jesus.”[15]

This was also my lesson from God long before I ever knew of Helen Roseveare. Oddly did it come in the same framework of time. I am most reluctant to confess this epoch in my life, lest you think my faith inconstant. For me it was also in 1964 when I found myself suffering as a church planter trying to grow a church that just wouldn’t grow. In this discouraged state, I found myself crying out to God to help the church. But gradually the heavens turned to brass, and I found God at first silent and then, it seemed, absent. I had long nurtured my reading life on Bertrand Russell and the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno. The former long had mocked the existence of God and leveled his atheism at the Almighty with the most powerful sort of logic. The latter was a storyteller, schooled in the “theater of the absurd,” who told a story that had become a kind of shelter for me. I do not justify my era of doubt; I only record it and hope that its honesty may serve you.

Unamuno’s priest in the story guided me too far, and I found myself unsure about the nature of God—even His reality. The priest in this Spanish tale was one who had come to doubt the existence of God and Christ, but he was a pastor par excellence. He loved his people; they were a simple people who needed the Christ he preached to them. While he himself did not believe in God, he went on preaching the gospel as though he did, because it was the best way he could help the people of his parish. He loved his people so much he could not bear to tell them the truth, the horrible truth that there wasn’t any God. And so he determined he would carry his great lie to the grave so that he would never hurt the simple, believing people of his congregation.

It was the nobility of this dishonest priest I so admired, and as odd as it sounded, I somehow latched on to his mystique. I was so in doubt about God at that time and so mixed up in my own heart that I carried on as best I could, loving and ministering to the people I shepherded. This state of “gracious atheism,” as I liked thinking of it within the dark corridors of my despondency, seemed to get me by, until one night a Christian friend of mine named Joe stopped by my office at dusk to ask for my prayers. There had been a huge airline disaster in Alaska that very day, and his brother, along with scores of others, had been killed. He was weeping as he told me of his brother’s death. I had long been so sterile spiritually that I had not done much praying. I tried to ask Joe about the disaster and the family’s plans, funeral services, etc. I told him, as anyone might have, that if there was anything I could do, I would. We continued talking while we made our way outside and stood under the stars in our church parking lot.

“There is only one thing I want you to do right now: Pray!” he said.

“Joe,” I said, “I am very sorry you’ve lost your brother, but I have pretty much ceased to pray at all, because, while I love you very much, I am not sure there is a God, and even if there is, I am not sure He takes any notice of any of us, no matter how great our need.”

Joe began to weep. No longer for his brother, but for his pastor. And he said, “Preacher, if you don’t mind, I would like to pray for you!”

I didn’t give him permission, but he clamped his eyes shut and began to pray for me anyway. I studied him at first. His prayer was so earnest that I found myself broken in shame. I don’t remember his exact words, but I know that he said things like, “God, our pastor has lost his way. I beg you to restore his spirit and call him to Yourself again.” In his brokenness he finally found his way to an amen. We were still standing in the church parking lot, now near his car. The stars blazed overhead, a perfect testament to the God I was trying to ignore. Yet there are times when our blindness is so deep we don’t see the obvious revelations, and so it was with me. But I was touched by Joe’s love for me. He opened his door to get in and drive away.

“Wait a minute, Joe. I’ll pray for you,” I said.

I put my arm around his shoulders and said, “Our Father …” which is about all of the prayer I can now remember. I felt my whole existence shake emotionally. I don’t believe I talked in tongues; I only know that what I did say was so garbled by repentance it was likely unintelligible. I suddenly felt the almighty power of this otherworldly God I had all so recently denied. I was, in my own way of thinking, caught up to one of the lesser heavens, and there Christ scrubbed me up for the rest of my life.

The wonderful thing is that Joe never told anyone in church about the great secret we both held and have kept these fifty years since. He knew enough to destroy me, but he didn’t.

Now that I have lived long enough to have ample reputation to “tide me over” with some credibility, I can be open enough to utterly confess. But I have looked back so often on that night when Helen Roseveare described my spiritual inconstancy. And I know I was rescued by a very simple rule I have kept and cherished to this day. My whole life was reclaimed when I made up my mind to try to minister to another. This is how I arrived at my one great rule of survival: When you can’t find Christ, just play Christ to someone else, and you will have all of Christ you desire.

13 John of the Cross.

14 Helen Roseveare, He Gave Us a Valley (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1976), 180.

15 Ibid., 181.

Letter 16

When Idols Fall

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Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.…

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed

that He is grown so great?[16]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

Any iconoclasm kills mostly its own idolaters. Those who never worshipped these idols go on living. But their names toll a warning to all those who keep their highest praise for the contemporary heroes of Christianity. And as John Donne said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee!” Therefore I would encourage you, dear young pastor, stay away from such low worship.

I say this because I have good friends who have worshipped some national evangelical idols. Which ones? Well, it doesn’t matter all that much. For whatever reasons, they all fall into some kind of excess—sexual, financial, or lavish living—and the end result is pretty much the same: irrelevancy. So whether my young friends worshipped Haggard or Swaggart or Bakker or Richard Roberts, the end of their esteem plunged them into tailspins of lost confidence in the Christian message. They all finally came to their senses and realized that those who worship at such low altars are always living with the risk of disappointment.

In a recent inquiry by a federal bureau, investigators questioned six famous preachers in regard to their lavish lifestyles. Among those under scrutiny were Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and Joyce Meyer. Since 1986 (according to Wikipedia—a none-too-flawless source), at least twenty-four prominent Christian ministers have fallen from effectiveness as a result of some kind of scandal. But it is the sexual fallen souls I want to focus on, because I think sexual sin is the most prevalent of errors. And the problem is not only with evangelicals but among Catholic clergy as well. On February 27, 2002, CBS News revealed that 756 Catholic priests had been charged with pedophile incidents over recent years with more than 10,667 complaints of scandals that never made the papers at the time. John Geoghan, of the infamous Boston Archdiocese, was convicted in 1998 of molesting more than 130 people and was sentenced to 9 years in prison, where a fellow inmate murdered him. The scope of the scandal went all the way up to the former cardinal Ratzinger—now Pope Benedict XVI—for his complicity in trying to cover up the rape of three Houston children by a priest in that diocese.

Inevitably, the entire Christian clergy scandals have led us to at least concur that priests and preachers are fallible and, as such, need to be considered not the most reliable guides to what our own behavior should be. Now, there is little good in my telling you this, since most all of us are mentored—consciously or not—by those we admire. And so it is with me. Sister Close, my childhood pastor, was for me an icon, and I attribute much of my own desire to please God with her noble example of what a true minister of Christ should be. The same should be said for Brother Daley, my first Baptist pastor. To say that these two people were not huge factors in my own call to ministry would be a lie.

I have had three other mentors whose influence on me was infinite, yet had I followed in their footsteps, I would have been totally unusable by God. Like the army of those who fell into sexual sins, they too were counted loss for the kingdom of God. It is these influences that I want to talk about.

All three of these mentors were peers. All three of them were close to my age. Two of them were fellow pastors in the same city where I served, and the other one was a national writer and evangelical leader. All of them had affairs with women in their churches or organizations. Immediately after being caught, each of them called me and asked to talk to me about his sin and what possible course he might take to minimize the dangers to his respective ministry. Those counseling sessions were marked by the men’s obvious mood of repentance and their sense of despair about the future, which was dour. All of them lost face with their flocks or their national boards. They left their ministries; only one of them ever tried to return, and did so, but never with the clout he had earlier enjoyed in his organization.

In every case, my own world was shaken because of their falls. In every case, I redoubled my own sense of integrity and further determined, after seeing their personal agony, that I must ever be on my guard not to follow in their footsteps. Of most impact was the constant idea that I had never imagined such an end for them as I came to observe. And I reasoned that if men of this stature and resolve could fall, then I could fall as well.

The point is that the treasured calling every minister of Christ holds is not always treasured. There are down times in the lives of all the “up people.” And in the case of these three men, their downfalls began because of low points in their ministries that left them feeling that they were in a “slough of despond”—to use John Bunyan’s term—from which they could not extricate themselves. In two of the three cases their own wives had not been there for them (or at least in any measurable way). Their wives seemed not to care about their personal agony in their respective arenas of leadership. And their wives—often busy with their own issues of family or leadership—had withdrawn from them sexually. They each felt they were trapped in a cul-de-sac of nonsupport.

None of the three of them began their illicit affairs as predators. They did not begin by stalking their paramours to achieve some illicit sexual trophy. They were hurting men who finally, after circulating through a thousand sterile boardrooms and committee meetings, found somebody who really listened. The bedroom was never their goal. Oddly, it was the prayer support that they craved. One of my friends told me that he and his wife lived in different worlds that only came to oneness on Sunday mornings when their family was on exhibit as the model marriage, which everyone supposed them to have. Then somewhere in the lonelier corridors of their faulty relationship, they found an ear, which turned into a touch, a tear, a hug, an embrace, and … you get the picture.

But my own forthright intentionality toward these men was not motivated entirely by my love for Christ. As a matter of fact, in any one of the three who fell, I saw in him a highly devotional lifestyle that seemed to me to be superior to my own. I made a mental note that even the most apparently devout could, when the circumstances were right, make such a fragile end to a strong ministry. I think at least as important as my love for Christ was my fear of making just such an end to my own treasured calling. Remember, Ashley Montagu wrote that men think about sex 75 percent of their waking time. I’m only supposing this is as true for ministers as it is for laymen. I’ve never cared for the statistic, not because I don’t think it’s true, but because I don’t particularly like owning up to it. Such a truth leaves us pastors living on the edge of hell even as we sweetly preach Christian victory.

I, like most pastors, have a least one sermon on Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” I like preaching on those kinds of texts because they leave the inference that Ashley Montagu is wrong, at least when it comes down to ministers. Here is the grand impression: When we preachers are tempted to sin, we just rehearse all the godly adjectives in Philippians and—presto!—We are safe. We are managing our thought lives perfectly. But I now believe that what’s in a minister’s thought life can get him halfway to hell even while he’s dedicating babies or just praying in a hospital ward.

When did I arrive at this kind of honesty? It came to pass somewhere in the midst of my three mentors’ entanglements. I was on a pastors’ conference program in Canada with the late Ray Stedman, who was then pastor of the Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California. This man I so admired, aware of the rash of ministerial sexual debacles, was not telling us pastors what we could do to quiet our libidos. He just told us how he managed his. In words rather like this he said, “You might think by looking at my old white head of hair that I live completely free of any sexual meanderings. But I have had my problems in my time, like all the rest of you. I would like to tell you that when I have been tempted to lust, I simply called on the Holy Spirit to fill me, and thus I won over my worst nature. But the truth is, it was not the Holy Spirit that most motivated me to live above indulgence. I just kept hearing—over and over again—what Jesus said in Luke 12:3 [KJV]: ‘Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.’” So I have given up on using Philippians 4:8 to cleanse my inner temple. I have adopted the Stedman doctrine. It’s this “housetop exposé” that terrifies me into being my best self.

Probably you think it’s a too severe doctrine—a paradigm of fear even! In that case, find something else that will keep you straight. I only know that good men have perished because they lost their way in the darker moments of their lives. But what they have discovered is that Luke 12:3 isn’t just about the rooftop disclosures of eternity. No, it all happens now. In the very house that heard their whispers of infidelity, the rooftops betrayed them. They woke to find their pictures in the papers, and printed there were all the things they had whispered in the closet. The rooftops had destroyed them. I enjoin you: Be afraid of those discoveries that set you naked on a rooftop and shout to all the world, “Here was a foolish man who was never wise enough to fear.”

16 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.2.135, 149.

Letter 17

When Bishops Quarrel

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“When it finally occurs to the new Narcissus that he can ‘live not only without fame but without self, live and die without ever having had one’s fellows conscious of the microscopic space one occupies upon this planet,’ he experiences this discovery not merely as a disappointment, but as a shattering blow to his sense of selfhood.”[17]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

The Avignon Papacy consisted of the seven popes who led the Catholic Church between 1305 and 1378. During these turbulent years, the church not only moved out of Rome but also actually built a fairly impressive building to house themselves in France. Then, following those years, the popes all packed up and moved back to Rome, leaving the Avignon capital to move forward or die on its own. But between 1378 and 1423 popes resided in both places, each claiming to be the legitimate leaders of the church. Historically the later Avignon popes became known as the antipopes, and the quarrel ultimately died.

But enough of church history.

Evangelicals have long been a loose conglomerate of leaders without any real institutional formality about their leadership, but they have had a great deal of influence on evangelicalism. I wonder if the argument and politic of the Avignon popes were as important as they believed. What happens at the grass roots when bishops quarrel? Nothing much. In the case of the popes, they had been having all their arguments in Latin anyway, which nobody in the villages spoke; so even if the good laity happened to overhear their debates, they would likely never have guessed the substance of their arguments.

And so it really is with the evangelical lords of their video and jumbotron worlds. These are the current lords of the earth. Not only do most people not know what the Christian gurus discuss in their thousands of videoconferences, but life is so basic that their needs don’t pay much attention to the footnotes of the big boys whose names may be known but not their arguments. The quarrels rage, however. Is Rob Bell a universalist? Is Rick Warren? Is there consequence in John Piper inviting Rick Warren to his annual Desiring God conference? Does it matter that Andy Stanley doesn’t like the word shepherd? (Yes, but only to Andy Stanley, I’m sure.) And if Brian McLaren wants a widened orthodoxy, can it really matter in the realm of those who must still concern themselves with joblessness or the heartbreak of psoriasis? Is N. T. Wright too revisionist with Pauline theology as John Piper asserts, or is Piper himself, as McLaren might assert, too stingy with his orthodoxy? Is Osteen conservative or only cute?

While I hate to spoil the playground of those who see their dialectic as all-important, the truth is the world is too needy to care about what is going on at the top of evangelicalism. I’ve often wondered if there is a relationship between how the quarreling evangelical bishops rate their importance and the fact that four thousand churches every year are locking their doors never to open them again. If the elitists keep their quarrels in bright focus, is it possible that they could wake up and find that their significance has been demolished by a complete loss of all interest in popular religion? Is it possible that their arguments in the last desperate days of the church have kept them too busy to see that culture moved on during their war of preeminence?

I heard that when the Bolshevik Revolution formed to proclaim the church illegal, the bishops of Russia were meeting to discuss what color their clerical robes should be in carrying out their ministry to their churches. It gets so hard to examine the Christ of the grassroots gospel and to figure out His connection to the quarrels at the top. When I find intellectuals of Christianity pushing viewpoints, I remember the first line of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”[18] Of course, just as the literati sooner or later define the borders of real literature, so do the elites likely define the borders of orthodoxy. Such definitions are not likely to rise from cable-television pundits. Kierkegaard is to be more trusted to define the faults and foibles of Danish orthodoxy precisely because he was not counted worthy to be invited to the bishops’ debates. And now after all, the issues and arguments they loved to adore have been swallowed up by a godless secularism. I wonder if the Danish clergy, who kept writing papers and essays citing each other’s footnotes, even saw it coming. In his 2002 best seller, The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins pointed out that the vitality of Christianity that is perishing in Western Europe and the United States is just now being born in the Southern Hemisphere and in China.

By the time religion gets involved in its own interior arguments to this extent, it is probably so far gone from practical relevance that it is pretty much invisible and not at all recoverable. The truth is that religious movements are healthier when they are less diagnostic. The most important medicine is practiced on the battlefield and never in the medical schools. Theology only really matters when it is affecting and changing the culture. In its current state when only a handful of ministers are graduating from seminary every year, probably the movement is too far gone for any elitist studies to revive it.

Not too long ago, Anne Graham Lotz encouraged us to keep it simple and in effect was saying it doesn’t really matter how good we are at defining postmodernism while the man in the streets in need of basic spirituality is crying out, “Just give me Jesus!” Is Ms. Graham Lotz ignoring the needs of grassroots Christians, or is there a difference between what the evangelical academes think is important and what the rank-and-file Christians need the church to be?

So, young pastor, I would encourage you to live openly in your parish. Read the Bible as though the faith depended upon it. Read and keep in touch with the upper crust, but do not lose your way in the search for some icon you want to esteem. Read the ancient voices of the saints. Ask yourself what Jude meant when he talked about the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Exactly where was Jesus before any theological opinions had crystallized into variant viewpoints? Care about the flock. Whatever theology you arrive at, test it in the laboratory of pastoral care. You will likely begin and end your ministry in a small church. This is neither a threat nor a curse. Every church can matter, and most of us live and die somewhere far beneath the grand temples where the bishops live and write opinions.

Therefore, trust no theology that doesn’t work where the crowd is small and the pay is inadequate. Many pastors find they can’t survive there, but all of them sooner or later have the chance to try their ministry in the desperate world of small-group dynamics. If your church is small, it will likely more approximate the ministry of St. Paul than Dr. Megachurch. It will number its community much more like those who met in the upper room to wait for Pentecost than those who attend Easter services in football stadiums.

Best of all, never despise the day of small things. When Jesus comes again, only two—not two thousand—will be working at the mill. One shall be taken. The other will be reading dialectical spirituality and miss the whole event.

17 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 22.

18 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 3.

Section Three

Never Cast a Vision in an Empty Sanctuary

Leaders, whatever their professions of harmony, do not shun conflict; they confront it, exploit it, ultimately embody it.[1]

1 James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 39.

I cannot lead

If I will not follow.

I dare not command,

When I have not obeyed.

Self-will is only

A sacred oath made hollow.

Disobedience is only

A trust mislaid.

Calvin Miller

“Follow Me,

And I will make you fishers of men.”

They immediately left their nets and followed Him.

Matthew 4:19–20 NKJV

Letter 18

The Player-Coach

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“Often a company or church consists of a few hassled, harried leaders and a great many take-it-easy followers. Generally, such followers have not been challenged to participate in bearing the workload of those who lead, and no great leader can live long in this condition. Followers must be made to believe that they are a part of a team. They must be made to participate with the leader in the work the team has to do. Such participation will level out both the busyness at the top and the lackadaisical attitude at the bottom.”[1]

Now this is the law of the jungle,

It’s as old and as true as the sky,

And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper

And the wolf that shall break it must die,

As the creeper girdles the tree trunk,

The truth runneth forward and back,

For the strength of the pack is the wolf,

And the strength of the wolf is the pack.[2]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

The ultimate model for any church administration is “team.” The ultimate metaphor for pastoring is coaching: player-coaching. Never ask your people to do anything you have never done and wouldn’t do. Never ask them to run a play you consider beneath your dignity. Go on the janitorial staff for a couple of weeks. Clean a few toilets. Not only will you learn a lot about sanitation; you will never see your janitors in quite the same way again. You will never again think of the janitors as underlings but as important players. They will rise in your eyes, because you learned to coach them from a playing position.

Ask the nursery worker to schedule you for duties you can help with. Learn how to put on a diaper, to change a crib sheet, to stay calm when all the babies are crying at once. My mother was a nursery worker all her life. When she was a seasoned matron in Baptist baby world, I asked her, “Mom, how do you live with all these doctor and lawyer church members who always seem unnecessarily snooty to me?”

“Well, son,” she said, “I have been a nursery worker here for a long time. I knew all these doctors and lawyers when they were just babies. I have seen all their backsides when they were too young to know they had backsides. It takes all the fear out of serving them later.”

A player-coach can pick up on such wisdom only by serving with his team in things mundane, even as he leads them spiritually.

Perhaps my favorite evidence of this is leading in the church-outreach program. I have never known a pastor who was afraid to evangelize and could lead other people to do it very well. So many preachers tell their people to “witness” while never doing it themselves. Cowards are never good at teaching courage. I used to regularly take laypersons with me when I went out to present Christ to those who needed Him. The first few times I ever did this I was most nervous. No one who is renowned for “soul winning” likes to be seen as afraid to do it. But after doing it for a while, I realized how important it was to risk being discovered as weak at my art in order to help others move past their fears. Further, most people need to be coached on how to fail as well as how to succeed. Only a player-coach can teach both arts at the same time.

No coach was ever so great that he or she won every game. No pastor was ever so great that he or she did either. I have always enjoyed living through the failures of ministry so my children and church members could see how I failed. To teach the ins and outs of failure is a rotten job, but somebody has to do it if the church is ever to become a stable institution grounded in reality. It’s the tied game on fourth down when the blocked punt really counts. You’ve got to be willing to look bad if you want to really look good. Talk to Jesus about your Good Fridays. He looked like a loser on His, but you can really trust a player-coach like that when He says, “Take up your cross.”

Wait till the stands are full, then drop the ball, square your shoulders, and walk off the field. Do this in the first quarter, and the rest of the team will stay to the end of the game. Remember this: Nobody wants to sit alone in the stands. Everybody wants to play the game.

Once upon a time I had in my congregation a wonderful teenage boy whose adjustment in life had been cheated by a restrictive home life. He just couldn’t relate to kids his own age in our youth group. Our staff was nice to him, and so he hung around the church office a lot. To my shame I often put him off when he wanted to talk, and he always wanted to talk—really he was just short on listeners.

Everything about him said, “I’m lonely … would you be my friend?” Our church janitor agreed to the cry and asked him to help sweep and mop the floors. The boy agreed. He spilled the mop buckets, poured on too much wax, and dumped too much Comet in the bathroom stools, but I never heard the janitor act impatiently with him. In fact, the janitor only complimented the boy.

On the day this boy killed himself he placed a call to our church janitor and thanked him for his kindness. While the janitor listened, a revolver went off on the boy’s end of the line, and our staff drove to his home to find him dead. We all went to his funeral. I preached it. But my vision of leadership had all been confirmed. The last person he ever talked to in this life was a fellow player. He had been recruited by a fellow player who gave him the only shred of loyalty he had ever had.

Team building is a tricky art. Those who appear to be so much in control are often crying out for a place to join the huddle. And those who would leave an impression are not always the ones in charge.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.[3]

In my book on leadership I included the following letter to a player-coach:

Dear Leader:

When I was a little boy, I wanted to play baseball in the city youth league. I was sure proud when I got my uniform and cap two weeks before our first practice session. I wore it around everywhere—to school, to church, on shopping trips with my mother. But after that first practice, I felt very bad. My coach had noticed that, while I looked good in my uniform, I could not catch the ball. I was not a good batter, and I was a poor thrower. This trio of faults the team recognized as a triple threat.…

But best of all, when the coach treated us to ice-cream cones after our winning games, I always got a double dip just like everyone else. It’s hard to feel like a loser when you’re licking ice-cream cones with the champions. I was a part of a winning team, and the coach let everyone know it too.

Well Pastor, you’ve probably noticed by now that I can’t sing very well. I also won’t make a very good Sunday School teacher. I’ve never been very good at public speaking. Actually, I’ve always been shy in front of a group. I don’t have a very high paying job, so my tithe is not going to be much help. But before I join your church, I gotta know, “Do I still get an ice-cream cone after the game?”

—Your Follower[4]

And that’s the question we all have: “Do I still get an ice-cream cone after the game?”

Player-coaches build teams.

Never coach what you’ve never played.

Spend a lot of money on ice cream and remember this: Suicides often die on the playing field. They also die on the bench where they sit playing Russian roulette hours at a time and no one ever notices.

1 Miller, The Empowered Leader, 158.

2 Rudyard Kipling, “The Law of the Jungle.”

3 Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory,” in Hazel Felleman, Poems That Live Forever (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 33.

4 Miller, The Empowered Leader, 156–57.

Letter 19

Breaking Your Bondage to the Success Syndrome

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Meet the new gladiators: megapastors in the arena of pride. Avoid this game. Most who play it lose, and many who win are not sure to whom the victory should be credited. “[One pastor] was tempted to measure success by the size of the congregation. Yet because his congregation was a small one, he always felt like a failure. Due to his fear of not being or doing the best, he tended to be indecisive and to avoid conflict. He had grown up in a family of high achievers and felt that, by comparison, his own achievements had been unspectacular and modest, far from ‘good enough.’ This perfectionism made him more vulnerable to emotional exhaustion as the pressures built up around him in the church. As a result, he became increasingly paralyzed.”[5]

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Dear Young Pastor,

Authors Kent and Barbara Hughes have addressed a critical problem: the success syndrome. It’s more than just critical; it’s a killer.

The success syndrome originates from many fountains, but it always flows down toward the same muddy lagoon of despair. One of the fountains that feeds the lagoon is church-growth conferences, which are usually set up to feature prominent role models (usually from distant population centers, and they nearly always rise in the suburbs) who have built impressive churches that are vastly praised. These churches are all dressed in strings of titles: “one of the largest churches in America” or the “third-largest church in Houston” or “the New England place to be.” These huge churches avoid using the names of the saints, preferring to be known by names of rivers or mountains or beaches or trees. They rarely carry mainline labels such as Baptist or Presbyterian and prefer to include the word community rather than any real strong adjectives that would identify their doctrine or heritage.

Another fountain that feeds the lagoon is the contemporary shtick. Each of the really successful large-church pastors has a particular shtick that none of the others quite have. One may have a “back to the Word of God, Reformed” shtick. A famous megachurch pastor I know has a storytelling shtick. Another shtick is a national center for the singles culture. Another church is famous for its creative graphics and drama shtick. To really profit from a church-growth conference, you must figure out what your own shtick is and then try to get all the idiosyncrasies of your life and ministry to line up behind it.

Each of these different Baskin-Robbins flavors often takes its own particular taste seriously. I once preached at a church whose shtick was to avoid the flavor of any old-time religion. In one of the services I used the words altar call and had three of their church officers catch me and lecture me between services so I wouldn’t blaspheme their “new-time religion” syndrome in any of the later services. In all such shtick-driven worship, the neuroses are as large as the doctrines. I have often wondered if I had denied the virgin birth in my sermon if I would have received nearly as stern a rebuke as I did over the words altar call.

Many of these successful pastors have published books on how to grow a church. But generally, these books do not include a variety of paradigms. They usually follow a more restrictive recipe for church growth that is big only on those growth techniques that they have proved and put to work to make them great. Meanwhile, back in Smallsville using your own bumbling techniques, you’ve been marking off your frustrating years trying to be well rounded with a growth plateau that has left you chewing your fur.

It’s not that you don’t care about growing your church. You do. And yet 80 percent of your church-growth brothers using techniques similar to yours have abandoned their call to build a church and began to sell life insurance, teach school, or sell men’s suits where they will never ever have to meet any really contemporary pastor who traded all their suits in for something more Tommy Bahama.

The thing that is wrong with your assessment of the high-rolling, church-growth pastors is that you think they are free of the success syndrome. But it’s not true; in fact, they’re the real players. Has God rewarded them because they have settled in to a huge congregation where the Spirit visits them regularly to congratulate them that they deserve a big church? They are not dying from losing the competition. No, they are captive to the success syndrome because they are winning.

However, they are insecure. They know that nobody keeps winning forever. They read constantly. Great books? No, not all of them. Many of them are reading things like The Idiot’s Guide to Big Attendance or The Rancher’s Guide to a Big Spread or Don’t Add to Your Membership, Multiply.

One of the things I don’t much like about myself in my thirty-five years as a pastor is that I played the game—at least from time to time—and played it fastidiously. I think there were brothers along the way who admired me because our church was always a fast-growing church. Did I really want their admiration? … Yep! I hadn’t been liberated from the success syndrome. It took me decades to get out of the race. Why did I want out? Because I found the old adage was right: Even when you win the rat race, you are still a rat.

Then one day, when I was speaking at a church-growth conference, I actually found myself saying, “The Holy Spirit don’t sponsor no copycats. He never leads any two pastors to do things in exactly the same way. Be as individual as your fingerprint. If God intends for you to be on this program next year, your really big chance at it is to be as unique as you can be. Throw away all your manuals that you just bought from the book tables outside the auditorium, and spend a little time with Jesus.”

I remember thinking, Whoops, where did that come from? Sometimes the Holy Spirit can sponsor an intrusive shot of honesty in the middle of the weaker lies I plan to tell. But, wow, that was right! And I had just blurted it out over the heads of those who looked shocked at my unexpected volley of integrity.

Well, it turned out that I was the one who wasn’t asked back the next year.

But of course, others were—others who are always there, defending their techniques, championing their own neuroses about what it takes to keep God happy. One thing I wish I had done better was to be sensitive to those who I knew wanted me to tell them how to grow a church. I would always puff out my chest and tell them.

What a sham.

One of these young men started a church the same year I did in Omaha. We were on opposite sides of the same city. We were nothing alike. I’m a rather pleasant and affable chap with a gift for gab, “a sanguine salesman” said my Myers-Briggs profile. I had turned my natural talents into a gift for evangelism. He, on the other hand, was good at spiritual formation. My gift put bread on the table and people in the pews. His gift only caused him to love God more. I read the books by the pastors who led (or “ran”) the churches of what’s happening now. He read the saints and tried to love God more.

Inevitably, he wound up in the mental hospital. His poor church was dying and couldn’t pay him what he needed to live. My salary was always better than his. I remember hearing some of my members ask, “Tsk! Tsk! Do you think pastors who really love God can have mental problems?” I often found myself silent in the face of their assessment. I think a lot of great men are never prone to find their true greatness because their people usually admire only the gabbier, more relational shepherds.

Further, we ought to care when we see a brother or sister lost to the success syndrome. And not just care, we ought to help each other back to the unique fingerprint of our individual strengths. There ought to be honor given to each other for whatever spiritual strength we possess. Church growth is one of them … but only one of them. Walking with Christ is the prior gift.

I don’t need to be in power.

I don’t need to be the best.

I can live without the prefix mega.

I am a metaphysician who has met the physician.

I can heal.

I can splint.

And I can’t afford the next megachurch conference.

So I’m sticking close to home and wrapping bandages for the job at hand.

5 Richard Winter, Perfecting Ourselves to Death (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 52.

Letter 20

Image or Vision: It’s Your Choice

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“[It is futile] to try to trump up a vital self-image by pasting together the best part of those heroes we might wish to worship. It struck me one day in a Christian bookstore that most of the ‘church growth’ books I picked up in that store were not books on vision but on image. They hadn’t been published to help me see the world in a particular way but to help the world see me—were I a megachurch pastor—in a particular way. These were books that enticed the pastor of limited self-image to be like somebody else the world admired. What a cul-de-sac of emotional poverty this is. These books were published to serve the idolatries of megapastor wannabes.”[6]

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Dear Young Pastor,

The words image and vision seem to pass close, but in reality they are miles apart. Vision is seeing down the road ahead, the road called “what God has given me to do.” Image is how you want the world to see you. Image has not been prompted to think well of itself as a reward for any real achievement. It is completed by such simple things as applying makeup or changing clothes. Image is ego given space to decorate itself. Vision, on the other hand, requires a calendar and a set of carving tools to sculpt one’s entire reason for being. Vision’s only important dress is “purpose.” Rick Warren is right; it ought to do the driving.

Image, for the pastor, is largely appearance. Appearance has its limits of acceptability. As a pastor, you are forever locked into some of its accommodations. You have only to grow a beard, pierce an ear, or wear a gaudy tie to test just how important your appearance is to your congregation. I have a dear friend who wore a T-shirt to a youth rally that tested his acceptability. On the front of his shirt was the phrase “Go to Hell …” and on the back of the shirt it said, “… or Heaven, it’s your choice!” The youth loved it, but the denominational moguls who attended the camp considered it “unchristian,” and those who claimed to really love Jesus thought it was “vulgar!” Dress codes are important, but they really don’t change very much. Megachurch pastors wear Levi’s in the pulpit and believe Jesus would too if He were—God forbid—a modern messiah with a megachurch. Traditional pastors still wear suits, Oxford button-down collars, just like Jesus wants.

Some years ago, when I was in seminary, I worked full-time plus overtime for Hallmark Cards. I had a friend named Bill who also worked there. We both worked second shift till midnight, and sometimes, very late within the ghostly, cavernous bowels of the company warehouse, we would share our dreams for our love affair with Christ. He, for reasons of his own walk of faith, wanted to go to Africa as a missionary and die for Christ. I wasn’t as big on dying for Jesus as he was. I only wanted to go to Nebraska and plant a church. We confessed our visions freely to each other. Vision nags at you once you state it. It talks back to you in your lonely moments. So within twenty years I had actually planted a congregation in Omaha, and he was secretary of missions for West Africa. We had no image when we shared our dreams with each other. We usually worked in T-shirts and dungarees. And we actually had no image we regarded very seriously after we had completed the vision God had given each of us.

John Wesley is reputed to have said, “Give me England or I die!” He didn’t die—at least right away—and England was his for the sake of the gospel. The problem with vision is that it can be bought off for pennies. I have known a lot of pastors who were bought off just for the prize of tenure. Tenure is not a vision. Tenure plus achievement is, but not tenure alone.

In the process of planting a church in Nebraska, I went through four different building programs in twenty-five years. At the end of the second program, I learned a new truth about my vision. On the night before the Sunday we were to cut the ribbon to officially open the new building, I took a final walk through the glistening new facility with my young associate pastor. We surveyed the new pews, the baptistery, the choir loft, all filled with congratulatory bouquets from contractors and subcontractors. All was in readiness. All was beautiful!

My associate said, “This must be all a man of God could ever want.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. Suddenly I realized that this second building we had built wasn’t the end of my vision. No, I had been called to Omaha to try to win a portion of the city to Christ. I had not been called there to build a couple of buildings and act as though this meager attainment defined my vision.

Needless to say, however, opening a new building was a kind of milestone. My picture was in the paper, and the local newspaper reporter had some wonderful things to say about me, so it did heighten my image. Image was there big-time, but the vision had not yet been achieved. I would have to stay an additional fifteen years to make that happen.

The problem with these visionary stopovers is that it is really easy to mistake the acquisition of some lesser level of community prestige and image with the achievement of a stopping place. Why? Because the further we move in terms of achieving our dreams, the easier it gets to rationalize that we’ve gone as far as we need to. This is because the bigger the dream, the more difficult it gets to pull it off. The second building program that I was so proud of cost around $700,000 and seated around 600 people. The final building we finished ten years later cost around $7,000,000 and seated 2,400 people. That program required so much more work and was so heavy to bear at times I actually prayed to be delivered from the pain of it.

But in the fullness of time it came to be. What is the point of all this? Just this: Don’t be bought off by secondary stopovers of any kind, stopovers that keep you from the real destiny God gave you. Don’t let these mere image builders block you from your arrival at your completed vision.

Here’s what I really learned that night when my young associate congratulated me on my stopover: The vision isn’t “being there” but “getting there.” Perhaps that’s why Paul didn’t just stop with his sally in Asia Minor and call it his finished mission. There was across the Hellespont a new continent: Europe. And beyond that the further dream of preaching in Athens or Rome. And as far as we know, he never got to Spain, but in his Roman letter he stated that this too belonged to his vision. He probably died before he ever got there, but at least he knew he was on his way when it happened.

If so, Paul never completed his vision. He died somewhere en route to his vision’s end. But in a way, visions should always be bigger than our life span. We should die in health while pushing our way toward the important thing that we couldn’t reach even though we strained ourselves in the attempt to finish the dream that wouldn’t let us go. But while pushing for the dream of God, we should not be bought off by something as superficial as trying to look good. This is true in your career as well as your personal reputation. The next time you buy a church-growth book, ask yourself: Did I buy this so I could be as famous as the author or simply because this writer might have something in his bag that I could use in chasing my own vision? So many of our flights into new views of ourselves have proved flighty and short lived.

One night not so many years ago, I went out to make an evangelism call in a home. When I arrived, the residents invited me in. The television was blaring when I entered. I took the seat they provided for me. When I sat down, they were so engaged in watching the television that for a moment or so I joined in watching with them. A commercial was playing that I have never forgotten. It was advertising a new men’s cologne. It was mesmerizing. I found it hard to look away.

In this compelling video a Tarzan-sort-of-a-Schwarzenegger, largely naked except for a loincloth, was proceeding down a jungle trail. He was leading a leopard on a leash. Ever and anon as they moved down the trail, Tarzan would stop and snarl at the leopard, and the leopard would snarl back. It was savage and virile and more macho than a crack-up at Talladega. In the middle of all this savagery, there swung down out of the trees a beautiful, voluptuous woman—let’s call her Sheena—who was scantily dressed and lust worthy. Sheena stopped both the leopard and Tarzan and snarled at them. They snarled back. The camera zoomed in as Sheena took out a bottle of the men’s cologne and sprayed it on Tarzan. He snarled a final time and scooped her into his magnificent biceps and crushed her against his 54-inch chest. He kissed her furiously. There was a great deal of drooling at this point. Then, way too soon, all snarling stopped and the commercial was over.

I forgot all about witnessing and excused myself from the TV room and started directly for home. As soon as I was in my car driving away, I snarled and said, “You know, Miller, you’re a lot like that man in the commercial.” I went to a drugstore and bought me a bottle of that stuff. I got back in my car, and just before I pulled into my driveway, I stopped and sprayed myself liberally with this mist of passion, then went into the house.

My wife was standing just beyond the door as I entered, and I took her in my arms, snarled at her, crushed her against my 42-inch chest, and planted one on her. It was savage and macho. It was me Tarzan, you Jane. I thought she would be swept away. To my surprise, she seemed unmoved and said, “Why can’t you ever pick up your own socks when you leave in the morning?”

Suddenly I could see I wasn’t that much like Tarzan after all. I had just been sold a bill of goods on bogus image. We all want to buy a six-pack set of abs and an image of ourselves that isn’t so confoundedly Southern Baptist. The need for this infatuation can be overwhelming.

I had a friend who went to a big church-growth conference in Chicago. He came back with a whole bag of tricks. I knew what he was thinking. When I get through with all these books and manuals, I’m gonna be just like my alter ego in Chicago, my new self—my avatar. A year later his church was even smaller than before he went to the conference and bought the books. Snarling leopards and megachurch mystiques pass close … but that’s another story.

Only two things are necessary for real significance. One of them isn’t image. One of them is a vision, and the other is a good look at your thumbprint. Look at it. Stare at it until you honestly believe there’s not another you in this world. And when you come to believe that, the vision God gave you—that only you can accomplish—will be yours. Better than that, it is His. This is the foundation of significance: Settle on your vision, and your image will be authentic. But pursue image, and you may miss your vision altogether.

6 Miller, O Shepherd, Where Art Thou?, 4.

Letter 21

Never Resign till Tuesday

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“My child, I have a message for you today; let me whisper it in your ear, that it may gild with glory any storm clouds that may arise, and smooth the rough places upon which you may have to tread. It is short, only five words, but let them sink into your inmost soul; use them as a pillow upon which to rest your weary head: ‘This thing is from me.’”[7]

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Dear Young Pastor,

I need to tell you right up front that I hate Mondays. Mondays are those days when all world wars begin. It’s the only day of the week that the divorce courts stay open an extra hour. It’s the day when our best friends die and someone steals our identity and our accounts are overdrawn. It is the day when most pastors, weary with the trek, walk out on God. Resignations always pick Monday. While there are no real statistics that back up any of this, from my own experience, completely unsubstantiated, I believe it is true.

I have always argued for the six-day workweek. I know in a sense it wracks the whole concept of Sabbath. But if we could just go from Sunday to Tuesday, preachers would better survive the ministry.

I have always loved the parable that speaks of Jesus coming down to earth to have a look around the evangelical milieu. As He walked the city midmorning, He came across a poor weeping man.

“Forsooth, dear weeper,” said Jesus Elizabethanly. “Why weepest thou?”

“Lord, I weep because I am lame as Thou canst see.”

“Poor friend of God, weep no more, but be thou healed.”

The poor man was instantly healed and ran off, praising God generously. Continuing on, Jesus came across another sidewalk weeper.

“Forsooth, dear weeper, why weepest thou?”

“Lord, I weep because I am blind as Thou canst see.”

“Poor friend of God, weep no more, but be thou healed.”

The poor man was instantly healed and ran off, praising God for his sight! Continuing on, Jesus came across yet another sidewalk weeper.

“Forsooth, dear weeper, why weepest thou?”

“Oh Lord, I weep because it is Monday, and I am a pastor.”

And Jesus sat down and wept with him.

It is for this reason I say: Never resign till Tuesday. I realize that only those who make this a firm, unyielding precept will ever build up tenure in any church. Why?

Because Monday is the day when we process Sunday. On Sunday we preachers get a lot of rocket-propelled grenades. The outfall of shrapnel is intense:

“Pastor, your sermons don’t feed me,” say all the chubby Christians.

“I sure hope you’re always our pastor,” which sounds like a compliment, but in reality we can’t help but wonder if they’ve heard something about us from the personnel committee.

“Pastor, will you be taking the furniture from the manse when you leave?” This is often hard to process because we didn’t know we were going anywhere, and what is particularly scary is that sometimes the laity knows before the clergy.

Sundays are a holiday for paranoids. When anyone says pleasantly, “Hello, Pastor!” we have to ask, “I wonder what they meant by that?” The thing that makes paranoia so real is the knowledge that sometimes when you feel that everyone is out to get you, they really are.

The general response to the questionable things of the ministry is a smile. We pastors get good at this. We smile. It’s Sunday’s most important work. We smile all day long. There are smiles that are spontaneous and happy, and there are smiles that are ego defensive. We smile, we shake hands, and we do our PR stuff just to paste the congregation together. We smile and recognize the visitors. We smile when there are no visitors. Once in the early hours of Monday morning, I woke up and found myself smiling. Why, in the middle of the night, would I have been smiling? Because it’s what we pastors do. We smile to keep Monday at bay. Monday was originally named after the moon, as Sunday was named after the sun, but in ministry Monday is the time for putting the day under the microscope and analyzing the state of the congregation.

They say Botox works because it paralyzes your face, and the wrinkles and laugh lines all disappear from your visage. Sundays do the same thing for us ministers. I have gone into the pulpit feeling so bad about myself because someone said some little snide something that unleashed the RPGs for the day. The incoming hostility of Sunday has to be taken from the day into the laboratory of Monday for study and analysis.

But still, the worst thing you can do on Monday is resign. The problem with resigning is that it’s so terminal. Most of us got into the ministry because we felt God had called us to be ministers. Most pastors, however, are not so willing to wait for God to call us out of the ministry. This we do all by ourselves, usually as a response to the pain we can no longer bear. Based on all I’ve seen, there are only three ways to handle the pain of pastoral care.

First is just to quit. Most take this approach. I have heard the statistics fly at me from lots of different sources, but generally they all agree in substance. Within ten years of graduating from seminary, eight out of ten graduates will have left the ministry for some other kind of work. For reasons of their own they just decide they can’t tolerate the pressure or the emptiness in which they once defined their lives.

I believe the statistics, for now in the seminary where I work only about 17 percent of the students are studying to become pastors. The rest want to be something else. Too many of them have no stated career goals of any kind. Quitting has become the preferred answer to tenure in the ministry. It is a dismal goal, and many of these resignations are the work of lost Mondays when the pain of it all caught up to them.

Second, there is a group of us who are trying to live with the pain but in a kind of hopeless way. This group has decided that they cannot defeat the pain; they can only agree to coexist with it. In the jewelry industry this is called the process of culturing pearls. Those who build the best cultured pearls realize that they implant the burr and wait while the hapless oyster makes a deal with life. And so the broken pastor will sometimes pearlize his injuries and wait.

Waiting is the hard part. Many pastors are not happy with life in their parishes, so they wait. They make their payments to the annuity board as faithfully as they can, and they wait. Retirement is out there, somewhere … next to heaven. If they can live long enough to collect their benefits, they will have succeeded. Longevity of life is really the key to the benefit program. These pastors develop what I call the minister-annuity syndrome. It is based on the idea that if they keep their retirement account up to date, someday they will be happy again. This syndrome can come as early in life as the midthirties. It reminds me somehow of the bumper sticker “I am having a better time since I have given up all hope.”

The symptoms of the syndrome are the vacant eye, the death mask, the feeling that while they may never really build the parish of their dreams, it has become incidental to their survival. They don’t want to change the world anymore. They did when they first entered the seminary all bright with the call of the gospel. Now the object of life is safety. They wait out of the way because if they get in the way they are going to be crushed in the gearbox of mechanical churchmanship.

Years ago, when I was a young pastor in a very small church, I wrote The Singer, a story of Christ set in allegory. I was going through a terrible set of circumstances at the time. In my tale, Christ is not crucified. He is crushed in an odd execution machine composed of ropes and gears and cables. To make the machine work, people who don’t like what the Singer sang have to file by a large hopper into which they cast their “stones of offense.” As critic after critic passes by, the stones they throw into the bin put pressure on the cables and gears, and the machine slowly tears the Singer apart.

I have now known many pastors who are being crushed in the gearbox of heavy denominationalism or petty committee structuring within their churches. And they can’t get out of it; it chokes the very life from all their hopes and dreams of ministry.

Are there many of these pastors?

They are legion. I meet them everywhere. They are in agony. They will do study leaves, attend seminars, work on a DMin degree, anything to keep the Band-Aids in the box. They start looking around for some other kind of job, any kind of job: hospital chaplaincy, a home in the denominational pleroma, a parachurch fund-raising position, a pastoral-consulting office job, an administrative post in the seminary. But talk to them, and you hear them saying the same thing: “I’m living under a stack of employment résumés and fear. I’m as far into the pastoral ministry as I ever want to be. Help, somebody who loves God. Deliver me from the people of God.”

I once heard a presidential candidate say after losing the national election, “I’m too old to cry, and it hurts too much to laugh.” Once, in a DMin course I was teaching, one of my middle-aged students approached me after class and said, “Prof, look at me! I’m the picture of ‘sick and tired.’ I am worn out. I’m here not because I want another degree. I’m here ’cause here is ‘someplace other than there.’ There are only two places possible in my world: my church and someplace else. My wife is a good person, but I’ve seen her brutalized by women in the church. I’ve seen her cry because women in the church have refused to invite our children to little birthday parties, simply to make her cry. I can’t remember the last time any church officer offered me the firmness of a good hug or handshake. I live alone wherever I am, but here in the seminary I don’t have anyone that doesn’t like me.”

I knew Jesus had saved his soul. Now, I sat there trying to think of some plan for saving the man’s life. While I turned his desperation over in my hands, he just stared at me. “Can you help me?” is the last thing he said before he broke into tears.

Besides those who wait in hopelessness for deliverance, another group is trying to outlive their pain: a third group that still has hope. These pastors have decided to try to solve their parish problems. They fight it week by week. Day by day they square their shoulders, and then they are off for another week.

They endure a bit at a time.

Do they cry? Yes. Do they win? Sometimes.

I generally think they do two things: First, they live in the light of Calvary and think about the price Jesus paid, and then they opt for the crucified life. The only logic for this step is hidden in Galatians 2:20 and the open admission that they are crucified with Christ. The only other scripture that keeps them is the reminder that the servant is not greater than his lord.

But there is another thing that they do, and that is to declare widely that they are Tuesday’s children. They build tenure because they live by one adage: Never resign till Tuesday.

7 Laura A. Barter Snow, as quoted in Paul E. Billheimer, Don’t Waste Your Sorrows (Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1977), 65.

Letter 22

Vitality: The Art of Not Snoozing through a Revolution

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“The best hope of emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in a recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in a recognition of others not as projections of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own. More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our own desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods.”[8]

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Dear Young Pastor,

Churches die for a lot of reasons. Some of them die in violent congregational explosions. Others die from a slow death of bad denominational reputations. But the most torturous death of all is death by blah. Blah is composed of only two ingredients: the desire to play it safe and sameness. The desire to play it safe is where sameness originates of course. To conquer the syndrome, the first thing that must be jettisoned is the desire to play it safe. In my book The Sermon Maker, the story’s hero is named Sam. When the book opens, Sam is dying from the blahs; he feels it most on Mondays:

Lord, I’m so tired of preaching … so tired of saying the same things to these same people every same week.…

Same, Lord, do you hear me? Same, same, same. I’m tired of praying the same prayers after I preach the same sermon to the same crowd the same way every same week. And this is most ludicrous of all, the grand jest to end all jests: Even my name, Sam, is just the word same with the e left off.[9]

The book is an imaginary tale of Pastor Sam, whose church is dying from the blahs. In this bland and dying state, Sam is visited by Sermoniel, the angel of homiletics who explains to him the reasons for the blahs:

“I’m the eighth archangel. I go around helping powerless preachers get it back.”

“Get what back?”

“Come, come, man! You don’t mean to tell me you are still pretending you have no second thoughts about your effectiveness? Preaching is much more than you ever bargained for, isn’t it? … There behind the big box is where you stand alone, strengthened only by God. There you hang your every word out in the open. Anybody can shoot it down. It’s the loneliest, cussedest, blessedest work in the world.

“Have you not felt the terror of preaching? The death sweat in the palms of your hands, the clench in the intestines, the gelatin in your joints, the lock-up in your larynx, the tonnage of the tongue, the ice in your arteries, the drain of the adrenalin, the mental muck, the—”

“Yes. Stop! I know all these things. These are the demons who share my nest. I just don’t know what to do about them.”

“Well relax, man! I’m your personal guardian! Your angel of homiletic therapy! You have a condition known as sermonic sclerosis, or hardening of the homily. We call it by its more Latin name, homileticus horribilus. It’s terminal. Most preachers die of it long before they are boxed and filed away under irrelevant. In fact, most preachers go on preaching for years after people quit listening.… You know what I mean?”

Sam nodded. He knew.[10]

Most every preacher I have known who died from the blahs—and make no mistake about it, they can be terminal—know they have the blahs, and they know the blahs are killing them. They want to be free of them; it’s just that the process of getting free requires so much personal discipline they would rather die than change.

In any career field, the attempt to play it safe is the real killer. I have never known anyone to have really succeeded who has not from time to time thrown their heart over some barrier and then leaped over the barrier themselves, desperate to rejoin their heart. And as a leader myself, I must admit the search for the heart is both addictive and exhilarating. It is addictive because you don’t just do it once. You do it again and again. It is exhilarating because it makes of the leader a naked Greek athlete who lives for the victor’s laurel. And the victory welds the congregation and the pastor into oneness. The passage is dangerous, but the triumph is exotic.

If I seem to indicate that the sermon itself is the only element of escaping the blahs, not so. But the sermon exits the dream, lays out the risks, and calls like Moses shouting over the hordes of Jewish brickmakers: “Go, now, and proclaim liberty throughout the land!” The sermon empowers the people when the dream is too heavy to bear. The sermon celebrates the dream’s fulfillment. The sermon quits just being an exposé of what God did in Leviticus or John. It becomes an enactment of what God did in Leviticus or John. The sermon becomes a picture of biblical heroes standing against their insecurities and participating with God in the boldest risks that must be taken.

Make no mistake: The only alternative to what I have described is business as usual, which can never be confused with God’s agenda for the preacher and the flock. The blahs are just the result of fear of risk.

Fear of risk is a condition that particularly affects the middle years. Most young preachers care too much for God and His good pleasure to suffer from the blahs. But somewhere arises the fear of the dream!

Risk is slaughtered on the spot!

Bam!

The routine!

Ever notice that within the first four letters of the word routine is hidden the word rut? And as one wag has said, “A rut is just a long, long grave with both ends knocked out.” And as a second wag observed, “We die because we mistake the edges of our rut for the horizons.” Soon we are trapped in our dull way of doing things. It isn’t dull at first, it is all very exciting; but soon it moves from vital to vitriolic. Then one day we wake up with a mouthful of old gum that we’ve been chewing long after the goody disappeared.

At this point we can’t remember exactly when the excitement stopped. A couple of business meetings ago, three years after we got the personnel committee’s reprimand, the month after the church cut our annuity program for want of funds … who knows exactly when we died, we just did. And we’d give anything if we had marked the place, so we could go back there and pick up the vitality we laid aside and start over.

Then we start living between our longing for a new start and living in that never-never land of “something good” is going to happen to us. The list of these pipe dreams is endless. The pulpit committee we once snubbed will surely call again and give us one more chance to start over in a new place with a new dream. The denomination is going to call and offer us a post at headquarters. The chief of navy chaplains is going to call and give us a chance to serve on a submarine. We’d have a huge case of claustrophobia, but never mind, the submarine would come with a livable salary, maybe even hazardous duty pay, and we’d be ready for that. We’ve been a pastor for years, so we’re used to hazardous duty without the pay. Maybe we could just go into selling life insurance or door-to-door Hoovers. Maybe Jesus will come again. He hasn’t yet, so it’s about time.

In the last state of the blahs, our eyes glaze over. All real vision is gone. We go on writing sermons and preaching them without really caring about them. This seems to be the way our congregations feel about them too.

Starting again in some other place is easy. But starting again where we are is cussed work. To make it happen, here are the steps we must take:

Step one: The open acknowledgment that we are dead inside.

Step two: An open announcement to our congregations that they also are dead inside.

Step three: A personal time of retreat and reflection, while we look around for our souls and find them.

Step four: Acting out our new profiles of life in the dead world we drifted so many years to create.

Step five: Repeat steps three and four every day for the rest of our lives.

These steps to renewal are so difficult I’ve known only a few people who could pull them off, and most—as I said earlier—would prefer to die in the rut than summon the energy required to jump out of it.

Then vitality is gone!

Business as usual sets in!

And there is nothing left for the church or the pastor except to die from an inactive imagination and practice the pitiful requiem I once heard:

The rector is late, he’s forgotten the date,

So what will the faithful do now, poor things!

They’ll sit in the pew with nothing to do,

And sing a collection of hymns, poor things!

Once we’ve died to all possibility of vitality, we never again think about the church triumphant. Jesus is coming again … probably. In the meantime there’s always golf and overeating.

8 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 242.

9 Miller, The Sermon Maker, 61, 63.

10 Ibid., 29–31.

Letter 23

Nets Allow Aerialists to File for Social Security

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“The late A. W. Tozer was fond of talking about two kinds of fellowship in the church. One kind of fellowship he called ‘front-line fellowship’ and the other ‘rear-guard fellowship.’ At the back of a military advance, the generals sit having tea and discussing what might be the best strategies for the war at the front. But at the front there is no time for tea and speculation. There the bullets fly and the foxholes are never quite deep enough. There soldiers defend each other in a kind of camaraderie and fellowship impossible to those who, at the rear of the advance, munch cookies and sip tea. On the front line, criticism flies as thick as bullets. There the chemistry of friendship knits leaders and followers so closely that their dreams fall or stand together.”[11]

///

Dear Young Pastor,

The Beatles once sang that they needed a little help from their friends to get by. I think we need a lot of help from our friends.

Nets are for survival. Once upon a time in Fort Worth, Texas, I was hurtling down the freeway with my two grandsons. They were ten years old at the time and happened to spy a Ringling Brothers Circus billboard as we sped along. The billboard trumpeted the grand announcement: “See Arianna, the Human Arrow! May 6!”

“Grandpa, what is today?” my grandsons shouted.

“Today? I dunno … let me see. May 6, I think.”

“Hooray! May 6! Grandpa, Arianna is in Texas. What luck! Can we go see her? Can we go to the circus?”

“Sure, why not,” I said. “I wasn’t going to do anything but teach at the seminary and I’ll never get a chance to see Arianna again.… Let’s go to the circus!”

We had a great time. Circuses are wonderful! I’d forgotten how much expertise there is in a circus. It’s so different from church. The performers actually practice stuff. Aerialists tippytoe on wires. Tigers leap through fire, and clowns clown around.

When the circus was all but over, all three rings condensed down into one while the announcer, who was dressed something like a Pentecostal evangelist, stepped into the center ring and cried out, “Preeesenting Arianna, the Human Arrow!”

After a bit of a drumroll, this little green tractor came out pulling a huge bow behind it. This was obviously the very bow from which Arianna would soon be launched as the human arrow. It was a fearsome thing, with a bowstring that appeared to be made of a steel cable. The little tractor putted its way out and anchored the bow apparatus to the big top’s floor. Next, when the contraption was anchored down, the tractor went to the back side of the rig and connected the pulling bar with the bowstring and stretched it way back, hooking it over the latch of a windlass. When the bowstring was taut, so was the audience.

Then there was a huge fanfare and out waltzed Arianna, a woman in a silver metallic spandex jumpsuit. I was aghast. Like so many circus performers, she looked good from a distance; but we weren’t quite back far enough. I could see that she was wrinkled and wore rouge on her pasty cheeks. She looked like the land that Botox forgot. I thought, Lord, please help her to hold together, or there will be dry bones everywhere.

She climbed and stood on the supertight bowstring. There was yet another drumroll while we tried to compute her IQ. The cymbals clanged, they tripped the great windlass, and off she flew into the darkness. There was utter silence. Then a huge spotlight began to play a great orange net on the far side of the Tarrant County auditorium. There she was!

“Arianna lives!”

Oh, thank You, God! I thought to myself. Thou hast delivered a fool in silver spandex! Then I thought, Yes, now the circus will travel on. She will be able to do the same stupid thing in Peoria tomorrow night, and it’s all because of the net. That’s what nets do! They keep bony daredevils alive when they won’t snuggle in with their social-security checks and make baskets at the hospice craft center like God intended.

I had a lot of time for reflection on the way home from the circus. The truth is, I was more like Arianna than I wanted to admit. In my own ministry I had been shot from church-administration longbows a few times. And I am still here because I believe in nets. One of my nets was Wendell Belew. He was twenty years older than me and acted as the net I needed when the chairman of deacons put me on the bowstring.

Here’s how it happened.

One August, back in 1970, a church leader passed me at the water fountain when I was on my way into church to preach my Sunday-morning sermon.

“Have you seen the crowd in the sanctuary?” he asked.

I knew what he meant. There wasn’t any crowd. Our church, which in those days was usually small under the influence of the “summer slump,” had now dwindled down to microscopic. “It’s August,” I said. “Churches are down all over in attendance.”

“Pastor, I’ve been talking to God.”

“Wow! Good for you!” I laughed. “What did He have to say?”

“Calvin, you know and I know that you are good at starting churches, but you are not good at making them grow. I believe God wants you to resign.”

“Gosh, did God say all that? Funny, He never mentioned it to me. It seems like He would, too, seeing that I’m so central a part in what God has willed for you. Besides, what will I do, John? I have no money. You know what my church salary is. I’ve got two children—just babies really. I don’t have any other livelihood. I can’t believe God would say that.”

Neither of us was laughing now. His face was as gray as cold oatmeal. He was as serious as a heart attack.

“Well, John,” I said, “how thoughtful of you to tell me on my way in to preach.… Your timing …” I stuttered, “… it means so much!”

My delivery was down for the day.

It remained down for the next six months, during which time John waged a blitz of gossip all aimed at getting me thrown out of the church, while I obstinately refused to resign. He isolated me from the fellowship of the church.

John had a big home. I had a small one. He had almost our entire small church over to his house on Sunday nights after church for pecan pie and Blue Bell ice cream. My family and I were never invited. Finally, when I thought I could no longer survive his relentless pressure, I determined I would resign. My spirits were in the bottom of the barrel. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I determined that whatever it was, I wasn’t going to live under the heel of such a cruel church leader. On a fateful Sunday morning in spring, I got to church early and wrote out my resignation. I was all set to read it that morning and walk out of the church I had prayed for and lived for the four years since I had founded it. I was all steeled for reading it when I thought to call Wendell and ask him to pray for me. I called his home. Miraculously he was there! He wasn’t usually there; he was usually preaching somewhere else in the United States. But that morning he was home!

I told him of my predicament. I told him I was about to read my resignation.

“Why would you do that?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “they don’t want me as their pastor, and I don’t want to be their pastor. It’s as simple as that!”

“But you’ve always told me it was a great church.”

“Yeah, I know, but I lied. It isn’t a great church. It stinks! I hate it! I want out.”

“Well, I guess you know what you’re doing. And when you’ve resigned, I’ll work to help you get another church, I promise. I won’t desert you. But let me give you some advice.”

“I could use some,” I said.

“Since you’re going to resign anyway, why not just walk out there this morning and tell them how you feel about them.”

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“’Cause I don’t use profanity in the pulpit!”

“Well, if you’re going to resign anyway, they have a right to know how you feel.”

He prayed for me over the phone.

We hung up.

And I thought about it. And thought about it. And thought about it. I concluded that Wendell was right. I needed to do just that, and they needed to hear me do just that. Yes, that was exactly what I needed to do. The rats! They needed to know why I didn’t like them!

I went out into the pulpit that morning with my resignation speech in my pocket and a sermon in my Bible. But I didn’t read the one or preach the other.

I said to them that morning, “I’ve got a lot to say, and I am going to tell you how I feel about you.”

I could tell they were taken aback!

I went on.

“Nobody in the world should treat anyone like you have treated my family and me for the last six months. I’ve got the feeling that God is ashamed of all of you. You’ve sent my wife to bed at night crying. I’ve looked at my children and asked what did they do to receive this kind of brutality from people who call themselves Christians for what good reasons I can’t imagine. I’ve been pressured to resign by people who know I have no other way of livelihood. Every dream I ever had for this church has been killed by apathy and meanness.”

It was a pretty good rebuke, as rebukes go, and I never knew rebuking could be so much fun. I made a mental note that if ever I got another church I was going to do a lot more rebuking. But then it started, or better yet I started, to weep. Let me give you some advice. If you’re going to rebuke an audience, do not cry. Crying terribly weakens a rebuke. But an amazing thing happened. When I started to cry, so did they. In a way I can understand their crying. I’m not a guy who cries with any finesse. I like how movie stars cry with strong, leathery, masculine faces, and a single tear rolling down the broad cheek highlighted by blue cinematography. When I cry, my whole face wrinkles into a prune, and those forced to watch are usually repulsed. Still, I must have come across as sincere. For soon the altar filled up with weeping people. Our church had a lot of good reasons to cry together. They came to the altar and wept, and they hugged each other and me. It had been years since anyone had hugged me!

And the long and short of it is I didn’t resign. I didn’t leave the church. In fact I stayed for twenty-two more years. And the church finally grew to more than three thousand members. John did leave. And in his absence grew a pastor-to-people relationship that was the foundation of the dream that grew in the very vacuum of leadership the ogre took with him.

But my whole life beyond that weeping Sunday I credit to the network. My friend Wendell was there the night I flew from the longbow. And when the lights played the net that long-ago dark night, there we stood together, Wendell and me.

The Beatles were right. I get a little help from my friends. A lot, in fact.

Make a few yourself.

Make ’em good, good enough to trust; then trust them.

And if you get a chance, go see Arianna. She’s probably still on the circuit.

11 Miller, The Empowered Leader, 51.

Letter 24

Coping with Difficult People

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“The most disheartening time in the life of any rookie preacher is the first few weeks of service. This period of time can be debilitating and destructive to the soul. During college and seminary years, preachers find life consumed in the process of preparation. Then comes graduation! Suddenly the ‘preacher boy’ is a full-fledged minister. The hard work of ministry begins. Maturity in any field is always hard-bought, but in the gospel ministry, it can be particularly difficult. Only in the ministry is it important that we lead unlovely people even as we try to see the character of Christ in their lives.”[12]

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Dear Young Pastor,

I once wrote a similar letter to this one in my book on leadership.

When it comes to loving other people, you need to know that I fully agree with what Jean-Paul Sartre and Charlie Brown said. The former said, “Hell is other people,” and the latter said, “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand.”

I once had a pastor friend who answered my every query about the health of his church the very same way. Every time I asked him, “Bill, how’s your church going?” he would always answer, “Just fine, now! We got rid of three more problem families this week.” I followed his ministry very closely. In only three years he was completely out of problems … and members.

One pastor I read about had a similar approach to problems. He beamed that he had just finished a “membership drive” in which he “drove” out fifteen families. They were all problem families, I’m sure.[13]

The opposite of loving difficult people is not hating difficult people but coping with them. Every pastor has them. Sometimes they are conquered by the difficult people, and sometimes they are able to work with them, or around them, to get the job done despite them. Difficult people have been around since the beginning of time. Moses had his difficult people. King David had his difficult people. Jesus had them, and so did St. Paul.

Let us take the difficult people in Paul’s life and suggest how he might have coped.

First of all, Paul indicted the false apostles (2 Cor. 11:13–14). These were vicious, difficult people in disguise as Christians. They were masquerading as apostles, claiming for themselves spiritual reputations they did not have. What is to be done with people who have a heightened sense of their own spirituality? The self-righteous have a pair of gods that often ride just above Yahweh in their view of what really is important. At the base of their idolatry is of course themselves, and the god just above themselves is what they believe is universal public adoration. Both afflictions are hard to cure, and both are almost impossible to clear up at the same time. Simply pointing out their flaws is usually fruitless. They best begin to heal on the reverse sides of their personal calamities. Pain, over a period of time, will cure the affliction. Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel had the problem and seemed to have been cured by long-term schizophrenia. The only other thing that works better is a corporate transfer to another city.

Paul’s second category of difficult people is “people of dark understanding” (see Eph. 4:18). These people allow themselves to become corrupted with evil desires. They usually arrive at a permissive sense of license by granting themselves a free flight into the world of immorality.

Dark understanding, like cancer, is sometimes curable if caught in time. The bad thing about letting this carcinoma get too big too fast is that it metastasizes throughout the brain until it becomes an appetite that supplants all decent thought. I once talked to a pastor who was hooked on pornography. He wanted an easy fix, but his dark understanding had pervaded his entire conscience. I still know him, and he is still a pastor, but I often wonder if he keeps on serving the same affliction we talked about decades ago. He probably does. I think now his conscience no longer tells him it is wrong. This is how we sanctify the sins we cannot conquer. As the apostle said, we corrupt ourselves. Unable to win over sin, we simply rename it permissible and move on.

The third category of difficult people includes those like Euodia and Syntyche (Phil. 4:2). These two women were apparently constant in their habit of nitpicking each other over a petty quarrel that was disturbing the whole congregation. Apart from personal renewal, these quarrels usually end up in a root of bitterness that divides the congregation. It sets the Hatfields and the McCoys at war for years to come. In Paul’s case he entreated his true yokefellow, probably the pastor, to arbitrate the conflict that existed between these two women. We can only hope the pastor in Philippi was able to get it done. I have a Greek neighbor who lives across the street from me. He is from Philippi. He showed me pictures of the ruins of the ancient city. I couldn’t help but wonder if the quarreling of Euodia and Syntyche was responsible for the ruins in the pictures he was showing me.

Fourth, it was Demas who at one time was a staunch disciple but had folded when persecutions came upon the church (2 Tim. 4:10). People like Demas became legion under the persecution of the great Roman emperors. Those who backslid under fire became known as the lapsi. Those Christians who lost families in successive waves of martyrdom resented those who denied Christ, just as Paul resented Demas. Demas must have been a terrible disappointment to Paul. But one can only guess that Demas must have been somewhat of a disappointment to himself. In his more lucid, postbetrayal life, he must have been stung in suffering by the commitments he had surrendered so cheaply.

Finally is Alexander the metalworker (some Bibles call him the coppersmith, and some who understand congregational betrayals often call him “Alexander the copperhead”), who had personally injured Paul in some way (2 Tim. 4:14). It sounds as though the man had once been a trusted friend but ended up a kind of Judas Iscariot. And Paul found himself wounded to the point that he felt somewhat destroyed by the treachery. I don’t know why Paul never took the trouble to categorize the people who gave him a hard time; I know I did. Somehow it helped me quit seeing each belligerent church member as unique. In a way, all troublemakers have their own niche where they fit in with their own genre of like-minded saints.

In The Empowered Leader, I identified five of these difficult-people categories. Here is the list and a brief description of why each of them is so hard to work around:

1. The chronically arrogant are the leader’s challenge to corporate creativity.

This difficult person burdens leadership simply because of an ego that he or she can’t rein in. They are know-it-alls. They take their opinions most seriously. Socrates believed that all of humanity could be divided into two groups: the wise who know they are fools and the fools who believe themselves to be wise. The chronically arrogant fall into the latter category.

2. The congenitally belligerent use anger and volume to intimidate.

These people have a takeover mentality and therefore must be stopped. As a pastor, I quickly learned that these demanding types were like a chaw of gum stuck under the pew, leaving every business meeting a potential minefield of pending holocaust. However we deal with them, we must chain the dragons without becoming dragons ourselves. Jesus said when dealing with a head-on attack we should turn the other cheek. Teddy Roosevelt said speak softly but carry a big stick.

3. The nonnegotiator uses silence aggressively.

They don’t do much talking in an open committee meeting. They like waiting till it’s over and then spending a couple of hours on the phone. Beware of them. Their silence doesn’t mean they agree. Hardly. They are often like rattlesnakes that have lost their rattles. You never know where they are until it comes back to you after the meeting. David Augsburger calls this negative communication “silence, avoidance, evasion and confrontation.” But never forget, manipulating feelings is often their intentional ploy.

4. The nitpicker picks holes in corporate ideas.

Nitpickers have a way of picking holes in major ideas. They pursue no noble dreams of their own and spend their lives in committees carping at nobility. They are minor chords in major symphonies. They are hot in pursuit of any and all distraction and are awfully fond of “I told you so!” They avoid any semblance of good, old-fashioned positivism.

5. The wheedlers are whining needlers whose names are a marriage of both words.

It is usually not possible to sweeten them up, or shut them up. They are famous for seeing the glass half-empty when everyone has agreed the glass is half-full. They often remind me of the classic tale of a newcomer to a small New England village. He went to the local hardware store to pick up a collection of nuts and bolts, but being new in town he decided to ask the store owner a question.

“What kind of people live in this town?” he asked.

“First, before I answer,” said the store owner, “tell me what kind of people live in the town you just moved from.”

“Rotten people! They were contentious, quarrelsome, and hard to live with. Most unfriendly. Most mean!”

“Well,” said the owner, “unfortunately that is the very same kind of people who live in this town.”

The newcomer left, and a second newcomer entered the shop. After picking up the nuts and bolts of his trip to the store, he asked, “What kind of people live in this town?”

“First, before I answer,” said the owner, “tell me what kind of people lived in the town you just left to move to our neighborhood.”

“They were wonderful. They will be our friends forever. Whatever you needed you could ask and they would supply: a can of tuna, a cup of sugar at midnight! They were the best people.”

“Well,” said the store owner, “you’ve hit the jackpot here. This town is full of the most wonderful people in the world.”

Wheedlers always come from really bad places and then set about creating the very kind of despicable towns they just corrupted and left behind.

Perhaps it would be good to close this letter by just reminding you that overall there is nothing more powerful than the power of love. And love—good, old-fashioned, pastoral-care love—can change the types we are forced to live with. The best way to run any organization is not just to cope, but to change the antagonists to supporters. Maybe it’s good to always remind them that we are all called to be ministers. And it is quite possible that I who am forced to cope with difficult people am a difficult person in some of their lives.

Above all, never hate anyone.

John said that to claim to love God and hate your brother is but a great deception that blinds you to what you really are, the certified lover of the church, all of the church, starting with the difficult people.

Most people are difficult once in a while. In fact, nearly everybody is a problem to somebody, sometime, somewhere. You must decide whether to solve these people problems, cope with them, ignore them, or run them off. Pastor, I know that in the ministry it gets hard to like everybody. Will Rogers did, I know, but then there’s a general feeling that while Will never met a man he didn’t like, he never really got out all that much. And I’m pretty sure he never pastored a church.[14]

12 Ibid., 138.

13 Ibid., 136.

14 Adapted from Miller, “Leadership: Coping with Difficult People” in The Empowered Leader.

Section Four

Sermons: Great Introductions and Conclusions

Kept as Close Together as Possible

“The Twenty Day Sermon”

The twenty day sermon of

Reverend Tom Herman

Began on a Sunday

And lasted three weeks

And nobody stayed

Till the sermon was done.

When God came to town,

The Reverend Tom Herman

Invited God over

To hear Herman speak.

But God replied, “Tom,

I can’t stay that long.

I’m only in town for the week.”[1]

1 Calvin Miller, When the Aardvark Parked on the Ark (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 133.

In the word made print

We find the Word made flesh

In the word inviolate

We find the Word incarnate

And in the word that’s read,

We find the Word that Bled.

And in preaching such a simple thing as the Word in print

We serve God’s finest argument.

Calvin Miller

How beautiful on the mountains

Are the feet of those who bring good news,

Who proclaim peace,

Who bring good tidings,

Who proclaim salvation,

Who say to Zion,

“Your God reigns!”

Isaiah 52:7

Letter 25

Grumpy Homiletics

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“I must confess I never rebuke a child for being noisy in church, for I suffer the distinct impression that if I were more interesting, he would be less rowdy. I once heard a famous preacher rebuke a retarded child for playing in the aisle next to where her parents sat in a pew. I cringed in sympathy for the family, as did the rest of the church. I had the sneaking suspicion the sermon was so bad that we all would have preferred playing in the aisles had they been wide enough to hold us all.”[1]

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Dear Young Pastor,

One of the things I wish I had learned earlier is that my sermons do not have to get better week by week. This would seem an easy thing to know. But we get caught in a trap for approval. We are so eager for our people to keep bragging us up, and so we work even harder, to keep getting better. This is a snare. Avoid it.

So many things go into making us feel good or bad about our church services that have nothing to do with the sermon itself. I am like most pastors when it comes to evaluating early services. I know it sounds bitter, but I believe nothing spiritual ever really happens at eight o’clock services. If Jesus were to come again during the eight o’clock service, no one would notice. When churches try to press for a real worship experience at that hour, it is just a sign of pastoral immaturity. Whatever they teach you in seminary about building a vital eight a.m. worship service, get that right out of your mind. Nothing can be done to pump life into dozing believers at such an hour.

I know this because I used to have a man in my eight o’clock service (the earliest of our three Sunday-morning services) who would yawn at precisely 8:42 every Sunday, when I was only eleven minutes into my homily. I am not talking about a casual little yawn of grace. This was Carlsbad. His uvula became a heavy pink stalactite that hung down in the center of his laryngeal abyss, draining all life into the bottomless chasm. It sucked in pews, hymnals, pulpit furniture. That yawn of horror forever redefined the term black hole for me.

The first time it happened, it destroyed my self-confidence. I saw it as a kind of sermon critique from hell. I wanted to fold my homily back into my Bible and start selling Amway. But when it happened time after time, I began to realize he was just a deacon who stayed up too late on Saturday nights, trying to improve his poker standings. He was just your average child of Satan, and I had to learn that his gaping piehole shouldn’t be seen as anything personal. Once I knew this about him, I was able to think it all through and find some measure of victory even in the early service.

Then there’s children going to the bathroom during your best illustration. No, that’s too broad. Not children randomly going to the bathroom. The same child week after week! Slamming the door as if to punctuate her Fifth Amendment rights to protest your freedom of speech. Her parents always sat there smiling, never correcting her, always dressing her in Easter frillery so her performance would be tasteful.

But how does she know every week that you are into the very best part of your sermon? She is too young to think it all through, so you have to guess she is in league with antisermon demons. You can’t actually see any more than her little back when she exits, but I always imagined that on her face was a grin that would chill the nerve of a Vatican exorcist. The point is that you will beat yourself up later in the week trying to figure out why your sermon had so little power to it. I’ve never much admired the State of the Union speech. And it’s no wonder why the president gets all those standing ovations: The senators can’t bring their children.

I’m afraid the good old days of well-disciplined children are gone. And I am amazed at how the same few children are the constant interrupters of our services. I attribute 90 percent of this to willfulness and the other 10 percent to demon possession. Still, there it is! These carefree little ones walk out of services, just at the wrong time each time. During your power-packed sermon finale is the time they usually choose, although some are more flexible and seem to know when you are about to make your most serious point or quote your favorite poem. Then, like a rifle shot, they erupt into action and, with a flourish of self-will, leap over everyone in the pew and bolt into the aisle. The noblest men will stand, giving them space to pass between a dozen rigid kneecaps and the pew in front of them. If you are lucky, they’re back in five minutes, wedging themselves between pew and patellas once again.

The thing I really resent about it all is that their parents, smug as cobras, will sit there smiling as though they are proud of their impish offspring. I get mad just thinking about it! But the good minister knows that it can’t be dealt with while it’s actually happening, during preaching. How then is it to be handled?

My first rule is to have a talk with the parents of Little Baby Bladder. Remind them that while everybody has to go to the bathroom in life—sooner or later—the facilities are always open before and after services. Point out that of the three or four hundred other bladders in each service, most of them rarely leave their seats. Suggest that this is due to the subjugation of their need for the Holy Spirit, who has a lot going on in the services and would appreciate the timely preworship use of all the gleaming porcelain fixtures in other parts of the building. Suggest kindly that they might want to see to it that their child goes to the bathroom a few minutes before the service starts each Sunday or at the very latest during the preservice announcements. I’ve never seen this approach solve the problem, but I’ve tried it a number of times.

Next.

If there is a children’s worship service, you might want to suggest that the parents put their biologically codependent children in there. This will not stop the children from going to the bathroom, but at least it will become the children’s pastor’s problem. Point out to the parents that the children’s worship services are held very close to the bathrooms and that their children would be able to come and go without a long walk.

Usually when I have suggested this, the parents tell me that they believe a child’s place is in the adult services with the parents. They will get misty eyed and tell you that they believe families should worship together; after all, “the family that prays together stays together.” The truth is that in all the time you’ve known them you’ve never seen them even look like they were praying together. Thank the good Lord they don’t believe that families should go to the bathroom together. But being together in worship is a kind of family doctrine with them, and they are very firm about it. They don’t believe they should always be together in worship or they wouldn’t allow junior to leave the tightly knit nuclear family to go to the loo alone while the rest of them, pining for his absence, remain incomplete in their inner lives till the little one comes back, dislodging kneecaps to complete their family circle. As a pastor trying to be captivating with your sermons, you know that the whole neurosis could be solved if the family would simply put their child in children’s church like God intended. Actually, I’ve not found counseling them about the availability of children’s church works very well either.

Another ineffective thing I have tried is just suggesting that they sit farther back in the auditorium so their children won’t disturb as many people with their leaving. They will likely tell you that the parts of your sermon that their children stay for means so much to them and that they just feel that they have to sit as far forward as they can.

I might suggest as a fourth approach that you show them this particular chapter of this book. Ask them to read it. They will probably think my ideas are foolish, but you paid for the book, and you don’t owe me anything; so go ahead and ask them what they think of these notions, and maybe—hope … hope … hope—they will see the light.

I’ve known pastors who tried to pray the family into another congregation. And while it deepened their prayer lives, nothing else much happened. Clearly not all things are possible through prayer.

The fifth resort: Reform school.

The sixth and last resort: Hire an exorcist.

But one thing you must not do is correct the errant child during the sermon. In the rare case where you are preaching on Proverbs 23:13 (“Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with a rod, he will not die”), when the child hurries from the room, it will be extremely tempting to single out the child as a case in point. But don’t do it.

Nobody likes grumpy homiletics.

I’ve generally found it impossible to correct these situations. Even if the child becomes a Christian, he will likely not change his ways. There’s only so much the Holy Spirit can do with willful children, Christian or “un.” Just suffer with the problem. It will make you more like Jesus in the long run, and everybody will notice the deepening of your spiritual life. You may never be regarded as a great preacher, but a godly reputation is worth something.

Another thing that helped me realize that the quality of sermon has nothing to do with the reception of the sermon was the postsermon comments from the flock. I am sure there were auditors who sat passively through Jesus’ sermons, whose children left the Sermon on the Mount completely oblivious of the brilliant genius of Christ’s content. It was on one of those Sundays when God had visited our church that this became obvious to me. It seemed a glorious day. Acts 2 was everywhere that Sunday: flame, wind, a crowded altar, tears, joy, and all things Pentecostal!

On the way out of church, a woman asked me rather point-blank, “Pastor, why was there no toilet paper in the women’s restroom?” There are insensitive laypersons who deserve at least five or ten minutes in purgatory for questions like that. My first impulse was to answer her, “Excuse me, sister, but where were you when the fire fell? Could you not rap on the next stall over and borrow a Kleenex? Don’t miss the visitation of God then ask me a question like this.” What I did was smile sweetly into her tight face and say, “I don’t know. I never go into that room myself. I’ll see that it gets taken care of.”

What I’m trying to say here is that there are a lot of reasons why you feel blah after a sermon, many of which have nothing to do with the sermon. But the number one reason that you feel thwarted by your feelings of sermonic failure is your unrealistic expectations that every sermon has to be better than the last. Go with the flow! Sermons properly seen are an extension of pastoral care. The homily is the conversation, a parish conversation, where the person of God has a chance to talk with people. It should therefore always be rated as a conversation. It is a conversation in context. It is like the conversation we have with our barbers. We never hang our rating scale on conversations with our barbers. There will be other haircuts as there have been other haircuts. We like our barbers, that’s all. We look forward to the conversation, and we trust their haircuts. They have their acts together, but we don’t hold them accountable for any blessing they may provide us. We never compare March’s chitchat with the one in February.

Am I being too casual about the sermon?

Not at all.

I am just trying to help you over the ups and downs of postsermonic moods. Does this mean you should slight your sermon preparation? Of course not! I’m just saying that these ebbs and flows come embedded in the work of the kingdom. Does it ever strike you that we have almost no sermons in the Bible? We have snippets of sermons. Bits and pieces of what Paul said. Even Jesus’ sermons come to us more as clips than entire sermons. That’s all. The biblical writers are apparently more intent on giving us a picture of the kingdom, and what homiletic tidbits that we have are there to emphasize kingdom context rather than show off orations of our favorite cultural heroes.

One other thing that might get you respect is the shortening of your sermons. For some reason sermon length is one of those things that just fixes admiration or criticism from the flock. Probably the number one criticism one hears of sermons has to do with their length. Long sermons have so many places where things can go wrong. They usually contain a lot more “thin” paragraphs than short ones. It is hard for any preacher to pack a long sermon with interesting truth. As Polonius said to Gertrude, “As brevity is the soul of wit, I will be brief!” The goal is to study all week and preach for thirty minutes, not vice versa.

Still, what does show forth is the lifelong study of a scholar-pastor. We love hearing from a person who takes the Bible seriously. And for those who don’t, nothing much is ever said about their sermons. So here are the rules: Study, live in the center of your parish, then preach. Slowly … slowly … slowly. Pacing … pacing … pacing. Then at last you will be old, then you will be wise. Do it as best you can, and when you get it just right, you will die. When they clean out your office after you’ve gone and find your old sermons, they will say, “Oh, pshaw! What is this … all these outlines and notes? What do they mean?”

Only you will know. They are nothing, but they were gold at the time—the footprints of a pastor who tried. They are the lost ramblings of a dreamer who did his best to live in the center of his parish and love God. And the little girl who went to the bathroom every week will be an old woman in heaven. She will play a harp and be a lot more considerate.

1 Calvin Miller, Preaching: The Art of Narrative Exposition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), 53.

Letter 26

The Candidate Sermon

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“When you candidate for a pulpit, be sure that you get this idea across.

“Although pastors may struggle with exactly what it means to be called by God to lead a church, they must have some sense that they are in the ministry because God wants them to be. Time and again, amid the challenges of pastoral ministry, this divine, more-than-subjective authorization is a major means of pastoral perseverance. To know that our ministry is first and finally validated not by our feelings, nor even by the judgments of the bishop, but by God: this is great grace.”[2]

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Dear Young Pastor,

The first sermon I ever preached in church I must have preached at least fifty times in rehearsal.

But I preached that first sermon shortly after I “felt the call.” What I didn’t understand about the call to preach is that it presupposes that someone is called to listen. And it would be years before I really got that connection down. You can pick up a sermon off the Internet at any time of day. Picking up listeners, on the other hand, comes from a willingness to relate to a diverse gathering of people in an unprotected and out-in-the-open minefield of desperate needs and testy public opinions.

It does all begin with a call from God, and the resulting volley of criticism in and of itself can embed you with shrapnel. Shortly after I went home and told the family I was called to preach, my sister, who had summed up my quiet lifestyle, told me that if God called me to preach He obviously had a wrong number. Anxious to prove her wrong, I accepted the first obligation to preach at the Garfield County Old Folks’ Home, as we called it before we later remodeled and renamed it the Oakmont Golden Age Center.

Admittedly, I was nervous about the opportunity, but my pastor assured me that the Old Folks’ Home was really not a bad place to try my homiletic wings. He told me that most of those who would attend the sermon were visually impaired, and so eye contact was not entirely necessary. They also couldn’t hear very well, so content was not critical either. Further, they were somewhat physically challenged, so there was little danger of them getting angry and walking out on the sermon. He did caution me that short sermons would be best, since their attention spans were not very enduring. He reminded me that some of them drooled a bit uncontrollably but that this should not be taken as a sign of their hunger for me to extend the sermon.

But my pastor neglected to mention that people don’t get so old that they like totally uninteresting sermons. Their lack of apparent interest in what I was saying, however, led me to become more hurried in my delivery. I flew through the sermon with a spastic energy that lasted only three minutes. There is only one real enemy of preaching: disinterest. I should have listened to my sister.

I was sixteen then, and after three more years of speech courses and speaking sermons at county-jail services, I actually learned to reckon with disinterest, and all of this study and experience brought me to the pulpit of First Baptist Church of Hunter, Oklahoma, in August 1956. I was nineteen years of age and knew that in fact I was contending to become the pastor, if my candidating sermon was judged to be acceptable to the thirty or forty farm families that attended the church. My text was the Old Testament tale of Naaman, the leper general of Syria. I pretty much told the tale as it is in 2 Kings 5. I did spend a bit of time discussing the symptoms of leprosy and how the telltale signs of the disease were easy to spot. Polio was at that time the scourge of Garfield County, and the sermon would have been a bit more relevant if the leper general had come down with polio. But it was what it was, so I preached on leprosy. My descriptions were more lurid than necessary, but the rustic congregation seemed to stick with me through all eleven minutes of my delivery. It was a short sermon, but still nearly four times longer than my ordinal homily at the Garfield County Old Folks’ Home. The sermon seemed to be quite effective, so effective that there was no outbreak of leprosy in the county for years after I preached it.

Believe it or not, I was called to be the pastor after this leprous homily. I was young and inexperienced, but in the successive weeks and months, I branched out into the Pentateuch as well as the Pauline Epistles, and ever so gradually I worked my way through the Catholic Letters and the more accessible Minor Prophets.

But I learned some things about preaching by starting out with the leprous general. And as you take up your own mantle of prophecy, let me counsel you in these three ways.

First, after my initial sermon at First Baptist, I learned that stories preach more relationally than do propositional sermons. Jesus was a first-class homiletician in this—and every other—regard. Narratives offer the youth a place to latch onto the sermon. I have watched preachers all my life, and I have discovered that those who are so in love with logic and cannot grab hold of the relational intrigue of a story generally bypass the youth and a good many of the adults. Is it any wonder that Jesus seemed always to have children gathered around Him and at the same time was ever indulging them in His terrific once-upon-a-times? In fact, we have seventeen of Jesus’ complete stories in the Gospels.

Second, I learned that brevity is indeed the soul of wit. There are no bad short sermons. I really think the reason the church hired me after one eleven-minute sermon was that the preacher who preceded me in that pulpit preached for an hour every Sunday. His sermons were so long that the little church outhouse was a “take a number” place with the long lines of those whose bladders had become explosive while they waited for the benediction to arrive. And it was a great gift of mercy when it did arrive.

The third thing I learned was that the best preachers have a built-in sense of compassion for the “listenability” of their offerings. I recently heard a pastor preach for an hour and twenty minutes. He was British and preaching in Alabama. Ordinarily a good British accent in Alabama would hold an audience as spellbound as a Spirit-filled evangelist preaching on prophecy would. But this British scholar was as dull as the moss on the shaded walls of Westminster Abbey. At the first of his sermon people seemed to be interested, but by the end of it they were crying out for the second coming. We all wanted to stand and say, “For heaven’s sake, forbear, man! We are dying and we want to live. The length of your sermon should be measured by your watch and not your calendar.”

Rodney Howard-Browne said that the Toronto Holy Laughter movement began with a long service where someone died in the rear of the congregation. The rescue squad was called in to remove the corpse. Unfortunately, said Howard-Browne, when the paramedics arrived, they hauled out eight rows of the dead before they found the real corpse.

It is especially important to be brief on that all-important candidating sermon. I have had people tell me that short sermons are usually preached to “Christianettes” by “parsonettes” with “sermonettes.” But I remain unconvinced. I have heard scripturally deep sermons with many supporting texts preached by pastors who took their work so seriously they determined that what they said would be an economy of truth, with piercing insights and a built-in altar that made the demands of God both reasonable and terse.

I once memorized the Sermon on the Mount out of Matthew and preached the whole thing in eighteen minutes. Never had I used so many scriptures so efficiently and so powerfully.

Thus, when you preach your candidate sermon in the church, play by the same earnest rules of interest you would use on your twenty-fifth anniversary sermon at the same church. Here are the three rules to make this happy history in your parish:

Keep it relational … make it narrative.

Keep it short … brevity is the soul of wit.

And above all … it must be listenable.

2 William H. Willimon, Pastor (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2002), 14–15.

Letter 27

Preaching to Hansy and Betsy

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“In the healthy church there are always a great many new Christians and a great many who are new to the particular denomination in which the sermon is being preached. It is better to remember Luther’s word on the subject. When asked how he preached consistently to the brilliant Melancthon and the other scholars who attended his sermons, Luther wisely answered that although he knew there were scholars present, most of the time he just ‘preached to Hansy and Betsy.’

“Who were Hansy and Betsy? German housemaids, perhaps. But Luther realized that the sermon was for all of God’s children, and to favor the intellects and the scholars was not only unwise, it was in a sense un-Christian.”[3]

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Dear Young Pastor,

Sermons, unlike movies, shouldn’t be divided into children and adult. With sermons it’s children all the way. If the kids get it, it will get got. Luther freely admitted that while he had many scholars who attended his sermons weekly, he preached specifically to Hansy and Betsy. Preaching to scholars in scholarly ways, he found, injured the gospel.

Beware your own youth. Young pastors are far more prone to want to “make impressions” than older pastors. Don’t let your youth trip you up. Youth have a way of wanting to impress other people, and in the pulpit this is an artificial habit indeed. Anytime you speak over people’s heads to exhibit your own brilliance, you injure the gospel. It is a classic case of jabberwocky. The poem “Jabberwocky” does have a key, and Lewis Carroll told us what it is. But if a glossary of terms must be used to demythologize the myth, then the quality of preaching has already been diminished.

A hearer of John Wesley once said to him, “I understand the Bible splendidly, and someday I hope to understand your commentaries as well.” I don’t remember the name of Wesley’s hearer, but whoever the person was, he or she was the counterpart of Hansy and Betsy.

Important ideas—really urgent ideas—come without adjectives. Adjectives are for adults. So are adverbs. Substantives are for children. Children are the nouns-and-verbs people.

Remember your first-grade reader. Run, Spot, run! See Spot run. Jane has a dress. Etc. I can still see them. Jane running, Spot running. We are never told if they were hungry when they ran. Hungry is unnecessary; hungry is an adjective. Take the real emergency words. Danger! Exit! Fire! No theater sign ever says “The Exit,” just “Exit.” So it is with the word fire. The more adjectives you add, like a “big, red, explosive” fire, the more unnecessary! In fact, the more you describe the fire, the less fiery it will be. A real hot, burning, unending, interesting fire is just “Fire!”

The Bible is a nouns-and-verbs book. So should sermons be.

Consider the phrase Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It is a clean little adage. Not an adjective anywhere near it. For John the Baptist to have said “Sincerely repent, honestly repent, for the glorious, superbly beautiful kingdom is at hand” would have left his whole message bogged down in boredom.

Evangelicals have a habit of using far more adjectives than are necessary. Sermons are more “out of sight” or “thrilling” than necessary. Awesome is the adjective du jour. Everything in the church is “unbelievable” or “inconceivable” or “glorious” or “hallelujah.” We have lost the art of speaking normally in the church. Why? I don’t know. I suppose when you’re saved and certain and shoutin’ and waitin’ for the rapture, it’s just amazin’ what praisin’ can do. One thing is for sure, when you’ve got the word and the bird and you’re getting your socks blessed off because you go around saying “Here, there, or in the air” and you know you’re high on heaven, it sure gets hard to talk normally. I once heard about a church tour group on their way to visit the Grand Canyon. When they arrived at the majestic wonder, they were suddenly quiet, having used up all their adjectives on the bus trip out west. And what, after all, is to be gained by talking our own churchy lingo? Kumbaya is just ayabmuk spelled backward.

The worst thing about this excessive adjectival spending is it congests the sermon. Clichés, like adjectives, pack in around the holy truth like dryer lint. Try while you are young to get rid of them. It’s hard because they do congest and add a pasty quality to what could become good, clean speech. Here’s a list that spoils the logic—the clichés that clog the homily with junky speech:

“If you can’t bless it, confess it!”

“He’s my brother from another mother!”

“Do I hear a witness?”

“Where you go hereafter depends on what you go after here.”

I think the clichés I hate to hear preachers use are those that ask for audience response.

“Praise the Lord!” can be just a simple cliché, or it can be a question—“Praise the Lord?”—which is the preacher-chorister trying to get a little togetherness in the sermon.

“Amen?” is another one. This one I really hate, because I know preachers who string the interrogative plea together in a long line of elicitation just to keep from being alone. When used with this frequency, it is just flat-out annoying. It isn’t just an attempt to arrive at collusion on some subject but a cry of insecurity because there is nothing of real importance to get people to agree with.

Worst of all these homiletic afflictions is the intentional fishing for applause. We have at last reached the clap-happy age. I think it comes from this entertainment society in which we live. I have noticed one thing about preachers who get constant, interrupting applause. Almost without exception, they are preachers who don’t get applause because they have something outstanding to say, but in reality it is quite the opposite. Preachers who get the clappy sermons repeat a lot of shibboleths with great emotion. “Jesus saves!” is much more likely to get applause than “Think of the cost. Christ paid to ransom you. Heaven was bankrupt when the Son of Man was hanged by His hands!” Having been to a thousand pastoral preach-a-thons, I have made a study of this. “Brother, you better get right with God!” cried out with earnest energy is far more likely to be applauded than quoting the prayer of St. Francis. I always hate to follow a one-liner emotionalist at an evangelism conference.

I become victimized by my own foolish notion that sermons ought to argue and reason with the audience. So on I plod trying my best to make sense of the gospel and feeling bad that no one ever claps for sound reason, only for sound bites.

Well, enough has been said on this topic.

Just watch yourself, young pastor. Keep it simple. Keep it free of contagious claptrap. Speak to Hansy and Betsy, and you will create the kingdom with your homilies. And best of all, God just might start listening too.

3 Miller, Preaching, 205.

Letter 28

To Entertain or Not to Entertain?

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“Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.”[4]

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Dear Young Pastor,

It has now been more than twenty-five years since Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death from which the epigraph to this letter was taken. But what was true in 1986 is even truer today. Postman had our number a long time before we knew we had one. We are indeed the entertainment culture. And Irving Berlin also had our number when he wrote the definition of entertainment:

The clown with his pants falling down,

Or the dance that’s the dream of romance

Or the scene where the villain is mean,

That’s entertainment!

In short, entertainment is the art of keeping idle people busy while they remain safe from injury or accident. It serves the incidental function of occupying the mind so fully that we don’t stop to evaluate the content or quality of our focus.

Perhaps its worst fault is to divide the world into two categories: the entertainers and the entertained, the creators and the onlookers, the comedians and those who thrive on their empty distractions. There isn’t a preacher who hasn’t stopped from time to time to tell a story or a joke or read a poem, not because it really fits the sermon but because it’s “just too good” not to pass along to the people of God. But consider what we are doing when we do this. We shift from the high calling of God-involvement in world transformation to mere amusement. So let us ruthlessly differentiate entertainment and biblical exposition.

Entertainment is a spectator sport.

Biblical exposition is the basic work of the kingdom.

Having said this, we still have not answered the question of whether or not there is anything good in an occasional sermonic sally into entertainment. Is there any good reason for just “sharing the items” that don’t really fit into a sermon? Is it okay for a moment to produce a tear or a laugh or that intense “community togetherness” that just occurs when we chase those rabbits completely unrelated to the more majestic themes of the kingdom of heaven upon which we were actually called to preach? I believe it is, but we must never abandon our understanding of the difference between the two.

The one great thing that entertainment always does is create community. People in a theater are somehow fused into a single togetherness as they are enticed to feel the burdens and joys of their common humanity. Nothing is more important than feeling a common humanity. To laugh or cry together is to join the world. Remember the Coca-Cola ditty?

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,

I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.

Well, there we all were in the commercial world: women in saris around the Taj Mahal, old Chinese men on the Great Wall of China, all drinking Cokes together, clinking our cola bottles in front of the United Nations building, perfectly agreed that “it was the real thing, and definitely what the world wants today.” Never mind the Iranian nuclear threat or the unresolved sorrows of 9/11. Community now comes under a bottle cap or inside an aluminum can.

But one thing the ditty taught us, for all its superficiality, is we are communal animals. We want to be a one-world family. Miss America is right—airheaded and naive though she may be—we all want world peace. Nobel laureates can, with a little time away from their own serious views of themselves, dance the Watusi around the jungle fires with natives singing in Swahili, “It’s the real thing.” Never mind those ugly items that have yet to be worked out: nuclear disarmament, cold fusion, and breast cancer.

Community is a powerful lure, and nothing better illustrates communion than entertainment. John once said to Jesus, “We saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” Jesus did not say, “Why didst thou not rather buy him a Coke and teach him to sing in perfect harmony?” but He did say, “Do not stop him.… Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:38–40).

The truth is that we Christians are more often guilty of thinking the world apart than we are thinking it together. We hear the word Samaritan, and the next word that pops into our mind is heretic! Episcopalians are prone to call Catholics “papists,” and Baptists are prone to call Pentecostals “Holy Rollers.” But what if Episcopalians were prone to call Catholics “the noble font of our own faith,” and Baptists were prone to call Pentecostals “our happier cousins”?

Then we could go a lot further in eliminating all our prejudices.

For a while all evangelicals went around singing their own version of the Coke jingle:

We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord

And we pray that all unity will one day be restored,

And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love …

I liked those services where Episcopalians and Baptists wrote their sins on little pieces of wood and threw them in the fire while singing “Kumbaya.” I don’t know what either of them wrote on their little sticks. Probably the Episcopalians wrote, “God, forgive the Baptists for always going around singing ‘Just as I Am’ and remaining just as they were,” and the Baptists wrote, “God, forgive the Episcopalians for using real wine in their Communions.” But at least for the moment “Kumbaya” was everyone’s way of saying, “It sure is good to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.”

Well, this brings me around to the original question: Should we ever entertain in the pulpit? When Jesus said to John, “Whoever is not against us is for us,” He wasn’t saying that doctrinal differences aren’t important; He was saying, “The kingdom of God is pretty inclusive, and if once in a while a Baptist and an Episcopalian grudgingly admit they are both Christians, something wonderful has happened. The relational is born! Community takes root, and people who thought they were different found out that they were not as different as they thought.”

To be honest, so often when I have been lured away from my Baptist intolerances, I have been at a movie or a play. When I saw Schindler’s List, I left the theater a lot more prone to speak of myself as Judeo-Christian. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a new-age place filled with Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, and Christians. When I saw Sabrina in a small theater there, for one small moment I laid aside the vast differences I felt with Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus. We all broke into applause at the end of the film, because we had been so engrossed in a single tale that we all abandoned our differences in favor of our similarities.

Entertainment can do this.

If there is a story or a remark that comes to you in the pulpit and it is not against Christ, it could be that sharing it openly might be a way to build a collective mood that says to all who hear it, “We are one in the Spirit, kumbaya; let’s get a Coke and sing in perfect harmony.” Given all the churches that fight and split, maybe the spirit of entertainment is better than all the pandering of viewpoints that divide congregations. After all, I’ve never heard of a church splitting while they were all clinking their Cokes together.

Recently our pastor was preaching a very doctrinal sermon, and in the eight o’clock service, which I attend, I found myself getting very sleepy. He was talking about God the Father and Jesus, both persons I immensely admire, and I felt guilty that I was getting so sleepy in the middle of a discourse of such importance. Nonetheless, I was, and even my guilt could not call me back from the la-la land of important, creedal stuff.

Then, for some reason, the pastor stopped and read us all a story about a little boy who prayed about the cruelty of a woman. The woman had taken her child shopping at a supermarket and while in the store refused to buy him some chocolate-chip cookies, though the child badgered her to do it all the way to the cash register. Finally standing in the register line, where they were about to check out, the little boy prayed with great volume, “O Jesus, please help Mama to buy me some chocolate-chip cookies.” The whole congregation burst into laughter at the conclusion of the story.

If you see no humor in this story, maybe it’s because you had to be there. As far as I could see, there was no relationship between the story and the sermon the pastor was preaching. But instantly, all of us who were dozing came alive and laughed rather fervently. Suddenly, we were one. We shed our cadaverisms and discovered we were humans with pulses and nervous systems. The heavy biblical exposition was over for the moment, having been replaced with a code-blue entertainment stimulus to the laugh gland.

All pastors have been caught in one of those improprieties we call pulpit bloopers. I have a few of them in my history. I don’t really enjoy feeling like an idiot out searching for my village, but the spontaneity of my own embarrassment has left me blushing while my congregation sat amused to the point of uncontrollable laughter. These bloopers are really counterproductive entertainment we would rather do without because they usually destroy the unpreached remainder of our sermons. Still, they do build community and are entertaining.

I was once preaching on marriage during which I said, among other things, “No marriage can ever be fifty-fifty in the matter of shared opinion. No sir, folks! In marriage, there is no such thing as a tit for tat.” I was bellowing now to emphasize the point, “It must always be two tits for a tat!” I think I had been preaching fairly seriously out of the Bible, probably citing glorious passages and Greek word roots. But alas, all scholarship died, buried in hoots of laughter. I was allowed to keep the church, but it was at least a month before I preached anything again that could be called theologically appreciated. They still talk fondly of that particular idiocy even today.

The late Bruce McIver said that while preaching a Palm Sunday sermon, he said, “When Jesus wanted to prove His ‘messiahship,’ He rode into Jerusalem on an ass, but once inside the city, He got off the ass and began teaching the kingdom.” And then, unfortunately, he applied the scripture and said, “If we’re going to get anything done for God, we had better get off our _____ and begin preaching the kingdom.” Fill in the blank if you must, but silently please, in your mind only.

But let’s leave this kind of unintentional entertainment and ask, “Is there anything wrong with intentionally entertaining when you could be expositing?” The worse thing about using entertainment in legitimate ways is that it can lead to the highly addictive need to make people laugh or cry, or to fish for applause or get an outcry of “amens.”

Let’s be honest. Humor, the most frequent form of entertainment, is in itself a great teacher. People remember expository truths better if they come sheathed in unforgettable moments of laughter. I have found certain passages come fixed, chapter and verse in my memory, by just remembering something entertaining someone said about them. I remember Romans 1:13 because an evangelist said it was later used as an old maid’s epitaph carved on her tombstone: “I would not have you ignorant brethren.”

All in all, it must be said that humor and wistful sentiment are teachers, and illustrations that grab an audience may come from any part of the human condition and serve the world of truth. Someone once pointed out to me the difference between American Baptists and Southern Baptists (my particular kind of Baptists): American Baptists say, “There ain’t no hell!” and Southern Baptists say, “The hell there ain’t!” It helps me pick out the defining sentiments of either denomination. Did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor, “Make me one with everything!”? Of course not, but it brings up one of the controlling sentiments of Eastern religions. Are Presbyterians just Baptists with stock portfolios? No, but it does point out where each denomination stands in the hierarchy of socioeconomics. Do Episcopalians really buy a fifth to drink on the fourth? Not all of them, but they are far more likely to do so than Quakers, let’s say.

Well, it’s time to wrap up this meandering argument, but let us at least agree that entertainment is the language of the age. Our people listen to hours and days of television each week and go to innumerable movies. We are not in the middle of their lives to replicate the less important work of singers and comedians, but here and there we might add to their remembrance of something spiritually vital by including things merely human. Here and there we might actually agree that it is good to endorse our divinity by giving it an injection of humanity.

It works for me! The little boy who asked Jesus to please give him some chocolate-chip cookies is hard to relate theologically to either the concordance or the creed, but for one brief shining moment the slumbering dead were laughing. And laughter is a life sign.

4 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1986), 3.

Letter 29

Keeping in Touch with the Arts

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“I do not know when I have had happier times in my soul, than when I have been sitting at work, with nothing before me but a candle and a white cloth, and hearing no sound but that of my own breath, with God in my soul and heaven in my eye … I rejoice in being exactly what I am,—a creature capable of loving God, and who, as long as God lives, must be happy. I get up and look for a while out of the window and gaze at the moon and stars, the work of an Almighty hand. I think of the grandeur of the universe, and then sit down, and think myself one of the happiest beings in it.”[5]

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Dear Young Pastor,

Certainly every worthy preacher keeps in touch with the Holy Scriptures every day of life. But there is another source for knowing the course of humanity: the arts. For a few of you youngsters, you need no encouragement in the matter. By nature you read novels, enjoy plays, take every chance you can to go to the art gallery, etc. You don’t do this just because you want to be an informed pastor; you do it because you want to live a full life. Nevertheless, your way of life adds up to a large profit for your parishioners.

I grew up in Oklahoma and went to church off and on all through adolescence. Yet I was fully into my twenties before I had a pastor who in any real way informed me about the world in any wider way than just an elementary understanding of the Scriptures. Not that I didn’t need to know the Bible. I certainly did. But I had a huge interest in culture that the church never addressed. I think I first discovered this in grade school when my mother first introduced me to some great books. What I noticed was that the classic novelists and poets she read to me almost always touched base with the Scriptures. Wherever they did, we would talk about those references in particular.

Since I found the Bible and secular works both to be highly poetic, it bothered me that one poet I admired was Muslim. I would often wonder why Omar Khayyám was not a Christian. At that time I had no opinions—and certainly no jaded opinions—of the Muslim literati. But I remember my mother teaching me any number of his quatrains, many of which I can still quote by heart:

Think in this battered caravanserai

Whose portals are alternate night and day

How sultan after sultan with his pomp,

Abode his destined hour and went his way.

Or:

The moving finger writes and having writ

Moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit

Can lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

It was years before I realized Khayyám was Muslim. And even after I came to understand it, I realized that most evangelicals would discourage my even knowing about the Persian poet, let alone having memorized poems from his work.

This has always been a conundrum to me: Why is it that Christians seem to deplore the reading of secular books? For years I made it my custom to read all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays annually. His sonnets too! His words still nag at me to read them. I love all his characters. I have known so many people like Cassius who have a “lean and hungry look.” I can’t help but believe that “such men are dangerous.” I don’t know for sure, but I think Judas Iscariot was a skinny little suspicious rat, and the New Testament says he went to hell directly after hanging himself. I have a feeling hell is full of skinny little suspicious rats. Cassius, as far as he is historical, will be there. This is a stereotype given to me by the Bard. The Bard also defined Desdemona, Othello’s compliant wife: Now there was a real Ephesians 5:22, Bill Gothard sort of a woman. Shakespeare well defined for me Iago, who has been on every board of trustees I have ever known. Mercutio is every Romeo’s plucky comic relief.

But let’s leave Will out of it. Longfellow is a quotable chap in sermons. So are Byron and Keats. My mother would summon up her best imitative voice for any number of poems. I can still remember her best “Old Squaw’s” voice while reading me “Hiawatha.” Then there was my high school Latin teacher, Miss Fullhague, who taught me: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” the opening words of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. On and on goes the list of books and plays.

I have stood before the great paintings of the world in the most splendid galleries of Europe. I have seen the little gray tablet in the British museum that contains the Gilgamesh epic. I have read Ibsen, and even better than that, I have seen his plays. Bernard Shaw—all of Shaw—I have seen and read. I have visited the cinema and seen a whole lot of mediocrity, but here and there on the screen I have seen great films. I have read the English subtitles to movies in Chinese, Italian, and French, all to my liking.

Why make such a federal case of this? Because every movie or play or poem or painting I have run into is ingested and filed in my inner retrieval system. I have dragged out bits and pieces of this whole hidden repertoire, stirred it into the gospel, and served it up with John or Luke or Moses to the profit of all.

Why am I so big on the arts? Because the arts and the Bible are really about the same thing: life. There are not a great many important life issues, so you would expect both the arts and the Bible to touch base every once in a while. And so they do. Think about it: Billy Budd, Melville’s Christ symbol, dies clinging to his integrity. Who does this remind you of? None other than Jesus.

Don Quixote, Cervantes’ man about Spain, dies dreaming a better world. Who does this remind you of? Again, Jesus.

John Coffey, Stephen King’s giant, innocent, death-row convict, heals and redeems all within the narrow confines of his Green Mile. Who does this remind you of? Jesus, perhaps?

Sidney Carton at the guillotine, the Count of Monte Cristo, John—Bruce Willis—McClane, who saves the entire Nakatomi Plaza from Hans Gruber and the boys: Can all of these be valid savior images? Christ symbols? Bruce Willis? Well, he doesn’t exactly preach the Sermon on the Mount, but yeah.

I have always admired preachers who can link up the world of movies with sermons in real ways that give them a solid, contemporary sound. I had a student-preacher in my class who linked Quasimodo, Notre Dame’s hunchback, with Jonathan’s deformed son Mephibosheth. I had another who took the resurrection of E.T. and linked it to a passage in Matthew 28. I had another who managed to clean up Ricky Bobby’s adoration of the baby Jesus from Talladega Nights.

Wonderful, relevant film clips can be lifted from Ben-Hur, The Passion of the Christ, Doubt, Up, The Book of Eli. There is a wonderful use of Psalm 129 in The Sixth Sense.

As for poets, there is Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, Billy Collins, and virtually anything from James Kavanaugh. T. S. Eliot, too. And in my opinion, Calvin Miller. Egad! Can I really be saying this? Well, consider items like these:

How odd the song born on Earthmaker’s breath,

Should lead his only Troubadour to death.[6]

Earth holds a strange power that ties feet in the dust,

So that ponderous men are bound to her crust.

But the winds whisper tales of a force in the sky.

And those with the courage to scorn dust can fly.[7]

Yet in this cradled straw, grace can reside

And we have hope because a baby cried.[8]

The key thing is that those pastors who have experienced the arts have an edge on those who do not. Sermons are rich where the pastors have walked the edges of culture. And where sermons are rich, the people are rich too.

But just to see things entirely right: The best thing is that the pastor is richer. Many years ago I was with my seven-year-old grandson at a performance of Macbeth in Stratford, Ontario. Macbeth is a rather bloody play for children, but it is also fascinating for two reasons. It is shorter than most of the Bard’s tragedies, and youngsters dig short! It is full of witches and ghosts and swordfights. Who can resist such fast action married to such dramatic intrigue? We were well into the play when Banquo’s ghost came onstage. The actors carried on the scene irrespective of the specter, since the only one who can actually see the ghost is Macbeth himself. My grandson tugged me on the sleeve and whispered, “Grandpa, don’t you think it is fascinating how all the actors pretend not to see the ghost of Banquo?”

“Yes!” I said. “It’s an amazing theatrical effect, isn’t it, Jared?”

That’s what I like about the arts. Both my grandson and I were richer for the experience. Now he is twenty-one years old and illustrating books and doing storyboards for movie producers, and I often think how rich the arts have made our entire family. But then, the Bible has also mortared our relationships. And between the two, we Millers have lived wonderful lives, and I believe we have given a couple of churches now the grace of our insights and shared the golden coinage of our wide affections.

Take time: let this world’s joy seep into you,

And draw from every source the measure due!

Then ask was ever soul so blessed as I

To know both Christ, and all earth may supply.

5 Mary W. Tileston, ed., Daily Strength for Daily Needs (Los Angeles: Indo-European, 2010), 13.

6 Calvin Miller, The Singer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 45.

7 Calvin Miller, The Guardians of the Singreale (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 9.

8 Calvin Miller, “Christmas 1985.”

Letter 30

Whatever You Want Me to Remember, Be Sure It Starts with “Once Upon a Time”

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“Draw your chair up close to the edge of a precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”[9]

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Dear Young Pastor,

We are all trapped in the middle of a story, looking for our own happily-ever-afters. It is because of this that we all have a fondness for stories. Why? Because the best stories do have endings, and we know what those endings are. Therefore, a wonderful Storyteller has lifted the heaviness of their suspense. It is He who has put the peace in our pockets.

There are only two kinds of story endings. The first is the happy ending, and the second is the unhappy ending. Unhappy-ending stories fix a negativity into our days, but we Christians don’t have to serve as slaves to them. We serve a grand story and are called to tell it to the miserable sufferers whose unfinished stories have them tied up in psychiatric wards and marriage counselors.

Cinderella’s story ends happily. Joan of Arc’s, unhappily. Cinderella, that miserable, mistreated half sister, has one wonderful thing going for her: The shoe fits! And we listen again and again and again. This poor, soot-and-ash-gutter-sleeping girl leaves her abusive mother-in-law and moves into Buckingham. And we couldn’t be more thrilled. Tell us her tale yet again. Why? Because our own lives are bogged down in credit-card debt, and we are thousands behind on our income tax. We have no idea if we are going to prison or if we are going to win the lottery and buy Hearst Castle. Our miserable story ends at a big red question mark, so tell us one that doesn’t.

The sweetest words in the English language must be “and they lived happily ever after.” They call the fury of every tempest back to the teacup. They stanch the war and call the infantry back to lemonade. No matter the circumstances. Despite bacteria, racism, and the heartbreak of teenage acne, they do it. Pandora’s box is once again full of all ills, and they are gone from the world. Is there hope? Yes, tell us about that girl who lost her glass slipper on the palace step. We need to hear about her. Why? For one wonderful reason: She lived happily ever after. So many things are wrong with our own stories; tell us one that has nothing wrong in its outcome.

God understood our pain. He knew we were in the middle of some story and we had no idea how it would end. So He wrote a book that ended with those words we all love “and they lived happily ever after” … or, “Yes, I am coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.” And we read the book of God again and again, because we know how the human story will end. It will end wonderfully.

J. R. R. Tolkien went so far in his essay on fairy tales to say that the little phrase “and they lived happily ever after” originated in the West. It happened in history one time for all times. Jesus walked out of the tomb. Here was the very worst of stories. God Himself was hanging in the gallows, and the world was upside down with grief. But they put Him in the grave, writing off every possible hope of meaning, and the world that could never find its way out was locked in darkness with never a shred of light.

Then it happened! Easter! That stone that locked a dead God in darkness rolled back, that certain steady light broke, and the happy ending was born. This is the archetypal story that holds the center of God’s book. It is amazing how this story can sound so much like Hans Christian Andersen:

Once upon a time in a far-off land, a baby king was born to very humble parents.

Astrologers came, and winged creatures sang to the little prince. But then a very wicked king decided the little prince must be put to death. So he killed all the babies in the little town where the prince had been born. But the prince escaped just before the wicked king’s soldiers came. And the little prince grew to become a great king, who was kind to everyone he met. But one of those who said they loved the great king turned him in to the other wicked rulers, and he was captured by one of his own friends who had kissed him and led him to those who would take his life. And they treated the noble king terribly cruelly. They beat him with whips and took off his beautiful robe and nailed him to a cross. And his poor mother, who was now very old indeed, began to cry when they put nails in his hands and feet.

Bit by bit his blood was all spilled, and finally he died.

They put him in a dark, dank cave, and said, “He’s dead!”

His friends cried for three days, and the horrible man who kissed him killed himself. And all those who loved him cried from Friday to Sunday.

Then … guess what?

He came back to life!

And all the people loved him. And they had wonderful times together.

And the king went back to his father, who lived in a far-off land.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Now the people come to us and sit in our pews. Even as they walk into our sanctuaries, their miserable lives are locked in despair. Fifty percent of all people who walk into our Sunday talks are under the tonnage of some problem. But that’s all right, because 50 percent of the times that we stand up to preach to them, we too are under such a burden. They don’t always know why they came to church. But we do. They came because, like little children, they want to hear us read from the Book that ends happily. And to fail to read them the Book, and to read it consistently, is the greatest sin the minister of God can commit.

Don’t all ministers tell God’s story? Well, sort of. They refer to it a lot. They discuss the characters in the story, but so many have never caught the connection: that it is the narrative that saves, not our discussion of the narrative. They have never really seen that the opening words of Genesis—“In the beginning”—are “Once upon a time” words. They talk about propositions that appear within the hundreds of little stories that compose God’s big story.

And they miss it!

They actually miss the big story that gives hope.

They become prosaic.

They give speeches, write essays, devise explanations, and the people come and go with their own miserable stories. They can’t finish their own tales. They don’t connect their stories with God’s happy-ending story. They hurt and turn their own stories over and over in their minds. The arguments that get set forth are often hard to follow. They get sleepy. Preachers blame their sluggish listeners for not forcing themselves to get with it. The people who wanted the stories are pretty much dropping out. Four thousand churches close their doors every year, and only a thousand new ones are planted. And the tragic issue is this: Each of those who live in the middle of their own unending narratives would have come, and gladly, if they had only heard from the Book the story that kills and makes alive, that saves and destroys. It is the redeeming narrative that leaves the needy standing before an empty tomb and crying out, “So this is how a story is supposed to end!” I must get back here in this place as often as I can. This Preacher—this wonderful Storyteller—has made it clear, that God, when He wanted to save me, said like F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Draw your chair up close

to the edge of a precipice

and I’ll tell you a story.

And what a story!

It covers all the unfinished details of my own.

9 F. Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), 694.

Section Five

Come into My Heart, Lord Jesus … Please

Heavenly Father, how I want to look like You in every respect—in heart, thought, spirit, and action. I have only one lifetime to give to You. This is my only opportunity, so refine me until potential character becomes proven character. I give You permission to test my faith as You see fit.

I know this is a dangerous prayer. My flesh is screaming at me to stop and recant—but I must not. I love You too much and I love what You can make of me. You bore the Cross for me! That puts it all into perspective. Amen.[1]

1 Wayne Cordeiro, Dream Releasers (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2002), 103–4.

This year

I wanted to serve you, but the calendar was unkind.

The sun, it seemed, despised the meadows.

They dried.

The livestock died.

This year the fig tree would not bud.

The grape vines shriveled into nothingness.

The olives died in a sunny scorch,

The wheat fields were bowls of dust.

Then, above this pageant of ocher death,

I caught sight of you.

And all you said was “My child, I love you.”

Music broke around me.

The desert summoned snow.

The winds were washed in cold rain.

And a kinder sun kissed

The meadows back alive.

Calvin Miller, “A Meditation on Habakkuk 3:17–18”

As the deer pants for streams of water,

So my soul pants for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God,

For the living God.

Psalm 42:1–2

Letter 31

Nonconformity: The Art of Submissive Individuality

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“Perhaps the most dangerous verse in all the Bible is the second verse of Romans 12, where Saint Paul endorses Christian nonconformity. When he writes, ‘And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God,’ he is telling his readers not to do that which comes naturally to them. An invitation to nonconformity is a dangerous thing, and thoughtful nonconformity, for that is what Paul is requiring, is all the more dangerous because nonconformity is an intention and not an inadvertence. In a culture in which conformity is valued, nonconformity is likely to get one into trouble.”[1]

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Dear Young Pastor,

There are two words I have never much liked: conformity and propriety. They are the ugliest of twins. Conformity is what you do to arrive at propriety. Both of them are “blend-in” words, when what God calls us to be is His “stick-out” people.

St. Paul realized back in the first century that the world is a conforming place. The world wants to shape you to fit its own secular contours. In fact, one Bible scholar translates Romans 12:2, “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold.” Paul wasn’t just writing this verse because he was short on his word count. He knew that conformity is the thief of life. He knew that you can never really be anything usable when you’re trying to become only what someone else wants you to be. Religious leaders are often specialists at homogenizing individuality. They see a maverick and promptly enroll him in Imitative Christianity 101. And before long all the stick-out stuff that was so memorable about his life becomes just a blend-in look-alike of a bland disciple who lost his way in trying to be like someone else.

I first noticed this in leading people to Christ. They were beautiful before they were “church broke.” Great young converts often start out as radiant Christians and end up only as carbon-copy Baptists. Great young ministers start out as adorable mavericks, but after a business meeting or two and a church fight, their independence begins to look for protection. And then somebody buys them a new suit, and somebody else gives them an all-expense-paid ticket to the Holy Land. The goodies change them and leave them so codependent on favors that they soon live only for those perks one earns simply by being predictable.

I have worked at a seminary for years. One cannot fail to mark the enormous conformity that goes with scholarship. When students begin their study, they arrive on campus with a gleam in their eyes. They are in love with Christ and sure of their calling. Three years later they have shucked their naïveté. And it is good to see them lose some of their gullibility. But they often lose something else, something so very fine that they will never be quite as outstanding as they once were. They have been “seminary broke.” This odd domestication leaves them looking for the rough edges they traded in for professional sophistication. They got their degrees primarily because they did everything they were told to do. They turned in papers, parsed verbs, and footnoted their way to academic respect. It was only after I had spent some years helping conform them that I asked myself, “Why is it that so many of the great pastors of America and the most effective foreign missionaries have never gone to college?” I set out on a quest to answer that question.

Shortly after this issue began to burn within me, I happened to be doing some missionary work in Costa Rica. One Sunday I spoke in two different churches—one in the morning and one in the evening. The church I spoke at in the morning was a denominational church (my denomination too) that had a beautiful little building built with US denominational resources. The podium held a Christian flag and a Costa Rican flag. On the front wall of the church just over the piano on one side was a register board telling me how many they had in Sunday school. On the organ side was another register board telling me how many they had in evening worship. There were twenty-some people in attendance all dressed in suits and ties and Sunday-go-to-meeting dresses.

Their worship was a yawning affair. The entire church looked like it had been built in Richmond, where the missionaries were from, and put down in the heart of San José. Miraculously, everyone stayed till the end of the service, but nobody got a blessing. If this had happened in a Mexican Catholic church, the stone virgins would have wept.

That evening I preached in an old movie house reclaimed by exciting Pentecostals. There were no register boards, as who would have time to shop for them? Jesus was coming again, probably next week. There also was no organ, just a keyboard and a stack of tambourines. Their church nursery was a file of playpens across the back of the auditorium. One playpen was marked “six months to nine months,” the next was marked “ten months to twelve months,” etc. Each of the playpens was filled with children, noisy children. They weren’t really too bad during the song service, being no match for the tambourines and the keyboard. But I did notice them while I was preaching. I could scarcely hear myself think. What amazed me was that they didn’t seem to bother anybody else. The place was packed. The Lady Gaga amplifiers slicked my hair back and purged my sinuses. I caught only a brief glimpse of the Holy Spirit. He was wearing earmuffs. Nonetheless, He was there.

I spent the next week trying to analyze why a few Pentecostals with tambourines were packing in people. Why? They cared nothing about theology. They didn’t parse a single Greek verb. They just stood there, praising God and secreting thyroxine.

Here’s what I think. So often we old-line denominationalists give our ministers degrees in missions and tell them to get out there and be “missional.” They are so well educated that they have to consciously step down to the street level to preach and praise. Not so with the Pentecostals. They are not known for being scholars or necessarily even being seminary graduates. They don’t have to step down over their education to relate to the people in the street: They are the people in the streets. What I am really saying is that they have never been in a place where they were forced to conform to graduate standards. Nobody ever said to them, “Write a paper on the Mosaic census in Numbers.” How were they to know it mattered? They had to get their guitars tuned.

God taught me a real lesson on conformity that day: There just isn’t any life in it.

I am a seminary professor. I can’t play the guitar, and I do know a lot of Greek verbs. Still, I’m not ready to give up on seminary just yet. Why? Because every now and then I meet a very bright student who graduates, and bam! There he or she is out in the field, listening and saying to God, “Well, here I am, God! Where can I find a movie theater and couple of tambourines?” These are the world changers because they learned all they could and never conformed themselves to the forces that wanted to change them into something so ugly that no one in the streets ever accused them of making Christ beautiful.

The nonconformed are the mavericks. As I pointed out, they are no good at propriety. They live in search of that electric synapse, where the power flows. They hate being proper, just because propriety so often ends in frostbite. God’s frozen chosen never meant to be trapped in carbonite. They were just afraid that if they really lost themselves in the rapture of praise that they would be criticized, so they pasted on icy masks and practiced the kind of religion that religious people want everyone to own.

Why do all the conformists want all the nonconformists to conform? Because misery loves company. They thought they once heard God yell down from heaven, “Are you having fun there in church?” When they cried back, “Yes, Lord!” God shouted back, “Well, cut it out right now!” So they did, and they got that frozen look that always denotes propriety. This is why I attend contemporary worship. Anything goes once the guitars start. I don’t always know what’s coming next, but whatever it is, it won’t be boring.

But let me finish by saying to you, young pastor, don’t conform yourself to any dead models. Experiment with life. Have you ever done a monologue sermon? No? Why not? Are you just too frightened to try it? Don’t be cookie cutter for the rest of your life. Bust out of the mold. Lose your captivity to propriety. Don’t be conformed to the norm. To break out of your captivity, there are four demons that must be exorcised:

1. Ignorance: “I don’t know how to handle this situation. I must look through my seminary notebooks for an answer.”

2. Heredity: “I can’t change because this is how God made me.”

3. Age: “I’m getting too old now to handle the adjustment I need to make.”

4. Inferiority: “I can’t do this. Who am I even to consider this?”

All these demons can be driven out by one rebuke: “Oh fiddlesticks! Here goes!”[2]

1 Gomes, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, 45.

2 Adapted from Miller, The Empowered Leader, 173.

Letter 32

Confession: The Art of Telling It Like It Is, However It Makes You Look

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It is one thing to admit that I have sinned.

It is another to admit that I am a sinner … consistently a sinner,

a sinner and a pastor.

How shall I approach thee, O my God!

Come clean, my child.

Scrub yourself with honesty.

Wash your inconsistencies with confession.

Then our togetherness will bless me

And I will call you my child.

And our union will grant you access to my

Throne.

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Dear Young Pastor,

“Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son,” said the penitent prodigal in Jesus’ parable, and miracles unfolded around his confession. This is the inevitable course of things. It is the only set of words that fires off a volley of hallelujahs in heaven, even when it is merely whispered on earth. I must be honest, whenever any pastor shows a spirit of penitence, I am moved to listen.

I have never cared much for religious cable television. It’s not that I think nothing spiritual ever happens on a cable network; it’s just that I always feel that video spirituality rarely tells the whole truth about our God relationship. Who with a lens pointed at them is ever going to come completely clean about themselves? I learned this from Jimmy Swaggart, directly from one of his telecasts. I don’t know why Jimmy changed me. Maybe it was because Swaggart rhymed with braggart. Or maybe because Baton Rouge reminded me of a cosmetic empire. I don’t know exactly what it was that changed me, but I was changed.

I never disliked Jimmy. I generally steer away from forming any possible bad opinions of anyone. I just never listened much to cable television. I think it all went back to a long-standing argument I had with our NBC affiliate station that used to run Star Trek reruns on Sunday night. It was my favorite way to end any hassled Sabbaths. Sundays, along with being the Lord’s Day, were also nightmares. Two or three morning sermons and an evening one, afternoon hospital calls, and even a committee meeting or two: These were the ingredients of the Sabbath hassle—Sabbath after Sabbath—every Sabbath, world without end, amen.

Beaten up by ennui, it was my custom for years to hurry home on Sunday nights and watch old Star Trek reruns. Sure, they were predictable. Every week Scotty was out of dilithium crystals. Bones told Spock a joke he didn’t get, hampered as he was with his infernal Vulcan logic. Every episode without fail, the Enterprise would lurch its way through an intergalactic force field, and all the actors would fall on the floor. And of course, they always split their hands into two groups of fingers in the oddest way and said, “Live long and prosper!” But I loved it! There wasn’t a church trustee on the series, ever.

Then one night the announcer said they were taking Star Trek off the air because Jimmy Swaggart had bought the time. I couldn’t believe it. “Why, God?” I protested. “Why would You take off these adorable, somewhat-Christian cosmonauts and replace them with another cable evangelist?” I think I would never have even considered listening to Swaggart after that except on one Sunday morning, sometime later as I was going off to church, Swaggart himself came on television, announcing that he was going to confess on his Sunday-evening telecast. He was crying, too, so it seemed to me that he meant it.

That night I hurried home from church, and by eight o’clock I was perched in front of the TV set, waiting for the evangelist to live the confessional life. He soon appeared; the camera moved in. He was weeping, and he confessed. It wasn’t clear what he had done, since he seemed to confess a kinkier confession than I could figure out. He hadn’t committed adultery exactly, and I found this a bit baffling, since I have always preferred the kind of adultery I can understand. But he was confessing, and he meant it.

He wept!

I have always been a sucker for a child of God in tears, and I have been a special sucker for a weeping man. Since men usually weep less frequently than women, it breaks me up when they finally weep aloud.

He asked for national forgiveness, and I for one forgave him on the spot.

I didn’t forgive him so fast because I measured all his motives. I didn’t try to assess the character of his truthfulness. I did it because he asked, and I had no right to evaluate his sincerity or integrity. This is the nature of all of God’s forgiveness. Every prodigal is greeted the same way. No one is given a polygraph test. All are forgiven merely for having asked.

Something wonderful happens in confession. We come face-to-face with a God who is waiting for the world to come clean and then live clean. Pastors especially need this because it is generally believed that they are sinless. Nobody would say that out loud, but all people in having rehearsed their own sinfulness like believing that there is a group—i.e., pastors—who do not struggle with sin. D. T. Niles’ definition of evangelism as “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread” is not really believed—not really. Only the pastor really knows what his sin is. He does not have to name his sins to the congregation, but he also doesn’t want to connote the opinion that he has conquered it all.

The specifics of our confessions are for God alone. The only time we should name our sins aloud to our congregation is when we have wronged them. In this sense Jimmy Swaggart had done his confession just right. He had wronged the entire world of believers by living a life that had damaged his soul by hypocrisy, which no one believed he would have done since his video commitment to Christ seemed so entire.

My rule on confession is this: Never confess to more people than you have wronged. If you have wronged your family or your wife, confession should be made to them. If the sin of your life is only against God, then your confession should be made only to Him. But confession is to be the lifestyle of the follower of God. If you store up unconfessed sin, the weight of it will destroy your spirituality. The practice of confession is really the practice of taking your own morality seriously. Jesus is our example in the matter. He knew no sin, and yet His clinging to His righteousness was altogether important to Him. It is sin—your sin—that fastened Christ to His gallows.

People will sooner or later guess by the powerless life you live that you’ve lost your openness with a holy God. No one has a right to invade your life and demand your open confession. This is what I love about Romans 8:1; there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, which, loosely interpreted, means there are no video projectors in heaven. I used to say to the congregation every once in a while, “If you knew what I have held in my heart from time to time, you wouldn’t really listen to one of my sermons ever again, and if I knew what was in your heart, I would never want to preach to you again.” The key thing is that both pastor and flock own the washing of grace. And when we keep scrubbed up, a holiness is born, an altar is formed, and the possibility of continuous congregational renewal is as real as the book of Acts.

What has the confessional life to do with great pastoring?

It is crying, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son,” and feeling the warm, wet tears of God’s laughter coursing across your need.

The cleansing comes, Peniel, face-to-face.

And you are clean, your conscience bathed in grace.

Letter 33

Touch: The Delicate Art of Leaving Your Fingerprints on Human Need

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“The great conundrum in pastoral care is how and when to touch others—particularly the opposite sex. Touching is the final boundary of permission. Yet there is nothing more powerful than the ministry of touch. In my book The Valiant Papers, the angel Valiant laments his inability to touch as humans do: ‘What a blessing is simple skin! What confirmation mortals find in touching each other. Where there is touching men grow secure and lovers delight themselves. Where there is too little touching, frightened children weep at night, and the race grieves.’ Touch is health, yet its boundaries are formidable, and permission in some form must always be given.”[3]

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Dear Young Pastor,

This will probably be the most pointless letter in this collect. People either touch or they don’t. I don’t know why. It almost seems like the ability to be tactile to the human race originates in the lost gene pools of long-ago generations. It seems either we find it easy to embrace the world or we find it taboo. I have learned this: Some of the world’s finest people just don’t like to touch. Usually if they don’t like to do it, they don’t like to have it done to them. Touch to be done naturally must not fear to invade anyone else’s space. And conversely people who don’t touch seem to resent anyone who gets within touching distance of them.

Sexual-harassment suits seem to be utterly common in our day and age. For the last several years, we who teach are usually told in the opening days of seminary not to physically touch any student. We sit and listen, and we understand that illicit accusations can happen to a faculty member who gets too friendly with anyone else. However, when I walk back to my office on campus, I probably hug half a thousand returning students and other faculty members I haven’t seen in a long time. I am a hugger—a seventy-five-year-old hugger—who can’t break the habit.

In all my years of hugging people I have had only one incrimination. When I was in my first pastorate, I called on a woman who was generally known as a troublemaker in the church. I had prayer with her and thoughtlessly hugged her on the way out of the house. As soon as I was out of the house, the woman (let’s call her Mae) phoned the deacons and told them that I had been to her home and hugged her and held on a long time. Her charge never went anywhere; since she was such a physically ugly woman, not even the Devil would have hugged her and hung on. Except for that one charge, I never had any other person accuse me of inappropriate hugging. Since I’ve now grown as elderly and wrinkled and covered with liver spots as Mae, I can’t imagine anyone else ever accusing me of recreational hugging. It looks to me as though time has “purdy neart ruint me” that any serious charges of sexual impropriety are unlikely: Old is good, and very self-protective.

But as risky as touching is, I think it has served me well. I have a lot of theories about it. It seems to me to be religious to the core. In the Scriptures, people are consecrated to the ministry by the laying on of hands. When others are healed, both in the Bible and in modern prayer services, touching the afflicted in the mightiest of names is a factor in healing. Whenever I made hospital calls, I tried to touch the lonely and hurting, and in this continual ministry of laying on my own hands, I believe I was able to bring something more of Jesus than I would have in a nontouching, more germ-free, but less efficacious extending of God’s power.

At the end of our services we often held hands across the auditorium by the hundreds to sing the doxology or a chorus of fellowship. We used to have a Presbyterian come to our church who never liked the practice, and he always managed to find himself between his wife and the last seat on the aisle. His wife didn’t try to hold hands with him, so he could worship with us and leave uncontaminated. Still, I always feel sorry for Presbyterians who can’t grant Baptists enough germ-free status to hold a hand just for half a hymn.

We do need to be sensitive to others’ requests in the matter though. People who don’t like to be hugged will let you know it the first time you try to hug them. The hate-to-be-hugged type is a kind of koinonia cadaver. Hug them, and you can feel the stiffness in their system. Their vertebrae fuse into a column of manganese, and they look straight ahead. When you release them, they will let you know with their eyes that they do not like the practice. I get it when this happens and make the point of never hugging them again, but when I walk away and leave their visual field, I always grin a bit, thinking of the wonderful thing I just did. For one brief, shining moment, I hugged the unhuggable. I uncurdled a bit of their thick, cold blood. I thawed a ventricle. I hooked them up with a bit of humanity. I taught them what the reception line in heaven will be like. I never feel more human, more real, than when I rattle the bone-cold frame of a remote, arctic soul who moves through a lonely world, defying the only human activity that might possibly warm them up.

Take it from me. There are times when you can put the world back together for some aloof and hurting souls just by touching them. Yet I always have to face the world with some reckoning. There are people I just wouldn’t hug. Take Queen Elizabeth II. I have never met her, but even if I saw her at a hot-dog stand—even in this casual place where she might drop a splat of mustard on her royal bodice—I just wouldn’t hug her. If I did, I know she would look at me and say, “Vulgar American! We are not amused!” There are plenty of other people. Movie stars and politicians, people of reputation, and most Episcopalians. But other than that, I’d have to let the occasion be my guide.

Once at a young girl’s funeral, I had to make just such a decision. The girl’s father was a member of our church and an air force serviceman. He was an aide on Air Force One and had flown with the president many times. A few generals and lots of upper-crust brass attended the funeral. When it came time to review the open casket at the end of the service, I went to take my customary place at the head of the little casket. Standing in this needy place, I often hug family and friends, particularly at a child’s funeral. There is no kind of occasion that more elicits tears and touching than a child’s funeral.

On this particular occasion I looked at all the generals who were there, and I thought to myself, I must keep my respectful distance here. It is not my place to hug a general.

But as the people began to pass me by, one of the enlisted men, who was a pallbearer, came past me and hugged me. He was weeping, and I hugged him back. The next person by the casket was a general, and when he saw the serviceman ahead of him weeping for the child, tears filled his eyes. When he came to me, I took his hand to shake it, whereupon he reached out, grabbed my hand, and pulled me toward him. I hugged him as he wept. His open humanity gave all the other upper-level military brass permission to hug me.

Hugging generals was never a goal of mine, but I am grateful for the ministry of touch, and I hope you yourselves might realize that touching is one of the senses, and the one that is easiest to appropriate in following your calling. Remember the Prodigal Son; remember the waiting father. When the son returned, here is what the father did:

And he arose, and came to his father.

But when he was yet a great way off,

His father saw him, and had compassion, and ran,

And fell on his neck, and kissed him. (Luke 15:20 KJV)

Welcome penitents with touch.

Comfort the afflicted with touch.

Touch the world, and your compassion will be seen not as the mere pressing of your hand, but a literal passing of the fingers of God on all the woes of humankind.

The world gets well when you touch it.

3 Miller, O Shepherd, Where Art Thou?, 90.

Letter 34

Self-Crucifixion: The Art of Looking Good on Wood

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Never go into the pulpit without a definite plan to change the world in some way.

Preaching is to change. Frank Honeycutt writes: “The preacher’s role in this labored transformation is not only to speak of his or her own ‘death’ at times (and signs of such should be obvious by the way a preacher now lives), but to be sure the power of God’s word to kill and raise people is not softened or diminished. Daniel Berrigan once said, ‘A Christian should be prepared to look good on wood.’ The gospel is good news, but depending on your perspective, such news may actually sound pretty bad. So a central role for the preacher is to get a sense for the message, faithfully speak it, and then get out of the way. Death is at work and there may be casualties.”[4]

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Dear Young Pastor,

This letter is for you ardent disciples who love God and yet after years of service find your reputation not very widespread. It is not for you who stand on top of the evangelical food chain. You who are famous Christians will not find this chapter to your liking, and should you happen to pick up this book, I encourage you to lay it aside and go back to your fan clubs.

Still, this particular letter is for the rest of us. We must of necessity live with poorer incomes and much less notoriety. We play by very different rules in the toughness of all we are asked to endure. I remember a time last fall when one of the nation’s largest megachurches was running $900,000 behind on its “ministry budget.” The pastor made a national appeal, and in the next week or so announced that he had received over $2,500,000 and was giving God the glory. God appreciated it, I’m sure. I attend a church that had to let staff go because we couldn’t make our budget. But we also gave God the glory for His goodness. Still, in our hearts, we wished that we were affluent enough to run $900,000 under budget. What a gift that would be! We were only $100,000 under, but we had no fallback national image that would allow us to tell our story. And since we could not augment our budget, we had to cut it.

The vast majority of preachers are in smaller parishes that must play at God’s will by other standards. It is moments like these that I feel a huge necessity to remind myself of the true nature of things. It is so easy to feel second class in God’s program of world redemption. It is hard not to see ourselves as small, not because the big guys tell us we are small, but just because they are so big. They don’t brag about how big they are; they just show up on national television, and we diminish ourselves just in the simple act of happening upon their happy empires.

Your closeness to your smaller parish may have deceived you into believing that you are a “little monk” in charge of a “little abbey.” I want to counsel you to remember that you are a voice, an important voice in a pretty big world, whatever the size of your parish. I write this letter to encourage you to step up to a bigger view of who you are and to catch a glimpse of your own significance. There are so many things wrong with your errant world, and Jesus has an opinion on each of them. It’s your calling to keep your part of the world aware of Jesus’ worldview.

Why do I think you are bigger than you think you are?

Because things went haywire in Eden. Before Adam and Eve’s apple was even digested, things began to fall apart on the planet. Now so many things need fixing, it would be hard indeed to put it all back together again. Nevertheless, this is exactly the point of deity. God is, and He wants the whole thing put back together again, which is why He spent Himself in the incarnation. Jesus came with the only completely right worldview there ever has been, and between the time He came and the time you arrived on the scene, the general sermon subject has been fixed: We who call ourselves preachers have been called to put it all back together again, one sermon at a time.

The problem is, there are so many things broken that all need fixing at once that we have to check out God’s priority list to see what things need to be fixed first. Generally the top things on the list never seem to change. First, the world needs to know Jesus as Savior. After people come to know Christ, the next thing is that those who are followers of Christ need to start acting like it. This second category of broken things has a lot of subcategories.

From there on, the list is nearly endless. Human integrity is broken. Human sexuality is broken. The whole political world is broken. Apathy is rampant. Virtue is muddy. Parenting is flawed. The laws of the land lie shattered. The Ten Commandments deserted. On and on the human arena is filled with wounded warriors. The hospitals are gorged with addicts of all kinds.

So preaching never wants for subject matter. The problem is that we preachers are as flawed as those to whom we speak. We should never enter the pulpit without a burning desire to help God fix stuff. It is wearisome work. Generations upon centuries of preachers have worked on the list, decade after decade, and then they die and nothing much ever changes. But the work is not futile; the work is the most important work there is. Without our calling, God’s dream of restoring Eden is hopeless.

I have heard the theologians argue that God has no needs and is completely independent. I’ll leave it with them. Theologians have a way of resolving things that are inerrant and writing them down in books that go unread. My own calling in Christ has never been so tidy as theirs. I wish I could be like them. I wish I could figure out God’s agenda, print it up, pass it out, and sleep in a few mornings a month. But I’m a repairman, and the world, as I said, is broken. The only tools in my toolbox are the Book and the sermons I write to take it to people.

I am a flawed soul preaching to flawed souls. I am—as D. T. Niles once said—“one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” My repair shop isn’t even very big. I read about the preachers who are more famous repairmen. Their numbers are huge, and they often seem to me to believe they are more crucial to God’s stuff than I am. Further, they all write books telling me how to do it, which by coincidence is always rather like they have done it. They all seem to have a network of television stations and a blog file that would impress God. Some of them used the Book a lot and take it seriously; others hardly mention the Book. But all of them in one way or another believe that the work is worthy, and they try as I do to help God fix stuff.

I used to listen to them tell me how I should be like them and enlarge my shop and my tool kit. They all have the “best” ideas on how to help God fix the world. Some say my approach is too remote and I should be user friendly. Others think I should let purpose drive my life. Others think I need to get more in touch with that most famous determinist of the sixteenth century. Others think that all I need to do is find my best life now. Others think I should go back and try to reconstruct my life of precepts, and precepts piled upon precepts. Alas, I cannot tell which world fixers would best fit me, so I just get up each morning, take my toolbox into the world, haul out my Bible, and do what I can without even a video camera or a bloggery to put the world back together again.

Still, I am fastidiously committed to my little plan. And I never waste a day of checking in with God as to what I can do in my own way to serve His “fix-it plan.” Which brings me back to where I first launched out upon this metaphor. Here is the maxim of this letter: Never go into your pulpit without checking in with God about what most needs changing in His world during your pitiful twenty-minute sermon slot. Just remember that what you have to say about brokenness is not as important as who you are. So here is the most important part of your assignment every week: Never even begin to prepare your sermon without answering this question: “How good do I look on wood?”

I take my advice from Paul the apostle. He was one of the early fix-it men of the Christian faith. I don’t think he was a great preacher. Unlike Peter, the mass evangelist of Acts, or Apollos, the whiz kid of century one, Paul seemed to preach only to little groups. His sermon reviews always seemed to end in citywide riots and stonings. He never wrote a second-coming novel or did anything famous in his day. He stuck mostly to prison correspondence. None of his sermons have survived in their entirety. But he was terribly concerned about what his credentials were for world fixing. He wanted to know how he looked on wood.

He kept on reminding people in his collect of letters that if they really wanted to be world fixers they needed to

Be crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20).

Quit crying out for status, and be content with their current level of popular acceptance (Phil. 4:11).

Prepare themselves for the end of God’s dream for them: to be poured out as a love offering, always keeping in mind their coming departure from this world (2 Tim. 4:6).

Paul could look across the field of popular preachers and lament his own necessity in the gospel. I don’t think he was jealous of Peter or Apollos or any of those on the “grand tour” of ancient Christian celebrities. Still, he needed to vent his frustration about their popularity and his own smaller realm of service: “Don’t we have the right to food and drink? Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas? Or is it only I and Barnabas who must work for a living?” (1 Cor. 9:4–6).

Paul was more famous for his trials than his successes, I suppose. But in a way he endured and ultimately triumphed over those with better reviews: “As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way … in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger … through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors … making many rich; having nothing” (2 Cor. 6:4–5, 8, 10).

This is the cleaning up of the toolshed, the straightening of the shop, and the cleansing of the sermonic voice to make it pure for the work to which we are called. But only two questions remain: “Are you out to fix stuff?” and “Do you look good on wood?” Answer the latter question first. Let each day begin by crucifying yourself afresh to the work for which God has called you. Then, open the tool kit, take out the Book, and sincerely ask God, “What’s still broken in Your world that I can help fix?” And if your church is a little short on money, suck it up, stick your chin in the wind, and get on with it.

4 Frank G. Honeycutt, Preaching to Skeptics and Seekers (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001), 25, 56.

Letter 35

Humility: The Art of Doing Good Stuff and Giving Jesus the Credit

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Humility isn’t thinking yourself a worm. It is the high art of standing so near to Christ that you are so diminished as to be missed altogether.

“Bernard of Clairvaux confessed, ‘My Jesus, when I see you so humiliated before me, how can I wish to be esteemed and honored at all?’ Alphonsus Liguori wrote, ‘My beloved Jesus, I kiss the cords that bind thee, for they have freed me from those eternal chains that I deserved.’ Humility may be such a simple feat as kissing the cords of Christ. For they hold such glory they must have staggered heaven when the flog fell on the flesh of Christ. No wonder Alphonsus wept, ‘God, taken and bound! What could the angels have said at seeing their King with his hands bound?’ Surely in the humility of Christ we can find the way to the center of our own souls.”[5]

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Dear Young Pastor,

Pastoral arrogance is intolerable. Yet, the number one reason that young men and women of God quit the ministry is their inability to cope with poor self-esteem. Somewhere between the pastoral braggart and the whipped soul is the just-right mystique. Good pastors never champion their leadership. Nor do they cry publicly when their flock mistreats them.

Nonetheless, these days of high expectations fill every church governance position with a lot of Monday-morning ecclesiastical quarterbacks. To survive the constant, free help takes a lot of humility. The problem is that those who freely offer critiques of our ministries are sometimes right. It would be better if all of these overbearing people who sit in judgment of us were always wrong and we could spend a little vitriol on condemning them and feel good about the retaliation. But they are right sometimes. And when they are, it is ever so good to be able to tell them they are right.

I remember a long-ago night when our church-business conference was hatched in Dante’s inferno. Baptist business meetings were my nemesis for all thirty-five years of my parish life. I have always lived in fear of them and have always despised those five little words from hell: “Is there any new business?” The phrase awakes the nodding Lucifer as demons grab their shields and halberds and fly from hell to Baptist sanctuaries to throw their fiery darts at each item of new business. Demons came in such numbers over the years as would have amazed even Frank Peretti.

On this particular night, the new business was a motion that we not proceed with the formation of our weekday preschool. We had already voted in favor of having the weekday preschool as a part of the planning of our new building, which we were about to move into. Our building had been built with that in mind and had moved in such a way to please state fire codes, including a security and fire-sprinkler system as well as fireproof-wall construction and crash-bar exit doors. Things went poorly. There is a whole department in hell that is focused on building programs and state building codes. So of course a tumult erupted, and the hostility grew to such a pitch that we tabled the whole issue till next month’s meeting, which meant that we would have an entire month of the church membership boiling in partisan quarreling.

It was a long meeting, and when it finally subsided, I headed for the men’s room. I was generally taking care of business there when my trustee adversary entered the restroom, took the next short-screened area, and began to take care of his business. Urinals are places where men stare straight ahead and remain relatively quiet. Some are prone to whistle a hymn or Dixie, depending on whether they are religious or more secular.

“Preacher,” my adversary said, “I really didn’t mean to come across as heavy handed in there awhile ago.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said, in such a way as to let him know it was a big deal and I was ticked by his aggression.

“Maybe we can work it out!” he said.

But we were at side-by-side plumbing fixtures, and given the business at hand, I just said, “Maybe we can!”

I’m not sure exactly what happened in that moment. Maybe it was the oddness we both felt, but all of a sudden we quit looking straight ahead and looked at each other.

He smiled at me, and then he laughed.

What was there to do? I laughed too.

I knew that it was difficult to pray with someone and practice animosity. I had no idea the same was true of peeing. It was hardly a divine moment, but the laughter was all we needed to end our odd multitasking and become friends. The next month, the fight—at least that particular fight—was over. Sometimes God uses something very earthy to move the gates of heaven. Community is born when people pray together, or pee together—as long as they laugh together. Urinals and altars can pass close, and just as the family that prays together stays together, disciples who pee together should probably be together. Whatever it takes to dissolve anger should be called into play.

Anger is the parent of arrogance, I think. Repentance is the parent of humility. Proud people don’t repent with any conviction. This is why business meetings (or board meetings, depending upon whatever church you are serving) are such nightmares. It is typical of younger preachers to have their way. So it is with older preachers for that matter.

There are two proverbs I have tried to remember. Number one: It is amazing how much can get done in a congregation if we don’t care who gets the credit. Number two: The less I feel like I have to have my way, the greater the possibility is that God might actually have His. After all, this is what pastors really want for their churches, isn’t it? The problem is that it is easy for us to feel like God’s way is our way. This leads to the worst kind of arrogance. I have often heard a young pastor saying, “The Lord told me that He wanted …” This is when arrogance is transformed into real transgression. This kind of arrogance shuts off all discussion, and the pastor either gets his way or gets fired.

But worse than shutting down all humanity, this high-mindedness can lapse into high-handed remorse. There is an old saying I have heard the wisest (and often the most aged) pastors say: “Pick very carefully those hills you are willing to die on.” There aren’t too many of these, so they are not too hard to isolate. You can see them well in the distance a long time before you get to them. The authority of Scripture in your ministry might be one of those hills. Things you can laugh about at urinals probably aren’t.

But the “dying hill,” whatever it is, will likely not define itself at first for you. Like my preschool nemesis and the hellish new-business motion that triggered it, it seemed at the time that my reputation as a leader was at stake. Of course it wasn’t. All that I really risked that night was my infernal need to be right. I can now see that this was a temper tantrum, not a cause. This was an infected pimple, not a Golgotha. God showed it to me, and beyond that decision I stayed for twenty more years. And the man who opposed me—the man I felt was so wrong—was righter than I had supposed. Our friendship went on for another decade.

And I was reminded of Edwin Markham’s lines:

He drew a circle that shut me out.

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win.

We drew a circle that took him in![6]

Arrogance is the architect of little circles.

Humility is the architect of large circles. And I like large circles; they’re so roomy.

Arrogance is short lived.

Humility is—in its purest, crucified definition—life eternal.

5 Calvin Miller, Into the Depths of God (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany, 2000), 107.

6 Edwin Markham, “Outwitted,” The Best Loved Poems of the American People (New York: Doubleday, 1936), 67.

Photo by Chuck Watkins, New Leaf Designs

CALVIN MILLER was the pastor of Westside Church in Omaha, Nebraska, for twenty-five years. After teaching seven years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, he joined the faculty of Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, where he serves as research professor and distinguished writer-in-residence. He is the author of more than forty books.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section One

Letter 1

Letter 2

Letter 3

Letter 4

Letter 5

Letter 6

Letter 7

Letter 8

Section Two

Letter 9

Letter 10

Letter 11

Letter 12

Letter 13

Letter 14

Letter 15

Letter 16

Letter 17

Section Three

Letter 18

Letter 19

Letter 20

Letter 21

Letter 22

Letter 23

Letter 24

Section Four

Letter 25

Letter 26

Letter 27

Letter 28

Letter 29

Letter 30

Section Five

Letter 31

Letter 32

Letter 33

Letter 34

Letter 35

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9