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Sunday mornings, my conversations with my mom are always pretty much the same. I'll call her around 10 o'clock, as I'm on my way to a church somewhere in metro New Orleans, and she'll tell me she's dressed, sitting there waiting for her ride. My sister Patricia lives across the road and will be picking Mom up in a few minutes. Church starts at 11, but Mom likes to get there early to greet friends.
Invariably, Mom will say, "I don't feel like going. Every bone in my body hurts." This Sunday, it was her feet that were giving her trouble.
Also invariably, at church, people will come up and hug her and say, "You look so pretty. I hope I look that good when I get your age." Pastor Mickey Crane will brag on her--she's both the oldest member and the one with the longest continuous membership--and tell her what a reward she has waiting in Heaven.
Across the road from the church is the cemetery where Mom's husband of nearly 74 years lies buried. Twenty feet away, her youngest son, Charlie, is buried.
I said to her Sunday, "Mom, back in the 1940's, when you had six small children to deal with every day, if you had only gone to church when you felt like it, you would never have gone. But you learned to make yourself get up and get ready and go on. And look at the payoff."
I said, "So, today, you're just continuing to practice a habit you've kept all your life."
What she ended up with is a family of church-going children, with two of her four sons being preachers with nearly 90 years of ministry combined.
Some of our readers are New Orleans-lovers and others are displaced citizens who yearn for home, while a few just find the doings of this banana republic fascinating. This one is for you.
Today, Sunday, the Times-Picayune ran a feature on Dr. Ed Renwick who is retiring from Loyola University's Institute of Politics after four decades of commenting on the local political scene. In 1967, Ed came to New Orleans to work on his doctorate--on the "Long" dynasty, which covers Huey, Earl, and Russell--and ended up staying.
For a political junkie, he says, Louisiana is Heaven. "We're so divided in Louisiana--by ethnicity, by race, by religion, by language, by geography. You have the French and the non-French, the Catholics and the Protestants, North and South, black and white, liberal and conservative. Having all these different forces makes the politics lively. It's never boring here."
Most state governments, Renwick points out, are rather weak. But not us. "We come out of the French and Spanish traditions of absolute monarchy, and on top of that, we're Catholic."
The state collects royalties from the oil and gas produced in the state and that adds up to a neat sum. Renwick says it's like a fountain of money pouring in.
"We have a very strong governor. The whole system is kind of monarchical. We elect kings."
Or popes.
Staff writer Elizabeth Mullener played a little game with Dr. Renwick, tossing names of various state political leaders to him for his take. The result was memorable. In fact, my hunch is only the fact that he is retiring liberated him to go on record with some of these blunt comments.
Early Saturday morning, working at my computer, I suddenly became aware of a new floater or two in my right eye. Since I've lived with floaters all my adult life, I knew what this was, but also know what a distraction they can be until you adjust to their ever-presence. These are like black strings hanging on the right lens of my glasses, or sometimes like a water bug skittering across the surface of a pond. Not painful, just distracting.
I googled "eye floaters" and learned they are normal and to be expected as we age. My wife is rubbing that in. ("Poor thing--he's getting older like everyone else!" No mercy around here.)
In time, our brains adjust to the point that we won't notice the floaters. They will still be there, presumably, although one of the internet sources indicated they sometimes diminish.
The brain is a magnificent organ. It filters out the trivial and mundane and alerts the mind to the odd and unusual, anything out of the ordinary so we're able to function in a world where stimuli fly at us from all directions every minute of the day. This is a protection against overloading the nervous system, for which we thank our Designer and Creator.
This process of culling out the commonplace allows the person living by a railroad track to rarely hear the train go by. It enables animal workers to function in and around horrendous odors.
Evangelist Bill Glass asked a friend at the Fort Worth stockyards how he stood the smell. He said, "What smell?"
The session of the state legislature that ended in Baton Rouge this week did a hundred great things, a few questionable things, and one truly dumb thing: they gave themselves a massive pay raise. Governor Bobby Jindal had said all along he would veto such a move, and would only support the legislature giving a raise to itself if it kicked in following the next election. The law passed last week, however, becomes effective with this term. Jindal, we hear, plans to sign the legislation.
In the beginning, they proposed tripling their pay to something over $50,000 annually for what is part-time work. When the citizenry howled at that, they cut the figure to $37,500 and that's what passed. Even so, it's more than a 100 percent increase over their present salary of $16,800. There's also a nice per diem allotted each legislator which is rarely mentioned.
Now, whether they deserve that kind of increase or not has been ignored. The fact that they've been maybe 20 years without a pay increase should be factored into the discussion. However, once the session adjourned and finally, it appears, our representatives began to pay attention to the clamor from outraged voters, suddenly they got concerned. Too late. The deed was done and the lawmakers had closed up shop and gone home.
So, hearing the frightening sounds of recall-petitions throughout their districts, our state lawmakers started running for cover. Some are announcing they choose not to receive the raise, while others are calling on Governor Jindal to veto it. It's almost funny.
The recall petitions are for real and are gathering momentum, even the one for Jindal himself, the most popular governor we've had in ages.
Saturday morning, I sent this letter to the editor of our Times-Picayune:
A friend we'll call Chris has alerted me to a reality about fellowship in church: not everyone likes an all-out full-court press. Some newcomers to our churches prefer to remain anonymous a while and will hang back, then come forward on their own terms, at their own timing--if they do so at all. Not all will.
Not everyone is looking for the same kind of church.
Not everyone is outgoing and friendly and eager to make new friends the first time they walk in the door.
Not everyone responds to the same stimuli, loves the same programs, needs the same kind of spiritual nourishment.
Okay, granted. There are indeed people who will visit our churches and appreciate not receiving a handshake and be delighted no one contacted them the following week.
But they are the exception. Case in point: Last Saturday night, as I write, Scott approached me at a church dinner. He said, "A few years ago when I moved here from Boston, I didn't know a soul. But you welcomed me to church and from then on, you knew my name. I was impressed by that. I mean, I wasn't anybody." He might have said I visited him in his apartment that week, I'm not sure. (Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. So I'm not giving myself an 'A' in that department.)
Scott needed the personal touch and appreciated the warm welcome. He ended up meeting the love of his life in our church, was made a deacon, and recently served on the pastor search committee.
Not everyone wants to go where "everybody knows your name." The shy ones among us need a little space.
I asked Chris to give us her story. She's a lawyer in a large Northeastern city, educated in the Midwest, raised Catholic. Presently, she is an active member of a good-sized Protestant church in her city, one that has been led by some well-known pastors.
Chris writes, "I want to emphasize that this is not a conversion story. I was a 'true believer' as a Catholic.... As a general rule, Catholic churches are much larger than Protestant ones. I always hear (our) church referred to as such a large church. We run 1700-1900 in attendance. In my experience, it is a normal-sized church."
In her job, she often passed this church on a corner by the subway stop, so she was familiar with its location. She checked out its website and listened to some sermons on-line. Then, one day when she did not have time to get to her Catholic church, she dropped in on the new congregation. For a time, she worshiped with both churches, one on Sunday morning and the other Sunday night. Eventually, she made the move to the new church and became a member two years ago.
In the 1987 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, the report of the Foreign Mission Board contained a telephone hook-up with Frances Fuller, one of our missionaries to Lebanon. A few days earlier, President Reagon had ordered Americans out of that war-torn country, and had warned any who insisted on staying they would lose their passports. Our missionaries had been evacuated to Cyprus, from where Mrs. Fuller was placing her call.
"You have failed your missionaries by your prayers," Mrs. Fuller told the thousands of messengers at the convention. With that, she had our undivided attention.
"All the people I talk to back in the States tell me, 'We're praying for your safety,' or 'We're praying for you to get out of that country.'"
She continued, "You should have prayed that God would keep us safely in this country in order that we might bear fruit for Him. Consequently, we have been exiled from a country of great need where we should not have left."
She concluded, "Give us back to Lebanon in your prayers."
No one who sat in the huge auditorium that night will ever forget her plea.
In the New Testament epistle of James, we read, "You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives...." (4:3) Another translation has it read, "You ask amiss."
Lehman Strauss wrote a powerful book on prayer a generation ago, with the intriguing title, "Sense and Nonsense About Prayer." I confess to buying it for the title. I knew there was a lot of nonsense about prayer out there, and was glad to hear someone in a leadership position admit it.
Dr. David Hankins, executive-director of Louisiana Baptists, was part of the delegation which met in New Orleans Tuesday to put the finishing touches on plans for the annual convention which will take place in our city in mid-November. Over lunch at Deanie's in Bucktown, he told the group about his son Adam who finished his residency at our Charity Hospital just before Katrina hit. Charity, you may or may not know, is the state-owned downtown medical center which receives all the cuttings and beatings and killings. Or, it did before Katrina. The storm inflicted great damage and the hospital has not reopened.
"Did you learn anything working in the emergency room at Charity?" Father Hankins asked Son Hankins, the M.D.
He did, he said. "Three things in particular. I learned to wear my seat belt, not get on a motorcycle, and never buy my wife a forty-five."
So, what have you learned in your "residency"?
In reading a book on 1940 England recently, I received a reminder that the makeup of my church and yours is a microcosm of society in general. Case in point.
On May 10, 1940 (six weeks after I arrived in the world), as newly chosen Prime Minister Winston Churchill was forming his cabinet, former Prime Minister Lloyd George sent word that he would be willing to serve under Churchill, so long as he could retain the right to criticize.
To no one's surprise, Churchill did not go for that.
Then, a few months later, Mr. George sent a similar message. He had a particular office in mind which he coveted. The price Churchill would pay for the prestige of having Lloyd George on his team would be that he would be free to criticize.
Whatever was the man thinking?
The late and legendary W. A. Criswell used to tell of the weekend he visited Manhattan. On Saturday night, his group attended the Broadway play "Hello, Dolly." It was light and bright, happy and spirited, and left them with a song in their hearts and a lift to their steps. On Sunday, they visited a cold church where the songs were unsingable, the members were unfriendly, and visitors felt like intruders. The contrast between the Broadway play and the frigid church was so stark, Criswell said, "If they'd given an invitation, I would have joined 'Hello, Dolly'!"
I had a similar experience on my first visit to Cincinnati some thirty years back.
On Friday night, I attended a baseball game at the old Riverfront Stadium and saw the Reds play the way only the "Big Red Machine" of the 1970s could play. Everyone around me was friendly, they were enjoying themselves, and they included me in the mix. At the end of the game, they were all shaking my hand, saying how good it was to have me in the Queen City, and inviting me back. Bear in mind that I was alone and had not known a soul in the city. It was a charming experience.
On Sunday, I attended a worship service across the river in Covington, Kentucky, that was a clone of the Manhattan church Dr. Criswell attended. Cold, formal, irrelevant to anything in my life.
Thereafter, when I have reflected on that experience, I have adapted Dr. Criswell's line and said, "Had they given an invitation, I'd have joined the Cincinnati Reds!"
What made the difference? Figure that out and you will go a long way to determining why some churches are growing by leaps and bounds and others are dying on the vine.
I've not spent hours sorting this out, and your opinion on this is as good as mine, but a few things seem clear. With both "Hello, Dolly" and the baseball game, we were watching professionals do what they did best. These were people who had devoted their lives to their craft and took it seriously. They were well-trained and highly prepared. Every detail of their presentation--whether the songs and acting of the play or the baseball game's announcers, organ music, seating comfort, and the hot dogs--had been gone over time and again and made as good as they could make it.
And the church? My opinion about dead, cold churches will color my analysis, of course. You get the impression that the worship leaders care little about what they are doing, that they are bored as well as boring, that their main purpose is to get through the service, and that someone actually enjoying what they present is the farthest thing from their minds.
I used that little word "enjoy" on purpose. It's a lightning rod and draws the ire of many a "pure" worship leader. "We're here to worship God, not enjoy the service." Mostly, I agree. However, I've noticed that when I worship best, I get a lot out of it myself. And I've also learned that if my emotions are not involved and my intellect challenged, if this is just an act my body is performing and words my mouth is uttering, I may as well have stayed home for all the good it's accomplishing.
The huge question, the massive consideration that must be dealt with by every church staff team planning a worship service is this: how and at what point do we engage the congregation?
In a sentence, they tell you things you could find nowhere else.
Case in point, the Times-Picayune for Sunday, June 22, 2008. The best story is a front-page feature, but we'll get to that in a moment.
When I have chided my young pastor buddies for not subscribing to the daily paper, they have come back with, "I read it on the internet," and I have been silent. But having been to nola.com and read the portion of the paper which is on-line, I tell you it's not the same. They're missing a lot of fascinating material.
They're missing the comics and the puzzles, of course, both staples in my morning routine. And they're missing the kind of fascinating tidbits that pop up in other places throughout the newspaper, and which never get posted on the 'net.
Take the wedding announcements. Being a longtime pastor, occasionally I'll see people I know there. And then, once in a while, I'll scan the articles themselves, don't ask me why. Today, I found this....
Michelle Lynn Autin was married on May 17th to Brent Bernard Branigan. The third paragraph was made up of one fascinating sentence: "The bride carried creamy white hydrangea, stock and roses, wrapped with her great grandmother's linen handkerchief a gift from her grandmother, Theresa M. Hindermann, that included her grandfather's onyx rosary, antique doubled side charms, that pictured her grandfather, George J. Hindermann, Jr., great grandfather, Joseph T. Mangerchine, Sr., great grandmother, Thelma M. Mangerchine and her beloved pet Tigger, bound together by strands of crystal."
Whew. The bride was carrying all that. Wonder if she was using a wheelbarrow.
Underneath that article was one announcing the wedding of Mr. Courtney Baine Robinson of New Orleans to Miss Kristen Michelle McKeever of Fort Worth. Her parents are Mr. and Mrs. Urbin C. McKeever, and no, I do not know them. Just found it interesting. We see others by our name so seldom.
No doubt they're wonderful people.
I visited Indiana Jones one day last weekend. Sat in the theater with 100 strangers and watched Harrison Ford portray this comic-book character in breathless adventure after hair-raising adventure. When we walked outside into the sunshine, we all felt we had spent time with the man, but none of us had any sense of time spent with one another. In a movie house, there is no fellowship. It's about spectatorship.
In the 1940s, things were different. Often, before the main feature, an emcee would come out onto the stage and lead the crowd in singalongs, get people out of the audience for little contests with small prizes, and in general, connect members of the movie audience with one another. No more. We grew out of that, got too sophisticated for such antics, became too busy. Those of my generation and a little older look back to those days with fond nostalgia.
Churches are becoming more and more about spectatorship. Turn on your television and watch the mega-churches being preached to by their celebrity pastors. Five or ten thousand people pack into giant auditoriums. They sit and listen, they respond as the preacher asks, and they get up and leave. They are hampered by their sheer success from fellowshiping with each other. We cannot imagine the pastor announcing to eight thousand people, "John Jones' class will be having a cookout in Dwight Munn's backyard Friday night and you're all invited."
Meanwhile, the church a half mile down the street from the megachurch, the one that has sat on that block for the last fifty years and only recently watched as the ever-growing congregation-on-steroids bought up a hundred acres and moved in and began sucking all the members out of neighborhood churches, that more normal church watches and wonders what it has to do to keep its members and gain a few more, and makes all the wrong decisions.
The "normal" church--as opposed to the giant spectator congregation--begins to invest in screens and projectors and high-tech innovations. That must be what it takes to draw people in, they think, and they must be right.
But drawing crowds in may be missing the point.
If the fellowship is missing, something vital has gone out of the life of a church.
Acts 2:42 tells us the believers in the Jerusalem church were engaged with each other in four ways:
1) The apostles' doctrine -- which means they were studying the Word. Without a written New Testament, the apostles were relating their personal stories of Jesus to the new believers. In our gospels, we have much, most, or possibly all of what they shared.
2) Fellowship. More about this below.
3) Breaking of bread -- they were eating together.
4) Prayer -- they were praying with one another.
Let's draw a bead on the second element, fellowship. The Greek word, as everyone on the planet has heard by now, is 'koinonia.' It's a good word and basically refers to something that is shared. We sit at the table together and share a "common" meal. "Common" means we all partake of it. When I was in college, the big living room on the first floor of the dormitory was called the common room. Likewise, we have words like community, commune, commonality, and communication.
My Greek professors--all of whom are in Heaven and presumably none of whom read this blog--might not appreciate my free-wheeling take on "fellowship" or "koinonia," but I think of it as simply "hanging out." To "fellowship" is simply to spend time with others without an agenda.
We don't do much of that any more. Not in life in general or in the church in particular. But it's one of the best parts of life.
Each afternoon at the McDonalds a few blocks down the street from my house, the old guys meet for coffee and fellowship. Their wives are glad to get them out of the house, their adult children are glad Pop has some friends, and the men themselves may look upon it as harmless chit-chat, but the idea is the same. Hanging out.
I spent two hours hanging out at church this morning. Here's what happened.
Someone said to me once, "The Bible doesn't say a whole lot about the interworkings of believers with one another." What was surprising about this is that it came from a godly deacon who knew his Bible as well as anyone in the church. I knew he was missing something.
I said, "Remember all those 'one another' commands in the Bible? Those are directed toward the Lord's people. And by 'one another,' they don't mean everyone in the world. They're talking about how we are to treat other believers."
The other night, I scanned the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation--no computer either and no concordance; did it with my Bible in a motel room in Indianapolis--and made a list of every 'one another' command I could find. I counted thirty-one.
These are elements in Christian fellowship, expressions of God's will for the members of your church and mine.
Since we're putting them in order, that explains why the first one is John 13:14 (or, at least, it's the first one I found).
"Wash one another's feet." John 13:14
"Love one another." That's given most memorably in John 13:34-35, but is found at least a dozen times throughout the New Testament. It surely must be the most important element in our relations with each other.
"Be devoted to one another in brotherly love." Romans 12:10
"Give preference to one another in honor." Romans 12:10
One day this week I was entering the local library to drop off some recorded books I'd carried to Indianapolis. At the same time, a young mother was coming in from the parking lot, fanning herself with the palm of her hand. I commented, rather inanely, "So, do you think it's hot?"
She didn't smile. "Rather," is all she said.
Five minutes later, we happened to be exiting at the same time. I said, "Well, we can be thankful for A/C." She said humorlessly, "I don't have air-conditioning."
I said, "Excuse me. I'm sorry."
My assumption was that she was doing the same thing I was, rushing from an air-conditioned office to an air-conditioned car, and from there to an air-conditioned library, back again, and later into an air-conditioned home. That in this modern age when every building and vehicle seems to be cooled, she was without such a taken-for-granted blessing never occurred to me.
A little reflection shows the error of my assumption. On these blisteringly hot evenings when residents of some neighborhoods are sitting outside, visiting with each other, I have been known to glance in their direction and wistfully comment, "How nice. They're spending time together." That they're outside because the inside of their houses is smothering never occurred to me.
Assumptions. They can be embarrassing, as in the case above. Or, they can be deadly.
Craig Ratliff pastors the St. Bernard campus of Celebration Church, built on the location of the former site of First Baptist Church of Arabi, whose buildings were ruined by Katrina and later demolished. At our Wednesday pastors' meeting, Craig shared some aspects of his growing ministry.
If all goes as planned, pastor, your visit to our church this upcoming weekend will result in a unanimous call from the congregation for you to become our next shepherd. You will return home, make your announcement to your church family, and put your house up for sale. A month or so later, you will preach your first sermon in our church.
You will find a lot of things once you begin your ministry among us. You'll find our people receptive and responsive. We've been over a year without a pastor--we've had the very best interim possible in Mark Tolbert, but he would be the first to admit, "it ain't the same"--and we're ready.
You'll find this church to be a lot like the one you came from, and probably the one before that. Since congregations are made up of frail beings from the complete spectrum of humanity, we're not unlike all those other churches. This means you'll find the vast majority to be good folks who require low maintenance, but a certain percentage at each end of the range will require more of your attention. At one end will be those who try your soul, who are never satisfied, who are takers and complainers and demanders. God puts them in the church to keep the pastor humble.
At the other end you will discover the sweetest people on the planet, those who look for ways to serve, who are grateful for anything you do, who bring you the occasional pie or flowers or a book. God puts them in the church to keep the pastor from quitting.
A pastor friend wrote back to his former church, "The most surprising discovery we've made since arriving here was to find the very same people we left behind. Only, they have different names." I expect you'll find that to be the case with us.
In spite of all our attempts to put no expectations on you and your family, I think it's fair to warn you we do have several.
1) We expect you to be yourself.
Trying to get back into the saddle at the associational office after being gone for some 10 days is tough. Fortunately, not a lot on the calendar this week.
First Baptist Church of Kenner is agog over the upcoming visit from the prospective pastor this weekend. He will meet with various groups on Saturday, including the senior adults at lunch, various individuals in the afternoon, and the entire church for a dinner that night, followed by Q and A. He'll preach Sunday and then the congregation will express their sense of the Lord's leadership (also known as "voting on him," a poor choice of terms).
Church administrator Danny Moore said Tuesday, "The congregation is so excited about his coming, I think they're ready to 'vote him in' right now before they've even met him." In my conversation with the pastor today, I told him what Danny said, and for a moment considered teasing him with, "You'll have to do a lousy job to blow it this Sunday, because everyone is so ready for you!" But, he doesn't need any more pressure. I've been in his position a few times and the hardest thing you have to do is keep the focus off what the congregation wants and keep it on pleasing the Lord.
I dug out Cal Thomas' op-ed column from Monday's Times-Picayune since its message has followed me around the last two days. He was commenting on Barack Obama's religious faith, wondering if he is indeed a Christian as he claims. Thomas' authority, he's quick to point out, is an interview Obama gave to the Chicago Sun-Times' religion editor Cathleen Falsani in 2004. She was writing a book, "The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People," for which she interviewed Obama.
"I'm rooted in the Christian tradition," she quotes Obama. Then, he says one of those innocuous things that only an outsider to the Christian faith would utter: "I believe there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people."
That is tantamount to a medical doctor stating his belief that all remedies for physical ailments--everything from modern medical science to the incantations of medicine men to the ignorant drillings and potions of witch doctors--are equal in value and similarly effective. I don't think so.
Falsani went on to say that Obama believes "all people of faith--Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, everyone--know the same God."
The only person who can utter such a statement is someone unfamiliar with any of those "gods." The more you find out about them, the quicker you see how incompatible they are.
Cal Thomas, a devout Catholic if I remember correctly, concludes, "Evangelicals and serious Catholics might ask if this is so, why did Jesus waste His time coming to Earth, suffering pain, rejection and crucifixion? If there are many ways to God, He might have sent down a spiritual version of table manners and avoided the rest."
Dear Grandson,
Before long, you'll be getting your drivers license. That's a day you have long anticipated and the adults in your life have long dreaded. It's a bittersweet moment, signifying in a sense that you are coming of age and taking a giant stride into independence. Your mom and dad are hyperventilating just thinking of that.
This is a great time to be a driver in some respects. The cars are better, safer, and easier to drive than at any time in history. They're also more expensive and the insurance you will need to carry will cost enough to buy a second car. The price of gasoline has always been a factor, but never more than now. In our neighborhood, the cost per gallon has risen ten cents in the last week. When I was your age, three of those dimes would buy you a gallon. Dark ages, right?
Actually, I got my drivers license in the summer of 1957, exactly 51 years ago. In those days--just to show you how this driving business has changed--you were required to take the test in a car with a standard shift. And you were not allowed to use the electronic turn signals; you had to stick your hand out the window and signal to other drivers your intent to turn, slow down, or stop. Of course, there were no seat belts back then, no air bags, and the tires regularly blew out. As I say, the cars are much better now.
However, beloved grandson, there are some urgent matters I feel a need to call to your attention about driving.
The highway is a dangerous place. And yes, so are the streets and avenues. Powerful cars, high speeds, and frail humans can be a deadly combination.
Now, at this point you're thinking, "Grandpa, I've ridden in cars all my life. I know about these things. I've seen a dog run out in front of the car and Dad slam on the brakes. I've seen wrecked cars where someone had been drinking and ran a red light and people were hurt. I am well aware of the danger of driving."
Does this mean you're going to forget this foolishness about getting a drivers license? I didn't think so.
So, let me continue, even if you want to roll your eyes and leave the room. Please stay with me just a few more minutes.
My friend Verona Cain and I have been exchanging e-mails regarding tithing and stewardship, and she told me a story that knocked my socks off.
What follows is all hers with only a tiny bit of editing...
"I teach my children to tithe. My oldest is seven years old and we have had a bank for her for years. The bank has three sections--a church, a savings bank, and a store--which is intended to teach the child to tithe, to save, and to spend.
"When the time came to purchase a similar bank for my middle child, now 5, I drove to the Christian store and could not find one. I described it to the clerk who thought she remembered something like that from years ago. She plundered in the back and came out with it. However, it was so old, the labels that represented the windows for the buildings had peeled off. When I asked if she could order me a newer model, the clerk said, 'Do people still teach tithing?'
"I could not believe my ears. "Now, my older two children are from a prior marriage. Their father, Robert, left me because of my Christian faith. He came back later and gave me a choice. 'I will come home if you back off this whole God thing.' Well, First Corinthians chapter 7 tells us to let the unbelieving spouse go and I knew I could not turn away from the One who promised to never leave me or forsake me in favor of one who had already left me once.
"So, I told him that I was sorry, I just could not live up to those terms.
This morning I ran across a sermon the wonderful Frank Pollard preached a dozen years ago with the intriguing title "Forget my sin; remember me." The text, Psalm 25:7, says precisely what the title conveys:
"Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your lovingkindness remember me, for your goodness' sake, O Lord."
Forget my sin. Remember me.
Some of the best news ever encountered for sinners--that would be people like you and me--is that when God forgives a sin, it is forever erased from the eternal record.
I called the cell phone company the other day to ask if they could retrieve a message I had deleted by mistake. "No," the man said. "Once you delete it and close that transaction, it's gone." Gone where? "Just gone. Like it never existed."
"Your sins and iniquities I will remember no more." That outstanding promise from Hebrews 10:17 can also be found in Hebrews 8:12 and in Jeremiah 31:34. By recording it in three places, God clearly meant us to get that message.
(A prayer for my grandchildren)
"Heavenly Father,
You have showered Heaven's blessings on me in ten thousand ways--with life and salvation, with health and friends, with family and church. But no gift from Thy hand has filled me with deeper joy and purer pleasure than the children of my children.
I thank Thee for my grandchildren.
And I pray for them.
I pray that they shall know
--enough of sin to drive them to the Savior, to make them understanding toward others, and to keep them humble.
--enough of failure to turn them to the overcoming Lord and make them wise and strong and smart.
--enough of heartache to appreciate the comfort of the Holy Spirit and to fill them with kindness.
--enough of betrayal to appreciate Thy faithfulness and make them loyal.
--enough of struggle and hardships to find strength in Thee and make them faithful.
--enough of bruises in life to toughen them and make them gentle.
--enough of disappointments to open their eyes about people and give them discernment and judgment.
--enough of ugliness to appreciate the beauty always found in the heart of God and in Thy creation.
Enough--but no more than that, please.
Next week, with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention going on in Indianapolis--one of our favorite cities for this sort of thing--I'll be away from this blogging machine. I may or may not send something to son Marty so he can post here, but readers need a vacation from this constant barrage of our stuff. Enjoy it while you can.
On the way back south from the convention, I'll be leading a deacons retreat for Five Points Baptist Church in Northport, Alabama (Tuscaloosa is its suburb) that Friday night and Saturday morning, then preaching for the two Sunday morning services. Not sure of the times of the service, but if you're in the area, we'd love to have you present.
As you know, we do not do promote anything or sell stuff, or for that matter, send forwards to you. (You're welcome.) However....
This is a good time to call to your attention some special friends with fascinating ministries you might want to check into.
1) Kathy Frady may be the most creative person on the planet. Check out her website at www.thecreativedramatist.com. She's a local lady and, with Rebecca Hughes, leader of the women's ministry of our association. What she does is don outlandish disguises--wigs, outfits, etc--and assume the role of various women you will meet at church (in your dreams/nightmares!) and a few who lived in earlier generations (Lottie Moon, Annie Armstrong, Georgia Barnette, these girls). She is so funny it's not funny. How in the world she can be so off-the-wall crazy and so wonderfully-sweet-and-sane-and-spiritual at the same time is beyond me. She writes her own material and will knock your socks off.
Kathy's husband John Frady is a staff-member at Celebration Church in Metairie and her biggest supporter. I figure it was either support her or kill her. (That was a funny, Mom.)
Many of our readers have seen Kathy on denominational programs and know what I'm talking about. This week I have sent out letters to some of the leading pastors/churches in Louisiana about Kathy, asking them to check out her website, and to consider inviting her to their church for special events, banquets, women's day services, and the like.
2) My son Marty has a young friend with a unique website which invites your prayer requests and enlists the participation of readers in praying for needs posted there. Check out www.iwalkwithhim.com.
Anyone who watches sports--football, baseball, you name it--sooner or later will hear the announcer say about a ball thrown by the pitcher or the quarterback, "Boy! I'll bet he'd love to have that one back." But it's gone, for better or for worse.
One of the best features in having a website is being able to go back into something you've written and posted for all the world to see--and brother, do we mean all the world!--and edit it.
What we call tweaking. Fine-tuning. Improving, amending, correcting, fixing. You get the point.
I suppose the process is similar for others who do this sort of thing, but sometimes you reach a point where you feel, "That's all I can do for this article," and you quit tampering with it and go ahead and post it. My son Marty showed me how to post these things a couple of years ago, thus cutting out the middle man (himself). It's good to be able to do that. (If I sound like a 1940 model pleased that he knows how to do something in this technological age, I plead guilty.)
Then, once it gets on the website, the writer is able to read it as others do. That helps the writer see it more objectively and it's how the flaws often stand out. A sentence doesn't read right. I used the wrong word. Used a word twice in the same sentence; need to find a different choice for one of them. What did I leave out? What did I include that should have been left out?
The process of editing calls for me to back out of the blog and go through another series of clicks to enter the editing room. I read back over the manuscript (so to speak), and tweak it. Add a comma, shorten a sentence, and so on. At the end, click "save," wait until it assures me the changes have been made, and voila! the article on the website has been improved.
At least, that's the plan.
...is with myself.
I tend to be lazy, self-centered, thoughtless toward others, have a short attention span, forget the way others have blessed me, and not stick with projects. And, as a friend says, those are my good points.
I forgot vain, materialistic, and fearful. I also worry a lot.
Oh, great, some reader is thinking along about now. We get to endure all his soul-searching and wade through the results of the autopsy he has run on himself.
Nope. I'll spare you.
Because, to tell the truth, I'm not at all unlike you. Whether you like that or not, it's the unvarnished truth. You and I are two peas in a pod, twins of such similarities we might as well share the same DNA.
You too are self-centered in many areas, and childish in some ways, and with a tendency to give little thought to pleasing your Creator or for that matter, other people. You and I are sinners. And, just to set the record straight, I don't mean respectable sinners but incorrigible, hard-core rebels of the first magnitude who need to be taken out to the woodshed and "whupped."
When the Bible said, "There is none righteous, no, not one,"--it's found in both the Old and New Testaments, so that ought to tell us something--it could just as well have inserted our names. (Romans 3:10)
When the Lord Jesus told us to deny ourselves in order to become His disciples (Matthew 16:24), He knew full well what He was asking. What He was NOT asking for was that we would deny our humanity, our identity, or our dignity--that is, how He made us, who we are, and what we are worth.
What He WAS calling for was that we turn our backs on our self-centered, destructive, people-using tendencies and misguided behaviors.
And that's where our biggest battles come.
The church I belong to is expecting.
Finally, they are nearing that long anticipated day when the pastor search committee will present the man they believe God has led to us. Last Sunday morning, I made a few suggestions at the monthly men's breakfast about this crucial time in our church's existence and encouraged our guys to pass this along to other members.
1) This is no time to quit praying.
Over a year ago Pastor Tony Merida resigned to become assistant professor of preaching and dean of the chapel at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. One of the first acts of the leadership was to call the congregation to prayer.
Over the past several months, each Sunday morning, interim pastor Mark Tolbert has called a member of the search committee to the platform and led in prayer for their work.
Now that the committee has announced a date at which they will introduce the prospective pastor, there is a tendency on our part to feel a great sense of relief and thank God for answering our prayers, then to stop praying. But if anything, this is the time to intensify our intercessions.
I've heard that tightrope walkers find the most hazardous part of their routine to be the last step or two. They've been out on the rope, they've performed their death-defying act, and the crowd is cheering. A sense of relief floods over them as they step toward safety. This is the danger zone. Veterans learn to be vigilant and cautious at every point until they are safely on the ground.
2) This is the time to trust your leaders.
This most dreaded of all seasons begins June 1 and goes through December 1. Weeks ago, the National Hurricane Center or a department of the University of Colorado or someone came out with their forecasts for this year. The fact that their predictions for the past two years have been dramatic failures does not stop them from issuing a new sets of prognostications and the news programs and papers from reporting them. But no one I know pays much attention to them. There have to be better ways of predicting these storms.
As though they are finally getting the message, the hurricane "experts" are hard at work in search of more reliable indicators. We hear of attempts to measure the temperature of the ocean underneath tropical depressions and of robot airplanes which will be sent into the storms closer to the ground, something the weather service's airplanes cannot do safely.
Such information would be no help in predicting the number and intensity of storms but could give us advance knowledge of what a storm already formed might do.
Are we safe? Is New Orleans protected from a storm? Has the relentless levee-building which the U. S. Corps of Engineers has been engaged in since Hurricane Katrina, nearly three years ago, produced stronger, more reliable levees?
Good question. The only sure answer is: we won't know until a storm hits.