Article for Ministers: Sir, Reverend, Would You Have Them Hold the Mayonnaise

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There are times that I really get wrapped up with being important. I mean those times when I am so into the importance thing that the whole world finds it’s orbit around me. I know that you may find that hard to believe, that “importance” could have such a dizzying effect on me but it does.

In fact some time ago, I found myself being very important. Our church was hosting a preaching workshop. Rick Wyser was doing his very good seminar “The Six Should-Be’s of Preaching” and I was feeling particularly important. We had plotted and planned and had all sorts of free books, gadgets, computer programs and all sorts of other things to give out to the participants. Somewhere around fifty ministers came and we were having a tremendous time. Nothing motivates me like talking about becoming a better preacher, so I was definitely enjoying the element.

We started on Friday evening and went long into the night and were to continue the next morning and work through most of the day. There I was in front of all of these ministers opening up the day with prayer and some brief but very important comments. I had on crisp, dry-cleaned clothes and a sparkling new tie and had the look of, well, importance. Right before Brother Wyser came to the platform, I managed to see someone motioning to me in the back of the church and behind the person who was motioning was someone very unimportant-looking. I knew what he wanted and I knew that in my status of current importance that I did not really want to get involved.

However, because of my importance that day, I was chosen to meet a little man who began to germinate the thoughts of what you are now reading. He was dressed in ragged clothes, his shoes were literally coming apart on his feet. He looked as if he hadn’t been near a razor or a tooth-brush in days, who knows, maybe weeks. As I got closer to him, it also became very obvious that he had not been near soap and water in several days either.

I ushered him into the office and honestly I wanted to give him a few dollars and send him on his way. See, I was busy helping Brother Wyser and busy helping other ministers become better preachers, frankly I was very busy being important. However, his story was compelling, in fact so compelling, I shall never forget that day or his story as long as I shall live.

He had a severe speech impediment that made it a little difficult to understand him. He had gotten a job with some Texas boys who had taken him to South Carolina to work at a condo along the beach. He knew how to hang sheet-rock and could paint so that is what they wanted him to do. The key to this whole deal was that the poor fellow was one of those guys that this world is constantly taking advantage of and that is exactly what happened. He had worked for three weeks and only had two-hundred dollars to show for it and then they conveniently left him in a bar in north Georgia drunk as a hoot owl. When he finally had aroused from his drunken stupor all he had was the clothes on his back, the shoes on his feet, and the two-hundred dollars were now gone!

So I began to quiz him on his story. Maybe quiz is not the right word, I began to interrogate this man. His story was so outrageous and I was so busy being important and I needed to get back in there with the action. Where is your car? I don’t have one. How did you get here? I walked. When was the last time you ate? Yesterday morning when I cleaned up some trash in a Burger King parking lot and the manager gave me some biscuits. How long have you been walking/hitchhiking from north Georgia? Four days, please sir, I am not lying to you. I see a fence row that needs cleaning off, can I do that for some money? I need to get back to Texas. How are you going to get there? Well, somebody told me in Georgia and if I could get to Hwy. 84 and follow it, it would take me to Texas.

Up to this point, my importance had been progressively dissipating but now all the importance had been effectively squeezed out of me. I took him to the fellowship hall and loaded him up with a large bag of food from the continental breakfast from our meeting. I noticed that as I walked down the hall that he was literally limping almost to the point of being crippled. I inquired about this and he told me that his feet were blistered so bad that he could not hardly walk and that he was going to rest for the remainder of the day.

I ended up taking him to a motel on Hwy. 84 and putting him in a room and thought to myself how wonderful and how benevolent that I had been on my way back to the church. It took me about twenty minutes and I slid right back into my important mode. I forgot him, until the waitress at Larry’s brought my second run of BBQ chicken around 8:30 P.M. I had been having a great conversation with Brother Wyser and Brother Patterson about. . . . . . you know, preaching and other important stuff,but when I bit into that second run of chicken, the Lord graced my memory with that little guy. I asked Brother Patterson to take care of Brother Wyser that I had something that I needed to take care of. To this point, Brother Wyser nor Brother Patterson even knew about this little guy.

So with a full stomach and a very troubled soul, I went to this little guy’s room. The last time I had seen him had been around 9:30 that morning and it was now working toward 10:00 PM. He opened the door to my loud knock. He appeared almost fearful to me. Now as I think in retrospect he probably thought that I was coming to throw him out or take him downtown to the police station or some such as that. I asked him brusquely, “do you have any food left?” “No sir, I don’t. I ate the last of it around 2 o’clock.” “Are you hungry?” “Yes, sir, I am.” “I am going to Burger King to get you a Whopper Value Meal,” I said. I turned and started for my car and had gone no more than ten feet when I heard his voice again. “Sir, Reverend, would you please tell them to hold the mayonnaise?” I could not answer, I could only nod. I got in my car and he left the door open and watched me drive out of the parking lot and watched me go on down the rode.

The next twenty minutes or so as I drove to BK the Lord gave me a whole lot of insight into some things. Not an audible voice, but I heard the Lord as plain as day, tell me, “That is how you look to me when you get busy being important.” He reminded me of all the times at the great conferences that I asked Him for all the big stuff. Use me Lord to do the big stuff, the powerful things, the glamorous things, the high visibility things, let the miracles fall off of me, let my name be on the lips of all far and wide, please make me important, and by the way, God, can you hold the mayonnaise?

Where did I get that attitude from? From all of that blarney that I had been feeding my mind over the last several years, this leadership book, that time-management program, this self-development seminar, and on and on, ad nauseum. Now understand with me that I feel very strongly about all of these areas and some of the personal and professional development that has occurred within my own life could never have come to pass had I not known about the “how-to’s” and “what-for’s” of leadership development, goal-setting, and raw, rigorous discipline.

But there is something that is lost when our lives become dictated by the Covey “Habit’s.” We have a tendency to lose touch with humanity and the hurts, stresses, anxieties, and pressures that they battle with day-in and day-out. When we lose touch with those pressures that come from the pews, we become empire builders instead of kingdom builders. When I get busy intersecting flights, reserving hotel rooms, planning events, and just being important, I lose touch with what God wants for my life.

God does not want me to be important, He wants me to do His will and His will is never a mystery. His will is to do the best serving where I am when the need arises. Importance will rob you of a miracle. One of the most notable examples of this is Namaan. He almost did not get his healing because he was too important to dip in the muddy Jordan. I wonder how many miracles that I have circumvented miracles in my own life by being important.

Importance is summed up at the Last Supper when the Lord knelt down, girded with a towel, and washed all of the disciples feet. Maybe I had known it but somehow it had escaped me for all of these years that Jesus washed the feet of Judas before the supper ever began. He washed the man’s feet who was going to betray him. That is what importance really is. It is serving the Judas Kiss. It is serving the betrayer. It is ministering to the deserter.

Michael Card has a song entitled The Basin and the Towel. It goes like this:

An upstairs room, a parable is just about to come alive,

And while they bicker about whose best,

With a painful glance He’ll silently rise,

Their Savior Servant must show them how,

By the will of the water and the tenderness of the towel.

And the call is to community,

The impoverished power that sets the soul free,

In humility to take the vow,

That day after day,

We must take up the basin and the towel.

In any ordinary place or any ordinary day,

The parable can live again,

When one kneel and one will yield,

Our Savior Servant must show us how,

By the will of the water and the tenderness of the towel.

And the space between ourselves sometimes is more than the distance between the stars

By the fragile bridge of the servant’s bow,

We take up the basin and the towel.

And the call is to community,

The impoverished power that sets the soul free,

In humility to take the vow,

That day after day,

We must take up the basin and the towel.

When we bow to the basin and the towel, importance has a way of being totally removed from our lives. Servants are not very important. Servants have no rights. Servants move at the command and the whims of the master. Servants have no personal agendas they focus on the mission which supercede any personal agenda.

When we do the small things for the Lord, we advance the Kingdom. The whole attitude of importance revolts against the idea of doing something “hidden” in the Kingdom. Yet, when we fill this role of washing dirty feet, great power, great humility, great purpose slowly seeps into our lives. Increasingly, I am becoming convinced that spiritual greatness comes from serving and with heightening anonymity. Through the continual denial of the flesh, which is a monumental challenge in itself, and through the pouring out of ourselves into the lives of others with no expectations from those actions, that greatness does indeed seep into our lives. Therefore, live out and flesh out this principle of the basin and the towel because in doing so it strangles the very thin veneer of importance.

John Piper writes in Brothers, We Are Not Professionals:

We pastors are being killed by the professionalizing of the pastoral ministry. The mentality of the professional is not the mentality of the prophet. It is not the mentality of the slave of Christ. Professionalism has nothing to do with the essence and the heart of the Christian ministry. The more professional we long to be, the more spiritual death we will leave in our wake. For there is no professional childlikeness (Matt. 18:3); there is no professional tenderheartedness (Eph. 4:32); there is no professional panting after God (Psalm 42:1).

But our first business is to pant after God in prayer. Our business is to weep over our sins (James 4:9). Is there professional weeping? Our business is to strain forward to the holiness of Christ and the prize of the upward call of God (Php. 3:14); to pummel our bodies and subdue them lest we be cast away (1 Cor. 9:27); to deny ourselves and take up the blood spattered cross daily (Luke 9:23). How do you carry a cross professionally? . . . .

I trust that you take this in the spirit by which I have tried to write this. We still need discipline, we must have vision, we will fail if we do not plan, and we must continue to lead, but there must in all of this be ministries marked by utter dependence on God. The Kingdom of God is not advanced with importance nor professionalism but rather with humility.

Trying to Decrease. . .

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In order to be aware of the financial difficulties one has and know what causes them, a person must educate himself to the reasons for the difficulties. The following are a list of reasons that most people find themselves in financial difficulty.

FAILURE TO FOLLOW SCRIPTURAL PRINCIPLES. The Bible is full of guidelines regarding financial principles. In fact, one-half of all parables and one out of six verses in the New Testament deal with stewardship. Get your Bible out and start studying. Ask your pastor for more information. See a Christian Financial Counselor for assistance. You will find great guidelines and principles in the Word of God.
FAILURE TO IDENTIFY YOUR PRIORITIES. Just exactly what do you want? More things or better financial stability? Prioritize your desires and needs and stick to it.
NO DISCIPLINE! That one horrible word causes us more problems than anything else in the world. We need to exercise discipline in every phase of our life, especially when it comes to discipline! Discipline yourself to limit unnecessary purchases and wasting money. Discipline yourself to set down once per month to analyze your finances. Discipline will be the greatest thing you can establish in your life. Work diligently with disciplining yourself.
FAILURE TO ESTABLISH GOALS. A person who has no goal is a person without direction. A person without direction is going…nowhere! To solve your financial difficulties, you have to establish a clear goal. Where do you want to be one year from now; five years from now, etc.? Write your goal down and work toward it.
NO CONTROLS. This compares to discipline, however, it means to have written controls over your spending. Write down what your limits are. Review them frequently.
FAILURE TO ESTABLISH A BUDGET. A budget is not a nervous breakdown on paper. It is a clear cut guideline of where your money comes from and how it is to be spent. It only takes about 1 hour per month to maintain a budget so that you can control the process of knowing where your money is and how it is spent. Don’t negate the importance of a written budget…it will be the greatest factor in helping you get your finances under control.
UNABLE TO CONTROL IMPLUSIVE SPENDING. If you don’t follow the direction of your budget and discipline yourself, you will be unable to stop spending when you see that item that you just must have. Don’t spend any unnecessary money until you discuss it with someone. You must control your spending if you ever hope to get ahead financially.

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FAILURE TO FOLLOW SCRIPTURAL PRINCIPLES. The Bible is full of guidelines regarding financial principles. In fact, one-half of all parables and one out of six verses in the New Testament deal with stewardship. Get your Bible out and start studying. Ask your pastor for more information. See a Christian Financial Counselor for assistance. You will find great guidelines and principles in the Word of God.
FAILURE TO IDENTIFY YOUR PRIORITIES. Just exactly what do you want? More things or better financial stability? Prioritize your desires and needs and stick to it.
NO DISCIPLINE! That one horrible word causes us more problems than anything else in the world. We need to exercise discipline in every phase of our life, especially when it comes to discipline! Discipline yourself to limit unnecessary purchases and wasting money. Discipline yourself to set down once per month to analyze your finances. Discipline will be the greatest thing you can establish in your life. Work diligently with disciplining yourself.
FAILURE TO ESTABLISH GOALS. A person who has no goal is a person without direction. A person without direction is going…nowhere! To solve your financial difficulties, you have to establish a clear goal. Where do you want to be one year from now; five years from now, etc.? Write your goal down and work toward it.
NO CONTROLS. This compares to discipline, however, it means to have written controls over your spending. Write down what your limits are. Review them frequently.
FAILURE TO ESTABLISH A BUDGET. A budget is not a nervous breakdown on paper. It is a clear cut guideline of where your money comes from and how it is to be spent. It only takes about 1 hour per month to maintain a budget so that you can control the process of knowing where your money is and how it is spent. Don’t negate the importance of a written budget…it will be the greatest factor in helping you get your finances under control.
UNABLE TO CONTROL IMPLUSIVE SPENDING. If you don’t follow the direction of your budget and discipline yourself, you will be unable to stop spending when you see that item that you just must have. Don’t spend any unnecessary money until you discuss it with someone. You must control your spending if you ever hope to get ahead financially.

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Back in the summer, Brother Ensey sent out an e-mail soliciting papers to be written on various subjects and after musing through the choices, I started thinking more along the lines of a pastoral theology kind of subject. Although I am not quite sure how I finally settled on this particular issue, I have been thoroughly enlightened on this subject.

In the past, I have written on church trouble from the angle of people in the congregation who found great enthusiasm for tormenting pastors until they finally ran them off. The religious landscape is littered with men who no longer pastor churches and gave up the calling of a ministry because of a situation where they found themselves in great contention with the hidden powers that ran the church. If you are interested you may read those old Barnabas Blog posts from a couple of years ago (Part 1 & Part 2). Since writing those posts, I have observed a few more of these unfortunate situations as they unfolded.

On the other hand, there are also churches that have had endure terrible abuses at the hands of heavy-handed, manipulative, and dark pastors who fall into the category of being a spiritual abuser.

I must say from the outset that this kind of activity to me is totally foreign because of the environment that I grew up in with my own pastor (and now father-in-law) Joe Patterson. Because of his spiritual leadership, I grew up with the idea that the church was the most incredible, warm, and safe place on the earth. It was only after I begin to travel around a bit and grew up some spiritually and mentally that I was exposed to the dark side of the church and ministry. To be quite frank with you, it was a bit unnerving and initially faith-jarring.

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Know how to say it. Creativity greatly enhances communication. Use all the tools you can to make the message interesting and memorable: plays on words, acrostics, humor, stories, skits, music – all can help increase your impact. Avoid being too predictable. If people always know what you are about to say or how you will say it, they will tune you out.

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Believe that people can change. Keep in mind that all great communicators have one thing in common: They expect their message to change lives.
Live what you say. Unless you have credibility, even the best content will get you nowhere. If you don’t live it, your listeners won’t either.
Know when to say it. Be observant of people’s reactions to your message. When you sense that people are receptive, it is time to ask for a response.
Know how to say it. Creativity greatly enhances communication. Use all the tools you can to make the message interesting and memorable: plays on words, acrostics, humor, stories, skits, music – all can help increase your impact. Avoid being too predictable. If people always know what you are about to say or how you will say it, they will tune you out.

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1. Learn that leadership is servanthood. Servanthood begins with security. Jesus knew His position and was willing to not flaunt it. Jesus knew His calling and was willing to be faithful to it. Jesus knew His future and was willing to submit to it.

2. Let your purpose prioritize your life. Because Jesus developed priorities based upon His purpose:

He successfully dealt with distractions.
He wisely responded to personal rejection.
He willingly suffered pain.

3. Live the life before you lead others. Jesus never begged anyone to believe in Him. He knew that integrity cannot be proven; it must be discerned. He never wasted time with critics. He kept His attention on His goal. He stayed focused.

4. Walk slowly through the crowd. Leadership impact is drawn not from official position, but from authentic relationships. (John 4:5-30, 8:1-11) "You will never possess what you are unwilling to pursue." Jesus knew this.

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2. Let your purpose prioritize your life. Because Jesus developed priorities based upon His purpose:

He successfully dealt with distractions.
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A Few Good Things To Know About People

Showing your compassionate and caring nature will aid you in forging successful relationships.

When you extinguish hope, you create desperation.

Remember that your followers generally want to believe that what they do is their own idea and, more importantly, that it genuinely makes a difference.

If you practice dictatorial leadership, you prepare yourself to be dictated to.

Delegate responsibility and authority by empowering people to act on their own.

When you make it to the top, turn and reach down for the person behind you.

You must be consistently fair and decent in both the business and personal side of life.

Never add the weight of your character to a charge against a person without knowing it to be true.

Never crush a man out, thereby making him and his friends permanent enemies of your organization.

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A Few Good Things To Know About People

Showing your compassionate and caring nature will aid you in forging successful relationships.

When you extinguish hope, you create desperation.

Remember that your followers generally want to believe that what they do is their own idea and, more importantly, that it genuinely makes a difference.

If you practice dictatorial leadership, you prepare yourself to be dictated to.

Delegate responsibility and authority by empowering people to act on their own.

When you make it to the top, turn and reach down for the person behind you.

You must be consistently fair and decent in both the business and personal side of life.

Never add the weight of your character to a charge against a person without knowing it to be true.

Never crush a man out, thereby making him and his friends permanent enemies of your organization.

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Casting a vision and leading people are not easy to do. Here are a few pointers when it comes to creating vision in the local church.

Don’t micromanage. Create a program or system for management then simply allow others to do their job. You may consider employing another person to do the managing. This would be someone who is close to you and knows how to follow your orders. Let them do the follow up, you cast the vision.

Admit mistakes. Being the leader does not mean you are going to be right 100% of the time. There are going to be times you make mistakes. Admit them quickly and cast a new vision. Allowing yourself to make mistakes will show your congregation that you are human and will enable them to feel that you are approachable.

Lead without fear. Fear will cripple your potential. “We have not the spirit of fear.” Seek your churches direction from the Lord. While it is good to get other people’s opinion and counsel regarding the direction the church should be moving, God alone can give you Divine direction. Seek God’s face for His will. Once he gives you direction, move forward into it without fear of defeat or what others may think.

Gather allies. Surround yourself with others who think like you do. Especially if they compliment your vision. As you begin to share your passion and burden with them, they will want to get on board. After training and equipping them, get them on board with you ASAP.

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Amy Wilson Carmichael was born December 16, 1867 in a small village in Northern Ireland. Her parents were evangelical Christians and she committed her life to Christ's service at a very young age.

One story of Amy’s childhood noted that when she was little, she always wished she’d had blue eyes instead of brown. As a little girl, she prayed for God to give her blue eyes, but she never received them.

Carmichael was the founder of a women’s group in Belfast that quickly grew to over 500 women and they needed a larger place in which to meet. She saw an ad in a newspaper saying an iron building could be built for £500 that would seat up to 500 people. A donation and a plot of land were given, and the building of the first “Welcome Hall” was built.

Amy felt led to fulfill her call in missions. In many ways, she was an unlikely candidate for missionary work. She suffered neuralgia--a disease of the nerves that made her whole body weak and achy--and she was often bedridden for weeks on end.

At the 1887 Keswick Convention, she heard Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, speak about missionary life. Initially, Amy travelled to Japan for fifteen months, but she later found her lifelong vocation in India.

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When Taking Up the Offering

Here are a few things to remember when taking up the offering.

Don’t be timid or embarrassed to ask people for money. It takes money to make ministry happen.

Teach your people to give financially to the church. You are robbing them of a tremendous blessing if you are not teaching them to give tithes and offerings. It is the job of the ministry to instruct people how to give financially to God’s work.

Be the first to give. Instruct your ushers to take the offering from the platform first. The Pastor should be the first to give and then anyone who is seated on the platform. Preachers, musicians, singers, everybody should be instructed to be an example in giving in every service. Rule number 1 – If you are on the platform, you must give in every offering. (This serves as an example to the rest of the congregation. You will be amazed at the increase in offerings when your congregation begins to notice the leadership of the church being the first to give.

Tell the ushers to slow down – Recently I visited a church where the ushers went so fast collecting the offering that people did not even have time to get their wallets out before the ushers were finished. Slow them down. People need time to dig deep.

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The Dark Side of Spiritual Abuse - Part 4

Leadership seems to be the buzzword of our times. Bookstores now have multiple rows upon rows of books concerning this particular subject. Some of the content is very good and can help a person to hone their management skills and work toward becoming self-disciplined in a manner that will prove good for the organization that they are serving. I personally have benefited from some of the secular leadership books that I have read over the years. Despite all of these necessary and good resources only a small, in fact, microscopic amount of these books address spiritual issues in the life of the leader.

There aren’t any spiritual leadership concepts given in the books that Jim Collins has written. Patrick Lencioni does not address the spiritual side of a man who wants to build a Fortune 500 company. Peter Drucker’s works have almost elevated him posthumously to an exalted messiah among the leadership gurus of the last century. If we are not careful, there can be a tendency to think that we can build a church the same way that Steve Jobs made Apple successful. Once a spiritual leader buys into that particular idea that he can build a spiritual church with the same techniques that a profit-driven company is built, he deceives himself and he will create spiritual mayhem with the sheep he is meant to feed.

Spiritually abusive leaders are often very ambitious and driven toward success. It is important to understand the motives that drive men in spiritual leadership because our motives say much about our true intentions. Gary McIntosh in his book, Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership, identifies five types of leadership styles that lead toward tendencies to be spiritually abusive. The compulsive leader is characterized by being status conscious, looking for reassurance and approval from those in authority. He will have a tendency to try to control activities and keep order at all times doing this by being an extreme workaholic. They can be excessively moralistic, conscientious, and judgmental. He may have an angry and rebellious attitude but will repress his true feelings and hold in the anger and resentment. When these dark emotions turn on the church, the atmosphere immediately turns into one of control and extreme authoritarianism.

There are certain traits that usually show up in the preaching style of a compulsive leader. He will frequently be a gifted and charismatic speaker but has the tendency to minimize any impact of the Scriptures unless they are going to serve his own agenda. He will also be the hero of all of his stories and listeners will be “amazed” at his feats in personal outreach/evangelism, prayer schedule, and devotion to the Scriptures. He may even say something like this; “I am God’s appointed authority in your life. If you oppose me you’re opposing God.” He will almost have the capacity to turn himself into a rock star for a lack of a better description. He leads people to follow him instead of the Lord.

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