A Dose of the Ghost

It's a sweet day in our household. We have been running hard all week long and we had to just sit and stop because tomorrow it gets real again for another week. John is outside playing with his dog, Joseph is playing basketball, and Jessie and Nadia are napping. But not before Jessie made a banana nut bread castle. I have gone out a few times, working through my sermon and each time I am touched by the sight of our warm house. I know that when we come in from the cold, the fire will be going and I can sit down with a nice cup of tea and the pile of books that are on my plate to read in preparation for shepherding the people of God.

Wednesday night, we got a dose of the Ghost at our Wednesday Bible study. We have been spending time on discipleship, following Robert Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism and A.B. Bruce's The Training of the Twelve to lay a groundwork for what we will be doing.

There is in this an element of danger, that discipleship, like so much in the Church, can become an onject of study, a time for transferral of information, not transformation. So I like to inject calls to the practical. But I got more than I bargained for!

Alex Absalom sums up the apostolic plan of discipleship when he says that instead of reading lots of books and setting up an elaborate plan for making disciples, you just need to ask, “What is Jesus saying?” And “What are you going to do about it?

When I asked how do we know what Jesus is saying, well, everyone pretty well intuited the content of Foster's Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy. It's simple... anyone can do it.

But then, the obedience question... what are you going to do about it?

In many different ways we admitted, with a simple comment from Tim Miller, that we like to talk about things more than we like to do things. At the risk of sounding like we did a lot of talking... we stayed for 45 minutes past our allotted time.

Johnny Fryman kind of blew it open when he said...”I come from a rural background. We could not pay our preachers much, so we did most of the work ourselves.”

Oh boy. This is what I have been saying for a while. Clergy have been too willing to be the bosses. To be at the head of everything. What if the members did almost everything? What if the pastor preached, visited the sick, evangelized, started new churches (and taught the members to do those things as well!)?

I put forward my idea that maybe we need to go back to 2-year appointments for pastors? The Methodist Church was exploding when that was the pattern. Could it be that made the laity stronger? Jay Barrett said that as it is, a new pastor comes and the church stops to wait and see what the new guy will do.

Shouldn't it be that the church is already doing all kinds of stuff and it doesn't matter who the pastor is?

Joyce Saxon wins the prize for pithiest comment. “Isn't that kind of moving hard on the pastor's family?” I said that moving is not as hard as it seems. I went to 5 elementary schools and on average lived in one place for 20 months until I left home. She said, “That's why you're so warped!”

At the risk of sounding like we talked a lot... yes, but the energy coming out of there. Wes Holland came up to me afterwards and said, “Plant the seed and let us run with it.” Yes. We have been working on that. We are on the verge of some things just letting loose. It's the kind of discipleship and church growth stuff that hopefully has nothing to do with who the pastor is.

I shared that I am discontent and restless. I feel like a chump saying it. 17 new believers this year. Baptisms. 34 new members. But it's linear growth. I want to see multiplication growth. I can't wait for when each new believer wins another new believer! And that keeps rolling. What about if each current member won a new person to the faith? Joyce Saxon said-- leave it to the math teacher-- “that would be exponential growth!”

Ah, exponential!

You know what I think the biggest barrier is? We think we have to be successful. We are afraid it won't work. We are afraid someone will say no to our invitation. I wonder if we can just have joy in asking someone to come to church? Joy in telling someone how much peace we had in prayer!

John Wesley's Journal

Working on my sermon last night, it became clear to me that the biggest influence, by far, on my preaching has been reading John Wesley's Journal. (I would say that it has also been the biggest influence on the way I go about pastoral care as well.)

What I have learned about preaching from 12 years of reading his Journal:

Sin is our biggest problem, the Cross is our remedy, that's what you preach

How to look for the Gospel in the Old Testament

How to preach the Good News to sinners

There is a price to be paid to preach the Gospel

Be willing to go anywhere, learn to be comfortable everywhere, and talk to anyone

Raise up as many people as you can to spread the workers out into the harvest field

A simple word of encouragement to someone that they should seek Christ can bear fruit years later

It's kind of funny. I did not grow up in church. I went to seminary unaware of controversy in the Church. I became a Methodist because of John Wesley, in spite of the Reformed, Baptist and Episcopalian fellows who helped win me to Christ. There is a dear saint here who likes to joke and tell people around the church and town that I am a “closet Baptist.” I will take that as a compliment; but I preach simply what Wesley preached. And he preached the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) Look at his 52 Standard Sermons. I don't know why we would preach anything else.

Letter from Wendell Berry

I received a letter from Wendell Berry the other day. Now, this is not as dramatic as it sounds. It's not because I am somebody, it's rather that he is a very gracious man who has unfailingly answered any letters I have sent him over the past 20 years.

Anyway, I have been wondering for some time why Kentucky's Appalachian counties are so much poorer than the Appalachian counties in the surrounding states. Additionally, Kentucky's Appalachian counties are some of the least church-attending parts of America, whereas the Appalachian counties of the neighboring states are not as low in their church attendance.

Wendell was one of the people I sought out on this.

I won't go in to his answer-- at least at this point-- because he said something else in regard to our church plant in Menifee County and the dream that is in my heart of a new church in Wolfe County:

“I would like to see the Christian faith, with or without the churches, amount to something in the modern world.” Man, that hit me hard. He meant it in regard to Jesus' love for the poor and the hungry and the sick.

So whether or not I ever find out why Eastern Kentucky is so consistently poor, one of the effects of the Kingdom must be that the poor hear not just Good News, but find Good News.

Visitation

Yesterday turned out to be a day given over to visitation. I love days like that, but they can wear you out. It started with one of our Life Transformation Groups, where four of us are serious about spiritual growth. So while it is not technically “visitation,” it is sitting donw in an intimate environment and turning everything over to the Lord.

There were some hospital visits, about which more later. I stopped at a few houses of folks shut in for one reason or another. As I was going up one street, I was walking by the house of a church family. Their three year-old girl, Isabel, was standing at the storm door. She opened it and had the sweetest smile. She said, “Pastor Aaron, it's too cold outside. I came over and got a sweet smile and a hug. I talked to her dad for a moment-- they were on their way for her mom to take her citizenship test. Cool stuff.

But I was brought to tears by her sweetness. I can't really say what it was. Perhaps to be called out to by a child you have watched grow, a member of our Princess Mafia with Nadia. Something came to mind about giving a cool drink of water... but this was so much more. I thought, as if for the first time, “Pastor Aaron.” Pastor. Aaron. There was a time those two things could not have gone together, but thanks be to God that He wonderfully saved me.

Visiting some folks in the hospital, I was reminded how much a section of Psalms has such power for the suffering. Ricki Ashkettle and I seemed to land in Psalm reading back in Louisville when her baby daughter had some serious heart problems. I found myself there again yesterday. If you are in a hospital visiting, or with a scik person, or suffering yourself, then here is a great set of verses to pray, to let flow over you:

Psalm 61:1-5, Psalm 62:1-2, Psalm 63: 1-8.

Fast forward to tonight. John went to the hospital with me to visit Mary Philips and Charlie Derrickson. John loves Charlie-- who has a farm with a pond where John caught the monster catfish that he had Jessie fry for him at 9:30 at night... Charlie's granddaughter Morgan is one of the boys' favorite people. She saw John out walking one evening and she told him Charlie would be having surgery. She said she regretted telling him because she said John got a stricken look on his face. So when he found out it was a knee surgery, he was better. And John was really happy to see Charlie.

I suppose if there were a child who should hate hospitals, it's John. But he goes with me to visit every so often. We read Psalm 91, a Psalm that is traditionally an evening prayer Psalm. As we shared some other Scriptures and spiritual encouragement, there was a part of me wondering if I was talking to John as much as I was to the people we were visiting, reminding him of the goodness of God, of His power over life-- “Even in death the righteous have a refuge” (Proverbs 14:32).

While we were in evening bible study, the nursery worker answered the church phone and brought in a message that a dear saint of the church, Mary Phillips had had a heart attack and bad fall. After Bible study, I headed out. I walked over because I knew Jessie had some work to do before we'd leave. Carol Pierce graciously drove me over.


What I found when I visited Mary is worth telling. First, she was not in the ER where I was expecting her to be. When I came into her room, she was looking pretty good. She was happy to see me-- it's funny. I have been wanting to see her for a while, but have not had the chance.

Why I wanted to visit her was that I had heard that she has a ministry of passing out tracts at Cracker Barrel and a few of the staff have found salvation in Christ because of the ministry. Wow! Can you believe it! I keep hearing you shouldn't do evangelism like that! It doesn' work! Tracts are... what? Cheesy? Inelegant? Simplistic? Go ahead, keep it coming! We will just keep handing out tracts and witnessing to the love of God in Jesus Christ.

So as I was sitting with her, asking her what was wrong, she said she had a heart attack that caused her to fall and break her hip. But the break is probably not so serious as to need surgery and they are just going to monitor her heart. We had a wonderful time praising the Lord.

We read sections of Psalms-- 23, 24, 25, 27, 34, 62, 63 and Matthew 11:28-30. We spent some time in prayer.

Some things to reflect on. Mary started handing out tracts because she wondered what she could still do for the Lord then she selects the tract from a variety she carries with her. How simple this would be! Just carry some tracts, Billy Graham's Peace With God is a good one. Give it to a server, a cashier, a co-worker...

Mary mentioned someone who is a “prayer warrior” who wins many to Christ, and I was reminded of how often that is true. I am thinking of Ada Sweeney, such a force in the old Epworth church, her constant praying and prayer meetings, and how many people were “wonderfully saved” in her living room.

So... pray that people would be saved. Pray for them. Pray with them. And have a tract ready that they can take home and think about.

You Have to Check This Out

Copy the link below and plug it into your browser.  This is awesome.

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The Gideons

I have had an interesting series of conversations with Jeremy Brown, a banker and Gideon in our town. I should say that they are more like one conversation that we seem to keep having; we keep picking up the same thread.

The conversation is about Scripture, of course. The Gideons exist to get the Word of God into people's hands, lives, minds, and spirits. With Jeremy's permission, I share a couple of things he shared with me about some times he has passed out New Testaments.

Once, a fellow in a car saw him on a corner passing out Bibles, and he stopped the car in the middle of the road and hollered, “are those Bibles?” When Jeremy indicated they were, the man hollered that he wanted one. So Jeremey hastened to the car and ended up handing out 4, one to each person in the car.

I tell that as the inspirational piece. The rest of what I share is heart-breaking. I suspect that many of you do not understand or believe what I am about to share MEANS. The ignorance of Americans as to what Christianity is/believes is staggering. Church, you cannot stay in your shell anymore. Well, to be honest, you can. But you will find it emptier and emptier, and one day, one of you will be that last one there.

It will be easier to do nothing and hope you die before you see the terrible decline. But surely there are some of you who want to fight.

One young college student asked Jeremy and his co-worker if they knew anything about Heaven. They said they did. The student said her thrid-grade Sunday School teacher told her one thing, but a professor another. Jeremy said I will have this in common with your professor, “Read the book. The answer is in here.”

“Is the answer really in here?” she asked.

“I guarantee it is.”

Another time, a student asked, “What are you handing out?”

“New Testaments,” Jeremy said.

“Is that the book Jesus is in?”

At a recent event, Jeremy noticed a man looking at the New Testaments available. But he wasn't really making a move towards him. Jeremy engaged him and the man asked what they were giving away. “New Testaments.”

“What's that?”

“It's a part of the Bible.”

“Oh, I have heard of that.”

Friends, I was once as ignorant of the Bible and Christianity as these were. I was worse off, because a college education had convinced me that I knew more about it the fallacies, contradictions, and madness of the Bible than the Christians who had been brainwashed to believe it. I had such good and elegant reasons for my unbelief! A Gideon's Bible, Fall Semester, 1994 changed everything. I had refused or thrown them away before that.

Support the Gideons. Look into becoming one.

But more than anything: get to know some non-Christians and tell them what you believe and why. Invite them to believe it, too