Author: David Tyra

When I was in college it was an exciting time. It seemed like most everything in my life was up in the air. I had way more questions than I had answers, like: Would I get married? Who would I marry? (I had some thoughts about that, but I really wanted to hear from God.) What kind of a husband would I be? Would we have children? How many children would we have? What kind of a father would I be? Where would I go after I graduated? What part of the country would I live in? What kind of ministry would I have? Would I be an associate pastor first, or go right into a senior pastor position? Would I serve on a church staff, or be a solo pastor? And, on a deeper, more fearful level: Would I be a success? Would I be able to provide for my wife and children? Would my family be disappointed in me? Would God be disappointed in me? Would I be disappointed in myself?

I’d spent my teenage years as a prodigal son living on the edges of “the far country.” My parents made me tow the line for the most part, but I drifted away from God. I was making my own decisions, planning my own life, and taking my own path. And it all ended up with my life in the ditch in a big way. I wrecked the most important relationships with the most important people in my life, wasted some really good opportunities, and started to become someone that nobody really wanted to be around. I mean it when I say that, without Jesus, nobody would like me.

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I have a small leather 3-ring binder that I use for my sermon notes. I got it some years ago from supply store. It isn’t really a notebook. It’s actually an old address book, meant to hold pages with five or six names and addresses per page. These days you can hardly find address books like this anymore. Everybody(including me) keeps all their names and addresses on their contact list in their smartphones.

But I’d seen Billy Graham preach with his Bible and a full-size 3 ring notebook, and I thought, “Now why can’t I do that?” I’d begun preaching from more extensive notes, and eventually adopted a full manuscript format- something I thought I’d never do. I write out my sermons on half sheets of paper, 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches, and the more pages I wrote, the more a notebook made sense.

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There’s a short poem about money I heard a long time ago that I’ve never forgotten. Here it is:

Money talks; that’s no lie.
I heard it once; it said “Goodbye!”

But let me reword it a bit, like this:

Time flies; that’s no lie.
I heard it once; it said “Goodbye!”

Actually, I don’t think time says “Goodbye” at all. It just rushes by without so much as a “See you later!” It really is astonishing how fast it goes.

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About 1982 my family and I moved to Coal City, Indiana and I reconnected with a friend of mine I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. His name was Richard, and he was a musician, too. I was playing strictly acoustic guitar in those days, and he loaned me one of his amplifiers and an electronic effects unit for guitar. (For you guitar geeks out there, it was an Ibanez rackmount unit with compressor, overdrive, chorus, flanger and phaser.) All of this opened up a whole new world of wonderful sounds to explore.

Even more significantly, he loaned me an album of contemporary Christian music. It was an LP (I know, I’m an old guy) recorded by Dion, of “Dion and the Belmonts” fame. Dion had some top-40 hits in the sixties and seventies with songs like “Runaround Sue” and “Abraham, Martin and John.” But later Dion became a Christian and began to record Christian music. His music was a revelation to me. He sang the Gospel, clear and true, but in his own style, with guitar, bass, drums, and a Hammond B-3 organ. It was fantastic.

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John Maxwell was and is a Wesleyan minister who has pastored several churches in Indiana, Ohio, California and Florida. He has written many books on the subject of leadership, and held conferences on leadership all over the country. He has written and said many good and helpful things on leadership, but as far as I’m concerned, the best and most helpful thing he ever said was in an interview with Dr. James Dobson back in the mid-nineties.

Dr. Dobson’s organization, Focus On The Family, had begun issuing a series of cassette tapes specifically aimed at pastors. Each tape contained an interview with various people on some aspects of ministry. During the course of the interview with John Maxwell, Maxwell said this: “Leadership is influence.” That’s a direct quote,and it was an epiphany to me. I have long since given away that cassette tape to another minister…and if I still had it, I’m not sure I have a working tape machine to play it on anymore. But what he said on that tape has stuck with me.

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My earliest church memories are of me standing beside my grandmother during the congregational singing. She would always hold the hymnal down so I could see the words, and point with her finger to what line we were singing. I would listen to her singing harmony with the melody line of the hymn. To this day I love to sing harmony with others, and I believe that goes back to my grandma in church.

One of the first songs I remember singing in church is Give me Oil in My Lamp…or as it is more properly known, Sing Hosanna. (As a child, I always wondered who Hosanna was, and why she wouldn’t sing?) This may actually have been the song that my grandmother was singing in my memory. To this day I still love that song. For some reason whenever we’d sing it in church, I’d always imagine an Old West-style covered wagon coming down the center aisle, driven by a grizzled old man, saying, “Come on, Hosanna! Sing!” (I guess that’s how I imagined the children of Israel traveled through the desert…probably because of all the episodes of Gunsmoke and Wagon Train my folks watched on television…black-and-white television, that is. Yes, I’m an old guy.)

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I know people groaned inwardly when I said I took over 1500 pictures while I was in the Holy Land in 2014. I promised not to make everyone look at all of them, but to my surprise, a lot of you willingly looked at a great many. When I showed some pictures in the evening service that first time, I honestly thought people would quickly get bored with them. I remember my grandparents coming home from vacation and showing us an interminable number of slides of their trip. It was all quite boring to me as a kid, and I had no desire to bore any of you in the same way.

But the Holy Land is different, isn’t it?

For my part, I’m glad I took all those pictures. And I knew this would happen, but I’m still not happy about it: we went so many places, and saw so many different things, some of the details have started to blend together in my mind. When I compare notes with my son Josh, he often reminds me of things I’d forgotten about the trip. At least, I’d forgotten them until he spoke of them. Sometimes I go back through my pictures, and even through some of the 2000 pictures Josh took, and it helps to refresh my memory.

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When I began my education to prepare for the ministry, I went to a Baptist college that was very much immersed in what came to be called the “church growth movement.” The term “mega-church” hadn’t been coined yet, but there were many churches in our fellowship that gathered thousands of people every week, with a few having ten thousand or more in attendance. The pastors of those churches were revered, and their explanations of “how to build a church” were eagerly heard and followed. These pastors were in high demand as conference speakers, and their churches were written about in books by “church growth experts.”

I grew up in one of those large churches, and accepted and absorbed these ideas about church growth without question. But there were lots of churches in our fellowship that were much smaller, numbering in the hundreds, and many more that has a hundred people or less in their weekly attendance. Somehow the unspoken thought was that their smaller churches and their pastors weren’t doing it right, somehow falling short or not measuring up. Because if they were doing things the right, and if the pastors were dedicated enough, committed enough, loved Jesus enough, and worked hard enough (often at the expense of their families), then, of course, the church would grow. And if a church wasn’t growing, well, that was a pretty good indicator of the disappointing lack in these churches and these pastors. The unfortunate result of all this stuff was that lots of churches and pastors felt like failures. Some pastors even attempted to commit suicide because their churches weren’t growing.

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