Category: Newsletter

Let me point to what I believe should be the future for our church. And please note: when I say “our church,” I mean in the sense that we belong to it, not that the church belongs to us. Our church belongs to God. It’s His. He paid for it with the blood of His Son (Acts 20:28).

We have revised our church constitution twice in the last 28 years. Both times it was a lengthy, challenging process, even with the aid of computers. Both times we looked at our church constitution- which, like so many others, borrowed heavily from the business world of the mid-20^th century- streamlined it, and brought it more into line with how we actually do things.

But we have also had an ongoing problem of diminishing interest and participation in the running of our church.

The nature of a thing impacts how you interact with it. When we remember what the Bible says about the church, it will change the way we interact with it- especially our main Sunday morning gathering. Let me tell you about three different scenarios.

Scenario A. You go to Walmart. You need to get some bread and milk. You walk in through the sliding doors, grab a cart, and make a beeline to the back of the store. You maneuver around a few people who stopped in the middle of the aisle. You grab the milk. Heading for the bread, you have to take the long way because someone spilled something. Finally, you get the bread and head to the checkout. With some frustration, because the machine didn’t like how you swiped your credit card the first time, you completed your trip. Despite some inconveniences, you got what you came to get.

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.

I turned on the radio in my truck, listened a moment, and my heart sank. I thought: “Not again!”

I’d only listened for a moment before I realized that the announcer was describing yet another senseless, horrific shooting. Children in a Catholic school in Minneapolis had gathered in the connected church for a service, when someone fired indiscriminately though the stained-glass windows. Seventeen were wounded and two were killed. And first reports say that all the victims were children. The two who died were 8 and 10 years old.

That hits hard hit hard when you have children or grandchildren that same age. And it didn’t happen in a bar, late at night, in a rowdy crowd of grownups who were in a drunken rage. It happened at a church, in broad daylight, to a group of children who’d gathered in a church for a back-to-school service for their parochial school. This was unthinkable and unheard of not so very long ago. Now, when I hear news like this, my immediate reaction is: “Not again!”

When our son Josh was just a tyke, one day he announced to us with great conviction: “Oh, I can’t stand change!” My wife and I both laughed and told him he was going to have to get over that.

Turns out, sometimes that’s easier said than done.

Over the last nearly two decades our family has gone through major changes. These changes began with the birth of our first grandchild in 2008. (Grandkids are more fun; I recommend having them first.) Our first grandson’s birth was followed less than three months later by my mother’s death. My mother-in-law died in 2014. In 2016 my father-in-law remarried, and later that year our second grandson was born. Then came the whole COVID shutdown in 2020. In 2021, my father-in-law passed. There are some other things: a heart attack, a couple of hip surgeries, and so on. But the ones I mentioned are the most powerfully personal ones.

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.

Last week Ann Hensley died. It was almost fifteen years after her beloved husband Wes had died. They’d been married sixty years. Then Ann lived as a widow for almost fifteen years, more than half of that time as a resident in Glenburn Home.

She didn’t start out as a preacher’s wife. She married a soldier. After Wes got out of the Army, he became an insurance agent. At one point Wes was even a drummer in a swing bang! Then they both became Christians. Then Wes became a deacon in First Baptist Church of Linton. Then after a while he felt the call to preach and became a pastor, first in Worthington, then in Spencer. So, Ann ended up being a pastor’s wife. (Surprise! There’s an old Jewish proverb that says, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”)

 When my family and I came to First Baptist Church in Linton all those years ago, Ann and Wes offered us unstinting support and encouragement. They were always ready with a kind word and an “Attaboy!” after a church service. Until Wes died, you really couldn’t think of Ann without him. They were always together.

Well, we had a grand Easter, didn’t we? To God be the glory! Our daughter and her family came down to be with us that morning, and she said, “My goodness! Is this ‘Pack the Pew’ Sunday?” Because we were blessed with the largest crowd we’ve had for a very long time. How many, you ask? Oh,no, you don’t. I remember what happened when King David got too hung up on numbering the people! (See 2 Samuel 24 for the rest of that story.) The last thing we need is to be prideful. Let’s just be grateful and say “Oh, praise the Lord, we had a bunch!”!

I always love Easter, maybe best of all the Sundays of the year, with the Sunday at Christmas a close second. But the longer I’m in the ministry, the more I struggle with what to preach on those Sundays. I know that sounds silly. Of course, I’m going to preach on the birth of Jesus at Christmas and the resurrection of Jesus on Easter. But I’ve been doing this for so long, the challenge is to try to preach the “grand old story” in a brand-new way. I don’t want to just grab an old outline and “phone it in” on Christmas and Easter. At the same time, I’m starting to realize that all I really have to do is be faithful to proclaim the death, burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, explain what it means, and leave the rest to God. Dallas Jenkins, producer of the Chosen TV series about Jesus and the apostles, likes to say “My part is just to give God my loaves and fishes. His part is to feed the five thousand.” That’s a really good thing to remember. (See John 6 for the rest of this story.)