Category: Newsletter

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.)

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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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I have always loved Christmas lights. I loved them as a child, and even since I grew up, its always make me smile, when Christmas lights start appearing on houses every December.

But I gained a whole new perspective on Christmas lights when my grandsons came along. Somehow, when seeing the world reflected in the face and eyes of a child, it all seems new and wonderful again. We need to be reminded of that, especially at Christmas.

My first grandson is named Andrew, but we call him Ender, after a character in one of his dad’s favorite novels. When he was less than a year old, experiencing his first Christmas, I loved holding him up to the Christmas Tree to show him the lights. (I didn’t enjoy it as much the next year trying to keep him from eating the lights during his second Christmas.) But as he got older, we both discovered the joy of looking at Christmas lights from “Gwampa’s dok-wed Fod Wanger twuk!” (Translation: “Grandpa’s dark -red Ford Ranger truck”)

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Years ago my grandfather told me. “Davey, politics is a dirty business.” As I have gotten older, I have come to understand what he meant.

From time to time, I have quoted to our church something Steve Brown said about politics. When he was a pastor, he would tell his church, “I have political opinions, and they’re better than yours. But that not why we’re here.” And once or twice over the years I’ve had to exhort some of the brothers and sisters to leave politics outside the church. Not very often, but it has happened. I really want there to be places in my life that are free from political rancor. Like church. Or playing music.

I think one of the things that grieves me the most is the black-and-white characterizations of people who vote differently than someone’s own perspective. I really don’t know anyone who thinks that a particular political candidate “walks on water.” I know lots of people who will readily admit that a candidate is flawed, even very flawed, but who still generally works to accomplish what they consider to be good things.

And I long ago realized that there is only one Messiah per universe, and He isn’t running for office in either political party.

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My family and I once visited a church of another denomination. The service was fairly traditional, the music was reasonably good, and when the pastor started his sermon I was hopeful. But at one point he seemed to be building to a climax, and I was anticipating his next words. And with great conviction he said, “And that just goes to show why we all should read our bulletins!” That is not what I thought he was going to say.

Church bulletins date back to the middle of the 19 th century. The first regular church publication was started in January 1859 by Rev. John Erskine Clarke, Vicar of St. Michael’s Church in Derby, England. Then in 1884, Albert Dick Blake invented stencil duplicating, brought printing to the local church, and so was born the Sunday morning bulletin. It was modeled after theater programs. It contained an order of service, news of the local church, and various other items of interest (hopefully).

On occasion, I’d like to have traveled back in time and slapped John Erskine Clarke and Albert Dick Blake upside the head, because sometimes church bulletins can be a real pain. One church secretary told me their pastor would often have her redo the bulletin two or three times, until it was all to his satisfaction. That seems a little obsessive. I mean, let’s give it our best shot and all, but I think it’s important for us to remember that Jesus and the apostles never passed out church bulletins.

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I recently finished reading in the Name of God, a book by O.S. Hawkins about two early twentieth- century pastors, J. Frank Norris and George W. Truett. Norris pastored the First Baptist Church of Fort Wayne, Texas, and Truett pastored First Baptist Church of Dallas. Their ministries were more-or- les simultaneous, and the two men were often at odds with each other. There is a lot to admire – and to censure- in both Norris and Truett. Together, these men represent the best and worst of Baptist fundamentalism and Baptist denominationalism.

Dr. Hawkins wrote a sequel to In the Name of God called Criswell: His Life and Times. After the 47- year ministry of George Truett, young preacher named W.A. Criswell was called to be the pastor of First Baptist, Dallas. Criswell’s ministry there lasted over 50 years. It’s been said that Criswell combined the best characteristics of both J. Frank Norris and George W. Truett: a fervent commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture and passionate preaching of the Gospel, blended with a winsome spirit and a statesmanlike demeanor.

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