Category: Newsletter

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.)

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.)

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.

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.