Tuesday I had two choices. I had been invited to a pastor’s meeting where a number of my friends would be in attendance. Most of them would be younger pastors. There is a hopeful movement among young pastors toward a more robust theology. It’s great fun to be around these guys. The preaching and the fellowship and the singing can make your soul soar up to God. I put it on my calendar.
Later I heard that there would be another pastor’s meeting on the same day in early May. …

Puttering around among my books I spot and old book of pastoral theology passed down to me from my grandpa’s modest library. I take it in hand and turn it over a few times, enjoying the weight of it. Something about it tugs on my memory. I open it. Suddenly it comes back to me why this is a very special book.
Grandpa had great eyesight. He always said that when he was in the Navy he was tested and told he had rare 20/10 vision. (I guess that’s twice …

The Way It Should Have Been (mp3)

Last week I watched a lovely old movie about a newly-wed pastor and his young, beautiful wife. The movie follows their first three years serving a rural Methodist circuit charge in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Georgia. In the movie the pastor was a good guy. That should tell you it was an old movie. Pastors in modern movies are usually oily charlatans trying to get into people’s pockets, week men who are unprincipled and can be bought and sold cheap. They …

I’ve always considered a trip to the barber kind of a luxury, a social event. A barber shop is one of the places that hasn’t changed much over the last fifty years (except for a brief “styling salon” period in the seventies which went the way of the disco, thank God.)
I just love a good, old-fashioned barber shop. The smells. The local gossip. The latest news. A few new jokes. A fishing report.
A few years ago in a distant city I purred in town in my little brown wagon to …

In high school my favorite class was always study hall, because there I could read what I wanted to read. I read books about ministry, pastoring, preaching, evangelism, discipleship, prayer, and the Christian family. I don’t ever remember reading textbooks. I had something else burning in my heart. I wanted to be used of God to influence people for Christ. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that way. Today I want to share a story with you about how a woman was used to influence many for …

Years ago, when I was going through a season of reaction and resistance to my leadership in a church, my brother Nathan was helping with music. He was living at home and attending college. Nathan came to church one particularly difficult evening and he had a note for me from Dad. It was a simple passage of Scripture to read: Ezekiel 2:4-5. Dad quickly jotted it on the back of his business card and sent it my way.
Before I went out to preach that night I looked up the …

I try to pray daily that God will bring people across my path, or that I will find people who are open to the truth of God. If they are not I try to sow seeds of truth wherever I go but I am always praying that God will bring people into my life who are ready to listen and I am always ready to tell them the good news.
When that is your great love the people around you know it. They tend to send people your way.
On Wednesday …

This was the sign we made for the Pine Street Parsonage in Fremont, Michigan. I believe the graphic was made by my brother, Kevin, for our original web-site. Larry Barber created the sign for us. I still have it in my study where it reminds me to pray for the good folk at First Baptist Church in Fremont and remember the kindness of the people, the good had of God and the memories of Fremont we will always treasure. Hope America was born in Fremont at the Gerber Hospital.
While …

This morning I came upon this thoughtful article about young people who are raised in the church, leaving the church during their post-high school years. It’s worth your time.
Somehow I have a feeling that young people are not leaving the church because we didn’t have enough rules. They are not leaving the church because we didn’t try to schedule enough “fun.” That is all much of youth ministry has been for the last 30 years. It’s been the Christian “Party Plan.” Now thousands don’t take the church or the …

A classic from 2003
When we moved to Flint to assume the direction of the ministry here at the Character Inn we discarded or gave away many, many things. We now live in an apartment on the sixth floor in six rooms. We have a storage room in the basement. In preparation for our move we hauled away six truckloads of things at one point and gave many things to Goodwill or just threw them away.
There was one thing I could never throw away because it was too …