Village Parson

It was 47 years ago last Tuesday on August 11,1976 that I was called to pastor my first Church. I was seventeen. I had been preaching since I was 14 in rest homes and jails and prayer meetings and such. I preached wherever I could. I even preached at a large Boy Scout Jamboree once in the Greenville City Park. That summer and in the summer of 1977 I worked through the week at the Union City Body Company building GM delivery trucks.

My first church was a small church in the countryside. Before I left for Moody in late August of 1977 we had a baptism service. I baptized my little brother Nathan and almost all the young people in the church. I think there were over a dozen baptized that day. The little white church was near the Ohio-Indiana border in beautiful Ohio farm country. It was named Pleasant Ridge.

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There was a little rise in the road east of the church. Embedded in my memory is the sight of that old church—light shining out from large stained class windows as I drove down the little knoll toward the church.

I tried to study and stay ahead of the people I pastored. I studied when I could. During the school year I would rush home every Wednesday afternoon and sit at a little typewriter stand at the foot of my bed and write my message for Wednesday night. On Saturday I got up early and wrote my messages for Sunday morning and Sunday night. I leaned heavily on people my dad told me were good to read so I wouldn’t tell the people at Pleasant Ridge anything wrong.

For the first summer my job at the UCBC was to get truck chassis from the lot and drive them into the factory to the assembly line. I would go the truck and wait until they were ready for it. Much of my job was waiting. That gave me time to read in the cab of the truck. That summer one of the books I read was by John R. Rice. The book was called Prayer: Asking and Receiving. It was rich with scripture, simple, clear, strait-forward and helpful. I was growing my own faith and my own walk with God and discovering the God loves to hear and answer prayer.

I loved to read about God answering the prayers of others, but the question in the back of my mind was, will God hear and answer my prayers. I was conscious of my own sinfulness and weakness.

Years have passed but the memory returned to me this week because I was preaching on prayer. I’ve lived long enough to have a journal full of personal evidence that God does indeed answer prayer, even for those who don’t deserve it.

Bittersweet Farm | August 13, 2023

Mrs. Anderson was feeble and afraid to meet new people but she made herself get dressed and she drove out to our little church in Ohio years ago. People were kind to her. She felt at home. Later she was saved and baptized. Her daughter and son-in-law and grandson were eventually saved and baptized. She grew to love our church and never missed a service. She had her own little place just inside the back door. She came to every service morning and evening. She grew ill and had to be treated for cancer. We loved her and we prayed for her. When she went to be with the Lord her funeral tent was filled with her friends from the church. She told me she was afraid the first time she visited, but because she received a warm welcome in our little church she is with the Lord today, her family knows the Lord today. I’m so glad someone greeted her warmly that first time she visited our church.

Is Your Church A Welcoming Church?

I have an important question for you. Is your church a friendly church? Careful. Think a little before you answer. In most churches people are friendly with their friends, they are friendly with people they know, but is that the measure of a friendly church?

If a new person came to your church, let’s say a person who was struggling with alcohol abuse or drug addiction, or depression and anxiety, or a difficult marriage, or shame and guilt, or troubled kids, if a person came to Bethel with any of these problems it is unlikely you could tell just by looking at them. I wonder, would they find a friendly welcome or would they see people talking with other people they already know?

Follow Jesus. Help Others Follow Jesus.

Here at Bethel we have a saying; “Follow Jesus and Help Others Follow Jesus.” We are “Jesus People.” We are Christ-followers. But Jesus said something I think we need to think about. It was in his famous Sermon on the Mount:

Jesus spoke to the heart of this: “If you love those who love you what reward o you have. Do not even tax collectors do teh same. And if you free only your brothers what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?” (Matthew 5:46-47)

A Few Other Important Questions:

Why do you go to church? Do you go to get a blessing, or do you go to get and blessing and be a blessing to others? Do you go to church praying for an opportunity to serve and help others, or are you tempted to just go for what you get out of it? Do you go because you want things for your family? Jesus said he came, not to be served but to serve and to give. If we are following Him we should do the same.

A Friendly Suggestion About Friendliness.

I have a simple suggestion. Here are a couple things you can to help strengthen the culture of Bethel church in the area of warmth and friendliness.

Pray before you leave home for God to give you an opportunity to show warmth to someone you don’t already know. Agree as a family that you want to be a blessing to others every time you attend a service. Set a personal goal to pick out at least one new person a week and learn their name. Sometimes I will walk up to someone I don’t know and will say, “Hey, I’m Ken. I’m sorry but I don’t know your name….” Try this. Ask them a question or two to show kindness and warmth. You might even want to invite them to join you at Culvers or One North.

Let’s be a truly welcoming, truly friendly, loving church. Let’s go out of our way to make new-comers right at home. You never know what people are going through and how important it is to welcome them. Let’s keep working on keeping a culture of warmth and genuine love at Bethel.

It doesn’t take much. You don’t have to meet everybody, but if a number of us would meet at least a few every week, it would go a long way to making Bethel even friendlier and more welcoming than we already are. Who knows what would happen. I’m sure there would be wonderful stories to tell. …and there are many “Mrs. Andersons” out there.

How Many Acres Are You Farmin’ ?

I’m a pastor and a preacher but sometimes I like to call myself “The Village Parson” and sometimes I like to call myself “The Keeper of the Story.” If you have a few minutes I’d like you to make a cup of tea and pull up the chair by the fire and have a visit. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about. I think it will help you understand why I like to call myself the Keeper of the Story.

In the last number of years I have noticed a besetting sin that I struggle with. I have had this struggle as long as I can remember. It’s only been in the last few years that I have really began to see it and realize the damage it has done to my soul and to my ministry. I’ve also begun to notice how it has hurt so many others.

How do you evaluate a church? I’ve struggled all my life with the temptation to measure a church by its attendance. As a boy my dad was a pastor and I wanted his churches to grow. I started pastoring my own church when I was still in high school and I have spent countless hours thinking about what makes churches grow.

When I was young my dad was a bi-vocational pastor. He was a school teacher and pastor. He made his living as a teacher but his passion and his heart were devoted to building a church. He pastored small churches. Most of them drew fewer than 100 a Sunday. One church dad pastored for a few years while I was in high school ran a little over 100. After I was gone from home dad pastored a church that had as many as 200-300 in attendance but it did not last long. There was division in the  church even before his came and in his first year they pushed him out.

I grew up during the heart of the church growth movement and Dad was trained in a Baptist group called the GARBC. He regularly read independent Baptists, especially The Sword of the Lord and it publications, which featured articles and books flatly stating that if you did not win at least 200 people to Christ a year and baptize them you were not working hard enough.

Dad just never felt like he measured up to that standard. The little churches he took and tried to help were often small for very good reasons and the people in them did not intend to change the things that kept them small.

Not all big churches are good and not all small churches are bad. Attendance is only one measure of a church, and perhaps not at all the best measure of a church. I want to suggest that a church can be large well-attended or it can be small and it can still be a good church. Over the years I have poured my heart into this and I want to suggest a better way to measure a church, a better way to evaluate the health and vitality of a church.

The measure all my life has been budgets, bodies it the pews, buildings, in some circles the number of busses.

How Many Acres Are Ya’ Farming?

I have a friend who introduced me to the Farm Science Review central Ohio. We left our country early in the morning and left time for breakfast. When we arrived at the fairgrounds it was  a sea of hybrid seed-corn hats and John Deere hats and International Harvester hats. There were farmers as far as the eye can see. We had to park and ride a shuttle in. There were hundred of vendors each of them trying to sell things to the farmers. I noticed that the vendors had a question that they  would eventually work their way to asking in every conversation. The question was “So, how many acres are you farming?”

My friend loved farming but at the time he was working for a utility company. He was a fine, honest, talented, hard-working man, but he did not have a lot of cash on hand and a the time he didn’t farm any acres. When the men would ask him how many acres he farmed and he told them. “None,” they would quickly abandon their conversation with him and start looking over his shoulder for the next customer.

When I saw that happen a few times my heart was sick and I remembered the feeling of watching my dad with his fellow pastors at pastor conferences and hearing them ask the pastor equivalent of the very same question; “So how many you runnin’ on Sunday morning these days?” It was never an impressive number. It was always little embarrassing. “Oh, we are just a small church,” Dad would say smiling warmly. But standing in the circle of men around my Dad my heart would ache. I did not know a finer man or a more hard-working sincere pastor then my Dad. My little soul often asked the questions, “What makes a church grow? Why do my Dad’s churches not grow more. He is so faithful? I often thought that many of the problems we had in our churches would get better if Dad could just gather more people. It didn’t at the time so much occur to me that the problems endemic to the churches were the main reason we didn’t add more people.

Ecclesiastical Peacock Shows

Dad came home from a pastor’s meeting one day when I was a teen (which he attended in order to be encouraged) and he related a painful incident where an old college acquaintance had leaned back in his chair and shouted across the hall to my dad, “So, Kenny, what little berg are you pastoring in these days?”

Dad laughed but I know he felt he sting of it for years. The man who insulted him was disqualified for ministry because of immorality a few years after that. When I discovered it and eagerly reported it to my dad he immediately fell to his knees and began to weep and pray for the man, his family and his church.  That was over 40 years ago and dad has faithfully tended his little flocks in the wilderness all those years, preparing messages, cleaning and repairing the church, raising money, making hospital calls, counseling, witnessing, passing out tracts, loving people, walking the roads of his perish and praying for people he passes their homes.

Dad once told me, “I don’t know, Ken, some of those meetings a like peacock shows sometimes.”

There Has to Be a Better Way

I think there is another way to measure the success of your ministry. I would like to set aside the old metrics of measure that we have used so long and suggest another way. Instead of size, what if we were to measure a church by its stories? Stories of people who are following Jesus afresh. Stories of reunited families. Stories of people gettin off drugs or starting family devotions. What if we measured a church by its stories of God’s grace, restored homes, deeds done in love, sacrifices made, people who listened to others when the hurt, elderly people visited.

A tree can reach maturity and it will stop growing but it can still bring forth fruit and display full flower and foliage. Some churches are in small places. Some are served with people of modest gifts. Some churches pastors are gifted a tend a little flock in the wilderness. Some are gifted to preach to large crowds and lead complex organizations and build impressive building or cathedrals. Some are gifted by God to gently shepherd a few in a wayside chapel.

Do you have fresh stories of God’s people doing what God asked of them? Do you have stories of young people serving God? Can your church tell a story of a faithful pastor, Sunday School teacher, deacon, elder or Awana leader? Can you tell stories of people you have prayed for and loved and engaged in Gospel conversation? Can you tell stories of children and youth going to camp? Can you tell stories of children who grew up in the church and still walk with the Lord? Are there stories you can tell of people who humbly joined their voices with the others in the church choir for decades without demanding a solo? Are there elderly ladies that have given themselves to visitation for years and received no money and little praise for it. Are their srories of faithful givers and men who have use their own hands and gifts and tools to repair things around the church quietly for years—men who would be embarrassed to be mentioned publicly?

A church with testimonies of God’s faithfulness is a good healthy church regardless of their size or budget or the speaking or leadership gifts of their pastor.

When someone whispers in your ear “How many acres are you farmin,’” here is now to answer; “Let me tell you a story. Last fall  some of us were out raking the leaves from the churchyard and we noticed the elderly lady across the street had gotten behind on her leaves. A coupe of the men and their sons walked over their and just started raking her yard. It was a beautiful October afternoon. In thirty minutes they had raked and gathers all her leaves. One of the men loaded the into a pickup truck. As they loaded the last of the leaves the door opened and the old woman stepped out onto the porch and tearfully thanks them.

“My son has diabetes. This year they tool off is leg and he can’t help me with the leaves anymore. I didn’t know what I was going to do. How much do I owe you?”

“We won’t take any money. We just wanted to be good neighbors.” They found our where her son lives and went over to rake his leaves too. At Christmas time she made her way over with a tea ring on for the pastor and his family and said, “Thanks for being such good neighbors. What time is the Candlelight Service my son and I are going to come this year.”

I don’t know what the total attendance was really but we love to tell that story. When we were singing Silent Night I noticed that the boys who raked her leaves had tears on their faces.

In a couple weeks my dad will retire after 60 years of ministry. He just does not have the strength to do what needs to be done anymore. Dad pastored his last church for about 11 years. 9? One fall afternoon were in the back yard of his parsonage and we were taking some pictures in the leaves over against the picket fence that once stood there. I asked about the neighbors. Dad said; “They go the our church.”  He went on to tell that they were far from God when God led mom and dad to pastor the little church. Mom befriended her. Dad called on him in the hospital. There are a sweet German couple. Now both of them a saved and baptized and attend the church. The super-star pastors of the big churches in far away places don’t now them but Dad and Mom will move away in a couple weeks, but they will tell the story until they die of the sweet German couple who live next door to the church and will spend eternity with the Lord.

I say let’s stop making numbers the main measure of the church and let’s use stories to measure its faithfulness, not the way of the high-powered city businessman, but the simple way of the Village Parson.