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“The coffee mug you made for your late mother? I thought it was a miniature chamber pot!”

The Crack(ed) Pot!

The following sort of misadventure occurs in the life of every minister. I’ll let my friend Rev. Dean tell his story:

I had just become pastor of Gethsemane Baptist Church and was going through the cupboard in the church kitchen one Sunday after the worship service, looking for a coffee cup. I wanted something distinctive that I could use every week. Among the collection of mismatched, faded, and dusty cups, glasses, saucers, vases, dessert plates, jelly bottles, et al. was one particularly ugly, misshapen, cracked coffee mug with a broken handle. I turned to the ladies in the kitchen and asked them if there was any reason for keeping this particular cup. No one offered a response so I threw it in the trash.

A week later, Hector Quigley, a retired magazine publisher, who had been a member of the church since the time of the apostles but who only attended about twice a century, was at the worship service and found his way into the kitchen for the post-service coffee hour. Our treasurer had informed me that although Mr. Quigley almost never attended, his checks came regularly. He was, in fact, our most generous donor, contributing nearly a fifth of our entire budget.

I watched as he fidgeted through the kitchen cupboard. Red in the face, he turned to me and demanded, “Where is that green coffee mug?”

“You mean the cracked mug with the broken handle? The one that would fall over if you set it on its bottom?”

“Yes, the green coffee mug!” he replied. “That was the one I made for my mother at church camp. She loved that mug. As a matter of fact, she drank her last cup of tea from that mug just before she died.”

The folks in the kitchen and I shrugged our shoulders and maintained a discrete silence.

Cute Kids!

Austin Markle, the Sunday School teacher, asked his class: “What are sins of omission?”  After some thought one little fellow said: “They’re the sins we should have committed but didn’t get around to.”

Sylvia Carboni was telling the story of Moses to a class of wild-eyed five-year-olds at Grace Community Tabernacle.

“And who do you suppose,” she asked dramatically, “did the beautiful Egyptian princess get to take care of the little boy she had found in the bulrushes?”

Without hesitation, one little girl answered, “A baby-sitter!”

Over at Fortitude Holiness Tabernacle, Dexter Rice, the Sunday School teacher, was telling her class the story of the Prodigal Son.  Wishing to emphasize the resentful attitude of the elder brother, he laid stress on this phase of the parable. 

After describing the rejoicing of the household over the return of the wayward son, Dexter spoke of one who, in the midst of the festivities, failed to share in the jubilant spirit of the occa­sion. “Can anybody in the class,” he asked, “tell me who this was?”

Olivia Crombie, a nine-year-old girl, who had been listening sympathetically to the story, waved her hand in the air.   “I know,” she said beamingly.  “It was the fatted calf.”

Pastor Denning was talking to the eight-year-olds’ Sunday School class about things money can’t buy.  “It can’t buy laughter,” he told them.  “That comes from the soul.  And it can’t buy love.”  Driving this point home, he said, “What would you do if I offered you $1,000 not to love your mother and fa­ther?” 

A few moments of silence ensued while the boys and girls mulled this over and then a small voice demanded: “How much would you give me not to love my big sister?” 

Ruth Troutman, the Sunday school teacher, was very keen on religious ceremonies and had spent an entire session talking to the class about the correct way to pray.

“Now,” she said finally, “suppose we want to pray to God for forgiveness. What must we do first of all?”

“Sin?” suggested one little boy.

Stories sought! Do you have favorite anecdotes about the pleasures or perils of the Christian ministry? If so, send them to Rev. Lowell and he will include them on this website and in a possible future book. Please indicate if you want your contributions to be signed or anonymous. 

“I thought I’d try my hand at ditch digging. Being pastor of this church is driving me crazy!”

In Deep Trouble

I was called as pastor by unanimous vote of the congregation. Within six months, I was in deep trouble. The opposition to me was personal, vocal, and persistent. I did the job for which I was called. I fulfilled my duties as set forth in my contract and job description. I preached, conducted serv­ices, taught adult classes, attended committee meetings, showed the flag in denominational and ecumenical gatherings, counseled the perpled, visited the sick, consoled the dying, and, generally, comforted the afflicted.

I also, without intending to do so, afflicted the comfortable. Despite my best efforts, my prayers, my skills as a counselor and mediator of conflict, I ran into a brick wall of opposition. Their chief complaints, sometimes voiced directly to me but usual communicated by others through the usual small church grapevine, went something like this:

1. We don’t like you.

2. You’re not like Pastor Bill (the previous minister who by then was in a mental institution).

3. You’re not warm and caring,

4. You’re spending us into bankruptcy.

5. We’ve never done it your way.

6. We’ve always done it our way.

7. You’re too original, too emotional, too histrionic, a show off.

8. You’re boring.

9. You don’t get along with (fill in the blank with the name of a secretary, an old time member who hadn’t attended in ten to twenty years, the spouse of a current member, etc.)

Now these indictments are not like charges of misfeasance, malfeasance, or nonfeasance in office. No one ever said that I was sleeping with the church secretary or had stolen money from the poor box or was a fall down drunk. If my opponents had made such accusations against me, I could have defended myself.

But how do you defend yourself against the charge of not being likable? How does one quantify his units of warmth and caring? Was I the minister or a contestant on the Dating Game?

“I don’t like to commit myself too much!”

Getting the Point

 I spent a day with Pastor Bill, my predecessor at the Little Brown Church shortly after my arrival on the job. Bill had been released from the mental hospital and wanted to talk. Some of his close friends had asked me if I might try to minister to him. I felt awkward about meeting him, rather like a marriage counselor who is asked to advise his wife’s former husband.

Bill is a hale fellow well met. He maintains a surface chatter of optimistic remarks and well-turned phrases. But he is a very angry, frustrated, and disappointed man. He told me that he had maintained his job for twenty years by biting his tongue, keeping his opinions to himself, avoiding controversy, and, above all, never asking for anything for himself or his family.

We discussed his preaching. He told me that in his early years he had been “a biblical preacher, a preacher of the Gospel.” “But after about eight years,” he added, “I came to see that I wasn’t reaching anyone. So I adopted a different style.”

I was quite familiar with what he meant. After hearing from numerous folk of how they missed Bill’s wonderful sermons and feeling rather defensive, I had viewed several videotapes made over the last four years of his ministry. Frankly, I was appalled! His sermons had no titles, no opening leads, no structures, no summaries or conclusions. They were strings of illus­trations, many of them taken from old familiar collections, others clipped from a variety of sources as diverse as Field and Stream andForbes magazine.

The regulating principle behind the selection of the material was a single overarching theme. The favorite and often repeated illustration was the life of Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln failed at business, at romance, at politics until he was, despite the odds, elected to the presidency. And by the grace of God, you, the person sitting in the pew, can do whatever you are capable of doing.

Like all of us in the ministry, Bill was preaching to Bill and about Bill. To me, Bill was clearly a deeply depressed man reaching desperately for the light.

Bill explained his “different style” in detail. He felt that if he told enough stories in a single sermon, one of them was likely to be remembered and to be of positive influence in the lives of the hearers or, at the very least, in the life of one hearer. This kept him going. But to me this is editing not preaching. However, within three years, after having tried every style of sermon I could construct, I found that I too was capable of little more than telling personal stories—I called them my “parables”—and hoping that someone would get the point.

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