13- This and That

XIII. This and That

NOBODY SEEMS TO KNOW JUST WHAT PAUL’S THORN in the flesh was. I have heard it suggested that probably it was his board of deacons. Many a pastor is critical of his officers, feeling that too often they are a liability in the work of the church rather than an asset. It is not difficult to draw up an indictment against any board of officers they lack responsibility; they are dictatorial or stubborn; they like the prestige of the office but not the obligations it involves; they spend the money but make the preacher raise it; they are afraid of change; they want a soothing-syrup gospel; their conception of their task is to be a brake upon the minister; they will make a venture in business but never in the church. Any minister could extend the list. The officers’ list of the preacher’s failings, however, might be longer and even more blighting. When we have something like this growling around inside of us, it will be wholesome to ask ourselves if we are really thinking about a more efficient church organization, or easing up on our own failings by putting our finger on those of others. We never get anywhere in any situation unless we are willing to be cleareyed about it.

Suppose we do have a difficult officer situation.

We are a part of it, and the only thing we can, do about it is on our side of it. We can be better ministers than they are officers jthat will help. We can remember that we helped to choose some of those officers, and then never spent a moment in guiding them or instructing them in their duties. We can be patient; we can stop trying to force things; we can pray about it and not as the! Pharisee either, but as the publican.

We can study the strong points of our men and use them where a task will engage their strength instead of accentuating their weakness. We can tell ourselves that if everything were perfect our job would pall. And when we get together in official meetings, we can have sense enough to withhold all formal motions until frank and brotherly discussion has led to an agreement before a vote is taken. If anyone has to be voted down, let the matter go until a later time. It may be brought up again, or the question may resolve itself just because together we looked at both sides of it.

I always receive the most help whenever I look back over a period of three or four or five years at the things over which I worried and stewed, about which I was critical of others, and about which I finally had sense enough to pray and leave to the Lord, and find that they have worked out in a way beyond all expectations.

We sing a hymn sometimes which says, God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.

Whether they are always mysterious ways or not, they are many times performed in little events and through casual things. It would he good to remember that when we so often agonize over some effort, and pray, and plan, and labor to bring something to pass. We need not pray, or plan, or work less, but it is helpful to note how often, when a result is accomplished, it was some little unstudied, casual thing that G-od used to bring it about. It is to be supposed that God, knowing us as he does, would be wise enough to use us often when we are not aware of it, as one way of keeping us humble. The following is out of the experience of one of the most eloquent preachers I ever knew. A young man began to attend services in his church.

He was a newcomer to the city, and Sunday was lonely; a church service helped. He was greatly attracted by the eloquence of the preacher and he finally became a regular attendant. The minister noted him there each week, but did not know who he was. Then one Sunday he was absent. It chanced that the next day, walking along a crowded downtown street, the minister met this young man. Still not knowing his name, the minister just put his hand upon his shoulder in passing and said, “I missed you last Sunday.” Some weeks later this young man came before the Session to unite with the church upon confession of his faith and to be baptized. The minister was surprised as he had had no personal interview with him about it. So he asked the young man how he came to take this step. And he said, “When I came to church at first it was because I was lonely and I enjoyed hearing you preach. It meant nothing personal to me until one day you touched me on the street and said that you missed me. And I began to think that, if in all that crowded church you noticed me, there must be something personal about this for me. I found there was, and here I am.” A mother came to me to tell me something her boy of twelve had said. He had recently joined the church and had been attending quite regularly with his mother. He was ill and in bed with a cold, and he had evidently been thinking about what his mother was doing for him, and how she sometimes asked him to do things that he wasn’t always keen on doing, such as going to church, for he said, after patting the bed for his mother to sit down beside him, “You know, Mother, when I go to church I don’t always get much out of Dr. Pleune’s sermon, and sometimes I just daydream; but after the sermon, at the door, when he looks at me and says, ’Hi, Bob,’ boy, that means a lot to me, and I am always glad I was there.” I spend days on a sermon, and then “Hi, Bob,” means more than anything else. A studied effort may do little, a casual contact be fruitful. That is the way God often works. This carries no suggestion for us to labor less diligently, but it does suggest the value of the slightest word, and the power of the smallest deed and this too, that we can turn men from God through casual ways and words as well as turn them to him. The Book of our religion says, “In lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” That is a counsel of humility. It is also a counsel for improvement. We can always learn from others as long as we recognize those things in which they are above us. But it is no counsel to fail to be ourselves. It suggests no false humility or belittling of ourselves. God has a use for us with what we have and what we are. Even being God, he cannot very well use us with the personality and the faculties of somebody else.

We can serve him only with our own. And comparing ourselves always unfavorably with others only lessens our worth in God’s hands.

I do not mean to imply that I have learned that truth or any other, but it was brought home to me in the very first pastoral and preaching work I ever did, and by a man whose discernment in this matter was hardly to be expected. It was after one year of my seminary 1 course that I was asked to take full charge of a church in New York City during the summer. I had three sermons.

They were used up after the first Sunday and the first Wednesday. And I was scared to death because the pastor whose work I was doing was an especially brilliant man. I recall how I worked under the handicap of the thought of how the congregation must be comparing my poor efforts with his outstanding work. I made many friends, some of them in relationships that endured for many years, but one man was especially kind.

He took me about New York and eased my loneliness. He was not particularly a spiritually minded man, but he gave me one of the most spiritually helpful hints I have ever received. One day he said to me, “I believe that you are doing yourself a disservice by thinking about our minister. Be yourself. That is the way we are^ thinking of you.

You are our pastor now, and we are looking to you. Just forget about everything else.” So I tried to be wholly myself; and it worked, not only to a far greater inner peace of mind for me, but to an effectiveness in the work which was not possible before. We must not be content with our gifts as they are, but seek to cultivate them. We do have our own abilities such as they are. Any comparison with those of others should challenge us to use ours to the full.

Whatever theological theories are developed out of the death of Jesus Christ, he was crucified because he would not conform. The founder of our faith was the first great questioner of things as everybody else believed them. When I remember that, I have most respect for the young man who asks questions about “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. ’ ’ God can have little use for an old man who is only twenty-five years of age. If a young minister is not asking questions, he is not thinking. And if he is not thinking then, when is he going to begin? It is natural for a young man to feel that perhaps the past is too slow and inadequate for the present. It is unnatural for him to sign up unequivocally as a rock-ribbed conservative. Life will take care of things, soften and deepen his convictions, and he will know what and why he believes if he gives himself faithfully to a pastoral ministry for sinful, lost, suffering, sorrowing men. Let him not be disturbed if he does not know all the answers in the beginning. The place to learn them is in his work as the answers come in the needs of human lives.

Dr. William Barton, for many years an outstanding Congregational minister, once said to a group of candidates for ordination, By what this Council is about to do to you, it is vastly increasing your power for harm. Yesterday as laymen, you might have committed any possible sin and been sent to jail for it and not much attention would have been paid to you. But tomorrow any one of you can get your name on the front page of every newspaper in the United States. Not many of you have the ability, perhaps, to achieve high distinction or to bring to the Church great honor, but the least conspicuous of you for ability can bring the whole Church to shame.

It is proverbial that people talk about the minister at the Sunday dinner table. They are critical of his sermons, Ms grammar, his clothes and the color of his necktie, the cut of his hair, his mannerisms, his social errors, the length of his prayers and the things he prays for, of what he does in the pulpit and what he fails to do outside of the pulpit.

Some of this criticism is silly, and most of it is not. The minister needs a critic. Somebody ought to tell him these things. But nobody does. They tell each other, but not him. So every man is out of luck who does not have a critic in his wife. That is an awful thing to wish on a minister’s wife, who has problems enough of her own. She loves her husband, but she does not love him enough until she is willing to be critical of him in his work* The minister’s own standard must be high enough to assure constant self-criticism. He will, however, do many things that may be little in themselves, but they will be large in their nuisance value in the minds of his people. He does not know that he does certain things, and he will hardly credit their truth unless his wife tells him about them. We can do some of the dumbest things and suddenly develop some of the queerest mannerisms even after years of service. I know it is hard for my wife to tell me of some things that I do, and I don’t like it either, and sometimes I show my sensitiveness too. But she has never given up trying, and I thank God for that. We naturally do not pick out our wives for their critical ability, nor do they choose us for our imperfections as ministers.

Every minister’s wife should soon learn that she can help her husband most by being his best ministerial critic. The worst thing she can do for him is to fold her hands and ecstatically look up at him, thinking that everything he does and says is perfection. Does any wife, knowing us, really think that?

It is sometimes supposed that sexual temptations must be a special difficulty for the minister because in his work he meets so many women. That is, for one thing, a slander against the womanhood of the church. I do not know what the percentage of impurity in ministers is as compared to other professions. Any lapse here is naturally headline material. I do know from conversations with many men that, as far as they are concerned, they never found this to be a problem at all. I am convinced that if a minister is cleanminded himself it is his best protection against impure suggestion from without. Impurity detects impurity. It is there first in the minister himself if ever the evil thing lifts its hand to beckon him on. The Bible says, “Unto the pure all things are pure. ’ ’ That is not true because it is in the Bible; it is there because it is irrevocably true. If ever a minister meets with deliberate sexual temptation in the course of his ministerial duties, it is to be hoped that he will not only be strong enough to resist it, but will then go to the altar of his Lord and get down on his knees to ask God to help him with the weakness in him that made that temptation possible. “We ought as Christian ministers to be far enough removed from Adam not to repeat his accusation that the woman tempted him. A pastor has a man’s job. Not everybody seems to think so. And it is not often that in fiction, or drama, or movies, he is so portrayed. Sometimes this gets under our skin. A Methodist bishop speaking out about this was answered by a newspaper editorial in the Courier- Journal. It was entitled, “Ministers Are Easy Targets.”

Ministers, “parsons,” clergymen, are made game of in the movies. To depict and deride them as though the old taunt that society is divided into men, women and ministers held the truth of the matter is easy and popular. But it’s slander. The churchman militant is not a museum piece. The “sissy” is. It isn’t necessary to tell of the grit, pluck and endurance of missionaries all the world over. It isn’t helpful to instance such towering, thundering prelates as Phillips Brooks. It is sufficient to take the men in charge of our city churches, to know their industry and discretion, to realize with what consecration they visit the sick in spirit, the mentally wrecked, the tempted and the tempters. Day by day they touch and struggle with the misery and injustice of modern life, of civilization, Christian civilization socalled; such, labors may well be summed up in one word, “manly.” But fiction’s mission is to amuse. A caricature does better than a picture of the truth. We show the story of Nurse Cavell and draw tears; we do not show the chaplains on the firing lines and in the hospitals. It is so easy to believe in a hypocrite. “We are, most of us, not altogether candid and without guile ourselves. And, then, to place a preacher in an embarrassing, a compromising position, what could better raise a laugh, and a snigger? The Bishop has a grievance. If he be wise he will forget il. His cloth needs no vindication. 1

I wonder if Elbert Hubbard had ministers in mind when lie wrote: “A great deal of good can be done in the world if one is not too careful about who gets the credit.”

1 Used by permission.