My father was a workaholic.  My mother was a perfectionist.  Put them together and you get me.  If I had to remember one key word of my early life it would be the word “excellence.”  It was never enough to be average – not in school, nor in athletics, nor various methods of competition.  I carried this early training into my adulthood, and it was never enough to preach an average sermon or deliver an average lecture or even be an average competitor in trivial things like monopoly or ping pong, or even in – come to think of it – trivial pursuit. Now, in my early eighties, I can’t even be an average retiree.   Friends wonder how I keep the schedule that I keep.  I receive a daily e-mail from an organization that posts quotes to make readers think.  The other day, they posted the following quote from an anonymous author, “Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.” I’ll have to let others decide how well I’ve done on the average to excellence scale.  I’ll just be satisfied by “reaching forward to those things which are ahead, (as) I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14). How about you?  Are you striving to be average or excellent?

Mugs and Prayer

We’ve been selling everything in a rent house in order to eventually sell the house, and as a part of it, we took advantage and added some other stuff in order to downsize.  In my last office move, I no longer had room for my campus mugs. During my collegiate ministry and my North American Mission Board years, I visited many university campuses to either speak to BSU/BSM groups or consult with campus ministry leadership.  I always told them not to worry about an honorarium, but rather just give me a mug from their campus.  Once I joined the Seminary’s faculty, I displayed these mugs around the top of my bookshelves, thus creating not only prayer reminders to pray for specific university ministries but also much discussion starters with students who came in my office and seeing the mugs, began to look for a mug from their alma mater.  Now it was time to get rid of them, so I took a picture and posted it on Facebook with instructions to “Tell me where you went to college, and I’ll tell you if I have your mug.”  The response was overwhelming, but I realized how many more campuses there were as time after time, I had to say “no” to a named university. Out of my 72 mugs, I was able to say “yes” to 18  and actually give away a considerable number of mugs to alumni.  It all reminded me how often we ought to include university ministry in our intercessory prayers.  The university campus is surely one of the largest mission fields in the world and those who minister there need our prayer support.  During a recent Collegiate Day of Prayer, college students from 6,069 campuses representing several nations gathered on their campuses to pray. Why not pick a campus, in addition to your own alma mater, and begin to pray daily for those who minister there as well as pray that students will understand “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7),

Interim is a term describing the space of time between an ending and a beginning.  When used for a church it refers to the time between the departure of one pastor and the arrival of another pastor.  Since Baptist churches do not have Bishops who appoint a successor, the interim time can be long as each church must search and find its own new pastor.  Some churches hire an Interim Pastor.  For my years as a denominational worker followed by many more years as a Seminary Professor, and then the current years of retirement, I have served as an Interim Pastor – in fact, I recently began my thirtieth interim. Some pastors leave for a larger, more challenging church, while others leave for denominational positions of leadership.  Still others, for various reasons, leave the vocational ministry altogether.  And yes, some retire.  The common factor is that this move leaves a church behind, and churches are filled with people who have emotions.  Some church members are sad because of the leaving.  They had respect, admiration, and love, and they are genuinely grieving departure.  Others are glad their pastor left – either glad that the move was to a bigger or better position or glad because there was no love in the first place.  A few are mad – how could the pastor dare to leave. An Interim Pastor is called upon to face these emotions and minister to them.  There is no average time for the duration of an Interim.  My longest was three years.  My shortest was one week.  Some churches simply want an Interim Pastor – preach on Sunday and leave us alone the rest of the week.  Other churches really want a Pastor during the Interim time – staff meetings, committee meetings, on-call 24/7, etc.  My challenge for the week – if your church is pastorless, or you know of one that is – as you pray for the church, pray also for the Interim Pastor.  His task is rewarding but challenging.  As deserving as he is, he is often forgotten when it comes to prayer support. So, “pray without ceasing” (1Thessalonians 5:17).

You suspect God is calling you for some special task or even for a career of ministry. How can you know your call is from the Lord? In the Bible, people such as Samuel (1 Sam 3:4-10) and Isaiah (Isa 6:8) experienced direct, audible calls from God. These instances left no doubt about the divine origin of call. . I know very, very few people who say they have heard an audible voice from God. So how does one know?  Let me suggest that one way is wrapped up in the word “impression.”  As a teen-ager at summer youth camp at Palacios Baptist Encampment, I felt “impressed” that God was calling me.  By definition, an impression is “an idea, feeling, or opinion about something, especially formed without conscious thought.” One unknown writer said, “Sometimes, the most profound messages come not through words, but through impressions on the heart.” God may impress something in your thoughts or in your emotions. J. I. Packer writes, “Direct communications from God take the form of impressions.” The writer of Ecclesiastes, having experienced the wonders of God, wrote, “This too I saw as wisdom under the sun, and it impressed me” (Ecclesiastes 8:13 NASB).  What is God impressing on you today?

The last couple of weeks I have written about movies that I should not have attended.  Let me go a different direction today and mention a favorite movie of mine.  I could go back to my early years and mention a couple of films that few of my readers would remember but let me mention one that everyone who ever played catch with their father remembers – “Field of Dreams.”  I have actually visited the site of the movie twice – once shortly after it was made before it became a tourist attraction and the sign said, “Please do not take any of the infield dirt.”  I’m sorry I fell down while walking the bases and while I was re-tying my shoe, sone of the infield dirt jumped into a small bottle.  The second time the place was a huge tourist attraction.  One of the reasons I love the movie, and the movie site, are the great life-quotes from the script.

• Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases … stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That’s my wish.
• They’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.
• Ease his pain.
• Is this heaven?  No, it’s Iowa.
• Hey, Dad? You Want to Have A Catch?”
• The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past.  It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
• We just don’t recognize life’s most significant moments while they’re happening. Back then I thought, “Well, there’ll be other days.” I didn’t realize that that was the only day.
• Man, I did love this game. I’d have played for food money. It was the game… The sounds, the smells. Did you ever hold a ball or a glove to your face?
• If you build it they will come. Reminds me of Jeremiah 29:13 – “You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.”

My manna of last week, including a confession of attending the movie “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in spite of my Pastor-Farther advising me not to go see it, stirred up a lot of response.  All of which reminded me of another movie I should not have seen, only this one was during my college days, many miles from my father’s advice. The local theater, located only a few blocks from my conservative Baptist university, was showing a midnight movie starring Brigitte Bardot entitled, “And God Created Woman.”  My not-so-conservative friends in the dorm, discussed attending the movie and it was agreed that we should do so since, as one older ministerial student argued, due to the title being based on Genesis 2, it was probably a biblical movie.  We went. It was not a biblical movie.  Due to my previous experience at such events (see last week’s Manna) we were seated in the back row where we could make a rapid departure before being seen.  However, the theater manager must have been a graduate of a rival university because he turned on all the theatre lights the very second the movie ended.  To our amazement, we could have held a meeting of the University’s Ministerial Association since there were more ministerial students in that theater than usually attended our regular monthly meetings. I have forgotten who the other students were who were with me that night, and, referring to last week’s Manna, ‘the older you get the more forgotten endings you have,” I’m sure whoever they were, they have breathed a sigh of relief to get to this part of the Manna without seeing their names. I can hardly wait to see what I remember to write about next week. Stay tuned!

Memory is one of God’s greatest gifts.  The writer of Proverbs says, “The memory of the just is blessed” (Proverbs 10:7). I’m a member of a Facebook group called, “Houston Memories.” Recently a picture of the inside of the Majestic Theater brought back memories of Friday night double dates.  One particular, Friday evening, as I was waiting to be picked up, my Pastor-Father asked which movie we were going to see.  When I admitted that I didn’t know, he replied, “I don’t want you going to that Elizabeth Taylor movie. Now picture four teenagers from the same Baptist church headed to downtown Houston, when the driver asked, if we wanted to go see “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (staring Elizabeth Taylor)?  I lost a three-to-one vote that night. We slipped in and sat in the back row, praying that we wouldn’t get caught.  Just as the movie began, two adult couples from our church came in and sat in the row right in front of us. One of them was the Chairman of the Deacons. I never got to see the last five minutes of that movie since we slipped out a bit early, lest we be seen, reported, and become the first teenagers to be ex-communicated from a Baptist church. I’m sure there was a powerful life-lesson learned that night, but I don’t remember it.  That’s another good thing about memories – the older you get the more forgotten endings you have.  But I am still blessed.

In a recent year, 4500 Protestant churches closed, while only 3,000 opened, making it the first year that the number of churches being added to the country had declined. Some saw this coming.  I remember a Chapel sermon in the 1980s, delivered by a Senior Professor entitled, “Dead Churches and Delayed Funerals.” In addition, at least part of the blame can be placed on Covid, when active church members learned how to stay at home and worship via media, turning it off when a song or a sermon was not to their liking.  I know very few churches who have regained their numbers flowing Covid.  Some are even now on their way to joining the ranks of the “closed churches.” In contrast, the last few Sundays, I have been preaching at the New Hope Baptist Church, a church that has been serving the community of Mansfield, Texas for a century and a half.  It is one of the oldest Baptist churches in Texas, dating all the way back to the 1880’s. While there were better days with bigger crowds, this church refuses to be a part of the number of closed churches. When I was a college student, I would make frequent trips to my home in Nacogdoches, Texas, and occasionally preach at the Old North Baptist Church, located four miles north. It was the first Baptist church established in Texas, founded in 1832. Like New Hope Baptist Church, it refuses to be counted with the deceased. During my Seminary Professor years, I taught a course on Contemporary Evangelism and one of my lectures was entitled, “Why and How Churches Die.”  Students who were amused by that lecture later became pastors and staff members of dying churches. I have suggestions that might keep churches alive and growing, but first and foremost is the often, forgotten ministry of prayer.  Read the Book of Acts, the history of the early church. Every reference to believers praying is followed by a passage on the growth of the early church.  Yet, one of the first gatherings that ceases to exist in a modern-day, declining church is the prayer meeting.  So, I invite you to join me this week in interceding for churches that have stopped praying and started dying.

Steve and I sat in the Bar B-Que Restaurant for three hours.  Everyone else had come and gone, but we were enjoying one of God’s greatest gifts – the gift of memory.  We were reminiscing. Five decades previous, I had gone to The University of Texas as the Director of Baptist Student Ministry.  I had spent the previous nine years serving in the same capacity on two other campuses – campuses where the students were eager to be led and seldom questioned anything I ever said.  But U.T. was different.  Students were different.  Everything taught was challenged, questioned, often dis-allowed.  I had very few friends during my first year there.  It even seemed that I was a poor fit for the job I had been given.  Steve was the student President of our organization, but more than that he was my friend. I’m not sure he believed in everything I said, but he followed, and he led.  And now, fifty years later – after “many dangers, toils and snares” in each of our lives, we sat at the Bar B Que table for three hours. We talked about old times, old friends, old church memberships, old struggles, and of course, baseball. When we finally left, he said he enjoyed “every minute” of our time together.  I enjoyed the fact that he enjoyed every minute. Michael W. Smith sang, “Friends are friends forever if the Lord’s the Lord of them.”  Give thanks today for memories and for friends with whom you can share it. “The memory of the righteous is blessed” (Proverbs 10:7).

In Japan it is a 16th century tradition called “Forgetting the Year” party, in which people gather on New Years Eve and burn their old calendars in a way of moving on to the new year.  An old Irish tradition is to open the front door of your house at midnight, in order to let the old year out and begin the new.  It makes me wonder if we shoot fireworks, not only to make noise but to blow away the old year so the new year can arrive.  I confess I’ve had a few years when I needed to burn more than a calendar, open more than the front door and shoot more firecrackers.  But the best thing about January 1 is that a new year begins.  It is a reminder that God is “the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End (Revelation 1:8).  It is He who was, and is, and is to come. So welcome, 2025.  We’ve been waiting for your arrival. Your promise of freshness and newness is like a clean slate, a chance to begin again.  Here are a few good quotes for the New Year:

• “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.” K. Chesterton
• “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” Mark Twain
• “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” — Bill Vaughn