Transcript
I want to hear what Reverend Palmer has to say and people are going to slowly come in
and join us and we'll let them do that.
I'd like to welcome you here today and if you would please bow with me for word of prayer.
Heavenly Father, thank you for this day and for this time.
God, we pray that this time it's seminary, it's so special and that we can learn in the
many ways that you have to teach us about your church and your ministry.
Thank you to us today, O Lord, and let us hear your word and your name we pray, amen.
We'd like to announce some of the upcoming TSF events.
This Friday at seven o'clock, we'll have Friday night fellowship here in the main lounge.
This past weekend, we took 50 people to a Caedmon's Call Concert down in Philadelphia,
had a blast.
So FNF's really picking up, we'll hope to see you this Friday night.
Also like to announce for new time forums in November, December, we're going to do several
sessions on contemporary worship and what it is, what it looks like versus traditional
worship.
Sometimes in the conflicts it can occur, we're going to have some of the leaders in the contemporary
church movement come and speak to us and it should be really interesting.
I hope you all can come out for that.
We'll have those dates available later on in the month.
Also if you were here for Dr. George Hunsinger's session on the Catechism, we told you that
we were hoping to get some of the new Catechism's for you to have.
So those finally came in yesterday, wasn't it, Friday, the day after the event, but they're
here.
So those are by the door over there, you're more than welcome to pick those up.
Take an extra one if you'd like for a friend that you might know that would like to look
at that.
Also there is a journal of articles that talk about the ordination vows.
In fact, Reverend Palmer has written one of those articles and it's very poignant and
has some good interesting views on that.
We encourage you to pick one of those up as well.
But today we are happy to have with us the Reverend Earl Palmer from University Presbyterian
Church.
He's from the class of 1956 here at Princeton Seminary.
He is a Princeton Seminary trustee.
He was the 1999 distinguished alumnus and we are proud of him for that and also his
most proud achievement is that he is a new grandfather.
He's a grandfather of three, but just last Monday, a new baby boy joined the Palmer family.
So please join me in welcoming Reverend Palmer.
Thanks a lot, especially for that.
It's great to be back with TSF and to have a chance to share with you.
Tim Hartman actually interviewed me this summer and asked what perhaps I could speak
on.
And he asked if I would speak on the pastorate itself, which I've been sort of given my
whole career to, and try to make the case for being a pastor because maybe some of you
are wondering, of course some are filling out PIS, I know, and that sort of thing.
But whether you're wondering whether you want to be a pastor and that's what you wanted
to be, or a theologian in some other mandate or some other calling.
So I'm going to try to make the case for being a pastorate, I can't.
Now I realize that a Christian disciple can be a Christian disciple anywhere, and in fact
we have an internship program in our church, and we don't imply, and we, nor do we even
want to imply to those interns who are interns, that it's a preparation for becoming a minister
of Word and Sacrament.
We want them to have an internship experience to help them focus what it means to be a
Christian disciple of Jesus Christ in the world, and then several of those from our internship
program go on to law or to business or to other professions.
And we really feel that's neat because then they've had a focusing experience in the
internship, and one of the things they focused on was, you know, this is, I want to always
be active in Christian work, but I don't want to be a pastor of Word and Sacrament.
I want to go into some other area.
So I want to let you know that right at the outset, because I'm going to make a strong
case for being a pastor since I'm kind of pro-pastor here at this point.
But I do want to say I know that I have a kind of a low doctrine of call.
I think my doctrine of call is that every Christian's commission to be a disciple of Christ
and has the mandate, but it's kind of doing most of what you do best, and that's confirmed
by the church.
It was confirmed by the church that you've got the gift of teaching or preaching and
pastoring.
And that confirmation is the call to ministry in the church professionally, but every Christian
has the call to serve Jesus Christ and serve him wherever you, your gifts can be used.
And so that I wanted to be clear on at the outset.
But I'm frankly very pro-parish, and I've been a pastor of my entire career.
I left Princeton in 1956, went to Seattle, I'll give you my history, went to Seattle, and
was youth pastor for eight years, where Jeff Town, who graduated here this last spring,
is now our pastor of youth ministry in mission.
In my day, when I was there, I was pastor of the high school and college together and met
my wife, and then we had our first little daughter there, and then after eight years bolted
and went to Manila, where I was pastor of a union church, expatriate church, that was
just an incredible experience too.
And we were there six years, had two more kids there, that's our whole family then.
And then came, after six years in Manila, in 1970, to Berk, California, where I was for
21 years.
So I've been a pastor a long time.
And I had 21 incredible years at Berkley, California right next to the University of California.
So I kind of have done two full circles in my life.
I went for a full circle back to Berkeley, where I became a Christian in that very church,
and at Cal as a student, and now came back to be a pastor of that church.
And then almost nine years ago, the church where I was a youth pastor called me back to
Seattle to be senior pastor there.
So now I'm on my ninth year in Seattle, so that's my career.
So you can see I'm kind of pro parish, because I've spent my entire time in the parish.
Now what do I like about being a pastor?
I'm going to just share four things, that there are so many things that could be shared.
But I'm going to share four.
I'm sure that some of them may be occurred to you, maybe some of these haven't occurred
to you.
And then I have a second list of four things to share.
So here's what I like about being a pastor.
First of all, it's four gifts that I get being a pastor.
And the first gift of being a pastor in a local church is the gift of people.
Now you can get that in any place you are.
But the continuity of the gift of people, of being with a group of people a year in and
year out, that's why I always say to people, when you go to a church and you start a ministry,
don't ever start a ministry and say, well, this is sort of my entry into ministry and I'll
be here for a little while and then I'll go somewhere else.
Especially if you're in youth ministry, don't ever think that way.
After all, pediatricians don't think I'll start in pediatrics and move on to geriatrics.
No, pediatrics is a call and it is a mandate.
And when I started youth ministry at Seattle, I thought I'd be in youth ministry the rest
of my life.
And in fact, I have been in youth ministry the rest of my life.
I have never stopped being a youth minister.
It's my favorite part of the ministry.
But go to a place and relate to it as if you're going to be the rest of your life.
And I can honestly tell you I've done that in each post I've had.
And then I've been called away to the next stage of my life.
But I went to Seattle and thought, you know, this is where I'm going to be.
And I just zeroed in.
And then I went to Manila.
And I found out in Manila, since they were mostly expatriates I worked with, that almost
everybody there was thinking, you know, I'm only going to hear it a little while to advance
my career.
And then I'll be gone.
And I didn't view it that way.
I viewed, hey, I'm here in Manila.
I love Manila.
I always, I've always felt that where I am is the most important city in the whole world.
And I believe in that.
So I went to Manila.
I said, it was during the Vietnam War.
It was a very turbulent time to be in East Asia.
And I said, this is where I'm supposed to be.
I'm going to be here the rest of my life.
And I zeroed it.
And I taught that to the people.
I even preached a sermon on that that was published locally because I called it, I
was an ignorant age to say, put your roots down wherever you are.
As if you were going to be there the rest of your life.
And then if you do move, hey, that's fine.
But you've made friends and you've got a root system down and you really care.
And it makes a tremendous difference in the way people relate to you and the way you
relate to people.
And then I went to Berkeley and I never thought I would leave Berkeley.
In fact, when the Seattle church came to me and said, we'd like to consider you to
be a pastor.
I thought they were just being polite because I was 59 years old at that point.
I said, I don't think a major church wants to call a person 59.
So I said, thank you, but I really feel I should stay in Berkeley.
And I didn't have a P.I.F. or anything.
And then about two months later, the presbytery liaison pastor who was liaison to the committee
called me and said, you know Reverend Palmer, you really owe it to this committee to send
the P.I.F.
Because even though they have you down as declined, they still have you as one of their
top three candidates.
And so I said, wow, I didn't think they were that serious.
So I did fill out a P.I.F.F. and it was true, Seattle wanted me.
And it was right for me to go there.
And so again, I don't feel I'll ever leave Seattle.
And I just feel that why is that?
It's because of the gift of people.
The fact of the church is fundamentally real people in a real place.
And it's not like Karl Barth, it's not the cloud of cuckoo land.
It's real people in a real place.
And there is something so wonderful, such a gift to your life, to be able to relate,
to real people in a real place and watch their lives and watch their kids grow up.
And I always say in youth to youth ministers, you really haven't had youth ministry until
you've watched at least one generation go to high school.
And then you can see what you did right and wrong.
And then you get clout.
And there is true in ministry, in Berkeley being such a kind of a grouchy city, you don't
get clout in Berkeley until you've been there 10 years.
And after I had finished my 10th year in Berkeley, then I had clout, because I knew I was for
real, because most people had very short itineraries in Berkeley, everywhere, university, everywhere.
And so the people give you their respect, and they give you their love, and they become
the tremendous gift.
Well, with each of these gifts, I'll give you a warning.
I think the warning is to be aware of the danger of bureaucracy in the church.
To be aware of allowing yourself to be removed one step away from people always.
One step away, always through somebody else.
Maybe it's your administrative assistant, or if you have a secretary or associates you
have, or somebody else so that you can be, you end up being further and further removed.
How on the one hand to be available, and yet keep your own sanity, and keep your own
life, and I'll say a word at the end about rhythm.
But that's the thing to be aware of, is where you become, where you lose this best gift,
which is a gift to people.
That's why I say to every pastor, get in a small group, right away make that your first
priority.
I just wrote an article for the catalyst, which is going to be sent to all seminary students
I guess, and they've asked me to write an article on the case for expositional preaching,
where I try to advocate expositional preaching to all of you seminary students.
I make one point to that I think it's so important, if a person is going to be an expositor,
that they themselves are in a small Bible study group, support network group, where you're
in the group, not in order to preach from it, but in order to learn from it, along with
other people.
That way the gift of people is given to you.
They love you, they're praying for you, and I have two of those groups right now that
I'm in.
I have three because I have one group that meets monthly, and then I have two weekly groups,
and they honestly are so important in my life.
I had it in Manila, I had it in Berkeley, I have it in Seattle, and that's the gift that
the parish gives you.
And I'm not saying that a great college or seminary experience can't give it to you either,
but not over the duration of time that a church can give you.
The seminary, except among faculty, the students come and then they go, and that's great.
And I love that mandate that Christians have to be a professor in a seminary.
But I'm telling you now, the church has to give you.
And that is, friendships that go far longer than four years, or the ten year of a student,
or even the ten year of fellow faculty, it's a lifetime of friendships you can begin
to build.
We're still in touch with friends from the old Berkeley era and the Manila era because
they became dear to us.
And Paul said to the Thessalonians, you became dear to us.
And I think you know you're getting that gift when people are dear to you in your church.
I just hate it when I hear pastors making jokes about their elders or jokes about their
people, because then I realize for those pastors that the people are not dear to them.
But when they're dear to you, then you receive that gift, all right, that's a gift the
church has to give you.
The second gift is time.
Now this may surprise you, I know of no profession in the world that gives a person as much freedom
about time as the ministry does.
Basically except for the sort of absolute requirement of worship on Sunday.
And now you can even fudge a lot there as to when it's held.
You may stick in a Saturday night service, which I don't like, I stick strictly to Sunday.
I don't want to have service that competes with football games.
And at the University of Washington, but we have a lot of services on Sunday.
But apart from that requirement, to have to have church on Sunday, you know that just
about everything else in your schedule, you tell me any other profession has this freedom.
You get to pretty much control your time.
It is a tremendous gift of time that a congregation gives you.
You can even move the session around, which is a pretty risky thing sometimes to do.
But you can do it.
In Manila, I had session meet right at the dinner hour because they were all driving home from work.
And I've always made my rule that session never lasts more than two hours.
They love it, by the way.
Our elders love that.
And I have the gift of time.
I'm the moderator.
And I get to set those time frames.
And appointments with people.
You don't have to meet with people at night, doctors don't do it.
You can meet insurance salesmen do, but you don't have to do it.
You can meet with people when you want to meet with them.
And you can use times like those shoulder times.
So you don't interfere with times that you have at home.
And if some people say, I'm just being with people all the time, that's your problem.
You didn't have to do it.
You could still be loving and caring and people oriented.
And yet you have the gift of time.
You're the one that gets that calendar out and can set times.
You can build a rhythmic week.
More than any other profession I know.
School teachers don't have that.
School teachers have to be there eight o'clock in the morning.
They have a class at nine o'clock.
The bell rings, they have to be in that class.
So do professors here, no professors in a great seminary, also get lots of gifts of time.
But you get the biggest gift of time there is.
Tell me a profession that has that gift as much as you do.
And now what's the warning?
The warning is the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency toward randomness.
And that tendency toward randomness is the biggest danger that I find among young pastors
and older pastors too.
I can always spot a pastor who's burning out.
A pastor who's burning out is the pastor where every day looks alike.
And if every day looks alike, it's your fault.
It didn't have to look alike.
So in the morning when you wake up, you have a pit near stomach and you don't look forward
to the day, folks, that's a sign you're burning out.
In every single week, you've got to have a rhythmic week where you can look forward to
a time where there are days that you are sheer delight.
And I don't mean just your day off.
Days that are rhythmic so that you don't do the same thing each day.
And I've been able to achieve, by and large, been able to achieve that in my ministry,
not the beginning of my ministry.
The beginning of my ministry, I was definitely on a burnout circle until I got married, until
we had our first daughter.
I can't even say until I got married because when I got married, my wife was a school teacher
at Garfield, high school, and she was the head of the Yale leaders.
So our life was horrendous.
We went to every basketball game, every football game at Garfield.
I tried to go to all the other games of my kids at Roosevelt.
We tried to have retreats way too many retreats.
See, I didn't learn the secret that one of the best cultivating devices is a clipper,
as well as a seed bag.
I was adding programs but never cutting them out.
And we were just doing way too many things and then we had our daughter.
And our daughter was the greatest clarifier in the world for us.
We had to then recalibrate our time to be decent parents.
And then I went to Manila, fortunately, about a year after my daughter was born, went
to Manila.
And in Manila, I had, because I was a solo pastor, I had everything on my shoulders.
And I simply had to make my week rhythmic.
So I designed a week, which I'm still following to this day where I work extremely hard, Sunday
Monday Tuesday and Wednesday.
And I have every meeting, every appointment, everything is in those days.
And I study Thursday and Friday and I take Saturday's my day off.
That's my basic rhythm.
Sometimes something will fracture that rhythm.
But I found out that when something fractures it like a death or some emergency, you don't
resent that fracture as much if you go back to a rhythm.
But if you don't have a rhythm at all and every day looks alike, you resent everything
that comes in.
And you begin to get that pit near stomach in the morning, which means that you're non-rhythmic
and means you're burning out.
But the gift of time, folks, is given to you in the ministry.
I know what I've been in it for a long time.
And I'll tell you in a minute how you earn that gift, but you get the gift.
The church will let you do what you want to do.
All right.
Now the next gift is a gift of challenge.
I'll tell you what, folks, from a theological standpoint, I don't know of a more exciting
place to be a theologian than in the marketplace, than in the parish, that in the place where
people are actually living, where you get to work out your theology and instantly see
feedback, provided you preach that way.
And you encourage it.
You'll have it happen.
You get that amazing opportunity to work your theology in a matrix that's an ongoing,
durable matrix of real people.
You begin, if you preach this way, you can actually dialogue with your people and your
preaching.
That's why I advocate preaching a series and advocate creating study guides for people
when you're preaching.
So they're encouraged to think with you.
But if you do that, I want to tell you something, as a theologian, think of Eugene Peterson,
one of the sharpest theologians in the church.
And he carved it all out in slugging it out for over 35 years in one church in New Jersey.
And you can really carry on a tremendous theologically perceptive, grappling time preaching
to real people in a real place.
In university students, if you have them around, and if you don't have them, get them, find
them, pull them in.
I'll tell you a story on that.
A young man from my church in Berkeley, who was very active in our group, went to Louisville
Seminary, not Princeton.
And then he got a call up to Oriskany, in New York.
They named the aircraft carrier after that town.
And it was all white-headed people, all white hair.
But about 10-15 miles away was one of the New York universities, part of the New York
University system.
And he went down there, just because he was very active in our student program.
And he went down to that university and walked on campus and saw a little sign that said,
Bible study group, IVCF, University of Christian College, and everyone welcomed.
So he went to it.
And these students were there, and he sat there and he said, I'm a pastor, I'm just up
at the street at the Presbyterian Church up in Oriskany, Kay, whatever it's called.
And I saw that anyone could come to the Bible study group, and I just thought I would
sit in.
And they said, oh, would you be our advisor?
They asked him that very minute to be their advisor.
They didn't have an advisor.
So he said, okay.
And he became advisor to that group.
Those students started to come up to his church.
They infiltrated his Sunday school.
The folks in that church were totally transformed, and his preaching was totally transformed by
having these university students that started to come up to his church.
Why?
Simply because he showed them that he wanted them.
I said, the secret to having university students is to show them that you want them.
You want them in your church, and you can get them.
They'll come.
They'll drive to your church.
And then you've got that excitement of being able to preach to them too.
And believe me, you get feedback from them when you preach to university students.
And I want to say a story.
This is really current.
Last Sunday, I preached a sermon.
I'm going through the book of Revelation.
And I preached a sermon on the church of Smyrna.
And in that text is where the boundary theology, Karl Barth's great boundary theology, but
it's really John's great boundary.
It's the New Testament boundary theology is there.
That tragic things happen, turbulent line is there in history.
But it is boundary by a greater boundary.
And the greater boundary is the faithfulness and the goodness of God.
But that means that within the boundary terrible things happen.
And that's what the Holy Spirit says to the church of Smyrna.
But there's a greater boundary around it.
So I preached that sermon last Sunday, and I decided to tell them a parable from an experience
I had when I was in Berkeley.
In Berkeley there was a terrible thing that happened.
The whole city of Berkeley was in turmoil over it.
A man murdered his wife and then committed suicide.
And one of his, he had four little kids, and one of his kids found them.
You imagine such a horrible thing, find the bodies of your mother and father dead.
The father murdered his wife and then killed himself.
And fortunately those kids survived because they had a great grandparents, they were just
wonderful grandparents.
And anyway, I was the one that was asked to speak to those kids and to try to comfort them.
And I went to see those kids and I knew them, one of my new very well, because same age
is one of my kids.
And all these little teenagers were there in the room.
I told the story of the congregation last Sunday and I said, I was in that room with
these kids trying to think, what do I say to these kids?
And a parable came to me and because there was a table in the living room and it was blind.
And so I said to these little kids, the oldest was 16 and the youngest was 12.
And I said, you guys, I want you to know something, think of this table as if it were a field
of dirt and think of your lives as a field.
What has just happened to your lives is that two terrible jagged rocks have been put in
your field and kids are going to be in your field all your life.
You'll probably have terrible dreams about those bad rocks, all your life.
And that's just, that's true.
And then the Lord led it, I think led me to say to them, actually it's the theology
of the New Testament.
I said, but I want you kids to know something, wheat can still be grown on that field
in around the rocks.
And the field is boundaries by a greater boundary.
Well I told that story to my congregation last week in connection with the Church of
Smyrna, that that's what is the message of the Church of Smyrna.
There are these horrible jagged rocks of persecution of the Church's facing and and then I went
on to say to the kids and kids, I want you to know that those jagged rocks on the field
of your life were against the will of God.
It was not God's will that your father murdered your mother or that your father killed himself.
That was against the will of God.
But there is a greater boundary, it's part of the mystery of the fact that God gives
us freedom that we sometimes make decisions that are against His will.
Well, anyway, I told that story to our people and said, you know, it's very important
that we not say what Goethe said that the grass will grow over the rocks or that you
will soon get over it.
The jagged rocks are there and stay jagged.
There are things that happen that are against the will of God and yet the greater boundary
still stands.
Well, I want to read you an email I got yesterday.
My wife and I are new members, we're just joining your church.
We consider transferring to your church because of our teenage daughter and the youth group.
I now realize I'll benefit probably more than Shannon from the transfer if nothing else
to hear your sermons.
Last week's sermon answered questions I've been carrying around for 25 years that had never
been answered and I think created a real barrier to my faith.
By the way, this is a professor at the University of Washington.
Our family has a very large jagged rock put in the field when I was in the early 20s.
My father, a superior court judge, was murdered by a convict and all we ever heard was, it
was God's will.
It just never seemed right.
Your inspired sermon last Sunday helped me finally proclaim that it was in fact against
the will of God which I always knew but I couldn't understand how such things could happen.
Well, you know I want to tell you something folks, when you get a chance to do theology
in a setting of real people in a real place and you get feedback like that, I got a letter
also yesterday in the mail.
I've been attending your Sunday sermons the past three years.
This lady says at the end that she hasn't attended for 25 years before that, she did
not attended and I've grown to love UPC more and more each time but up until last April
I volunteered for a sexual assault crisis line and I co-facilitated the support groups
for survivors and one thing that I was taught by the trainers of the agency and the survivors
is that one of the most damaging things a person could hear was to try to minimize their
pain with comments like you will get over this or in fact, I've had survivors tell me
that those words are just as damaging as the attack itself.
Thank you for educating us, your congregation on how to respond to those who are suffering.
I am so thankful these three boys had you after their murder of their mother and suicide
of their father.
You did not ignore the horror of their situation.
You chose to let yourself feel their pain and most effective thing a person can do for
a suffering person is to suffer with them and then she says, UPC is the first church
I've attended since I was five years old and I grew up being scared of the church.
I always yield Christians as people who insisted that everyone ignore other people's pain.
You have broken through so many of my stereotypes and I've experienced the amazing love of
God through your church.
But when you get a chance to preach in that real people setting and grapple with the gospel
and the light of the world they're living in, I want to tell you folks that's theologically
challenging and then finally the last gift you get is the gift of freedom.
I told you about the gift of time but I want to give even a deeper look into the gift
of freedom.
You have freedom with regard to time but even in a more fundamental sense I really believe
that you have the gift to do most what you do best in the church more than any other place
I know.
You can do most what you do best.
Now what's the warning?
The warning is the danger of the Peter Principle and if you are a Parkinson fan you know the
Peter Principle is being promoted to the area of your incompetence.
And I really think that one of the biggest dangers is the sucking power of institution and
the sucking power of power and the desire to have petty power or to get into a power game
or to get into sometimes denominational politics I'm not against it but sometimes it can suck
you away from what you do best which is mainly the maybe the care of souls and the preaching
and being with people and doing studies and making a difference in modeling and being
a part of people's lives and you can in effect do most what you do worst like maybe you're
not a good administrator.
Find somebody who is a good administrator and empower them to administer.
Empower people don't hover over them.
I have a doctrine called the doctrine of benign neglect.
There are good things to neglect.
Some pastors hover way too much over their church ending up doing most what they do worst
and not what they do best and also the people around you have a style of ministry that encourages
them to be free to do most what they do best.
It means sometimes continually calibrating jobs and job descriptions which we're always
trying to do in our staff and our staff relationships so that each person can do most they do
best and honestly I know of no profession where that can really be true as much as a ministry.
You really can you know it's amazing how you can really you can really thrive in a church
when you do most that you do best and the people want you to they don't want you to do
most that you do worst.
It's obvious and yet sometimes a lot of pastors are spending all the time with the building
committee you know I built several buildings as a pastor of both Berkeley church and
now Seattle and I've only met with the building committee at Berkeley once and we built
a whole new sanctuary and I've only met with the building committee in Seattle once and
we've done a complete renovation of our entire building.
You don't have to hover if you empower and if you empower people you don't have to hover
over them.
Now after saying that I have four more things quickly to say and it occurred me one day
that a congregation will grant you this freedom they'll grant me this freedom if I pay
four rents that have to be paid and there are four I think of this rents to pay for the
building and if you pay four rents you can do all these things and here are my four
rents.
I several years ago I shared another in another context I shared some of this stuff about
the rents and I've been rethinking about it a lot since then too.
The first rent that I think you have to pay in order for a church to set you free is
the people in the church and this is especially true of evangelical churches in which I'm
a part is that people and I think it's maybe even true of non-events of the church is
when you hear I'm going to say I think your people need to know that the gospel of Jesus
Christ is in your life and is at work in your life they'll never set you free if they
don't know that's happening.
I call that the congruence reality they have to know there's some congruence in you or
they'll never set you free they'll always be worried sick about you and then they don't
set you free they're always needling you after you because they don't trust you they've
got to trust you and what causes trust in an evangelical church and, as I say, the reason
I say is not only evangelical-- I spoke at Gordon-Conwell a couple of years at the Altengate
lectures and believe it or not some Unitarian churches in New England came to Gordon-Conwell
and says send us a pastor who believes something we'll argue we'll argue with him a lot but
we'd like to have somebody who believes something so at least we can have an argument and so
maybe even the non-evangelical churches want you to believe something they want you to
know that you believe something that you care deeply and then they'll trust you and they
don't want you just to have double talk or you have all the language it's got to have
a congruence in your life they've got to see that you're not that you're perfect in fact
that's why I like the word congruence you know that's the word that's translated worthy when
Paul says let your life be worthy of the gospel the word is axios and you know that word
means congruence I was talking to a Greeks one of my members of my church who's Greek yesterday
just actually yesterday at the session retreat and I said oh by the way I'm going to speak
at T.S.F. and I want to use that word axios T.S.F. tomorrow how is axios used in contemporary
Greek Greek language today he says exactly that way it means congruence that you're a congruent
person not that you're perfect Paul is not talking about being perfect he's talking about being
congruent being under the gospel the gospel is it working your life when you make a mistake you
ask forgiveness you don't play games with that and that's you pay that rent I'll tell you people
set you free the second rent is they need to know you're growing intellectually in skills certainly
in skills you can run one session meeting terribly and foul it up and not know anything about
Robert's rules of orders and you can the meeting can go five it can go 25 35 minutes long when you
said it was going to be a two hour meeting it goes two and a half hours you can get away that
once folks but after a while you know I had a wedding the other day and I was doing the wedding
with the guy and he had a little sun the second wedding he had no sun here with one of the tenants
and there's the yes we're over there and the sun started to act up and the father standing here
trying to do the bow and his wife and I washed him with his hands saying drink the boy
I was worried he's going to go three you know that's once that's twice three times of
boy you're out of here and that little boy he calmed down at two with the two figures but the
father's doing the vows and nobody in the audience can see this but I can see it the father's doing
the value this kid they had a little signal system believe it they knew well I want to tell you
you can get away with making a whole bunch of mistakes once and twice but I'll tell you
you started doing it three and four times and they feel you're not growing and then they start
jumping in and they start taking away your freedom because they don't think you're competent
hey folks you got to be a professional you can't stand up and talk about the Pharisees and say
their priests their laymen big difference and you got to have your facts straight because there are
people out there that have been to Sunday school a long time and they know I mean you can't get you
know Jacob mixed up with Esau you got to get him you got to get it right they've got to feel
that you're growing professionally skillfully and spiritually and if they feel you're growing
then I want to tell you they will set you free people love to see you grow and that's why you can't
keep repeating sermons if they feel that you're just repeating stuff you did over and over again
in fact I'll tell you a story about myself when I went to Berkeley after six after six great years
in Manila I made a mistake when I first went to Berkeley I said I'm going to do a series at
Berkeley that I love that I just did in Manila and it was a great series on the secret of Saint Paul
my hero and and I just did at just done it in Manila and people loved it in Manila and I'll say
they'll love it in Berkeley you know and that way I can kind of get my feet on the ground and do
old stuff for a while and you know I was floundering in Berkeley and finally when I finished that I
did finish the series six weeks on the secret of Saint Paul it's finally sick and tired of that
and I finished that six weeks and I can honestly tell you I never preached another thing in
Berkeley that I did in Manila I started all this stuff in Manila and my ministry took off
because I was growing and they could sense it they can sense it when you're growing and I'll tell you
when they know you're growing I'll tell you the people come back to you they'll be at you and
and they'll set you free third they've got to know that you're working hard I mean I've been in
churches where people work hard and they've got to know it I mean I got Microsoft people in my
church I got about set I got about 50 of them and they work so hard in fact it's fanatical how hard
they work they don't even want you to leave the Microsoft campus get you over there they they
trap you that's why there are you know something Microsoft is a huge corporation in Seattle and there
are no restaurants around it it has had no impact on Redmond unlike Boeing and other companies
where they're all kinds of little restaurants where people go out you know and eat in restaurants
because nobody leaves Microsoft you get in there and it sucks you in and they have a restaurant
in Microsoft and everything is free practically and they have volleyball nets there and they have courts
and they have even aerobics and they have exercise workers everything and stock options and
but they're all working hard now when they come to my church I don't think they discover I'm working
hard by me posting my work schedule they can tell if you're working hard they've got to know you're
working hard my dad always said to me give him an honest days work for an honest days pay my dad
was working and he said you work hard today and I think it's very important to your hard worker
and then they'll set you free and then fourth and this is then I'm then maybe I'm finished
yet they have to know you love them they have to know that they're dear to you
I want to tell you something folks when you go in the ministry if the people know that you love
them you can get away with it sometimes that's even scary but they've got to know that
I have never told a joke about my session I've never made jokes about my colleagues I don't run
those people down I don't run my elders down I don't run my church down I've got great people
I never make fun of older people there might be treasure they're they're the treasure
I can honestly tell you that I love my people and when the people sense you love them I want to
tell you you paid the rent by the way I don't think those are bad rents to pay anyway but
and then it makes the parish ministry absolutely excited hey I'm supposed to stop exactly at
at 1:20 and I did but some you have