We really are made of dust. That is a truth taught in the Scriptures. It is also a truth born out in every day life.
Perhaps no one knows this better than a pastor, because he regularly is brought face to face with the challenges the people God gave to him face. This was certainly our experience in the twenty-one years we served the Lord and His people at the First Baptist Church of Oglesby, Illinois.
There are many stories I have locked up in my memory from our time there. Stories of marriages made, broken, healed. Stories of marriages broken permanently. Stories of illness over which God gave the victory. Stories of illness which, at least to all appearances, had the final victory over its victim.
There are stories of young people who wandered away from the Lord in spite of the teaching of their parents. There are stories of young people who wandered away from the Lord because of the lack of teaching by their parents. There are stories of young people who came to the Lord in spite of the failure of their parents to teach them the things of the Lord.
There are stories of people who made decisions based on what they wanted rather than on what was right, and came to regret it. There are stories of people who confessed their poor decision making to the Lord and came to experience His hand of blessing.
There are stories of people who faithfully, day-by-day and week-by-week, slugged away in the minor leagues of church work and experienced God’s hand of blessing in their lives for their faithfulness. There are stories of people who began to think they were God’s gift to the church, and became so self-satisfied as to be useless to the kingdom of God.
For twenty-one years, I prepared for and preached three services a week, visited sick people in the hospitals and elderly people in their homes, counseled with people whose lives were in varying degrees of self-created misery, tried to help lazy Christians get more involved in the ministry of the church, tried to help overly-zealous and self-loving Christians to accept God’s place for them in the church, gave pre-marital counseling to couples and married them, only to find in too many cases that they failed to live their married lives God’s way even though I had showed them from the Scriptures how it should be done.
In addition to all this, we made movies with the young people as I have already shared, wrote and recorded a series of radio programs that were broadcast all over the Illinois Valley, wrote and published bulletins, newsletters, booklets, articles, conducted business meetings, sometimes with reluctant leaders and stubborn church members, and even occasionally rebellious church members, all while helping my wife raise our children, one of which you have already met, keep up our home, which the church owned (it was called a parsonage for those readers too young to remember when churches had parsonages), keep up the church property, arrange for musicians, Sunday School teachers, church cleaners, Vacation Bible School personnel, Christmas program personnel, and, for a few of those twenty-one years, keep a choir director happily leading a choir which almost emptied the pews when they sang because so many of the people were up on the platform singing instead of in the pews listening.
But there is a problem I have here. All of these stories which clearly show the failures with which human beings are cursed, and the victories with which God blesses His faithful children, all of these stories filled with drama, laughter, tears, joys, sorrows, victories, failures, all of these stories must remain locked in my memory. I cannot commit them to these pages here. I can’t tell the stories here because they are not my stories to tell.
You have no doubt heard pastors use illustrations in their sermons from previous ministries, illustrations where they tell the most intimate details of the challenges faced by someone they ministered to in a previous ministry. They don’t identify anyone by name, and they are usually careful to select stories involving people who are not known and not likely to be known by the people to whom they are preaching. So, why cannot I do the same thing here? I could tell the stories without identifying the people. In previous chapters I have given real people fake names; why could I not do that here? Why could I not simply change some of the details to protect the privacy of those whose stories I tell? I most likely can’t remember the details exactly as they happened anyway.
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I cannot do these things because the stories are the private property of those involved. They are not my stories to tell. I played a roll in the stories, certainly, but a minor one. I was the voice of conscience, the proclaimer of God’s Word, the little voice that said “don’t do it; you’ll regret it, and here’s why.” It was not my words I gave them; it was God’s Word. If they had victory over sin, it was their victory based on their submission to God and His Word; I had nothing to do with it. If they failed, it was their failure based on their rebellion against God and His Word; I had nothing to do with that, either. I was merely “a voice crying in the wilderness,” nothing more.
To tell their stories without their permission would be a breach of their trust in me and my commitment to them. I did not become a part of their stories with the intention of exploiting their stories someday. I do not have the right to do so.
But, there are those preachers who use other people’s stories in their sermons, quite successfully. Have they broken a confidential relationship with the people who lived those stories? Not really.
The parsonage of the First Baptist Church of Oglesby, Illinois in the winter of 1978.
If I stand in the pulpit of a local church and use a story from my past ministry to help make a point, not identifying the persons involved and even disguising the story somewhat, chances are very slim that the people involved will ever know I am telling their story. Not that I mean to suggest that if they don’t know it’s okay! What I mean is that a sermon is limited to the people listening to it, and if a pastor selects his stories carefully there is little likelihood that he is violating a trust. That has changed in the past few years, of course. Now that the Internet has made instant communication possible worldwide, and sermons regularly find a permanent place on the world wide web, pastors may want to exercise extreme caution in telling stories about real people.
This writing is intended first for the Internet via my website, and, hopefully, eventually, into print in the form of a book. It may well be that few people will ever read it. But it also may well be that someone whose story I tell might happen upon it on the Internet, and not appreciate that I have violated their privacy.
So, I will refrain from telling their stories, and stick to telling mine. I have plenty of challenges and teaching moments in my own stories to fill these pages.
In that list I shared here of things that filled my time while pastoring the church in Oglesby, I failed to mention one type of ministry that occurred on average about five times a year for all twenty-one years I was there. You see, people kept dying. They wouldn’t quit doing that. People in the church, people in the community, it made no difference, they insisted on needing funerals in their families on a regular basis. I was called upon more than one hundred times during my years there, to conduct a funeral for someone who could not resist the urge to die. I could tell you about some of those funerals; in fact, I already told you about one of them. I would now like to tell you about another one, one that did not involve a person who was a member of my church, or who lived in Oglesby.
