Every Preacher I Know Needs a Coach

Every preacher I know needs a coach. There are a few exceptions, I suppose, but right now I cannot think of a single one. Every preacher I know needs a coach.

I wouldn’t dare tell my friends they need a coach, though. Their reaction would be some version of, “Well, who died and made you pulpit pope?”

Which is a good question, considering that for most—if not all—of my own ministerial career I have been the most un-coachable preacher ever to open the Bible and announce a text. Like many young men who aspired to succeed Billy Graham, I had the charisma, the character, the skills, and the intelligence—or so I assumed.

But I needed a coach. I needed somebody to ask questions; such as:

Where did that text come from?
Who exactly were you preaching for today?
Are you angry or did it just seem that way?
Do you know the rule for “you and me” and “you and I”?
Who were you pointing at so much during that sermon?
What exactly did you want the people to do?
Who taught you to pronounce “news” that way?

I can think of a thousand things I pronounced in the name of God that were of more questionable origin. I grimace at recalling the mannerisms, the interpretations, the jokes, the stunts, the gestures that have accompanied my forty years of gospel work. How people tolerated it for so long can only be chalked up to the mercy of God.

But, of course, there were no coaches in those days. We were on our own.

Things may be changing, though.

Lots of other people now have coaches: life coaches, they call themselves, or career coaches. Google “life coach” and 48 million sites will come up. I have a friend who was trying to move from a college vice-presidency to her own presidency; she hired a coach.

More than one and a half million sites are listed when I punched in “preaching coach.” That is not nearly enough; and I am willing to bet very few if any of them are in my part of the world.

Like I said: every preacher I know, or hear, needs a coach; every preacher I hear could be fifty percent better as a communicator if he or she would stand in from of a video monitor and, with a coach, watch themselves preach a sermon or two. Few things would delight the people in the pew more than such pastoral openness to being coached.

I once thought about becoming a coach myself. It wouldn’t work, I am sure. I am too blunt, totally lacking in tack, without the patience for the inductive method of coaching—that strategy that would ask such questions as:

What did you see there that might interfere with your power to persuade?
How could you make that transition cleaner?
What scripture would have been perfect there?
How could you have connected with what happened in your community this week?
What did you think was funny about that comment?
Is that theme really important to your people?

Churches should budget for preaching coaches. It could be part of the pastoral package, like convention costs, mileage reimbursement, and health care coverage. It wouldn’t cost much and would return enormous dividends. Like I said: every preacher I know needs a coach—especially me!

The First Billion is the Hardest

I was a pastor in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when T. Boone Pickens rode into town. He was even then a corporate gunslinger headed for a showdown with the largest corporation in the Steel City: Gulf Oil.
Pickens talks about this confrontation in his new book The First Billion is the Hardest. I for the stockholder, he said then (and again in his book), ignoring the many other stakeholders in any large and expensive venture (employees, retirees, taxpayers, vendors, customers—to name a few). He failed to take over the company but did force them into a sale to Chevron, by which he had a most handsome profit.
Much of that money he lost by speculating in the natural gas business; and now he is speculating in the future of water and wind. You may have seen his commercials on television promoting his solution to the energy crisis. They have the appearance of public service announcements, of disinterested advocacy in the midst of a national dilemma. I thought so until I read the book and discovered he stands to make billions of dollars if the country follows his lead.
“It’s all about leadership,” he writes repeatedly in his soon-to-be best-selling book; he claims the country has had no leadership on this issue—ever.
It will sell a bazillion copies because it is the quintessential American story: rags to riches. He tells of growing up in Oklahoma with poor but proud parents, stern but steady, cautious but kind.
Pickens doesn’t explain where he developed his unbounded ego. The book is basically 235 pages of self-promotion.
God is invoked, fleetingly, to explain his urge to give. He has donated mostly to athletics at Oklahoma State University. “I want victories,” he explained. I am sure he is a church member in good standing somewhere; it is hard for churches to stare down such well-heeled patrons.
But the book is not about religion or charity or even economics; it is about T. Boone Pickens. He sprinkles little “Booneisms” throughout the text, but most lack any compelling reason to remember.
I read the book as background for my sermon on Acts 4:32-37 which describes the attitude of those early disciples on issues like ownership, community, and generosity. Pickens might not have been comfortable with such people but then neither would most of us.
By Tuesday I will have that sermon posted but I am ready now to give the book to anyone who wants it.

Rating: ** (out of five)
Coming soon: a review of The Shack

Sarah Palin and the Pentecostals

The first time I saw her presented through the media—seems like months ago but it must have been less than a week—Sarah Palin was identified as a Roman Catholic; and in fact, she was born and baptized into a Catholic family; and if the Catholics are like the Baptists her name is still on some Catholic parish membership list.

            Today, however, a friend said to me: “I heard that Palin is a Baptist.” That could be, I found out; because since 2002, Palin and her family have been what we might call Christians-at-large but what we more often call church hoppers: here for a while, there for a while, mostly in non-denominational evangelical congregations. Some of them could well be baptistic in ideology and practice.

            But in between her Catholic initiation and her Evangelical itinerancy, Palin was embedded in the life and work of large Pentecostal churches. One video circulating on the web records a brief testimony she gave to her “home” church—where she was saved, baptized and discipled as a believer. It was there she learned the religious rhetoric she uses no naturally in public and in private.

            It is inevitable that one day a Pentecostal will be President of the United States—or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or Ambassador to the United Nations: in the same way Muslims will hold high office.

            You recall we broke the Roman Catholic barrier back in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected President. Some people thought that would be the beginning of the end of our great democracy.

            Now five members of the Supreme Court are Roman Catholic—and that is worth a week of blogs!

            Pentecostal Christians live in a fairly new room in the Christian house (to employ an image popularized by C. S. Lewis). They started building that room in 1906, when a revival broke out in a storefront church in Los Angeles, California. The people practiced speaking in tongues, casting out demons, giving words of prophesy, and performing all kinds of what The Acts of the Apostles calls “signs and wonders.”  They also have bought into the end-of-the-world scenario popularized by the Left Behind books.

            Pentecostalism was an in-your-face, no-holds-barred, help-me-Jesus counterpunch to the ideas and preferences of the modern world. It took root on the margins of American society but spread like Kudzu into every religious tradition. Kathryn Kuhlman of Pittsburgh was a Pentecostal, as was Oral Roberts of Tulsa (until he became a Methodist).

            John Ashcroft was a Pentecostal; you recall he was Attorney General during George W. Bush’s first term. I wrote about him in my book, On the Other Side of Oddville.

            Now, Sarah Palin.

            Pentecostals should not be discouraged from holding civic office; nobody should. But the populace should know what we are getting if we elect such a person. I will write more about this in the weeks ahead.

 

            Next blog: Sunday night.

            Coming soon: book reviews of The Shack and The First Billion is the Hardest

            Number of viewers in the first three days: 340; and I am pleased.

Ramadan and the Baptists

Hannah and Ike are cavorting through the Caribbean and John and Sarah are raising cane in Minneapolis. But the event attracting the most attention is Ramadan: not from us, of course—we are too consumed with the tropical storms off our southern coast and the political struggle shaping up for the fall. These two provincial concerns are overshadowed globally, however, by the holy month of Islam. More than one billion believers have altered their daily routine in adherence to one of the five pillars of Islam.

            Today is the third day of Ramadan. In the United States, Ramadan began at sundown on Monday (about the time our family was celebrating the two-month birthday of my first grandchild Sam—more about him in future blogs, probably on a pretty regular basis).

            These days the beginning of Ramadan is at least reported on major web sites and newspapers. There was a time when we were all ignorant about this religion and its festivals. Nine eleven changed all that. It is one of the good things to emerge out of that disaster (just like better levies in New Orleans have been a result of Katrina).

            While all attention was elsewhere over the weekend, the Islamic Society of North America was meeting in Columbus, Ohio. One small part of that gathering was a forum featuring Baptist and Muslim leaders. Robert Parham, Executive Director of Baptist Center for Ethics and editor of EthicsDaily.com was both a presenter and a reporter. This link will take you to many of the articles that were inspired by that meeting. They are worth reading even though they do not have the sensational element of the political conventions.

            What happens at the political conventions, though, impacts our relations with Muslims. A prominent Methodist minister in another state said this in an email to me yesterday: “Anymore, I’m not sure that it makes a lot of difference who is president.”  I thought that in 2000, as well; then we elected a president who took us to war against Muslims; he even called it a crusade.

            The trillion-dollar war has been an unmitigated disaster. Thousands of people have been killed and orphaned; millions have been displaced; ethnic hostility has been nurtured; and untold numbers of families—in America and Iraq—have suffered grief, loss, and hardship. It has been so sad; sadder still is the pathetic campaign to rationalize the hostilities with rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and global security. It will be centuries before relations between Christianity and Islam recover from this disaster.

            A few years ago Baptists were criticized for a promotional campaign that asked Christians to pray during Ramadan for the conversion of Muslims. This was seen as a particularly cynical act of disrespect. I propose a variation of that theme. During the month of Ramadan, let Christians pray for Muslims—for their well-being, for their safety, for their happiness—and let us ask Muslims to pray for us—for our well-being, four our safety, for our happiness. Good things happen when people pray for each other, things that, in the long run, might be more significant than the storms dancing off the coast of Carolina and the candidates posturing for political gain.

Tomorrow (Friday): Palin and the Pentecostals

Sarah Palin and Family Values

I am a feminist. I am an egalitarian. But a woman nursing a Downs Syndrome baby and parenting an unmarried pregnant teenager needs to tend to her primary calling as a mother and not run around the country raising money and giving speeches.

            Nobody in the country is more eager for a woman to take the oath of national office in January than I am. I have taught my own daughter, now 28, that there are no limits and no boundaries to her vocational aspirations. She is a better person for living in such an environment.

            Nobody is the church is more ready for women to take their place in the Christian pulpits than I am. For ten years I have nurtured female college students toward their personal goals of ordination as Baptist ministers.

            But the plain truth is this: being a mother is a more important vocation than being vice president. Circumstances not of her own choosing have created an urgent need for Mrs. Palin to put into practice the family values her party has so vociferously defended for the last twenty five years.  

            Sarah Palin can postpone her political ambitions while she gives primary attention to an infant who needs her constant care and a teenage daughter who needs her faithful counsel.

            Palin’s political network has touted her adherence to these values: she talks the talk—on life and abortion—and she walks the walk. By such language they refer to her decision to carry to term a Downs Syndrome baby and her daughter’s decision to carry to term an unmarried, unplanned pregnancy.  

            But Palin’s decision to re-interpret “maternity leave” is where I draw the line. Normally, that phrase is used for women who take time off from work to give birth and raise a child. Such leaves are common at the college where I have taught for the last eleven years. All places of business should have such policies.

            But Palin has decided to take a leave from parenting in order to work in politics. This will provide a new paradigm for the concept of maternity leave; it will give a fresh twist to what has been called Family Values.

            But her preference for politics over parenting is but one challenge to the traditional notions of Family Values. At the top of her ticket is a man with a personal testimony of promiscuity when he was young enough to do so, a man now living in seven houses purchased by the proceeds of his wife’s multi-million dollar beer-brewing business.

            My, how the allure of power tempts us to reinterpret our most cherished convictions!

 

 

Thursday: Ramadan and the Baptists