A Pastors Journey

Troubled

2006-07-03T16:53:00.000-05:00

I really am in a strange frame of mind today. Church members are falling back into thier old life styles and it appears that nothing I say or do seems to matter. Things have gotten so bad that I have considered calling for the churches disolution but evrytime I think about that or pray about it I get no response in the affirmative from God so I keep hanging in and trusting that God, at least, knows what he is doing even if I don't.

One thing that has me very puzzled is the total lack of response not just from my church but also from all who visit this blog, my website, and my message board. Sometimes it feels like I am a pastor cut-off and completely alone because no pastor, church or even christian brothers and sisters say anything or show any concern about this or any other small church that is in trouble. This kind of burden is very draining both spiritually and emotionally.

Then just when it seems I cannot go any farther I meet a catholic builder who says he will help because it is a house for God. Then I meet another pastor that says he will bring his menfolk over whenever we are ready and they will also help. Now how can this be if God had really decided to close this little church? What is happening when people that could solve this problem overnight are silent while those with almost nothing are willing to commit what they do have?

God in heaven I pray for understanding and guidance. I pray that your will be done to bring honor and glory to your name. And God, I ask for forgiveness where we have failed you and strength to continue in your calling. In the name of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ your Son I pray... Amen...

God's Blessings

2006-06-13T18:34:00.000-05:00

The vacation I took a few weeks ago was a real blessing from God. See, when I made the commitment to leave the job and church behind I knew I would be losing money every day I was gone. Still, I had to do something to relax or I would have ended up in the hospital, or worse. So my wife and I went to Florida and had a great time for almost two weeks. When I returned I found the church was still here and so was my secular job. New Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church as a group had been praying for my wife and I the entire time we were gone for God to make a way for us to afford the fall out of zero-income from the trip. My God has made a way, our utilities were less than half what they normally are and the repairs we had to have done were paid for my someone else "just because."

This past Sunday I was very suprised to see Sister Mosley, a 83 year old widow who has been sick for almost 5 years, walk into the church under her own power. This is truely an answer to prayer and a wonderful blessing from God.

Resting Time

2006-06-01T06:36:00.000-05:00

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselfs apart into a desert place and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. - Mark 6:31

In Luke 9 we are shown where Jesus sent the twelve apostles out by themselves to do the work he had given them. I don't know how long they were gone but when they got back they wanted to share everything they had done and taught with Jesus. Now in this scripture Jesus doesn't start but correcting their teaching or telling them what a good job they did, he tells them to withdraw from the work for a while. They may not have known it but they needed a chance to get away from everything. Maybe Peter thought about fishing but Jesus said go into a desert place, get a real change of scenery, take time to be alone with God and think about it, sometimes God wants time alone with you!

It was with thoughts like these that I finally decided to take my first vacation in over four years. God has blessed me and kept me safe but I was getting so worn down with secular work, house work and church work that I had lost my joy in living. This "worn down" feeling is not good for anyone but I believe it is really bad when it happens to a pastor. My wife set all the plans for my vacation and for eleven days we had a wonderful time playing all over the state of Florida.

Blessed Assurance

2006-05-09T16:20:00.000-05:00

Since April things have been like a roller coaster both at home and with the ministry. At home I find appliances like my AC and refrigerator breaking down. They are under warranty so it mainly comes down to a major annoyance more than anything else. I was very happy to get at least one of my lawn-mowers working again though since it was starting to look like a jungle had invaded the lawn:)

At the church the contractor we hired to build the new study and porch really messed up and built the supporting walls over two feet away from where the plans call for! After several attempts to get him to fix his mistake we finally ended up dismissing him and hired a couple of people to correct his mistakes. The re-build took all the money we had to get the job done so now we have walls and door opening but no joists and no roof so its back to fund-raising.

I was very happy though to meet a young man that has volunteered to take care of the church grounds for us. That is a big load off my mind since we have had no one to do the yard work for months now. I am also happy to see some people are starting to use our message board. Last on the blessings side this month we have picked up the support of two new companies that are helping us with our recycling project (so far this year we have managed to make over $150 from this source).

Even with all the troubles we have seen over this past month I fell a blessed assurance in my spirit and know that we (It's The Bible, New Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church and all who support us) are still in the will of God and doing what he would want us to do.

It's The Bible Church Work

2006-04-22T17:14:00.000-05:00

It's The Bible is attempting to follow the word of the LORD:

Hag 1:7 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Consider your ways.
Hag 1:8 Go up to the mountain, and bring wood, and build the house; and I will take pleasure in it, and I will be glorified, saith the LORD.
Hag 1:9 Ye looked for much, and, lo, it came to little; and when ye brought it home, I did blow upon it. Why? saith the LORD of hosts. Because of mine house that is waste, and ye run every man unto his own house.

This is not as easy as it sounds! Consider our first project which is the restoration of a 60 year old church that has been destroyed by fire and vandalized over a dozen times. Can you imagine the struggle of christian brothers and sisters making less than $10k per year as they work to even collect materials to restore this church? Some ask why and all I can do is point to the Bible, God said to do this, Elijah did it, Haggai did it, James, John and Paul did it and so we can but try and follow their example. It does get hard though when we attempt to do even little things sometimes. For example, we have four lawn-mowers that we use to take care of the church grounds in need. Now just consider how it must feel when a christian brother says he will help a church and mow their grass for them only to have ALL FOUR lawnmowers break down before even getting a chance to start! Please pray for us...

The dog did it!

2006-04-12T23:45:00.000-05:00

One of the challenges a bi-vocational pastor faces is finding time to visit not just the members of his church but other people in the community he serves. This week I had a strange idea and instead of washing my van I wrote the website address on it hahaha. I really didn't expect to much but I have received several positive remarks on it instead of the usual "wash the ....". One comment came from a young mother of four who lives less than 5 blocks from the church, she doesn't like being so out of place in the big church she is in now and said she may drop by for a visit. What really encouraged me the most though was this little dog that ran up to me while I was at the church checking the mail. A family of six showed up looking for this little dog and asked if we were rebuilding the church. Well you know I said yes, we really hope to get the sanctuary finished by Christmas but it takes money... the family was very nice and they live just 3 blocks away. Just imagine, if the little dog had not come by it would have been months before I made it by for a visit and they would not have seen what God is doing just around the corner from their home!

Worship with a hammer!

2006-04-09T23:40:00.000-05:00

Sunday when we came to church we found out that two of the new walls and all but one of the new roof rafters had been blown down by the 50+ mph winds of this past Saturday! Well you know we couldn't leave things like that, it is way to dangerous for not only our children but for other people in the community. So first we tried calling the contractor but found out he had hurt his arm on another job so that left three men attending church (myself and two visitors) to try and fix it. The ladies sang songs of encouragement and we used ropes and crowbars to pull the walls back into place. Once that was done we had prayer and then nailed some crossbraceing to the walls to hold things in place till our contractor can get someone over and make sure everything is ok before attempting to move the new roof rafters into place. Now I had planned a very different service for Palm Sunday but you know what, sometimes God really does want us to worship him with a hammer in our hands:)

Joke?

2006-04-01T10:12:00.000-06:00

I heard that the police in Alabama caught three college kids that burned down about a dozen churches. When asked why they did it the report said they burned down the first two churches as a joke and then burned down the rest to distract attention from the first two!!!! Maybe I am getting dense but I fail to see the joke here. As you know if you have read any of my previous blogs my own church was also burned down and we have spent the last 4 years attempting to rebuild it. During this time money and resources that could have helped over 500 families in need have been diverted to the rebuilding effort and this is from a church with less than two-dozen in regular attendance. Even when we finally manage to complete the rebuilding effort it will take another 3-5 years to get back to the level we were at prior to the fire. The total loss of almost 10 years in helping others in the name of Jesus doesn't seem to me to be a joke. What about it, can you show me anything like a resonable punch line to this behaviour? On the bright side and changing the topic just a little bit... We have signed on as an affiliate with

The Bible Source. This is a fine bookstore that is focused on Bibles, just as our own website It's The Bible is which makes this company a very good match. Purchases made through the link will benefit our ministry by helping to rebuild not only our own church but others as well.

In Christ,
Pastor Rick

It's The Bible - Redesigned

2006-03-31T21:41:00.000-06:00

Well now, it has been a long month but a good one. I found this program called WYSIWYG Web Builder and with its help I was able to completely redesign my website While doing this I was able to change the number of streaming audio sermons from the two I had on the old computer to five. I also checked all the links and corrected those that had changed so now everything works :) In the course of the redesign I had to change the online chat over to a message board since the "free chat" service went under.

Good Times & Bad

2006-02-27T18:21:00.000-06:00

You never know how something will turn out until you try! In the case of my church we saw a chance to help a couple that was in some major trouble. The man and woman are in their late twenties and he used to be an electrical worker until they both got into the drug and alcohol scene. When the church met them they said they were really trying to come out of that scene but needed some help. Now if you saw my church you would know that financial help wasn't really an option for us so we decided to provide them with a place to stay at the church and in exchange all we asked was that they clean up around the church and map out what was good electrically in the church and what needed to be replaced (the church building in over 60 years old and it did go through a fire and several vandal attacks in the last five years). Anyway, after one week the man left and the woman was going nuts. Several of their friends came by and instead of the church being cleaned up you would think a bomb had exploded inside, what a mess! I told the woman she would have to leave at the end of the month, our church had done all we could do to help and saw nothing but disrespect to both God's house and his people. The next evening the young lady told me she had cried herself to sleep and had begged God to forgive her. Right there and then she accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior and she told me it was like a fog had been lifted from her life... At one time their were five people at the church, they took everything we would give them and did nothing in return. I look back and remember this young woman starting to turn her life around and taking her first few baby steps as a christian. She made enough money doing odd-jobs to buy a bus ticket back to her folks and is now going to school to earn her high school diploma. Yes, my church went through a bad time while trying to help but God gave us a true blessing in the end.

Presents & Blessings

2005-12-12T20:17:00.000-06:00

This past Saturday I must admit to being very discouraged. I had prepared Bible discussion guides for use after the church went to see the new movie, Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and nobody was able to make it to the movie!

Then on Sunday one of the church regulars showed up with a washer and dryer which he donated to the church and another member donated a Conn model 653 organ to the church which will replace the tiny Optima keyboard we have been using.

The gifts to the church were wonderful but as nice as they were I must admit my heart was really lifted when 6 children were brought in by another member. Needless to say, I felt somewhat foolish about my earlier discontent with God not doing things my way!

Dear God in Heaven, please forgive me and help me to see your path more clearly. Amen

Christmas Wish

2005-12-03T08:48:00.000-06:00

As we come up to Christmas I look back at all the things my little church has been able to do. We have helped almost 100 people in times of crisis. We have helped orphans and widows, single moms and drug addicts. We have provided food and clothing to our local community and even reached out to hurricane victims. We have reached out to over 4000 people around the world via the internet with sermons, teaching tools and bibles. All this from a little frame church that would be hard pressed to seat more than 50 people in a worship service and in very serious need of repair.

Truly, God has blessed us more than we can even imagine and we should be thankful. I want to ask one thing though, when was the last time you paid attention to small community churches such as mine? These small churches work year round, striving to please God and helping, where they can, in the local community. My Christmas wish and prayer is to see a christian brother or sister take the time to stop by one of these tiny and almost forgotten churches and just say thank you. You cannot imagine what encouragement this gesture of christian love would accomplish. Think about it, pray about it, then do what God has laid on your heart.

Merry Christmas

Directions

2005-11-29T21:23:00.000-06:00

I am looking at remodeling www.itsthebible.org but I am reluctant to make the commitment, time wise, that this would take. One thing I will never do is remove the realaudio sermons that are there without replacing them with new sermons. Personally I would like to publish all of the sermons, especially those from my father but with both the church and myself being stretched financially I have to work with the space already provided. My other limitation is being forced to work with a WYSIWYG site editor since my knowledge of html is almost nonexistent. Pray for me on this, there used to be a lady in the church that worked on the site but since she left I find myself wearing this hat as well...

Dear God in heaven, please grant us the resources we need to do your will... Amen

Prayers and walls

2005-11-28T19:49:00.000-06:00

The church decided to set up a 30 minute prayer time just before the main worship service. To make this happen we decided to meld the Sunday School and Devotional reading into a group discussion of 25 minutes. My prayer is to find 3 people, one for the children, one for the adults and one for the music ministries. This way I would be able to concentrate more on the preaching ministry and be able to guide our little church instead of being expected to perform all functions myself. Maybe one of the local Bible Colleges will have the people I seek but I must confess that with such a small group I hesitate to even ask... I NEED prayers on my behalf that God will show me the right way to go.

On the building front, we are buying 2x4's as we have money so we can frame the new east and south walls to the sanctuary. Our goal and prayer is to get this done before Easter 2006.

Log Cabin siding!

2005-11-26T15:56:00.000-06:00

I know this sounds strange to those who attend the medium to large size churches but bear with me a moment. My church has always been a small community church with a membership under 100 and annual tithes and offerings of $10,000 (plus or minus $1,500). This means that as we rebuild our little church we do not think fancy, just basic floors, walls ect.

Now given what I just said, when we started to consider what the outside of the church should look like we found this company that makes vinyl log cabin siding. This looks like it would give our little church a unique look and still be within our budget plans. Of course, after finding this siding we have now started to discuss how to make the inside of our church light, airy and open with a log cabin/western feel to it:) Should God allow it we may even change the name of the church to Log Cabin Baptist Church...

While creating this blog I had the idea that perhaps others would also like to talk about what is happening with their small community church so I created a new forum on my message board for this purpose.

Jack it up, tear it up, another slab

2005-07-16T18:30:00.000-05:00

For 2005 I thought we would be doing great if we could get two new families and maybe raise enough money to replace the floor in the church's hallway. God had different ideas though and a church member was blessed with a economic windfall that allowed him/her to donate $4000 to the church (the condition of the donation was total anonymity) so another major portion the rebuilding project could be done!

As a result of this donation we were able to jack up the roof on the east side of our sanctuary so that we will be able to have a 9' ceiling line. Then we tore out half of the eastside wall so we could see what else we have to do to widen the sanctuary to 26'. Finally we purchased 9 yards of concrete and poured the new slab that will let us start building the new eastside wall and classrooms.

Our visitors now outnumber our members on a fairly consistent basis but so far we have had no new members. This concerns me greatly and I pray to God often about our membership status.

1 year update

2005-07-12T19:42:00.000-05:00

Ok, it has been a long time since my last posting. My apologies, it isn't my intention to neglect the website www.itsthebible.org or this blog page.

Since the last posting which showed where my church was after my fathers passing alot has happened. We raised $3982.00 and then all the women of the church helped as we removed the floor in the sanctuary and discovered we actually had to make a foundation for our church instead of just repairing damage. See, when the church was built back in the 1940's Fort Worth didn't really have any building codes so the church was built on a few cinder blocks with the wood actually resting on the ground! The money we had raised was just barely enough to build the foundation for the existing sanctuary and put the subfloor in place!

It has taken us another year to raise the money for the porch/entry area (a 15 x 30 foot slab) which will let us start the renovation of the classroom and office portion of the church. Not bad when you consider we had fallen to an attendance of 3-5 for Sunday Worship! In the last 2 years we have had 4 baptisms and the attendance now gets up to 20 at times.

Dear God in heaven,
please grant us the strength to continue the work set before us,
Amen

Getting started

2005-05-14T08:22:00.000-05:00

Well after the shock of Kimberly and Clay saying they would help to rebuild the church I decided to call other inactive members to see what was happening in their lifes. One family, which is now four families since all the kids have grown up, said they would be back as well. The first sunday I called a business meeting to see what the church wanted to do. We had $250 dollars to work with and everyone said they wanted a sign for the church. I don't know what kind of a sign we can get for that kind of money but everyone is looking. We also decided to hold a church fellowship to remember what the church has done in the past and thank God for another year. We are going to call it the "Hobo Lunch" in honor of how this church was started. See, way back in 1949 those traveling workers called hobo's would come into town on the freight trains and work in the Fort Worth Stockyards for awhile before moving on. The church started to provide a place for them to worship since the existing churches didn't reach out to them. Now Founders Day is actually on May 13 but that is so close to Mothers Day that we decided it wouldn't work for this event. Soooo, a new date was chosen, the first sunday in February, to honor our begginnings. I am having a couple of signs made that say "Free Lunch" and anyone that wants to come in can eat what food we prepare without worrying about paying for it. Oh yes, we are making a cookbook with recipies based on what the Hobo's may have eaten back in the forties and fifties.

Dear God, thank you for sending a few workers our way,
Help us to continue and do what is right in your eyes.
Amen

Looking out

2005-04-16T18:58:00.000-05:00

Don't ask me how or why but for some reason we as a church fell into this state of going through the motions without seeing what was wrong with both the church and community. Everywhere you look there are signs of massive decay and somehow we just didn't notice or acknowledge any sort of problem. We went through the motions, we thought that since "God provides" that somehow things would get better. Even when the church burned we didn't notice just how far we had fallen into the religion trap... you know what I mean by that don't you? We would meet, sing a song, say a prayer, listen to a sermon and go home till next week with the idea that we were serving God by doing this.

The trouble is we were doing acts of worship without works of faith so you might say the church was in a "persistant vegetative state," we were there but it didn't mean much. As a church we started to see what we had become when "clean-up day" arrived and only five people showed up!

Later in the week I was talking to friends of mine and lamented on the condition of the church. I didn't really ask them but Kimberly said she would like to come back to the church to help rebuild it. What a shock! I had not considered asking any of the old members to do anything before. Afterall, they had left the church so it wasn't their problem right? When I walked into my study later that evening a verse of scripture came to me; Galations 6:2 Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Dear God in heaven, forgive us for our sins,
Help us to be what you want us to be,
Provide us with brothers and sisters in Christ,
Aid us while we seek to do your work,
Even as we now thank you for the work you
have already done.
In Jesus name we pray, Amen.

Shingles

2005-04-06T20:44:00.000-05:00

I had been a pastor for one week and no matter how hard I prayed I didn't have a clue on what to do. Still, a pastor is always supposed to be doing something so Saturday I went down to the church and wandered around. The church is located in the old part of Fort Worth in a housing community that was built to house stockyard workers. All the old busineses have long since vanished but the community is still here. Well over half of the people are from Mexico so one thing I was thinking is that since I do not speak spanish the church would need to move fairly soon if it was going to survive. I have walked over and around this area called Diamond Hill many times but never thought of the church moving before. Besides, even if we were going to move the church doesn't have the resources to convince a bank to fund the project.

I wander around to the back of the church and notice a pile of shingles. Mixed into the shingles are pieces of burnt wood from the fire. The thought comes to me that this would not be something I would not want Jesus to see so I get a couple of trash bags and start picking them up. While I fill the first sack up I am feeling really depressed,

Lord God I pray, show me what I should do.
This church has so few people and so many needs,
I see no way we can do anything for the community in your name.
Should we stay in this place or leave?
Show me dear God what we should do.
Amen

I look at the shingle in my hand and it occurs to me that I can only fill three bags at most because where I live there is a limit of six bags of trash per week per household. Wait a second, what if the church had a cleanup day? Even as small as we are there are still five households which means we could cleanup 15 bags of shingles! The church has asked what they should do, I look at the shingles in my hand and smile.

Jumbled thoughts

2005-04-03T22:28:00.000-05:00

I have never done this before so if the content of this post seem confusing it is probably because I really have no clue on where this is going. For many years I was not a pastor, I was a ordained minister who was very happy working on my website, teaching sunday school classes, bringing the sunday evening sermon for my church and sometimes helping other churches when they needed someone to preach for them.

Then, in somewhat chronological order several things happened: My church was burned out, many members left thinking the church was gone for good, vandals broke into what was left of the church and destroyed what they didn't take, my father (who was the pastor) passed away and seemingly overnight my church was reduced to a mere handful of people. To make things even worse the members which remained were either retired or unemployed! With less than a dozen people left I was asked to conduct a business meeting and the church called on me to be their new pastor. My first order of business was to ask for the church to decide if they wanted to disband. A motion was made but defeated, the church wanted to go on.

So now what? The only biblical training I have ever received is from pastor's. The only scripture training I have is from books. My only management training comes from the various jobs I have held and still hold as a bi-vocational pastor.

Things do not look good!