We have been watching with pleasure the evaluations of our new column “To Illustrate.” Apparently, many of you find at least one illustration usable and perhaps many of them challenging.
In this issue you’ll find a bonus illustration, “Making Truth Memorable.” As I commented to my own pastor, I thought this might even be preached as an entire “sermon” in itself, for dramatic brevity can hammer a concept home.
How was it selected for LEADERSHIP? Terry Muck commented to me after a game of racquetball, “Dean heard the illustration in church and told it to Marshall and me. It was so powerful it made tears well up in our eyes. … ” I mention how our LEADERSHIP editors chose this illustration to indicate their own hearts for ministry, with material growing out of their own involvement in the church.
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As I read the galleys for this issue, I found myself saying over and over, “That’s it; that’s exactly what should be said!” However, on this subject of preaching, there are limitations to the help LEADERSHIP can offer. Neil Wiseman, a pastor who has taught homiletics, insists that preachers learn to preach by modeling. There’s a lot to that. In fact, we’ve decided to provide an additional resource in this area; sometime this spring, you’ll see information on a series of tapes from Christianity Today and LEADERSHIP. Each will have a contemporary “great sermon” and, on the reverse side, a collection of unusually effective illustrations. We’re very much excited about this new service, which can provide both excellent models and illustrations for messages (more on that as the program develops).
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We are also concerned about a need we increasingly sense is as deep as that which launched LEADERSHIP three years ago. We find time and time again that pastors’ wives are in a situation just as pressured and awkward-and just as promising and fulfilling-as their husbands. Yet there is very little specific help for them.
How are pastors’ wives to view their unique potential, their marriages, their relation to the church, to their children, to God? How can they get past the negatives and embrace the positives? We’ve encountered strong feelings. Some, for instance, dislike being called pastors’ wives, feeling it puts them in the shadow of their husbands’ ministries, typecasting and limiting them. Others like the identity but find coping very difficult.
Occasional articles in LEADERSHIP on the subject have been well received, but so much more should be done.
After sensing these needs for several years, we’ve concluded we should develop a magazine to explore with full candor the role of the minister’s wife. We recognize there are also husbands of female ministers, but we believe their needs are so different that meeting them would require a separate publication. Right now, the vast majority of spouses of ministers are women, and good magazine publishing requires high specificity to be effective.
We invite your ideas concerning this new publication. If you were named editor, what would you put into such a magazine? (In fact, maybe you’d like to be editor-write us if you believe you could be the person we’re looking for.) How about a name for this magazine? We’ll pay $250 to the person who first sends us the one we eventually use.
The first issue will appear in January; it will be published six times a year.
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Fred Smith, our good friend who writes regularly for this journal, recently made some interesting statements about the value of having enemies. “They plumb the depth of our Christian maturity,” he observed, “exposing our self-centeredness, arrogance, and self-righteousness. They attack and expose our motive, for seldom do we form an enemy out of a mere mistake of fact or even opinion.
“Enemies are personal, not positional. Therefore, we are commanded to love them. This command is like a spiritual thermometer stuck into the depths of our feverish little souls. It is interesting that the Jewish historian and sociologist Hart puts the command to love our enemies as the greatest difference between Christianity and all other religions.”
Enemies. Do you have any? Do they slander and vilify you? Have you been, or are you being, hurt or even crushed by them?
For help in this area, I’ve found Thomas … Kempis’s Imitation of Christ a treasure. Thomas Nelson has recently released an excellent new translation by E. M. Blaiklock, from which I’ve drawn the following quotes:
“You are not more holy if you are praised, nor the baser if you are reviled. You are what you are. … If you give heed to what you are in yourself, you will not care what men say about you. ‘Man looks upon the outward appearance, but God upon the heart.’
“Who are you that you should be afraid of mortal man? He is today, and tomorrow will not appear. Fear God. … What can anyone do against you by words or violence? He rather hurts himself than you. … If for the moment you seem to go under and to suffer shame unmerited, do not be put out by this . . . but rather look heavenwards to [God].”
Blaiklock’s translation is available in paperback; I heartily commend its wisdom.
Harold L. Myra, President, Christianity Today, Inc.
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