Truth Magazine

By Dennis D. Tucker

Since last fall I have “tried out” at a number of congregations and feel as if something should be said about this whole process. This article is not motivated by anger but in hope of bringing some things to light. I started to preach because brethren encouraged me to do so. It is a privilege to preach and I have worked with some very good and kind brethren. However, there are problems in the attitudes and practices of some congregations.

1. Lying. As Christians we are to “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15). We need to make sure that our “yea” is “yea,” and our “nay” is “nay.” I had one congregation tell me that they decided to not look for a preacher for the time being. Previously, they had sent men to “interview” me. After telling me of their decision to not look and to preach themselves, they put the word out at a lectureship that they were still looking. Within a month they had located a preacher. Please notice that the problem is not that they had decided to look else-where. They just lied. If a congregation decides for whatever reason not to ask a preacher to come, they have that right. They do not have the right to lie.

One congregation decided on a certain preacher. In discussing a monthly salary they gave a dollar amount and said that was all they could pay. When the man said that he would need more, they suddenly had more money and gave a counter offer. If a congregation thinks a preacher is asking for too much money, they should say so. Do not lie by saying there is no more money while there really is. We need to remember Ananias and Sapphira who lied about the amount they received for their land. “You have not lied to men but to God” (Acts 5:4).

2. Professionalism. We denounce the clergy/laity system in denominations. Yet some of our brethren seem to have the same concept. They want a professional speaker who will take over the work at a congregation. I agree that a preacher must be able to communicate, however, brethren seem to want more. They want a big name or someone who will wow their friends and neighbors. They want a man to do their work and act as their elder. They want a Bible degree from a Bible college. A number of good men who have stood for the truth in the past and present are discouraged by such an attitude. The church will lose many strong preachers.

Brethren, if a man can preach and you can trust him to stand for the truth that should be enough. Numerous congregations have fallen into a “preacher parade” because they did not want to “settle” for the first preacher. On different occasions I was told, “We do not want to get into a preacher parade.” Yet they have tried out a number of preachers and are still looking. Do not get into the trap of thinking, “Yes, he can do the job but there may be someone better.”

I remember reading an article by James Adams a couple of years ago. He said a congregation called him and asked if he might be interested in the work. They then asked him to send a resume. He respectfully declined and stated that he had not needed a resume before. He always preached the truth and if brethren wanted to ask him questions they could. I am not trying to be overly critical. I realize that brethren need to know the background of a man before they ask him to work with them, however, I wonder if we have not developed the attitude of the secular world. We are sup-porting a preacher and he should apply for the job just like any other job. I’m afraid the apostles would not be welcomed today in some of our pulpits.

3. Finances. Both sides must be realistic in this area. I will admit that I am not comfortable when brethren ask me how much I think I will need to live. Yet we must think in such terms. Preachers have the same cost of living as other people. I have to pay my taxes just like you. When my children get sick they need medicine. J.C. Penney has never written off a debt because I am a preacher. My car needs tires and gas just like yours.

In addition I have a number of added expenses. Preachers generally pay 15% for social security. Medical insurance is sky high. For a number of years we had health insurance. Our premiums were $500 a month with a $1000 deductible and no maternity. During that time we had three children. The hospital and doctor bills for the three children totaled around $18,000. I also must allocate money for my retirement. If I set aside $150 a month for an IRA that will total $1800 a year. I have been preaching twelve years and last year was the first time that I could put $1800 into my IRA. By most estimates that will not be enough for my retirement. How many refuse to support their preacher and then condemn him when in financial need?

One congregation called me and in the conversation mentioned that they were “self supporting.” They had a house and could pay $530 a week. For a man with a family that is not enough money. They were really saying they wanted me to live on that amount and not get any other support. Another congregation told me what they would pay. In addition, they did not want me receiving any money from any other source. I would have liked to have moved there, how-ever it was just not possible-due to the salary. If a congregation cannot pay a man enough to allow his family to live fairly, they should either allow him to work at an-other job or look for outside support. They should not expect him to starve his family.

A congregation should not expect a man to deprive his family when they can support him better. They should not expect other congregations to support their preacher when they can do so themselves (2 Cor. 11:8).

We have preachers that have worked for the Lord many years. They have nothing to live on when brethren feel they are no longer effective. Brethren then remark, “They should have planned better. They should not beg.” Brethren should be ashamed.

4. Treatment of family. How many of my brethren have ever gone on a job interview understanding that his family must come along? Can you imagine a company asking to see your children and wife before they will consider you? I understand that a man who preaches and is married should have a good home. He should treat his wife with love and be the head of the home.

I have felt at times that the brethren want to inspect my children. It is hard to travel all day in a van with young children, sleep in a motel or stay with a strange family,and get up on Sunday morning and feel relaxed. There have been times I have apologized to my children because they were on display. They understand when they are being “looked over.”

I also had a congregation send out questionnaires to my references. One of the questions asked if my wife conducted Bible studies. Brethren, my wife has the same responsibility as other godly women. We are not hirelings or the shepherds (John 10:11-13). Another questioned if I projected well on video. Does it matter if I am tall and handsome or short and dumpy? Such treatment is unfair!

Let me close on a personal note. Most of the time my family has been treated well. I have enjoyed getting to meet brothers and sisters. However, trying out is not a vacation or a picnic. It is costly, time consuming, and nerve racking.

Guardian of Truth XXXIX: No. 22, p. 14-15
November 16, 1995

By Connie W. Adams

The homeplace in Virginia which my father and his brother built when I was three years old, never had a front porch. The original structure was four rooms built of rough lumber from trees cut on the spot where the house was to be built. A steady job by 1939 enabled my father to add eight feet to one side of the house and to add four rooms upstairs, making it a nice-sized farm house. My parents patterned it after a farm house they saw in southeastern Virginia, complete with a front porch extending across the front of the house and around one side to include the chimney. But my folks were never quite able to build that porch. The reason for that contains a lesson many parents could use.

Paul wrote “for the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children. And I will very gladly spend and be spent for you …” (2 Cor. 12:14). In this context Paul explained why he would not be a burden to the Corinthians when he visited them again. You see, he had “begotten” them “through the gospel” (1 Cor. 4:15) and looked upon them as his children in the Lord. He was as a father to them. He did not expect them to sustain him. No, he would “lay up for them,” he would “very gladly spend and be spent” for them. The attitude shown here would greatly benefit all who preach the gospel. It would abolish selfishness.

But there is also a great truth taught here about parents and children. It was actually that truth upon which Paul relied to impress his point to the Corinthians. The truth is that parents ought to provide for their children.

After my mother’s death in July, this truth came home to me forcefully after a conversation with my aunt Ida, my mother’s only remaining sib-ling. She said, “They always wanted that porch on the front of the house, but there was always somewhere else for the money to be spent.” Why did I learn that from an aunt? I never heard either of my parents speak about a frustrated dream of a porch. But I am one of several reasons why the porch was never built.

My father was a carpenter on a construction crew for Hercules Powder Company. He farmed a little on the side to provide food for the family. My mother was a homemaker. Our house not only was home to three children but to other relatives. My great-grandmother and grandmother lived there until they died. My father’s sister lived there most of her adult life. My grandfather spent his last few years there. In 1948, I went away to Florida College, never to live at home again. It took every dime I could earn and all they could do to make that possible. My father sold chickens and farm produce from door to door in Hopewell, Virginia to make extra money. He drove a 1936 Chevrolet for a long, long time. His wardrobe was limited.

So was my mother’s. Without complaint and no attempt to make me feel guilty, they sacrificed to help me all they could to go to college for four years. Before I had finished, Wiley began preaching and decided four years in college would be a great help to him. My parents tightened their belts and pitched in to help all they could. It was even more difficult for Wiley to go than for me because he was already married and had two children at the time, with a third born while they were at Florida College.

My sister, nine years younger than me, also attended Florida College. More sacrifices had to be made. Still, no porch. When Glenda had finished, they decided to care for some foster children and there were a number of these in succession. Soon, it was retirement time and more limited in-come. Then the ravages of time and age took their toll. When Daddy passed away in 1986, our mother continued in the home place along with our aunt Beulah, her sister-in-law. It was her desire to be independent as long as she could and to maintain her own home. She died on July 16 in the bed-room at the homeplace where my father had breathed his last.

Now we are left to sort through the memories of a marriage that lasted 63 years plus nine more years during which our mother was the rock that sustained all of us through the loss of the spouses of all three children and assorted heartaches and concerns. On the real estate market, the old house is probably not worth a great deal by the standards of today. If only those walls could talk! There has been a heap of living in that big house with no front porch. You see, with them, their children and other people came before the porch. Now there is a lesson on priorities.

Guardian of Truth XXXIX: No. 22, p. 3-4
November 16, 1995

By Irvin Himmel

Christ gave commandment to the apostles, “Go ye therefore, d teach all nations, baptizing them . . .” (Matt. 28:19).

The teacher in a class of children wanted to impress this lesson on her pupils.”She handed each of them a sheet of paper and told them to print the words, “Go, ye, teach all nations.” One little girl printed it this way: “Go, ye, teach all notions.”

It would seem that some religious people have misread the great commission just as that little girl wrote it, “Go, ye, teach all notions.”

All manner of ideas, concepts, doctrines, and beliefs are being taught. Religious people who claim to follow Jesus Christ teach such notions as theistic evolution, reincarnation, premillennialism, salvation by faith only, impossibility of apostasy, infant baptism, papal infallibility, situation ethics, hereditary depravity, unconditional election, direct operation of the Holy Spirit, exorcism, and numerous other concepts foreign to the New Testament.

Everything imaginable is taught rather than the pure gospel of Jesus Christ. Perhaps we need to reread the commission given by our Master to the apostles and note more carefully what it says. Mark’s account is unmistakably plain in saying “preach the gospel to every creature.”

Guardian of Truth XXXIX: No. 22, p. 4
November 16, 1995

By Larry Ray Hafley

(From Seventy Years On The Frontier, by Alexander Majors, we seize this selection.) The beaver “is an animal possessed of great intelligence, as the amount and kind of work accomplished by it show. It is a natural-born engineer, as connected with water; it can build dams across small streams that…hold the water equal, if not superior, to the very best dams that can be constructed by skilled engineers.

“… the higher up the stream they go, their dams are built correspondingly higher; hence a dam built at an altitude of 1,000 feet would not be built as high as one built at an altitude of 3,000 feet, in order to overcome the deeper freezing at that point, for in constructing these dams they must be of sufficient height to give plenty of room to get their food in the water under the ice .. .

“The beaver, considered as an engineer, is a remarkable animal. He can run a tunnel as direct as the best engineer could do with his instruments to guide him. I have seen where they have built a dam across a stream, and not having a sufficient head of water to keep their pond full, they would cross to a stream higher up the side of the mountain, and cut a ditch from the upper stream and connect it with the pond of the lower, and do it as neatly as an engineer with his tools could possible do it. I have often said the buck beaver in the Rocky Mountains had more engineering skill than the entire corps of engineers who were connected with General Grant’s army when he besieged Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississippi. The beaver would never have attempted (as Grant did  LRH) to turn the Mississippi into a canal to change its channel without first making a dam across the channel below the point of starting the canal. The beaver, as I have said, rivals and sometimes even excels the ingenuity of man.

“Another of the peculiarities of the beaver is the great sharpness of its teeth, remaining for many years as sharp as the best edged tool. The mechanic with the finest steel can not make a tool that will not in a short time become so blunt and so dulled as to require renewed sharpening, and this, with the beaver, would have to be repeated hundreds of times in order to do” its work during its lifetime of ten to fifteen years. The tools of men need sharpening, but the beaver’s teeth do not.

To use the language of Jehovah’s questions to Job, “Who taught the beaver and who instructed him in the lore of engineering? And who gave him his teeth such as cannot be eaasily duplicated by the tools of men? Who put the gauge of mountain altitude into the beaver’s heart and taught him to build dams corresponding to the depth of winter’s ice? Who gave the beaver his paddle-formed tail?” Do our atheist friends hear the echoing answer to these questions, “God”?

Majors says, “The beaver’s feet are webbed for the purpose of swimming, and there are nails on his feet, so that he can scratch the earth almost the equal of the badger.” The beaver is adapted for swimming, logging, and digging tunnels. His design signifies his Designer! Indeed, “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” (Psa. 53:1).

Guardian of Truth XXXIX: No. 22, p. 7
November 16, 1995