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These Are a Few of
My Regrets I am now officially retired as a Baptist minister. In retirement, I continue to serve God as an interim pastor, believing that He has not put me completely out to pasture. I would sincerely regret not using the talents and skills of ministry that my Lord granted me to use for the 35 years I served Him. I don't believe God desires that I completely forsake my calling simply because I am retired. Generally speaking, I am proud of the ministry I've performed over the years. I have experienced many victories and believe that God has used me in a multitude of ways to accomplish his will on earth. I want to believe the words of Paul in Philippians 1:6 are true for my life. {"…being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ."} Although I will probably stay in retirement at the tender age of 62, which is rather young to retire, I plan to continue to serve God in whatever way I can until He takes me home to heaven. I believe I can honestly say that I have always given my best for the master. I have always attempted to do what is right in the sight of God. I am an eternal advocate for honesty and integrity in ministry. I am an eternal advocate for treating people as God would treat them. I abhor dishonesty and legalism in ministry. I abhor excessive pride and arrogance in ministry. Far too many pastors become consumed with pride and arrogance to the extent that they allow a heavy legalism to dominate their lives. I suppose that most such pastors never recognize the extent of the pride and arrogance that creeps into their ministerial lives. As I reflect on the 35 years I served as a pastor, I am partially proud and partially plagued with regrets. Yes, I do have regrets. I regret that I allowed a measure of pride and arrogance to dominate my ministry. Today I experience a measure of pain when I reflect on some of my attitudes and actions over the years. If confession is good for the soul, then it will be good for me to confess my sins and share my regrets. Perhaps sharing my regrets will help younger pastors to avoid the negative attitudes I had. I sincerely regret treating divorce as though it is the unpardonable sin. I realize now that I allowed a form of fundamentalist legalism to dominate my thinking on the subject of divorce. Perhaps I came by it honestly from my early mentors. I was led to believe that people who experienced divorce, in every case, committed a sin that was unforgivable by both God and the church. I treated divorced people as second class Christians, who by virtue of divorce, completely forfeited all rights and privileges as church members. I always declared that I loved divorced persons just the same as I did the non-divorced persons, but never treated them the same as those who kept their marriages together. I feel a great deal of pain now because of the way I treated the divorced persons. I regret consistently counseling against divorce in every case, even when it was clearly obvious that divorce would have been the better option. For example, I have on a number of occasions counseled against divorce when a husband has been abusive to a wife. On numerous occasions I have counseled against divorce in cases where the wife was morally unfaithful to her husband. In every case, I falsely believed that divorce was worse than the abuse or the unfaithfulness. I falsely believed that I could "fix" things so dysfunctional couples could continue in marriage. I took the legal approach, using the Bible as whip to prove my case. I have never recommended divorce, even in cases where I knew that divorce was the best option. I didn't want to go on record as being soft on divorce. Primarily because I was treating divorce as an unpardonable sin for Christians, especially church members. I sincerely regret allowing divorce to be the reason for not ordaining deacons and pastors. As a pastor, I have prevented several good and godly men from becoming deacons because of divorce. I served one church for fourteen years where a divorced man received more votes of any man in the church during deacon elections. The man had married as a teenager and was married for less than a year. During the first deacon election after I became pastor, the man received the highest number votes but I persuaded the Deacon Screening Committee (the committee that had the final authority of acceptance or rejection) that he was unqualified because of his divorce. Never mind that he had been married to the same woman for more than 45 years. I judged that divorce has consequences and one of the consequences was that a divorced man is eternally disqualified to be a deacon in a local church. It was okay with me for him to sing in the choir, be a S.S. department director and have lesser offices. Other than the legalistic disqualification of divorce, the man was a perfect candidate to be a deacon. I grieve deeply today about my attitude and action toward the man. He died last year and was never allowed to be what the church wanted him to be. I went against the wishes of the church because of an unchristian form of legalism. I sincerely regret asking a fine deacon to surrender his ordination papers because he experienced a nasty divorce. He was a fine young man of about forty, whose wife suddenly became unfaithful to him. The wife left him with a nine-year old daughter to raise. He was one of the finest deacons the church had. He was a true servant of God and the church. The divorce did not change his character or commitment to God. I am more than ashamed of my actions toward this devout believer. If there's anything unpardonable about this situation, it's probably that I committed a grave error in legalistic judgement. On the other hand, I am proud to say that I have somewhat redeemed myself regarding the ordination of a pastor who had experienced a divorce. After I became a Director of Missions, I realized the error in my thinking. A small rural church in my association called a young Agriculture teacher in a nearby town to become their interim pastor. Early in life the man had felt God's call to pastoral ministry and was seeking training. Before he finished college, he experienced a divorce. Believing that he was eternally disqualified from the pastoral ministry, he pursued a degree in Agriculture Education and spent his time as a lay preacher. After about six months as an interim pastor, the church decided to call him as full-time pastor and asked me to help ordain him. Despite some rather serious objections by several pastors in the association, I went ahead with plans to help ordain him. Today, after two years at the church, he is marvelously leading the congregation to carry out the Great Commission in the local church and in the association. I have no regrets about changing my mind in this situation. Believing in the total autonomy of the local church and the call of God in the man's life, I support the man in every way I can. I do, regret, however, that I spent so many years stuck in the legalistic quagmire of opposing divorced men in the pastorate. I sincerely regret refusing to perform marriages for persons who had experienced divorce. For some strange reason, I got over this one rather early in my ministry. During the first decade of my ministry, I prided myself for never performing a wedding for a couple where one or both had experienced divorce. I falsely believed that if I performed such a wedding I would be going against what the Bible teaches about marriage. My solution was to recommend that the couple go to some other pastor for their marriage. I soon realized that I had lost every opportunity to ever minister to these couples. They were not only going to other pastors to get married, they were forever leaving my realm of influence. I was making enemies of them because of the unpardonable sin. I was the one committing the unpardonable sin. I was the loser. I sincerely regret that today. I sincerely regret having an unchristian gender prejudice in my ministry. For 30 of the 35 years I served as a pastor, I refused to accept women as equals in ministry. I strongly opposed the ordination of women either to the deaconate or the pastorate. I credit this to the slavishly literal fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. I falsely believed that God discriminates on the basis of gender. I felt that if the Bible forbids females to become deacons and pastors, then I should follow suit. Part of this may be credited to peer pressure. And part of it may be credited to an unbiblical form of fundamentalism. The last thing I wanted my peers to think was that I am an evil liberal who doesn't believe the Bible. As far back as a decade ago, I began to have second thoughts about such views. Here in Oklahoma, Baptist churches and pastors continue to be extremely gender prejudiced. They are prejudiced against women serving in prominent positions in the church. The firm belief is that women should be absolutely submissive to men in every aspect of life. This means that women are submissive to their husbands, this means that women are disqualified to serve as deacons and pastors in churches. Evidence of this is clearly seen in the fact that executive Director of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma was the chairman of the committee that gave us Article XVIII in the Baptist Faith and Message (in 1998). So how did my views change concerning women in the church and home? The answer is my own daughter brought me to my senses. In 1995, my oldest daughter went to the University of North Texas to earn a masters degree in music. She joined a moderate Baptist church and became actively involved, playing the piano and becoming a director in the young adult Sunday School department. After two years of faithful service in the church, the congregation nominated her to become a deacon. I was nearly mortified at the thought that my own daughter was going to become a deacon. I felt that my reputation was at stake. What would happen if the news of this filtered back to my church and the local association? To solve my problem, I decided to sit down and write an ironclad biblical defense against the ordination of women. But when I did the critical study, I realized that there was no way that I could build an honest case against the ordination of women. I called on every resource I could muster. I failed miserably. I realized that I had been locked into a legalistic form of fundamentalist thinking. I now regret that that I ever held the view that women are inferior to men in the church and the home. I also regret that I didn't see the light until too late to do anything do anything about it. I have never had the opportunity to be a part in the ordination of a woman. I have sincere hopes that the day will come that I can be part of ordaining a woman either to the gospel ministry or to be a deacon. I will not live down my regrets until I can do this. I now know that God does not judge on the basis of gender. Having realized this, I have written an apology in favor of women's ordination. [Why Not Ordain Women?] I am trusting God to use it to help younger Baptist pastors to realize the errors of gender prejudice. I will carry these regrets to my grave. I am trusting that God will forgive me. I know he will. But it doesn't ease the pain I now experience. It's done. I can't retract the misdeeds on this side of eternity. However, for the remainder of my life I will seek to do what is right in the sight of God. I will never again be guilty of these particular sins. Not that I'll never sin again. But I won't commit these sins again. -- March 17, 2003 (This article was written for BaptistLife.Com Discussion Forums) |