The Others

I started my message yesterday with a short list of lessons learned in the Philippines last week.  The last on the list was my big idea for the message.

Most of heaven's heroes remain nameless on earth.

In the Philippines I met three guys in their mid-20's who are all starting brand new churches in April.  I met pastors who do full time ministry for $25.00 a week.  They have next to nothing, but still give it all to Jesus.  They were the inspiration for the teaching yesterday. 

You can read The Others here.

To listen to the teaching, go here.

By the way, this was an international message.  I started it at the airport in Manilla.  I continued at about 30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean.  I typed some more at Starbucks in Ngoya, Japan (above picture).  I put alot of it together cramped into seat 58H somewhere between Japan and Canada.  I finally put the finishing touches on it Saturday night at about 5 feet above street level (at my house).

Altogether it was the longest running experience of preparing one sermon in my life; a total of about 35 hours.  Of course, I wasn't writing the whole time.  I had to work around the battery life of my laptop, and unfortunately outlets that actually work are hard to come by in international airports.

For what it's worth, I don't understand how any pastor could be unprepared to speak on Sunday.  A major chunk of a shepherd's job description is to feed the sheep.  How can I justify failing to prepare the weekly meal?  When we started our church I made a commitment that I would always step into the pulpit (or music stand in our case), prepared to teach Sunday.  Some people may prefer to wing it.  I prefer to write it.  The job is too important to do it on the fly. 

Now writing it on the fly, that's a different story!

Comments

[jr]

Hey Brad, I thought Googlefight is quite amusing. I found that ".com" beats out almost everything except "a", "the", etc.
Have you heard of GoogleEarth? My bro-in-law just showed me, it's sweet! You can fly to the Philippines in less than 1 min, then see 3-d terrain. It's close to flying, w-out jet-lag :)