Why Pastors Work So Much Overtime

I often heard David Watson preach when he came up to Brunswick Methodist Church in Newcastle in the early 80s. I don't think he would have known me personally, but I did listen to him preach. He died of cancer in 1983 and I was very upset. What a lovely man. Something I read in the book 'The Purpose Driven Life' - God uses this life to prepare us for eternity. We don't die, we graduate. I was given an old tape of his from an old lady in our church who died recently and we were given all her old books and tapes. Although the tape is thirty years old, the coating has worn out and you can hear the sound fading in and out a little, it contains David Watson's vision of the church. David Watson could take a dying Anglican church that had hardly any members and make it grow to an enormous size. What he knew about the church is worth knowing.

Someone had asked him a few days before the conference, 'What do you think God is saying to the church today?' David Watson said, 'I think one of the many things God is saying to the church today is to rediscover what it means to be the body of Christ and to be wide open to the full range of his gifts.' Another thing he said was, 'We should be as committed to one another as we are to Christ.' There will be no marriage in Heaven, but we will be brothers and sisters. One woman said, 'I am only just really getting to know my husband, and in Heaven I would like to have all eternity to get to know him more.' But in Heaven there will be no marriage, we will be brothers and sisters. Perhaps in eternity God intends each of us to be that close. Something that Scot said in the Jesus Army was, 'I hope that I won't really feel any different when I'm in Heaven. I hope that when I'm in Heaven I'll think, everybody's together, everybody's loving eachother, everybody's sharing everything, that's just the way it was all the time.' Another thing David Watson said was that the effectiveness of our ministry would depend on how much we loved one another. I think of Operation Mobilisation campaigns and their published figures. 80,000 leaflets given out and only 50 people became Christians. I ask, if we need to give out 1600 leaflets to lead one person to Christ, what's wrong? We need to love eachother more. Knowing Operation Mobilisation members, perhaps some of them need to be a little bit less proud and arrogant and show other people more respect.

The World Owl Trust run the World Owl Centre in the Lake District. They have a cuckoo owl that will damage its feathers if it doesn't have two other owls with it in its cage. Its the only cuckoo owl they have, but it needs to have two owls of different species in the cage with it to keep it company or it will pull out its feathers. Bear in mind that when a bird pulls out its feathers, its not like you messing up your hair. Its not trying to look ugly, its trying to die. They had a bird that had been neglected when it was young and had had something wrong with its feathers in the past. It had healthy feathers now, but it could not fly properly, at 2,000 feet. It could fly a few feet when the trainer was feeding it, that was all. So a bird with damaged feathers cannot hunt. You and me are pretty much like that owl. How many people kill themselves just because they are lonely?

The church needs to have a strong sense of community. There are many ways in which different churches try to create this. In the Bible Christians always met in housegroups. Romans 16: 3, 5. Greet Priscilla and Aquilla and the church that meets at their house. They always met together in houses. I have seen photographs of the houses where Christians in the early church used to meet. The upstairs had a baptismal tank and was used for adult baptism. The house must have been quite large. We don't know if the early Christians actually lived in these houses the way the Jesus Army do. Many churches have housegroups, many churches go on holiday together, and the Americans have a coffee hour, where the church go down into the basement after the church service to have a cup of coffee and talk to eachother. The Jesus Army live together in big houses. This is not a very easy thing to do. There are several different layers of membership. Some people are covenant members, members of the church but not living in community. Some people are probationary members, living in community for as long as they want and paying rent. Finally, there are common purse members, who live in the community permanently and who share all their possessions. If you allow people to come to your church, give you their life savings and their car, they might have a trivial argument with somebody, they might decide they made the wrong decision, and they might want to leave. It leaves you open to all sorts of allegations. People used to complain that they had given the Jesus Army all their worldly goods, then wanted to leave and the Jesus Army tried to stop them. In any church, if you want to leave people will try to persuade you not to. Everybody has a shepherd to guide them and to show them how to live in community. Scot is my shepherd. Living together is not easy. I know people who didn't want to join Operation Mobilisation because they didn't want to live with three hundred people on a ship. That was the reason they gave. It doesn't always solve all a church's problems if they live in community. The Hutterite communities learn German so they can study the writings of the people who founded their church five hundred years ago. They haven't had anyone like them since. It's all right talking about David Watson thirty years after he died but I hope in five hundred years we'll have forgotten all about him because we'll have had so many other people like him.

1 Corinthians 12: 31. We are to make love our aim and eagerly desire the greater gifts. We are Jesus' eyes, hands and feet. 1 Corinthians 12: 7. To each the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. David Watson gives four tests for a spiritual gift. Does it glorify Christ? Is the church edified? Is it in accordance with the Scriptures? Is it done in love? Did it do any good? My friend was rolling on the floor laughing because he was full of the joy of the Lord. It edified him, it glorified Christ. If people are bursting out laughing while I'm preaching, the churches in Tyneside are closing down and I'm trying to save them, that's not glorifying Christ. If people are praying in tongues during a sermon, they should pray quietly. If people are shouting over eachother and the preacher can't be heard, that is rude. That is not what the Bible says. Those people at Toronto who were dressing up as clowns and laughing weren't glorifying Christ. That cloud that used to hover over the altar at Kansas City Church didn't glorify Christ. It glorified the person who had put it there. Some of those prophets in America, I would like to ask them, 'Have you ever prophecied anything that actually happened?' There was a man on the internet saying that Saddam Hussein was going to make an atomic bomb. People would tell him it hadn't happened. He would say, 'The war's not over yet.' But Saddam Hussein hadn't got a bomb and there's absolutely no chance of him making one now. It's not always a question of whether something is in the Bible. It must be done to edify, it must be done to glorify Christ, it is always done for a purpose. There used to be a programme on the television, the Paul Daniels Magic Show, and the voice would say, 'It's the Paul Daniels Magic Show.' No voice in the Sunday service is going to say, 'It's the Holy Spirit Magic Show.' Miracles are always done for a reason. Nothing only applies to the apostles. As an old brethren man from Chowdean Chapel told me, do they really believe that real Christianity only existed for a few years before the Bible was completed?

1 Corinthians 12: 26. If one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. It is true that when people are suffering the whole body suffers with them. Scot lost his first child, who was still born. I remember my friend thanking me for what I had said in a meeting similar to this one, except that there were 1500 people in the tent, not just 10 like there are now, and she quoted that verse that if one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. David Watson gave a different interpretation of this verse. He said that if someone doesn't use their spiritual gifts the whole body suffers. Our pastors are overworked. I recently spoke to Norman Hiley's brother on the phone, delighted that he is still living in Leeds somewhere and is eighty years old. He had a heart attack twenty three years ago. How old was he when he had the heart attack? I think he was only 57. Norman Hiley was a good preacher. I couldn't preach like him myself. He looked like Mike Neville. He could have been a television presenter, he could present information so clearly. I have been told by some people that I will never be a church minister because I'm not married. People would like someone who can do all their evangelism, who can do all their preaching, who can do all their youth work and who can solve all their problems. The other members of the church are not using their gifts. We are so afraid of making mistakes that we never let people do anything.

The answer is to make people accountable for the way they do something. David Hunt, the new Baptist Pastor in Gateshead, would give people a talk from the Bible about how to witness and about being polite to people before they went down to the tall ships that were visiting Newcastle quayside. He would then talk to them when they came back. What had happened? How had it gone? What had they been saying to people? Then he might say, 'That's too strong. You should say, I couldn't stand before God and say I had never sinned, you shouldn't ask them if they could do it.'

I would rate spiritual gifts on a scale of A to C. A is for something you're naturally very good at. Nobody had to teach me to be a writer. I just know how to write. I actually left a night school class because I didn't like the way I was being taught to write a novel. I appreciate that the man teaching me had written novels and had them published, but he didn't like what I had written in one of the exercises and I didn't like the way I was being taught to write. My preaching I would not put at A, I would put at B. I worked very hard to be able to preach a sermon today. I could condense the whole story of my life into half an hour. Excellent writing, poor preaching. If people want to preach, ask them what they want to talk about. The elders at Chowdean Chapel asked me what I wanted to talk about and said, 'Put it in the church newsletter.' Again, excellent writing, poor preaching. We did put it in the church newsletter and everyone enjoyed it. My youthwork I could put at grade C. If I went outside to help Gordon with those boys playing football now, I could probably do it. But it's not what I'm really good at and I don't have a great desire to do it.

I have written that in the 1970s the Pentecostal Christians never got beyond prophecy and tongues. They are the most common gifts and most Christians have them. That's why many Christians believe that all the Christians have all the gifts, if tongues and prophecy are seen as being the gifts most Christians can do those. Prophecy is often just a word from the Lord that you want to share. I remember a woman at our church standing up and prophecying that there would be a new church planted. She prophesied the Cedars Fellowship which was started in Old Fold. Other people have told me what the prophecy was about, I can only remember the fact that a third of the church walked out, horrified that a woman had taken part in an open service. This caused a division in the church that was handled quite nicely, the people who didn't want women to speak started their own brethren service in a factory.

1 Corinthians 12: 29, 30. The Bible asks, 'Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all speak in tongues?' And any scholar will tell you that the real meaning of that text is, 'of course not.' Not all Christians have the gift of tongues. I met one Christian in a pentecostal church who believed that he didn't have the Holy Spirit because he hadn't spoken in tongues. He had been there for twenty years. That's tragic.

I earnestly desire the gifts of preaching and evangelism. They are the gifts that are going to save us now. I don't want people to feel inferior if they don't have a gift. I heard of a man who gave up on Christianity altogether because he didn't think he could ever preach. Do you really think I'm a better Christian than you just because I preach? As Gordon said last week, preachers suffer from problems. I hear other people in the pulpit and I wonder whether they should be in the pulpit. Pride. I think I don't need anyone to teach me anything. I can work it all out from the Bible myself. If you read more books than me, you might know more than I do, even though you're not a preacher.