You may stop and ask yourself why a minister would find himself sitting in a casino at 2:00 am on a Sunday morning or walking through the honky tonks and bars near Ft. Bragg, North Carolina but those are situations that I and other ministers have found themselves in from time to time. While there are plenty of people who are sitting in a pew on Sunday morning struggling with hardships, disappointments and sin - there is also a world of people outside the confines of that sancuary who are looking, seeking and longing for someone to rescue them from the storms of life.
My ministry (and that is probably a loose use of the word) changed dramatically in 2003 when I went through a painful divorce. For 25 years I ministered from the book. I read, studied and tried to apply what I knew about godly living from a more academic approach. This is not to say that I wasn't emphathetic to the needs of others, or that I was totally unrelatable to the many challenges in the world - but to be honest, most of what I taught and practiced came from my personal study.
There are two kinds of knowledge - what we learn from study and what we learn from life. In the Greek New Testament one of the translations of the word knowledge comes from the term "epignosis," literally a word that means learning that comes from experience. Why is it the older women are commanded to teach the younger women... (Titus 2:4)? Very simply - they have lived more life and are better suited to give advice based on personal experience.
I started writing a book recently entitled "Broken." It addresses the most fundamental truth concerning each and every one of us - we are broken. I struggled with the decision to begin this project because it was going to require me to open a vein and bleed all over the pages. My life (and the life of many of my friends) is broken. I never realized that more than the first time I tried to stand in a pulpit and talk to people about how to live a Christian life, when my own life was in shambles. Divorced, discouraged and struggling with sin there were those who wanted me to speak to them about a relationship with God - incomprehensible!
That was also the start of journey in which God placed a lot of other broken people into my life. People who were asking hard questions about how their lives got messed up and where they were going. They wanted to have a relationship to God but had no idea how to get there. Lots of questions I am pretty sure I didn't have the answers to.
So here I sit, nearly 10 years removed from my own divorce and I am doubling down. I may loose it all in the process; but if my journey, my hurt, my pain and my changing view of the "HOW" to do ministry alienates some people - so be it. They accused Jesus of eating with tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 9:1), so if trying to help old friends means tracking them down in a Casino at two in the morning, or searching the honky tonks and bars (as my childhood minister did), for an AWOL soldier then that is where we need to be.
