Follow Up on the Letter that Got Me in Trouble

Last week, I wrote about one of the early Barnabas Letters that got me in trouble.  The earliest letters were all mailed out with envelopes and stamps before email was even a thing.  Then as I finally figured out email, I started gathering email addresses from various places.   If you are old enough to remember this activity, it was almost as exciting as the first login to America On-Line.  Back in the day, that was an early form of Facebook.  AOL was passed out on the small floppy disks back when our hard drives were huge sitting at forty megabytes.  I can remember getting a floppy from a cereal box and signing up with the login name “barnabas14” because “barnabas” had already been taken.  The seeming innocence of AOL was because we lived in a world where naivete was the king of the day.  As much as I have benefited from all the technology that changed our world since then, as I have aged and read and researched about the detrimental effect it has had on our world it gives me pause to think about the future.  What it holds for my grandchildren is the greatest concern that I have now.

So, the previous unedited letter that you read last week dropped me squarely into hot water that was very hot.  Yesterday as I was thinking about how I would describe it, I mused over the date of that Barnabas Letter.  It is now moving into almost thirty-one years ago that I wrote it.  I was the ripe old age of twenty-eight deeply mired in great youthful inexperience and innocence.  My thoughts about my reaction back then versus now have greatly changed to say the least. 

Now, I was certainly sending the letter out in activity that would surely be considered spamming.  I would think that almost everyone would know what that term is but just in case you don’t, it is defined as sending out unsolicited email to unknown users.  You are probably in the same dilemma that I am in with the now three email accounts that I am trying to manage.  I get thousands of unsolicited emails from all kinds of sources these days and we think nothing about it.  We have spam filters that delete some of it and then we can use search filters within the email system so we can rapidly delete large volumes of emails, and we never even read them.

So that email makes it way into the inbox of a second-tier official in our organization and he reads it.  I think when I get to heaven, I am going to ask the Lord to let me see his reaction when he opened that email three decades ago.  I want to see his reaction in real-time; I can only imagine what it was.  I think that once he read it that he immediately picked up his ministerial directory and called me.  I was sitting at my desk in the den and there was a cordless phone that went off around 9:30 PM that night.  I answered it and there is this twitchy, angry, and heated voice demanding to know if he had gotten me on the line.  Of course, I answered him in my usual respectful “yessir” as that was the way I had been raised to answer men.  He then demanded why I had written a letter like that to send to him.  I was immediately placed on my back-foot so to speak and shocked and startled at this obvious excessive response.  I am sure that I stuttered around a bit trying to answer him, but I told him that it wasn’t addressed to him directly but to a general audience of ministers.  I can imagine that I sounded very weak, timid, and shaky.  To say that he was pretty boosted up about it is an understatement.  The man was practically yelling at me on the phone. 

In his agitation, he then cranked up the threats.  “Boy, I will have your license!”  “Son, what gives you the right to address this kind of subject?” and “Do you know who I am?”  I didn’t until he told me who he was and I recognized the name as one of the old “so and so’s” in the organization.  However, his threats of getting my ministerial license were a pretty sobering and terrifying thought at the time because I had only had them a little over three years.  I was doing my best to cultivate a good reputation and make sure I did everything that was expected of me. 

I look back at it now and go to one of my old standbys about self-importance.  I have been known to observe that I have seen a few fellows who get up every morning and drink a big, tall glass of self-importance to start their day and some drink a gallon of it.  I first noticed that kind of behavior among some of the physicians and medical folk that I worked with in various hospitals.  Sadly, that kind of attitude can get woven into preachers.  But at the time, my youthful inexperience and panic had me by the throat.  It is quite funny now and has been for a long time, but it wasn’t that funny on that September weeknight in 1995.  “Boy!  I am going to call your district superintendent!”  At the time, it was Brother Roger Lewis who has now been in Mobile for close to sixty years.  That really scared me because I had known Brother Lewis since I was a kid.  He was and is very close to my father-in-law, Brother Joe Patterson.  “Boy, you better not ever write anything like this again!”  Even more fear was tightening up in me to say the least.  Then the old windbag hung up on me which even ratcheted up my imagination even more. 

In turn, I called Brother Patterson and told him what was going on.  He recognized the name of the person because of his long-time involvement in global missions and told me that it didn’t quite work like that.  No one could just threaten to take my license over such a matter without the action of the district board.  But he did tell me to call Brother Lewis to let him know about the call.  That was the next thing I did.  When I told Brother Lewis who the man was that called me, he started laughing.  I confess that I didn’t think it was too funny at the time.  His next advice to me was priceless and I suppose that to some degree I have taken it.  Brother Lewis said, “You want me to give you some advice?”  “Yessir!”  “Keep writing!”  Admittedly, I was a little shocked at that because I was certain I had violated some of the cardinal laws of ministry. 

Brother Lewis then told me that backstory about how there had been a moral failure that had been covered up and finally had come to light.  My letter had sort of innocuously found its way to one of the men who had been part of the cover-up, and he thought I was directing my letter toward him and his cronies.  I have written multiple times on the Barnabas Blog about this matter of moral failure.  My thoughts still remain the same to this day that if that particular sin finds its way into a minister’s life, he has disqualified himself from a public, pulpit ministry.  I have stated publicly and privately that if I fall to this moral stain, I will need to go back to the hospital and work there until my retirement date.  This kind of sin can be recovered from, and fellowship can be restored but ministerial function has been removed. 

As the years have passed both experience and age have changed my take on that situation of aggressive intimidation.  Looking back, perhaps the harvesting of email addresses to send out a general letter like that may have been wrong, however when positions of power are used to throttle a dissenting voice for such a matter it is troublesome at best.  Sadly, the old fellow has long since departed this life, but his track record followed him.   He left behind a very weak church that has been swallowed by the world, sin, and compromise.  Only a handful of people now attend it, but it was marred by the very sin that he got angry about me writing about.  Given time, the present people who attend it now are very elderly and probably only go there because that it just what they have always done.  That church will die soon enough, and this is a sad matter to me because it is in a place that needs a strong church.  In reality it started dying more than three decades ago when the pastor who called me started getting soft on sin.  He didn’t know it at the time, nor did I.  However, there are laws of the harvest that catch every single one of us.  Please make sure that what you are planting is the good seed that will sustain you in the future. 

After the last blog post, a pastor sent me a text asking me about the Chuck Swindoll list that I mentioned.  I pulled it from a letter that was written more than 30 years ago and then I repeated that list in another letter 26 years ago.  I personally think you should copy and paste it and get it laminated to carry in your Bible so it will keep your life grounded with a moral compass.  John and Charles Wesley would begin their meetings with the following questions:

• What known sins have you committed since our last meeting?
• What temptations have you met?
• How were you delivered?
• What have you thought, said or done of which you doubt whether it be sin or not?
• Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?

Chuck Swindoll's more contemporary list follows:

• Have you been with a woman anywhere this past week that might be seen as compromising?
• Have any of your financial dealings lacked integrity?
• Have you exposed yourself to any sexually explicit material?
• Have you spent adequate in Bible study and prayer?
• Have you given priority time to your family?
• Have you fulfilled the mandates of your calling?
• Have you just lied to me?

Over the years, I have used something that Chuck Swindoll said which ruins ministers.  Multiple times, I have used this in our district licensing seminar as well.  Silver, sloth, self, and sex will destroy a ministry and a life.  Keep that in front of your thoughts.  Every time you see a pack of M&Ms remember that money and morals are crucial in life as well.    

If you really want a list to stimulate your mind and soul, you need to track down the resolutions of Jonathon Edwards.  There are seventy of them and they really turn up the heat on your soul as far as keeping eternity in view. 

Thanks for reading. . .

Philip Harrelson