236. Hyles Church Manual Examined - Part 3 - Bus Kids: Reaching People or Reaching Numbers?
Episode Notes
We take a deep dive into the Infallible Hyles Church Manual. We hope you enjoy.
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Transcript
So, I can't tell you how many goldfish I have swallowed through my time in the bus ministry. It started when I was in my church growing up. My pastor didn't go to Howell's Anderson.
He was an underjack house, but he was influenced by pastor school. So, we tried the goldfish thing growing up as well.
But, man, when you got to Howell's Anderson, it was serious. So, you had the goldfish, and the bus captains had to swallow the goldfish. And the beginning of every program, the first Sunday was Goldfish Sunday.
And so, I had to – it was hard to do, man. So, I had to kind of get a little system down. So, here was my system for swallowing the goldfish.
I would get the goldfish, and I would put it facing down, like swimming down, and hold it there with my tongue and kind of swallow it and chase it with a Mountain Dew.
Because that was the only way I could get it down. Now, I had some – because if you swallowed it the wrong way, if you swallowed it thin first – I found out the hard way. If you swallowed it thin first, it would swim back up your throat back into your mouth.
So, after that happens a couple times, you learn to swallow it with the head facing down the gullet. And so, I learned that the hard way. So, you swallow the Mountain Dew, swallow the goldfish. We do that so much.
And the bus captains had to do it, and I was a bus captain. But I had other workers that just wanted to do it just because they wanted to do it. And I had some people,
man, they would take that goldfish, and they would chew that goldfish up and then put the goldfish on their tongue.
And then walk around and show all the kids the chewed-up goldfish on their tongue. So, we're going to talk about goldfish. I got some goldfish stories.
Welcome back to the 4-Freedom Podcast. We're so glad you're here today. Let's see. It is fall time, but it definitely doesn't feel like fall time. James, I saw something that our good buddy J.C. Grove posted on his story, and it was interesting to me because later that day,
my music director and her husband are going out of town.
I asked them where they're going, and they said they got a cabin in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They're going next week. And I said a friend of mine, I'm talking about J.C., just posted that the hottest heat dome in the world right now is over Chattanooga, Tennessee.
It's the hottest place on earth right now. And they're heading for it. I know it's fall time, but it definitely doesn't feel like fall weather.
We've been eating chili and soup, and we've got our fall colors out, but we're still in short sleeves and shorts. But that's just the way it goes. And then we're supposed to get a really bad winter this year, too. Yeah, Brett, you know, maybe they're in Chattanooga.
They're in Catoosa County. Maybe they're closer to hell. Or Jesus. Maybe that's the reason that that's happening there.
We've been waking up here, and it's been in the 60s. Man, it's been great morning weather.
It's starting to actually feel like fall. Now, in the afternoons, it's like 99 degrees. But we're waking up in the cooler weather.
So, J.C., maybe you need to do something about that. Maybe your preaching is not hot enough. Maybe you're not preaching hell out fast enough to get that heat bubble away from you. Or maybe he's preaching too hot. Maybe he's tearing it up down there, and that's why it's so hot.
Love it. Love it. Man, so things have been going well here. We have a full swing of ministry and fall season.
I've got a board of directors meeting. I've got revivals coming up. I'm preaching like the entire month of October. So I'm starting to plan out that. But, man, life is good. Life is doing well. Our family is healthy. We have just been staying so busy.
And I love it. Love every bit of it. My wife may not love it as much. Yesterday, she was running everywhere, and I was running everywhere.
And I'll be at the church all day today until tonight. We've got a financial readiness meeting tonight. And so, yeah, but it's been crazy. How are things in the Martin household?
Man, things have been going well. We've got a great Sunday planned this Sunday. We've got a music Sunday. We've got some musicians in our church, and we've got some singers in our church.
We've got a whole Sunday planned of just music. I'm still going to bring the word at the end just a little bit. But most of the service is going to be special music. And we just wanted to have a music emphasis Sunday. And so we're looking forward to that. And then the next Sunday is our homecoming revival.
And I have Sunday morning, I have Sean Parker. He's the executive director of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board. He's going to be preaching our homecoming service. And then all the way through Wednesday night, we've got a different executive from the Baptist Board going to preach for us. And the whole revival, the theme is Mississippi on Mission.
I've been planning this revival for two years. You know, when you want to book the executive director of your state to come to your church, you've got to do it two years in advance.
And so I've had this in the works for a long time. And I'm definitely looking forward to our revival coming up. But everything, man, everything else has been going good. You know, my family's scattered.
You know, I'm here at the church, and my wife's offered her job. I've been my, I got one son in college, and he got him a job at Sonic. And then I got another, another teenage son.
He got him a job at a chicken farm, picking up dead chickens. And so he does that every day.
And listen, when you work at a chicken farm, it's seven days a week. There's no days off. I bet it smells really nice when he gets home too. Oh yeah.
He's instructed to take his shoes off, leave them outside, and go directly to the shower. Yes, I have many chicken farmers at my church.
And they have built, most of them, when they were building their houses, their wives were smart enough that they went ahead and built in a mud room that's not even really attached to the house. And so they come in, it's got its own little vent. They strip down to their underwear.
They've got their own washer and dryer in there, so it doesn't even mess with anything else. They strip, they get dressed into another outfit, and then they leave, they come back into the house. And so they're not bringing anything from the chicken farm into the house. And so they live very regimented.
You got to take precautions when you live around chicken farmers like that. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
So man, but yeah, it's been good. A couple of housekeeping notes. This is a way you can support the podcast, a way you can help us continue to do what we do on a daily basis, weekly basis here.
I want to thank all of our listeners, man. You guys have been really sharing and popping these last episodes.
You guys have really done well, and I want to thank you for that. Another way you can support, we don't have a Patreon. We don't have anything like that.
But what we do have is we have a cigar company. It's a way where we can give glory to God through a smoke and through an enjoying sit down with one another and enjoying that together. Maybe you're looking at a Christmas gift coming up or a birthday gift coming up.
We want to give you that opportunity to go on there and support us that way. And then I've also produced two different books, From Brokenness to Freedom and Freedom from Depression.
And so if you haven't picked those up, thank you for those who have. But if you haven't, they're available.
The link is in the show notes. And I'm just excited to see what the Lord's going to do with those resources that he's laid on my heart. Amen.
And I don't think we have any. I tell you what, did you get the email about the hotels for the convention next year? I just got that email where I'm looking forward to going. Of course, the convention is a year away. I don't think we have anything else going on.
We're just ready to be here, ready to talk about our subject this week and looking forward to it.
Well, you know, something that sort of came up a little bit, Daniel Wynn reached out to us and said, Hey, you guys plan to meet up. I'm there. I'm down. And so I'm going to be in Tennessee October. Let me see the dates here. 22nd, 23rd and 24th.
And so if you are nearby there, you want to swing by and see us. We're about to be about an hour south of Nashville. I'm going to have several boxes of cigars there for our conference. I'll be selling, selling my book as well.
And we're going to have a great time just being together. If you want to come and hang out, shoot me a message. My number's everywhere on all of our website and everything. And we'll try to get together.
Daniel, drive on up to Nashville. See me and John. And I got a buddy of mine named Andrew that's going to be there. And so come on by and see us there at Nashville if you want to meet up with us. Absolutely.
Yeah, that might be something I can go to as well. Yeah, dude. Come on, man. We'll be great. I'll have to check that out.
All right. Well, hey, let's jump in to today's episode. Welcome to the 4-Freedom Podcast.
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Welcome back to the 4-Freedom Podcast. We are continuing to walk through the Howe's Church Manual. Today we're getting into a chapter and something that's become almost synonymous with what the Howe's ministry and really the generation of independent fundamental Baptist ministries.
As a young person, as a kid, my church had a bus ministry. I'll share a little bit of this story before we jump into it. My mom and dad ran a bus route with John's mom and dad.
My dad was the bus director. He helped with Chuck, John's dad.
And I was born on Thursday, Brett. And I kid you not, I have a picture and a video of this. My mom's got it somewhere. I've seen it. I'll have to find it for her and put it out. I was born on a Thursday. And that next Sunday,
December, what, 7, 8, 9, 10, December 10th of 1988, I was in my car seat on the bus, picking up bus kids to come to church on a Sunday morning.
My mom was driving the bus. She had just gave birth to me three days before that. And she's up there driving the bus away, picking up kids.
My dad's leading the bus as a bus captain. And so I have been a part of the bus ministry literally since I was born. Our church burned down.
They sold all the buses. And my, I think I was 16. And so it was about 10 years the church went by. They gave up the bus ministry. They sold everything.
And we had a guy that wanted to start it back. And so he asked me to help.
He said, I'll drive it if you lead it. And I said, I don't even know what I'm doing. I've never even heard of this thing called a bus ministry. And he said, it's in your blood, man. You were there as a baby. You got this. He was encouraging me.
And so we went out. And I'm telling you, I have witnessed and evangelized for a bus ministry.
I have never seen so much oppression against the bus ministry than when I started that bus route back. And this is the reason, Brett. I was going around and I would be knocking on doors and I'd be inviting people.
And there was a lady, and this is really what I can really stem it to, who I knocked on her door and invited her and her family to come to church. So we'd come by and pick her up. And she said, what church do you go to?
And I said, Gospelite Baptist Church right down the road here. And she said, why in the world would I ever let my kid go to your church? And I'm stunned.
I'm like, what are you talking about? And she looked at me and she said, as a little girl, your church picked me up and brought me to church every Sunday. And all of a sudden, one Sunday, y'all stopped picking me up because the church burned down and we sold everything. We moved buildings.
We abandoned the bus ministry. And she said, why would I put my daughter through the emotional damage that you put me through of no one ever coming and picking me back up for church?
And I just stood back and I was like, man, Lord, you have put us in a hard place. They made decisions.
And I looked there and I said, listen, I'm sorry that happened to you in the past. I was a little kid when that happened.
I'm just a teenager now wanting to bring some people to church. But that story over and over and over again happened because we stopped doing what the ministry was there for.
And so I say all that because this episode is going to be a little bit different. We're tempted to always say that everything that Jack House did was automatically terrible.
And there are some things that were, but that is not what we're going to be doing today. There are something admirable about the church saying there are children whose parents aren't bringing them to church. These are poor families without transportation and their communities that churches have forgotten.
So you know what? Let's buy some buses, recruit some workers and go into the communities and bring these kids somewhere where they can hear about Jesus. You know, Brett, I don't have a problem with that. In fact, I wish more churches had that kind of evangelical fervor and urgency about going out and reaching people for the cause of Christ.
And what we discover through working through this manual is that you can have a really good mission built on an unhealthy system around accomplishing it.
And this chapter that we're going to look at is another look at a system because once again, we're going to encounter numbers, attendance, contest, programs, and pressure.
And there's something different about this episode because Brett, as you were reading it, and as I was reading it, you actually went to House Anderson. You were part of this system. You were part of what happened here.
You participated in the world. And some of what we're going to be talking about today isn't simply what you read in some old church manual, but it's something that someone experienced and lived through their life. Right.
Exactly. So I was there. I was at First Baptist Hammond for several years and at House Anderson College. And, you know, I've eaten a many ago.
I've swallowed a many a goldfish. I've been there through all the Sundays and the programs. And that's I think that's what made this chapter hit me differently.
You know, when I read the other chapters, there's certain things I recognize because I was around that culture, man, when you start talking about the bus ministry, I've been there. I'm just like you.
I was I started out as a bus kid in church. You know, I was I was a little kid riding the bus route.
And then they made me a bus captain when I was a teenager. And, you know, then I went to went to House Anderson.
And I wasn't even out of my first semester at House Anderson. And they made me a bus captain. And so I was just been in the bus ministry for a really long time. But I've been involved in it. I've been in those neighborhoods that Jack House is writing about.
So I'm reading House explain the philosophy behind this whole thing while remembering what some of those years look like when I was a student at House Anderson College.
But, you know, I do want to put a big qualifier on this from the beginning. When I talk about what I personally experienced, that that's exactly what I'm claiming.
This is what I personally experienced. I'm not claiming that I know everybody's motivation. I'm not saying that everything was done for some sinister reason.
I'm sure many people are sincere. And a little bit later in the episode, we're going to get into some kind of racial dynamics. And I'm certainly not going to sit here and claim I know what was in somebody else's heart. I don't.
But what I can tell you is what I saw compared with the philosophy, compared with the philosophy we're reading about in the manual and then ask what we're seeing lines up with the biblical philosophy of ministry.
So we want to see if these two things line up. And also, I want to say this right out the gate. I like the idea of the bus ministry.
I mean, if there's a kid out there who wants to come to church and mom and dad aren't going to bring him, our church can safely go get him, bring him to church, love him, teach him the Bible,
tell him about Jesus. I'm all for it. We just, you know, recently this past Sunday, we took up an offering for a church in Nicaragua, a church in Central America to have a church van.
And so, you know, I'm all for that. But my concern isn't that they went after these kids. My concern happens when reaching people gets mixed together with an obsession for producing numbers.
And when I tell you, there was an obsession with numbers and how Zanderson numbers was the game. Numbers was what it was all about. Brett, you know, as you were telling the opening monologue about the bus ministry and how the idea of the bus ministry is such a phenomenal thing. It really is.
And I'm watching a docuseries right now on YouTube. One of my pastor or one of my members let me watch it or shared it with me.
Um, and it's on the, um, the end or the corruption of the contemporary Christian music CCM, um, and how big media has taken over it.
And, and all throughout his nine episodes, he's got one more left, 10 that's about to come out.
And, uh, I think we're going to probably do something on that just to talk through music a little bit, but all throughout his episodes, this is what he continues to come back to.
Everything that started started out of a good response, but eventually led into a bad reasoning behind it and, and bloomed into a big, um,
you know, just corrupt system. Uh, the, the main one that I can think of is the, the CCLI, the licensing to, for churches to be able to stream music in their services or print music. It started because of a lawsuit that happened, um, back in the early seventies for a Catholic church.
They were, they were being sued $3 million. And so the response was, let's start a licensing feature for churches to do. So they don't all get sued $3 million from these people.
Well, then as it has evolved, now there are 230,000 churches that are giving millions of dollars a year to this organization to protect them that ballooned into this massive thing.
And this is what happened with the bus ministry. You know, house actually gives us plenty in this chapter that we can compliment. He talks about going into housing projects, apartment complexes, trailer parks, poor communities, rural areas, and communities that are geographically isolated.
In other words, this is what he's telling us. Find people who aren't being reached and figure out how to reach them. You know, that's the missionary instinct. Churches have a tendency to become comfortable.
They build a building, they put a sign out front, the highway, and then they wonder why lost people aren't showing up at 1030 on Sunday morning.
Well, you know, Jesus said to go. He told us that the Great Commission requires movement and to be on mission for a reason. And whether I agree with everything that house did or not, these people were willing to go places where other people were not going. I myself was willing to do that.
But I can remember going into the housing projects here in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and going in and I met the grand ma, the grand pupa, the entire place.
And she was sitting in there, big old black lady, and she's making fried or collard greens and cornbread.
And she's got it all smelling good. And I knocked on her door and she said, come on in here, white boy. And I was like, dude, what is going on? Like, I'm stunned.
I don't know what's going on. And I sit down and I hate collard greens to this day.
But she threw a bowl of collards in front of me with some cornbread. And she said, eat up. You're a little too skinny for me.
And I'm like, I don't know what's going on. Like, is this lady, is she like about to take me? Like, I don't, I've not been in Hot Springs long. And so I'm super nervous.
And all of a sudden, I tell her what I'm there for. I'm telling these little kids about Jesus. I'm trying to pick them up. And she goes,
oh, you're from a church? We don't get anybody from a church down here. And I said, yes.
I'm picking up some kids for a bus. She said, you just come by my apartment on Sunday morning. And I'll have 40, 50 kids out here for you. She said, I know all these kids. And so all of a sudden, I'm like, okay.
So I didn't go by anybody else's house. I just told Brother Mark Cantrell, Mark, we need to go by apartment 5B in the projects over here on Hot Springs Avenue.
And we're going to have some kids. I don't know how many. We pulled up, Brett.
And I'm telling you, the bus was already full. And there were like 40 or 50 kids standing outside this latest house. She had called all these mamas.
And she told them, there's some people that are going to pick your kids up. And you're going to have them here. And all of a sudden, we built in this project area.
And every time I saw her to this day, she's dead now. But every time I'd see her, she said, there's that white preacher coming by and get those kids. All right. And so that was the mindset. We did it for a good reason.
And we came out of that mold. And, you know, the story at the end of this chapter, I think, is where Howes gets absolutely right, was absolutely right. A well-to-do member complains about the bus children and asks them, what are we going to do with all these children? And he responds,
I don't know what you're going to do with them, but I'm going to love them. And the man basically says, if they stayed, I'm leaving. The kid stayed. The guy left.
And Howes says that he felt like they got better, that they got the better end of the deal. Now, I'm with Howes on that one.
If your biggest problem with ministry is poor children that are coming to your church and you're afraid they're going to mess up your building and mess up your walls and mess up your comfortable little environment, then bus kids
and reaching the community of lost people probably isn't the best thing for you. Exactly. You know, absolutely. If somebody came in my office and said, Pastor, we got to do something about these poor kids coming in here because they're loud. They don't know how to behave. They're messy.
You know, they're messing stuff up. They're messing up our walls. They're wearing hats in the auditorium. You know, I'm probably going to tell you the same thing that the Howes told the man. You know, we're going to love those kids no matter what. Yeah. You know, so congratulations to Jack Howes.
On that note, he officially gets an amen from the 4-Freedom Podcast.
Right. Because, you know, even a, you know, don't get used to it, though. You know, we're not going to get used to giving Howes an amen. You know, like we said last episode, even a clock is a broken clock is right twice a day.
But seriously, I think it's important because I don't want us to manufacture criticism where criticism isn't warranted.
There's some there is some really good stuff here in this chapter. Even practical things that he says about making sure, you know,
children aren't left wondering around. Having adults take them to their classes. Getting them back to the correct bus. Taking them back to the same place where they were picked up. Watching them until they get inside the house. That's responsible ministry. So the problem isn't bus ministry.
I mean, with our background, we love bus ministry. But I think the first sentence of this chapter tells us something about the philosophy underneath it. Howes says, quote,
one of the fastest and surest ways to increase Sunday school attendance is through the operation of buses. And after the chapter that we covered last episode, that immediately got my attention because we're back to focusing on attendance.
We're back to numbers. We're back to growth. Now, listen, numbers aren't inherently bad.
We count people at our church. The book of Acts counts people. But there's a difference between counting the people you're reaching and reaching people because you want the count. You know, once the number becomes the definition of success, the ministry will naturally start organizing itself around producing a number.
Brett, you know, I think that that's one of the strangest sections in this chapter because it becomes really super important because Howes tells you how he would start one of these routes. He says he would go into the neighborhood,
find some children playing, get them all around. He would tell them that they, you know, how would you like a 30 mile all expense paid bus trip to watch Bozo the Clown or some other famous character that would entertain them. Once he had the children excited, he would then approach their parents.
He talks about providing hot chocolate and donuts in the morning for breakfast and recreation and activity. And then he says something that's revealing. Remember, you must sell them on yourself first.
You're a door-to-door salesman. Now, I'm not against donuts. I'm not against fun. I'm not against trying to make this attractive for children. But the language is interesting because suddenly evangelism sounds a lot like salesmanship.
He's not talking about the gospel. He's not talking about church. He's merely asking, we're not merely, he's not merely asking, how can we serve these families?
What he's asking is, how do we get them on the bus? And those are not automatically the same question. You can get a child onto a bus because there's a clown, breakfast, prizes, something exciting that's going on this Sunday. It doesn't necessarily mean you're reaching that child.
Getting somebody onto the bus is only the beginning.
Jesus doesn't tell us to go into the world and get everybody onto the church property. He tells us very specifically, go into the world and make disciples.
Right. And somebody is going to hear us say that and immediately go to Paul saying, I am become all things to all men that I might by all means save some. And I understand the principle.
But, you know, Paul didn't say I became Bozo the clown to the children. I might by all means fill a bus. You know, there's a difference. I don't think Paul would have a problem with giving a kid a donut either. The issue isn't whether you use something enjoyable to make contact with somebody.
Promotion isn't the problem. The issue is what you're ultimately trying to produce. Listen, if Bozo gets him on the on the bus, fine. Now what? Are we going to know that kid?
Are we going to know his family? Are we going to preach Christ to him? Are we going to disciple him?
Are we going to care about him six months from now? Are we going to care about him when there's no contest going on? Because if the entire objective is simply we have thirty five hundred in Sunday school and fifteen hundred came on the buses,
then the child can very easily become a statistic in somebody else's success story.
And that's kind of where this gets personal for me, because when I was at House Anderson, there was definitely a distinction between the bus kids at City Baptist and the Hammond Baptist kids that go to the church.
And I mean, you've had this conversation before. Yeah, let's spend some time there, because even for me at the end of my time at Champion, this was beginning to happen at Gospel Light.
While we were there, everything was together. But at the end of my time, they began separating and having a bus kid Sunday school and a bus kids children's church. And this is where some of this most important things come out.
You told me and I'll share with you that Chicago children coming in through the bus ministry were predominantly minority children.
While the Hammond Church children were predominantly white. And from your experience, those weren't simply two groups of children arriving at the same church, becoming one group. They were separate Sunday schools, separate children's churches and even separate Christian schools.
Now, we need to say this again, that we're not assigning racial motives to people. We don't know their motives. There could have been a legitimate logistical reason why hundreds of children coming from Chicago needed a different structure. But I think we can still ask a theological question without pretending to read anyone's heart.
If we're willing to travel all the way to another community to reach these children,
what does it actually mean to bring them into the body of Christ once we reach them?
You know, the gospel doesn't put us into two different categories, one from one background, one from another, one from one church, one from another. Ephesians 2 presents something so much more radical where Christ tears down the dividing walls and creates one people group. James 2 condemns this specifically based on economic status.
The early church had to work through an enormous tension between Jews and Gentiles because they were becoming one family and one unit.
And so there's a difference between saying we have a ministry for those people and saying these people have become a part of us. You know, and that's one of the things I look back on now, and I wish I had thought about it more when I was there.
However, the bus kids had their thing and the Hammond kids had their thing.
The bus kids school was City Baptist, which is while the church kids generally attended another, while the bus kids attended another Christian school.
And again, I'm not telling you that every one of those distinction was created because somebody said let's separate people by race.
I have no basis for saying that, but I can look back and ask whether the structure itself was producing the kind of unity that we see in the New Testament. Because here's the question that bothers me.
At what point does a bus kid stop being a bus kid and simply become one of our kids?
You know, if a child rides your bus for years, hears the gospel, professes faith in Christ, gets baptized, grows up in your ministry. Is he still somebody from Chicago that your church ministers to?
Or is he your brother in Christ? Is he part of the family? The Great Commission isn't about creating a permanent class of people that we evangelize from a distance. We're supposed to make disciples.
Disciples become a part of the body. And the church ought to be one of those few places in this world where people who would never naturally belong together look around and say, Hey, that's my brother. That's my sister. You know, Jesus made us a family.
We're from all different walks of life. But one common thing holds us together, and that's Jesus Christ. Yeah.
And there's another part of the story that I want to talk about as well, Brett. You said that most of the years that you were there, you weren't allowed to go into certain predominantly black neighborhoods. Most of your regular work was predominantly Hispanic areas, correct? Correct.
But when it came time for major attendance days and promotions to be done, suddenly you were allowed to go in those black neighborhoods.
You've also said that you heard safety given as the explanation of why we're not going to go into those neighborhoods.
Neither of us know any safety concerns or reason of why we're not going to go there. But part of the reason, or even the entire reason, we're not even going to pretend to know. But there have been many legitimate concerns about sending college students into particular areas.
I believe JC had shared it when he was at Temple.
They were called Orange Districts or Orange Groups of People or something. Orange Groups or something. Some color they had assigned to that.
But, you know, we're not even granting that. We want to give sort of an obvious question. If an area is too dangerous for an ordinary ministry, why does our willingness to enter that area change when we're trying to break an attendance record? And I don't think there's primarily a racial question to hear.
I think it's a ministry philosophy question. We've already seen it in this manual, how much emphasis piles places on the big days, the contest, the records, the attendance.
And so when the geographical boundaries of ministry suddenly expand around a big day, it's fair to ask the question, to ask it this way. Is the attendance goal, is it influencing who we pursue and when we pursue them?
All right. And that's exactly where I am with it. I don't know why the policy existed. I'm not going to sit here years later and say those people were racist. That's not something I can establish. But I know what I personally experienced.
And the thing that sticks out to me even more than the neighborhood is, you know, those Chicago high rises they talk about all the time. If you were around House Anderson, you heard about those high rises.
They're part of the story. And we're reaching Chicago. We're going to these places. They're bringing kids all the way back to Hammond. And it communicated this idea of incredible commitment to reaching people that nobody else was reaching.
But my personal experience was that we weren't going in those high rises week after week throughout the year. We especially hit those places around big attendance days.
And when I combine that memory with what I'm reading in this manual, the contest, the promotion, the emphasis on increasing attendance, it makes me ask a question I didn't know to ask then.
Were we going into that community because we wanted a long-term relationship with that community? Or were we going into that community because there are a lot of potential riders in those buildings? You know, I mean, I can't answer for everybody involved, but I think it's a question worth asking.
Yeah, and I think it's a good question to ask because House gives us the reason in his own manual, in his own words. He explicitly recommends competition between buses. He says that children are easy to excite over a contest. Winning buses can receive prizes.
He tells of an occasion when a child from a winning bus were taken to the airport and each child received a five-minute airplane ride. Again, nobody is saying take a poor kid to an airplane is wicked.
We might have been one of the, that may have been one of the greatest days of that child's life. And the concern is what's happening when the child becomes part of the competitive system that's designed to increase attendance.
This becomes especially sensitive because House specifically tells churches to target poor areas and housing projects.
If you're working with children that don't have much, a child, I'm sorry, a prize, a special trip,
breakfast one morning, or some other incentive may have been an enormous persuasive power.
Christians should be generous to those children. But generosity says, I want to give you something because I love you. Manipulation says, I'm giving you something because I need something from you. And I believe this is the line that our churches need to guard.
I believe even looking at this, and if you think back just to the last season, we did our whole Jim Jones episodes and we did a deep dive into Jim Jones.
He uses these same tactics that Howells Anderson, I believe Jack Howells took from Jim Jones and used them himself to go into a very deeply poverty stricken area and give them incentives to, hey, sell everything, give it to
me. And I'll take care of all your needs and we'll move away and we'll take care of everything.
Right. You know, and that distinction is huge. You know what? Feed the kid. Buy him Christmas presents. Take him somewhere. Help his family. Do all of that. But do it when nobody's counting.
You know, that's the test for me. Would we still go into that neighborhood if there were no big day? Will we still give that kid breakfast if he didn't help our bus win a contest? Will we still visit that family if there weren't an attendance goal hanging over our head?
Because if I'm only passionate about reaching your neighborhood when I need your body sitting in a seat on Sunday morning, I'm not sure that I'm loving you. In fact, I'm pretty certain I'm using you. And that's where numbers driven ministry can become dangerous.
Even when everybody involved thinks they're doing something good, we can convince ourselves that anything is justified because we're, quote unquote,
reaching people for Jesus. But biblical ministry doesn't just ask whether the goal is good. It asks whether our methods and motives honor Christ as well. Yeah.
You know, there's another part of this chapter that connects with what we've seen throughout this manual, and that's the role of the pulpit. Howell says one of the best ways to recruit bus workers is through preaching. He describes preaching on the bus ministry, giving an invitation,
having more than 40 people volunteer and then organizing them immediately afterward.
And then he says we should never forget the inspiration of the pulpit is the most important thing about building any phase of a church program. Later, he says the pulpit should be promoting the bus ministry constantly. And you can't have a hot bus ministry and a cold pulpit. Now, I'm a pastor.
Obviously, I believe preaching should move people. I preach about evangelism.
I preach about serving. I preach about missions. But there's a subtle distinction that matters. Scripture should drive ministry. The ministry shouldn't drive scripture.
If every time I need volunteers for something, I use the pulpit to put pressure on people. Eventually, preaching becomes the motivational arm of the pastor's program.
But that's especially important and significant when you combined it with the other chapters we've covered so far. This isn't simply a pastor occasionally saying, hey, we need some bus workers. Hey, we've already seen the emphasis on loyalty to the pastor.
And so now we need to support the entire church program. Attendance, expectations, centralized leadership.
And now the same pulpit becomes the place where the pastor continually generates enthusiasm and manpower for a program. 2 Timothy 4.2 tells us, Timothy, preach the word. That doesn't mean biblical preaching has no practical consequence. Of course it does. If you faithfully preach scripture,
Christians ought to evangelize. They should give. They should serve. They should sacrifice. They should do things above and beyond for Christ. But the pastor's job isn't there to ask what part of my organization needs help this week. And how can I use Sunday sermon to get people excited about it?
The difference between this is the word of God is producing ministries and the pastor is using the word of God to produce workers for his ministry machine, as we looked at last week.
And to think that a machine is the right word, because when you put everything in this chapter together, you can see machinery beginning to take shape.
It's almost like an assembly line of you do this part, and then we're going to move to this part, and then this part, and then this part. This is an assembly line of how to build a ministry, a machine.
You know, I've said this several, several times on this podcast, and I'll say it one more time. The biggest lie that Jack House ever told was his philosophy of ministry. Yeah.
In the short semester that I was there, I probably heard him give that philosophy, and I was only with him for one semester before he passed away.
And I probably heard him give that philosophy over and over and over, and he said it all the time, and it was, I will not use my people to build my ministry. I will use my ministry to build my people. And that was the biggest lie that he ever told.
He would use his people to build his ministry all the time.
And listen, one piece of evidence itself might be perfectly innocent when we put all this together. You know, buying a bus isn't a problem. Keeping attendance isn't a problem.
Giving a kid a sausage McMuffin isn't a problem. Having a contest isn't automatically a problem. Setting a goal isn't automatically a problem. Having a special Sunday isn't a problem. But now let's put all the pieces together. You identify concentrated populations where you can pick up a lot of people efficiently.
You recruit workers from the pulpit. Those workers go door to door. You track every rider. You contact absentees. You constantly promote attendance. You run competitions between buses.
You give prizes. You have big days. You push for records. You expand into additional areas when you need a bigger number.
Then everybody arrives Sunday morning and you count the result. And at some point, ministry can stop feeling like shepherding people and start feeling like operating a production line.
And the problem with the machine is that that machine has to keep producing no matter what. Yeah. My dad worked at Freightliner for many years.
He retired from there. He was the maintenance guy at there.
And he told me, he said, even when the shift wasn't going, we as the maintenance crew still had to be there because the machines were still running.
And someone had to make sure that nothing malfunctioned and blew up because it was easier to keep them running 24-7 than it would have been to stop them and then restart them later. And this is what happens with the ministry and the machine. I saw it.
I stayed at Champion and Gospel Light throughout the summer when all the college students exited stage left and all the workers that you had for the college were gone. And I was left there working,
trying to pay my bill and save some money. And all of a sudden I turn around. I'm the only one doing ministry. I'm like, where are all the church people at?
But all of the ministry was done through the ministry of the college students that were there.
And this is once the institution has established this bigger equals better, everyone inside the institution knows what success looks like. More riders, more professions, more baptisms, more buses,
more attendance, bigger, big days. And this is where 1 Corinthians 3 gives us such a healthy understanding of ministry. Paul says, I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.
Think about how freeing that is. Paul is saying, I have a responsibility, but I do not control the results. The ministry machine says it like this. If we use the right technique, apply enough pressure,
offer the right incentive and work hard enough, we can produce the numbers. Biblical ministry says we preach Christ faithfully. We love people faithfully. We serve faithfully. We plant, we water, and we say, God, it's all in your hands.
You give the increase. We can produce attendance. We cannot produce regeneration. We can produce an aisle response. We cannot produce conversion.
We can fill a bus, but there's absolutely no way we can manufacture and produce a Christian in and of our own work and self. And when you look at Jesus,
you know, he doesn't seem nearly as impressed with the crowds as the modern Christian church does. John 6 is the perfect example of this. Jesus feeds 5,000 people. And if you're measuring ministry by success, man, 5,000 people, men, women, 5,000 men plus women and children.
I mean, you're looking at 15,000, 20,000 people. I would put that on my church sign, right? I fed 20,000 people with five loaves and two fishes. But then Jesus begins to teach some difficult truths. And by the end of the chapter, many of the people who have been following him leave.
And John 6, verse 66, if you're a numerology guy, don't get too caught up in all the sixes there, says many of his disciples turned back and no longer decided to walk with him. Now, Jesus doesn't panic.
He doesn't bring the disciples in and say, disciples, look, look, look at the attendance graph. We're going down.
We're going in the wrong direction. We need to do more. We need to change the message. We need to preserve what we've got the crowd. You know, where, where's the kid with, with the desserts? Let's, let's break the desserts and get them back with some donuts. He doesn't say that.
He looks at them and he's trying to never produce this impressive number.
He looks at his followers and he says, are you going to genuinely follow me? And that's what Jesus is asking. Right. He doesn't run after them and say, wait, come back next Sunday.
Hey, we're, we're giving away free fish sandwiches. Or, you know, we, we, we, we got Bozo the clown coming to Jerusalem. Everybody get on the bus. He, he doesn't do that.
You know, that, that story, all he's, I love that story that you just told because, you know, they're after him because they want the, they want the, they want the fried catfish. Um, and he knows it.
So he turns around and says, you want something to eat? You want something to drink? Eat my flesh and drink my blood. And then they left him. And so that's, that's a, that's a great story in the book of John. Listen, Jesus preached to the crowds. So crowds aren't bad.
Acts records thousands being saved. So growth isn't bad. We're, we're pastors. I want my church to grow. I want to baptize people. I want to see people saved.
But if my definition of success becomes the number, eventually I'm going to be tempted to compromise something in order to protect that number.
And we've seen that all through this IFP movement that we were raised in. That's why Jeremiah can preach faithfully for years. While people still reject his message and still be a successful prophet.
He, he would have been a bad bus captain, but he was a great prophet because God's measurement of success is faithfulness.
Just like you said, I'll say it again. We plant, we water, but it's God who gives the increase.
You know, if I were building a bus ministry today, I think I'd, I think the question I constantly put in front of our people would be what happens after they get off the bus. Don't just tell me how many rode the bus. Tell me their names. Tell me about their families.
Tell me what they're learning. Tell me who's discipling them. Tell me whether mom needs help.
Tell me whether dad's here has been hearing the gospel. Tell me what happens when that child becomes a teenager. Tell me whether that teenager has a place in the youth group. Tell me whether that young adult can eventually serve and lead in this church.
At some point, that person has to stop being one of our bus kids and simply become one of us because that's what the gospel does.
Yeah, and I think that's where your experience and my experience in separate ministries becomes more of a historical observation. It really becomes a warning for every single church. It's actually easier to minister to people than it is to share life with people.
One of the things that me and my wife love to do, we do it often. We bring families over on a Sunday morning or after church or a Sunday night or even a Saturday night, and we'll just share time with them.
We'll share our life. We'll bring them into our house. We'll let our kids play outside. It's extremely emotionally taxing to do that.
But when they walk away and we walk away, we have just felt so much love and attraction for those people because we've shared our life with them. We've allowed them to see all the messiness that we have inside of that.
We can create ministry for poor people without ever having poor people truly integrated into our church.
We can create ministry for another ethnic community without ever building genuine relationships across an ethnic lines.
And we can congratulate ourselves for reaching people while keeping enough distance that our own comfortable church culture never has to change. The New Testament church Christianity is messier than that. The gospel creates a family out of people who ordinarily would not belong together. Different geographics, different denomination, different demographics of people.
And so maybe the measurement for successful bus ministry isn't simply how many people you can bring in.
Maybe it's how many people stop being the people we minister to, and it becomes the people we worship beside. And ironically, I think Howes gives us the sentence that we ought to end with.
The wealthy church member that began to ask him the question, what are we going to do with all these bus kids? And Howes looks at him and says, I'm going to love them. And I believe that's the right answer.
If we're going to say that, I think we've got to take it all the way. It's not we're going to love them when it's a big promotion day. It's we're going to love them when there's no attendance campaign. We're going to love them when there's no other bus competing for any other reason.
We're going to love them when no one's taking a picture of our packed bus for the magazine or the book that's about to come out.
We're going to love them when no one outside your church knows their name or knows that you're serving them. That's when you're going to love them. And that's when we discover whether the people was actually on the mission or whether the person was helping us accomplish another mission.
You know, and that's where I land, too. If a bus helps you reach people with the gospel, run the bus. If a sausage McMuffin helps you minister to a hungry child, feed that child. If transportation is keeping somebody from church,
go get them. If there's a poor neighborhood, everybody else has forgotten. Go into that neighborhood. By all means, do that. But, you know, go when nobody's counting.
Go when there's no trophy. Go when there's no contest. Go when there's no attendance record. Go when there's nothing you can put in the church bulletin the next morning to brag about.
Because the question isn't ultimately how many did we get? The question is, were we faithful with these people that God has put in front of us?
And if we're willing to go into somebody's neighborhood because we need them for a big day, but we aren't willing to enter their life when there's nothing they can do for us, we need to seriously examine what we're calling ministry.
You know, bro, one of the things that I have had to retrain myself in ministry is to know that people aren't numbers. Children aren't statistics.
People are made in God's image. And if they come from Christ, they're not bus kids. They're brothers and they're sisters.
And our goal should not be to build a bigger ministry, to build the biggest bus ministry, to build the biggest whatever ministry you have, worship ministry, whatever it may be. The goal shouldn't be to break all the attendance records and to be the largest church ever.
Our goal, I've said it before in this episode, and I'm going to continue to say it, our goal should continue to be making disciples. You know, and I think I'm going to end this episode with taking Jack Kyle's philosophy statement, and I'm going to rearrange it and restate it.
Don't use people to build your ministry. Use your ministry to serve people.
I think that's the difference. Thanks for listening to the 4-Freedom Podcast. We want you to stay grounded in scripture. Keep Christ at the center.
And, man, this has been a good episode. James, what you think? Man, it's been great. I'm glad you tuned in with us all the way to the end. Like I said before, if you can go and support us in any way possible, go and do that. We appreciate it.
And until next time, to God be the glory. Great things he has done.
Found my new name. Found that good grace. Found that healing. And the tears fell down my face. When I found my beginning. That has no ending. Found that second chance. Found my best friend. Found my forgiveness. Found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom in you.
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