I read once where Abraham Lincoln died with articles in his pocket that spoke well of his presidency and his leadership. Those in leadership understand this gesture. Everyone wants to feel like they are making a difference and that they are doing a commendable job.

October is pastor appreciation month. It is a month where congregates are told to affirm their pastors. Through the years, not only in October, but all through the year, simple little notes and not so simple gestures have been enacted to affirm my own efforts in pastoral ministry. I actually keep the notes. They are in my tax records for each year; yes, right there next to the utility bills are the notes in a file collected all together. I do not keep them to re-read them. Hardly ever do I go back through and read any of them. But I see them if I poke around in an old tax year trying to find something. It is the visual equivalent to the vitamin for ministry-a shot in the arm to keep you going.

Quite a part from cards, I can remember some life altering encouragement which reshaped the trajectory of several situations. I remember once a few days out from going on vacation in the mountains of Tennessee that my car did not check out right. Because of the need for some special parts, my brakes could have potentially failed and my mountain vacation car was on the fritz. I went to the Saturday morning prayer meeting and we all prayed about it. I got a call later that afternoon that a local car dealership had worked out a matter and I was to pick up a new car for a week for my vacation. The kids were amazed. Their parents had their hearts filled with gratitude. The stories are legion. How much good beef have I eaten through gift cards of thanks through the years?

Some of the stories are funny. I had a lady once bring me her husband's camel sport jacket for dress. It was beautiful and it fit just right, seemed hardly warn. I wore it out. The first Sunday I wore it, it looked great. I wanted to thank the guy for giving it to me. I went right up to him and started the conversation only to notice her in the background gesturing me away. Come to find out, it was his graying hair and the mix with the camel jacket and her taste that was not working. He had no idea I was wearing his jacket...and she wanted to keep it that way. That is ethical tension. One time a group of anonymous families put together a coalition and had a "clothes horse" man take me to a men's store to spend the money on a few suits. I was flabbergasted. My heart was full of joy, until I began to contemplate just why this gesture had emerged. Was it about their love for me? Or was it, in the end, about their sense that I dressed like an idiot? I was afraid to ask. Was it grace or a referendum on my wardrobe?

Maybe another reason why these affirming gestures mean so much is because of the other comments that pastoral leadership receives. I cannot print what I have been told...about myself. Some one wrote a book once called "Well Intended Dragons". Maybe you have to be there in pastoral ministry to appreciate the title. Believe me the dragons are out there. It is their fire breathing feedback that makes one appreciate all the more the encouragement from others. I have had associates fight back their emotions as they repeated to me what they had been told. I have picked up the fragments of their vision of themselves and sought to glue it back together. That old "sticks and stones" proverb is a lie. After a while, you come to expect negative feedback and listen for the truth and do not take it so personal. As Warren Wiersbe used to say, "In time they shoot through the same hole. It does not hurt as bad." As Gordon McDonald encourages one looks for the kernel of truth in every bushel of criticism and grows from it and prays through it.

But thank God for the Barnabas-s out there that encourage. They are worth their weight in gold. I was particularly amused at a recent prayer meeting when a brother identified October as the month of pastoral encouragement. He charged the group to encourage the pastoral staff. He was waxing on in his challenge and he may have over reached when he drove the point home with "we need to really tell them what we think of them". It got real quiet and there was a lull...and then he quickly added "I mean, tell them something good." The whole room exploded with laughter. We laugh at times so we do not cry. Everybody knows there will always be those who take the freedom to tell them what they think of them...good or bad feedback. Thank God that the lion's share for me through the years has been encouraging. What a privilege it is to serve God's great family...the church of Jesus Christ.

The "at a boy" we in pastoral ministry yearn for is the last one, the one from the Great Shepherd of the sheep. We live and work to hear in the end "Well done, you good and faithful servant." Pray that we may order our lives to make that a reality. It is required of a steward that he be found faithful.

Bill Maher, late night comedian and recently minted social commentator was interviewed by Larry King on CNN last week. Maher's sarcasm and cynical humor is a hit with his following. He is irreverent and edgy in driving home the barbed ends of his humor. If you are on his ideological page he can be very funny.

The interview took place a few days after mega-church pastor Rick Warren hosted the presidential candidates for a discussion. Maher has a jaundiced view of what he calls "religion". His take: "It's not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die...They believe in this comic-book figure called the devil who's going to poke your ass in hell if you're bad."

It is healthy for the church to ponder her critics. Are we disinterested in the common good of society? That position is certainly off mission for Jesus. Luke said of him, "You know about Jesus of Nazareth,...how he went about doing good..." Acts 10:38. His ministry was certainly much more, but at root it was not any less. If a church is not concerned for the common good of humanity, they are not following Jesus. John Wesley, a follower of Christ from the 18th century, said, "Do all the good you can in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can." Maher is for Wesley's vision.

Jesus winsomely combined doing good with offering hope. He knew that what ails us at root is our sinful selfish heart. We need a change of heart. We need to be saved. Heaven is our hope. Hell is reserved for those estranged from God who could never stand being around Him. Dallas Willard said, "Heaven is for everybody who can stand it."

Hell is an obnoxious thought until you ponder the justice for which we all yearn. Everybody wants the murderer to face the charge, the rapist and the pedophile to face "the judge". The sexual trafficker will face "the judge of all the earth" (Genesis 18:25). Liars complicate our lives. Oddly, I am attracted to God by hell. Hell is God's response to evil. I want a God who gets ticked with evil. What I was less free to acknowledge for a while was the destructive seeds of evil present in my heart. I myself was estranged from God. How could that sixties slogan have become one of our culture's most deeply held convictions, "Hell no, we won't go!"? We still need a Savior from our culpable guilt before a holy God. Yes, Bill, we need to be saved. And the good news is still "there is Savior who has been born who is Christ the Lord!" (Luke 2:10). And the news gets better at Good Friday and Easter.

What critics with Maher are less willing to acknowledge is that these saved folk are the same people who are engaged in more work for the common good in America and around the world. Ask FEMA who provided the most volunteer labor in the aftermath of Katrina. Whole sections of the worst of New Orleans were given over to Franklin Graham's Samaritan's purse. Why? No one else could muster those volunteer armies. Those armies of the saved got their butts to New Orleans and found high joy in serving for the common good, and they would argue, for the glory of their Savior.

Sure, Maher is right. There are churches who are simply after saving their "ass from hell". But they are not following God's entire book. People do all sorts of things in Jesus' name that are not in the book. There is some pending justice for that as well.

Southgate is pleased to be a part of a band of volunteers from churches all over Springfield who find joy in serving others in Jesus' name and work for the common good of all of us. Bill, you protest too much! We do not need less engagement, our world needs more of these volunteers whose involvement stems from their gratitude for God's work in their life to save them from the eternal consequences of their sin. According to the book, when your butts are saved, you just can't help but pour your life into making life better for all in the name of Jesus Christ. And along the way, you invite them into life, forgiveness and peace through knowing Jesus Christ as Savior...in deed and in word!