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Preacher jumps into lake to catch a fish
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A Mississippi preacher once jumped into a lake and grabbed a 12-pound bass with his bare hands!

Warren Whitaker, pastor of Fort Adams Baptist Mission in Woodville, Miss., was at a Big Bass  Championship tournament at Lake Fork, Texas. He hooked the large-mouth bass with a tequila-colored worm. “He screamed so loud I thought he was a hog caller,” said a nearby fisherman, J. D. Green.

Then the bass wrapped his line in standing timber. What should the preacher do? He could have given up, deciding it was not God’s will for him to catch that fish. Instead, he decided the Lord would have him to do everything possible to reel it (or pull it) in. After all, there was an $18,000 prize awaiting. So he stripped down to his boxers and jumped into the water, rod in hand. While Green tended his boat, Whitaker felt the line with his toes, but realized the fish had wrapped a second time. Then the big fish bumped him on the foot. He came up for air, and shouted, “Man, that fish just bumped me and I’m going down to get her!”

Whitaker dived in again, spotted the bass underwater, grabbed it by the tail, bear hugged it to his belly, and hauled it in.

Jesus told some other fishermen who had a great catch that if they would follow Him, He would make them into “fishers of men” (Luke 5:10). The Holman Christian Standard Bible translates the verse this way: “From now on you will be catching people!”  How pleased God would be, if we all had the same urgency to reach people for Christ that Preacher Whitaker had to reach that bass.

Brother Whitaker would agree. I know that because I know him. I was the first pastor of Fort Adams Baptist Mission, and he came as pastor of the church later. Fort Adams is in a sparsely-populated rural area, but that didn’t prevent Whitaker from trying to reach people, and today his church is a thriving congregation of about 100 people. He believes in reaching out for people the same way he reaches for fish. He doesn’t wait for them to come to him. He knows it is his calling to go after them. After all, Jesus told us to “Go out into the highways and lanes and make them come in” (Luke 14:23, HCSB). Christian, are you fishing for men?

(Copyright 2011 by Bob Rogers.  E-mail: brogers@fbcrincon.com. Read my blog at www.holyhumor.blogspot.com)

Is there a church for a big woman with an itch?
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A pastor was called to be guest preacher at a church. He knew this church was different when the congregation ended every line of the hymn with the shout of “yeehah!”


As he stood to preach, he noticed that people were spread out on the pews. He would see a person, then a space, then another person, and another space. He wondered why nobody sat next to another person, when he noticed on the pew beside each person was a cowboy hat.


Another time this same preacher was invited to a new church in the city. He was surprised to see that everybody there looked like they had fallen face first into a tackle box, because they had piercings and earrings on every part of the body imaginable. A rock band was playing alternative music on the stage.


As different as these two churches were, they were both growing and reaching people for Christ.


Years ago I was pastor of a small country church in the backwoods of Mississippi. There was another Baptist church just five miles away in the town (population 600). The pastor’s wife at the town church asked me, “Why don’t our two churches merge?” I said, “There are people in my church who would not feel comfortable or fit in at your town church.” She said, “Oh, come on. We’re a small town church. What could be so different?”


I said, “Well, I got one really big woman in my church who, when she gets to feeling an itch, she pulls her dress halfway up and she scratches herself.”


The eyes of this pastor’s wife got really big and she said, “I see what you mean.”


I forgot to tell her about another woman in my church who saw a roach running across the wood floor, so she stomped on it with her bare foot, laughed and shouted, “Aha! I got him!”


Yep, the culture was definitely different where I was pastor.


Jesus upset the religious establishment because He crossed cultural barriers. He loved to eat with tax collectors and Gentiles and other strange people. Jesus walked into the land of Samaria, full of half-breed Jews who worshiped in weird ways and talked different and smelled different.


Jesus walked right up to a Samaritan woman at a well and started talking her language. He accepted her culture, but he let her know her sinful lifestyle had to change. Soon she had the whole town following Jesus (see John 4).


So what cultural barrier is keeping somebody in your community from hearing the gospel? If you tear down the cultural barriers to share Christ in your neighborhood, you may hear the angels shouting, “Yeehah!”


Copyright 2014 by Bob Rogers. Email: brogers@fbcrincon.com. Read this column each Friday in the Herald. Visit my blog at www.bobrogers.me.