The advantages of looking like a preacher

Bob Rogers

Updated: Aug 21, 2009, 2:26 AM

Published: Aug 21, 2009, 2:14 AM

Somebody once told my associate pastor that I “don’t look like a preacher.” I’m not sure what that means. Did she say that because I have a beard or because I like to wear my blue jeans and baseball cap around town on my day off? Did she say that because I don’t have some stereotypical kind of stern or “holy” expression? I don’t know. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to look like a preacher. At least not until I heard Dr. Laurence White.

Dr. Laurence L. White, senior pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas, was speaking to the Washington Briefing for Pastors, sponsored by the Family Research Council. He stood up in his black clothes and white clerical collar, and looked over the crowd, most of whom were wearing business suits, and said, “I want to say something to you Baptists who have forsaken the traditional garb of the clergy, that there are some advantages to looking like clergy.’

Then he told this story:

Rev. White was late for a speaking engagement in Georgia and was driving way too fast when he saw blue lights flashing in his rear view mirror. He pulled over, and the state trooper pulled in behind him. A big man got out of the patrol car, pulled his belt up around his waist and walked toward Rev. White’s car, his hand on his gun.

When the trooper looked in the car and saw Rev. White, with his black coat and shirt and white clerical collar, he started to laugh. Rev. White thought, “Oh, no. He’s a Baptist deacon. I’m going to jail.”

But instead, the trooper leaned in, pointed his finger in Rev. White’s face, and said, “Forgive me, father, but you have sinned!” Then he gestured down the road with his hands wide open and said, “Now go, and sin no more!”

So there can be advantages to looking like a preacher (or priest).

The Bible says there is a clothing that all of us can wear that is greatly to our advantage. Job said, “I put on righteousness as my clothing” (Job 29:14, NIV). The apostle Paul tells us what that should look like: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (Colossians 3:12-14, NIV).

So a clerical collar can be good and useful, but righteousness is even better.

Copyright 2009 by Bob Rogers. E-mail brogers@fbcrincon.com. Read this column each Friday for a mix of religion and humor. For more “Holy Humor,” go to the Web site of First Baptist Church of Rincon, www.fbcrincon.com.

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Is there a church for a big woman with an itch?

Dr. Bob Rogers

Updated: Jan 23, 2014, 10:34 PM

Published: Jan 23, 2014, 10:36 PM

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!”

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