Peter SmytheIntelligent Holy Ghost Christianity

Yesterday I received an email that reminded me that being a moonlighting preacher is not all that bad.

A few months ago, my wife and I traveled up north to go to some Gospel meetings. We had a great time at the meetings as the pastor and his wife and their whole church treated us as part of the family. In fact, the pastor treated us to lunch and had us in his home for a home-cooked meal. Frankly, we were never treated so well in our home church.

A week or so ago we cut an offering check to the church for no particular reason (sometimes it’s good to do that). Yesterday I received an email from the pastor’s wife that said, in part:

Just yesterday I opened the church mail and received your check to the church. I just want to thank you for your generosity … . I considered it an encouragement from the Lord! At the same time as the meetings we had 5 families leave the church, so the extra encouragement was such a blessing!

Though the pastor founded the church some 18 years ago, it is still a smaller church so the leaving of 5 families must have been a big financial hit.

Given the kind of controversial stuff that I’ve churned up on this site (and I am still orthodox), the leaving of just 5 families would probably be a good Sunday for me. Thankfully I haven’t left my day job.

And my day job brings up another point.

If you’ve read about Ms. Elijah, you know that I had intended to go into “professional” ministry right after my Bible school graduation. After being vavoomed (you should read the post), I turned my attention to law school.

When I got out of law school, I made the “mistake” of thumbing my nose at the big firms to go to work for solo practitioner. My very first day on the job I wanted to either run away or just die where I was standing. The guy didn’t have a staff to speak of and his filing system consisted of laying all of the files on the floor with the clients’ names written on them with a big black marker. You literally had to tiptoe through the office to find the file that you wanted to work on.

Times were tough those first few months as I would go down to court time and time again to face the uppity big firm lawyers (yeah, the ones I thumbed my nose at) who were not only armed with 6-inch thick briefs, but also an entourage of young associates in expensive black suits and Matrix sunglasses (yes, they were actually carrying the big guys’ briefcases).

During those harrowing months and ensuing years, I heard it a million times, “Judge, you know that we’ve always done it this way,” or “Judge, Mr. Smythe has just come out of school and, well, once he gets some experience he’ll understand … blah, blah, blah.”

It took me a while, but I eventually learned that the law was the great equalizer. It didn’t matter if that Rolex-flashing lawyer had been practicing for twenty-five years, drove to court in a Ferrari, and was a mover-and-shaker in the downtown political scene. If I had the facts and law on my side, he was going to have to fess up to his country club buddies that the new kid working at that shanty-town office roughed him up pretty good.

When I hear phrases such as “but virtually every translator sees it this way” or “this has been the way we’ve interpreted it for years,” I think back to those old courtroom days (my practice is essentially the same today, but it is much more romantic to talk about those early days). It doesn’t matter how many translators translated a particular word this way or that way or how long “historic” Christianity has believed some something. The text is the great equalizer.

Many of our country club theologians have missed it in certain areas and their sacred cows not only need to be tipped; they need to be slaughtered. Sometimes it takes a moonlighter with moxie to raise the butcher knife as slaughtering isn’t a favored activity in our hallowed halls of professional ministry.

[Note: Yes, I do know that cow-tipping is a myth, but it makes for fun prose.]