Dan's Thoughts

Pastor Hardwick #3 - July 27th, 2005

Pastor Hardwick has lived in Nashville, Tennessee for almost 900 years. He has been a pastor to stars. He is a friend to some very powerful people. Bishops and governors have sought his advice. He is very highly regarded by numbers of church leaders, some of whom strongly disagree with him on doctrinal or political matters. However, if you ask him to tell you something about himself, he will inevitably begin by saying, “Well, I’m just a Holy Roller kid from Finley, Tennessee. I like catfish and I enjoy talking to people. I guess that just about sums things up!”

That speech used to bother my wife. We would have been with someone really important when the pastor would have said something like that. Later, on the way home, she would ask me, “Why does he do that? He is really smart. He is a wonderful pastor. Why does he put himself down like that?”

It’s taken us a long time to realize that he wasn’t putting himself down. He was just acknowledging his “ground.”

In one of the old Greek myths, the hero lost his super powers every time he got disconnected from the earth. That’s true for everybody, I think. We have to keep our hold on who we are with one hand, however high we try to reach with the other. If we inflate our sense of identity with our accomplishments (or with our own P.R.) we will lose our connection with the ground, we will fall. To use our Lord’s words, “when the rain comes and the floods rise, the house will fall and great will be the fall of it.”

Steven Covey wrote a book called The Eighth Principle. In it, he says that no organization can succeed for long if its leader does not remain grounded. In other words, the leader must know who he or she is, must display a consistency of words, deeds and principles, and must deeply believe in and must personally reflect the values of the organization he serves. Without this sense of “ground,” the greatest talent, the most impressive education and the most charismatic personality will not allow him to move beyond the momentary dazzling performance of a few sporadic bursts of false starts.

We are not just spiritual creatures. We are material creatures too. If our health fails, we will be unable to create art, preach sermons, and write books -- or evangelize Tibet, for that matter. Our material existence is our ground. If we lose that ground, our idealism, spirituality and artistic ambitions will have no vehicle through which to move and to make themselves known within the material world. Ideas are mere sparks in someone’s head unless the thinker has enough discipline and ability to put flesh on them – to “ground them” in other words, in the world of matter.

Through the years, Pastor Hardwick has worked upon keeping our church grounded. As spiritual fads have come and gone, he has read the Bible, prayed and served our people. He has also done “unspiritual things” – such as making sure we were not spending more money that what had come in, getting the grass cut, asking us to paint a dingy wall, and constantly learning about leadership and management.

I used to marvel when people (me included) would be talking about visions and dreams, theories and “fresh moves of God” and so forth, he would listen for a while and then say something like, “have any of you ever been to Sylvan Park on the days they serve that pecan pie?” We would all just stare and wonder what planet he was on. What was really happening was that someone had the good sense to touch the earth before we all floated up, up and away!

A lot of good churches, full of smart, sincere and godly people, have failed. The leaders of many of these churches had faith, goodness and authentic piety. What they lacked was a “ground,” a deep understanding that we are material creatures connected to the world of time and space, whatever our spiritual experiences. Three issues catch churches like those off guard: demographic change, financial mismanagement, and generational transitions. All of these issues are related to our inescapable human condition. Churches lead by real “spiritual” folk fail when they refuse to acknowledge human realities like these. Spirituality cannot survive the elimination of the material ground upon which it rests and out of which it must grow.

Our pastor loves God and lives a godly life. He is well read, pious and upright. But he has also insisted upon keeping his feet firmly connected to dirt. He is, in the words of Paul, “rooted and grounded.” He thinks common sense is simply a way of cooperating with creation. He believes that honoring common sense is a way of acknowledging that God created us to be material as well as spiritual creatures. Thus, he views a flight from materiality as a distraction from God’s design, however “spiritual” the journey may look.

That may sound like a lot of circular talk but believe me, it has been one of the greatest blessings of my life.

Our church is a lot of things to a lot of people but underneath all the impressive stuff is the ground on which the church was constructed: a boy from Finley talking about the glory of God and the shear goodness of eating catfish with good friends.

When he reads this, he will thank me. Then he will say, “Try not to be so abstract. It needs to be more practical.” And, of course he will be right.

Dan