+ Great morning at church today.

+ The Mets lost this afternoon.

+ The gym kicked my butt late afternoon.

+ It was the morning that mattered most out of all that of course.

+ It has been a challenging few months for us as a church in many ways, but an outstanding period in others. I felt like this morning we turned a corner. It was an outstanding day.

+ The music rocked at both campuses, with Todd Davidson and his band bringing it in Ronkonkoma (that’s him above) and our good friends from Lamb’s Chapel were terrific in Mastic.

+ I preached the third part of the series Confessions Of A Veteran Pastor, talking about What Gives Me My Biggest Buzz.

+ I get my biggest buzz when someone who was lost comes to faith in Jesus and that happened in both places today. Great day – heaven’s partying and I’m celebrating too.

+ Looking forward to Sunday evening meetings later this month with new folks from Ronkonkoma and from Mastic.

+ Surprised at how many new faces we’re seeing, especially since it’s the height of summer and of vacation time too.

+ Can’t believe the Mastic campus is almost one year old. That has been quite a ride.

+ We talked a bit about baptism today. Celebration Sunday will be September 12th and we’ll be baptizing that day. More than 60 people have taken this step since last November and we’re looking forward to adding to that number.

+ Man, this was a good day!

As I mentioned yesterday, we had some amazing times during the years I pastored Cairnbulg Assembly of God, like baptismal services at the shore that attracted unbelievable crowds. A newspaper reporter estimated there were 3,000 people at one, but there was no real way to verify the number.

Yet while there was a lot of very good stuff going on, there were tensions in the background over the direction in which I was taking the church, leading to my resignation in October 1984.

The remote nature of the community was to lead to a major dilemna. A substantial amount of people in the church actually liked the livelier services and the more contemporary approach I had introduced, but they knew that my departure would leave the pendulum to swing way back in the opposite direction to tradition and sterility.

They were not going to find another church that offered the style they had come to embrace and they did not want to go back into history. So what were they to do?

Several of these good people shared their problem with me and I realized that while I could well walk away (though I did not want to), they lived here and there was no live church around. Person after person kept telling me they could not settle in the church that would now move backwards and I prayed a lot about what to do.

Don’t ask me where I got the number, but I came to the conclusion that if 40 people asked me to start a new church, I would. 40 did and we launched Inverallochy Christian Fellowship in the village school with 112 people present for our opening service.

I led ICF for the next seven years and those were some great times. Sitting here now I think of the people who came to Christ, of the ventures we got into, of the dreams we shared together.

We used to baptize – in the sea of course – every month and each month there were new believers ready to take that step. We weren’t that polished and our Sunday meeting place wasn’t that great, but God did some amazing things in the Cotton Hall.

Of course there were tensions with the Assembly of God, which really was not far away at all. The situation was not ideal, but in an ideal world, I would have still been in a thriving Assembly of God and we would be moving forward in leaps and bounds. When that door closed another opened and I thoroughly enjoyed the ability to actually lead and to be innovative without being bound to the way things had always been before.

We had no history so we were able to simply build a future.

Fifteen years in one very special place was a blessing from God.

The first time we drove into the conjoined villages of Cairnbulg and Inverallochy in the far north east of Scotland, I turned to Gill and said, ‘I could never live here.”

I guess God laughed because in the summer of that year, 1976, it became our home and I began pastoring Cairnbulg Assembly of God – the third and final congregation I would lead before leaving the denomination. It was probably the remoteness of the community that freaked me out on that first drive down the main street, Rathen Road. Little did I know that it would be our home for the next fifteen years, the place that our children would grow up and the setting for the greater part of our most treasured memories of family life.

I love that small village, nestled beside the North Sea – and really expected to spend the rest of my life there. It was quite a move from that tiny rural community with a population of around 1,600 people to living within easy reach of the capital of the world, New York. But I’m jumping ahead of myself.

It was definitely intimidating for a young pastor, not quite 26 years old, to take the helm of a strong, established church like Cairnbulg Assembly of God, which had a reputation within the denomination for being a bastion of very solid Bible teaching. I was set to preach four – yes four – times every week to a congregation known to have a very good grasp of Scripture, so I studied hard and long.

I was a sermon machine, spending hours poring over my Bible and study books throughout the greater part of every week. At least I had a great place to work, with an office in the church manse (parsonage) we lived in, that looked out over the local golf course and the North Sea – great view. All that studying has served me well down the years.

We had some good times at Cairnbulg Assembly of God and some serious challenges too. It was encouraging to see some of our teens really get a hold of God – some of them have been in ministry themselves now for years – and it was gratifying to watch the church grow until we were bulging at the seams on Sundays. For our main service, which was Sunday evening, we had extra seats down the aisles and overflow seating in the fellowship hall where you could watch everything through a huge glass window while the sound was being piped through.

I loved pastoring in a place where I knew everyone and they knew me. While small communities all have their own quirks, the blessings of living there outweighed any of the negatives by a long way.

However, in the 1970′s in rural Scotland, change was often looked upon with suspicion, especially in church life. So while crowds were coming to our services and people were coming to faith in Christ, there was an ongoing tussle with the church board, who preferred the style of church they had been accustomed to before my arrival and the innovations that followed.

The way that church was structured seriously limited the amount of leading a pastor could actually do. The ultimate decision was always made by that small group of laymen, who were good people, strong Christians but who had neither the calling, ability or experience to pastor a church.

I pastored that church for 8 years and have much to thank God for as I look back over them, best of all the special people who are still a part of my life.

The tug-of-war with the traditionalist lay leaders and myself proved to be a draining, stressful backdrop for me to all that God was doing.

After several years of this pattern, I felt unable to continue with such tension and so with great sadness and a huge reluctance, I resigned as pastor in October 1984.

In the end, it was not a good fit at all. There’s no way a progressive visionary belonged in that structure. Please do not think I am implying anything negative about the good people who were the decision makers in that church, because I am not. We were just not on the same page and were never going to be.

Chapter 2 of our time in Scotland was very interesting indeed …

+ Now that was a very full day!

+ Just got back from Manhattan. Our son, Jonathan, was with us for the weekend and he’ll be in the city with his work for the next few days. Dropped him off at his mid-town hotel earlier this evening.

+ We watched some of the Mets game on TV earlier – they stunk today.

+ But in the world of way more important matters, we had a great morning at both of our church campuses.

+ This was Taryn Martin’s first Sunday leading worship for us in Ronkonkoma and she rocked. Great job. Excellent worship time. It’s a pity she has already got several commitments on Sundays in August, but when summer is over she is going tro be a great asset to us moving forward.

+ Unusual to see so many visitors on a summer Sunday – interesting to see what God is doing.

+ One of the big events of the day in both services was hearing feedback from our youth missions team, who spent last week rebuilding homes in New Orleans (that’s them in the picture above). They didn’t really say a lot about how they worked like stink in temperatures of a thousand degrees, they all seemed to be more stoked about what God had done in their own lives. Fan-tas-tic!

+ A number of them had come through to a real commitment of their lives to Christ. This, good people, is why we do what we do. Fabulous testimonies from fired up young people.

+ I preached the next part of the series Confessions Of A Veteran Pastor, admitting that I barely know what I’m doing. I suggested that we take the advice Joshua gave Israel in Joshua 3, when he said they were going down a road they had never been on before – Keep your eyes on God; Keep clean and Dream big.

+ Super-impressed again by all our volunteers today. Special shout out to Joey DiCola who came off a 12 hours shift in Brooklyn at 5.00am and then came straight back to drive our equipment truck over to Regal Cinemas and unload all our gear. That’s commitment, outrageous commitment.

+ Cut my arrival in Mastic real close. Arrived in the theater just as the worship set ended – was technically late, but that’s the first time in almost 11 months and I think I got away with it.

+ Good service over there too. Looking forward to our Meet The Pastors night with all the new folks on August 22nd. Need to do one in Ronkonkoma too right after Labor Day.

+ This has been an interesting year so far, high enery and high stress. But when I see teenagers as fired up for God as I did today, I realize you can’t buy that.

+ I’m exhausted and elated.

My first pastorate behind me, in the fall of 1972 we packed all our belongings and headed south to Yorkshire where I became the pastor of Bethesda Church in Swallownest, a village nestled between Sheffield, Rotherham and the M1, with a major road running through the middle of it. The “we” I speak of included the new addition to our family who had arrived earlier that year, our first child Charlotte Elizabeth, born in Dryburn Hospital, Durham in the early hours of February 9th.

Bethesda had been in the community since 1934. It was not a huge congregation – though double what there had been in Birtley – and never had been. It was a solid, steady church whose previous pastor had retired and they were now looking for younger leadership. They got that – I was 22 years old.

We were in Swallownest for four years, living in the manse/ parsonage right next to the church building and while my ministry seemed to help a number of people, I know I learned a lot too.

1. I learned that for a church to be effective it must harness technology. It almost sounds laughable now, but back then a radical move for us was recording our services on new-fangled cassette recorders and taking the recording to people’s homes so they could hear it. No fast-copiers in those days, but it worked.

2. I learned to do what is right and live with the consequences. I hit some major issues within the church and being a novice, this was the first time I had ever come across them. I knew that to deal with them would rock the boat, but I did what I had to do. Good leaders don’t shy away from tough decisions.

3. I learned that as Christians we speak a language of our own. I still smile when I think of the new believer who kept raising her hand during my Bible studies to ask questions. Truth is, I was preaching in a whole other language and was certainly not communicating with her.

4. I learned that getting kids out of their home setting for a week can be life-changing. We focused a lot on our children’s outreaches in Swallownest, much as we had in Birtley. My policy was to see regeneration from the ground up. During those years we spent some marvelous weeks at Bonsall Camp in Derbyshire and saw a lot of kids get really anchored in Jesus.

5. I learned that living beside the church is not a good thing. I became the odd-job man, the boiler lighter and the security guard. It also meant that whenever something was missing from our kitchen, it was probably because I had taken it over to the church kitchen to be used there.

6. I learned the incredible blessing of having good friends living nearby. For some of the time we were in Swallownest, my friend Ian Jennings was pastoring in nearby Doncaster. We loved having him and Barbara so close, but sadly after some time he moved on to another church, in south Wales. Weird note here, Ian is now the Anglican Rector of the parish that includes Swallownest.

7. I learned that God often opens unexpected doors to ministry. While I was in Swallownest I started receiving invitations to speak at conferences and conventions in other parts of the country, so that while Bethesda was my focus, I was able to function in a wider arena too.

Those were four good years, not spectacular, but solid which fits with the character of the church. I was invited back to Bethesda in the late 70′s to speak at the dedication of their refurbished building – and the photo above is from then.

While the past nineteen years of pastoring have been spent here in New York, I started out a world away at the Assembly of God in Birtley, County Durham, England. Both the town and the church had seen better days. With the pits closing down all around, this coal mining community was suffering incredibly high unemployment. The church to which I had been called now had 30 people at Sunday services whereas some years before that number was nearer 300.

It was July, 1970. There were challenges all around.

I only pastored that congregation for two years, but I learned a lot of things in that time.

1. I learned that God always provides. We had to get by on an understandably meagre income and yet we could tell story after story to this day of how God helped us through time and again.

2. I learned that however much some church members say they want things to change, most of them really don’t. All they want is a different outcome, but they want to continue to do things the same way. Pardon me, but isn’t that the definition of insanity?

3. I learned that people may applaud your suggestions, but that doesn’t mean they’ll lift a finger to implement them. Like when we agreed to change the seating layout in the church and had to move 300 fixed seats that had been screwed to the floor for decades. In the end I did most of it myself – without any power tools.

4. I learned to prioritize young people. We developed a strong children’s program and got a teen ministry under way. One of those teens is now a prominent church leader in the UK – not that I’m claiming any significant part in that.

5. I learned that the first benefit of Bible study is to the person doing the studying. We never had much of a crowd at our mid-week teaching services – like four to six people – but I put everything I could into them, so the time spent in God’s word enriched me.

6. I learned that preaching three times a week demands a whole lot of preparation. We had two Sunday services in addition to our Thursday evening Bible Study. I was a sermon machine, rolling them out. It was another world from preaching a couple of times a month which I had done prior to and during Bible College.

7. I learned that friendships keep you going. It was so good to be able to compare notes with friends from college who were starting out in ministry too. So good to know I wasn’t the only one finding it far tougher than I had imagined. And it’s great that we’re still connected to this day.

8. I learned to appreciate the other churches in the town. The local ministers’ fraternal reached out to me, inviting me to join them for their monthly meetings and I came to value each one of them – even dear old Father Joseph who couldn’t offer a closing prayer at one of our get-togethers because the poor guy had not brought a prayer book. Jesus doesn’t want us to be isolationists.

9. I learned to ask for advice and input from pastors around me who had been at it way longer than me. I gained so much benefit from men like Herbert Harrison over in Newcastle, Clyde Young in Sunderland and George Stout in Gateshead. They had a lot of time for this roookie pastor and were genuinely interested in being there for me. Guess that’s why I enjoy paying that bit forward nowadays.

10. I learned that you put in a lot of hours every week as a pastor. For the first couple of months I kept a time sheet, because since I was my own boss I wanted to be sure I worked a fair number of hours. I gave that up after a very short while and have never needed it since. I don’t make the mark on every level, but I am no slacker.

When we left Birtley in 1972, the church was marginally stronger but in all honesty not significantly different. Yet I was different. My training was continuing – out there in the real church world.

+ I sat in this chair a couple of hours ago and honestly don’t expect to move far from it before I go to bed early this evening. The Mets are not riveting viewing right now, but they’re a great excuse to sit and do nothing.

+ Our missions team has arrived safely in New Orleans, all 21 of them. Praying they have a great week serving victims of Katrina and in turn being built up themselves.

+ This morning officially launched me into my 5th decade of pastoral ministry. I guess this could well be the last, which doesn’t mean I’m planning an exit strategy. Just saying I don’t know where I’ll be physically, mentally or whatever else when I turn 70.

+ We were stretched thin with volunteers in Ronkonkoma today, with a number of key people vacationing or committed elsewhere, but we pulled it off. Good service.

+ Very happy to have Randy Altschuler share with us at both campuses. He’s standing for Congress as a Conservative/Republican in November. Great guy, principled guy, smart guy. Looking forward to seeing him elected and representing us in Washington.

+ Matt Margiotta has been leading worship for us in Ronkonkoma for most of the past two months. Love the guy. Great spirit, gifted worship leader – sadly he’s headed back south to school soon, so today was his last day with us for a while.

+ Over in Mastic Todd Davidson was back leading worship. Looking forward to seeing a bit more of him in the future.

+ 40th Anniversary cakes at both locations, but I swear I never touched a single piece. How’s that for self-control and the awareness of my WW monthly staff weigh-in tomorrow?

+ Enjoyed reading cards from some of the wonderful people that I am privileged to pastor. They really are too kind.

+ Started the teaching series Confessions Of A Veteran Pastor by talking about pushing through self-doubt and insecurity to achieve what God wants us to. Gideon was a great model of that. As the preacher said, God often takes a situation that is impossible and makes it plain ridiculous. Then he brings us through.

+ So, here’s to the past 40 years and now let’s get into the next 10 … and beyond?

Tomorrow morning I will get up early and do what I have done for exactly forty years this weekend, go preach at the church I am currently privileged to lead.

I’ll write a bit more about those years over the next few days as I’ve been thinking through some of the things I’ve learned in each congregation I’ve served, but for today I want to say how grateful I am to God for the joy of spending the whole of my working life to date doing something I love to do.

My life has been full of people – it has been all about people – and there have been outstanding folks alongside me every step of the journey.

Tens of thousands of pastors leave the ministry every year and the fact that I have kept going is nothing whatever to do with my being some kind of superhero. It has everything to do with the support I have received from three special people who have been with me for all or almost all of these years.

I would not be pastoring myself today if it were not for the love, support and encouragement I have received from the woman I met in Bible School, married before I graduated and who was with me from day one. Gill is a remarkable woman and a wonderful wife.

My two children have also been a source of great encouragement and support. They were born into a pastor’s home of course, but they have been my biggest cheerleaders all along the way.

I may be the pastor, but I couldn’t be that without them.

+ It’s 4.30 in the afternoon and I have been awake for more than 12 hours, but there’s still a lot of Sunday ahead as we fly out to Dallas this evening to spend a few days with Jonathan and the kids. Grandchildren are the best!

+ Not sure why I woke up so early, dozed off a bit around 5.30 I guess and then overslept by 15 minutes. Maybe I should havve just got up at 4.00am? Nah!

+ Loved the morning at Church At The Movies. Two great stories coming.

+ The first is that I met a first-time visitor who had run into one of our guys in the Apple store during the week. He was wearning one of our Keepin’ It Real church t-shirts and she was curious about it. She even took a photo! That conversation brought her to our Ronkonkoma campus this morning. Keep wearing your church shirts – and keep talking.

+ In Mastic I met a first-time guest who has just moved here from Missouri. I forget the exact wording, but he had found us by Googling something like Churches without church buildings. And it brought him to us. Seemed he had a good morning too.

+ Rohan did a first-rate job of leading worship for us in Ronkonkoma. He was clearly a bit nervous to start with, but he soon got into his stride. I’ve seen him do it loads of times in India – the guy’s good. Thanks to Matt for taking Rohan’s spot on the drums today.

+ Frank finished off our Family Matters teaching series with some superb stuff on parenting teens. The man’s a star. I maybe should be embarassed that we have such a wealth of teachers in one church, but I’m not!

+ Had friends with us from India overnight. They are visiting relatives upstate and came to see us. It was good to catch up with them and enjoy lunch together at The Curry Club.

+ Our set-up team really cranked it out in Ronkonkoma – they were outstanding.

+ Prayed over our New Orleans missions team, leaving next Sunday to help down there. 21 people all set for this adventure and another 13 headed down to Haiti six weeks later. Gotta love folks who get it.

+ Did I say Frank was great today?

+ Wish I’d heard that stuff when our kids were teens. I think they survived our amateur child-raising efforts anyway. Well, I’m extremely proud of them.

+ Fulfilling part of my promise to myself for this year by making more time for the family. I only got to see Ben and Emily once last year and that was not enough. So I’m going to give them my undivided attention for the next four days. I see plenty of swimming in my future.

+ Okay, time to shower and get out the door. An on time flight must be about due for me by now!

Looking forward to what I expect to be a long and rewarding day tomorrow as I make a one-day visit to Washington, D.C. An old friend I haven’t seen for several years, David Baird, is the lead pastor of www.thelifechurch.me just outside of the nation’s capital and I want to spend a few hours picking his brain.

My longstanding friend, Wally Odum, has made The Life Church his home base as he continues an exhaustive traveling ministry of encouraging pastors and churches all over the country. So I’ll get to hang with two great guys, eat some good food, reminisce, put the world straight and address a subject that is front and center for me right now – discipling new Christians.

David, like us, has been blessed with a continuing stream of people coming to faith in Jesus and I have been impressed by some of the things I’ve heard about how he helps these converts get grounded in the Christian faith and in the local church. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I figured maybe some of the things they’re doing well at The Life Church would be transferable and would work in NY. So we’ll see.

Road trip starts just after 6.00am and should end around 1.00am Wednesday.