I’ll never forget my first baptism as a senior pastor. And once you hear this story, you’ll realize how impossible it is to forget this event. Ten people were getting baptized and half of them had just become Christians in the first months of my ministry at this church. I was pumped!

I had organized the service in such a way that, after the baptisms were finished, the praise team would play a couple of songs to give me time to change and get back up to preach.^[1] Since I’d be the last one out of the water, I’d only have five minutes to change out of my wet clothes and into dry ones.^[2] To make this more difficult, the way the church was set up, after you left the baptismal tank, through a door that went backstage, you had to go down a spiraling staircase into the basement, across the Fellowship Hall and down a hallway to find the bathroom to change.^[3] It was ridiculous. So, I decided to change backstage. No one would be back there, as I’d be the last out of the water. I could drop my wet clothes into a bus pan and change into the dry clothes backstage, and then seamlessly walk onto stage when the music finished. It was perfect. And everything worked just as I had planned…, until I got a report after the service.

As the congregation was thinning out and heading off to their baptismal celebration parties, a single lady in her mid forties pulled me aside and proceeded to give me some ministry advice.

“Pastor Stef, next time you do something like that, could you please make sure you close the side door that opens to the room behind the stage?”

Apparently, I’d let everyone sitting stage right see a lot more of their pastor than they needed. And the fact that I didn’t see them, helps me deduct which side of me they saw.^[4] 

Why didn’t someone get up and shut the door? Maybe that would have drawn even more attention to the situation. Maybe it would have acknowledged that that person had seen me. Since this lady was the only one who ever mentioned it to me, I’ll never know how many other people I scarred on that day. But I’m sure the conversations around lunch were not about the sermon.   

 A few years later, at this same church, an incident occurred that revealed my ongoing discomfort with medical issues. I had just finished my book, Walking on Your Knees, about the Lord’s Prayer, when several boxes of the book came to the church office. As my friend and associate pastor Jonah began hauling these boxes out of the delivery truck and into my office, I noticed that my forearms looked badly bruised. I immediately started feeling dizzy and quickly found a chair to sit on to catch my breath. Trying not to pass out, I put my head between my knees and started my square breathing exercises. It was in this state that my associate pastor found me.

“Hey Stef. What’s going on? You alright?”

“No. Not at all.” I showed him my arms and in a weak voice replied, with what I believed was the most logical explanation of what was happening to me, “I think I’m bleeding internally. You’re going to have to take me to the hospital…, quickly!”

Jonah took a closer look at my arms. Then he looked at his own arms. Then he went over to the boxes we’d just brought in and rubbed his arms against them.

“Stef! It’s just the ink from the boxes we’ve been carrying.”

Yes. This really happened. And, sure enough, my associate pastor went on to use this as a sermon illustration without disguising who the panicking “internal bleeding” numbskull was.  

I did get payback though. During a staff meeting Jonah was complaining about one of the bathroom doors in the church sticking. He was worried that, if something wasn’t done, someone was going to get stuck in there. Later in the meeting Jonah then got up and went to the bathroom. I sprang into action with some of the other staff. We followed him and held the door shut. When he had finished doing what he had to do, he pulled on the door and it didn’t budge. He pulled again. Harder this time. It still didn’t budge. It took everything for us to muffle our giggles. Thinking we were still down the hall in our staff meeting, Jonah started hollering, “Hey guys. It happened. I told you someone was going to get stuck in here. Guys! The bathroom door is jammed. Hey, can you guys help me out!?”

I’ll finish with one more mirthy ministry story. It happened while visiting a senior in the hospital. While I was sitting at his bedside asking how he was doing, I noticed leftover food and a jug of apple juice on a table about a foot away from me next to his bed. My visit was around 1pm, and so I assumed it was leftover lunch that had yet to be cleared away. When we finished talking, and after I prayed for him, he then told me he had to go pee. I asked him if I should get a nurse. He said no. Instead, he grabbed the jug of “apple juice”, placed it under his covers, and started filling it up. At that moment I realized I had been ministering to him while sitting a foot away from a pitcher of his urine. I’m just glad I didn’t ask for a glass of “apple juice.” Where would we be without laughter? We’d be tempted to think too highly of ourselves while going crazy trying to play God and control the uncontrollable lives of the people we minister to. It’s good to remember that God chose the foolish things of this world (1 Cor. 1:27). It makes life and ministry much more joyful and endurable.                

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^[1] I know this may be surprising to some, but we don’t always pray and pick worship songs for spiritual reasons.

^[2] If we would have been pentecostal, these two songs would have given me about 30 minutes, but we were baptists.

^[3] Why baptists would put the change room so far from the baptistry makes me wonder if the building was built by paleo-baptising presbyterians. 

^[4] I thank God continually that this happened before the advent of cell phones. I’m even thanking him now, one more time, as I write this.