How to Swallow Your Pride

How to Swallow Your Pride
JOSHUA 9: 22- 10: 11

In the church where I was a young assistant pastor, I shared a house with an older man called Charles who in U.S.-speak would be called the janitor but in Brit-speak was called the caretaker. I don’t remember how he had been appointed, but it was common for someone to get such a job by an ordinary job-hiring process; it wasn’t required that he or she be a churchgoer. The same was true about the janitors/caretakers at the church we belonged to just before we came to the United States. Apparently the theory was that they didn’t need “spiritual” qualifications for this kind of work. The same applied to the organist at a church we belonged to in between these two—more surprisingly, because you might have thought that involvement in leading music was more of a “spiritual” business. In all these cases, I felt a bit uneasy about the arrangement. But in two out of the three, I watched the people concerned become more involved in church life as time went by...