10 Aug In Search of Leaders

My greatest concern is finding leaders to assign to churches. I get resumes nearly every week, but few of them I believe would be the kind of people I want to assign to one of our churches, because their experience shows that they’ve never led or grown anything. I think our single biggest need is to have enough of the right quality of people when we need them.

Years ago, if you started in a small church and kept your nose clean and didn’t ruffle feathers, you got promoted to a little nicer church. Then, if you continued to keep your nose clean, you got promoted to another church.

I think that kind of approach to assigning churches is terrible. But it’s all we knew and what everybody was doing, so I don’t condemn anyone for doing that. But to find people who are leaders, you really have to do some recruiting. It’s something I didn’t take the time to do as bishop–go to seminars, talk to professors, see who the top students are, build a relationship with them, see if they’re interested in doing something with us.

06 Aug What Lies Ahead for Ron and EJ Ramsey

Well, I moved the last of my books out of the office over the weekend. I will complete a few loose ends over the next two weeks and then I will go to Greencastle, Pa., to preach at Macedonia UB and at the Rhodes Grove Camp Meeting Aug 16-20. Those will be my last duties as Bishop.

Many have asked what I am going to do in retirement. So I thought I ought to respond.

For the first couple of weeks, I plan to do very little. I am sure I will become involved in some projects around the house. This will be the first time for many years when I will not have a job to go to in the morning. But I believe more than my job defines my life.

First and foremost, I will still be a follower of Jesus Christ. I hope to have the time to read and study in detail a few topics for which I have a great interest.

I look forward to spending more time with my wife of 49 years, EJ. For all our married life, I have held a job and a great deal of the time she has been employed as well. Next to Jesus, she is the love of my life and I look forward to the time we will have together.

I haven’t been a “person in the pew” since my days in Wheaton, Ill., with Scripture Press. EJ and I look forward to finding a church home where we can serve in our areas of giftedness and interests.

Moving is also in our near future. Don’t know where yet. We had hoped to have a house purchased way before this, but so far nothing. We don’t know what the Lord is trying to say to us, but at this point we are still looking. We have leased a house from Huntington University for the past four years and we need to move out ASAP.

Every time we have moved, EJ and I have talked about the need to rid ourselves of much accumulation of “stuff,” but we really never have. We move it and store it away somewhere…garage, closets, attic, basement…you get the drift. This move we will have a huge moving-on sale, and hopefully a lot of that “stuff” can be moved from our house to someone else’s so they can store it away until that time they need to have a huge garage sale.

It will be nice to get settled somewhere.

After the dust settles, I’d like to do some pulpit supply, seminars, and church consultations as opportunities present themselves. I still believe what the rock in my yard says, “Where God is taking us is always better than where we’ve been.”  I look forward with eager anticipation to whatever that may be.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve my church in this high capacity.  It has been a rewarding, challenging, and humbling experience.

04 Aug Pastor’s Familiarity Tour to Israel

Denny Miller, pastor of Emmanuel Community Church (Fort Wayne, Ind.), is leading a Pastor’s Familiarity Tour to Israel February 19-26, 2010. It is designed to train other pastors to lead groups to Israel (something Denny has done many times). There are 17 slots for pastors, and 11 of those slots have been filled. That leaves room for six more to get aboard.

The criteria: that you are a pastor who has not been to Israel before, and that you will make a serious effort to take a group from your church during the next two years. Follow the link below for complete information about the trip.

(more…)

03 Aug Liberty UB: A Small but Healthy Church

I just received a letter from Mike Turner, a layperson at the Liberty UB church of Stockport, Ohio, down in the beautiful hills of southern Ohio. He reports that on July 12, they baptized, in Wolf Creek, 13 people who had been saved in the past month and six who had been saved earlier in 2009. A nearby Nazarene Church learned of the upcoming baptism, and they baptized one more person, for a total of 20. Mike reports that 68 persons were present to witness the power of God, sing songs, and pray. Mike said it was a grand and glorious day.

Over the past four years, I had tried to be consistent in calling our churches to become healthy. I think some people thought I was saying all churches had to become large. But that was and is not the point. I believe that healthy churches do grow, but size isn’t the issue. The issue is one of being effective in seeing people come to Christ.

Liberty UB is a small church that is healthy because they are reaching people in their community. We have many of our churches who haven’t seen a conversion for a long time. The baptismal fount is dry! Oh that many of our churches might become involved once again in the harvest fields.

Way to go Liberty! The angels in heaven rejoiced on that day!

30 Jul The New Bishop Gets Moved In

Phil Whipple makes some phone calls in front of the moving truck, which is in front of the UB offices.

It’s moving-in day for Bishop-elect Phil and Sandy Whipple. For now, they are moving into apartments right across the street from the UB offices. Huntington University owns those apartments. They hope to eventually move into the home which Bishop Ron and EJ Ramsey have been renting from Huntington University for the past four years.

The Ramseys, meanwhile, continue having trouble with the house-hunting process. Yesterday, they had to withdraw from an offer they had made when, during the inspection, they learned that the home wasn’t quite what it was advertised to be. So back to square one. They could use your prayers, that God will lead them to the right place.

29 Jul Pastoring at the Strongholds

We have ministers who are at the strongholds where Satan lives in their city. They know that to break the strongholds hindering their churches, they have to deal with certain issues. And they’ve taken them head on. They would charge hell with a water pistol, because they know that Ron and I stand behind them. Though they’ve been bloodied, they feel they’ve been loved on and they’ve learned some powerful lessons through it.

One pastor has gotten beat up badly, but we stood with him and talked straightforwardly with his people about some issues. Some of our pastors are just as straightforward as we are. I’m proud of them. They’ve learned some powerful lessons about tempering their straightforwardness with care and tenderness, and God is doing things in their churches.

We’ve had people be pretty caustic with us. Most times we find that when we follow the Lord’s agenda and processes, he does the work, moving resistant people out of the way. In some churches, we’ve seen people turn and repent. I had a guy come ask forgiveness for something that happened 12 years. You see that and realize it’s God.