Southern Indiana Business January/February 2020 | Page 11

my life, I had been helped by a social worker
during a time of my life when things weren’t
going that great. I feel that pastors need to
have that kind of counseling technique and
theory understanding to be able to effectively
do their job.
2
You do a lot within and [outside]
the church. How do you create
a life-work balance with all that you
have going on?
I prioritize my personal time with God first
above all things, then I prioritize my family
second, my physical fitness next, and then
everything else comes after that. I try to do
the things within the church that need to be
done and delegate — a pastor doesn’t have to
do everything. He just has to do a few things
really well.
After 20 years of preaching, if I don’t do
it well, I probably should get up and go do
something else. The second thing I do well,
I can build relationships pretty easily with
people I don’t know; it’s something that comes
naturally to me.
I’ve been at Park Memorial 14 years…
there’s a trust with the congregation. They trust
that if I’m leading direction, they fully trust me
and I also fully trust them. Our church leads
by spiritual consensus rather than by Robert’s
Rules of Order.
For instance, like with our commitment
to the shelter, it was 100 percent unanimous.
There were questions, but there was no dis-
senting votes. We have a leadership team with
15 people on it. We meet at least six times a
year and they help oversee all the ministries
that the church has. Our commitment to the
poor previous to these experiences recently
has been benevolence, working with them as
they come through our doors, to try to help
them get their lives on track.
The more we have worked with those who
are poor in the community, we’ve recognized
a major clog in the artery, so to speak, for a
proper system of care. A system of care flows.
First, you have these street outreach people
and you have the shelter and then you have all
the other service organizations, where each of
those sheltered individuals need to be connect-
ing with in order to get the help that they need.
We have a responsibility to make sure that
people are properly sheltered in a way that
meets their need and and that’s one of our
commitments to each other.
3
When working on a systemic
issue such as homelessness,
how important is it to form partner-
ships in the community?
Oh my gosh, I didn’t even know that was
possible to do so. And that’s what I guess to
me pushed the pedal forward was when I real-
ized and saw the amount of relationships we
were able to leverage through America’s Best,
I realized that something else was possible.
Because what happened with the Home-
less Prevention Task Force was it wasn’t just
a group of people who were working toward
their own ends, but actual friendships were
formed. And that is, I think, a key that people
miss, is that there’s friendship relationships
outside the working relationships we had with
helping the clients. In that moment, I realized
we could do something else in Southern Indi-
ana and that something else was possible.
I could call right now any of the community
partners that we have and whatever is going on
in their life right now, they would likely stop
that and do what we need to do, and I would
do that as well.
For instance, last week Angie Graf from
Hope Southern Indiana called and she had
gotten a call from a group that had a ware-
house full of brand new clothes and she said
they were giving them away. She went there
and loaded them up...all brand new, all kids
clothes. So I called community action of
Southern Indiana, got two trucks, called Paul
from Exit Zero, got their truck. We all went
there and got the stuff. So those relationships
formed back then have really blossomed
where we’re all working together to do some
pretty cool stuff.
4
Is there a particular passage
in the Bible you turn to often
when you need inspiration?
Probably Second Corinthians 12:9: ‘My
grace is sufficient for you, my power is made
perfect in weakness.’ That’s probably one of
my go-to passages, kind of one of those ones I
think helps me in my life. That’s one I kind of
repeat in my head.
I think it’s because there’s so many people
who think they have to be completely strong
for everything to work out. The passage basi-
cally says that God’s grace is sufficient and
his power is made perfect in weakness. That,
to me, makes sense. I don’t have to be strong
in everything, I don’t have to do everything
January / February 2020
11