Hats

by Bill Ireland

I offered the following words at the installation of my good friend and Pinnacle colleague, Dr. Eric Spivey, as pastor of Vestavia Hills Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. I have edited the content for a wider audience.

HATS

There’s a hat rack next to the door leading to our garage where I hang a lot of my hats… hats for all different kinds of activities. A ventilated cap for walking in the summer heat. The grungy hat I wear for yard work. The wide-brimmed hat I wear when I make it to the beach. The wool cap I put on when the weather turns cold.

I have a lot of hats to wear.

The same thing can be said of any pastor anywhere. I’m convinced that in this world of specialization, pastors are among the last general practitioners around. Pastors have to wear a lot of different hats—sometimes a bunch of different hats in the course of a single day.

Every week we put on our preaching/teaching hat when we’re at work in the study, grinding out a sermon or preparing to teach a lesson. Sometimes we have to put on the personnel hat so we can supervise other staff members and be the boss.

We grab the vision hat in order to get our church to lean into the future instead of clinging to the past.

Quite often we’re called to put on our pastoral care hat and when someone’s engulfed in grief, hurt, or tragedy.

We grab the spiritual direction hat off the rack when someone wants to talk about where they are in their walk with God.

And inevitably, we have to wear our finance hat whenever we engage in conversations about budgets, fund-raising, and special offerings.

That’s a lot of hats! And the list doesn’t even include the spouse hat, the parent hat, or the home repair hat.

Because there are so many hats we have to wear, we often wish we could get rid of some of them. We’d love to be able to wear only one or two or maybe three hats—especially those that fit us well. We’d love to be able to specialize: “If you want a killer sermon on the Third Sunday in Advent, I’m your guy!” But the truth is, the work requires that we wear many hats even though there are days we’d like to get rid of some. That’s just the nature of the beast.

So, at the risk of further complicating our work, there’s one more hat I want all of us to put on. One that is vitally important for this moment in time. It’s the truth-teller hat. Here’s what the writer of Ephesians has to say: So then putting off falsehood, let all of us speak truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.

I like the way the Contemporary English Version renders this verse: “We are part of the same body. Stop lying and start telling each other the truth.”

Most of us would agree that telling the truth is a good thing—except when we’re faced with the kind of tricky questions my wife, Ginny, often asks me: “Do you like my haircut?” In such instances, discretion is the better part of valor, and sacrificing the truth for the sake of harmony is a wise move! Still, aspiring to be truthful is a good virtue to pursue. We imagine that we should tell the truth simply for the sake of the truth. It’s an absolute.

And, the importance of truth-telling has risen as we continue to inhabit this postmodern space in which truth is in the eye of the beholder. You know, nothing’s true unless I say it’s true. Add in the fact that anyone anywhere can post something on the internet—if its sounds “truth-y” enough, it’ll go viral and add to the volume of disinformation swirling about us.

Nevertheless, the writer stresses the importance of telling the truth for what I think is an even more important reason. We tell the truth for the sake of each other. The writer and theologian, Lewis Smedes, put it this way: “We owe truthfulness to each other, not for truth’s sake, but for each other’s sake.”1 We tell the truth because it’s the connective tissue that holds us together. Telling the truth means we believe others can be trusted with reality. When we don’t speak the truth to one another, we shut down possibilities for growth and development. Truth-telling is essential to keeping the body of Christ together.

I want you to put on one more hat: The truth-telling hat.

As you launch your ministry here, I want you to tell the essential truth. I want you to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. To proclaim that God has shown us the fullness of love and mercy in Jesus Christ is bedrock, foundational. I want you to speak the truth that God’s love is far greater than we can comprehend. I want you to speak the truth that God is far more welcoming of others than we are. I want you to speak the vital truth that every single day God is in the business of making all things new.

And certainly, I want you to speak comforting truth. By your presence with those who are wounded and hurting, you are speaking the truth that every person matters to God. In small gestures and large, you convey the truth that God knows our names and knows what we’re up against. This world grinds people down in a thousand different ways. By speaking of the God who walks through the valley of the shadow of death with us, of the God who climbs into the furnace and walks in the fire with us, and of the God who bears our suffering—by doing that you are speaking the truth that God doesn’t leave anyone out.

Lastly, I want you to speak hard truth, reminding these lovely people there is no growth without pain. Leaning into God’s mission will push us. Becoming a follower of Jesus asks something of us. Nothing is automatic, and much of it is uncomfortable. You have to remind this congregation that, while they are by and large good people, they are not perfect. There are still rough edges that have to be sanded off. They are still on the way to being conformed to the image of Christ.

I know we have to wear many hats. But this is the one hat I want you to put on and never take off.

1 Lewis B. Smedes, A Pretty Good Person (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 79.