The preacher said to the deacon board,
“I would like to buy a chandelier.”
The deacons said, “Why waste our money,
There’s nobody that could play one here.”
One deacon then said, to the pastor,
“You are always asking for the moon,
You know that we are not fancy folks.
Besides, I hear that they’re hard to tune.”
“Instead of our spending foolishly,
While the church’s money is so tight,
We should only buy necessities,
Like, the sanctuary needs more light!”
A good supportive deacon’s board is truly a blessing to any pastor. There is an English comedy, on The Public Broadcasting Station, which Ruth and I watch, about a woman vicar who has to put up with an overbearing head deacon, who has to put up with an incompetent deacon’s board. It’s a funny comedy but in a real life situation, the tensions caused by contentious deacons can certainly hinder God’s work.
I’m not saying that The Out-Of-Tune Chandelier really happened but the story is a good example of why deacons should be carefully chosen.
The Pastor in this case, has two choices; he can let the board know how dumb they are by explaining what a chandelier really is, or he can just go with the flow and let them authorize spending for the new light fixtures that he wants. In the Air Force, I found that the most effective way to get funding for a project was to let the ones with the purse strings think that it was their idea.
It’s easy to see the moral of this story. A pastor may sometimes have to use devious means to bring the light to his flock.
