Steve Brown Etc.

Steve Brown Etc. is a nationally syndicated talk show featuring discussion, comedy, and interviews designed to explore what it’s like to live out Steve Brown’s teaching on grace and freedom. Visit SteveBrownEtc.com to get past programs, download interviews, read Steve’s blog, hear comedy bits, and a whole lot more!

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Pooped Pastors

At any given time, 75% of pastors in America want to quit. 1,500 pastors leave their assignments each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout or contention within their local congregations. 70% of pastors do not have a close friend with whom they can openly share their struggles.*

Chances are that your pastor is pooped. And if you are a pastor...well...you know. It’s a uniquely tough job, and Steve has just launched an equally unique website to help.

Now there’s a safe place of grace and help for the shepherds of God’s flock. Stop by PoopedPastors.com and spread the word!

Visit PoopedPastors.com

* Statistics from Focus on the Family, Fuller Institute of Church Growth and Church Resource Ministries

Easter Magazine 2013: It Changes Everything

I may have told you about the worship leader who overslept and failed to show for the Easter sunrise service at his church. The next year, the pastor called him Easter morning at 4 a.m. and said, "Jesus is Risen! You had better too!"

I remember the first Easter Sunday I realized that Jesus was alive. It wasn't as powerful as the disciples' realization; but, for a peon like me, it was close.

As a young pastor in theological graduate school at Boston University, I served a small church on Cape Cod to pay the bills. All winter, in that little church, we had struggled to get by. Cape Cod winters can be brutal and the people of New England are not known for putting church attendance at the top of their To Do list.

Someone said her church was so small that "when the pastor says 'beloved,' I blush." That describes the small church on Cape Cod. We had worked all winter to get people to church with very little success. That had a negative impact on our paying the bills and on me. I began to think that God had not called me to this. I had made a lot more money doing a morning radio show in Boston and, while I was willing to work for less, it began to look like the church wouldn't even be able to pay me.

Then Easter!

I was in my small study (so small that if I sneezed, I caught my own cold!) and heard some noise outside the door. I opened it and to my astonishment, the ushers were moving chairs from the church parlor and the Sunday school rooms into the sanctuary. "What are you doing?" I asked. They explained that it was Easter and Easter meant big crowds.

Now that really ticked me off! I decided to change my sermon to one on hell with the addendum of "that's where you're going and I'm glad." (Not really. In those days, I didn't believe in much of anything and certainly not that people were lost for all of eternity.)...

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Steve's Letter: May 2013

I'm writing this during Easter week and just finished (as a part of my daily Bible readings) the book of Ecclesiastes. Frankly, with thoughts of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter and Ecclesiastes, there is a disconnect.
If you read Ecclesiastes for your devotional time, make it in the morning. If you read it just before going to bed, you won't sleep very well. In Ecclesiastes, there are texts like...

"I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity [futility] and a striving after wind..." (1:13-14).

"I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity [futility] and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun..." (2:11).

"What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity [futility]..." (2:22-23).

"For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool! So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity [futility] and a striving after wind..." (2:16-17).

That's in the Bible?

Yeah. And you should read it to some of your pagan friends who think the Bible is an unrealistic book, and tell them to put that in their pipe and smoke it...

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