Rev. Bill Crawford
speaker
60 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Rev. Bill Crawford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
you know, God moments. I found myself with the opportunity to begin a committee to found a charter school here in Thibodeau, and that was back in 2007. The school was actually chartered in 2010. I really can't fully express to you how difficult it was. We had a... would put together a team and they would disappear and I put together another team and they would disappear.
Got to the point where we were down to approval and I had to take out a $35,000 loan to make the first payroll payment with my own credit. And we were able to do that. We were able to pay everybody's first round of salaries and finish out the process. And today, I think it's 13, 14 years later, Bayou Community Academy is the 27th highest rated school in the state of Louisiana.
We are an open enrollment school that competes with closed enrollment schools for that ranking. And so it's quite, quite an accomplishment. So that's not a Christian school. It's a public school. And we have leaders in that school that are Christian and non-Christian.
But I believe we've attacked, back to your questions about ethnicity and inclusion, what I perceive as a systemic evil here in the state of Louisiana is that our education system stinks. It's not because the people are awful. We have wonderful educators. We have wonderful administrators here in Lafourche. We are blessed with incredible leaders in the school board system.
I'm not criticizing them, but we're just not where we should have been. And so Bayou Community Academy gets founded. Our church supported that. They have endorsed that as a ministry of my faith. My presence here is a teaching elder, so it's something I can, you know, write off the expenses. I can take work time to go and do this. And that's been a commitment for many, many years.
And I get more, I promise you, I get more hugs on my neck and more comments on the street about that school than I do most any other role in my ministry. And so, yeah. Being a small church pastor, you can engage your community in very serious ways. We're not a rural town, but we're a smallish town. A pastor is often, a Presbyterian pastor especially, is often an educated person.
They can do many things. I have management backgrounds, I have lots of skills that were able to come to play in that. Likewise, we don't have a lot of programs because we're small, and therefore many of our leaders are also leaders in other nonprofits. And so that's kind of the quiet secret about PersPres by community church, Christian church, sorry about that.
I've got the community academy in there. It's gonna happen. It's my fault. No, it's gonna happen. And but, you know, we are able to engage the community in leadership roles and support roles and then support each other as we do those things. And so we do shape the community in that way. I'm also often amazed and surprised by how people in our community view me, view our congregation.
And I've had several people say when they ask me how large our church is, and I tell them 60 members, they're just stunned. And that's because we have influence. And so the small church can have influence in the small town, and we can have influence far beyond our size. And we should take advantage of that.
And we need to for the kingdom, because even if we're not drawing people into our facility, we are impacting the kingdom all the time. And the small church is part of a glorious story that is going on all around us. And we have a role in that story, regardless of our size. And so Karina Gambrell, lay pastor in the EPC, talks about the great big small church.
And she gets so excited when she talks about it. And I will borrow her phrase. There is this effect that we can have where we're the great big small church. And we do have an impact beyond our size because the Holy Spirit is in us and the gospel we're presenting is more powerful than us. And so we need to live in that truth, even though it's a dark time in many ways. It's a troubling time.
We're battling for sustainability. Pastors are having a hard time paying their bills. All those things can be true and the gospel can be advancing. The kingdom work can be getting done. And so we want to be honest on both sides of that equation, not get too caught up in the hard stuff. We need to know the hard stuff, but we also need to never forget the good stuff.
Well, I think it's different for every church. And again, that's the thing about small churches is they're weird. They're all different. And so, you know, traditionally small churches would come in. I think many, many, many, many small churches still do this. Someone will start coordinating meals. Somebody will do this. Somebody will do that. So All of those things happen.
These informal systems happen in a small church. They carry a lot of weight and they get a great deal accomplished. And so I think the role of a teaching elder that comes into a small church is to kind of tease out all of those informal systems and certainly not get in the way of any of them, certainly not ruin any of them by trying to make them too formal.
but also being able to utilize them and make sure they're not missing anything. And so you don't wanna miss a member because they're not in a certain group or a certain clique or somebody doesn't have their phone number. But you wanna utilize, if you have deacons, you wanna be utilizing them. If you have elders, you wanna utilize them.
So we have had conversations over 23 years in the eldership and deacons about just doing the work. Don't wait for me to call. And more and more, Brandon, you've seen it. I've seen it. A member will be in the hospital. And by the time I get there, two elders have already been there. you know, our deacons have already been in house.
I didn't even know about something and the deacons were there, took care of it, didn't even call me because it didn't require my attention. Those are all things that should be happening. And if they're not happening, then you need to work that direction. And again, in a small church, as a leader, you need to be careful how you move that ball.
You don't want to come in criticizing because one of the things I learned, and I think younger pastors need to know this, whenever you come into a church and criticize something, that's in play, especially if it's a formal system, you are criticizing someone. See, in a big church, you change a program, it's a committee, it's a group, it's a this, it's a that.
In a small church, when you change something, someone initiated that, and you're telling those people that someone is wrong. Now, what if that's their grandmother? What if that's some famous pastor? Well, you need to address that no matter how wrong you think it is. You need to address that very carefully and pastorally and with care.
And so sometimes there are systems that are unhealthy in a small church around this caregiving thing. But again, you need to start, one, make sure you're showing up, make sure you're doing the work, make sure you know who's sick. And then also... My word to all the elders, all of the deacons is, if there's something going on that I need to be involved in, I need you to get me involved.
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