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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
If you think I know and you don't see me, Make sure I know, because maybe I don't. And that has happened as well.
Yeah. So again, that's every church is different. Every approach is different. You know, I was on the National Disaster Relief Committee for its first year founding, worked with that committee, very proud of their work, very proud to be involved with the group that they collected, Whitney Alexander and one of the co-chairs at this point. He was the chair at that point.
And what I learned there, and I'm gonna get to your question, is that disasters are something that happened to me, to my community. They're not something I go looking for. So a lot of people that do disaster relief, do disaster relief work, that they are in the missions of doing disaster relief, it's actually something they go looking to do because they have a heart to help people.
It's not that I don't have a heart to help people, but that's not really my calling. I'm a pastor. It's funny because I've become known as a disaster relief guy. So the nickname is the pastor of disaster. And the reality is I've been through over 20 named hurricanes, storms, I guess, tropical storms and hurricanes since I've been here, probably without any kind of bragging.
I think it'd be very honest. I've been here 23 years. have been through more name storms than any other pastor in the EPC. The only one close would be Whitney Alexander, but Whitney is someone who goes after this and he goes into it and he does the work in an amazing way.
So I want to be careful with that because it's not that we as a church have made this conscious decision to go chase down disasters all over the world and be involved. When a storm happens, we engage. Now, we've engaged at all kinds of different levels. And so the small church can engage at all kinds of different levels. They can have a dramatic impact in a disaster or a very small.
So it needs to be discerned in each church what their engagement would be, how they would approach it, how they would engage. Often that happens very organically. My friend Rob McClellan is in North Carolina right now. And they ended up cooking in the church because they had gas stoves and gas hot water heaters.
And so they got going and restaurants were like, look, our freezer is about to thaw out. You want this food? And so they just kept cooking. That wasn't a plan. They didn't have a contingency. Oh, if North Carolina gets wiped out by hurricane, like anybody was thinking that, that we'll cook. No, they started into that. And so that's the beauty of the organic food.
the informal systems that a small church can dive into. Now for us, there's a, there's much more intentionality. I'm into it. Like I personally have a calling in this area. It's something I am personally really pretty good at. And the church has often at times just let me go and have my fun, you know, and over the years have more and more gotten heavily engaged in it.
And so like the last hurricane, I did not really have to lead all of our efforts. We had a room in the church, the fellowship hall turned into a food pantry and we had people running that. I was hardly involved in it other than the supervisor talked to them about what they were doing. We had disaster relief work going on that I got up and running.
But then we were able through First Presbyterian Roots to have somebody come in and help coordinate that. We had teams that were going out without me being there. And so Ida was probably one of our, not our largest operation, but probably one of our healthiest teams. more involved across the church spectrum.
And that is certainly something small churches can do because we don't wait for a formal proclamation to occur to begin to act. Yeah. And then it's incumbent on those leaders, whether it be the ruling elders, teaching elders, to go, hey, there's something happening here. Let's grab this and run with it.
But I will say, as a caveat, because we've been talking around church growth stuff, disaster relief work does not really grow a church numerically. No, it doesn't. It has the potentiality to significantly grow a church spiritually, and certainly in the sense of its trust in the sovereignty of God.
But that work is challenging and hard, and people do not, fortunately in a way, I guess, people do not respond to your church's ministry and disaster relief as your church's ministry and disaster relief. They see it as the body of Christ, which is beautiful.
So that person that you help, they may come into the kingdom as a result of the work, but there's no guarantee at all that they're coming to your church. So this is, again, one of those things you don't do because it's effective to grow the church. You do it because it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, and there's a rhythm to that. And so if you are in a small church and you're ever hit by a disaster, I actually have a decision making document that I've written that it's kind of an oral kind of document. written document that you can walk through and read through and begin to think through the process.
It actually gives you supplies you might need at the 24-hour period, 36-hour period, 72-hour period, one week, two weeks, and I kind of break it out from 20 years of doing this, but it also gives you moments to go reflect, what do I need to be doing? How do I need to rest? It's absolutely true, though, that that pastor needs to as much as possibly be in the pulpit
early on, comforting the people, speaking to the people. They need to see you. They need to hear from you. Don't worry about the quality of the message. Don't worry about the quantity of the preparation. Worry about the quality of the love and the message and the gospel in that. But then, yes, they do need time. If they're running operations, if they're involved in
daily work that they do need some time out of the pulpit so they can focus on ministering the gospel in their community. And that's a hard rhythm for pastors to figure out because they also are deeply aware of how much their people need to hear comfort and peace. And sometimes you bring people in and they missed the mark. I mean, they're not really reading the scene very well.
But nonetheless, God always works. And if they're preaching the gospel, it really doesn't ultimately matter if they made a mistake. And so, yeah, you should let that happen. But I do understand the challenges of it as well. Do appreciate that.
Showing 21–40 of 60 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →