Steal This Document: Ben Cachiaras and the T Doc

All week long that old Joni Mitchell tune, Both Sides Now has been stuck in my head. This week on the Better Preaching Podcast Nate Ross provided a moment that has made me think: I really don’t know preaching at all.

Nate was two and a half years into leading Northside Christian Church — the church where his father had been lead pastor. The numbers were exactly what any of us would want: twenty percent growth, a twenty-eight-million-dollar campaign successfully raised. And he was miserable.

So he did what most of us do. He pulled levers. He got his preaching calendar a full year out. He built a teaching team with names like Mike Breaux and Efrem Smith on it. Every lever worked. None of them touched the problem. “Everything looks unbelievable,” he told me, “but something is not right in your soul.”

I’ve sat in that chair. Most leaders I know have.

What finally broke it open for Nate wasn’t a better system. It was a question. A counselor asked him to set aside the business model and the branding and answer one thing: what is the Lord doing in your heart? And Nate’s honest answer — “I’d rather help leaders lead their thing than lead my thing” — came out wrapped in shame, because in ministry we’ve absorbed the idea that stepping out of the pulpit is a demotion.

Here’s the framework Nate gave us, and I think it’s worth writing on the inside of your study door. Awareness. Access. Action. Most of us live at the third step and never visit the first two. We take action, take action, take action until the wheels come off and all we’re left with is the awareness that something is badly wrong, with no capacity left to do anything about it.

Nate finds the pattern in Revelation 2. Jesus told the church in Ephesus to “remember” the height from which they’d fallen. Then repent. Then do the things you did at first. Awareness, then access, then action. We keep trying to run the sequence backward.

And underneath all of it is the hardest word in the conversation: undone. Nate describes the deep waters of Proverbs 20:5 the way a diver would: dark, cold, high pressure, nothing you’d enter casually. But he insists that’s where Jesus starts with us. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the undone. Judas left because he wouldn’t be undone. Peter kept reaching for a sword because he wouldn’t be undone. We all keep a lever within arm’s reach.

Here’s the earworm that displaced Joni Mitchell rattling around in my head: the best thing you can give your church, and your family, is the healthiest version of you. Not the most impressive version. Not the version that can keep pace with whoever preached that same text better than you did on Sunday.

But that means sitting in a powerless position long enough to let Jesus hold the power. 

There are preachers, and then there are preachers. Wayne B. Smith was the second kind.

Wayne helped start Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1956 and served as her senior minister until 1995 — growing the congregation from 152 to 3,700 weekly worshipers. He was, by nearly all accounts, the most popular preacher in the Restoration Movement. They called him “the Bob Hope of the Ministry.” He laughed easily, cried easily, and delivered Kentucky Fried Chicken to poor families at ten o’clock at night. I don’t know another man who wrapped the gospel in a bucket of chicken and made it feel perfectly natural.

But beneath the humor was a man dead serious about one thing: the pulpit.

In 1977, Wayne Smith served as president of the North American Christian Convention. When it was his turn to stand before his fellow ministers and say something worth saying, he chose as his text 2 Timothy 4:1-8, and his message was simply this — Preach the Word.

He structured the sermon around three great themes: the Summons, the Subject, and the Source.

The summons were urgent. He asked the crowd what had happened to the kind of preaching they heard on the Day of Pentecost — the kind that moved across a pagan empire like wildfire. He told the story of men visiting Billy Sunday and asking the secret of his preaching power. Sunday took them to the hotel window, looked down at the people on the sidewalk, and said three times — They are going to Hell. Wayne’s conclusion was simple: “Woe unto me if I preach not the Gospel.“

The subject was Christ — always Christ. He put it plainly: some men say we need a new message, but if that’s true, then we need a new Bible. The message is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The bedrock foundation, the heart and soul of the apostles’ message, was the Son of God — the crucified, buried, resurrected, ascending, reigning, returning Redeemer.

And the source was the Word. Wayne used the image of a healing spring around which a whole town had been built — until the day someone asked where the spring was, and no one could remember. His warning to preachers was clear: under our superstructures and our success, some of us have lost the spring.

Wayne remained faithful to the end, encouraging a gathering of ministers the very day before he died in 2016.

He preached what he believed. He believed what he preached. And he told the rest of us to do the same.

Woe unto us if we don’t.

I recently sat down with Ben Cachiaras for the Better Preaching Podcast. Ben has served Mountain Christian Church near Baltimore for thirty of its 201 years, and I wanted to hear how a kid from Rochester, Minnesota ended up giving his life to preaching.

He almost didn’t.

Rochester is home to the Mayo Clinic, and Ben grew up surrounded by doctors’ kids. He was bright. School came easily. Plenty of people told him medicine would be a noble path, and he was leaning that way. Then he went to church camp.

Pine Haven Christian Assembly sits on a Minnesota lake where Ben had been baptized years earlier. That weekend, the preacher in the hot little chapel was Ben’s grandfather—a Greek immigrant who came to Christ at Johnson Bible College in the early 1900s and served Minnesota Bible College from 1919 until his death in 1983. Picture it: folding chairs, restless high schoolers, and a nearly ninety-year-old man preaching with the passion of someone half his age.

At the end, he gave an invitation to salvation, and a couple of kids came forward. But he wasn’t finished. He issued a second call, for anyone willing to give the best energy of their life to serving the local church. To be a preacher. Then he added the line that undid his grandson: “If you think to yourself, ‘Yeah, I could probably do that,’ I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the one who knows you can’t do anything else and have peace with God.”

Ben melted. He walked the aisle crying, stood beside his grandfather, and repeated a confession the old man composed on the spot. Med school was over before it started. He enrolled at Minnesota Bible College, and the trajectory of his life bent toward the pulpit for good.

Looking back, Ben suspects his grandfather knew exactly who was sitting in those folding chairs that day. I suspect he’s right.

Here’s what stayed with me. Ben said that moment makes him want to grab every seventh, eighth, and tenth grader, look them in the eye, and tell them it’s not too early to think about ministry. I grew up hearing my preacher say the best and brightest of our generation should go to Bible college and enter the ministry, the highest calling any of us can pursue.

Somewhere along the way, many of our churches went quiet on that. We tell our sharpest students to pursue engineering or medicine, and those are noble callings. But somebody has to say what Ben’s grandfather said.

Who’s the kid in your congregation waiting for a bold, clear call?

Say it. They may be listening harder than you think.