Practical Ways Men Can Reflect the Image of God by Being Holistically Pro-life

Russell: Bishop you are over, lead, one of the largest, most influential churches in the world.  

Bishop Sheard: Yeah, you know, what a blessing it is. I’m so humbled by it. And then the thing is, brother Russell is that, you know, it’s a challenge to get our people to understand in many cases, some of the fundamentals of the Bible.  With this, and I don’t want to get in any trouble, but with this new age stuff and this contemporary stuff there’s some basics that we’re trying to get back to. To let the people know about righteous living and doing the right thing.  

Russell: What’s the big challenge to that? How do you navigate, because you have some people who know the Bible and have worked with the Lord for a long time, and then you have other people who have no concept at all. How do you disciple both of those groups? 

Bishop Sheard: You know, it’s those persons who know the Bible, you kind of pull on them.  You pull on those persons so that they can get those people who are just coming in so we can try to get them balanced. I have something at my church it’s called the vital link ministry. The vital link ministry takes those persons who are just coming into the church, into the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and it links them with a person who is well grounded. So that’s an effort to try to close our back door. I started that, I guess it’s been about 30 years ago, and it’s been pretty good for me. You don’t get a hundred percent success rate. But you know, and we try hard to emphasize what God sees as the family. 

That’s one of, I just got through doing a four part, actually an eight-part series. First with relationships with my wife and I. And then we had our children on for the four parts where we talked about the family. You know, the family is so important. Also, you know, there’s so many entities out there that are trying to distort what God intended for the family to look like, you know what I mean? And then there’s these efforts out there to try to, in my opinion, to try to stop the growth of families. When we say stop the growth, we’re talking about, you know, the abortion thing. There’s so many times that people, you know, we got women saying, it’s my body, I do what I want to do. And then we’ve got men that are absent. And that whole process  

Russell: Or even pressuring… 

Bishop Sheard: You’re right. That’s a good point.  

Russell: How do you, with men particularly, how do you reach men when it comes to this because it seems to me that right now, we’re at a time where commitment and sort of taking responsibility is hard for young men. And there was a young man I was talking to yesterday who said – I came out of a terrible, my dad was terrible.  

Bishop Sheard: Wow.  

Russell: And he said, so I had no role models at all to know how to treat a young woman when I started dating. I didn’t have any role models as to how to be married. And that might be the case with a lot of the challenges to human dignity that I’ve seen, at least in my context, with young men. 

How do you reach young men, particularly if they’re saying – like a lot of men are right now- I’m just kind of lost. I just don’t know how to find my way. 

Bishop Sheard: The best thing for us to do, and when I say us I mean we as ministers or we as Christian men, is to show a stellar example of what that’s all about. I see, I feel for the person you spoke about because I was tremendously blessed.  Because my father was there. You know, I and my father and I were like that. You know, my father he passed here recently and man, you know what my father told me – and I said the same thing to my son – My father told me, he said, if you see me smoke a cigarette, it’s okay for you to do.  

Russell: Oh, is that right?  

Bishop Sheard: He did. He said, if you see me drinking alcohol, it’s okay for you to do. If you see me mistreat your mother, that’s okay for you to treat.   

Russell: Wow. He had a lot of confidence. 

Bishop Sheard: He did. And I’ve done the same thing with my son, you know, I said the same thing. Unfortunately my son had his two children out of wedlock and I told him, I said, “Hey, so you messed up.” And he was young. He messed up. I said, “you messed up, but they’re shears.”   

Russell: That’s right.  

Bishop Sheard: You know, I said, they’re Sheards and we have to protect, and hear what I’m saying, we have to protect our name. Do right by their mothers. I tried to get him to marry them, but he said that wasn’t the thing. But he’s a great father to those kids. Because I like to think I was a great father to he and his sister. My father was a great father to me. Many men come to church and if the pastor or somebody in the ministry has to take on that arduous role of being what God intended for a man to be. 

And we’ve got to be able to reach out and touch those brothers that come to the church saying what you just described. Yeah, we gotta do it. We gotta get to ’em, we gotta talk to ’em. Gotta find out what they like and then start trying to make some adjustments in how they feel about a mother or a woman, or how they feel about dealing with the females and stuff like that. You know, one of the things that I had in our church was when I first started pastoring- we ran into some guys and they would say, you know, she’s supposed to obey me. The Bible says she’s supposed to submit to me, and I’d listen to them, and I’d say, yeah, I think you’re right. But the Bible also says that you’re supposed to be willing to give your life for them. They get quiet, you know. I say if a man walks in, and holds a gun to your wife’s head and said I’m going to blow her brains out you’re supposed to say don’t do it to her, do it to me.  

Russell: Yeah, as Christ loved the church.  

Bishop Sheard: Is that what the Bible said? As Christ loved the church, we’re supposed to love our wives. So, we have to work on and kind of massage that kind of mentality so that they’ll get a clear understanding of what that’s all about.  

Russell: You know, you mentioned, messing up making mistakes as a young man. I was just talking to a young man yesterday who had said previously he made a mistake. He pressured his girlfriend to have an abortion and said the devil just keeps accusing him of that; and I think sometimes that’s how it works.  A young man makes a mistake, but they don’t feel like they can go to their dad or to their church or anywhere else. And they don’t feel like…they feel like they’ll be rejected. How do you equip people to help those young men when they have made a mistake to say that doesn’t mean your life is over. I mean, how do you communicate that?  

Bishop Sheard: I just tell them. I just tell them, and I grab hold to them, and keep them involved in ministry. Yeah, you messed up. 

Here’s the key. Here’s the key. Here’s the key, Pastor. It’s that all of us messed up. But some of us have the fruits of our mess up. But those who have the fruits of their mess up, we look at them worse than those who messed up and don’t even know about it. You know, I tell him, Hey, you know, man, we all messed up.Something happened there and you know, it is, but let’s come in, let’s do our work. Let’s show God that I’m genuinely sorry by doing the right thing for that young woman, that child and you know, for yourself as well. So it’s all about reaching out to them and loving them and letting them know that we are messed up. I mean, every single last one of us messed up, but God gave us another chance. 

Russell: You know, I was telling somebody this morning, when it comes to that James 1:27 “care for widows and orphans” and the rest of that – one of the greatest things I ever saw in a church was a guy got up and gave his testimony. You could tell he was a nervous wreck; he didn’t want to talk. But he got up and said he was an auto mechanic and was really good at it. And one Saturday out of every month he would be in the church parking lot, and he would help the single moms in the community to not be taken advantage of at the mechanic’s office. He teach ’em, here’s how to do basic car repairs. How to check spark plugs and all that kind of thing. And I thought, as I was looking at, man, this is a wise church. Because they know how to use the giftedness that God has given to him. For him. And he’s now.  

How can pastors particularly – they’re saying we really want our men to care about image of God, love their neighbor. How do you get men who might say I can’t do that because I can’t preach, I can’t teach, I can’t sing, I can’t do the things they think of as churchy stuff. 

Bishop Sheard: Yeah, but you hit the nail on the head. Find out what they’re graced in. That gentleman was graced in working on cars.  So let’s create a ministry. That ministry that you talked about right there, that’s what you call innovativeness  and creativity. That’s the way we do ministry. Ministry, this is a Drew Shear definition at my church. Ministry is meeting the needs of people.  If we’re not meeting their needs, we’re not doing ministry.  And that’s completely holistic.   

Russell: Yeah, with the holistic part of it… I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I have.  It’s almost like if you go from church to church, there’ll be different groups of people – vulnerable people – that people don’t recognize. So, you might have one church, for instance, that really cares about combating abortion but they completely ignore racial injustice. Or, you know, any number of other things. You might have another church that cares about refugee community there, but they don’t care about family or whatever. You know, so it was almost like in every case there’s this question of  – Who am I not supposed to see as my neighbor? And a lot of them its just blind spots. How do you encourage people to kind of notice whether they’re the priest or the Levite passing on the other side of the road when it’s hard to tell? It’s hard to know with your own heart sometimes.  

Bishop Sheard: That comes from a sensitivity to different areas of life. 

First of all, I love people. I don’t think you can be a minister and not love people.  I don’t care what nationality they are. I think that you have a responsibility to love people. If at any time I tell people, if at any time I stop loving people, I should retire.  I should just go somewhere and sit in the corner. And then you’ve got to be, those of us who are in leadership in particular, you’ve got to be sensitive to people’s needs. And those needs are not, you know like you said, are not straight across. You know, you’ve got a pocket of people over here. They got this issue A. A pocket of people over there. They got issue B. A pocket of people over there. They got issue D. Now what are we going to do? I think that the common ground though has to be a love for Christ. 

If we have that common ground of love for Christ, we should be able to, and I said should, be able to break down all of these other walls that cause us to be in silo.  

Russell: You hit the nail on the head with people come up and say what should we do? One pastor said to me one time, he said, when people say that to me what they really mean is what should you do? He said, and I’ve got so many things I’ve got to do that I don’t even know where to start.  

Bishop Sheard: Delegate.   

Russell: How does he do that?  

Bishop Sheard: Delegate? You find different people with different areas of expertise. God is graced for instance, I’m oversimplifying this, but just like you got to have a musician. I don’t play.  So, no need of me going over there sitting on the organ, you know. So we find somebody who can do that,  you know. And we find people who – you’d be surprised at once you get a group of people together – you’d be surprised at how many different areas that can be actually ministered to. And then if there are areas that you want to minister to that are not included in your ministry, you know -then send somebody to learn.  

I remember some years ago. My wife and I have always had a good relationship, but I didn’t feel we were doing an adequate job at couple’s ministry.  So I got a couple that was really strong in that area. I said, I want you to develop a marriage ministry. And they said “Oh, we don’t know what to do”. I sent them to another church that had a great marriage ministry and said come back and develop it. 

You know, we gotta be open. One of my mentors told me that you gotta be big enough to let somebody else be big. A lot of times, and I’m so thankful for the people that God sends to me, because he knows that I want them to develop into the best that they can be. And that’s our job as ministers. It’s not to make them carbon copies of us, but to make them who God wants them to be and to help them to achieve that anointing. I tell people the anointing for J. Drew Sheard, I intend to occupy it. The anointing for Russell, I want you to get it, and whatever I can do to help you attain that, that’s my brotherly love for you. 

Russell: I knew a pastor one time who would get up every Sunday morning and would pray specifically for a church in his immediate community, no matter what denomination or whatever, and would specifically get up and talk about what the Lord was doing there, because He said he had a tendency to see the other churches and other pastors as competitors. And he had to kind of train himself because he said at first he was nervous because he thought “What if somebody’s sitting there and they hear what God’s doing over at this church over here and they leave?” He said that was an idol. I had to let go.  

Bishop Sheard: Yeah, That’s real. That’s a sort of you know, because I know when I was a young preacher I was being criticized by some of the established teachers and they would get up in their churches and talk about me and then their people would come over there to see exactly what I was doing. They got stopped. So you got to be secure to do that kind of stuff. You’ve got to be secure, and you got to be led by God. Can’t be in flesh.  

Russell: Yeah. One final. What would you say when it comes to this holistic sort of ministry, human dignity, human life, it’s hard and when you’re dealing with people in crisis and need in various different ways, it can sap you after a while. What encouragement would you give to somebody who’s working in whatever area and they’re just, maybe even especially coming out of COVID, they’re exhausted and discouraged. What word would you have for them?  

Bishop Sheard: The word that I would give to them is that if you read the Bible and you’ll see that when the people of God were in some very hard-pressed situations or hard-pressed circumstances; after they come through those difficulties God has an abundant blessing for ’em. Here’s the other thing – is that the Bible reiterates to us that our God, who is a loving God, would never allow us to be in a situation that e doesn’t already know we can come through. That’s the kind of God we serve. 

Hey Russell man, I just went through the most difficult, and I’m still in it I guess the most difficult time of my life. I lost my mom to COVID. My dad had COVID. He licked it, but it was the after effects of COVID that claimed his life.  My mom and dad had been married 64 years. They had been with me for 63 years and they were in good health. Mom and dad was still driving their car. My dad was still preaching. My mom still did what she wanted to do. And to see this happen – it brought me all the way down, you know, and I began to think well God, What am I doing? Am I doing something wrong? But I began to keep reading the Bible and listen to the word of the Lord, and I know that the hardest points in our lives, and I look back over my life, and when I had those hard challenges, once I could come through that. Once whatever God was teaching me and I learned my lesson, you know – I believe it was David who said it was good for me that I had been afflicted, that I might learn our statutes, and whatever lesson that I was supposed to learn. Brother, I learned it.  And then once I came through that difficult season that’s when God blessed us tremendously.  

Russell: And you see that looking back.   

Bishop Sheard: But you only see it looking back. That’s why I know that you can come through it.  Because you’ve got to be able to look back and say, how did I get through that? And then you just go up into a praise. God brought me through that. You know, I share this I remember before all this. I remember when my son…when he and his friend had – she was pregnant.  I’m like, man, I mean, I almost had a stroke. You know, I’m going to be transparent enough to tell you that I almost had a stroke because I’m like, Oh man, I’ve been teaching him. I’ve been telling him this and then this. And you take stuff personal. God, what did I do? Where did I mess up? You know, and now my grandson is 12 years old a budding. A budding preacher.  

Russell: Oh really? That’s great.  

Bishop Sheard: You understand what I’m saying? Yeah. I had to go through that thing. That thing was crazy. But what, Russell, what if they had aborted him?  You know, and I know they had those discussions. I, you know, I stayed out of it ’cause my point was very clear. We don’t do abortions, but I stayed out of it. I don’t know, I just backed up. I say, Lord, I look at my grandson, a delightful young man. He preaches, or I shouldn’t say he preaches cause I don’t want to push him into that, but he gets up and gives a word. It does tremendous. He’s tremendous.  

Russell: That’s great.  

Bishop Sheard: And what if we had aborted him?  

Russell: Yeah. And I mean, as somebody who preached my first sermon at 12. 

Bishop Sheard: Come on, man.  

Russell: And I thought my pastor was crazy.  But now I look back and say, Thank God. I mean it was a terrible sermon but in my case you had a pastor and a church that was saying we’re willing to see God’s calling and to support you with this. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing at first we’re going to teach you. That’s a blessing.  

Bishop Sheard: I think because we all messed up as preachers. Hey when I was kind of interviewing to get the church that I’m pastoring now, I went and preached and I preached a whole sermon. I read the scripture in Malachi and preached a sermon on the same chapter and verse from Micah. Preached the whole sermon. And when I got home after service, I said, Oh my God. So I go back to the church and I only had eight people at the church. I go back to the church and I said – you know, cause the devil said, “hey, you know, they don’t want, they don’t want you, you know?” But I made a conscious decision. I got up and I say, you know, I preach. I read this scripture when I should have been reading this scripture. And one of the mothers came up to me and she said, we still enjoyed you.   

Russell: That’s good.  

Bishop Sheard: You’d be surprised what people do if we just be transparent. 

Russell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good word. Bishop.  

Bishop Sheard: Yeah, man. I appreciate it. I had a great time with you, man.