Lead The Church

My friend, Larry Sherman

By Kevin Butcher

I met Larry in 2002, less than a year after being fired by a church I had served for 14 years…a church full of people I loved very much. My heart was broken and full of anger at the way the church had, in the end, treated my family…and full of shame concerning my own inadequacies as a man and pastor. Larry was recommended to me by a mutual friend because Larry was a leader in a worldwide community of believers called the Evangelical Covenant…and because my friend knew Larry had the heart of Jesus.

Over pancakes one morning, Larry listened as I poured out my story of pain and anger, shame and grief and as I shed bitter tears that literally dripped onto my syrupy plate.

He listened as I berated others and berated myself and asked frustrated, cosmic questions about whether there was any truly safe place on the planet where you could be a human being and grow and even make mistakes and yet follow Jesus together in authentic, repentant, forgiving and ever deepening community. He listened patiently and I remember feeling in my gut, “this guy doesn’t know me…but he cares about me – not as a commodity to be used or recruited for his group but as a wounded man and brother.” He didn’t need to say it. If the love and acceptance is real, it’s cool if you say it and often helps the healing if you say it but you don’t really need to say it because the other person just knows.

Finally, I was done. And Larry simply looked at me and said something like, “You’ve been through a rough time. You’re owning and working on your stuff. And you’re working on forgiving others their stuff. God is with you and you’re going to be all right.” And I can’t be sure because there was so much going on in those days…but I think it was at that moment – over pancakes with a brother I had never met in my life – that I began to believe it. God was with me and I was going to be all right.

Over the next 10 years, Larry partnered with me and the other leaders of Hope Community Church [my new community of believers] – and he taught us and consulted with us and counseled us and talked with us on the phone…and more than anything else, he believed in us. He helped Hope find its way into the Evangelical Covenant family and mentored me in the ordination process and was there for the hugs and high-fives and picture taking in Estes Park in 2005 when I became an official covenant pastor. He introduced Carla and me to his best friend and life-partner, Debbie…and the four of us ate together and went to shows together and laughed and prayed about all kinds of stuff and often told beautiful, life-giving stories about our kids and yeah, sometimes even cried together over those same kids. Larry treated us like we were family. And every couple months, Larry would call and ask if I wanted to hang out – and I always got the feeling he wasn’t calling just to do his job with the Covenant but because he really wanted to be with me as a man and brother. Larry Sherman, indeed, was my friend.

And yesterday, May 7, 2013, my friend Larry went to be with Jesus.

Larry, I miss you, man. Thanks for loving me and accepting me when I couldn’t love and accept myself. Thanks for not trying to be a star…but following Jesus and taking time to wash feet – my feet, Carla’s feet, the feet of the leaders of Hope Community Church, the feet of many, many leaders and people in the body of Christ both in and outside of the Covenant. Thanks for deeply loving your wife Debbie and your kids and grandkids in a way that models Jesus to us all. I will never forget you, Larry. Thanks for choosing to be my friend. And I will see you again soon, my dear brother…in glory.

By Tim Morey… (A fellow church planter.)

There has been a lot of shock and grief these past two days as two men who blessed me greatly passed unexpectedly – my teacher and mentor Dallas Willard passed away this morning from cancer, and yesterday, my friend and colleague Larry Sherman died unexpectedly on a flight home from Nashville.

I’ll write more about Dallas later, but I wanted to share a few reflections from my time with Larry, as many of you who read this blog are Covenant church planters who knew or knew of Larry Sherman.

Yesterday I was at a retreat with about 50 church planters and denominational leaders when news came in that Larry had died. The shock was palpable as the room received the news of his passing, as was the grief in the hours to follow as the news was absorbed.

There is no such thing as a good place to get that kind of news, but there was a sort of appropriateness about hearing it there, in the presence of friends and colleagues of his who had worked with Larry for decades. Much of Larry’s work took place quietly, behind the scenes – and his friends in that room were uniquely suited to speak to the effect of Larry’s steady influence on church planting over the years. My interactions with Larry span only a handful of years, but I was deeply blessed by him all the same.

I first met Larry eleven years ago. I was a prospective church planter attending the ECC’s church planter assessment center, and Larry was one of the assessors. I was struck by his love for God, the church, church planting and church planters, as well as the depth and breadth of his experience. I knew at once that if I was blessed to plant a church, Larry was a man I wanted to learn from. Every chance I got, I did.

Fast forward six years to my first experience serving as an assessor. I was intimidated to be sitting at a table among giants, most of whom had been on the team who assessed me. My plan was to fly quietly under the radar, observe, learn, and try to avoid saying anything stupid. Larry, it seemed, was aware of my plan and graciously determined to thwart it. “Tim what do you think?” “We need to hear from Tim on this one.” In the years of church planter assessments to follow, I learned much from Larry’s insights, and from the gracious way he would contribute to conversations that could at times be complex or contentious.

Larry was instantly likeable. Warm and friendly, he exuded genuine good-naturedness and care for others. If you are a person, you pretty much had to like Larry.

Larry was smart and strategic. He was a collector of ideas, models, and innovations – a voracious reader always thinking about how we could best position our church planters to live and preach the gospel.

Larry had a tireless work ethic, and a tremendous capacity for output. He approached every question with thoroughness of thought and was comprehensive in his answers.

Larry was a man of integrity. I was around him during moments of victory and moments of frustration, and in both he honored others and conducted himself the way any of us would hope to.

Larry had a gift for making good things better. He was not afraid to look for both strengths and weaknesses in what we did, and consequently was always tinkering under the proverbial hood, tweaking this and that to make the machine run smoothly. I think especially of our church planter training center and the work he did there. Any who have gone through that training will have benefitted from Larry’s meticulous work.

Larry loved his family. At every event we did together, the team would know within ten minutes of arrival how his kids and grandkids were doing. These reports usually involved pictures. And Larry would always ask about Samantha and our kids. We were blessed to have Larry at our dinner table a couple of times when he and I were working on projects together, and he always made a big fuss over our girls. The girls loved it, and so did Samantha and I.

In 1 Thessalonians 4 Paul writes the following: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”

As I reflect today on Larry’s passing, I’m keenly aware of two things: Larry’s passing occurs within the context of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and for that reason it is a passing that comes with hope. And second, many others know hope in Christ because of his life. May Larry’s life continue to be felt long after his passing.