Many years ago, I worked at a church. We had a local missions pastor named Jim*. This church did a lot of work down in Haltom City, and while down there, my friend Chris would go eat at an A-framed, hole-in-the-wall Mexican food joint. He became friends with the owner even though Jim spoke no Spanish and the owner spoke little English.
Jim told the owner he worked with churches to help them grow.
The owner started asking him a lot of business questions. Jim would sometimes randomly suggest things like, “You’re too cheap you should raise your prices 20%” and the next time he visited, sure enough, all the prices on the chalkboard would be raised 20%.
He’d say, “You should sell so-in-so” and it would be on the menu the very next time he went.
Once, the owner told Jim the health inspector was coming and he was worried. Jim said jokingly, “You should just shut your business down for those days and be closed.” Sure enough, the guy did it even though Jim was joking. Pastor Jim was kind of intrigued the business owner would do exactly what he said.
Jim wanted to take me down there to eat, so I went. He introduced me to the owner. I speak some Spanish so I told the guy, “You soy un pastor a la Iglesia con Jim” His face went ashen. “Iglesia???? Jim no work with Church’s Chicken???”
The dude thought Jim was a biz development/growth expert for Church’s Chicken restaurants. It’d been the reason he’d followed everything he’d said to the T. He realized nothing he’d implemented came from a pastor with no eatery expertise. Ha!
*name changed to protect the innocent.
