Monday, September 13, 2010

preachers journal #4

Ok, so some of you were kind enough to e-mail and ask why the blog stopped.  Well it was barely started, actually.  But here's the deal.  I really feel convicted about this idea that you can't take people somewhere you're not going.  I've always been the one with all the revolutionary ideas to fix the world.  But they're all ideas.  I'm long on words and short on experience.  So I'm thinking maybe I should just shut up and get a little further down the road before I try to point the way. 

I would like to blog again.  But it has to be from a point of groundedness I don't sense right now.  But really, thanks for asking.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

a preacher's journal #3

 I drove by a big church today. I drive by them all the time. They bug me. Not for any good reason. That church never did anything to me. It’s just that it was big and mine is small. That’s really its only crime. It got big and we didn’t. I’m trying to be Ok with that… being a small church pastor. But I’m only partly Ok with it.

I have this sense that I’m a good preacher and that preaching is key to a growing church. So when I add the two together… it just seems inevitable. Especially because deep inside I think I’m not only a good preacher, but exceptional. But then again maybe all preachers think that deep inside. That would be funny if we all thought we were better than average.

So what do I do with that? Usually just feel bad and try harder. Try anything that might draw and keep people. The drawing isn’t that hard. It’s the keeping. People are hard to please over the long haul. But boy do I try. I get the feeling sometimes that everybody will move on eventually. So it’s my job, in preaching, to try to keep them as long as possible. I feel that pressure. That can’t be good.

Everybody who goes to church has to abide some sort of weekly monologue preached by a guy who, like me, is trying to hang on to people. So if my monologue were to be marginally better than the competing monologues around me there’s a fair chance that some church folk might come to choose my place over theirs, and that I’d be tempted to call that success. But that’s not what preaching is supposed to be about. That’s not about the love of the word or His people. It’s about something else entirely. Something not worthy of ten hours of work each week.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

A Preacher's Journal #2

So I was preaching about listening. It was John 10. “My sheep hear my voice.” It started pretty well. I knew I was connecting as I described the three dogs I’ve loved. People love their dogs. When you talk about loving your dog, they think of their dogs. They feel good. They smile a lot. It’s the closest thing our culture has to the shepherd/sheep connection.

But then I had to move on. I started talking about what it means to listen to God. I’d talked about it during the week with several people. My wife had some good ideas. I liked her ideas. So I preached them. I preached her ideas. I almost don’t remember what I said now because I was mooching her ideas.

I could tell when it switched. I went all cognitive. Something about learning to listen to the events of your life and learn from them. It was good stuff. It’s just that I haven’t tried it very much myself. It was theoretical. Hypothetical. When I go from firsthand experience to hypothetical, something happens. I work hard, but almost too hard. I talk at them instead of with them. And they watch. I read their faces and I know they’re trying to stay with me, but they’re working too hard too. It’s like the magic left the room.

I guess that’s what happens when I try to take people someplace I’ve barely been. “I’m pretty sure you should go over there. No, right over there. I’ll be over there in a minute. But until I get around to it, you go first. You’ll love it over there, trust me.” Yeah. Really makes you wanna go, doesn’t it. When will I get it through my thick skull that I can’t take people to places I haven’t been? I can try, but I won’t be very believable. I have to go first.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

a Preacher's Journal #1

There’s a gap between me and my sermons. My sermons contain lots of good content. Lots of truth. Lots of high ideals. Then comes me lagging along behind. I can’t keep up with my sermon because the sermon trends toward the ideal while I trend toward the real. To some extent I’m a hypocrite every week.

I often try to hide this. I can hide behind other people’s deep insights and quotes. I can parrot back things that are trendy and clever. I can recycle other people’s stuff. But there’s a cost to that. People can tell. Oh, they might not be able to put their finger right on it. They may even enjoy the presentation. But deep inside they know whether I have a firsthand connection with the text or whether I’m preaching a hand-me-down. When I preach things I haven’t experienced myself, it leaks out. A little less passion, a little more abstraction, a little less of what Rhetoric calls “ethos.” It’s the God-given ability people have to smell a rat. It’s a subtle loss of believability. It’s a layer between me and my congregation.

On the other hand… when I do preach what I’ve tried myself, something different happens. The emotion is there. The connection to real life. The sense that I would die for this stuff. You can’t fake that. You just can’t.

There’s an undeniable and inevitable link between my personal character and my preaching. Quintilian said this in the first century. People are more than mouthpieces of truth. Since they speak from internal resources, what’s inside really matters. Or as Jesus said, “for the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.” In all our focus on being good preachers, the governor in the whole process is something prior to preaching: being. Instead of asking myself what I’m going to say this week, I must first think, “Who have I been this week?”