Overcoming writer's block with the help of others

Every pastor has struggled with it - the blank page. No words are more difficult to write sometimes than the first words. I was looking over some notes from a conference I went to a while back and came across these notes taken from a lecture by Anna Carter Florence:

Writers block is rarely about being blocked, usually it has to do with being empty. If your spouse locks you out of your house, the problem isn't the door.

At first glance, I get a little defensive when I read these words. Nobody likes  to be told the problem is with them. We'd rather think that there is simply a problem with method or technique. Change our technique and we'll be well on our way. I'd rather not admit that I have times of emptiness.

Over time, though, I've come to realize that this is more true than I'd like to admit. I've come to realize, there will be times of emptiness for every preacher. If you prepare a Sunday sermon and at least one Bible study a week with just a few weeks of vacation each year, you are creating nearly 100 sermons a year. That's a high demand on one's creativity. For some of us, it's just more than we can generate. Trying to tackle that volume all on our own will lead to seasons of emptiness.

Dr. Florence's advice, fortunately, was not to put more pressure on the preacher by telling them to just dig a little deeper. That advice feeds into the myth that one person is capable of being the one voice a church needs to hear from all year long. I just don't believe that anymore. Churches should hear from multiple voices. Some churches are picking up on this and moving towards a team approach to preaching.

For those of us in churches that still follow a more traditional pattern of hearing from one voice most of the time, Dr. Florence suggests that the preacher learn to draw from more sources than one's own brain during the sermon preparation process. I don't mean simply copying another's words or thoughts. I mean something more akin to group work. At the conference, we did exegetical and homiletical work with small groups of other ministers. It's amazing how this encouraged the creativity in all of us.

I've occasional borrowed this method of overcoming emptiness by reading an upcoming text in staff meeting and allowing the other staff to speak of what they see in the text or even how they might preach the text. I also have a pastor's group I meet with regularly and we've occasionally done something similar. In each instance, I have left the group setting with more ideas on how to preach a certain text than I ever would have had on my own. I've also felt sermon preparation has moved towards being a church activity and not simply something the pastor does all by himself.

What do you think? Do you agree with Dr. Florence that writer's block is a result of emptiness? Also, do you ever attempt to prepare sermons with someone else? How has that worked for you?

Ministry is sermon preparation

I am an advocate of the study. I think good, wise, biblical sermons require the preacher to spend ample time listening to the text so that they might also hear a fresh word from God. That being said, I was struck by a passage I read recently in Richard Lischer's The End of Words that reminded me, sermons are not the product of study alone. Ministry, especially ministry to the least of these, is also sermon preparation because it is where we encounter the presence of the living Christ.

“Training in preaching begins with training for ministry. ‘When did we see you naked or hungry or in prison?’ the naive sheep ask the Judge. Preachers have ransacked nature, history, and their own emotions for illustrations of the divine. They have scratched into every conceivable experience in search of divinity or its analogues. They have explored every possible site except the very places Jesus promises to be – among those who suffer and seek restoration.

"Preachers have looked for him virtually everywhere save among the ordinary practices of the people of God, who yearn more deeply than they are willing to admit for sermons that credibly portray their lives of faith – not Mother Teresa’s, Gandhi’s, or Gandolf’s, but theirs” (Richard Lischer, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (The Lyman Beecher Lectures in Preaching), 39).

What are ways you join the study and day to day ministry in your sermon preparation? How do you get out of the office and into people's lives?

What are your favorite books on preaching?

I try to read at least a couple of preaching books a year.  Thanks to doctoral studies, I've read more than that in this past year.  While not every book on preaching is helpful towards the task, several have proved immensely rewarding.  I'm currently reading Fred Craddock's now classic work Preaching.  In the first chapter he advocates the reading or rereading of older books on preaching:

"Let us not be uncritically enamored of the new.  Some older volumes on preaching could profitably be reissued, not as a sentimental return to old paths but as confession that part of the malaise in the discipline is due not to a stubborn refusal to move beyond tradition but to a thoughtless failure to listen carefully to that tradition.  One becomes a concert pianist not by abandoning the scales but by mastering and repeating that most basic exercise. Who could say, after all the centuries, that reading Aristotle's Rhetoric or Poetics or Augustine's instructions on preaching is no longer of benefit to the preacher?"

So the question of the week is this: What are your favorite books on preaching?  These of course, don't have to be books about preaching.  Some books my be very influential on one's preaching even if they are only indirectly about the topic.

Here are some of mine:

Favorite how-to on preaching: Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages by Haddon Robinson.  This basic text isn't glamorous, but it reminds me of the "scales of preaching" quite well.  The updated addition (2001) includes a greater emphasis upon different forms of preaching than the first (1980) plus more gender inclusive language.  It's a text I'd recommend to anyone wanting to learn to preach or to review their "scales." 

Most inspirational book on preaching: This is usually whatever book I happen to currently be reading.  But a lasting favorite is Barbara Brown Taylor's Preaching Life.  Not only does she paint a beautiful portrait of the preaching task as only she can do, a third of the book includes sample sermons which are themselves worth the price of the book.

Favorite collection of sermons: OK, this is cheating a little, but I'm going with 20 Centuries of Great Preaching, a thirteen volume set edited by Clyde Fant and William Pinson.  I inherited this from a mentor and have found it a true delight.  I freely admit that I have not read the entire thirteen volumes.  But I do occasionally pull a volume down and read through the sermons by a famous preacher.  All the heavyweights are there, but so are many that I have never heard of before.  Not every sermon is great, but many are.   

Favorite non-preaching book that has influenced my preaching:  Again, this one changes frequently. Most recently it has been Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.  This isn't a book about preaching, but a book about loving words, both written and spoken.  I don't reread many books, but this is one I can envision picking up and reading again and again.