Limping in the Pulpit

"The first time I preached a proper sermon, my mentor gave me some good advice: your praying and your preaching should be of the same length. You don't want to find yourself limping, with one leg shorter than the other. God works as a result of prayer and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness."

N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 226.

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?

How wandering through the library can make you a better preacher.

I escape to the public library to write many of my sermons so I was struck by Tom Long's advice on connecting the library's vast resources to your sermon preparation. As always, thanks to www.workingpreacher.org for these great videos.

 

Warp speed exegesis

Last week I attending the Preaching Practicum at Wilshire Baptist Church. The featured speaker was Dr. Anna Carter Florence, the Peter Marshall Associate Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. I was not familiar with Dr. Carter Florence other than having viewed one or two of her video clips at Workingpreacher.org. She was excellent.

One thing she taught us was what she called "Warp Speed Exegesis."  Her point wasn't how to fast-forward through exegesis. Instead, the purpose was to help the preacher dig into the text on his or her own without turning too quickly to commentaries. The practice was simple. Take the biblical text and work through it verse by verse paying particular attention to the verbs. Who is doing what? And what are they doing? What isn't happening? One also pays particular attention to where things might have gone differently in the text. What could have happened instead? 

We did this with a dificult passage, the rape of Tamar, found in 2 Samuel 13:1-22. I was surprised at how helpful this method proved to be. Part of the effectiveness was no doubt in part because we did this as a group, which was also one of the main points of the practicum. Doing this activity with lay people can add a whole other dimension to sermon preparation. The other reason this method was effective was because it help move you through the passage helping you pick up the key moments when something could have gone differently - Amnon could have confessed his troubles to a better chosen friend than Jonadab (a crafty man). David could have taken off his sin-induced blinders and kept from sending his daughter into a dangerous situation. The servants could have spoken up (though at a high cost). Before the exercise I thought to myself, how would I ever preach this passage. After the exercise, I had at least five legitimate ways I could preach this text.

Since then, I've tried this method on a few passages - Ps. 46, 1 Thess 3:6-13, and Rev 5:11-14. The results have not been as dramatic as they were for the purely narrative text in 2 Samuel. One reason might be that this works best for narratives. Another reason could easily be that I was working on my own and not with a group. Nevertheless, I have benefited from employing this method in each case and I'm grateful for Dr. Carter Florence's time with us.

Below is one of her videos from WorkingPreacher.org. In it she talks about how to involve the church in this process. Enjoy.

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?

Lights, Camera, Action: Helping your sermons come to life

In his book, The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Guide to Biblical Preaching, (Abingdon, 1999), Paul Scott Wilson argues that preachers should envision their sermons as movie scenes in order to help bring their sermons to life.  Wilson's thesis reminded me of an interview I did with Richard Kannwischer, pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian in Newport Beach, California.  Dr. Kannwischer said that one of the books that had most influenced his sermon preparation was The Screenwriter's Bible.  Wilson doesn't directly reference any such work, but he does provide some basic suggestions for how to transform your sentences in ways that help the congregation to visualize what you are saying.

1. Avoid adjectives and and adverbs. Wilson argues that these descriptive words actually diminish description.   Notice the difference in the examples he provides.  The sentences without adjectives or adverbs are easier to visualize.

• "The beautiful road" vs. "The road ran alongside the beach"
• "She ran quickly" vs. "She scrambled" or "Her feet pounded down the trail"

2. Avoid cliches.

3. Concentrate on a few small details to set the scene.  Think about what details you would need to shoot the scripture text or the modern illustration as a movie.  What decisions would you need to make about gestures, clothing, the age of the character, etc.?  By just adding one or two of these details, the preacher can help a scene leap off the pages of the Bible and into a listener's imagination.  

• Clothing - By briefly mentioning a small detail about a person's clothing we can not only help the congregation visualize the scene, but we also are providing information about that person's economic situation, interest, age, profession, etc.  
• Gestures/Facial Expressions - Emotions are difficult to visualize.  Gestures or facial expressions are not.  Instead of saying, "the boy was bored," one could say, "The boy slumped in his chair with boredom."
• Age - A few quick words about the color of one's hair or the state of one's skin can give a wealth of information about a person's age.

4. Stay out of characters' heads - Wilson argues that if we want people to visualize a scene, we must "stay out of the minds of the characters."  The best movies don't narrate a character's thoughts, they show you a character's actions and let you eavesdrop on their conversations.  This leaves many thoughts hidden, but that is what creates interest in the story. The listener or viewer is drawn into into the movie (or sermon) because they want to figure out what a character is thinking.  He notes that the Bible also rarely gives us a person's thoughts, but instead focuses upon their actions and a few brief quotations of dialogue.  To this day we can read, say, the story of Adam and Eve and wonder at motive as we ponder their actions.  The Bible doesn't give us thoughts, but action and dialogue.

5. Keep the camera on people and actions - Wilson doesn't want a sermon devoid of doctrine.  In fact, his  book is an attempt to get preachers to preach more doctrine in their sermons.  But, he argues, this is done best by focusing upon God as the primary actor in the story.  Instead of preaching on the caring nature of God, we ought to preach on God reaching out to those in trouble.  The action keeps us interested and informs us about doctrine.  Just saying "God is caring" is not as interesting, even if it is as accurate.

Question of the week: What are some tricks you have to find some extra time?

As is evidenced by the lack of posts last week, life caught up with me. School work combined with some extra tasks at work meant little time for the blog. That's alright, I doubt the world suffered very much for that. One thing that can suffer when extra work piles on is sermon preparation. Time spent in the study is time almost no one sees and it is tempting at times for the preacher to cut corners there by not doing enough exegetical work or not sitting with the text long enough to find a fresh word from God. What we usually end up with on those weeks is something that isn't very thought out or something rehashed that we've done before. In other words, not our best.

While we can't always predict when extra work will pile on - like when a funeral occurs. However, we do sometimes know when busy weeks are headed our way. Family vacations, conferences, etc. - these things show up on our calendar months ahead of time, usually. We can, plan our sermons in such a way as to take such heavy weeks into consideration.

One thing I will often do, if I know I have a week coming up that will prevent a lot of study time is plan to preach from a text for two or more weeks in row. I'm a one idea per sermon kind of preacher, but most texts, especially in the epistles have more than one idea in them. As a result, if I'm willing to do some very heavy lifting exegetically that first week on the whole passage, then I will be able to greatly reduce the amount of exegetical work I'll need to do over the next couple of weeks. I spend about 2/5 of my sermon preparation on exegetical work (2/5 on writing, 1/5 on delivery), so getting this part of my preparation finished ahead of time reduces the amount of time I'm spending on a sermon by 40%. That can be very helpful on a week that I know is going to be busy.

An example might be a sermon series that I did out of Hebrews 13. By exegeting the whole chapter in the first week of sermon preparation, I was able to minimize that portion of sermon work for the following three weeks - one of which I was at a conference limiting my ability to prepare.

Hebrews 13:1-2 Keep on Loving . . . the StrangerHebrews 13:1, 3 Keep on Loving . . . the PersecutedHebrews 13:1, 4 Keep on Loving . . . your SpouseHebrews 13:1, 7-8 Keep on Loving . . . Those who Taught you the Faith

To do this requires some advanced planning, but it can really help with the work load on weeks we know will be busy ones.

What are some things you do to help balance the responsibility of faithful preparation with all the other duties that a pastor faces?