Craft 9.29.2022

    Preaching is both a calling and a craft. It is a crushing obsession that refreshes the preacher who gives his life to it without qualification. It begins with a call and that calling invades every area of life. This is what God has called us to do. This is what God has called us to be. 

    This calling is not like being fast or tall. It is something that can be improved by diligent work and experience. Not every experience will seem fruitful.

I just pulled my first “preaching Bible” down from the shelf. There are more old sermons in that Bible than I can count. To read them now is painful. It must have been painful for those who heard them as well. Called? Yes. Capable? Getting there. Polished? Nope. The imperfections of the final product did not invalidate the call but confirmed it and gave it direction as I was learning the craft. 

One of the things that I know now is that being glib and able to speak “off the cuff” was both a blessing and a curse. Mostly a curse. I have learned to be deliberate and disciplined. Sermons like this would now barely pass as first drafts, preliminary sketches really. I would not trot them out in public. But by trotting them out then and learning what it takes to improve I began to improve. I would say that now I’m a passable preacher. Not because I didn’t make mistakes but because I did. 

It takes time and experience. Time must pass and experience must be experienced. There are no shortcuts to the future. But the time must be directed and invested, and the experience must provide a trajectory for growth. The same bad experience, experienced repeatedly without learning appropriate lessons is not only painful but exasperating. Don’t do that. Grow. Learn. Move forward.  

    To improve your preaching, you must take your time. Take the time needed to read. Take the time needed to write. Take the time required to make mistakes—and then correct them. Take the time to go down blind alleys, and then get out of them and continue with the mission. Drill a few dry wells, plug them, and move on. Chase the occasional wild hare, but don’t become obsessed like Elmer Fudd. To improve your preaching, you must take the time. To take the time you must make the time. If you cannot or will not you will not improve your preaching. 

    My goal every Sunday is to preach the best sermon in town. Regardless of the attendance, I want this flock to hear God’s Word as I have prepared it for them. I want them to know that I have labored over the Text. I want them to understand that I have selected my words carefully, edited them diligently, thought through them lovingly, and prayed over them fervently. This is not a hobby. This is my life. If you don’t want to do that, if you don’t want to be God’s messenger to your people on this Sunday, then by all means do something else. This is not pride speaking. This is craftsmanship. Every Sunday morning when I pray for Wes, Dustin, Clayton, Jeff, Lance, Josh, Mark, Nolan, and Sam this is what I pray for them. The best sermon in their town at the appointed time. 

    It takes time. Craftsmanship grows as we become more accustomed to the tools with which we work and the medium in which we do our work. Our tools help us study Scripture and write with clarity. Our tools are the same used by other “knowledge workers” but specifically tailored to our sacred task. Or tools help us to take the material of Scripture and prepare a message for our people. The medium we use is words. We want to speak in our own voice with our own personality. This requires our immersion in the text and the words we will proclaim to the Church when it gathers as a worshipping community. We can view that time as a meal. God has called us to be a Chef who understands the hunger of our people and meets that need with a well-constructed meal built from the raw ingredients of scripture, around which we have wrapped our minds and about which we have chosen our words. 

Craftsmanship takes time. It takes love. It takes obsessive even compulsive commitment. Jeremiah put it this way

“If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” (Jeremiah 20:9 ESV)

 

If you don’t feel the fire, you may be a teacher, you may say your peace, but you will never be at peace, and you won’t be a preacher. This fire will warm you as you bend over your books. This fire will flicker in your mind as you consider the best way to tell hard truths. This fire will calm you as you think about how to comfort the afflicted. This fire will fill you with anger as you confront the fallen and lax with their sin. This fire will remind you of your own imperfections and if you subject yourself to its cleansing power this fire will refine you into the preacher God wants you to be. 

Transitions 9.24.2022

    The tide of the year rolls endlessly on. Unable to stop it or even slow it down, we ride the rising tide to the beaches of our imagined tomorrows, like early mariners guiding their craft through surging surf and shifting shoals to discover new places and perspectives. The last heat of the summer. The final throes of the growing season. School is well underway, and the year passes silently by as we begin to take stock of what we have accomplished whilst laying the groundwork for what is to come. 

    The farmer plans for harvest. Solomon reminds us that ants and now grasshoppers consider their needs for the coming winter. Now is the time to consider the harvest of this year as you consider what you will do next. As you might have guessed I have some ideas.

Review

    Well, we’ve all done enough work this year that we can begin to review what we have accomplished. What to review? I would make at least two recommendations. 

    First, you need to review work product. Look at your sermons and lessons. Have you provided your congregation a well-balanced diet that teaches the whole counsel of God? Did your broader theme for the year provide continuity from sermon to sermon, series to series throughout the year? When and why did the plan need revision? Was there a small issue (such as getting COVID at the beginning of August) or was there a real, significant oversight in your planning? A good debrief helps clarify your effectiveness.

    Secondly, you need to review process. Big problems are generally process related in some way. If you came to June and did not think your planned series was in step with the rest of the year that is likely a glitch in your planning. Now is the time to work it out as you begin your preparations for next year. Did you find yourself short of time to adequately prepare each week? Maybe you don’t feel like you are doing enough general reading. Or, maybe, you just feel like you are perpetually behind. All of these are process issues. You can build the time into your schedule to accomplish what God has called you to do. Now is the time to look at your processes and see how they can be changed so that your work product—your sermons are better.

Revise 

    Next, take out some of your sermons from earlier in the year. Look at Christmas and Easter seasons. Print out copies of your sermons from around that time, pick up your red pencil, and revise them. I know, you’re not preaching them anytime soon. This is for you as a writer and preacher to improve your craft. Even well-written, clearly preached sermons have room for improvement. Unfortunately, we seldom take the time to revisit our work because “out of the pulpit, out of mind.” 

    Don’t reinvent the wheel here. Don’t question your call or claim incompetence. This process of revision is a small job that will repay you in the future. You will learn to edit yourself better before you take your sermons into the pulpit.

    After 40 years of preaching, I find myself doing this much more frequently. My basic calendar for 2023 is set. I have preached most of these texts many times. My first order of business will be to go back and look at what I’ve said before. Doing this with the red pencil, revising, and rewording as I go along helps me to clarify what I’ve said in the past so that I can be clearer in the future. I think that this will help you as well.   

Reconsider

    Those forty years of ministry have produced some bad ideas. The only way to separate the ones that work from the ones that don’t is to look at the big picture and reconsider the whole thing. Revision is detailed. Reconsideration considers the big picture. In my outliner, I can look at the big picture of every series and every sermon for the year. I can see the logical flow of the whole year right before me. Or the illogical mess of the whole year. Generally, I get it mostly right. The only way to know for sure is to reconsider the big picture. 

    In reconsidering what I did this year, and the year before I can have a better idea of what God is prompting me to preach next year. The Holy Spirit will lead us. The Scriptures will guide us. For the Spirit and Word to work within our congregations we need to give them context to work. If every sermon is detached from every other, and every week is an island unto itself we practically require Spirit and Word to begin their work anew every week. Much of what we allow to play out before our congregation should be worked out in the study so that the unfettered Word and the indwelling Spirit can flow freely. 

Hard Intellectual Work

    Preaching is hard, intellectual work. There are shortcuts and chicanery that can replace that work, but you won’t improve, and your people’s growth will be superficial. Simple steps taken at the outset of the work spread it out over the course of a year. Doing this regularly will spread the hard work evenly throughout your whole ministry so that this great task to which we are called does not become overwhelming. As you prepare for 2023 take some time to look back, look over, and look through what you have said during the year that is passing. Then you will be ready to look forward.

Focus and Reduce 9.8.2022

    Since I was playing catch up after my Oregon trip Last week’s blog was off the cuff. To continue tidying things up I’m combining two topics. How fortuitous. The kind of focus I want to discuss should result in a reduction. Reduction of words. 

    Another way to describe what I’m talking about is writing with economy. For some of us, this is a real issue. If you are well read from a broad variety of authors, you are constantly increasing your vocabulary. As you comprehend more words you use them in conversation, writing, and preaching. This can make your preaching and writing fresh and give your conversation greater breadth. For me, it increases the temptation to use too many words, to talk around a subject rather than summarizing my thoughts as compactly as possible. 

    Chronology as well as clarity are at issue. When five well-chosen, appropriate words are sufficient, the use of twenty is overkill. Any added clarity is absorbed by the excess. Rather than being hard and clear your expression becomes spongey, absorbing the space that words need to thrive. 

    We are reminded of this principle of increasing focus by reducing the number of words used in many places in scripture. One example is in 1 Corinthians 15.3-8 where Paul sums up the Gospel as it was taught in earliest Christianity using less than one hundred words. His topic in the balance of the chapter is resurrection. He prefaces that discussion with a summary that encapsulates the faith without drilling down into the details. He knows. The Corinthians know he knows. But his purpose is not to tell everything, just enough to introduce a subject and then unpack his subject in detail. He could have written extensively on any of the topics found in 1 Corinthians 15.3-8, and in other places he does. By focusing on the task at hand (introducing a discussion of resurrection) with an abbreviated summary he explains but does not exhaust the subject. 

The right word, chosen with care is better than lots of nearly right words. Even when those words--especially when those words--are on target. 

    Because we are responsible for teaching the content and intent of scripture, we must master our material. That process fills us with knowledge. Sometimes we are tempted to cram everything we learn into a message or lesson. Carefully choosing the words we use keeps us focused on the message of the text as well as our congregation. The operative quotation is 

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.                                                                                                                                             Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch 

    In the study, we should know how long we intend to preach. Habit informs us how many words it will take for us to hit our mark. Discipline teaches us to use the fewest number of correctly chosen words to teach the text. When we do this, we provide the space needed for each word to do its work and for the Spirit of God to move in people’s hearts. How hard we often make it. We say so much, forgetting that the Spirit is at work and can often work best when we are finished speaking and the echo of scripture is the only thing in our people’s ears.

The Long Run 9.9.2022

            Who can go the distance,

                        We’ll find out, in the Long Run             

Eagles

    Queen Elizabeth 2 died today. I’m not one of her subjects so it really is not my direct concern but there are a few lessons we can learn from her long reign which might inform ministry.

    She saw most of the twentieth century and reigned most of the first quarter of the twenty-first. She was beloved beyond the scope of her reign. She was, perhaps, the last remaining vestige of the “greatest generation.” She faced problems, controversies, and wars, as well as the final desolation of the British Empire. She may have been bred and born to it but that is not enough in a complex, rapidly changing world. 

    Much of the last paragraph describes the evolution of ministry, particularly in the last quarter-century. Many of us find ourselves ministering in a world vastly different from what we knew when we began our ministry education in the 1980s. There are lessons to be learned from her that inform a career in ministry teaching us what it takes to serve in the long run. This will not be an exhaustive list, but a few things jump to mind. 

Toughness

    She was a tough old bird. Those words are not elegant, but they are accurate. She never changed her public face despite all the issues she confronted. Some were personal (Charles and Dianna) others more public (Brexit, the Falklands war). She endured every circumstance without losing focus on who she was. It may be that many did not like her, but she was respected. Though some of her descendants were thought to be rich and entitled she never seemed to be tarred with that brush. 

    Toughness is a state of mind which needs to be cultivated in ministry. Some will not like you. Others will like you but not appreciate the way you do your specific duties. Others are just chronic complainers who for some reason decide to make you miserable. You cannot control them; you can control your response. Toughness allows us to absorb the blows and remain standing. 

    Jesus was tough without being combative or reactive. He was criticized and maintained His purpose. He knew hardship but it did not harden Him. Tough people can be tender-hearted and, in that juxtaposition, lies a strength that produces long ministry.

Resilience

    Toughness enables a person to stand when attacked. Resilience is the attitude that creates something beautiful from the experience. Her difficulties seemed to energize the Queen when the criticisms could have unmade her. She did not remain tied to outdated concepts of monarchy which were under attack, rather she redefined her role and changed. 

    Every criticism you receive in ministry should teach you a lesson. Resilience in ministry means that you grow stronger through the difficulties. Resilience should motivate us to remove the dross through the process of refinement.

Flexibility

    The monarchy Elizabeth left was not the one she inherited. She had her Corgis and horses and Balmoral, but she evolved through her long reign, emerging as a statesman emeritus for the Western world. 

    Economically and socially England and Great Britain were evolving in the same ways that the entire world evolved through the 20th century. When she began the British Empire was global. Globalism had shrunk the world when she died and eroded the distance between cultures. She changed while remaining the same and did not seem to become the final example of outdated cultural concepts.

    Flexibility is an ability to learn and adapt to change without losing sight of who and what you are. Ministry changes. Life changes. We represent an eternal Gospel and a risen savior. There are some clear boundaries that we should never give up and some central issues for which we should fight. Flexibility is what allows us to draw boundaries Biblically rather than personally. Flexibility enables us to see the forest for the trees and to grasp how important it is to carefully choose the hills we will die on.

Service

    The Queen’s service was different than ours. This is true of each of us. My ministry will look different than yours. Yet each of us should minister in such a way that people see Jesus through us as the source of all that we do and the reason we do it. 

    Some will be missionaries. Others will be rural preachers. Still, others will serve on large staffs at megachurches. Each of these is different. Each is the same. 

        “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than                 yourselves.” (Philippians 2:3 ESV)

 

    We serve Christ best by serving others. We serve others best by showing them, Christ. That may seem overly simple but that’s pretty much the ball game. 

Who Will Go the Distance?

        “Do your best to come to me soon. For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and          gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me. Get             Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry.” (2 Timothy 4:9–11 ESV)

 

    Luke was with Paul at the end. Paul longed for Mark’s company. He trusted Timothy. He mourned lost colleagues and deserters. He kept the faith. He was not as old as Queen Elizabeth. Though imprisoned he still taught, preached, mentored, and led. Not a monarch but a tough, resiliently flexible, servant. Lads, that is not a bad goal.