All at Once 10.27.2022

    I try and work diligently throughout October to put together a well-rounded, balanced Sermon Calendar for the next year. It would be wonderful if nothing else was going on and I could turn my full attention to this one big project. We all know that life does not work like that, particularly in the ministry 

    I have needed to keep up with my weekly exegesis for my current preaching. Beyond the study time needed there is requisite time for drafting, redrafting, editing, and producing the final sermon documents; my manuscript, a handout for the congregation, and a slide deck to be projected. Fortunately, we now have software tools that help streamline the process. Where I live and preach, I’m the guy using those tools. There are other teaching assignments each week, reading and studying for long-term growth, and keeping in contact with colleagues and peers in this wonderful calling we share.

    That’s to say nothing of the other things which occupy a pastor’s time. We must make hospital, pastoral, evangelistic, and courtesy visits with members of our Church and community. There are gatherings and programs at our local schools or other civic opportunities. These opportunities come our way and we need to participate. Our little town has a big shindig the Sunday before Halloween. Members of our Church will participate in the programming provided and I will spend time circulating. 

    It would be great if the challenges of ministry were spaced out. It would be awesome if the different aspects of the work came to us in bite-sized homogenous pieces allowing us to give our undivided attention to one thing at a time. Alas, the world is not like that.  

    This brings us back to one of my favorite subjects. Plan ahead. Give yourself time. You don’t know what interruptions may come your way or how long they will take. Track your work and know where you are going so that you can easily pick back up your train of thought or get back into the flow when you return to your study. Learn and cultivate efficient methods to do the unimportant things you and I need to do. Make time for what is most important. 

    One of the unforeseen outcomes of the otherwise dreadful pandemic is that each of us has had the opportunity to reevaluate how we deal with “emergencies”. There were some situations in which I used to drop everything I was doing, rushing off like some kind of a spiritual first responder. The pandemic has weaned me from the need to be essential. There are still emergencies that require immediate response, but not so many as I once thought. The days of me scheduling myself to be present for someone’s surgery—like I was performing the procedure are done, in all but the most extreme cases. 

    We learn to discern and confirm our call to ministry as a matter of giftedness and then, allow other things to crowd our time. We study scripture and realize that our central calling is to pray, preach, and teach and then spend a disproportionate amount of time not doing the very thing we are called and gifted to do. This is not reasonable, profitable, or sustainable. The most important thing you will do today is study scripture and pray. Ministry tends to happen all at once and keeping in focus means doing first and best what we are called to do.

Start Early, Go Deeper 10.20.2022

    At this point in October, about 85% of my sermon texts are determined for 2023. There are some remaining text-selection issues that will be clarified through a more detailed study. For example, next year I’m doing a five-sermon series taken from the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. The five sermons will each be "book" sermons. Clearly not the whole of each book.  I will need to do some preliminary study prior to choosing each specific preaching unit. The series does not begin until June. Sometime around mid-April, I will begin resourcing and researching. My method for this kind of series is to put together pretty detailed outlines during the study phase. I will try and make the outline for each book coherent with the others. This will be a little tough because of the difference in form between wisdom aphorisms, songs of praise, and the sort of dramatic epic that is Job. I have allowed plenty of time to get the research done so that I can spend time on the writing. This brings us to the subject of this week’s essay.

    Starting early is essential for doing deeply detailed work. In parallel with my Sermon Calendar work itself, I have been resourcing and researching Mark for most of the month. I will not be in Mark until January. I have a couple of months to do detailed background, historical, textual, and theological work. If I waited until the last minute to chart the course for each individual sermon, then I won’t have any work in storage to draw from when doing weekly work on each message. I’m reminded of something that Jesus said.

      “Have you understood all these things?” They said to him, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore     every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings     out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”” (Matthew 13:51–52 ESV)

    Regardless of the specific section of scripture or particular book, I want to be that scribe trained for the Kingdom, able to bring out of my treasure old things and new things. I have previously preached from every book I have scheduled for 2023. I have preached from some of them a lot. For much of my ministry, I have preached from the book of Acts every single year. I’ve got some old stuff. I’ve got a lot of old sermons. A growing preacher is always exploring newer scholarship, trying to be a properly disciplined scribe getting some new treasure. Much of it won’t add anything to our knowledge of the text. But there might be a cleverly written phrase,  an analogy, a quip, or well-articulated nuance that will help us to see all the old stuff, the data, and details we already know, with new insight. 

    Starting early provides the time to go deeper. Starting early means that we can begin and abandon exegetical processes knowing that we have ample time to explore blind alleys, dig new wells, and to re-dig old wells. If you are always only exegeting next Sunday’s text on Monday, you will not have the time to really explore the details, you will rely more on secondary literature than your own finely tuned exegetical eyes, and you will sacrifice precious writing and editing time just getting the study part finished. 

I still have more of that “work, work” yet to complete. Scheduling, tracking, and organizing a year’s worth of preaching remains. By getting an early start I can intersperse the drudgery with the much more fulfilling work of study. I have a third of the month left to get the basic organizational work done without becoming zombified by the clerical side of things. I still need to think through other lessons and studies, as well as plan this weekly blog and other writing projects. If I was still laboring over “what am I going to preach” week after week I would not be able to focus on the basic pastoral function of being “devoted to prayer and the ministry of the Word.” 

    You might be thinking “I can’t do that; the armor just doesn’t fit.” I understand. I’m not saying, “do it my way.” I’m saying, “do it your way, with enough time to do it with excellence.” There really are many ways to skin a cat. Pick your method, and skin your “cat”. They won't skin themselves. These cats, (your method of working) are not like garter snakes. They don’t sidle up to a rock, nick themselves under the neck, and wriggle out of their own hide.  Yes, there are lots of ways to “skin a cat.” And every single one of us must do our own skinning. I’m skinning mine. I’m doing what I can to help you skin yours. When it is time to go into the pulpit the “cat-skinning” is done. Will you be adequately prepared? 

Reviewing Your Work for Color, Tone, and Rhythm. 10.13.2022

    No one wants to be a boring preacher. Our prayer is that our preaching will engage our congregation and motivate them to bear fruit, grow more faithful, and to live with more focus. The source for this fruit, faith, and the focus must be Scripture. Scripture tells us what fruit to bear. Scripture reminds us that we must be faithful first, to Jesus. Scripture provides the information we each need to focus our faith and grow to maturity. 

    So, we want to engage people Biblically. When this is done well it draws people so far into the Biblical story that they see their own lives as an extension of the story of salvation we read in Scripture. When we fail, they yawn and tune us out. How can we be fully rooted while being culturally engaging? 

    For me, that means one thing. I’ve got to get better. During October, whilst writing my sermon calendar I am also focusing on what I can do to be a better preacher who is fully rooted in scripture and fully engaged with my congregation. I hope that you will benefit from my journey as you work to improve your own preaching. 

    This week we are going to talk about language. If you really wanted to get people’s attention you could include at least one cuss word in every sermon. This will likely not garner the kind of attention you are hoping for. There are other ways to use colorful language besides trotting out George Carlin’s big Seven. What we want to consider, this week is how we can write with color, tone, and rhythm. And the only way for you to grade yourself is to look at some of your past work. 

    This is far easier today than it has ever been. I will be preaching a series from Philippians in 2023. I need to review my most recent preaching from Philippians and see what I did then. As I write these words, I am going to access my Philippians preaching from 2012. And there it is! In addition to a more formal analysis of my exegesis and how I structured the sermons, I want to consider what I sounded like. Did I use fresh, vibrant language? How was my tone? Did I preach like a friend, a mentor, or a scold? Now, it may be necessary to use any or all those tones at one time or another, but when our tone becomes monotonous, the sheep can get tone-deaf. When I read portions of the sermon outline or manuscript does it roll off my tongue? Is it rhythmic and balanced or is it clumsy and dissonant? So, I just read through my outline for a sermon preached on August 15, 2010, from Philippians 1.1-2. Here is my appraisal.

1. The structure is good, clear, and easy to follow.

2. There are some passages where the language is colorful and paints a clear word picture. But for the most part, it is naked, and the preacher (me) will need to do the heavy lifting in presentation.

3. It is a detailed outline, but most of the points are not well fleshed out. I was making the transition to a more fully written manuscript and this sermon is a “tweener”. According to my current habits, this would be a good start, a fair first draft. I wouldn’t take it into the pulpit. 

4. There are a couple of salvageable word pictures. The introduction works, though it will need to be updated for 2022. It is possible to, and  I may rewrite and recast it. This series is not till next September so I have a long time to decide if and how I will actually incorporate this old material. 

    I will go through all these old Philippians sermons before the series begins, constantly considering what they “sound like.” For the most part, I will be satisfied with the exegesis. The text says what it says. As I grow older, I am growing more aware of each opportunity to preach and the need to be clear, colorful, and compelling every single time. Again, by colorful, I don’t mean either cussing or clowning around. I mean the deliberate, reflective choice of what I write. I mean balancing clarity and descriptive language and then having the discipline to deploy the words as they are written. 

    I still know how to preach without notes, can extemporize, and occasionally do. However, Sundays are not a surprise and I want to be the best workman that I can be. Every manuscript has some “air” in it where I can expand on the thoughts that are written. Yet, those words written, with the Holy Spirit as my partner in my study have been aged, pondered, edited, thought through, and prayed over. Why would I think that what jumps into my mind when I am animated in the pulpit will be more blessed than that which I labored over with deliberate, stubborn prayerfulness?

That Time Again 10.6.2022

     I begin this draft on the afternoon of October 3, 2022. That means I am working on my sermon calendar for 2023. I started selecting texts and putting together my different series for the year about two weeks ago. At this point I have drafted two whole series from the Old Testament, preparing preliminary but complete outlines for a series from the book of Ruth. The other Old Testament series consists of book sermons from the Wisdom/Devotional literature of the Hebrew Bible.

 

   Today is primarily a “work-work” day. Any big project has plain ol’ work that must be addressed so that the hermeneutical, exegetical, historical, and background reading can commence in earnest. This kind of work is not what I would call fun. It really is work.

    For example, I spent more than two hours this morning just looking for things. I’ve mentioned this before. After 40 years of preaching, I have studied many books, preached many sermons, and organized a lot of sermon calendars. During the yearly process of preparing the next year’s preaching there are times when I need to review and assess what I’ve already done with a book, and to locate where I have filed any documents, articles, PDFs, and other study materials I will need. 

    I’ve been in the full Apple ecosystem since 2012. I began preaching from an iPad and at the same time began using a Macintosh as my regular computer. The transition from PC took several years. When I came to Grayville in 2016, I got a 2012 MacBook Pro and said goodbye (mostly) to the Windows PC world. Till today.

I’m preaching from the epistle to the Philippians next year. I went through the process of dividing the book up by paragraphs for the series and dutifully planned everything in Omni Outliner. Then I went looking for materials I had used in the past. I could not find them on my Mac or any cloud storage services. So out came the HP laptop. It is long in the tooth and slow. I had upgraded it to Windows 10 but that only makes it seem slower next to the M1 Mac Mini I now use as my primary machine. After several minutes of mucking around on the hard drive, I found the folder I needed from 2010 and finally got it moved to a thumb drive. I was going to burn it to a CD, but I don’t have a CD reader on either my desktop or laptop Mac. I didn’t realize how much had changed since 2010. Files tend to be moved through cloud services or on thumb drives. Floppy disks? Are you kidding me? Those days are long, long gone. 

    It really needed to be done. The material I found was just over 75 megabytes of materials consisting of dozens of articles and monographs. I also located the actual sermons so I will be able to make a baseline comparison to what I said then and review the exegesis undergirding each of those messages. It won’t take as long to review the material as it did to find it and access it, but it will be worthwhile. 

    I will be doing tasks like that throughout the month. I have already looked through my reference manager (Zotero) to get an idea of what materials I have for my preaching in 2023. I have looked at Accordance and Logos to determine what resources I have in those two Bible programs. I have made several passes and will make several more because it is not always evident at first glance what materials might be helpful. Book titles are not always as transparent as one would like. A commentary on Mark is straightforward but there are other books that address certain topics, doctrines, trends, or difficulties that have helpful material.  I will try and have the literature sorted and laid out by the end of the month. That allows me some room for each series to determine whether I need to locate and purchase additional materials. 

    The key and this is why I’m addressing the issue now, is to do the “work-work” as efficiently as possible so that I can get on with the more important work of studying and preparing for the preaching task itself. 

    I’ve preached from an iPad since 2012. I’ve not printed paper documents in a long time. (Occasionally if I’m going to be speaking out of town I will make a paper emergency copy in case the Wi-fi does not work or some other technological glitch, otherwise—nope.)  It’s good to have everything we've said and much of what we've studied available on our phones, tablets, and computers. Don’t forget, however, we each must still study the material ourselves. Having what you need is the first step. No Artificial Intelligence can get to the heart of the matter when it comes to studying God’s Word. Automation only gets you so far.  The tools help to make the work a little more efficient, but effectiveness is measured by the quality, dynamics, and clarity of the final sermon(s). That is the real work. The work of exegeting, interpreting, applying, writing, and presenting the Word so that the congregation is inspired, grows, learns, bears fruit, and ultimately applies the Word to their world. 

    Don’t shirk the “work-work.” It is time-consuming and can be frustrating, but it is rewarding. Every wheel that you don’t reinvent and every furrow you don’t re-plow saves time to be invested in laboring in the text, praying for your people, and refining your writing. The work is worth it because of the harvest gathered and the fruit borne.