The Power of Patience. 5.29.2025

     Patience and procrastination are not the same thing. Patient people are often criticized for being indecisive, reluctant, and yes, procrastinating. Patience is none of those things and when we begin to invest in good processes, we will find that the time spent in choosing and maintaining our tools, laying the groundwork, and doing the right things the right way has enormous benefits. The first of which is that we can be patient. 

    Patience is a long-term strategic commitment. Patience requires self-control and the capacity to lay out a course of action over many weeks, months, and even years. We do not tend to think of patience as anything more than a psychological disposition, a personal commitment to not be overwhelmed or distracted by events. This is only partly true. In fact, this is really the outcome of patience. A person who has control of her tools, workflow, goals, intention, and schedule need not panic under duress because it is already accounted for. 

    A patient worker cares for his or her tools because those tools are more efficient and yield more effective work. A patient worker understands that there are times when their energy or outlook is not conducive to creative or elaborate production, and they have set aside tasks that do not require much energy or creativity. Patient people work hard at preparing the soil understanding that only God can produce a harvest. Above all patient people take their job and all essential tasks seriously. Preaching the gospel is not a game or a performance. Ministry should not be staged. In preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ we are answering His call to make and teach disciples. If we work with diligence patience, we will be able to spend many fruitful years at the task. The power of patience is one of the factors that helps the preacher decompress and de-stress. 

    Christians do not expect to hear the whole counsel of God every single Sunday. If a Church does have that unrealistic expectation they have been badly taught and have likely worn out many preachers who never had a moments peace because others had seized control of their ministry. Do not let that happen. Work with preparation, diligence, intent, anticipation, and a long-term framework. Prayerfully and forthrightly teach your congregation a Biblical understanding of ministry with well-preached, effective sermons as the primary deliverable. It may take time, but the result will be the ability to take a measured and patient approach to the work.

Practice the Fundamentals 5.22.2025

     Practicing the fundamentals is a common trope in coaching sports, advising business, and yes, mentoring preachers. Each, though different, obviously correlates the expectation that repeatedly doing the simple, elemental facets of a task produce muscle memory and mind memory that creates a context for excellence. 

    The next, practical step is to identify what those fundamentals actually are. Truthfully there are differing fundamentals for various dimensions of any job. Some are intellectual others physical. Some fundamentals are preliminary, other’s primary, and still others, tertiary and dependent. Practicing the fundamentals begins with identifying those fundamentals and often that identification admits that the fundamentals are often not even tasks—but attitudes or approaches that frame the entire endeavor. In this essay the fundamentals that we will discuss are less things to do than approaches to doing. 

Start Early

    Begin a task as soon as you can. You do not begin a task early in order to be first, but to go deeper. Deep thinking and reading require time and space. We can’t create more time, but we can redeem the time by allocating the time needed, with the space needed to allow for depth. 

    Depth is a function not only of having ideas but of reviewing, revisiting, and revising those ideas.  Consequently, (And, yes, redundantly) depth requires time. When we start early, we have the time to suggest hypotheses and to test them. Space gives us the opportunity to have both bad ideas and good ideas; to weed out the former and to water and nourish the latter. 

    Good thinking cannot be rushed. We work with a weekly deadline that is set in stone. If we want to have the time and space to do good, original, challenging work we must start months and weeks early. Because if we wait until the last minute, we will not have the time needed for practicing the next fundamental. 

Edit Often

    Editing a sermon is often more important than the initial outline, general phrasing, or specific wording. It is through a detailed, repeated editing process that we find mistakes and misstatements. As I begin this essay on Monday this draft comes immediately after finishing my sermon for Sunday. Wow. There were parts of my sermon (The slide deck) which required 5 edits. That never happens. For some reason I kept generating copy that was either sloppy, inexact, or truncated. Finally, I got things ironed out. One of the main reasons I could iron things out was that 1) I was doing this on Monday. 2) I allow plenty of time for editing. Beyond correction there are other benefits to editing.

    The first benefit is that you can experiment with phrasing, pacing, word selection, and presentation. The words of a sermon, if read on paper, will always just be words. However, your sermon is not an essay, and you will not merely read it. You will be preaching and a central part of editing material for the pulpit is editing for the ear rather than the eye. You may want to red line the document while reading it aloud. I often dump the raw text into a simple word processor and have the computer read it to me whilst I look for corrections both in form and content. 

    The second benefit is that you introduce space into the writing process. If you just stop and never come back you may find later, say when giving things a final look Saturday night that time has worn down your cleverness. It happens to me all the time. By building in space for editing as a part of the composition process you develop regular habits of going over, under, and through the same material repeatedly, to achieve different purposes. 

    A third benefit is that if you want a second opinion you can specify to your outside reader what issue you need help clarifying or fixing. Inevitably if you just send someone a sermon and ask, “What do you think?” the feedback will be too indirect and nice to be of any help. 

    Before we move on let me make this very clear. You need a well thought out process and procedure for editing. You need to review your copy basically the same way every week and follow the same pattern. That clearly defined path leads us to the next fundamental. 

Quit when finished.

    This is not only true when preaching a sermon, it also pertains in the study. Many of us may “Murder our darlings” but we don’t do a good job burying them. They follow us into the pulpit clinging to our legs and whining into our psyche, reminding us just how intelligent we are. Editing is not a process for prolonging a document, but for ending it. Remember what I wrote earlier about process and procedure? It is repetition that distinguishes editing from piddling or fiddling. Piddling with a document means not being able to let it go. Fiddling means returning again and again to alter a perfectly acceptable phrase or clause—generally by reducing it to proper written prose rather than a document properly worded for preaching. Piddling and fiddling keep us from finishing. Editing helps us to know exactly when it is finished. 

    The solution is simple. Have a checklist, follow your checklist, when everything is checked off—stop. You are finished. I really only learned to stop in the pulpit when I figured out how to stop in my study. So long as you never remove the “cuttings” from your mind there is always a risk that you will roll them back in. Flee the temptation. When you are done with the sermon do something else and don’t glance at it until you have a regularly scheduled review (mine is Friday when we are doing other worship prep). Far too many sermons suffer from too much material rather than not enough. If we can’t get closure as a writer imagine what it is like for a listener! 

Again!

    A final admonition. Write and preach as if they are going to come back next time. Leave them wanting more. Don’t answer every question, give the impression that you are only getting started. Many writers and preachers wait, or search for the perfect word. Other’s when finding it, cling to that word even when it does not fit. And yet some will take that word and through a process of piddling or fiddling find a way to work it back in after they have edited it out. No need! Just act like we will all be back next Sunday. Maybe the word, phrase, or notion you had to cut this week will be appropriate next week. 

    Once you become proficient at editing your work you will recognize that there is preservative and developmental process in throwing out phrases or thoughts which need more work. You’ll return to them, perhaps over the course of writing several sermons until it finally takes form and is ready to help declare the good news. This is not an act of recycling but of cultivating and nurturing. 

    The time and place you will preach are not a secret. I’m sure you have a sign which tells people when to come. You have weekly communications that keep people involved and attentive. You do things throughout the week to encourage participation. The rhythm of congregational life is one of the structuring mechanisms that keep us focused on the task of preaching. Those external structures can only help if we are diligent about what goes on when the study door is shut. So. Set aside the time. Sharpen a red pencil. And for heaven’s sake when you are done. Stop.

When you Can't Create, Work 5.15.2025

    I had what I consider to be one of the best possible jobs my last year of high school and the summer after my freshman year of college. I worked for Lex Shuler & Company, Fencing and Landscaping. It was the perfect job for a High School student. By definition I could not work at night which meant that it did not detract from the high school experience. And there were perks. I was given the use of a company pick-up truck my Senior year. This arrangement was far better than him tracking me down every day after school. My boss and his wife were High-School youth group leaders at Church, so the use of the truck came with a clear mandate. I could drive to work, school, and church. I was given a Texaco credit card to keep the truck and my mowing equipment fueled up. On Sunday I got instructions for the first part of the week and on Wednesdays at Church I got instructions for Wednesday to Friday. 

    Beyond the perks, I learned what it meant to have a job. A “Real Job”.  Many of those lessons still resonate despite the intervening years and the difference between what I did then and what I do now. Many basic principles about how “do good work” continue to inform my thinking, along with other ideas accumulated over the various non-ministry jobs I’ve held since then. Each has helped to expand my thinking with additional corroborating information regarding how to work with attentive excellence.  This week I will explain how my work so many years ago informs a principle that is essential to remaining “sane” whilst doing knowledge work in general and ministry in particular. The principle I want to discuss is summarized by the phrase “When you can’t create, work.”

    Whatever the job there are days when your best laid plans are laid to waste early, frequently, and completely. You’ve had those days, and I have. For me today is one of those days. What do you do when it is not possible through interruption, low energy, or simple friction to do thought-intensive work? You work. You do tasks that don’t require much energy, which tolerate interruption, or which are brief enough to avoid friction or inertia. 

    In the late 1970’s when doing landscaping this kind of dilemma would occur early on rainy summer days. I’d arrive at the company warehouse and find the other members of the crew sitting there at the open garage door wondering how we were going to get 8 hours in when the first 4 promised rain. We couldn’t do the creative work of building a fence or beautifying a lawn, but we had tasks that needed to be accomplished, so that when the sky cleared or the day turned, we would be ready for action.

     In that instance we took care of our tools. Someone would change the oil in mowers, tillers, and other power equipment. After that someone (generally me) would hose off and clean decks on mowers and bodies on tractors. Weed eaters would be fully restrung. Every machine would be prepared for the next task. 

    At some point all the bladed tools would be laid out. We would knock dirt and other residue from shovels, spades, axes, shears, and trimmers. Then someone would use a file to put a fresh edge on each of them. Finally, the blades would be wiped clean with one rag and wiped down with an oily rage to protect the metal. If there had been infrequent rainy day breaks it might take all morning to get this work done. If we were fortunate, we could do the real work in the afternoon, knowing that our tools were in tip-top shape. If the rain persisted, we would only miss half of a day. 

    Every job, even preaching, occasionally requires this kind of work. Calling it “Make work” or “Work about work” doesn’t make it go away, it still needs to be done, and it even has a useful place. In our daily ministries we will have days that are like those rainy days of my youth. You can’t run and hide just because you are interrupted, but you do need to have a few things at hand that you can do. Tool maintenance is certainly better than zoning out and becoming frustrated. Let’s consider a couple of examples. 

Computer Hygiene

    Reviewing to-do lists and calendars. Removing unnecessary files, folders, documents, and applications from the desktop. Updating operating systems. Upgrading software tools. Making sure that devices are in sync when possible. This is not an exhaustive list. Point of fact; such lists can be endless. 

    When I am able to work my daily/weekly plan I allocate a brief amount of time to this kind of work, but the normal day to day work takes precedence and this piles up. It’s nice to know that amid constant interruptions and crises I can make little bits of progress on these items.  

Desk and work area

    Paperless? Hardly! It piles up when it is not properly filed. It needs to be accessible. Various documents need to be available to congregants who may need access to them. I keep a pocket notebook, a desktop notebook, and a paper daybook on my desk. I am beginning the onboarding for a staff member today which means printing copies of W-4 forms and other documents that I will use, and then labeling and preparing a file folder for a permanent analog record of the information. 

    Sometimes these documents pile up. The perfect day for getting a handle on things is one where other unforeseen interruption make reading, writing, and reasoning difficult. These tasks are perfect for the in-between times created by persistent interruption. 

Undirected necessary reading

    I have stacks of books to read which are not specifically tied to a given sermon series. I have notes and articles I clip and collect from the internet that are staged within in-boxes of various electronic and analog form. Nothing like 20 minutes between meetings or waiting on someone who is dropping by in a panic, to organize things in Evernote and even skim an article or two. I always have a book going that is infortainment and documents that will (hopefully) yield illustrative material. It’s hard to use a major calendar block of set-aside time for this kind of busy work, though doing the work will eventually pay dividends. 

    The requirements for this kind of reading are low energy and relatively time independent. And if you have been in the ministry for any time at you understand the value of snatching usable time whenever you can get it. 

Correspondence

    Twenty-five years ago, this would have been a bigger deal. With email, text-messaging, and video-chatting business communication moves more quickly—and haphazardly. Look at your email application. How many unread emails do you have? Do you use pinned emails as a To-do system? Do you file and organize important communications? Do you have messages of any kind that need returned? 

    Perhaps the 15 minutes you have this evening, that accrue to you because of an interruption earlier in the day is exactly the right time to archive messages and work on achieving “inbox-zero”. There is nothing better for your piece of mind than your To-do list at zero, your inboxes at zero, every message returned, every call completed—no loops unclosed. Sure, these tasks can all be scheduled and batched. My experience is that using well that time, which is otherwise lost, reduces the amount of time necessary for scheduling them.

Dig clean

    Finally, let me conclude by returning to my landscaping analogy. Back then, I did a lot of digging. One of the lessons I learned is that there is wasteful digging and efficient digging. The benchmark is how much “crumb” you leave in the hole when you use a spade to dig. In planting a shrub, I would begin a hole at the center. The quickest, most efficient, productive way to dig was to “dig clean”. Digging clean means that when you cut through the soil to the depth of the blade you remove the entire spade-full of dirt as one uniform piece. If you let dirt crumble into the hole, after several shovels full, you will have to stop to clean out the hole. If you move too quickly or do not pay enough attention you can easily find yourself doing twice as much work just to prepare a hole. If you have 12 arborvitaes to plant and you fail to dig clean you are making more work for yourself and slowing the whole project down. 

    Learning how our tools work and maintaining them in working order is a part of the commitment to digging clean. If you start a sermon project and don’t know where to accumulate Bibliography, or how/when/where you will take notes, or whether you need to refresh your language skills—you are not digging clean. You are wasting time by not allocating it properly. Your first task is to take care of these tool issues. Then, with your toolbox filled with sharp, usable, appropriate tools you will be able to dig clean. You will be able to dig into the text, plant the seeds of good ideas, and harvest an appropriate message for your congregation. 

Tools again, tools always. 5.8.2025

     Every craft uses some variety of tools. Education and training introduce a craftsman to the tools needed to produce quality work. Time and practice provide depth, breadth, and perspective to the use of diverse tools. Experience helps the craftsman to move from novice, to apprentice, to expert smoothly as accumulated insight grows from mere knowledge to wisdom. History proves that this process is how humans improve at both professional and avocational tasks. Both creativity and productivity deepen with age. 

    As we move through time, most disciplines acquire new, diverse, even revolutionary tools that both deepen and accelerate work. Wise craftsmen test and evaluate new tools as they incorporate them into existing workflows. Very few products in the 21st century, regardless of the skill level of the master craftsman are immune to new technologies and innovative practices. One of the tasks of a craftsman is to always be practicing with our tools, refining how we use them, replacing those that are worn, and constantly assessing the outcome. We wield tools to do. It is the product that is the final measure of how the tools he uses are serving the craftsman. 

        As preachers, you and I are craftsmen. We are called to use our creative gifts to serve God by proclaiming the Gospel, making disciples, and teaching the flock. We have a wide array of tools at our disposal. So once again, we consider our tools. If you are serious about preaching with excellence, you should always be tool focused. We don’t always think this way because we fail to grasp how “knowledge work” works. 

    Preaching is not architecture, though we follow a pattern in our preparation. Preaching is not carpentry though we build sermons. Preaching is not scholarship, thought we read, write, reason, and recite. Preachers do not serve as travel agents, though we guide others on their path of discipleship. We are not executives, though we lead. We wear many hats, some better than others. The ultimate touchstone of the kind of labor we perform is that it falls under that broad category of “knowledge work”. Our tools are not hammers or blueprints. We don’t construct houses, garages, or commercial buildings. Our product, for lack of a better term, consists of the messages we preach, lessons, we teach and lives that we influence. There will not be a physical outcome. Unless someone prints a copy of your manuscript or holds on to the slide deck the impact of the message is felt in heart, mind, and spirit. In saying that we are knowledge workers we acknowledge that the concrete evidence of diligent labor is more difficult to quantify than that of farmer, banker, carpenter, or factory worker. The work is difficult and real though not always visible. 

     This knowledge work is more regular than the law, more occasional than the academy, and more personal than education. Though we share attributes of these and other knowledge-based endeavors, the fields we work are subtly different and there is some difference in the tools we use to till those fields. Our mandate is not to publish or perish, win the case, or impress our readers. We are embedded in the same journey we are planning and preparing for others.  We are heralds of God, and the words we write apply to our own lives as well. 

    Our work will require long hours of immersive study which, in partnership with the Holy Spirit, we mold into a lifetime of messages for the Church. We will serve, at various times in our lives and for various stages in the journey of discipleship, as teacher, mentor, guide, disciplinarian, muse, and inspirer. Any one sermon may serve in those varying capacities for different auditors in the same congregation. Preaching may be the hardest job in the world, so we need to think about the task and analyze how we use the tools available to pursue the excellence this high calling rightly deserves. 

In this essay I want to briefly look at various kinds of tools based on the role they play in the process of our work. 

Tools that Shape the Preacher

1. Depth. That is depth of your reading. You need a broad variety of hermeneutical, textual, theological, exegetical, and practical materials in your library. You need to read history, biography, science, poetry, and fiction. Many sermons fail, not because they are not Biblical but because the preacher’s own context is too narrow. If you don’t spend long hours reading outside of our natural disciplines, there will come a time when you find it nearly impossible to sharpen the crucial tools of exegesis. 

2. Trajectory. Keep a good Bibliography (I use Zotero) and refer to it often. Flip through it. Sequence your resources. Your trajectory as a preacher is largely in your hands. When you go through your weekly work constantly recalibrate where you are going and the steps you will get to arrive at each sermon and all the sermons in a series. 

3. Longevity. I am preaching from Matthew. By the time I shift my emphasis I will have preached 27 sermons from this great Gospel. Many of the tools I have used this time through the book are different. I am always looking for new studies, monographs, and approaches. Longevity requires rethinking, reconsidering, revising, reworking, and reviewing what we have used and said in the past. A preacher who does not work with longevity in mind will burn himself out and risks boring his congregation. Use tools that shape you.

Tools that Shape the Sermon

    Tools that shape the preacher more generally contribute to your accumulated knowledge. These tools contribute to your growth as a preacher and a well-rounded thinking person. Other tools make specific contributions to the exegesis, hermeneutics, and writing of this week’s sermons, lessons, studies, and presentations. These tools shape the work currently before us. The proper use of these tools presuppose that we are being more broadly shaped by the tools that add depth and longevity to our trajectory of growth.  

1. Lexicons and grammars. These tools help us to make exegetical sense of the text(s) we work through. They are reference tools. You look up what is currently relevant. These tools are also used to check the work in the work of other scholars. 

2. Commentaries and Studies. These tools help to verify what we learn and familiarize us with other viewpoints and approaches to the text. These reference materials are often detailed and specific helping us to clarify what we think prior to organizing our own material for preaching. 

3. English dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopedias. The difference between clarity and obscurity often comes down to the correct term, accurately defined, used in the appropriate intellectual context. If you don’t know what the right word means and what subject the word addresses, there is no substitute for looking it up. 

The greatest difference between this category of tools and the previous category is that tools that shape the preacher tend to be books, monographs, and articles read in detail which have an ongoing impact on our growth as a scholar-pastor. The tools that shape the sermon tend to be reference materials which we access as they are needed to prepare specific messages. 

Tools that Shape the Congregation.

    Properly speaking the tools that shape the congregation for hearing the Word of God are not found on shelves or computer hard drives. The tools that shape the congregation are tools of thought and behavior that you—the preacher transfer to the congregation as they engage in the finished product—sermons and lessons. 

1. Preparation. If you are always prepared to preach, your use of that tool will shape the expectation of the congregation when they worship. They will come prepared and expectant. They will arrive knowing that you have been shaped by your tools. They will trust that the sermon has been shaped by appropriate tools, and they will be prepared to be receptive. 

2. Discipline. Lazy preachers breed lazy listeners. You are responsible for content, form, and delivery. Disciplined work will practically guarantee that you make some improvement in each phase of the work. If you are disciplined your congregation will follow suit and be disciplined in their approach to scripture. 

3. Communication. Tell them what you know with humility and explain what you don’t know with honesty. The only way to avoid challenging questions is to neglect points 1 and 2 above. If you are disciplined in preparation you will learn to let God be God and you’ll just continue being you. That level of communication is about integrity and continuity. Tell them what you are studying and why. Explain why you are preaching given texts and how you study. It doesn’t need to be a mystery. You want your congregation interested, intrigued, and involved. 

    You and I are smart, educated, and creative. We are also human. And human beings tend towards the status quo. We use tools to expand our reach, enrich our thinking, and examine our processes. At some point virtually every week of your working life you will spend some time with these kinds of tools. Some of these tools will become familiar conversation partners. You will learn to keep some of these tools readily to hand on your computer, phone, tablet, or shelves. You will reach for them regularly. You will grow into the task and your preaching will improve.