Not Personal, Strictly Business. 6.26.2025.

     “It’s not personal, strictly business.” This line, featured prominently in The Godfather series of films. It was also featured in the classic romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail! In the former this sentiment was designed to serve as a reminder that even when bullying enemies or threatening subordinates that the intent of the Mob was to act in a businesslike fashion. Their perception was that, at times retribution, graft, and even violence was the cost of their lucrative business interests. So, for the Corleone’s family, “business” indicates somewhat uncivilized behavior. All the violence, intimidation, extortion play a role in defining the character of the Corleone business/criminal enterprise as well as framing the behaviors of individual characters. 

    In You’ve Got Mail, this phrase first uttered by Tom Hank’s character is questioned and debunked by Meg Ryan’s character who basically calls it a load of tauro-scatilogical nonsense. The point she is making is that this separation of work from personal and process from passion can be taken to an unnecessary and unhelpful extreme. Many people are wired to combine professional expertise and personal engagement in such a way that their entire personality is brought to bear on the work that they do. The unspoken critique of Bud Fox’s approach to business is that people who utter the phrase “It’s not personal, strictly business” are often the kind of people you want neither as business partners nor personal friends. 

    To be good at something and to have a professional stake does not mean becoming mechanical, and it should not mean abandoning personal connection. Preaching has a voice in this conversation—or dog in this fight—pick your metaphor because the place of the preacher requires us to assume and execute many roles during the week, particularly on Sunday and those rolls are a combination of hard and soft skills. They require ability and sensitivity. In short, they are both personal and business. 

      As much as I write and as often as I go on about doing the work, being prepared, and taking our task seriously you would be mistaken in thinking that I do not take this job personally and seriously. Work balance aficionados are always blathering about a person being more than what they do. And while this may be generally the case in some occupations, there are at least as many occupations where personal investment is a key element in doing the job with excellence. I want my doctor to be both technically proficient and human. This combination is particularly true in ministry. Like Paul before us and generations of other predecessors our call to ministry makes it more than just a vocation, profession, or pursuit. It must also be a passion if we are to be fully engaged in the task. My goal is to write and teach in such a way that you improve your skills and become a better preacher. My underlying assumption is that you already know that you need to be constantly becoming a better, more Christlike person. 

Consider the following passages and what they say about Paul’s investment in ministry and his conception of the task. 

“To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” (1 Corinthians 9:22 ESV)

“To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,” (Ephesians 3:8 ESV)

 “2Timothy 4:1   I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: 2Timothy 4:2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.” (2 Timothy 4:1-2 ESV)

    It is difficult for a preacher to strive for excellence week after week unless our whole person is invested in the ministry of the Word. Preaching the Scriptures puts us in the position of standing before our fellow human beings for the purpose of asking the central human question: “Is there a word from God?” Our preaching reflects not only the seriousness with which we ask the question but our conception of the answer and its authoritative voice in the world. The idea that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Amos, Peter, Paul and the rest, trembled with fear to be the human voice of the divine, and that we laugh it off by claiming “it’s only business” is not profound, it’s silly, juvenile, and frightening.

    What we must do is make a clear distinction in our own minds between the “head” part of the work and the “heart” part, recognizing that both are fundamental parts of our personality, and consequently central to doing the job of preaching with full integrity.  Let me make some suggestions, the first of which is a bit of a critique. 

    Many others who write about preaching make somber declarations about differentiating between “sermon work” and personal “devotional work". Don’t do that. If all the time you invest in studying scripture, thinking about the text, outlining, and writing about the text have so little effect on your spiritual nature that you need a separate quiet time; you may not be well suited to ministry. Preaching and teaching brings together both sides of your personality. Your self-discipline and ministry discipline will merge and be indistinguishable as you grow older. These false divisions between study for preaching and study to feed one’s spirit bring to my mind the constant parade of moral lapses of so-called ministry leaders. They have abandoned God’s call on their lives to function as technocratic cogs in the Evangelical Industrial Complex. This approach strikes me as the same things as the Corleone family moto; “It’s not personal, strictly business.” If you don’t want to go into business or be friends with someone like that—why would you want to be that preacher? 

    Next, you need to make sure that you invest in personal relationships within your congregation and community. In the 21st century calling and visiting are not as common as they once were, but this human interaction is an essential difference between serving a congregation and merely speaking to an audience. Sermons are delivered as an essential part of worship. All the things we do in worship require personal investment. Communion is an essential part of the process—as the word itself declares. Singing, prayer, even the greeting time all these things are based around the idea of personal contact within the local worshipping congregation. 

    Additionally, you should be clear about exactly how this relationship to the congregation is related to your relationship with God. We don’t work for a congregation. We serve a congregation. We are called and equipped by God. Ultimately, we answer to Him. If that does not fill your heart with awe and wonder and give you little bit of a chill, you may be missing the point. I hope people like my sermons, though that is not the goal. I don’t go out of my way to frame the text in a demeaning or demoralizing fashion, yet there are times we walk to the pulpit with difficult words. It is at those moments we need to be clear about the various configurations of our service and the clarity of our devotion. If we take the attitude that it’s merely business, we may be unjustifiably harsh with a text. If we adapt the attitude that we should not ever say anything challenging, we may water down words that need to be spoken with urgency.

    God called fully human people to be His messengers. The job requires negotiating a continually shifting set of opposites. Firm but forgiving. Corrective and instructive. Disciplined, focused, direct, indirect, opaque and clear. Human beings don’t just divide into simple categories of business and personal. We are everything we are, all the time. Ministry is the wrong task for those who enjoy simple, easily understood, reductive approaches to living. A reductive approach to humanity is ultimately demeaning, which seems to me to be the incorrect approach considering that the Word became flesh—accepting that very complexity as a part of His saving intervention. Be like Jesus who embraced the fulness of ministry with His entire person. At the end of the day trying to be like Jesus is always a good strategy.