Coherence 10.30.2025

    My theme this month, should I wish to state it in a single, pointed phrase, comes down to the following: “It should all make sense.” Clarity, certainty, and consistency all contribute to information hanging together, that is coherence.

    If you want coherence in the pew, you need coherence in the pulpit. If you want coherence in the pulpit there should be coherence in the study. Even if you function with a genius level intelligence you need to shoot for a coherent presentation of God’s Word. In fact, the smarter you are the greater the need for deliberation and reflection. What seems simple to you and me because of the amount of time we spend immersed in the text and surrounded with other print authorities we are in danger of thinking that things are simpler than they are, and less in need of explanation. 

    When someone speaks incoherently their grammar, articulation, and internal logic may be all still be perfect. The disconnect is with external reality, or for our work, between the preacher and the congregation. We need to remember that Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky was grammatically sound—but still incoherent. I occasionally ask myself “have I put the feed down low enough?” Not because my congregation is dull—they certainly are not! It is simply too easy to overshoot when you have lived with a text on your mind and in your heart for days or weeks. These four “C’s” we have considered in October all require a reflective approach to the work we do. We need to work methodologically slow, even when we are exegeting, reading, writing, and editing fast. This is a matter of having clear standards of coherence at the beginning of the process. Enforcement of those standards that assure clarity, consistency, and certainty is a matter of having clear processes. It won’t be because of luck or talent. 

    And that is why I write for you, every week, dear reader. As a diligent and conscientious preacher, you know that guardrails keep both bad drivers and good drivers safe. I expect that you are a good driver. Good drivers respect the guardrails because they understand the critical nature of the work of preaching and how easy it is to “leave the road.” 

    I do not wish to continue beating this horse any more than necessary, yet please allow me a couple of concluding reminders for your consideration. First, you are tasked with explaining the text. The cultural disconnect between then and now is real and must be addressed. Pretending it does not exist will make it more incoherent, not less. We must explain and connect using experience and analogy. There are few other ways to learn anything. Pretending that there is no cultural distance will confuse the intelligent and bewilder the simple. Pretending is easy. Explaining can be hard--hard but essential. You and I have to be constantly learning how to do it better. Treat your congregation as intelligent adults who will thrive if you help them complete a coherent picture of a specific text. Speak with clarity and certainty not with pride and unearned arrogance. You can strive for both humility and clarity. People will trust you because you will speak with a consistent voice. 

    A final thought. No one else can do it for you. Preaching is not like the theatre. After the singing, after the necessary human interactions, after we have all come around the Lord’s Table, you are going to rise, just you and Holy Spirit and proclaim God’s Word. This is a solitary task. This is a task of vital  importance. Do it to the best of your ability. 

    October is Pastor appreciation month. Many of us have had dinners and celebrations and other expressions of thanks. The one thing you do that requires the most time the greatest investment of treasure and a commitment to developing your talent is preaching. After all that gratitude, in light of the supreme sacrifice of Jesus, let’s do our best to proclaim a coherent, challenging sermon every single week. What better life could one ask for?

Consistency 10.23.2025

    Do not judge your work as a preacher by the “best sermon” you have ever preached or by the worst, but by the next one. Keep that one and this one in the broader context of the last one you preached, and the next one you will preach.  If you are clear about your responsibility to the text and work far enough ahead that you can be certain of where you are going, the next natural step, taken almost without conscious thought is to strive for consistency. 

    Last week, on Friday, October 18th Ol’ Ohtani had what is already being describe as the greatest game in baseball history. We have yet to see what other exploits will characterize the rest of his 2025 postseason. One thing that we do know is that his career will not hinge on that one night in Chavez Ravine. He has already established himself as a consistent performer both on the mound and at the plate. He is dependable. He will do the job. It must be a special for a manager to know that this is a player who can be penciled in day after day, start when he must, and just do the job. 

    Consistency is the outcome of continual commitment to doing the right things the right way. It requires a willingness to make in private the unseen commitments that result in optimum performance. As a quick aside, this is why extemporaneous preaching will always feel like reaching. It moves much of what should be done in private into the public eye. Because it relies so much on short term memory extemporaneous peaching can rarely rise beyond weekly preparation. It is doable, and sometimes necessary, but like most performances without a net, can become unnecessarily bloody. Most of the time our preaching work will benefit, grow more mature, and have greater consistency through diligent preparation and simple repetition. Doing the same thing every day in our studies. Engaging in the hard work of exegesis. Writing, editing, rewriting, cutting, substituting and revising our work and then presenting clearly the message from the text that God has given us through the process of hard work. 

    I do not know of any craft or profession that flourishes apart from long hours of unseen work. The law is not unlike baseball, not unlike accountancy, and yes, not unlike preaching. When Paul says to “Do you best to present yourself to God as one approved,” He uses a word that indicates an investment of labor and a commitment to excellence. He does not say “Hope for the best” He says, “DO your best”. This is not some kind of pseudo works-salvation issue. This is simple integrity and common courtesy to those who have engaged you in service and who pay your salary. 

    In aiming for consistency, I am not advocating that we aim for the lowest common denominator. Rather I am saying that we need to accurately assess our abilities and mold our preparation to not only fit our skills but to maximize them. Remember another admonition from Paul. 

 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. (Romans 12:3 ESV)

    It is easy for false humility to settle for a personal assessment that accepts unthinking mediocrity. That does not honor God, does not reflect Paul’s intent, and treats sloth as a virtue. We are called to accurately, soberly, and clearly assess our abilities and then to make the most of them. That is true humility. 

    The Church needs preachers who are unafraid to accept the calling and act upon it. Willing to make the sacrifices of study and preparation. Individuals who clearly understand the gifts they have been given, the skills they have learned, and the talents that can be grown. These skills lead to the kind of consistency we need that leads to long ministries predicated on long trajectories of lifelong discipleship.

    Much of contemporary leadership “teaching” strives for instant gratification or quick fixes to poorly identified problems. Our task is not just to get people “Saved from their sins”. We are called to make disciples. It can’t be done over the weekend, certainly not on one Sunday. Not even through a quick, four sermon, “Feel-good”, influencer series that gains Social Media notoriety. Successful discipleship creates lifelong disciples. It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes consistency. 

Certainty 10.16.2025

    Certainty really begins by being able to see what the end will be when you are starting. To think into, over, beneath, between, around, and through a Biblical text gives us clarity as we prepare a message to proclaim the truth of the text. To analyze what a text says-to take it apart and reassemble it. To see it organically and synthetically so that you may preach it authentically, takes time. Certainty is a function of time as much as any other factor. 

    And when we talk about time there are a few variables which are not very variable. We all have the same amount. In ministry most of us set our own schedules, allocate our study time, and pursue other necessary ministry tasks. The biggest task of all is preaching and teaching Scripture. This task should not only take the best of our time but the bulk of it. 

    How do we follow the Pauline prescription to “make the most of” or “redeem” the time? For many answering that question is the brass-ring of ministry. For some it is an elusive mystery lost in the many traps of good things that distract us from the one best thing. And for still others it is simply not true. They entered ministry with some other agenda than that found in Scripture. I really don’t have anything to say to those individuals. For the rest, hoping to make the most of their time in both the quality of the sermons they preach, and the depth of their study time here is the advice. Start as early as possible. 

    I routinely write here (rant, if you prefer) about sermon calendars and time allocation. I discuss planning, preparing, processes, and practical approaches. Nothing I (or anyone else for that matter) says will do any aspiring preacher any good if he or she does not allocate enough time for the task. Most of that time allocation is for work today that will only be realized over the visible horizon of tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. 

    The sooner you start the deeper you can dig. The sooner you start the wider the amount of water you can fish. The sooner you start the more detours you can explore. You may be getting tired of this, but I have buckets full of metaphors for you, all addressing this one issue. 

    It is best to have all the education you can, but the learning is wasted if time is not invested wisely. Shelves full of books are a poor investment for someone who can “Never find the time” to read. A group of helpful colleagues is a crutch if all you ever do is purloin their ideas or steal their completed work. Many of the bad things in the preaching ministry can be fixed and a lot of the poor sermons eliminated by the simple addition of a good alarm clock, to your inventory of tools. There are a few more helpful tools, of course. A well-crafted Task list that prioritizes preaching at the most basic planning stage. You also need a good daily/weekly/monthly/yearly calendar and an understanding of how it works and how you should work it. Virtually everything that you need to do a better job of doing this job is either on a shelf behind you or a computer in front of you. These personal management tools can help you acquire a laser focus on doing the right things, the right way, in a timely fashion. The use of “Timely” in this case indicating. START EARLY!

    If you don’t start early, you don’t have enough time to explore various approaches to individual texts. Without enough lead time you won’t be able to sketch out alternative approaches to outlining and presenting the information in a text. Your messages will be as dry as bread that has insufficient time to rise before it is baked. When you give yourself a cushion you allow yourself the room to make mistakes without the risk of carrying those mistakes into the pulpit. Cushion allows you to explore your own language, to consider how you want to approach a topic or phrase an issue in the sermon. If you’ve got enough time you can write, read, edit, discard, rewrite, change, and finally settle on your wording. 

    You must start early, or you won’t have the time to be your best. If you don’t have time to be your best, more often than not, you will feel rushed and underprepared. Even if the message works you will wear yourself out overlooking obvious deadlines (Sunday comes every week) that only became deadlines because you didn’t plan far enough ahead and did not start early enough. 

    If this sounds like too much of a rant to you, perhaps the advice I’m giving hits a little too close to home. It has been my experience that most preachers who agree with me work this way and are dumbfounded by persons who wait till the last minute. 

    Is that an objection I hear from out in internet world? Yes, it is. “What about bi-vocational or part time preachers?” In that case starting early is even more important. Most of my process-driven preaching model was developed when I was bi-vocational myself. By starting early and preparing a vigorous plan you avoid the bi-vocational reality of limited time. 

    Let me state this again though it may seem trite. Sunday is always coming. Every week When one Sunday is finished the next is just over the horizon. We don’t plan to displace faith but to demonstrate it. It is presumptuous to expect the Holy Spirit to deliver us from sloth. It is arrogant to assume that we don’t need to manage our time. It is silly to think we are not bound by the same chronological constraints that bind every human. 

     In 1 Timothy 3.1 Paul calls pastoral ministry (Elders, Deacons, Deaconesses, Teachers, Preachers, et al) a noble task.  Our part of that task is proclaiming the unsearchable riches of Christ. We honor the nature of the task by getting an early start on this most important of assignments. You may not like the admonition, but I guarantee you’ll love the outcome.

Clarity 10.9.2025

    It is better to drive on a clear morning than a foggy morning. In football it is easier to run a play if the offensive line clears a path. In intellectual tasks clarity is preferable to obscurity. When it comes to communication, clarity is seldom accidental. In our preaching we are giving both guidance and information to our listeners. Central to that task is making the text of scripture as clear as we possibly can without reducing or minimizing its content. Clarity helps our congregation to understand what we are saying and why. Clear thinking and presentation of the text allows a congregation to see how a sermon is derived from, based upon, or related to Scripture. 

    When listeners complain about boredom or that a speaker does not have their attention it is easy to misunderstand the issue, to diagnose the symptom(s) rather than the real problem. In my experience, more often than not the issue is clarity. The speaker is her/himself unclear about the object of his/her message and that lack of clarity is transferred directly to the congregation or audience. There are a few learnable strategies that can help an individual write and prepare better speeches/lessons/sermons. These strategies are unfortunately the victim(s) of changes in both technology and pedagogy. I begin with attitude or approach and then move on to technique and tool. 

Slow Down

    Even with a deadline there is no reason to rush. One of the reasons that preaching or any other presentation is unclear to the auditors is because the subject was unclear to the speaker, generally because the speaker was moving too fast to grasp the complexity before her. 

    This is an educational and cultural outcome. The idea of slowing down, annotating what you read, making notes or comments, and even paraphrasing seems quaint and old-fashioned. Yet the outcome seems clear. The velocity of teaching may have changed but learning still takes time. And if a speaker has not assimilated his text/message/presentation and written out what she wished to say with clarity then almost by definition the congregation will be unclear or confused as well. The lack of deliberate preparation will result in disconnect which leads to “boredom” and inattention. 

    Working slow does not mean that we allow unlimited time to prepare. We still must give ourselves deadlines. What must change is how we work within the time restraints that we provide. It is here that we must rely upon processes and procedures. The simple addition of a checklist that you work through provides speedbumps as we prepare insuring that we don’t skip the most important step of all—understanding the text and properly articulating its meaning in our message. 

Structure (Outline)

    Structuring and outlining go hand and glove. Preparing an outline, mind-map, diagram, or storyboard of our text and our message helps us to visualize structure and provide the scaffolding for what we want to say. 

    Beginning with an exegetical outline of the text helps us to nail down the author’s intended structure. This step of the process allows us to grasp or visualize the bones upon which the Biblical author grew his text. Some texts, poetry and parable for example are more difficult to outline—all the more reason to persist. Not everything in the Bible is narrative and treating it like it is diminishes the vision of the Biblical author and yields confused interpretation. Confused interpretation leads to confused audiences. So, work through the most difficult of texts until you can clearly see the bones of the text and how the flesh is connected. 

    I admit, that as a young preacher that was often the end for me. The exegetical outline became the preaching outline. And while that can be successful, it is the transformation of your exegetical outline into a preaching outline which is your own composition that is the point at which you “own” the text. You can then preach it with greater clarity because you have read, assimilated, and analyzed it to the degree that you can provide a preaching outline in your one voice. 

Edit

    Regardless of the clarity you arrive at when your preaching outline is complete, you still have work to do. One of the primary reasons to write a very detailed outline or manuscript is that it allows you to work out the actual phraseology of what you want/need to say. Without that necessary step of writing to completion you also eliminate the most important step for clarity: Editing your work. Extemporaneous preaching will always feel like preaching your first draft. Because it is.

     Regardless of how many times you practice or mentally work your way through what you wish to say the preaching event itself will be wholly unique. Without a manuscript you do not have any benchmark for whether you have hit your mark. You don’t have the opportunity to test phrases, diction, and vocabulary. You don’t even have a document that you can provide to a friendly proof-reader for comment. The message is in your head, and your preaching document is nothing but a guide for the content that you are keeping in your memory. 

    I must confess that the first decade and a half of my ministry was mostly extemporaneous. What I have found is that rather than liberating it is stifling. Performing without a net does not liberate the acrobat whose every step becomes potentially terminal. Writing it down gives you ample time to not only reflect and revise but also to fix entire sentence. Rather than composing in the pulpit you can actually preach and connect with your audience. 

    Let me conclude by saying this, my friends. We have all heard bad preaching. We’ve heard good preachers on bad days. We’ve heard mediocre preachers on their best days. I have preached bad sermons. It’s a hazard of the task. All my experience teaches me that most bad sermons can be fixed in the study. It is in the study that the correctable errors arise. It is in the study that poorly worded transitions miss the editor’s scissors. It is the study that clarity is lost. And it is in the study that clarity can be restored.  

    I believe and teach that we can improve our preaching. Not by copying others. Not by plagiarizing the work of megachurch pastors or by purchasing the products of sermon mills. We can improve our preaching by improving our sermons. Better sermons make better preachers because it allows us to go into the pulpit, clear about the revealed meaning of the text so that we can declare with clarity the Word of God.

For your Consideration 10.2.2025

    There is no such thing as post-church Christianity. It is a myth perpetrated by mega-influencers who hope to divert our attention from the local church and its “economy of interest” to globally defined issues. It is not only a myth it is wrong. It is un-Biblical. It is counterproductive.  It is an assault on the incarnational deity of Jesus who lived, died, and was resurrected in time and space. There was a there, and a then that redefined all subsequent human experience. Multiple generations of mega Church “biggerism” have impeded our judgement about what is truly important. We have lost our understanding of what we do and where we do it, which means we have also largely lost our identity. 

    I understand that many readers will see me as a malcontent who does not see anything good coming from the contemporary currents moving the Church. This is not entirely true. Yes, I see issues that must be addressed. Yet, I also believe that the Scriptures, rightly interpreted and applied to our present environment offer the solution that the Church needs to rise above our infatuation with culturally driven deviations. 

    This is an issue which has always confronted the Church. It always will. The salvation in Christ, described in the Bible is incarnational. Time, place, situation, circumstances, culture, social structure, national and political environment—these have always been realities the Church has had to navigate. This is not a bug—it is a feature. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is a theological truth not only about Jesus but about us. He came here. He did so then. His then and there allow for salvation everywhere and throughout all time. In celebrating this truth at the heart of our faith we sign up for a life of cultural and social embeddedness, engagement, and evaluation. 

     Jesus lived a culturally Jewish life, yet He questioned those elements of His culture which stood opposed to the will and purpose of God. If Jesus was able to summarize the whole of the law into two signal points and to hold His contemporaries accountable for social and personal deviations from the intended will of God, we must be ready to do so as well. We must understand, as Jesus did that the issue is not so much the content of culture, as the proper place and limits of culture. When cultural commitment creeps into the life of God’s people causing us to lose sight of God’s will it is right for the authorized shepherds of the flock to rise in protest. 

    This is essentially Paul’s position throughout his epistles. There are times when he functions well within the cultural norms of his time and place. There are times when his Jewishness takes precedence. At other times his Hellenistic education takes precedence. And there are times when he relies upon his Roman citizenship. But never do any of these lesser identifying markers supplant his primary commitment to Christ or his unfailing allegiance to the Church. Indeed, there are times when Paul addresses each of these lesser cultural identity markers noting the ways in which they tempt believers into accommodation or inculturation.  He consistently makes a clear distinction between cultural realities and Biblically derived commitments. 

    I offer for your consideration the idea that maybe, perhaps our capacity to make those kinds of clear distinctions we find in the New Testament has eroded. At one and the same time we have allowed media driven, even propagandistic concepts to mold our message whilst compromising the central spiritual and theological commitments which have historically authenticated our allegiance to Jesus. We live in an era in which the very name “Christian” has been emptied of its Christo-centric, Biblical content and replaced with a series of culturally derived prejudices. 

    Again, this is nothing new. In his epistles Paul generally does not address the surrounding culture in which the Church was embedded. Rather, he addresses those points at which the culture had invaded the Church. For all intents and purposes, we have reversed the Pauline emphasis. We focus tirelessly on the beliefs and behaviors of avowed non-Christian culture while avoiding any commentary on the behavior or beliefs of confessed Christians who deny Jesus in both word and deed. We have abandoned theology for sociology because the former is controlled by scripture while the latter is controlled by...us. In making this shift we are risking the broader testimony of the Church. 

    To be blunt. People are not stupid The Bible is widely available to anyone who wishes to read it. What we teach is not a secret nor the behaviors expected of believers. For those who wear the name of Christ the wariness and reticence of the culture far too often evoke a contentious response rather than considerate, patient, instruction. It seems that the very fallenness of the world insults us and insulates us from any empathetic, compassionate, evangelical response. The more we argue against culture, the more we take offense at the behaviors of those who are outside of Christ, the more we attack, the less effective is our witness the less resonant our voice. 

    Perhaps we need to be more compassionate and understanding rather than contentious and condescending. Outsiders who consider the Church can readily sense and easily see the disconnect between the words of the Church and the words of Jesus. In the 21st Century far too many Christians have become desensitized to this disconnect. I would offer, for your consideration, that something must change if we are to recover our voice amid the despairing, dying culture in which we find ourselves.