Review and Preview 11.27.2025

    As I write this essay, I am winding down my “fiscal” preaching year of 2025. I will spend time this week continuing to focus on the practical, administrative, necessities for researching, writing, storing, and preaching 2026. That will include weekly messages, Sunday School lessons, Blog essays, Newsletter essays, Book manuscripts, Camp lessons, incidental outside preaching (Revivals), and other unplanned (funerals) preaching. None of those variables of circumstance and “deliverables” even take into account that all these writing products are outcome of intensive study. Often the arc of study requires months and weeks of intense research, note taking, writing, editing, and thinking. I find this work both invigorating and exciting. The old joke that “Preachers only work one day a week” is only true if the preacher does not work. Clearly it is not the case if you and I are diligent, committed, and enthusiastic about the task. 

    You will have noticed that I did not post an essay last week. Not going to apologize. I had 31 words written towards an essay during a busy week of external work. Sometimes a person must decide that enough is enough. I was afraid that there was no amount of editing that was going to save a draft that looked like it was written by a tired guy during a long week. I wanted to end my 2025 blog writing on a high note with a reminder that you can do this and that it is worthwhile. It’s better to under promise and over deliver. 

    I’ve been listening to Autumn music and have even slipped in some early Christmas music. Christmas is coming and Grayville First Christian Church is excited for the season. I hope that you have given thought to what you will preach and why. Christmas can be challenging because there are only so many texts which are thought “relevant”.  You can only preach Matthew and Luke’s accounts of the nativity so many times before you begin to get stale. I know I’ve been there myself. It’s always a challenge. One thing I often do is take these smaller, time-determined series, and compose all the messages as a whole. I have completed first drafts of all my Christmas sermons awaiting final week of preaching tweaking to be complete preaching manuscripts. Working this way allows for a single overarching theme to tie tother all the messages from Sunday morning December 7 to Christmas Eve Candlelight on December 24. 

    I saw a story last week that reminds me of why it is necessary to work both hard and smart. Peter Wollny is a scholar of the music of the Bach family. In 1992 he discovered two manuscripts which struck him as having been written by the greatest Bach of all: Johann Sebastian. Since that time, he has been working on verifying the provenance of these manuscripts to finally determine authorship. It was a background project in a long career filled with other scholarly endeavors. Like most tasks of this nature the task required both serendipity and synergy to bear fruit. Over the years he followed the trail of hints and clues that led to a student of Bach’s named Salomon Günther John. The manuscripts in question were clearly Bach’s music, but also clearly in John’s hand. Manuscript and author were correctly delineated and on November 17, 2025, Ciacona in D minor, BWV 1178, and Ciacona in G minor, BWV 1179 were debuted at St. Thomas Church Leipzig (One of the old Bach’s old haunts). 

    How did that happen? Work. Serendipity. Synergy. Be stubborn. Be resolute. Be determined. Be committed. It took 33 years for Wollny to successfully determine that the two manuscripts he had in hand should be added to the official catalog of Bach’s work. There were times that this project was on the back burner. There were times that he relied on the work of others. There were, I’m sure times of frustration. 

    Whilst music and theology are not the same thing (Though Bach himself taught both Theology and Latin to his Choristers), we need the same kind of patient endeavor to succeed. You will not always feel like doing the hardest task which needs to be done on the next sermon. I am sure you have other tasks that need your attention. Like any intellectual work there are things to file, notes to organize, and papers to (ouch) discard. Sometimes the busywork keeps us sane until we are ready to do the heavy lifting. 

    Anyhoo, I hope that you take advantage of some down time this week. Give thanks. Get ready for Christmas. Sneak off and do a little work. Spend time in prayer, review, reflection, and preparation. As the weather gets cooler, things are going to heat up. 

Voice 11.13.2025

     Everyone is different. One of the essential tasks for any preacher, particularly when young is discovering your own unique voice. If visibility is about gaining perspective in our work, then clarifying our own unique voice as a preacher is a part of the application of that process. 

    We might think of growing up as the quest of every youngster to discover who they are, what they can do, and the specific contributions their voice makes to the community of conversations in which we are all embedded. As we move into our adolescent years, we begin to discover our own unique viewpoint and way of expressing it. One of the primary tasks of adolescence is differentiating ourselves from our parents, teachers, and peers. We learn how to make judgements about what is true, beautiful, and good. We also learn to internalize these decisions and to describe and defend our judgements to others. If we did not go through this process everyone would be the same and what a boring world it would be! 

    For those who are believers, particularly those who are considering some kind of vocational ministry, we must we aware that Teachers, Elders, Deacons Youth-ministers, and yes, even Preachers can have a disproportionate impact on how we come to view the work of ministry. The best ministry models understand what parts of the job can be “taught” and what must be “caught”. If an individual gets through adolescence with a healthy understanding of who they are as a person and what their natural abilities are then they are ready to cultivate and develop their Spiritual Gift, discerning what their role in ministry is. At this point they should be discovering their own voice, and the educational process would, ideally, work to accentuate their strengths, minimize their weaknesses, and clarify that personal voice. 

    This is necessary because one cannot speak honestly or articulate the message of Scripture clearly if they are trying to use someone else’s voice. When people listen to you speak, when people attend to the Word of God as you proclaim it, they need to trust your investment, your individuated incarnation of the written Word, as you represent the “Word made flesh.”

    As you grow and mature, as you continue throughout a long ministry you will hopefully continue to cultivate your unique voice. It is for this reason that we work with patient diligence. This is why we study. This is how we grow. Looking back over my own many years of ministry here are some of the contributing factors that I have come to realize helped me to refine, inhabit and own the unique voice God has given me. 

Opportunity

    The best way to discover your own unique voice is to use it! The more you teach or preach, the more comfortable you will become with the whole process of moving from study to pulpit or lectern. Not that we should take those opportunities for granted, rather we should see them as the chance God has given for us to serve Him to the best of our ability. 

    These opportunities are not guarantees of success or accomplishment. No, oh no! When we begin, we all preach bad sermons. One signal difference is that when my peers and I were beginning in ministry we were given a lot of leeway, not only to succeed but to fail. Both to flourish and to falter. It takes both extremes to really grow into your own unique ministry voice. I am very concerned about where young preachers and teachers will be given the kind of long-term experience they will need to develop their own unique voice. Will they be given astute guidance during these important formative years or will they become discouraged when unduly criticized for not being ready or not being someone else?

Peers

    One element that helps an individual grow into their own skin, to find their own voice is being surrounded with peers who know them and value them for who they are. To this day I have individuals I studied with and learned with that are perfectly willing to give me honest feedback, not as an instructor or critic but as a friend. 

    This is indispensable. We need a group that we can share our experiences with—who are having the same experiences, who have roughly the same amount and kind of experience that we have and who are in position to grow with us as we become more mature in the faith. Peers are different from the next group that provides needed feedback…that would be 

Mentors

    Mentors are individuals who have been there and done that. They draw from a deeper pool of experience, and their guiding contributions are grounded in hard lessons honestly learned. We need both peers and mentors. Each will have a different perspective on this process of finding and cultivating our maturing voice of ministry. 

    Often people who mentor us will have gone through transitional processes in which they changed or tweaked their approach to ministry due to the wisdom of experience. Peers usually walk along with us; mentors have gone before and help us to avoid some of the pitfalls that brought them difficulty or grief. 

    Mentors tend to approach the relationship without anything to prove. They are in the relationship for your benefit and to serve as a resource to you. We need mentors who can simply say “I’ve been where you’re at. I’ve experienced what you are experiencing. Here is how I have grown through this issue and allowed the experience to clarify who I am and to add tone to my own personal voice.”

Time

    This whole discussion presumes that you will commit enough time throughout the course of your life and ministry to become in full the person and the preacher God made you to be. There are very few things that happen overnight. You will need to have time to not only fail, but to absorb and learn from those failures. You need the opportunity to try new things, to consider many options, to delve deep into your studies, and to engage in transformative conversation with as many ministry colleagues as possible. 

    Nothing helps us to discern our own voice more clearly than taking the time to listen to others and to conclude “Nope, that’s not me.” It is only as we grow into our unique Christ-given voice, our own personality that we really discover how to benefit and grow from all the other voices that we hear.

Plan

    And here Bob ascends Soapbox. Time spent with mentors and peers pursing the opportunities of ministry requires following some kind of a plan. If schools follow curriculum and syllabi then why would we expect the post-educational process to flourish if it is ad-hoc, provisional, or even haphazard. 

God needs you to be you. He has patience and everyone knows that the only way to get experience is to do the thing in question. If you want to maximize the results and show continual growth you need to be working your ministry, living your life, and cultivating your life according to an intentional plan. And I’m not talking about the basic facts of discipleship “I just want to love and serve Jesus!” That is a good start if a little naive. Once you start pushing 30 you need to really think through the issue of “How”, you aim to live, love, and serve Jesus. How will your voice contribute to the great cloud of witness without either becoming indiscernible from the voice of others or so unique that it sounds eccentric or even weird? 

    I wish I’d started working from a more clearly defined plan earlier in my ministry. It’s not that much would have changed—I think we each eventually become the person that God made us to be. But I can’t help but thinking that it would have been a little easier. 

Concluding Thoughts

    Jesus tells us that, “My sheep hear my voice.” We serve Jesus by serving His sheep. This works better —the whole operation is much smoother when we try and develop our own specific voice. The sheep will recognize Jesus. I believe that it helps them to hear the voice of Jesus in our voice if we develop our voice for the specific purpose of leading and feeding the flock. Are you speaking and being heard? Do they hear the voice of the Good Shepherd of the sheep when they hear your voice? Can they follow Him because you, the local Under shepherd of these sheep, this flock have developed your own distinct individual voice?

Visibility 11.6.2025

    Every once in a while, I think it is good to discuss tools rather than tasks. Specifically, I want to discuss why I use an outline tool to lay out my sermon calendar. There are many such available tools. I have several Outliners (They are sometimes called Outline Processors) that I am constantly updating, testing, evaluating, and calibrating to determine which tool to use for a given task. I have Outliners that I use for quick outlines of one-off sermons, articles, or even poems. I have other tools which excel at the huge multifaceted work that goes into a full year’s preaching. 

    For my sermon calendar I am currently using the Omni Corporation's OmniOutliner (OO hereafter) The primary reason is that I know that it can reliably handle all the information that goes into preparing and researching a year’s worth of preaching. I collected all the basic organizational information I needed to plan for 2026 in OO. I have a calendar, a list of holidays and special emphases, as well as a place for some basic preaching work. 

    Next, I have major subdivisions for AM Preaching, Other Preaching, Outside Preaching, Weddings & Funerals, Writing Projects, Sunday School. There are times I may create separate outlines for specific projects. Generally, however every single first draft for the year will be prepared in this one long outline. There is the ability in OO to focus on a single heading or node in the outline and every sub-node. This is in a sense where the magic happens. I am able to open the outline drill down in such a way that I can see every week, every text, every title, every theme laid out for the whole year. It is this perspective that I find invaluable for laying out a balanced congregational diet for the whole year. This tool allows me to visualize the entire year, not as fifty-two separate weeks, but as one continuous program of congregational discipleship. 

    Because of OO’s particular focus, the year’s work has a clear plan to follow including built in benchmarks. Because I know where I will be I can work ahead and write entire blocks of sermons or conduct forward pointing research with reference to the big picture for the year.

    And all of that brings us to the title for this essay and the goal to which it has been pointed. This kind of work tool and the investment in learning how to use it well provides me with a level of visibility that other tools either lack, or which require much more effort to implement. Could I use a word processor? Yes, I could but it would be more clumsy and correspondingly more difficult. I’m using the writing program Scrivener to write this very essay and virtually every year I try to move my sermon calendar into this application and find it too be more complicated than I had anticipated and much more frustrating to work with. With a repeatedly used template and consistent numbering and tracking schemes already set up on OmniOutliner, it took me about an hour to set up the structure of my 2026 Sermon Calendar and was able to begin the process almost immediately of analyzing and breaking down the Scriptures to fill out the meat of the plan. 

    Visibility is good. Visibility helps the preacher to have greater insight. Visibility helps with all the issues we discussed last month. From clarity to coherence, we need visibility to achieve consistency and certainty. Driving blind is not safe. Why would we think that restricted or obstructed vision would help us with preaching?

    The power of visibility is really evident when past yearly outlines are opened alongside my current year’s work as well as next years. Now, in identical collapsable format I can examine how several years’ worth of messages function together to provide a clear path to growing discipleship. It allows for a degree of visibility with far greater reach than opening individual word processing documents. Which I do, have done, and try to avoid, because all those open documents make for a clumsy work environment.

    I learn a lot from rereading those old sermons. Occasionally I recall different wording from when I preached the message, and I can compare the first draft outline with the subsequent editions and even the final copy. It is helpful to recall how thoughts are smoothed out, phrases tweaked, and sentences retooled. This is not to satisfy the cravings of the perfectionist but rather to determine if I have done the best job I can possibly do of explaining what the text says to God’s gathered flock on a particular morning. This process of turning back and reviewing one’s work is also invaluable when one returns to a text in a future sermon or in a different context. I can then take the basic structure and reframe it for the different context of a changed audience with different needs.

    This is invaluable not only for preparing one’s weekly work but for the long haul as well. Turning back, I can see the last year laid out behind me. Looking forward I can see the next year approaching in all its promise. Good, consistent preaching integrates good study habits with good writing habits. Checking our work, editing our work, reviewing our work, and revising our work requires perspective. Perspective is what we call visibility in other contexts, but it is the same thing for the preacher. We need to be self-aware about what we say and how we say it. The message we bear is too important to be neglected or trifled with. We must be good, dependable, trustworthy workmen and that means we know where we are going because we know where we’ve been. Eyes on the road, friends. God will use you to give guidance to the lost or confused.