More like MacGyver...

For this week it's a marriage counseling session (I'm doing a wedding in August), preaching at the KCRM, and preaching at Redemption. In case you don't know, each of these things requires a certain amount of preparation.

It's likely that as I get older I will become more efficient in managing my time when it comes to these things, but at the moment (especially since I don't preach on a regular weekly basis) I just have to give myself over to them. Granted, I'm much better at time management when it comes to sermon prep than I used to be. There is a learning process. But sometimes it seems to take a while to get the creative juices flowing. As a rule, I try to write every day, but there is something intentional about a sermon that requires a little more focus and creativity, which can end up taking time.

Maybe I should become more like MacGyver, flexible, spontaneously creative, entrepreneurial, a clock-buster. Perhaps a sociopath, as suggested, but a nice sociopath. I wonder how many pastors are sociopaths? This might help me not to feel so overwhelmed by my to do list. After all, who else do you want to be like as pastor when you're boxed into a corner, ten seconds left on the clock? For sure, duct tape can fix marriages and sermons.

Carry on...

Preaching on the Trinity

Last Sunday I preached on John 20:19-31. If ever there was a passage that lent itself for some teaching on the doctrine of the Trinity, it's this one. There are very few passages where the Father, Son, and Spirit make such obvious appearances. Nevertheless, I won't bore you with the details, I struggled to do this.

I'm wondering if there are any resources out there (books, sermons, whatever) about how to preach on the Trinity. But more than that, how do we preach on the Trinity, or in light of the Trinity, without making each sermon about the doctrine of the Trinity. Does that makes sense? I suppose another way to ask my question is how can our preaching become more Trinitarian?

I don't usually plea for traffic, but pass this on to your friends and famous cousins and sent me some ideas!

Quote by Frederich Buechner

"The distances between the inner world that each of us is are greater in their way than the distances between the outer world of interstellar space, but in another way, the worlds of all of us are also the same world ... We are all of us in it together, and it is in us all. So if preachers or lecturers are to say anything that really matters to anyone including themselves, they must say it not just to the public part of us that considers interesting thoughts about the Gospel and how to preach it, but to the private, inner part too, to the part of us all where our dreams come from, both our good dreams and our bad dreams, elucidation less than evocation, where our concern is less with how the Gospel is to be preached than with what the Gospel is and what it is to us. They must address themselves to the fullness of who we are and to the emptiness too, the emptiness where grace and peace belong but mostly are not, because terrible as well as wonderful things have happened to us all." - Frederich Buechner, Telling the Truth, 3ff

Preaching as Performance Art

I got into a conversation today about preaching – the goal of preaching, the various styles of it, and practitioners of it. And it got me thinking about an article that I once read by Clayton Schmidt called “Preaching is Performance Art.”

He says we have all heard preachers who “employ an artificial set of communication skills divorced from ordinary human life. These preachers assume that the purpose of the exegesis they learned in seminary is to spring-load sermons with technical data that will impress and subdue listeners. Or they spend all their time working on what to say and no time at all on how to say it.”

These kinds of preachers, Schmidt says, tempt us NOT to go to church.

The opposite of this is also a problem, people who deliver in order to draw attention to themselves and not God –

“The wannabe comedian,

the preacher obsessed with cultural awareness,

the narrator that strings together poignant but pointless stories,

the media maestro who spends hours mastering digital techniques and only minutes on the message,

the preacher with an affected pulpit tone,

the awkward speaker who has plenty to say but no confidence in delivery,

the masterful presenter whose message is a string of banalities,

the preacher who becomes convinced that personal experience and ‘life message’ are more interesting than the gospel.”

Schmidt ask, “How can preachers present the gospel to their listeners without getting in the way?” His suggestion is to redeem a dirty work. “Preaching,” he says, “is performance.” Preaching is textual exegesis, contextual analysis, and creative writing, but “performance lies at the heart of proclamation.”

“When preaching is done masterfully, the preacher almost disappears.” The preacher isn’t showcasing his mad skills as a communicator for the sake of the notoriety, nor is the preacher performing for the sake of entertainment. When it comes to preaching, performance must point beyond itself or it does not achieve its goal.

So how does this happen?

Most importantly, the preacher must internalize his words. “If the preacher writes a meaningful word in the study, the next step is to turn that ink (or those computer pixels) into blood in the pulpit. The blood courses through the entire person of the one called upon to be that moment’s incorporation of the Word of God.” Words must be delivered from within. If they are merely being lifted up off the page in the moment with no thoughtfulness as to how they might be heard in the moment then the magnitude of the spoken word is in jeopardy.

Performance takes practice, it takes a great deal on intention and thoughtfulness to think about what you want to say and then say it in such a way that touches that hearts and minds of those who hear it, but not for the sake of merely experiencing a good performance. In fact, no one wants to merely experience a good performance. People want to be moved and preaching that takes performance seriously has the power to do.

What have I missed here? Does this cause any problems for you