Sermoning

Being the primary preacher for a church/congregation has been something I never thought I'd end up doing. Even throughout my days of studying at Ambrose, I never really saw myself as a much of a preacher. With the program, you're only obligated to preach twice over a four year span. The popular opinion, of course, is that twice is nowhere near the amount that it should be. There are ample opportunities for ministry students (and even non-ministry students) to preach at school or at other churches; but if you don't take on those chances, twice could be all you see. At times, being the bible school student carries with you the stereotype that you can preach: not true. I've heard many people try to preach, ... ah, nevermind. Anyways, not including my internship, I think I preached in some way or another a handful of times during my four years. Then, at my internship, I preached about once a month. So I am as new as it gets when it comes to being a preacher!

As you'd have expected, then coming into my job where I'm now asked to preach two or three times a month is a very big adjustment. I'm still not used to it, to be honest. Before this current state, I would probably have a month or two to prepare a sermon - it would be all I would need to do if I wasn't doing anything else. So I could go at it from any direction, read as many books as I need, and even re-write the thing a few times if I needed to. Nowadays, I have less than a week of actual time to prepare for each Sunday. I've been given tips from people that you should be preparing weeks in advance, especially if you're running a series. This is helpful, but I need to focus on the current week if I want to do well. So the only "in advanced" thing I really have is the general outlook for the coming weeks.

So I thought it'd be fun to give a rundown on what my week looks like when I have to preach, from the point of view of preaching preparation, of course.

Monday is a day off, so I do my best to stay away from church related work. Therefore, my work really begins on Tuesday! If I am preaching that week, my Tuesday will have a little more to do than the average Tuesday. I still use this first day to send out a lot of my emails and to get the admin stuff out of the way. That way, I can give people the entire week to respond while I go do other things.

What I am taught and encouraged to do whenever I preach is to pray endlessly. I really have to work on this part of the preparation. Everytime I come to doing work on my message, it needs to be bathed in prayer.

So, from Tuesday until, I'd say, mid-Thursday, all I'd really do is read, study, and meditate. If I already have the topic or passage I'm preaching on, I'll read that a million times in as many different versions as I can. I'll write down anything that sticks out, and jot down other passages that I may be reminded of so they can be used as supporting passages if need be.

Then, on the second half of Thursday and for much of Friday (occassionally even the Saturday), I'll take all of those notes that I've written down and try to organize them. The cool thing about these notes is that a lot of times they will categorize themselves into the points of the message that I need to preach. From that group, I try to find the main thing that is being driven across and I'll use that to form my points and illustrations.

On Saturday, this is where I will zoom out of all the notes and trim everything down so that I have less than two pages to use for my overall outline. Then I'll bring in the introduction and conclusion to the message. I will bold and highlight certain words or phrases that I need to emphasize, and put it all into a Word document to be printed out.

When my outline is finally complete, I will probably walk away from the thing as a whole until the time I go to bed. This is usually when I go to youth fellowship, so I get my mind off of my message completely for a couple hours. What this does, is that when I get back home and ready to go sleep, I'll be able to look at my message with some fresh eyes to see if everything flows and makes sense.

At last, I'll sit on my bed for half an hour or 45 minutes before I sleep just to envision myself preaching it on the Sunday morning. I'll mentally run through the message, from all the little details and all the transitions that I'll do. The big thing here is that I get a good visualization for how the message will go on the Sunday. This process makes me laugh at myself because I picture myself to be really exhuberant and energetic. But when the preaching happens, I'm my dorky self. I also know that many people like to stand in front of a mirror and rehearse, but that isn't my thing. I feel way too uncomfortable at doing that. I'm just not very good at staging something if it's not the actual thing.

What I didn't really mention about my preparation is that I feel a lot more stress throughout the week whenever I have to preach. There is a constant battle that I face each day that tries to pull me away from studying. There are weeks that I fight off well, and others where I succumb to the temptations and fail miserably. I think I've only been able to have a good night's sleep once, on the night before I preach.

Sorry for such a long post, but there's one or two more things I want to mention - I hope you don't mind! As a new preacher, I'm always wondering how I should preach so that people can respond to the Word in a positive way. What sort of illustrations will help make this relatable? Do I need to move around more? Do I need to be funny?

Darrell Johnson, a pastor in Vancouver, said, "the person most changed by preaching is the preacher." I would say that this is 100% true for myself. Becoming a preacher due to the nature of my job has really begun to change who I am. There are weeks where the message I preach speaks so strongly to me. These are usually the weeks where I am also preaching with more passion and more conviction. From that, the people see it and they respond better as well because they can see that I am affected by the message. After all, if I am not ministered to by the message first, how can I expect it to minister to others? This is a challenge that I very willingly take on. I love my job. LOL.

Wow, 15 degrees!