The Ecclesia Network

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Expository Preaching

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What I Learned After Almost Pretending to Faint Just to Get Out of Preaching

I remember pretty vividly the morning when, as a 27 year old associate pastor getting ready to preach for the first time in my new church, I briefly contemplated pretending to faint.

Sitting in the front row of the church, I was feeling completely unprepared to speak the Gospel to a group of people I hardly knew, and to a larger crowd than I had ever spoken to before. Sure, I had dealt with nervousness before, but this was definitely a notch up from what I normally felt. Sick to my stomach, head in hands, I thought to myself “If I just fall over to the floor and don’t get up, what will they do? They can’t MAKE me preach… can they?”

Fortunately for everyone involved, that moment passed. I preached that morning and it was fine. Since then, I’ve felt twangs of stage fright occasionally, but thankfully, never to that extent. In fact, over the years, the nervousness has subsided, but it’s mostly what I’ve learned about preaching that has made me increasingly comfortable in the pulpit.

Here’s what I’ve realized.

First, preaching is a marathon, not a sprint. I think we overestimate what can happen to modern audiences in one morning, and completely underestimate what can happen in a community through years of faithful preaching. Ask a regular church goer what the best sermon they ever heard was. Now ask them for their second favorite. Then their third. This is about where things get fuzzy for most people, not because preaching doesn’t matter, but because it does its best work in the aggregate. It’s not what people hear on any given Sunday that is likely to change them, but what they hear in a year of Sundays that is likely to provide a catalyst for change.

For the individual preacher on a particular Sunday, that means focusing on the long game. Today is important, just not as important as we are likely to believe. Few people will remember what we preach today, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working- slowly but surely watering the seeds of change that the Holy Spirit is working in the lives of our hearers. This takes a lot of pressure off the time I spend in the pulpit, and puts it were it perhaps better belongs: planning, preparing and preaching. I now focus less on what I am going to say to my community this Sunday, and more on what I sense God wants us to say to the community this season, this year.

Second, I’ve realized it’s not about me. And if it seems like it’s becoming about me, I should change that. The real reason we become nervous is because we’ve become focused on ourselves. Our performance, our image, our job… We want to know we’re liked and are doing a good enough job that someone will keep paying us to do it. Fair enough.

But that’s not what preaching is about and we know it. We just need to remind ourselves that it’s not about us. Unfortunately, a generation of celebrity preachers- funny, charismatic, and engaging- have made us think that maybe it is about us, at least, a little bit. We love to listen to them. We want people to feel about us the way we and countless others feel about them, and hang on our words the way so many hang on theirs.

When I first realized this about myself, I knew I had to get off that particular hamster wheel of approval. I’m a decent preacher, but I’ll never be (fill in your favorite big name preacher here).

And neither will you. The vast majority of us are not called to speak before ever larger crowds, get book deals off our sermon series and get called on to speak at large conferences. We just aren’t. And the quicker we realize that, and let go of the fantasy version of our career trajectory, the quicker we’ll be able to get about being the man or woman God has called us to be in our own individual, mundane contexts, speaking to people who, though they number not in the thousands, still matter immensely to God. When I realize that this sermon I’m about to preach is more about Jesus and the people He loves than it is about what people think of me, about honing my skills, increasing my platform or anything other than cooperating with the Holy Spirit in moving the ball incrementally forward in the lives of the people sitting before me, the pressure falls away. And, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, I don’t need to hit a home run every Sunday. Singles and doubles with the occasional triple are just fine. I just need to keep things moving. No pressure to knock it out of the park.

But even in that, I can feel some pressure, so it’s good that I realized it’s less about what I do or fail to do, and more about what the Spirit chooses to do.

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Preaching for the Nod

Every once in awhile, I find myself preaching for the nod. Do you know what I mean by “preaching for the nod?”

It’s what we do when we want to hard wire a bit of ego-stroke for ourselves into a Sunday morning.

How easy is it, and how often do we insert that small comment, that little aside, or even that main point that we know will appeal to the sensibilities of certain listeners? You know, the left-leaning (or right-leaning) political comment? The doctrinal aside that scratches the itch of that person so prone to give up the “Amen” or the vigorous head nod…

Preaching for the nod has less to do with what we see in the text and more to do with what we want people to see in us… and thus the danger.

The most God-centered, expository sermon or community-centered dialogical discussion could be completely me-centered if my intention in preaching it is to get certain people to give with the “Good words today, Pastor!” If my intention in preaching a message or making a point is to get certain people to see me as sufficiently hip and relevant (or standing against the tide of culture), or progressive (or appropriately conservative), or doctrinally adventurous (or steadfastly orthodox) then I have traded the proclamation of God’s Word to the people for the proclamation of myself to an audience, regardless of how I dress it up.

And all for that little nod…

It’s like a drug. The rush of agreement, of assent, of affirmation. Many of us would sell our souls for it and some of us do.

And the problem is not only how easy it feels, but often how right.

I remember when I pastored in the Netherlands in the late 90’s, one of the big issues in our church community was that the senior pastor didn’t give a “Gospel Invitation” every week as some of the old hands in the church wanted him to. I totally agreed with the pastor that good, text-based and God-centered proclamation was preaching the Gospel, even if there wasn’t an invitation shoe-horned into and behind every message. The thing is, it was easy for me to include that little Gospel invite on those weeks every couple of months when I was preaching. It was a total win-win. I told myself I was preaching the Gospel (a good thing, right?), some of the people got to hear what they wanted and I got affirmation from a notoriously hard-to-please group within our church. Hey, “whether from good motives or bad”, right?

Well… problem was, sermon prep began to be less and less about hearing from God and more about crafting statements of appeasement. It’s not like I didn’t mean those invitations, but… slippery slope indeed.

I pastored a church that did its Sunday gathering in a pub. We saw a different kind of folk than your average 1st Baptist or 2nd Methodist. Burned by “Church”, usually more politically and socially liberal, they often come, just like everyone else evaluating all the words said and sung, looking for reasons why they might or might not “fit” with our community.

And it was so easy to slip from speaking in a way which is accessible to those we are trying to love into community into speaking in a way which is attractive to them. You know, making sure they understand- that yes it’s church, but we’re not like those churches…

We had a broad spectrum of political and religious views in our community- Republicans and Democrats and socialists and libertarians, people who come from evangelical and mainline backgrounds or no church background at all. It’s something I loved about Evergreen. But I found myself, on occasion, throwing in the odd anti-GWBush or Trump comment. Or taking a poke at Joel Osteen. And if I am honest (and I’m trying to be) it was usually more about been seen as progressive, a Christian but not like those Christians… and more and more, I’m seeing just how misguided a thing that is. How cheap and easy it is to “speak prophetically” when you know it’s what certain people love and want to hear.

And if there’s anything I don’t want to be as a pastor, it’s cheap and/or easy.