It is my privilege to participate as a preacher for the Refresh conference at Wycliffe College in Toronto this week. I will be joining Marva Dawn, Graham Kendrick, Marva Dawn, Christopher Seitz, and Brian Walsh as featured presenters at the conference.

My role will be to preach at the morning prayer services each day (Wednesday through Friday) and to bring a presentation on the subject of preaching on Friday. I’m looking forward to this opportunity to meet a new group of people and to encourage those who gather with messages from God’s Word. I’ll keep you posted on what happens. If you are in the area, you might want to consider joining us.

A recent posting focused on the potential for plagiarism in preaching stimulated some discussion here on preaching.org. I’d encourage you to “weigh in” by clicking above under “Discussion” and “General Discussion” items. Add your comments or start a new discussion. You can also respond to questions that were raised in Choosing to Preach. We’d love to hear from you.

A few days ago I spoke to my denomination’s annual convention with respect to the importance of academic preparation. If you want to practice law there isn’t much question but that you’re going to have to go to law school. Med school is essential for the practice of medicine. If you want to build bridges you really have to go to engineering school. But for some reason if you want to practice ministry at a significant level, you can figure things out as you go along.

Why is this? Is it because ministry is not that complicated? Is it because there isn’t all that much too it?

I think not. Professional ministry is about as difficult a career as one could choose. Success in ministry requires knowledge, skills and character. You’ve got to know things about history, theology, biblical studies, and culture. You’ve got to have skills in exegesis, strategic leadership, relational dynamics, and communication. You’ve got to have character in terms of your spiritual life, your integrity, your personal faithfulness.

All of this is worked out in an extremely challenging environment. Ministers are…

-expected to produce a high level of excellence not just because people want it, but because God requires it;

-working within extremely complex organizational structures (churches);

-working with a primarily volunteer service base;

-constantly being evaluated by the entire “customer” base;

-expected to deliver a full set of services every week;

-operating within a disinterested or hostile broad cultural environment;

-working with varied and indeterminate standards of measurement for success;

-working with a broad multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural market;

-offering a hugely expensive product (“give your life” “sacrifice all for God”)

-facing stiff competition on every corner (other churches, golf courses, movie theatres…)

I write this not to depress you. In fact, I want to encourage those of you who are doing this work. You people are heroes. What you do is amazing. Keep at it, and don’t be afraid to get some help, training, whatever you need.

God calls us to this and when he does he sustains us with gifts and power from his Spirit. Still, a little training wouldn’t hurt.

I’m very pleased that we are able to offer a new feature on preaching.org. Note the categories listed on the right side of the home page organizing postings according to subject. There are almost 400 postings to this date and some of them are pretty good! Up till now, we had no way of working through the content other than scrolling down through every heading. Hopefully this will allow you to make more use of the materials other than just for the first few weeks or so that they are available on the home page.

Happy reading.

One of my students made an interesting statement to me recently about the value of editing one’s sermon. “I want to make sure that there is no wasted energy in the sermons I present.”

I appreciated that particular turn of phrase. I remember the days when I used to write full manuscripts for my sermons. In those days I spent a fair bit of time trying to hone the language. I wanted to make sure that every word was well placed for maximum impact. As a writer, I know a thing or two about the value of a good edit. Having moved, however, to extemporaneous (noteless) preaching for the last number of years, I have grown to appreciate the way that the sermon moment provides a language that is powerful, notwithstanding its lack of precision. I enjoy a certain sense of inventiveness that happens in the moment while I am preaching.

All that said, my student’s comment was telling. I want to eliminate the filler words, the useless pieces, and the unproductive elements that get in the way of my sermon theme, he said to me.

I agree. I’ve commented in the past about the problem of sermonic clutter. Sometimes less is more. A forty minute sermon might not be an improvement on a thirty minute sermon if it is filled with fifteen minutes worth of clutter. There is only so much energy available in the sermon process. Listeners only have so much energy to commit to the project. Preachers certainly have a limited store of energy. We want to make sure that we waste as little of it as possible so that the preaching event is as productive as it possibly could be.

“Energy” is an effective way of thinking about this question. Ask yourself the question… Will the energy required to add this story, this idea, this sentence, add momentum to the sermon or will it act as a drag on the sermon’s movement?” Everything we say ought to take a sermon forward. This is something we can sense somehow in the preaching of our sermons. If we are attentive to not only what the sermon says, but how the sermon feels, we will be able to discern the ways in which our words adds or wastes our energy.

As I get older, I’m increasingly conscious of the ways in which I use my limited stores of energy. Taking this thinking to my preaching seems natural.