The River of Ministry

I've been in a strange place in recent months.  I quit one bus driving job because I couldn't stomach a terrible administration and am getting ready to start one in another district, hoping that things will be better.  My kids are getting older, and rarely do they need me much anymore beyond just me being the 'provider' so they can do their own thing.  My body in recent months has finally started to feel older than the young man I thought I was, even into my mid-50s.  My heel has been through a period where insoles and stretching are necessities; my flesh continues to grow as my energy seems to wane; waking up in the morning do I rarely fly out of bed; even my libido seems to finally be slowing down.  

And my ministry, the thing that sometimes I feel has been my defining quality for almost three decades, seems to be in a strange place.  Church attendance is down everywhere: the amplifying COVID shutdown pushed people out of church, increasing secularism means that people realize that they have options that make it where they don't 'need' organized religion, and the realization that many 'Christians' are little more than MAGA acolytes means that genuine evangelism is getting harder all the time.  Even here in the heartland of America, where trends finally arrive years or decades after the begin on the coast, I'm seeing this more and more.  In my own ministry I've seen numbers go down, and even those who have come to our little church as the effects of consolidation mean we get members from closing churches have not offset the deaths of older saints and the indifference of too many others.  Far too often I wonder if my preaching and teaching and ministry is making a difference with people.

I still love to preach.  But I wonder if my life of being a Preacher is coming to an end.  I'm starting to think about what my next decade looks like, and more and more I can see that perhaps the other aspects of my life change are just preludes to a different career altogether.  Lots of churches would still need me to come and fill on occasion, as there are less and less people willing to preach almost everywhere now.  But the adminstrative side of being a preaching minister may end sooner than I once thought.  I don't have any desire to move to a new full-time ministerial position, as I don't know if I could start all over again.  What has been my second job for the last few years may well now be the first job or the gateway to some other kind of career entirely.  

So what does all this mean?  Several times this summer I have been taking days to pray and spend out in the wilderness to consider this question.  Today I went down to a place near the river that has a bunch of nice hiking trails, and I spent a few hours in consideration of the Future.  Through the heat and the spiderwebs I made it down to the sandbar and saw that the river was very low, as it has been around here for almost a year.  Even as we have had some summer rains and it is surprisingly green almost everywhere you look, almost a year of drought meant that the river remains low and slow.  

But I took time to watch it, and yet it continued to move.  Slowly, without any sense of urgency the waters continued to flow.  The mosquitos and water bugs would make little indentions in the water, small branches would float by, and patches of riverbeds that are still uncovered continued to sprout green grasses that normally are drowned.  And it hit me in this that perhaps this is my stage of ministry.  I've never been much of a raging river like some preachers, crashing down like a mountain stream or even at times flooding so much that destruction followed in its wake.  I've prided myself on always been a simple, steady kind of mature river that never got much out of the banks but nourished everything.  Maybe now, in my later middle ages, after years of spiritual drought of COVID, exhaustion with aging and family and driving, and just the increasing apathy of American culture when it comes to the Lord, slower and drier is now the norm for my life.  Maybe I shouldn't get so upset that the expectations of a young man to do great things are no longer realistic.  Like the river, I'll be low and slow yet perform a vital function in ways that may not be awe-inspiring yet are vital to the health of everyone.  

I don't know what this means for my life as the Preacher.  But I trust that somehow the Lord will find a way to use me to his glory.  I just wish I knew what that is...

When you're in the zone, the dangers await...

Tonight when I was preaching on the idea of 'praying that you don't fall into temptation' from Luke 22, I drifted into a state of consciousness that athletes know as 'the zone'.  It's really kind of hard to explain and I don't want to sound like that I'm extra holy or bragging or anything like that.  But it's like this...often when we preach, we preach what we have been studying on, we seek to connect with audiences, and we tell the truth the best that we can.  But sometimes, guided and prompted by the Spirit, we go somewhat further to this state of almost epiphany, where we just simply KNOW that this is true, there's nothing we can do to deny this; it's as real to us as our own existence and nothing can convince us otherwise.

Tonight I felt like this, though this can be dangerous.  When I preaching about temptation and the regrets that we feel when we fall into temptation, I felt almost a little bit too honest about all my failures, and after a moment I had to remind myself that preaching was not all about my own experience, but God working within all of us.  We might well confess far too much in a time like this, and people may look at us as the wicked people we really are (perhaps this would be better than putting us on a pedestal, however?), and it comes back to bite us in the end.  But when truth is flowing, where do you hold it back?

Preaching and Truth

It's Sunday night, another day of preaching and church fellowship in the books.  Today I preached about how Jesus is not who people expected he would be (from Luke 5:27-6:5) and then tonight I did a meditation on the importance of joyful praise from Psalm 111.  I don't know that either sermon was great, but both seemed to get a good response...probably because both of them were absolutely true. 

One thing I have really tried seeking in recent years when it comes to preaching is truth.  If it's not true, and if it means that I have to fudge things in order to have something to say, then I won't preach.  I have sat through too many sermons in my life that were not true.  Sermons that said that I had to interpret a Scripture in a particular way that took it wholly out of its context, or sermons that were more interested in damning others rather than looking at our own problems, or sermons that had nothing to do with reality but sought out a life that God never promised.  There's too much preaching both inside and outside of Churches of Christ...TV preachers, personality-driven preachers, 'faithful brotherhood' preachers, dull and lifeless and scared preachers.  I have heard enough of them to know what I never want to be. 

This isn't to say that I always get things right.  I misinterpret Scriptures, because I am not perfect in my knowledge.  I misunderstand the nature of God, because he is God and I am not.  And I mistakenly think I know what is in the hearts of others, when instead they alone must stand before God just as I alone must stand before God, and we both only have Jesus as our advocate. 

But truth is something that must be pursued, even if people don't want to hear it.  Our job as preachers is the incredibly difficult job of ensuring that hard truths will be at least considered, even if not easily acceptable.  I'd like to think that our little church here trusts me well enough to know that even if they don't like what I say, they will at least hear me out and consider whether or not this is the will of God.  If that's what I've been able to do, this is enough.  They know that I love God and love Scripture and love them enough to try to make sense of it all.  Again, I will fail in this at times, but I am grateful that the church lets me at least take a shot at this. 

This week I go back to the task of preparing more sermons for the next time I preach.  We have a guest speaker on Sunday and then a devotional on Sunday night, so the next time in the pulpit is two weeks away.  But truth will be truth, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to pursue it. 

Random subjects

One of the biggest struggles I have is not what to preach, but what format to preach.  Let me explain...ultimately, all preachers only preach the same ten sermons.  Yet how we preach those sermons and teach our classes varies.  Do we start exegetically and go from there?  Do we preach topical sermons based upon our systematic knowledge of Scripture?  Do we overlay various human schematics in trying to make sense of it all?  None of us get this right all the time. 

So I have a hole in my Wednesday night class schedule in a few months, and I am praying and thinking and agonizing about what ought to be taught.  Do I use another writer's book as a starter?  Do I simply go back and do another exegetical class?  Do I formulate my own plans? 

I'm not sure, exactly...but I did have a crazy, radical idea while going for a walk earlier today...what if I took a Bible website and simply asked it to give me a random verse?  Could I do a series of 8 classes on 'random verses from the Bible and what that means for us all?'  It would have to be wholly electronic to be random, because most of the time I can at least guess where we are just by feel from a Bible.  At dailyverses.net the first one to pop up was Mark 12:30, about loving God comletely...the next was Psalm 119:130, about having my heart set upon God's laws.  A third was Psalm 112:5, about how God come to the aid of the righteous, and finally Hebrews 12:14 about the need be peaceful and holy to all.  You know, I don't think it was truly random...I really expected that some list of genealogy or some obscure OT law was going to pop up.  But no, each of these were easily readable, without much context; likely they were pre-selected, then made random.  Too easy. 

Or, could I open up a Bible dictionary of some sort and randomly pick out a topic to teach about?  For instance, if take my Harper's Bible Dictionary and close my eyes and open a page and put my finger on something my first class would be on..."Literature of the Old Testament".  Meh, let's try it again.  "The Revelation to John."  OK, maybe these topics are too big.  "Guard, bodyguard."  Two paragraphs, maybe not big enough.  "Bitumen."  "Sociology of the New Testament."  One more... "Jesus Christ." 

So, that didn't work.  Maybe it's the wrong dictionary, maybe it's the wrong concept.  What if I did this with my 'Little Kittle', the Theolgoical Dictionary of the New Testament?  "Pneuma", section C, Spirit in Judaism.  "Kainos" (newness).  "Stoma" (mouth).  Again, hit or miss.  Maybe this isn't the best idea in the world. 

I don't know...maybe I just need to go back and do what I used to do all the time, simply work my way through a book of the Bible.  I enjoy that, and I've done it with the entirety of the NT and most of the OT.  Fortunately the word of God is ever-powerful, even when I stink as a preacher. 

The risk of preaching

Today I preached a sermon about the risk of following Jesus, and how Jesus then takes a risk to save us.  Luke 5:12-26 shows a man who crossed quarantine boundaries from Leviticus 13 and another man and his friends who crossed social boundaries to make his way to Jesus when the path was blocked.  Jesus then touches and heals the leper, and he forgives then heals the cripple, even as the Pharisees are aghast that he would do such a thing. 

It was a good sermon, I think.  But one thing that I struggled with is that I have the order backwards...ultimately, God is the one who takes the first risk, and then we respond.  The sermon made it as if we are a people who risk everything to come to God, and then he follows.

Sometimes preaching has a way to obscure some truths as it enlightens others.  The process of communication means that something vital is being said, but the fallible nature of humanity means that something is lost in the process.  Often times the good of the truth is more important (and even more obvious) than that which is wrong, but somewhere, I am certain, people will misunderstand things.  Even in the best of times, with the best of sermons, I have people who come up to me to thank me for saying something that I did not say. 

This is why preaching must in the end be Spirit-based.  As preachers and teachers we necessarily screw things up at times, because we are still people who on our own are filled with sin.  Only by the grace of God do we end up at all good, and even then we obscure truth along the way. 

Preaching with a cold

I came down with a very minor head cold a few days ago courtesy of my wife.  It's a 1.2 (out of 10) on the sickness scale, no big deal at all.  I feel fine except for my nose running and an occasional sneeze.  No problem. 

Except that today was Sunday, and so time to preach two sermons and lead a Bible class.  There have been times when I genuinely thought my voice would not make it through the day, but the Lord has always gotten me through things.  And today was no big deal at all, though by tonight I found I could no longer sing in anything more than a croak and I am glad that I did not have to hear me speak for a half hour. 

Sometimes I wonder whether God sends head colds, just as he might send other bigger forms of trouble into our lives.  Let's say that my sermon is not really faithful to the gospel...perhaps it misuses Scripture, or brings in legalism, or even leads people into sin.  If I was to preach this, it might be wrong.  Would God ever strike my voice to keep me from preaching in this way?

I sometimes wonder how active God is in the littlest things of life.  I am sure that he is more than capable of rebuking my voice, just as Jesus rebuked wind and waves and disease and demons.  But I don't know if he would do it regularly...maybe sometimes he would let us fall into sin our own.  If we are looking for a sign to always determine if we are right or wrong, how would we ever learn anything? 

Fortunately my cold is about gone, and tomorrow starts another day.  I am thankful for how healthy I am most of the time. 

A Year With Jesus: Questions #2 (kid edition)

As I continue to think long and hard about what it must have been like to spend time with Jesus in the flesh, I have more questions for his, but this time for when he was a boy growing up in Nazareth. 

-Did Jesus ever roll his eyes at something his parents said?  Did he ever complain to a friend about how unreasonable they were being?
-Did he ever tell his half-brothers and sisters to shut up?  Did they ever do the same to him? 
-If Jesus was the oldest of his mother's sons, did he have extra responsibilities in taking care of his siblings? 
-When he was a toddler, did he sit in his father's lap and pass gas and then say, "I fart on you!" and laugh uncontrollably?
-Did he ever play a practical joke on a friend?
-Did he ever flex or stand up taller when a cute girl walked by?
-Did he have acne?  If so, what did he do about it? 
-Did his parents ever find lice in his hair?  Did he ever have to get his head shaved as a result?
-Did Jesus ever look up at the stars at night and think, 'That one was my favorite to create?' 
-Did Jesus ever play street games with his friends?  Was he good?  Did he ever get beaten badly at something at then sulk for half an hour? 
-What was his best friend's name when he was 10?  What did that friend think about him? 
-Did Jesus and his friends ever have a competition to see whose pee would fly the furthest?  Who won? 
-When Jesus' baby teeth came out, did his parents do anything special to reward him? 
-Did he like to climb trees?  Did he ever fall out of one and break an arm? 

Again, these questions may seem weird or disrespectful to some.  But his fully humanity makes me wonder. 

A Year With Jesus: Questions

On Sundays through this year I am preaching from the gospel of Luke a series entitled, 'A Year With Jesus'.  There is so much in those few short chapters that I have way too many sermons to fit into 52 weeks...but still, there are a lot of other questions I have if I really did have a year to spend with Jesus. 
-If Jesus was a carpenter like his father Joseph, did he ever hit his thumb with a hammer or cut himself with a saw?  What did he scream if this happened?
-What kind of food did Jesus like?  Did he complain that his fish wasn't seasoned?  Would he have liked tacos?
-While Jesus surely would have loved Donald Trump, would he have considered Donald Trump a true follower?  Or what of Barack Obama?  The pope?  Jerry Falwell, Jr? 
-Did Jesus ever look out at an audience while he was preaching and see a woman and then have to pause to catch his breath because she was so beautiful?
-Did Jesus ever on accident step in donkey poo while walking down the road? 
-Did Jesus ever have a thought flash through his head while looking at Peter, "Man, that dude smells like fish."?
-When Jesus preached in the synagogues, did he ever get impatient waiting for the people praying to finish so he could get up and preach?
-Did Jesus ever have food stuck on his face or beard?  Did any of his disciples reach over and brush it off? 
-Did Jesus ever look in a looking glass to check out his hair?  Did he smell under his armpits?  Did he ever walk back into a room to adjust an off-center tunic?
-When waking up in the morning, did Jesus have a stiff neck or a bad back?  Did he have morning breath? 
-Did Jesus ever have to break up a fight between his close disciples?  Did he have to take Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector and put them on opposite sides of the room to make them calm down?
-What would Jesus have thought about television?  About movies?  About our culture of entertainment? 
-Did Jesus ever do a spit take because something around him was so amazingly funny?
-What did Jesus dream about?  Did he have nightmares? 
-Did Jesus ever have to deal with a woman who threw herself at him sexually?  How did he get out of it? 
-Did Jesus read things besides the Torah, prophets, and writings?  Did he have a favorite book? 
-When working in his carpenter's workshop, did Jesus ever realize that he made a mistake in measurements and have to throw out something? 
-When Jesus was twelve and spent three days alone in Jerusalem at the temple before his parents found him, where did he sleep and eat?  Who took him to their home? 
-Did Jesus enjoy a good poop or pee as much as we do?  Did he ever leave the spot he relieved himself at with a leaf stuck to his sandal? 
-Was there anybody Jesus loved but never really liked that much?  Did he ever see somebody walking towards him and inwardly groan? 
-What was Jesus' favorite weather season of the year?  Was he more about winter or summer or spring or fall?

I know that some of these questions sound ridiculous, if not scandalous.  He is our Lord, of course...but as he was fully human, would not these things have been very real possibilities? 

The Circuit

Way back in my grad school days my aspiring preacher friends and I wondered who among our classmates was going to eventually be on 'The Circuit'.  'The Circuit' was slang for those preachers who seemed to be headlining every church lectureship program, who preached gospel meetings at all the big churches, and who seemed to be front and center on a who's-who list of Church of Christ preachers.

Almost a quarter-century later, The Circuit may well be dead.  Few churches except the small and traditional do gospel meetings (having replaced them with parenting seminars or the like), lectureships are fading (sadly replaced by more independent programs like Polishing the Pulpit or Affirming the Faith seminars, which usually have taken a much more 'conservative' road than I have), and the famous speakers in our fellowship are now either evangelical authors (Max Lucado) or not even preachers (think of the Duck Dynasty clan).

I never really thought that I'd be one of those preachers to begin with, but after all these years I have come to realize that no way will I ever be famous outside of my small group of intimates.  I almost never get invited to preach outside my home congregation, and when I do I never get asked back a second time.  Sometimes I think about this, and while a part of me is slightly sad about it, I also am grateful for where I do preach and the ability to be home with my family as much as I am.

But again, why am I not one of Those Guys?  All the time I see some churches still hold certain people up on pedestals, such as those churches who still have gospel meetings and invite people either a)I've never heard of or b)I don't really respect.  Why not me?  I mean, aren't I a solid preacher who knows what is true and has over the course of thousands of sermons somewhat honed his craft?  I mean, I gotta be well past the 10,000 hour rule for having mastery over a craft (though, of course, preaching masters the preacher rather than vice versa...God is funny that way).

I suppose there are two ways to look at this.  The first way would be the voice of arrogance...too many churches want the smiling white teeth, the well-groomed, the deep-voiced preacher...they're looking for all the wrong things!  Or they want to be told what they want to hear, to hear the same sermons that they've always heard, to have the same affirmation of "we're right, and everybody else isn't" that seems to have characterized our movement.  If that's the case, I tell myself, then I'm glad that I'm not on that circuit.

But the second way is probably a bit more honest.  I am not much of a self-promoter...this isn't something I've ever really wanted to do, but it's likely important for building that resume.  I'm introverted, have a hard time looking people in the eye, and my voice is irritating not only to me (it is!) but likely others.  Sometimes my sermons aren't traditionally evangelistic but more of a Qoheleth-type search for truth (not this, not this, not this, but this), and while this is good for a long tenure at a church it's not a quick-and-to-the-point way that many like.  And probably my greatest problem is that maybe I'm just not as good as I think I am.  It takes a certain amount of smug arrogance to think that one is good enough to preach in the first place, and I have that...but likely it's a little bit misplaced.  Maybe I'm at the right level, and God knows enough to keep me humble.

This summer I will have finished 22 years in full-time ministry, and 18 years preaching.  I've loved this life, and will always be grateful to do this.  It was not in my plans to do this back in the days we talked about The Circuit, but I'm still chugging along while a lot of those guys are now selling insurance or teaching middle school.  I suppose God has a plan for me after all, and he can use me, even if my name will never be in lights.

The 10 sermons we preach

There's a preaching urban legend that goes something like this...one reason many old-time preachers only stayed one place for a short length of time is that they only had a years' worth of sermons.  When they would get through their year of sermons, they would move on to somewhere else, repeat those sermons, and move on again.

The truth is, most of us only have a handful of sermons.  No matter where we begin, we end up in the same places.  In Churches of Christ my experience is that the standard-issue list of traditionalist sermons goes something like this.
-1)The importance of sound preaching.
-2)The necessity of baptism by immersion.
-3)The evils of instrumental music.
-4)The evils of denominationalism.
-5)The evils of creeds, since we preach the Bible alone.
-6)Divorce and remarriage.
-7)The pattern of the church organization (a. a plurality of elders; b. the qualification of elders and deacons; c. the evils of parachurch organizations)
-8)The pattern of acceptable worship (singing, communion, giving, praying, preaching)
-9)The Adamic, Mosaic, and Christian dispensations (for expert Jule Miller-filmstrip-approved preachers only)
-10)The sins of worldliness we must avoid (pre-1970s); the proper role of women (post-1970s).

Again, it's not really important where one started from, but these themes seemed to appear in almost every kind of sermon I grew up hearing.  Nadab and Abihu?  That's a warning about instrumental music!  Acts (oh, we loved Acts)?  Numerous examples of proper conversion!  The Pastoral epistles?  Church organization AND words on Sound Preaching!  For all of our talk about creeds, these seem to be the Ten Most Important Things.

I used to laugh at the small-mindedness of this list...but as I have now finished 15 years of full-time preaching and almost 20 years of full-time ministry, I'm starting to realize that most of my sermons keep coming back to the same subjects.  I might well have close to fifteen hundred sermons in my files (and probably another 800 classes), but put them back to back and there's not that much variety.  I would, however, like to think that the things I have focused on are a more Biblical list, things that are genuinely important to matters of Christian faith.  So, what's my list, if I am being honest?

-1)Jesus is the only way to salvation.
-2)Grace, not perfect obedience, grants one salvation.
-3)The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
-4)The love, grace and mercy we must show to one another.
-5)The abject sinfulness of humanity, repeated again and again in human history.
-6)The calling out to God (as exemplified in Psalms).
-7)The power of the Holy Spirit for a transformed life.
-8)The call of God to return from sin (as exemplified in the Prophets).
-9)The teachings of Jesus for a full life.
-10)Why the power of the gospel enables Christians to live a holy life.

I'm sure that there are a few other things that I preach, but really most of my sermons end back up in these subjects.  I like my list a lot better than the first list, and I think it's more at the core of Scripture...but after all these years I'm finding that I'm not so different than my preaching ancestors.

Stopping a sermon before it crashes...

Monday mornings for some preachers is a time in which they feel bad about the previous Sunday.  For me, though, Monday morning is when I start outlining my sermon for the coming Sunday.  If all has gone well in previous weeks, when I've been doing proper Bible study and prayer and reflection about what needs to be said (or, better said, what God is trying to say through me), outlining the sermon that will be formally written on Wednesday is easy.  The sermon writes itself.

Today, though, I knew that there was going to be a problem.  Even as I had done my preliminary on this sermon, it never really felt right.  In doing this for almost 20 years, when I have to go hunting for scriptures to back up my premise, the sermon becomes something that is probably not worth preaching.  This was one of those sermons.  While I think that the premise was probably good and needs to be said, I had a hard time justifying the sermon.  I came to realize while looking over my previous notes that it was more like a rant than a sermon.  

Rant sermons are all too common by preachers.  We get fired up about something that is happened to us, or something makes us mad, and we want the congregation to know what's on our mind.  Or we get really invested in some particular doctrinal point and we think that the congregation isn't right until they agree with us.  So we rant and rave, and in the end we haven't preached the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Yes, it's frustrating to have wasted all that time on a sermon that won't (and should not) be preached...but it's better to have destroyed a sermon before it can do any harm.

If there is one blessing about having preached for almost 20 years, it's that there are plenty of sermons stuck away in the file cabinets.  Not all of them are good, of course, or are worthy of repeating.  But at least I have one that can be preached so that the church will be blessed rather than cursed.  

Preacher Shortage

A fellow preacher I know casually called me up the other day for some information which is not really relevant for this space, except that he's thinking of leaving preaching after being in a town different than the one he had been at when I knew him.  I had not known he had left the previous town, and he proceeded to tell me the story that I've heard so many times before from other preachers.  He'd been there a few years, been with them through some trials, and the moment he even thinks about looking for another job (due to some family concerns) he comes in the next week to his elders' meeting and is given a thirty-day notice of termination, though it's not really thirty days because they pay him for the month he's about to preach and that month was just about over.  From there he went to another church, not the one he had thought about going to previously because they dragged their feet for three months before finally saying no to him.  Ultimately the church at which he landed really had no desire to do anything more than what they are now (and probably don't even want to do what they are doing), so he's thinking of moving, and probably already quit by the time you read this.

Another preacher friend of mine have kicked around the idea for a few years of writing a book for churches, "How NOT to Hire Your Next Preacher", basically a collection of horror stories about things that churches do when it comes to hire churches.  While there are many good and responsible churches out there (and I am eternally blessed to be at one who treats me and my family wonderfully), there are many more that look at their preacher as a hireling, ready to jettison him the moment the shine wears off.  It shows in the interview processes: churches that do not consider that he is picking up and moving a family to a new place, shuffle their feet (aka looking for a whiter knight) and leave somebody hanging for months, or totally lose communication courtesy with somebody they had brought in to interview.  That book will one day be written, even if I'm not the one to write it.

I speak of all this because regularly I hear this statement that "there aren't enough preachers to go around".  Men (always men in my fellowship, but that's another column) aren't being trained to preach, and many churches can't get anybody to hire, so the lament goes.  So our church schools establish scholarships for preaching, 'preaching schools' (with little to no accreditation and no responsibility except to a particular ideology) pop up everywhere, and we wonder why things are the way they are.  Indeed, I can name in just the area a number of churches that do not have a regular preacher and are quickly withering away; it's not that they wither because of no preacher, but because they are just dying...having a preacher only seems to delay this happening.

But it's not that there are not enough preachers; it's that there aren't enough preachers for the many tiny congregations we have.  A friend of mine is a youth minister in a large (for that area) church of about 275 people, and they are looking for a preacher.  Last time I talked to him they had somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 applications.  I am not looking for a new job, but I scan the ads once in awhile see how many tiny churches can't afford to pay anybody; a run-down parsonage and $300/month won't support a family, sorry to say.  Certainly, there are a few semi-retired ministers out there willing to do that, and God bless them, but many more churches go wanting.  I can't say that I really blame these churches; they really can't afford to hire somebody on what is given, and just asking people to give more is not always the answer.  Sometimes the money just isn't there.

Still, many preachers are getting out and doing something else.  Two main issues I see:  1)We burn out preachers out to where they don't want to preach; many are the stories of preachers who keep getting burned by churches and need somewhere to recuperate.  In another area congregation I know of at least 4 men who used to preach regularly who no longer do; they need nurturing instead after years of giving so much that they have nothing else to given, all the while being dragged through the mud by churches who have never learned to understand that preachers need love too.  Why did it get that bad?  Some churches are guilty of malpractice.  2)We have too many men wanting a nice job in the Bible belt.  It's easier there; on the edge of it there are many more opportunities than for somebody away from it.  It frustrates me when I see missionaries return back from foreign fields and they use that experience of church planting and evangelism to settle into a plateaued congregation that simply wants a preacher.  3)Many of our preachers, when they retire, move to a church where nothing is asked of them.  In my parents' congregation in the heart of the Bible belt, they have dozens of retired preachers among them; a few still get out and preach occasionally, but most of them let their knowledge and wisdom go to waste.  I can't imagine NOT wanting to preach at all; maybe not every week, but I'd like to think I'm starting to figure this out after a certain time.

So where are we going with this?  Some suggestions.  1)Stop focusing on preachers being what churches need.  Most churches don't need somebody to give two sermons and preach two classes a week.  They need evangelists, those whose primary job is to make new disciples and strengthen old ones, and that happens more in the other hours of the week besides the assembly.  But wait, you say...what happens when there is nobody to preach?  2)Thanks to technology, most churches don't need a regular preacher anymore.  Many churches (my own included) provide audio podcasts, and some of the more high-tech churches provide live-streaming; it's now possible to watch preachers all around the world, good preachers who don't need a parsonage and $300/month from a congregation that can't afford it.  3)As most churches won't do the first two, here's a third and more realistic one: stop thinking that your preacher will be a star.  Far too many of our people today compare their preacher (for example) to the fluffy nothingness that is Joel Osteen.  We can't compete (except with more truth and better messages, but who wants that?).  Few of us are made for TV; we plod along week after week, looking for the truth of Scripture and applying it as best we can.  Far too many churches have far too high of expectations for their preachers, especially considering the fact that they can't afford to pay them a living wage.  Time for that to change.  4)Recognize that going forward most of us will start having to serve part-time.  Again, this is not all the home church's fault.  Sometimes the money simply is not there.  But we have to be realistic and find ways to help families stay afloat when the church itself cannot be the sole financial source.  It's one thing to say 'we need more tentmakers', it's another thing to help these men find places to practice their tentmaking.  I don't know of any church in which a business-owning member thinks about hiring dedicated Christian men whose first job isn't to work for him, but for the Lord.

I don't have all the answers, but things have to change.  It's a strange new world, and many of our churches and our preachers have no idea how to face it.

Podcast

After several years of thought I finally have started podcasting my Sunday morning sermons.  As one who listens to a number of podcasts each week, I know that there are also some really bad podcasts out there.  It takes a bit of ego in order to put yourself out on the web, to think that you have something to say, when in fact there are a hundred thousand other podcasts out there, all put out by people who think that they have something to say.  I'm not expecting my podcast to rocket up the iTunes chart list, but neither do I think that I have nothing to say.

The very act of preaching is based on the belief that God has called me to speak something to people that they need to hear.  As most of us who preach are not really 'prophetic' in the sense that suddenly a feeling comes over us that makes us think we can't control ourselves, we choose to preach.  Some of us even do it for a living.  Each week we need to have enough nerve to stand up and say, 'listen to me, because God wants you to hear something'.  I continue to preach, even though I wonder if people listen, because I still feel called to do so.

So why not podcast?  In this day and age technology offers us the opportunity to let our sermons go out to a wider audience than only those sitting in the pews on a Sunday morning.  For many years preachers have had their sermons carried through the printed word (once upon a time, even in city newspapers!), over radio and TV waves, and now through computers.  Some churches even livestream their entire service over the internet to be watched (and participated with) by people on the other side of the planet.  Amazing that people will listen far away, even when people in your own town (or even your own church) are not listening.

When I was considering starting this I polled some Facebook friends to see what they thought.  More than a few were not sure what a podcast was; it's not as widespread as I thought it would be.  One friend, an old college roommate, told me thought that this might be an ego trip, and perhaps he's right.  He also mentioned that maybe it is like another faulty form of 'evangelism', something where we think it's what people want to hear when in fact people couldn't care less.  Maybe it is...but then again, there are enough people who actually want to hear me speak that they will share the sermons (or knowledge) they hear with those who are not believers.  It's not that I have a great ability in my own, but God does use me to his service for whatever reason.

So...the podcast is alive.  And we'll see if anybody actually listens.