preaching

There is a black lab—a student's guide dog—lying on the floor during chapel. As I preach, I wonder what the dog is thinking.

I can see my dad's manuscript: the title centered in caps, the body double-spaced and marked up by hand. But I can't remember the words.

Shortly after my most recent move, my long-time boyfriend and I ended our relationship. The next week, I was scheduled to preach. 

I'm part of a multi-pastor church, and my colleagues graciously offered to step in and preach in my place. But I was stubborn. I decided that I wanted—no, needed—to preach.

Our guests know that resurrection defies logic. That is why they come sidling through our doors—every one of them comes hoping for it.

Our hunger is for words that evoke our deepest emotions, that name the wilderness in which we live—but not alone.

Many of us love the busyness and energy of a robust church. And yet all of us pastors must summon an uncommon discipline if we are to reflect the priority of preaching.

Cornelius Plantinga Jr. contends that to be fully prepared to share a word from God with a congregation, a preacher should attend to storytellers, biographers, poets and journalists.

As church leaders, we have our ears, hearts, and words. We pray that God will use them. But we also have limitations--time, energy, and ability. And even though we feel helpless, like we can never do enough, sometimes being the person who takes the picture, who tells the story is our most important job.

“You have to grow tougher skin, Carol,” my colleague told me when I invited him to lunch and asked for his advice on a church matter. I inhaled deeply. That was the same response I heard repeatedly for the first ten years of my pastorate. Whenever I got frustrated, well-meaning friends and colleagues would tell me that I needed to miraculously grow some sort of Teflon epidermis. 

I was at a youth retreat and a senior in high school asked me, “Who are your inspirations when it comes to public speaking?"

When my senior colleague proposed a ten-week sermon series on the saints, I was hesitant. Would anyone find this interesting?

The years I spent preaching Easter brought me closer to the heart of resurrection news. They drove me deeper into the gospel.

There is a particular authority that comes from privilege. When a white man steps into the place where he belongs, he has an internal power with which he was born. He is entitled. Like royalty, he sits on the throne naturally, because that place is caught in his blood. But an entirely different power emerges from women who have been told that they are not allowed to speak in church—and suddenly rise behind the pulpit. Something flares up from deep inside of them, and when they have a safe space, the words can come out of them with force and fury.

At a reception to launch a new collection of Lucille Clifton’s poems (The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010), the editor of the volume, Kevin Young, described coming across a folder in Clifton’s archives at Emory University. The folder had been labeled “Unpublished Poems.” That label had been scratched out and replaced by something like, “Poems that really aren’t that good and should probably just be thrown away someday.” That label too had been scratched out and replaced with “Bad poems.”

Whenever I preached a dense sermon or used too many references, a missionary friend would gently remind me to proclaim the gospel simply.

Excellent Christian preaching names and explores the shadows in order to declare that the light shines in the darkness.

Ten years ago, I studied readers of the then popular Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic novels. If I conducted that study today, I would potentially have access to far more objective data about readers than I did. How quickly do they read? Where do they stop reading? What passages do they mark? Do they write notes in the margins?

E-books are providing companies with the opportunity for all of this information and more about people who use e-readers like the Nook and Kindle.

A few months ago I preached a sermon that a lot of people loved and a few people hated. I heard from both groups but spent more time, as is perennially the case in ministry, with the few.

I didn’t set off to be controversial. I looked at the texts, read some commentaries. (Get behind me, Satan.) And then, in the middle of the week, a United Methodist preacher's kid made the news.