Leadership Journal

Some people nap regularly, but Thurman nodded off only when my sermon deserved it. When his attention wilted, I knew to check the temperature of my rhetoric.

Thurman was my thermometer. One of those thermometers hanging on a doorpost on a barn; a red alcohol glass tube, black numbers printed on a rusty-edged white steel back, advertising a feed business that died in the fifties. If Thurman's eyelids dropped, I knew my sermon had cooled off dangerously. Soon the congregation would pass from open-eyed catnapping to cold-cave hibernation. Even I was bored.

I need some homiletical friction. My notes aren't bad, they just aren't all that hot. I don't need something nuclear. I need to be more clear. I may be preaching too much story without a point, or too much point without a story. My reasoning may be thin or my illustrations may be fat. I may need a whopper illustration to materialize in my head while I wave my arms in thin air.

I fast-forward through my notes looking for the place to light a match.

Serendipitous illustrations come to me in mental pictures. If I decide to use one, the words will just have to come. When a sermon picture arrives in the middle of speaking a sentence, I continue the sentence while I evaluate the idea. Evaluating and shaping metaphors and illustrations is complex business and often takes days of rumination during preparation. While I'm preaching I may have ten minutes to one second. When the instant arrives that I must use it or lose it, I leap over the edge grasping it like a parachute or I drop it on the ledge and walk away—while I'm preaching, of course.

Sometimes small adjustments make a big difference. Think ahead. If a ten-verse Scripture quotation is dead ahead, cut to the three verses that really count. Do my notes contain a series of precise theological statements? Read the points slowly. Don't repeat. Move away from the pulpit, sometimes when my body leaves dead center, my mind begins thinking outside the box. I pray. "Lord, make something out of this. Help at least one person here."

If my best shot at corrections and repeated elbows from his wife don't wake Thurman, I start thinking about lunch. Odd as it may seem, when I fantasize about nachos while I preach to the finish line, without fail, someone who rarely makes a comment tells me the sermon meant all the world to them.

Of course it happens. After all, we serve "the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were" (Rom. 4:17).

During worship, before preaching, I can't help but check the turnout. It's all ego and it has nothing to do with preaching. I spent many years preaching to crowds of twenty. A difference of four people impacted my ego. What a waste, then and now. The Word of God remains the same regardless of the numbers.

Once I'm preaching, the numbers mean nothing to me. While I preach I take stock of the congregation in a way that glorifies God and blesses the people. Most pastor-preachers attest ...