We can muster heroic acts of sacrifice, commitment, and self-denial for a while, but eventually if we don’t pay attention to our personal needs, we run out of steam.
— Steve Brown
Ben Haden, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and an old friend, had spoken at a meeting in Miami, and I was driving him to the airport. At the time, in addition to pastoring, I was commuting by plane each week to Reformed Theological Seminary, where I served as adjunct preaching professor, and hosted an all-night radio program on Sunday nights (and sleeping most of Monday, my day off).
I felt I was handling it pretty well. Although I often tossed and turned at night, I would think, I’ll sleep better tomorrow night.
Although at times I dealt with a load of unjustified anger or low-grade depression, I would brush it off as my having a bad week. People in church would say, “Pastor, you look tired,” but that made me feel good. Besides, I felt, you can’t pay much attention to that or you’ll begin babying yourself. Anyway, I did take a day here or there golfing or at the beach.
On the way to the airport, Ben said, “Steve, you’re close to a nervous breakdown.”
That gave me pause; I didn’t want to admit it, but after a little reflection, I realized he was right. I was exhausted.
Sometimes, when ministry pressure gets to me, I have a fantasy I go back to North Carolina and a simpler way of life. I become a disk jockey again (or better yet, a vinyl repairman), work nine to five, watch television, love people, and spend time with my family. There was a time when I said in jest — but was more serious than anyone knew — that if they’d let me bring my wife, I’d become a Trappist monk.
Many things can turn ministry into a weekly grind. Boredom. Too little time, too much to do. Limitless small problems that inflict death by a thousand cuts. Occasional crises that overwhelm.
Where can we find strength to plug away at ministry week-in, week-out? In particular, how can we find energy and creativity to preach effectively for decades on end?
Waking Sleeping Dogs
During the Revolutionary War, George Washington one day visited a church. Recognizing him, the pastor took off his hat. Washington said, “Reverend, put your hat back on. We both have done the same thing — what we were supposed to do.”
Ministry is a weekly grind, but it’s what we’re supposed to do. Sometimes we may fantasize about different work or a different life, but if we’re realistic, balanced persons, most weeks we simply go back and do what we have to do.
Nevertheless, though we muster heroic acts of sacrifice, commitment, and self-denial for a while, if we don’t pay attention to our personal needs, we will eventually run out of steam. That affects all of ministry and especially our preaching.
In particular, I’ve discovered that sometimes we run through ministry like crazed zombies, refusing to back off, because we’re not able to come to terms with some inner turmoil.
I share an office with the man who teaches psychology at Reformed Seminary. He has a cartoon on the wall that pictures a large auditorium with only three people seated in it, and the caption reads, “The Annual Convention of the Adult Children of Normal Parents.”
Like most people, pastors carry issues from the past that affect their emotions and how they handle the weekly pressures of being pastors. Though we can deny them for a while, at some point we’re going to have to deal with them.
I knew of my “sleeping dogs,” but I didn’t want to wake them: my father was an alcoholic, and I grew up hearing my mother threatening to leave him. When I was twelve, I confronted my father’s mistress. You can imagine the loneliness, shame, anger, and fear in which I was raised.
Decades later, as a pastor, I functioned pretty well. I made it from morning to night. But eventually, I had so increased my workload (probably because I didn’t want to face my inner turmoil), that I ran myself down. That’s when my defenses started coming down; my childhood anger and fear surfaced, and I didn’t know how to handle those volatile emotions.
A friend of mine had gone through a similar experience and talked to me about it. One day I said, “Lea, I’m going to wake these sleeping dogs, but I’ll do it with a gun in my hand. If they bite me, I’m going to shoot them.”
A short time later, Lea attended a meeting where I was speaking, and afterward he said to me, “I have a message from the Lord. Wake the dogs, but forget the gun. They don’t have any teeth.”
Over time I dealt with those issues, forgave my father, and released the sense of shame I had long experienced — it’s a long story. But once I came to grips with my past hurts, I regained my equilibrium to perform active ministry for the long haul.
Riding the Wings of a Dove
I’ve preached when I didn’t have a vibrant spiritual life, and I’ve preached when I was experiencing God’s rich presence. The former is like peddling a one-speed bike up a long, steep hill; the latter, like riding the wings of a dove.
I became a Christian primarily for intellectual reasons and preached intellectually for years. Now and then I got “warm fuzzies,” listening to a Christian musician, for instance, but that was as far as it went.
Thirteen years ago, I reached a crisis in my ministry. I was intellectually and homiletically prepared each week, but I was spiritually bereft. I was a Christian; I believed the doctrines — I wouldn’t have endured what I was enduring in ministry otherwise! My preaching was reasonably effective. But I came to the point where my sin was more real to me than God. Everything was more real to me than God.
“God, I want to know you,” I prayed. “I don’t want to know you by hearsay. Whatever it takes, I want to know you.”
That was the beginning of a long trek.
Independently of each other, three friends sent me The Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. That opened a door. I began reading the contemplatives, whom I had hardly known existed: St. John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Thomas Merton. I experimented with some of the spiritual disciplines, spending time in silence before God, for instance.
Over time, God came, sometimes as quiet peace, sometimes as overwhelming joy. It was a life-changing experience for me.
That prayer — “God, I want to know you; whatever it takes, I want to know you” — is the sort of desperate prayer we need to pray periodically in our lives.
And then once our souls have been restored, we have to figure out ways to maintain the intimacy. I think the key to that is not great faith or great discipline or great resolve but simple honesty.
In the movie Fiddler on the Roof, Tevya is a common man with an uncommon prayer life. The movie doesn’t portray him as having great faith, but he prays honestly. He tells God how he feels. He’s real. He doesn’t try to impress God.
I need to be real with God. My morning devotional time is the one place where I’m not on stage, where I’m completely accepted. There I pour out my soul, telling God when I’m angry, when I’m joyful, weeping sometimes, singing at others.
Shortcuts
Time and energy are limited. Under the press of weekly responsibilities and emergencies at church, only so many sermons can receive our maximum effort. One way, then, to keep up strength for preaching is to learn a few shortcuts.
• Repeat. Our mothers told us if we didn’t wait an hour after eating to go swimming, we would get cramps, drown, and die. That’s a myth. Seminary professors tell students a similar myth: pastors should never repeat their sermons. They forget that during the Great Awakening, George Whitefield preached the same few sermons dozens, if not hundreds of times.
There are several good reasons to repeat sermon material:
First, if we repeat the average sermon one year later, nobody will likely notice except your spouse! People simply don’t remember.
Second, a congregation turns over every few years. In Key Biscayne, at first I felt terrible about the 80 percent turnover we had every five years. Then I realized that took some of the pressure off to keep coming up with new material three or more times a week. Of the 20 percent who remained, half probably missed church the first time I preached the message.
Third, a lot of material is too good to be used only once. If an illustration blessed the majority of the congregation, I want to use it again at a later date. Some humorous stories make you laugh even the second and third time.
Naturally, you can overdo it. A friend of mine told how he had used the old footsteps illustration (where the sufferer’s befuddlement at seeing only one set of footsteps in the sand is cleared up with the Lord’s telling him he had been carried during those critical times) a third time within a year. After the third use, a person said, “Thank you for that illustration, but I think three times is the limit.”
As we repeat sermons, of course, we shouldn’t slavishly repeat the entire sermon. We can add or subtract illustrations and points to keep it current. That alone can give the sermon a new feel.
I encourage pastors to develop “tracks,” whole units of material we can use in a variety of settings. For instance, I have a series of talks that address the twelve prisons we find ourselves in: the prison of responsibility, the prison of guilt, the prison of legalism, and so on. I can take units of that material and plug them like a cassette tape into various messages and settings — a Bible study at someone’s home, a youth retreat, in the newsletter. If used in a Sunday evening sermon, a track can be used several months later in a different Sunday morning sermon.
• Wing it. After you’ve attended Bible college and/or seminary and pastored for several years, you know more about the Christian life than 99 percent of your congregation. Especially in today’s culture, we’re not talking to biblically or homiletically sophisticated people. So, after a decade or two in ministry, I think we’re justified now and then to “wing it.”
Winging it doesn’t mean not preparing at all, just trusting experience and the Holy Spirit to see you through some standard presentations (like what it means to be a member of a church, or how to become a Christian).
I teach communication seminars with R. C. Sproul. He tells preachers they shouldn’t even take notes to the pulpit. Trust what you know and talk to people. Risk it, and go into the pulpit without anything. Sproul is the last person to advocate poor preparation. His message is that we can rely more on the deep well of past experience and study than we may be accustomed to.
During particularly busy weeks, I would risk like that on Wednesday night services. I would study the text and reflect on the presentation, but I wouldn’t bother coming up with an extended outline. I’d prepare a sketchy outline and speak from it. What I lost in succinctness and clarity I gained in intimacy and impact.
Naturally, for tightly scheduled Sunday mornings, where clarity and conciseness are demanded, so is more preparation.
• Borrow. A California pastor wrote me a humorous letter: “I have a confession. Everybody in my congregation was criticizing my sermons, so I stole one of yours. You used an illustration about your cat, and I don’t have a cat, so I changed that. Otherwise I preached your entire message.
“But I’ve never received so much criticism for a sermon!”
Borrowing may not solve all our problems, then, but it will help out with at least one: the need to find fresh illustrative material.
So I feel free to ransack others’ sermons for illustrations, ideas, and outlines. People say to me, “I use a lot of your stories.” I respond, “That’s okay, I stole them from someone else!” In the end, I believe we’re all on the same team. Naturally, I try to give due credit if the story is unusual or well-developed.
I draw the line, though, on borrowing entire sermons. Phillips Brooks’s famous definition of preaching — truth through personality — is true. A borrowed sermon will sound foreign on my tongue. It just won’t impact the congregation.
Weekly Habits
We’ve all heard statements like “You ought to be on your knees more than you’re at your typewriter.” After my spiritual breakthrough, my heart is naturally drawn in that direction, but I also know one key to having strength for weekly preaching is developing some weekly habits that keep me fresh.
The problem is that a lot of the advice I’ve heard over the years just doesn’t work for me. Here, then, are a few principles, somewhat contrarian, that I work by.
• Don’t get organized — unless you have to. I’m not naturally organized. If I try to get organized because I read a time management book or because I ought to or because someone says I should — rather than because I have to — those new systems are doomed to failure. There’s no motivation to keep them up. But if it’s do or die, the need to stay organized continues to compel me.
I never organized my library until I had to. I always knew where my favorite books were. But then I got to the point where I couldn’t find the quotes anymore, and so the library finally got organized, saving hours of preparation time.
If your life is copacetic, enjoy what God has given you. As pressures increase, read a time-management book. Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.
• Wait until the last minute. I’ve discovered that I work better under the gun. I cannot get motivated to work on a sermon, for instance, until the preaching opportunity is around the corner. So there’s no point in beating myself to prepare way ahead of time; I just won’t do it.
At Key Biscayne, I wrote my Sunday sermon on Saturday, starting at four in the morning and going however long it took, sometimes writing until late into the night, sometimes needing only an hour or two, but generally it took eight to fifteen hours of nose to the grindstone. I wrote Sunday night’s sermon on Sunday afternoon. Generally I spent most of Wednesday writing my sermon for that night.
• Don’t read what you should. Don’t read a book merely because it’s good for you, because a high-profile leader recommended it, because you have to. Don’t read a tome on theology merely because your seminary professor said pastors should read one theology book a year. Life is too short. Eat your dessert first. Read what you enjoy, what interests and stimulates you, what opens the windows and lets in a fresh breeze.
Most of my reading doesn’t end up in my sermons, but it’s provocative or fulfilling. I read or scan three to four books a week, but frankly there aren’t a lot of religious books now that I read from cover to cover. I never read theology books anymore. The magazines I read regularly are Time, National Review, Reader’s Digest, and Christianity Today.
• Appear superficial. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been devastated by criticism from someone I respect saying, “All he does is tell stories.” Now I take it as a compliment.
Perhaps there was a time when preachers could get by without illustrations, when people would sit and listen to straight exposition of a text, but that day is past. In our media-dominated culture, people think visually. If you can’t illustrate, you aren’t going to communicate (if something can’t be illustrated, it’s irrelevant anyway). Many look down their noses at story telling, but they do so at great peril to their ministry.
So as much as I like to study theology and philosophy, my main homiletic antennae are usually up for good illustrations. When I find one, I either photocopy or write it down, but I don’t file it alphabetically. I have a folder in which I collect illustrations as they come, and I regularly leaf through it, rereading what’s there. A good illustration can be used ten different ways, so most of the material I collect finds its way into a message within a few months.
Illustration books are my safety net. You’ve heard professors say you should never use illustration books. Well, they’re lying through their teeth. They’re using the same teaching notes they’ve been using for twenty years; pastors are out there scrambling for three messages a week. Use everything you can get your hands on, anything that works. If you only get two good illustrations out of a book, it’s worth the price (and you’ll find more than two).
Tell the congregation you’d sell your soul for a good illustration, and ask them to give you ones that catch their attention. When you use an illustration from someone in the congregation, mention the contributor’s name from the pulpit. Soon you’ll have dozens of research assistants.
• Stop being nice. If you’re going to find sufficient time to put into sermon preparation, you’re going to have to develop a “mean streak.” In a church, something’s always broken. If you’re at the beck and call of small people who want you to do small things, you’ll never get enough study time. You’ll spend all of your time pleasing people.
Once I put in the Sunday bulletin the hours I would be available for counseling and conversation. Some people were angry about that, feeling that their pastor ought to be available to them twenty-four hours a day.
So I responded to those who complained: “I will be available twenty-four hours a day for emergencies, and especially for a funeral — yours.” It was a half-joke, and people knew it.
If you can learn to say no (even though you feel guilty about it), you’ll communicate you’re not everyone’s mother. That will help lay people take increasing responsibility for one another. Then you can have sufficient time for study and be available for moments of real need.
I knew Ben Haden as a man with incredible insight into people, so I took his comment about my potential breakdown seriously. Within a few weeks, I pulled out of the radio program and began taking more time off. The more sane my schedule became, the more I realized how right Ben was. I had been on the edge, but while it was happening, I couldn’t read it.
My life verse is “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” Since I’m poor at recognizing when I’m getting too weary, I need to listen to the warnings of people who know me.
I also need to pay attention to my emotional and spiritual life, and to my weekly habits. When I do, my life is renewed by the Holy Spirit, and that means my preaching will continue to renew others, week by week, year by year.
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
