Pastor's Pastor

Pastor's Pastor: How to preach week after week

Pastor's Pastor: How to preach week after week

Floyd Bresee is the Secretary of the General Conference Ministerial Association.

In a cartoon a secretary is answering the church phone. Someone wants to talk with the pastor, but she replies, "Can he call you back? He's listening to a tape of his sermon." Meanwhile behind her, in the midst of his listening, the pastor has fallen sound asleep!

If the preacher has become tired of his or her own preaching, there's an awfully good chance that the congregation has too. Perhaps it has become more a bur den than a blessing to them both.

One day you felt the hand of God on your shoulder; you heard His call to the gospel ministry. You felt called to preach, and you accepted that call with high expectations. But perhaps something has happened between the homiletics class room and your present pulpit. It's some thing that happens to almost every preacher at some time. You've become just a little disenchanted—perhaps even a wee bit discouraged—with your preaching.

To bring a new enthusiasm to your preaching, try yearly pulpit planning. Once a year—possibly in the summer, when church activities tend to slow down—plan your preaching for the next year.

Planning requires looking in both directions, so first list the sermons you have preached in the past year—or even better, in the past two or three years. Look for what you have neglected or overemphasized. Then, on the basis of your findings and of the needs of your congregation and your particular present interests and concerns, select the topics for next year's preaching.

Yearly planning saves time. It takes much less time than what you would spend through the year if you depended on picking sermon topics out of the air helter-skelter.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but a few times I've paced the floor late into the night before I was to preach, still not certain of what my subject should be. With the time wasted on the weekly struggle to find something to preach, we could prepare masterpieces!

Yearly planning disciplines preachers and helps them grow. We all tend to preach about the subjects we love and to avoid those we don't care for or feel less confident in. Some love the Epistles and neglect the Old Testament prophets. Others enjoy the Old Testament stories but avoid Pauline theology like the plague.

George Sweazey insisted, "The preacher himself most needs to hear sermons on the matters in which he is weakest, and the only preacher he is likely to hear very often is himself. . . . A minister who would like to avoid preaching about prayer may preach himself into a grateful appreciation of it. If a preacher finds doctrine dull, then doctrine is probably what he and his congregation most need."1

Yearly planning produces balanced preaching. Parents who love their children provide them with food that's tasty, nutritious, and varied. Preachers who love their congregations provide them with spiritual food that's not only tasty but nutritious. Sometimes pastors seem to look only for the tasty. They feed their people too many sweets, preaching only love, peace, and joy. They so long to be accepted and appreciated that they preach too much of what their people want and too little of what they need.

Pastors ought to be concerned with what their people want. But in determining what to take to the pulpit, the final questions must always be Is this what God wants said? Is this what my people most need?

Preachers who love their people provide them with food that's not only tasty and nutritious, but also varied. Broccoli is highly nutritious; but if you ate nothing else, you would probably die of malnourishment. When a preacher has been feeding the congregation an unvaried diet based on whatever he or she likes best, the process of planning a sermon year will practically force that preacher to face that fact.

Winston Pearce declared, "When her esy has reared its ugly head, it has usually been due to an incomplete presentation of the gospel. It is not so much that what was taught has been false. . . . Usually, it was due to an overemphasis upon one truth of the gospel at the expense of some other." 2

Yearly planning produces balanced preaching, and balanced preaching pro duces balanced Christians.

How to Preach Week After Week, the new video course that Dr. Bresee has prepared for the Ministerial Association, expands upon these concepts. For information about how you may obtain a copy, see page 30.

 

1 Preaching the Good News (Englewood Cliffs,
N.].: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976), pp. 66, 67.

2 Planning Your Preaching (Nashville: Broadman
Press, 1967), p. 39.


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Floyd Bresee is the Secretary of the General Conference Ministerial Association.

April 1989

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