Preaching

I love preaching. When I am preaching, and the Holy Spirit comes, and I feel connected to God and present with our community, it's as though time is suspended and I'm riding the wave that I was created to ride.

My husband Tom and I give the majority of Sunday morning teachings for our church; any planning about topics and timing comes from us. Three factors influence our choices:

1. What does God want to say to our church?
2. What is alive to Tom or I at the moment?
3. Knowing our demographic, who they are and what they need to hear.
I love preaching. When I am preaching, and the Holy Spirit comes, and I feel connected to God and present with our community, it's as though time is suspended and I'm riding the wave that I was created to ride.

My husband Tom and I give the majority of Sunday morning teachings for our church; any planning about topics and timing comes from us. Three factors influence our choices:

1. What does God want to say to our church?
2. What is alive to Tom or I at the moment?
3. Knowing our demographic, who they are and what they need to hear.

No matter what we are preaching about, the state of our relationship with Jesus is central. Our first goal, though we constantly fall short, is to keep our relationship with Jesus alive and current. For me the constant challenge is not reducing Jesus to one more item on my check list. I am currently taking seminary classes at-a-distance, I have 5 children from 9 - 17, and I am the senior pastor of a church. I would like to believe that my years spent juggling work to my advantage, but recently, I wept as I realized how my performance-oriented life style reduced Jesus to serving my purposes. Finding my way back to him meant radically slowing down in order to let him shatter the cities I'd built and show me anew the ones he is building. This has everything to do with my preaching. When I preach from my strength--and I clearly do at times--I use my gifts and abilities, I may even entertain, but I am bereft of the anointing and backing of Christ. But when I am connected to Jesus, it seems as though every cell in my body is electrified. On those Sunday's people are less apt to tell me what a good speaker I am and more likely to tell me they felt confronted by the living God.

Tom and I are readers. We occasionally watch movies, but we primarily gain inspiration from the Bible and from books we are reading. We also hear from Jesus in nature. So for us, gathering our kids and finding our way to the nearest mountains (or, being from Iowa City, hills) is a regular occurrence. Some teachers plan out messages a year in advance or spend an extended stretch of Sundays in one book of the Bible, and they do great! We, however, are not wired that way, and so we play to our strengths. We find that we can speak passionately about what is alive to us in the moment, while planning teaching series is a discipline and a chore. If God is speaking to me about spiritual gifts and I am slotted to teach about addiction, I grind it out. If I have just been to Hong Kong ministering with Jackie Pullinger to the heroin addicts, however, I can (and did) preach for weeks about selling all we have and giving to the poor. That said, Tom and I know that planning can actually be good and perhaps necessary, so we make room for both. We are trying to build a teaching structure that incorporates what the congregation is asking for and God wants to say while leaving enough flexibility for our more spontaneous souls to thrive.

Lastly, we love our community, both our church and our city, and intuitively connect with them. We live in a liberal environment known for being hyper-educated. We attract an inordinate number of grad student and academics. They tend to be un-churched, pluralist, post-modern seekers who are passionate about social justice. Our friend Geoff summed it up best when he introduced himself to us a couple years ago as a Zen-Jewthran! As we think about what to preach, we are always aware of who we are talking to. In our case we are talking to un-churched folks, often in the early stages of considering Jesus. They either don't like or don't understand religious language. They are well read and enjoy a hermeneutic of suspicion. They are aware of the abuses of Christianity and wanting to be convinced of its truth. They are working to separate Jesus from some of what is done in his name. We hold this in our minds as we prepare our sermons and consider our series.

Preaching to me will always be a gift and a privilege. I long for our preaching to please the Father and to do what it is intended to do.