In preaching, raising your floor is more important than your ceiling. A congregation isn’t going to be shaped and formed by the one sermon you gave that one time that really stuck out. A congregation will be shaped and formed by faithful preaching that relies on the language and concepts of scripture. Instead of trying to raise your ceiling with rhetorical flourishes, raise your floor through sound exegetical work. A sound exegetical process won’t add a lot of flash to your preaching, but it will fill your sermons with substance and make preaching sustainable.
In college, I was a rhetoric nerd at a small Christian liberal arts school. My favorite course is still the rhetoric class I took senior year, where we trained in the art of crafting speeches. After college, I was a political staffer with aspirations of being a speech writer. I love words. I love speeches. And I love the way oratory can move people to imagine a new world.
That love transferred to preaching. During seminary, after I’d embraced the call to ministry, I worked on my preaching with enthusiasm. I switched from political rhetoric to sermons, reading sermons constantly. I intentionally developed a process of sermon writing that fit my personality. I sought out the advice of established preachers, taking their suggestions to heart.
Before being ordained, I served as a Director of Youth Ministries, with a Senior Pastor who graciously afforded me opportunities to preach. Days before each opportunity, I went to the sanctuary to practice the sermon, word for word, step for step, over and over. I knew that the real work of preaching rests in the power of the Holy Spirit. But I wasn’t going to force the Spirit to perform a miracle each time I preached.
I thought of preaching as another form of oratory, where I could control the words. If a sermon didn’t live up to my expectations, I obsessed. During sermon preparation, I thought through details of each word as I tried to sleep.
This was all fine. For a time. I was fresh and naive and didn’t really understand preaching. The first problem came after I’d been ordained for a few months. I was serving as an Associate Pastor, preaching once a month. I had moved states. My girlfriend (now my wife) stayed behind, to finish a doctoral program. We dated long distance for a few months, mostly over the phone.
I loved practicing my sermons with her. I timed the sermon while she listened. She would give me feedback. One Saturday night, though, I found myself stuck in a sermon that I couldn’t find my way out of. I had two competing ideas, really two sermons in one, and I couldn’t figure out which direction to travel. I kept pausing and working on each word, as she listened over the phone.
We lost track of time. At about 2 a.m., she fell asleep. When I realized she had fallen asleep, I became nervous that the sermon was boring. I obsessed more. After waking her up just long enough to say “goodnight,” I stayed up until about 4 a.m., working on the sermon I would deliver in just a few hours. The sermon was mediocre, at best.
I realized then that my approach to preaching wasn’t sustainable. Truth be told, it probably took me another two years to really work my obsessive tendencies out of my sermon preparation. But, that evening was the beginning of a realization.
I was viewing each sermon as a one-time event. Preaching isn’t a one-time event, though. At least, not the preaching of a local pastor. Preaching is an on-going conversation. Focusing on every word and rhetorical flourish isn’t sustainable when you have to write these dang things every week. And it won’t serve a congregation well.
This isn’t to say that rhetoric doesn’t matter, or that sermons are never great works of oratory. But this brings me back to the main idea: Raise your floor, not your ceiling. My preaching preparation was designed to lift the ceiling on a sermon, to make every sermon as rhetorically satisfying as possible. This type of approach can work if you’re only preaching once in awhile. But, over time, without a sound exegetical process, you’ll find that you’ve run out of things to say. Your sermons will become hollow. The novelty of rhetorical flourishes wears off, the reality of a busy schedule wears you down and your significant other will, inevitably, fall asleep when you practice too long.
I still practice my sermons with my wife. But only after a week focused on the scriptures. And during the early afternoon. She doesn’t fall asleep now. At least, not as often.
Jon Saur is the Senior Pastor of StoneBridge Community Church, a PC(USA) congregation in Simi Valley, CA. He graduated from Fuller Seminary and holds a D. Min. in Biblical Preaching from Luther Seminary.
