I've used very basic, pay-as-you-go mobile phones for however long it is I've had a mobile phone.  In the last week circumstances have meant oodles of texts and a fair few international calls that have gobbled up credit.  So today I gave in, signed up for a pay-monthly contract and ordered myself a smart-phone for my personal use.  My current personal phone will then become my work phone.  My pre-historic work phone will go in the drawer as the emergency spare phone!  This is allowed, as all the phones are my property, and I have saved each of my churches a small fortune by being PAYG, and still will be for my work phone for as long as it is feasible to do so.

Resistance is futile, and I'm now about to join the ranks of smart-phone sheep baa!

This is how one theological educator I know describes the disicipline of regular preaching - a treadmill that cannot be escaped (except through advance negotiation or sickness).  It's a slightly harsh/negative descriptor, but one that carries a deal of truth... Apart from those print journalists whose task it is to produce 'leaders' or 'comments' I find it hard to think of many other professions where there is an inbuilt expectation of a decent deliverable every week, rain or shine.  Although I know that as soon as people read that, they'll think of others.

The discipline of preaching, the routine of preparing at least one (and when I started out at least two) acts of worship every week is demanding.  Having preached weekly for eleven years, twice weekly for a year before that, fortnightly (plus occasional others) for four years before that and infrequently before that, I can safely say I've prepared and delivered a heck of a lot of sermons (of which I'd say less than a dozen have been used more than once).  Sometimes it is pure joy, other times it is sheer slog; mollty it is somewhere between the two.  Above all it is a deliberate discipline.

So here are a few stories and quotes from my experience, some of which fess up to things most preachers/ministers probably will never admit, about how it sometimes is.

In Season and Out of Season

This phrase, from Paul's charge to Timothy, and hence my own call, is one that I often wonder quite what it means.  Preach whether anyone listens or not?  Preach whether the time feels right or not?  Preach whether you feel like it or not?  For this reflection, I am choosing to hear it more along the lines of the latter.  Preach whatever 'season' of life you are in.  When the words come easy and when you stare at a blank computer screen with a brain devoid of words....  When ministry is rewarding and when, for two pins, you'd throw in the towel and become a checkout operator...  When your congegation seems totally engaged and the charismatics would assert that "the Spirit is moving" and when hardly anyone is there and you are not sure anything you are saying makes sense anyway.  I think it is a call to resilience, a call to "keep on keeping on",  that the LORD's servant refused to be discouraged (my interpretation of the Isaiah words).

If preaching is a vocation, we do it not because we can, but because we cannot not; not because we may but because we must... Because it isn't about us, but about the one who, out of the whole world, looked at us and said "it's you" (and there was no-one else that might have been meant).  "Here I am, I can do none other" - unless that's at the heart of it, then the resilience to preach when your heart is breaking or your faith is flickering or your body is exhausted will not be there.

Preach Faith until You Have Faith, Then Preach Faith

These words, or something very similar were spoken to none other than the great John Wesley when he was on a mission trip to the north Americas.  An ordained Anglican, he was going through a season of questioning his faith and wondered, should he still be preaching.  He took advice and was told to preach faith until he had faith, then to preach faith.  We know the rest of the story.

In my second year at college, I chose to work with a Roman Catholic church, which was challenging and painful, engaging and enjoyable in roughly equal measure.  Roman Catholics can do major festival brilliantly, and especially Easter.  We jourrneyed through Holy Week to Good Friday, culminating in the moment at 3 p.m. when there is no doubt whatsoever that Jesus is dead, and the empty ache of Holy Saturday must be faced.  The Easter Vigil from Saturday to Sunday is an amazing spectacle but it took me the closest I have ever come to losing my faith.  The church gradually filled with light and colour as the first Mass of Easter was celebrated... and I, as a non-RC person was excluded.  The emptiness was not displaced.  Christ did not rise, and I wondered if he ever would.  I had an evening service to preach at elsewhere, and no choice  but to preach faith... (who knew the first year Sprituality course for which I'd chosen to research Wesley would prove so helpful...).  It was only when I came to preach on Thomas at an evening serivce a full week later that something pierced my inner gloom.  I've never got back to where I was before that moment, but fifteen years later I still believe, still preach.

Part of the disicpline of preaching, the treadmill, is to preach faith when you have little faith, to speak of hope when God seems silent or adsent.  The challenge is, perhaps to do so in a way that honours the struggle and avoids glib platitudes.

Let the Dead Bury their own Dead - You, Preach the Good News

It was August 2008, I had just completed walking Offa's Dyke south to north and I had agreed to preach at my "Sending Church" on the Sunday before heading home.  At 7 a.m. that morning my mobile phone rang with the news that a member of my congregation in Dibley had died after a short, courageous journey with cancer.

This was one of my very rare 'repeat perfomance' sermons, adapted from one that I'd preached at Dibley a few weeks earlier, I think (I have not checked) on some of the harder words of Jesus.  It included "let the dead bury their own dead, you, preach the Good News."

Standing in a familiar church, with people who had watched me morph from engineer to student to minister, and wanting to be in Dibley embracing the congregation entrusted to me, I stood up to preach.  Suddenly I understood these words in a whole new way, and, like my experience in Easter 2001, I can never go back to the time before it.

Whatever is going on, no matter how I feel, the call is a call to preach Good News... to find hope, love, promises, hints-of-glimspes of God.  Afterwards I can crumple and crumble; afterwards I can weep or rage.  But in that moment, my task is to preach...

People tell me I do a good funeral, I'd like to think that maybe that is a practical outworking of this tough call.

Discipline

Preaching, for me, is not so much a treadmill as a disicipline.  Feelings and circumstances may (and perhaps should)  inform my preaching, but they can never control it.  Likewise, faith or its lack, questions or confusion are not a bar to my preaching, and sometimes I must preach despite them. 

I am 'contracted' to lead worship 41 Sundays a year... to prepare and deliver that number of sermons.  In addition are a few evenings, a share of Uni Chapel prayers, some mid-week reflections and a very occasional guest preach.  It goes without saying that the 'quality', whatever that means, will vary.  That sometimes what I deliver is prepared in haste and lacks refinement.  That sometimes I will have agonised over a word or phrase.  That sometimes I will have stared, impotent at the screen for hours,  That sometimes I will be wowed by a new insight I long to share...

And always, always there is the mystery that is preaching.  That my words are heard and morphed into something meaningful for someone or several someones.  That now and then there are 'hmmmm' moments.  That occasionally someone will say "that was for me".  And that very, very occasionally, I will abandon the notes I've laboured over and simply speak, because that, too, is Godly.

You, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season.

Preach faith until you have faith, then preach faith.

Let the dead bury their own dead, you preach the Good News.

This, for me is the disicipline of preaching, and if it's a 'treadmill' it's one I am happy to tread, trusting that somehow this is what God requires of me.

"Imposter Syndrome" is pretty much endemic among ministers, teachers and indeed anyone who is any good at what they do.... the fear of being 'found out as a fraud', the sense of lack or worth, that if 'they' only knew they'd be endlessly disappointed in me...

Well, this from Archdruid Eileen is bang on the money.  Enjoy"

I've just spent a quiet hour listening to the podcast of last week's service, and really appreciated it greatly.  From the call to worship, to the music, to the sermon and the prayers, it was almost as good as being there, and touching to be mentioned and prayed for intelligently.

I am really proud of the cover preacher, L, for taking on the challenge of focussing on a "text of terror" from the Old Testament and diligently seeking out hope from within it, when the easy option would have been to ignore that passage and preach something from the New Testament instead.

It reminded me a bit of the time I preached on the "Slaughter of the Innocents" as a student - a terrible New Testament passage - that I used to explore some thoughts around what we might do with the passages that disturb our ease or that we'd rather simply excise.  Avoidance and evasion are tempting; engagement is challenging and important.

The sermon ranged quite widely, perhaps more widely than I would do nowadays, with lots of useful material to expand on the context, exploring ideas such as questioning or arguing with God (very important to recognise); the nature of God who seems capable of wrath yet whose desire is that none be loss; the distortion of sacrifice and so on. 

For me the little nugget to ponder further was the idea that God would spare Sodom and Gomorra if as few as ten righteous people could be found (Abraham stopped at ten, but maybe the limit was actually one...).  The preacher then invited to imagine that the people in that place at that time were the only 'righteous' in the whole of Glasgow, and that for their sake, God would spare the entire city irrespective of what was going on.  Wow!  That's a massive, mind-blowing idea.

And as I pondered it, my mind leapt to the gospel words that tell us that as Christians we are the 'salt and light' of the world.  Far from passive recipients of God's grace to all creation, far from being spared within the mess and muddle of real life, we have a purpose that is no less mind-blowing.  We are the salt that preserves the whole, the candle that illuminates the darkness.

God does not lift us out of the muddle, God employs us to transform it from within.  And of course, by the Spirit, God shares with us in all of that.

Thank you, L, for a sermon that made me think and gave me something significant to ponder.  I am looking forward to more weeks of receiving.

(I'm sticking with my made up name for the recipient of preaching unless/until someone suggests something better!)

There were things that I had always either been taught, or seen modelled or acquired by osmosis when it came to church.  One of these was the 'task' or 'role' of the preachee... To listen carefully and attentively to what was being said, and to allow it to move past my ears into my brain, where it would be actively or passively mulled, and thence, potentially, to my heart where its work of transformation, encouragement, rebuke or learning might take root.  Whilst preaching may include teaching, it was not the same thing.

For many years, I would take a long walk on a Sunday afternoon to mull over what had been heard.  Occasionally I would categorise a sermon/service as "not so good" but I still recognised that my task, or my role, was to allow even some tiny nugget to reach me.  If not from the sermon per se, then from the hymns, the prayers or the Bible readings.  I knew what I needed to "do" or not "do", and how digesting a sermon was not really so different from digesting my dinner!

Then I started preaching and began to see it from the 'other side' - the challenge of expostion and exegesis, the significance of context, pastoral issues that may be current, the preferences and predilections (if the two differ) of those present, the way this sermon fitted into a series or a theme (or not)... The list was endless and I began to appreciate just what a 'big ask' it is to preach regularly, even if (then) infrequently.

Ministerial Students, as we were called in those days, preached a minimum of once a fortnight in their placement churches, plus assorted 'College Preaches' at other churches.  The rhythm and discipline of 'preparing Sunday dinner' as one book on preaching (that sits unread on my shelf) calls it began to emerge.  At the same time, we were expected to be present at College Chapel every week, where assorted invited preachers would take the lectionary passage for the next Sunday as their starting point.  College Chapel was, let's say, a challenging place, but it is my experiences as 'preachee' that matter here.

Ministerial students, or at least this one, seem to go through a phase in which their role/identity in worship is somewhat confused.  I would listen to sermons and find myself becoming critical - dodgy exegesis here, wrong translation of a word there, stylistic irritant somewhere else.  This troubled me, though my wise personal tutor seemed less perturbed when I told her, assuring me that it would pass given time (she was right!).

And there was that sermon we all recall more than a decade later because it was universally perceived as 'bad.'  A lovely, devout man, a skilled Bible scholar, and competent, accurate exegesis but...

How arrogant that seems thinking back.  Who gave me the right or the role of critic?  Sure, this man was not a gifted preacher, but he was, then, very much a novice preacher, either brave or foolish in allowing himself to be thrown to the lions of colleagues and students.  I recall next to nothing of the service, and little of the sermon, though the key text "an evening and a thousand years are the same in the sight of God" could not hvae been better illustrated - twenty minutes felt like an eternity.

As time has passed, and I've matured (I hope) as a preacher, so I have rediscovered my role as preachee.  That harsh critical edge has long gone (even if from time to time I particpate in serivces that leave me bemused, bothered and bewildered!) as I remind myself that I am not here to be entertained or educated, but to engage in a dynamic process of engaging with God's Holy Spirit to discover what there might be for me to mull over; what challenge, rebuke or word of encouragement will emerge unbidden along the way.

Sermons come in all shapes and sizes, preaching styles are as varied and as unique as those who preach.  I may or may not feel 'moved' by what I hear; it may or may 'speak' to me clearly and loudly; I may find it dull and dreary or difficult to follow.  None of these matters.  Someone has gone to the bother of preparing a 'meal' for me to the very best of their ability.  I might have liked more gravy or less rice, or whatever it is, but that's about me, not about them.

A couple of decades of preaching has taught me a lot.  It has also taught me to savour the gift of 'feeding' on the endeavours of others, finding that juicy morsel upon which to chew in the days ahead. 

Like most meals, most sermons are quickly forgotten - they aren't all going to be memorable, that's not their point.  Like any meal, a sermon contains nutrients... and whilst sometimes we like a full roast at other times a sandwich or a takeway is a sufficient.

I hope as I continue as a preacher, I am also aware of the task I have in providing  an adequate 'dinner' to those who for serve as preachees in my congregation(s).