Reading: 4.6—Teaching and Preaching Preparation

4.6 Teaching & Preaching Preparation: In many cases, the largest time consumption in a pastor’s week goes to teaching and preaching preparation. This might be reasonable if a pastor is the teaching pastor of a large, multi-staff church. However, most pastors are not and will need to streamline their preparation for teaching and preaching in order to devote time to other priorities. I know that I’m treading on sensitive and, perhaps, uncomfortable territory here, so I’m asking you to withhold judgment on this concept until you’ve thoroughly considered what I have to say.

I’ll begin by explaining what I’m NOT saying. I’m not saying that the teaching and preaching ministry of the church is unimportant. In fact, it’s vitally important. I’m not saying that there is no power or authority in the teaching and preaching of God’s Word. In fact, there is great power and authority in the Word of God and in the teaching and preaching of that Word. I’m not saying that the authority of Scripture should be held in low regard and not serve as a standard for ruling and judging all other ministry. In fact, Scripture is the ultimate authority regarding our faith and practice; what we are to believe and how we are to live; our guide in both orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

I am saying, however, that the methodology of preparation for teaching and preaching, for many pastors, is often padded with unnecessary elements that are time wasters that don’t upgrade the effectiveness of the teaching and preaching ministry while stealing time from other ministry priorities that go unattended. Pastors must learn to draw from the reservoir of Bible, theology, ministry, and life experience they have accumulated over the years as they prepare to teach and preach, not starting from scratch with every preparation.

My years in seminary were wonderful years for me and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity. If I could have figured out a way to make a living as a seminary student I might have stayed indefinitely. When that opportunity surfaced, I was already deep into ministry without the benefit of such training, so I consulted my wise and seasoned mentor. He said this, “Ken, if you have the opportunity to marinate in the study of God’s Word for three years, I advise you to take it.” Take it I did and that investment has paid dividends again and again.

When it comes to teaching and preaching, I learned about hermeneutics, exegesis, and homiletics. I studied Greek and Hebrew and learned to navigate language resources to get to the bottom of etymology, contextual usages, and the nuances of verb tenses and English translations. I studied theology under gifted theologians who required my reading books written by leading theologians. I took courses in preaching that included both sermon preparation and delivery, and I read and studied sermons by noted preachers such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Charles Spurgeon. I experienced a rich, full, and dynamic evangelical teaching and preaching education for which I am immensely grateful.

Though I consider the training in teaching and preaching that I received significantly positive, I do think that I left seminary with an out-of-balance perspective on how to utilize my ministry time as I stepped into the role of pastor of a small, declining church, as many of us do. I had been prepared to be a Bible teacher and preacher and had pictured myself during three years of preparation as standing behind a lectern or podium or stepping into a pulpit to deliver well-prepared, profound, and God-blessed messages that would change lives. I discovered that, while it was true that I would present messages of this kind, there was more to the role of pastor, much more, and that the luxury of spending hours and hours of time crafting teaching and preaching was a luxury that I could not afford in terms of my usage of ministry time. 

Perhaps this is an overstatement, but I came away from seminary thinking that proper preparation for teaching or preaching was to begin each preparation from scratch, almost as if I had never seen a Bible before. Start with the text, study the text in its original language, consult language resources and commentaries, examine the context, check cross references in Scripture, take a peek at how this text had been used in the church historically, and build my presentation from the ground up. This methodology was very thorough and was wonderful Bible study for me personally, but it was also very time consuming as I prepared to teach or preach to a handful of people who already knew Jesus as Lord and Savior. Meanwhile, the harvest outside in the community, for whom the laborers were few, remained unreached. You see where this is going, right?

I came to realize that missional ministry, i.e., being fruitful and multiplying, i.e., going and making disciples, needed much more than teaching and preaching to the proverbial choir. We assume that if we teach enough and preach enough, that somehow the Gospel will automatically overflow from even a very small congregation into the people living without faith around them. That assumption proves faulty virtually every time. Communities are not reached with the Gospel accidentally but through painstaking, intentional strategies and commitments that are prioritized in a church, and that takes time. Given that time is finite and unable to be replenished, significant ministry time must be devoted to ministry outside of the church. Therein lies the challenge, if a pastor needs to pour significant amounts of time into teaching and preaching preparation for the congregation and needs to pour significant amounts of time preparing and leading the congregation into missional ministry in the communities surrounding the church, that pastor soon learns that there isn’t enough ministry time to go around, and that ministry time usage needs to be recalibrated.

Going back to seminary for a moment, let me share one story with you. While in seminary, I studied systematic theology under Dr. R.C. Sproul and, for a short stretch of about six months, was in a small group Bible study that Dr. Sproul led. This was a true privilege for my wife and me, being in a group of ten or twelve people in someone’s home one night a week being led through the Gospel of Luke by such a gifted teacher. One such evening, once the initial chit chat and fellowship subsided, Dr. Sproul opened his Bible to begin his teaching and he said something along these lines. “I have a confession to make,” he began; “in all my years of teaching I have never come into a teaching session without preparation, but certain things happened today that demanded my attention and I did not have time to prepare for this evening.” He paused, perhaps for dramatic effect, and then continued, “however, I am not altogether unfamiliar with the Gospel of Luke.”

Unfamiliar, indeed; he had decades of study behind his teaching ministry, and, every time he opened the Word of God to teach, he drew upon that repository of knowledge, insight, study, skill, and experience, such that he was never starting from scratch. Looking back on that evening as a pastor helped me realize that teaching and preaching can be extremely effective without going through the start-from-scratch methodology that had been my training every time. From my own pastoral experience, and those of many pastors with whom I’ve ministered, I realized that pastors must learn to draw from the reservoir of Bible, theology, ministry, and life experience that they have accumulated over time as they prepare to teach and preach. Properly channeled, this can save an enormous amount of ministry time that can be dispensed into other vital areas of ministry, namely the design, development, and deployment of missional strategies to penetrate the harvest with the saving message of Jesus Christ. Why is the evangelical church of today so weak in terms of conversion growth? Because we are largely talking to ourselves.

Here’s one more story from my long journey down this path. Some years ago, I had been invited to speak to a group of denominational leaders at a conference center, sharing my perspective on revitalization and explaining what our ministry had to offer to those who were interested in going further. I was given ninety minutes to make my case. Following my presentation, the larger group broke out into their respective committees and I was asked to sit in with the Revitalization Committee. There were a few questions and some discussion and then the chairman of that committee asked a question that was truly more statement than question, but was in the form of a question. He essentially said, “Ken, I’m sure there must be a place for strategy in ministry, but isn’t it really all about the Word of God being powerfully proclaimed?”

To cut to the chase, I replied, “Do the ministers in your denomination powerfully proclaim the Word of God?” He emphatically responded, “Absolutely!” I shot back, “Well, if it’s really all about the Word of God being powerfully proclaimed, and your ministers powerfully proclaim the Word of God, why, then, is your entire denomination in plateau and decline?”

That night I was troubled. I had made my point but I didn’t sense that I had really helped anyone. I was up much of the night, praying about the encounter, reading my Bible, asking God to use me in a way that would be, perhaps, less sarcastic and more edifying. In the wee hours of the morning a thought came to me. I’m going to say it was the Holy Spirit. I recalled the riddle: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is, “yes.” Sound is produced by vibration and, when a tree falls, the air vibrates and, by definition, sound occurs. This sound is not dependent upon being heard in order for it to be a sound. It’s a physical inevitability. Consider this, though: if the saving Word of God is preached and there are no unsaved ears to hear its message, has evangelism happened? The answer is, “no.” Evangelism demands that the message be heard by unreached people.

Fortunately, I had a chance later that morning to apologize for my terse remarks the previous day and to share this new insight. I ended by pointing out that, while the powerfully proclaimed Word of God is essential to reaching the harvest, missional strategies would place this Gospel message within earshot of the lost, and that proclamation and missional strategy should combine as a one-two Gospel punch.

Managing Ministry Time well calls for pastors to streamline teaching and preaching preparation to give sufficient time to other missional priorities.