Video Transcript: Teaching and Preaching Preparation

Welcome back. We're continuing with our course developing great commission  skills. This is the final video, as we are treating the skill managing ministry time  and our skill topic for this video will be teaching and preaching preparation,  which is a major part certainly of a pastor's role, particularly if that pastor is  either the lone pastor, a solo pastor of a church, or perhaps the pastor who is  designated as the teaching pastor of the church. What I have found is that in in  many cases, the time consumed by teaching and preaching preparation for a  pastor is one of the largest time consumption elements in a pastor's week. Now  that does make sense, if that pastor's role is to be, say, the teaching pastor in a  very large church where the vast majority of his or her role is the teaching and  preaching role. It makes sense to spend lots and lots of time in teaching and  preaching preparation, but when it comes to the average pastor, those of us who pastor much smaller churches often being the the lone pastor, the sole pastor of  a church, there's so much more that we're responsible for besides the teaching  and the preaching that it's unrealistic to be able to devote gigantic chunks of  time to teaching and preaching preparation. Now I realize that this might be  sensitive territory for some of us, because, you know, most of us who felt the call to pastoral ministry, in large part, were thinking about the fact that our calling  was to be a preacher, to be a Bible teacher. So that was one of the primary  compelling motivations for us to pursue additional education, for us to pursue  serving God in that pastoral role. But the challenge is, what about all of the other things that need to be done, and how do you fit all of that into one person's work week? Now let me, let me be clear here, what am I not saying? Let's start there.  I'll begin by explaining what I'm not saying. You know, I'm not saying that the  teaching and preaching Ministry of a church are unimportant. I'm not saying that  there is no power, no authority in the teaching and preaching of God's Word.  The fact is, there is great power, great authority in the preaching and teaching of God's Word. You know, God speaks reality into existence, he speaks truth. And  we're told in Scripture that when the word goes out, it never returns, void. So the preaching and the teaching ministry is very, very powerful. And I don't in any  way want to suggest that that is not the case. What I am suggesting, though, is  that there has to be a balance between the role of preaching and teaching and  all of the other roles that are involved in a pastor's responsibilities. Finally, I'm  not saying that the authority of Scripture should in any way be held in low regard and not be called upon to serve as our guide for what we are to believe and how we are to live. The Word of God is our guide. It's our anchor. It's our true north in terms of both orthodoxy, what we believe, and orthopractice, what we do the  actions that we take. Well, what am I saying? What I am saying is that the  methodology of preparation for teaching and preaching is often padded with  unnecessary elements that are time wasters and so that's what we're trying to  work around here. We are in no way impugning the power and the authority of  the Word of God, preached and taught what we are stressing. Is developing a 

methodology for how we prepare to preach, how we prepare to teach, such that  time is highly valued, time is used very well, and time is left for all of the other  responsibilities that pastors need to fulfill. Now, you know, my years in seminary  were wonderful years I learned a great deal, and I cherished those moments  that I had in seminary when I was first given the opportunity to study I didn't  quite know if I should take that opportunity, because I was older. I was almost 40 years old. I was married. I had four children that were, you know, they had  needs of their own. They were in schools, they were in sports. They were in all  sorts of things. We were living in Southern California, the particular seminary  that was in view was out of state, we would have to be pulling up stakes and  relocating. There was a whole lot that was going to be involved in all that. And I  hesitated to take that plunge. But in speaking one day with a very wise professor who had become a bit of a mentor and advisor to me. He shared this. He said to me, Ken, if you have the opportunity to marinate and study God's Word for three years, to marinate in the study of God's word for three years. I advise you to  take it. Well, I did take his advice, and I never, I never regretted that. And so, you know, I learned about preaching and teaching. I learned about preparation. I  learned about, you know, things like hermeneutics and exegesis and homiletics.  I studied Greek. I studied Hebrew. I learned to navigate language resources. I, I  learned to get to the bottom of of Etymology and contextual usages and  nuances and verb tenses and and English translations. I i studied theology  under gifted theologians. I read books. I studied courtesy courses in preaching  and teaching. I studied sermons by such renowned preachers as Jonathan  Edwards and George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, I experienced what I  consider a very rich, full and dynamic evangelical teaching and preaching  education for which I am immensely grateful. But once I left seminary and I  stepped into the role of the solo pastor of a church that needed to be revitalized, I discovered that those techniques that I had learned in seminary, all that study I  had done approaching a preaching or teaching text essentially from the  beginning, from scratch, if you will, I learned that it was going To be very difficult  to follow through with every single element that I had been taught about  preparation, every single time I was preparing a sermon, or every single time I  was preparing to teach Bible, I knew that that wasn't going to work, because,  you see, we need to be doing more than just teaching and preaching. We need  to be going and making disciples. Now, obviously there's some overlap there,  but they are two very separate things. It's one thing to preach and teach to an  existing congregation of people who know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. It's  another thing to reach lost people who are living without faith, who are living  without a relationship with Jesus Christ. It's very difficult. It's very difficult to man  both of those stations, when every time we preach, every time we teach, we're  starting from scratch, from zero, and building from the ground up. So here's a tip for you. I came to realize that being fruitful and multiplying was going to take 

much more than just preaching and teaching, and I discovered that I was not  going to be able to start from scratch with every single preparation. Okay, now  let me share with you something that that I'm referring to as the great  assumption, obviously, a little play on words there the great assumption, you  know, we assume that if we teach enough, that we preach enough, that  somehow the gospel is going to spill automatically out of every person in our  church into the people living around them without faith, drawing them to Christ.  Well, it would be wonderful if that was if that was the case, but I've discovered  that that assumption proves faulty virtually every time it doesn't work quite like  that. Spreading the gospel is not something that happens accidentally, not  something that happens incidentally. It's something that we have to work for. We have to groom. We have to become intentionally strategic about moving the  gospel forward, painstaking intentional strategies and commitments that are  prioritized in the church. Now, therein lies the challenge. Here's the reality, 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 in the Great Commission ministry in the  community surrounding the church that Pastor soon learns that there isn't  enough ministry time to go around, learns that ministry time usage needs to be  recalibrated. Now let me go back to my seminary years for a moment, while I  was in seminary, I studied systematic theology under Dr R C Sproul, S, P, R, O,  U, L, Sproul, some of you may know of Dr Sproul. He was quite a renowned  theologian who passed away in recent years. He was a very gifted theologian.  He was a gifted preacher, a gifted teacher, and I had a very unusual opportunity  with him. While I was in seminary for about six months, my wife and I were part  of a small group of people that met at the home of someone in the in the area,  probably 10 or 12 of us, and Dr RC Sproul was our Bible teacher, and he was  taking us through the Gospel of Luke. So on one particular evening, as we  gathered to sit under his teaching, he made this statement at the beginning of  the evening, he said. He said, I have a confession to make. He said, I have to  confess that I am unprepared for teaching this evening. Said. He said, I think it  might be the first time in my life when I've come into a teaching assignment  unprepared, and he said I had some time set aside today that I was going to  think through the evening and review my notes. And he said, but there were  some events of the day that took me away from that, and I just did not have the  time. Now maybe he would have benefited from taking this course and learning  about managing ministry time, but hey, that's another issue. So he says that. He  said, I just didn't have enough time to get planned for this evening. And so He  paused there for a moment, I think, for dramatic effect. And then he said this. He said, however, I am not altogether unfamiliar with the Gospel of Luke. What a  great phrase. I'm not I'm not unfamiliar. I'm not altogether unfamiliar with the  Gospel of Luke. Well, of course not. I mean, how many times had this man 

taught through the Gospel of Luke in his lifetime? How many times had he  preached from the Gospel of Luke in his lifetime? I. It wouldn't surprise me if he  could practically recite the entire Gospel of Luke from all of his experience well,  see what he was doing. Is he was he was dipping into this reservoir of  knowledge and experience and application of the Gospel of Luke, that was his  an accumulation of Bible knowledge that had taken place over a lifetime, and he was drawing from that reservoir to bring teaching to us, not surprisingly, His  teaching was very powerful that evening, by the grace of God, and he just  picked up where we had left off the previous week, and spent about an hour with us, teaching us from the Gospel of Luke. Now, what I would like to suggest to  you is that those of us who are in the ministry of preaching and teaching, maybe we haven't accumulated the gigantic reservoir of someone like Dr Sproul, but we still have gathered knowledge, information, experience, know how application.  We've seen the gospel. We've seen the Word of God work in our lives, work  through our lives, work in people around us. In other words, when it comes to  preaching and teaching, we are not starting from zero. We are not starting from  zero. We are starting from a position of knowledge, a position of experience, a  position of know how, and we need to draw from that. Know how in our  preaching experience, we don't need to start every single sermon, every single  teaching preparation, with a blank sheet of paper, begin to read the scriptures,  study the languages, read through all the commentators that we can get our  hands on and build a gigantic preaching, teaching preparation fit for, you know,  getting an A in a class in seminary. Now, it's very helpful to know how to do  those things, to have learned how to do those things, but we don't need to do  those things every single time they take a great deal of time, if that's going to be  your posture. Week after week after week, I've had pastors that are preaching to congregations of 15, 20, 25 people tell me that they spend 20 hours a week in  sermon preparation. Well, that makes no sense. That makes no sense to spend  that much time trying to create the perfectly crafted sermon to preach to people  who already know Jesus, while hundreds of people outside are living life without him. You see where this is going? You see what I'm driving at? It's so important  that we that we find that way to balance. We find that way to balance. Now  here's a question for you, why is the evangelical church today so weak in terms  of conversion growth, that is particularly the case with the church in the US. And  here's the answer, it's because we're largely talking to ourselves. We're largely  talking to ourselves. We're talking to people that are already children of God,  already have bought in to the truth about Jesus Christ, already support the  gospel. We're spending so much time preparing to teach and preach to those  folks that we're failing to reach those were called to reach those that Jesus had  in mind when he said, Go, Go and make disciples. So let me share one other  personal experience of mine before we wrap up this video, in fact, before we  wrap up our discussion of managing ministry time altogether, some years ago, I 

had been invited by a particular denominational group to come to a particular  location where they owned some it was a conference center that. They held all  kinds of meetings at throughout the year, and so there was a group meeting at  the Conference Center. I was asked to come, and I was given about 90 minutes  to share my perspective on church revitalization and what kind of training  approach that I took in training pastors and leaders for church revitalization, just  an opportunity to give exposure to those kinds of things. So I did that, and I  walked through my approach. It largely has to do with alignment and aligning  with the Great Commission, alignment of vision and strategy and structure, the  alignment of people, both insiders and newcomers, and so, you know, I did  something that had done many, many, many times. I just shared a window into  the ministry that I was responsible for what we had to offer them if they wanted  to go in that direction. Well, toward the end of that presentation, one of the  pastors at this meeting asked me a question, and he said, Ken, I'm sure there's  a place for strategy somewhere in ministry. But isn't it really all about the word of God being powerfully proclaimed? Now his point of view was, in a sense,  undermining what I had been presenting, which was about how to strategically  position yourself to move the Great Commission forward. And he was leaning  into this idea of the power, the authority of the preached word, and I've already  said how much I support that, but I felt like he was missing the point. So I said  this. I said, let me ask you a question. I said, Do the pastors in this denomination powerfully proclaim the Word of God. And he said to me, absolutely. So I said to  him, Well, if it's all about the power of the Word of God proclaimed and the  pastors of this denomination powerfully proclaim that word. Why is it that most of the churches in your denomination are in long term and plateau? Well,  fortunately, there was a break for dinner at that point, because the room had  gotten a little bit tense, if you can imagine. So we went to dinner, and then there  were other activities throughout the evening. Well, that night, I was troubled. I  felt like, I felt like my response to this gentleman, while in my mind, it was  accurate, it was not helpful, it was more that I got a bit defensive about the  nature of my ministry and and so I, I pushed back. And so I began to pray, I  began to think through and I'm going to share something with you. This might  sound a little silly, but the riddle occurred to me. You know the riddle that says,  hey, if a tree falls in the forest, but there's no one there to hear it, does it make a  sound? Now that's not really much of a riddle. Sound is vibration. When a tree  falls through the air, the air vibrates and there is sound. You know that sound  doesn't need to be heard to be a sound by definition. So yes, when a tree falls in the forest, even if there's no one there to hear it, it makes a sound. But I thought  to myself, if the gospel is powerfully proclaimed, but there are no ears of the lost there to hear it, has the gospel really been proclaimed? And I thought to myself,  not really, you know, unless the gospel is heard, what's the point? And you see  where we're talking to ourselves so much in the. Church now the next morning, 

when we reconvened, I apologized for my rather terse remark, but I said this. I  explained my experience with thinking through the falling of the tree and  whatnot, and I said to them, Listen, what strategy? What strategy will do for you  is it will put the ears of the unreached, the ears of the lost, within earshot of the  gospel, so that the gospel can be heard. Now, as it relates to our topic for this  video. The point is this, it's not so much about how much work do we put into  preaching and teaching preparation. The real issue, if we're going to move the  Great Commission forward, is who's listening, who's hearing that word. Let's  make sure that we have ample time to actually reach the lost and not bury  ourselves just in preparation for the preaching and teaching. Now that wraps up  our video in terms of teaching and preaching preparation. So let me, let me give  us a quick rundown of the six skill topics that we touched on in this particular  skill. We started with time allotment, making sure that we we spread out the  work of ministry adequately throughout the time frames that we are involved. We talked about proactive scheduling, where we we schedule our time  commitments in advance so that we avoid two things, one is failing to fulfill  responsibilities by not planning, and secondly, getting into a crunch because we  waited too late to make those plans. We talked about the one touch calendar  filing system, those three sets of file folders, the daily 1 through 31s, the  monthly, January through December, and the projected years to come down the  path how we can take one item properly filed and it will always be where it  needs to be, so we can process it when we need to process it, without losing it,  without having to think about it all the time. We talk about email and voice mail  control and response by having designated checkpoints throughout the day and  planned response times. We talked about meetings on purpose, where  everyone is well informed about the meeting in advance. A meeting so started  on time, ended on time, and everyone knows in advance what's going to be  talked about, what needs to be decided, what actions will need to be  determined. And then finally, we wrapped up with this discussion we've just had  on teaching and preaching preparation. So that concludes our study of  managing ministry time, and so we're going to wrap that up now with next  session. We're going to start into the next skill. What is that next skill? The next  skill, has to do with working with staff and leaders. Very important consideration.  And as usual, we'll have six videos that examine that particular skill, working  with staff and leaders. Until then, may God bless your efforts on his behalf. May  God bless your ongoing studies in the name of Jesus, amen,