Monday Morning Scattershooting
Monday Morning Scattershooting while wondering about my obsession with Stockholm Syndrome. At
first I thought it was a bad thing but now I am starting to really like it.
I worry about redundancy
in my preaching. Redundancy is when you just keep doing the
same things over and over. It's kind of like the lessons are in a feedback loop, they keep returning to the
same subjects over and over. As a listener, I hated when a preacher would get up and a minute into the lesson I’m think
this again? Now for a preacher to some degree, repetitiveness is your job. Your job is repetitiveness. You are doing your
job by being repetitive. The truth of the Gospel need to be taught again and
again[*].
But redundancy can take your symphonic ideas and turn them into background
elevator muzak.
So how do you
avoid redundancy? Here are some things I have tried
The computer age has been very helpful in
helping the preacher keep track of his lessons. You now can have all your lessons in one place so you can quickly see when you last talked about a subject. One thing that helped me, that I discovered serendipitously,
was “tagging”. As I put articles on my blog I tagged what they were about. This gave me a good sense of the subjects I had
been writing about and areas that I might need to be discussing. You can quickly see what subject you have been
riding to long. I also have a Bible that
I highlight all the verse I used in a year in sermons in a certain color. If certain verse are way to colorful it might
mean I have over taught that subject.
2. Force yourself to do things differently
When we preach on certain subjects, we have
our “go to” passages. If you have a
topic that you feel need to be taught but you feel like you have done it all
before, create restriction or challenge for yourself. For example, talk about controlling you speech
without quoting the book of James or pick a topic but have the lesson be an expository
sermon. The idea is to make you work in a way and with text you may have not
used, so you won’t fall into a familiar pattern.
3. Rotate your stock
A wise retired preacher once told me “you can preach the same lesson over again as
long as you change your illustrations. People won’t forget the illustration you
use.” It is often not your text that people will find redundant, it is the
ways we explain and illustrate that they get tired of. That is why a preacher needs
to be constantly educating himself and reading, so he can discover new ways to
make his points. Don’t get in a rut of going to the same sources for information.
Be a collector of all kinds of fact, figures, and stories. Listen to many different
preachers, read as many articles as you can. This will help to refresh your
material.
If you are just throwing things against the
wall each week, chances are you will get stuck in rut. If you make plans you will be better able to
see the patterns. If you are a “ripped
from the headlines”[†]
preacher you are going to be at the whim of the media which isn’t known for
being anything but redundant. I try to
come up with a theme for a month at least two months away from the Sunday I am
preaching. This gives my brain time to think about what all is said about a
subject. A theme isn’t a series, lesson
that follow each other by a pattern. A
theme is lessons that are connect by a central idea, like family and the home,
or church growth. That way each month is
not just disjointed lesson but at the same time it is not the same thing over
and over again. I know I have done well
if I ask a person what my theme was and they don’t know but when I tell them
they say Oh yeah, I see that now.
Finally, three men
line up to show their skill at archery. They are to shoot off the apple off of
a young boy's head. The first one draws his arrow back, shoots, hits the apple
clean off of the boy's head, then holds up his hand and proclaims, "I am
Robin Hood!". The second one draws his arrow back, shoots, hits the apple
of the boy's head, then holds up his hand and proclaims, "I am William
Tell!". The third one draws his arrow back, shoots, and hits the poor boy
in the skull. The other archers look at him stupefied at what he has done, the
man then holds up his hand and proclaims "I am sorry."
[*]
I think that is Peter’s point in 2 Peter
1:12 “Therefore, I will always be ready
to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been
established in the truth which is present with you.”
[†]
It’s good to be current with things that are going on but if all your lesson
are here is my response to the thing in the news, you are going to have a lot
of holes in your work
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