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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

 1. Keep Good Records
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.
    4. Plan what you preach
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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