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Sermon: Full or Flat | Kathy Resel-Chambliss

Kathy Resler ChamblissPreacher: Kathy Resel-Chambliss
Sermon Title: “Full or Flat”
Original Sermon Link: here

Pastor Kathy Resel-Chambliss is the Awaken Pastor at Kentwood Community Church. She preached a sermon recently as a part of their series called “Momentum,” which focused on the early church in the book of Acts. She is a pastor who preaches with practical, passionate clarity.

1) Pastor Kathy brings us into the Scriptural journey. The transition from introduction to scripture reading is a familiar one to free church traditions like ours. Many traditions have the scripture read before the sermon. There are plenty of Wesleyan churches who follow that liturgical pattern.  The average church however includes the scripture reading within the sermon with standard words indicating that moment like these: “If you have your phone or your bible with you, go ahead and pull that out. Our reading today is found in _______.”

The pastor in that moment has implicitly invited the congregation to join the reading of the Word, but Pastor Kathy takes the extra step and makes the invitation explicit. “Won’t you join me?” she asks. Then three times throughout the rest of the sermon when she returns to the text, each time she uses the same commanding word— “listen.” She draws us in to the journey and then asks us to stay with her as she moves through the text. Many congregations desire a sermon that not only preaches something that is biblical, but shows them the connections with the text the preacher is making. Looping back to scripture multiple times both increases the preacher’s authority and models the preacher’s hermeneutic.

2) Pastor Kathy draws us into the capital “C” Church. The Gospel is more than about what the individual can get out of it, and it is even more than about what is happening in our own church. It is helpful , even necessary to remind our people week-by-week that the Church is much bigger than our immediate context. We have brothers and sisters in the faith all over the world who are living for Christ, many of whom are persecuted for their faith, as in Pastor Kathy’s story. A gospel that does not keep the world in view is a gospel that is out of perspective. Certainly one of the most common themes of the New Testament is the use of spiritual authority to remind the church of Christians suffering in other places and cultures

flattire-ebike3) This sermon is visual, intellectual, and emotional — One of the ways pastor Kathy accomplishes this is with contrasts so common to good preaching: good and evil, light and dark, holy and unholy. If we are not careful to make those contrasts clear and explicitly, they become hard to see and apply in our day-to-day lives. Pastor Kathy does a great job of making the contrast between “full and flat” very clear. She does this in three ways: she tells a story about her bike, in which we feel for her the contrast between riding with full tires and flat tires. As a visual tool, she places two boards on opposite sides of the stage, one saying “flat” and one saying “full.” She then outlines descriptors of these two ideas and puts them in her sermon notes for all to see from the screen (another visual tool), and she points out the contrast between full and flat characters in the biblical text. She’s helped us understand this with our eyes, with our emotions, and with our intellect.

So what can we do to give our sermons this practical, passionate clarity that she exhibits?

Watch your “This is the Word” words.

If you’ve been in ministry for a little while, maybe you’ve settled into a bit of a rhythm with the words you say when it comes time to read Scripture. Many pastors settle on a certain phrase that they may change a little bit from week to week but stays primarily the same. There’s nothing wrong with having rhythms;. Still if you do say the same words from week to week, make them intentional. Whether you realize it or not, you are theologically shaping your congregation’s minds in regard to the corporate reading of the Word by the words you choose to say in those moments. Make them purposeful. Take time out of your sermon prep this week to craft that phrase.

How do you connect your church to the global Church?

Perhaps your church is well connected to the global Church and other churches in the community; perhaps this is an area where you have a lot of room to grow. Regardless of where you are at on that spectrum, ask yourself this question: how, in this preaching series, can I connect our church to the global Church that has spanned two thousand years and is in so many corners of today’s world? Can I connect what we’re discussing to another period in Church history? Can I tell a story about something another church is doing really well to spur my people on to good deeds?

In your next sermon’s key content, how will you deliver it in ways that make sense for the emotions, the intellect, and the eyes? 

Remember that old writing adage? Perhaps you learned it in school. “Show, don’t tell.” Show your people what good is. Show them what evil is, do not just tell them. Make it imagistic so they can see it, put in in stories so they can feel it, and understand it. Talk about what it looks like for someone to live in goodness and to live in wickedness. Write it. Sing it. Display it. Narrate it. In doing this, you are not beating a dead horse. Instead, you are conveying contrast from Scripture in a variety of ways so that their whole person can understand— their eyes, their intellect, and their emotions.