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Thanksgiving Sermon: Keep Peddling | Rick Kavanaugh

navets —  November 7, 2011 — Leave a comment

SERMON: Thanksgiving Sermon: Keep Peddling

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BIO: Rick Kavanaugh has been in pastoral ministry for nearly 30 years. For 3 of those years Rick has served as the senior pastor at High Point First Wesleyan Church, a large congregation in the suburbs of High Point, NC. Rick urges, “it is more vital today than ever that we preach the word of God and to that end we must make it a life-long habit to meditate on the Scriptures.”

Lenny: Rick, you did several things early in the sermon that I think contributed to its impact. You used peddling a bike uphill as a metaphor for giving thanks to God always, especially when it’s difficult. You also framed your sermon with a mantra when you proclaimed “Peddling keeps us from coasting” in our journey with Christ. Your use of M&M, the metaphor and the mantra, gave your sermon the power of clarity and memorability. Do you try to use these devices often in your sermon?

Rick: I don’t always use an object lesson, but if there is one that fits well I think it helps to make an idea more tangible. I like to summarize the main focus of the sermon into a simple phrase. Andy Stanley calls it “a sticky statement.” I find that helps to keep the message on target and leaves the congregation with at least one idea they can remember.

Lenny: I noticed in the video of this sermon that you preached without notes. How do you prepare to preach with limited or no reliance upon your sermon notes?

Rick: I write a manuscript and then reduce that to a bulleted outline format. I transfer that to 3×5 cards and then memorize the cards. The main ideas and points are memorized but the specific wording is extemporaneous. At first I was nervous about preaching without notes because I was afraid of having a brain freeze, so I pray a lot! I like to preach that way because it gives me complete eye contact. It also guards me from blind spots. When I preached with notes, I would notice things after I spoke. I would think, “Now I see that problem. I wish I had seen that before I preached it.” Though there are always many things I wish I could change, the process of memorizing helps me see more before I preach. Because it is by memory I run through the sermon 5 or 6 times before preaching it.

Lenny: So often in sermons we put the completion, or application, of the sermon entirely on the shoulders of listeners. While you did challenge us to do our part, you also explored and emphasized the role of God in giving us the grace-filled capacity to “give thanks in all circumstances.” I have come to the conclusion that to truly preach the Gospel, we must point out not only what we must do but what God did and does for us. Why did you feel it was important to highlight this for your congregation?

Rick: I agree with you Lenny. The gospel is about what Christ has done and is doing in us. We can get stuck in our journey when we think the Christian life is about living our lives for Jesus. What God is really after is for us to reckon ourselves as dead and allow Him to live His life through us.

Lenny: You exposed the “rose-colored glasses” through which the Church has too often interpreted Romans 8:28. Things don’t always go our way even if we love God with all our heart. Do you feel the people in your community and/or church context have this shallow, simplistic view? How can preachers help offset this popular view of God as the cosmic lucky rabbit’s foot?

Rick: I think the popular trends in the North American church are drifting toward what Bonhoeffer called, “easy believism.” Christ calls us to take up our cross and follow Him. We are to march to our death so that He can live through us. Those who wish to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. I don’t think the church would deny that, because it is stated plainly in Scripture. It’s just that we are perhaps out of balance in that we shy away from that message. It is important to keep a balanced perspective.

Lenny: About two-thirds of the way through your sermon you described with passion what God through Christ has done for us. Your listeners clapped at the climax of Christ. There is some debate among homileticians about whether or not Christ should, in fact, be the climax in every sermon. What do you think? Should every sermon, even those preached on texts that don’t focus on Christ, climax with Christ?

Rick: I wouldn’t say that every sermon should climax with Christ, because that would be disingenuous, because some of my sermons do not. However, Paul gave us the example when he said he preached Christ and him crucified. The Reformers believed that Christ is at the center of every passage, even the Old Testament Scriptures. He is the theme of the entire Bible. I don’t think we could go wrong if we kept Him at the center of every message.

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Becoming Like God – Cost vs Worth | Aaron Perry

navets —  October 10, 2011 — Leave a comment

SERMON: Becoming Like God – Cost vs Worth

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BIO: As Pastor of Christian Education (Adult) at Centennial Road Church in Brockville, Ontario, Aaron oversees and organizes the discipleship ministry which includes small groups, support groups, group Bible studies, and conferences. He also serves on the teaching team. Aaron and his wife moved to Brockville in 2009. Centennial Road is a Wesleyan church that averages around 450 on a weekend and seeks to serve as a regional church for our surrounding communities. Aaron encourages preachers to “Work to sense the good news of the gospel so strongly that you can’t wait to proclaim it!”

Lenny: First of all, I love the “laughing guy” in the beginning of the audio sermon who did not seem to realize his microphone was on. Who was that guy? More importantly, why did you sense the need to begin the message with a humorous anecdote? Is this typical of your preaching or a device for this particular sermon?

Aaron: Our Lead Pastor, Eric Hallett, is a true encourager. He probably left his microphone on so that just in case the joke fell flat, I wouldn’t hear crickets. I liked this story because it combined humour and the sermon’s theme in a natural way. You always have to be careful with canned-humour, but in this case the theme of the sermon and the joke paired really well. I don’t always open with humour, but when an introduction includes humour, emotional poignancy, and fits the sermon’s theme the result is truly memorable. I had the chance with this one, and went for it.

Lenny: Your message focused primarily on loving like God loves, which includes the mandate to love our enemies. In Jesus’ Jewish context, the enemies were Romans and any Jews who compromisingly cooperated with the Roman government. Who are the “enemies” of your particular local church? In other words, which group or person seems most difficult for your people to love?

Aaron: Neighbours, co-workers, bosses, brothers, sisters, parents, spouses, etc. I think the easy way around this passage is to deny that I have any enemies and so Jesus’ words don’t impact me deeply. But once I reflect on the reality of life, then I have to deal with real people who run on my continuum of relationship somewhere between “very best friend” and “mortal enemy.”

Lenny: Your message was very Wesleyan in that it defined “perfection” as holy, God-like love for all people, including enemies. Some of our listeners might say, “Duh, of course a Wesleyan Church already knows that holiness is defined by love.” However, you and I have served as pastors long enough to know that sometimes Wesleyans put the emphasis of holiness on a syllable other than love. How have you seen this played out in your ministry context?

Aaron: My temptation is always to pin holiness down, to name it as specific actions, disciplines, and attitudes. This is tempting because once completely defined, then holiness is under our control. When we lose the relational nature of holiness as perfect love, then the next step is to set it up as a list, even if the list might change—for example, from holiness being defined as no dancing and no movies to holiness being defined as buying domestic clothing and always recycling.

Lenny: As a staff pastor, you are not the primary preacher for the church you serve. What are some of the pros and cons of preaching as a staff pastor? For instance, one of the pros for me when I preached as a staff pastor was that I had two months to focus on one sermon. The con, of course, is having so much to say I tried to say too much in one sermon. What are some other pros and cons when it comes to preaching occasionally as a staff pastor?

Aaron:
Pro: Recovery time- Whether after a single sermon or a four-part series, I know I have extended recovery time once it is over.
Pro: You can exemplify team. I love being able to support the vision the lead pastor is setting out or an event that a colleague is championing through the sermon. Those things are expected of the lead pastor, but staff pastors can embody team in those moments too.
Pro: You develop other avenues for teaching. Whether in personal conversations, small group, or another avenue, when all your spiritual eggs aren’t in the preaching basket, you are forced to develop multiple means of communication.
Con: Lack of practice. Preaching, like any skill, requires practice to improve.

Lenny: Aaron, I really appreciated some of your play on comparisons like life and death, as well as cost and worth. I think these concepts anchored the focus of your sermon, tying it together in one trajectory. Your sermon was not built on points, though it had a point to make. Walk us through the structure of this sermon by telling us how the sermon journeyed from move to move?

Aaron: I love Eugene Lowry’s narrative plot. Lowry’s homiletical form has a series of moves and I’ve gradually modified it to reflect my own style. These are the moves I try to make:
1. Conflict: What grabs the listener? What knocks them off kilter? I tried this with the idea of cost vs. worth and the story of Fred and Millie.
2. Complication: This is the problem of the passage. Why does the passage make us feel uncomfortable? Why does Jesus have to teach this and people don’t just practice it on their own? This is where preaching goes deep into the complexity of life. I used the story of the Christmas / Holiday Tree here as an example of a common-sense response that didn’t match Jesus’ words.
3. Shift: This is where the theme of the sermon, taken to its deepest level through the Complication, gets turned on its head. Jesus makes this move himself by comparing his listeners to their very enemies if they only love when it is easy. That kind of love costs them nothing and is worth nothing.
4. Good News: The Good News is that when we do precisely what others don’t do—love indiscriminately—that we are like God. And yet this love is not developed by our own effort, but by God’s grace through our commitment to him. I tried to camp here for a while, offering force through the Old Testament prophecies from Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
5. Unfolding: I then moved into unfolding the Good News as our commitment to God involves the death of self through the cross of Christ. The route to indiscriminate love comes through Christ’s death and then our own death to self through commitment to God. This makes sense because this is the very nature of God. And here we see why it costs us everything, but why it is worth more than the whole world.
6. Implications: Where does this good news impact my life? In this case, I spoke briefly of the lure of wealth and materialism and moved into the implication that this is only good news, not because of what material blessing we receive, but because it promises the presence of God.
7. Communal Practice: Finally, we practice communion as a tangible response or practice of the sermon, still trying to focus on the sermon’s theme of cost vs. worth.

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The Fish Store | Lawrence Wilson

navets —  March 21, 2011 — 1 Comment

SERMON: The Fish Store

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DOWNLOAD: Sermon Audio (.mp3) | Sermon Outline (.pdf)

BIO: Lawrence W. Wilson has served in ministry for 22 years and for 2 years as pastor at Fall Creek Wesleyan Church in Fishers, Ind. The church is located in a fast-growing suburb of Indianapolis. Fall Creek began as a church plant in 1995 and today comprises about 225 believers with varying levels of faith and maturity. When I asked Larry what advice he had for preachers he said, “Preach your passion, and stay close to the Word.”

CONVERSATION:

Lenny: Every church context is different and warrants the preaching of sermons on specific topics. I suspect that this sermon grew in you as a result of something going on in your context. What was going on in your community and/or church that necessitating the preaching of a message regarding the variety of people who land in the body of Christ called the Church?

Larry: Two things. First, I wanted to give permission for people attending our church to retain their own sense of identity and not feel that they must blend into white-bread Evangelical mush by coming to Christ. I wanted them to understand that faith in Christ is the heart of who we are—not career trajectory, politics, or anything else.

Second, I realized that our community is growing more diverse. We are now 13 percent minority, which is a 6 percent change from the previous census. There are 80 first languages (other than English) spoken in this school district. I wanted to challenge our core to see that we must be reaching across cultural and social lines with the gospel.

Lenny: The fish store became a prevailing metaphor for Christ and the Church. When did the fish store metaphor surface during your sermon preparation? Did the metaphor lead the sermon or develop within the process of developing the sermon?

Larry: In this case, the metaphor drove the sermon. I seized upon it after hearing a message by Dave Stone at Southeast Christian Church (Louisville, Ky.). He had a great illustration about the centrality of Christ in the church drawn from an anecdote about Disney World—where every day includes a parade featuring Mickey Mouse. I wanted to preach a similar theme and felt that my fish store experience conveyed it well. Being my own experience, it was also more powerful to me than relying on a generic anecdote.

Lenny: In Tom Long’s book, The Witness of Preaching, he encourages preachers to develop two statements that flow out of the meaning of the biblical text and guide the sermon with clarity and precision. The focus is a declarative sentence that states what the sermon says? The function is a declarative sentence that highlights what the sermon will do in and to the listeners. What was your sermon’s focus and function?

Larry: Jesus Christ is the absolute center of the church. This message will give mission clarity to the congregation so it can be effective in its true purpose—making disciples of Christ.

Lenny: Some might listen to your sermon and say, “He only preached for about 18 minutes and you can’t say much in that short amount of time. We need a longer sermon than that.” I wouldn’t say this simply because I assume it takes more work to preach shorter sermons than longer ones. How would you respond to someone who is convinced that a biblical sermon needs to be longer in length?

Larry: I’d say that the true measure of a sermon is its impact upon people (given that the content is true and faithful to the text). Providing more information doesn’t always improve the likelihood that the message will be acted upon. Sometimes it’s quite the reverse.

This message was a little brief, even for me. My average is about 25 minutes. That’s down from 35–40 back in the ‘90s.

Lenny: Larry, you did a masterful job of helping listeners imagine the fish store in a manner that enabled us to see the sights, hear the sounds, and smell the smells. Why did you feel it was necessary in this sermon to take the time to vividly paint a picture of the fish store?

Larry: I felt that I had to recreate the experience of entering the store in order to convey the impact of the realization I’d had. The power of this illustration lay more in the environment than in any declarative conclusion I could paste on it.

Also, I’ve been making a conscious effort to use more narrative in sermons, rather than simply dropping in quotes or brief anecdotes to clarify the argument. Here was a case where I could present a more well-developed experience, if not a full-blown story, and draw truth from it rather than presenting the truth and using a story to clarify it.

Increasingly, I think preachers will need to organize their ideas around stories rather than organizing their stories around an inductive or deductive argument.

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When God Doesn’t Meet Our Expectations | Lenny Luchetti

navets —  March 14, 2011 — Leave a comment

SERMON: When God Doesn’t Meet Our Expectations

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BIO: Since several of you have made the request and a Palm Sunday sermon was needed, Lenny Luchetti has submitted one of his sermons. Lenny serves as the Director of Wesleyansermons.com and Assistant Professor of Proclamation and Christian Ministries at Wesley Seminary. After 15 years of ministry, Lenny has sensed a new vocation to invest in those who are investing in local churches. He asked his friend and colleague, Dave Ward, to listen to the sermon and “grill him” with some questions. Dave has served as a pastor and has, as an itinerant speaker, preached in various contexts around the country. Dave presently serves as Assistant Professor of Preaching for undergraduate students at Indiana Wesleyan University. Here is their conversation.

CONVERSATION:

Dave: Some pastors claim that preaching for the special days of the church is the most difficult task they have. After five years of preaching on Palm Sunday, it is easy to feel as though you have run out of ideas. In your work as a pastor, how did you keep sermons for holy days and for holidays fresh and invigorating?

Lenny: Right, how many times can we possibly preach a sermon on Jesus’ “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem and still keep it fresh? One of the ways that I try to tell the old familiar story in new unfamiliar ways is to come at the same old Palm Sunday texts with a humble, listening posture as I invite God to surprise me with realities I’ve not seen before in the text. In addition to a listening, open posture to God through the text, I prayerfully consider how the text addresses the most prevalent dreams and doubts, hopes and hurts of the people to whom I preach. I constantly wrestle with the question, how can the sermon build a bridge from the claim of the biblical text to the congregational context? Simply put, listening for a fresh word from God through the text and listening beyond words to the needs of the people I serve allows those old familiar texts to come alive with freshness.

Dave: My favorite moment in your sermon came when your pace, pitch, and volume lifted and your passion came through with this statement: “If we can just hang in there past the Good Friday death of our expectations and just wait three days, three months, ten years, fifteen years we can get to see him exceeding our expectations. If we can just make it past Good Friday.” How did you come up with this phrase “hang in there past the Good Friday of our expectations?” Was this a planned phrase, an improvised one? And did you know in advance this would be a place where you “caught on fire” or was that an act of the moment as well?

Lenny: I intentionally tried to locate our story within the story of Christ’s passion, which we call “Holy Week.” As I got into the study of the text, particularly the Jewish expectations of the Messiah, I couldn’t help but see myself and our church. Most, if not all, of us have some expectations of God that he is not intending to meet. The phrase, “hang in there past the Good Friday death of our expectations” came as I contemplated people in our church whose misguided expectations of God became debilitating. So the phrase was certainly planned but the “fire” probably resulted from looking into the eyes of people whose faith was hanging by a thread because of their disappointment with the God who was not meeting their expectations.

Dave: One of the strengths of this sermon is its clarity and memorability. Tom Long emphasizes the importance of these two sermon characteristics in his The Witness of Preaching?

Lenny: I wish I got my hands on The Witness of Preaching much sooner than I did. I’m afraid too many of my sermons led people on wilderness wanderings instead of to the promised land of sermonic clarity. For this sermon I was clear.

Dave: Many preachers share that preaching is both agony and ecstasy, an anxious burden and a high privilege. In this sermon you seemed to demonstrate both the personal struggle with preaching and the enjoyment of it. What helped you enjoy this preaching moment so that it wasn’t pure agony and angst?

Lenny: I remember being very excited to preach this message because I felt it had the potential to “set captives free” from our propensity to make God a slave to our expectations. In order for us to experience liberation through this message we had to first experience a sort of death. So, in that sense perhaps the sermon was first agony (death) before it was ecstasy (resurrection/liberation).

Dave: The benefit of a site like this is we can learn not only from what other Wesleyan preachers do well, but what they might change if they had a chance. If you had to do a couple things differently with this sermon, what would those things be?

Lenny: As I listened to it again, I realized there was a slow and steady building toward a climactic resolution. This was intentional, but I probably could have done more to elicit an “itch,” or tension, in listeners in the first half of the sermon so that the “scratch” of good news might have been received with even greater joy. To this end, I could have captured more real life stories of people who experienced the “Good Friday death of their expectations” and either bailed on God or hung onto him.

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