Jamin Bradley

At one point in ministry, several people noted that something had changed in my preaching and that they really liked it. They had picked up on a new preaching system I had created, in which I stored all my favorite quotes, stories, and articles in a database. This allowed me to quickly incorporate much more engaging content into my messages.

Around this time, one of my congregants asked me how long it took me to write my messages. Since I thought they were also pleased with my preaching, I explained how much faster I could do it now. I then found out that they hadn’t been enjoying them, and they assumed the problem was that I needed to put more time into them.

There were three things I learned in that moment: (1) Not everyone will like your messages, even if they’re demonstrably better; (2) many think that it’s solely the number of hours you put into a message that makes it good; and (3) some congregants (and pastors) have an outlandish expectation of how many of your work hours you should delegate to your message writing, as though it’s the most important thing you do.

Don’t get me wrong, I think sermons are important, and I love preaching, but I’m not sure the Sunday message is where the most substantial discipleship happens. When I look at my own life, I’m hard-pressed to recall many specific messages. Rather, it all just kind of blurs together.

In my experience, preaching is ultimately a slow burn in which our words sink in slowly over time. It’s so slow that sometimes your congregants don’t even know when they’ve learned something from you! For example, I have had several times when people have quoted my often-repeated preaching catchphrases to me, thinking it was a new revelation they just had. Another time, I had a congregant go through my spiritual gifts class, and then later ask me if I believed in spiritual gifts like they did, seemingly forgetting that I was the one who first taught them on the topic.

Is a Sunday sermon really the main thing God wanted when he created the role of the pastor? Even if we put all of our hours into preparing a message, would it be life-changing? And if it was life-changing, could we pull it off the following week? And the week after that? And the week after that? Are we still even pastoring if we’ve delegated all of our hours to shoving our heads into books instead of being with our congregants?

While preaching is a huge passion of mine and one of the biggest reasons I became a pastor, after fifteen years of ministry, I sense that some of my other pastoral efforts are often more effective from a discipleship standpoint. I think the kind of teaching that changes people most substantially happens off stage. It’s the organic theological conversation that happens over dinner. It’s the joyful exchange of stories and lessons at the late-night gathering around the backyard campfire. It’s the sacred space where someone asked a spiritual question they felt was forbidden to ask at church. It’s among the small crowd that’s safe enough to talk about real-life dynamics like politics and religion without losing their heads. It’s the inner-healing session where you realize your congregant has been holding tightly to a harmful teaching and needs better theology and different Bible stories to rethink their beliefs. It’s the deconstructed person deciding that they won’t settle for pat answers anymore, and the pastor being challenged to keep up. It’s the space where you can safely share your pain, while your friends encourage you with the Spirit and Scripture.

While messages are important, pastors have much more to do than pour all of their time and energy into a weekly 30-minute message. Make that sermon as good as you can, but not at the expense of sacrificing other spaces where teaching also takes root.