Putting in the Reps

Early in ministry, I mistook volume for fruit. If the room was full, the sermon must have worked. If the stage was bigger, the calling must be clearer. It took me years to see I had the equation backwards.

Mark Christian drew a helpful distinction in a recent conversation on the Better Preaching Podcast: there is performative preaching, and there is pastoral preaching. Performative preaching walks onto a stage, earns the right to say a big thing, and says it well. It has its place. Camp messages, conferences, funerals for people you barely knew. Someone has to stand up and speak. We need preachers who can do that. But most of us aren’t called to live there.

Pastoral preaching is the slow work of opening the same Scriptures to the same people over a long stretch of years. It is not lesser work. It is harder in a different way. You can’t hide behind cleverness when the people in the pew watched you make coffee at their mother’s funeral. You can’t fake authority with a congregation that knows your kids’ names and has seen you on your worst Monday. You have to actually pastor, and the pulpit becomes less a performance stage and more a kitchen table where the family gathers to hear from the Book.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the preacher who stays gets something the traveling evangelist never will. You see the sermon land and then watch it grow. You preach on forgiveness in May and sit across from a reconciled father and daughter in October. You preach on generosity in November and watch the benevolence fund fill up by January. You preach a hard word on pride, and three families thank you for it six months later. That feedback loop shapes your preaching in ways no homiletics textbook can.

If you’re in year two or year twelve, and you’re tempted to think the real preaching is happening somewhere else, don’t believe it. Stay. Preach the text. Love the people. Let the Holy Spirit do the slow work.

Bob Russell will tell you himself that he isn’t a dynamic preacher. Once when he poke at a convention in Korea he thought himself bland in comparison to the more passionate Korean speakers. Hoping for a bit of encouragement he slid a note to his assistant. He slid it back with five words: “Just pep it up a little.” He didn’t, and couldn’t. Bible college students who heard him in chapel used to say, “If he can do it, we can do it too.”

That’s exactly why I wanted this message in our “Great Sermons of the Restoration Movement” series. Bob spent four decades proving that faithfulness outlasts flash, and in “Maximizing Your Preaching Gifts” he hands the rest of us five practical ways to get better.

Some of it is surprisingly earthy. Fix your lighting. Clear the clutter behind the pulpit. Set out fifty chairs, not seventy. Some of us have preached in rooms that were set up for optimism. Professional speakers told Bob the physical setting accounts for half of a talk’s effectiveness. Even if they’re exaggerating, that’s a lot of ground we’re giving away for free.

Then he gets to the heart of it. A golfer once told Bob there were only two things wrong with his game: distance and direction. Young preachers chase distance, the dazzling delivery. Seasoned preachers learn that direction, the content, wins over time. And content takes time. Lincoln didn’t write the Gettysburg Address on the train, and you won’t write Sunday’s sermon in a Saturday-night panic.

So, guard your study hours. Turn the phone off. Kill the adverbs. Apply the text with one-line examples before you go hunting for illustrations. Let your face show the joy your words describe. And be honest about your gifts. Rate yourself from one to ten, subtract two, and multiply by five, and that’s how many minutes you ought to preach. (I ran the numbers on myself. I’m not telling.)

Most of all, preach through books of the Bible. Bob’s wife Judy once sat through a Christmas sermon about the shepherds that never got back to the shepherds. Her verdict in the car is one I hope every one of us remembers: “What happened to the shepherds?”

The sermon ends at a Christmas brunch, where an entire family thanked Bob for preaching the gospel thirty-five years earlier. The children stood one by one to share when they were baptized. Bob walked to the car and told Judy, “Somebody was listening.”

Brothers and sisters, you can’t measure your effectiveness this Sunday. You may not see it for thirty-five years. Preach the Word anyway; your congregation are hungrier for it than you think. The harvest is God’s business.