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.
