Sharpen your voice. Strengthen your message.

I’ve often said that if I moved to a town without an independent Christian church, I’d have very little hesitation about worshiping with a traditional Church of Christ. So when my friend Dr. Orpheus Heyward joined me on this week’s Better Preaching Podcast, I was eager to hear what a brother from the a cappella side of our family thinks about unity. I wasn’t disappointed.

Orpheus has served the Renaissance Church of Christ in Atlanta since 2003 and has been its minister since 2007. Some of you heard him deliver our 2023 commencement address at Great Lakes. (People are still talking about that message.) He grew up in Churches of Christ in New York, where, as he put it, there was no real mixing between his churches and ours. We came from the same root, but we kept our distance.

Through time and study, that changed. Orpheus came to believe that if we accept the same gospel and believe in the same sovereign Jesus, we can at least admit we’re family. Not family without differences, but family with them. Part of that journey came through our mutual friends at The Solomon Foundation. What began as a lending relationship for his church’s building became, in his words, the discovery that “these are not just lenders, they’re actually brothers and sisters in Christ.”

I asked him what surprised him most as he got to know his Stone-Campbell cousins. His answer was how much we agree on: the gospel, how a person is saved, the Lord’s Supper, the second coming, moral conviction, and the authority of Scripture. “How little did I know,” he said, about the places where we already stand together.

That doesn’t mean the work is easy. Orpheus has been attacked for building bridges. He admitted he was once groomed to view men like Rick Atchley as liberal, only to discover through conversation a tremendous mind and a lasting friend. He warned that exclusivism, the belief that only those within our lines of fellowship are Christians, is dangerous and can border on a cultic mentality.

So what keeps him going? God first, and a deep conviction that Scripture, not the endorsement of a brotherhood, is our authority. Fittingly, it’s that same commitment to the text that has led him toward his brothers and sisters rather than away from them.

He stands in a long line of bridge-builders, from Carl Ketcherside to Max Lucado. I’m grateful to count him a friend, and I’m convinced this is work both branches of our movement need to be about.

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.

All week long that old Joni Mitchell tune, Both Sides Now has been stuck in my head. This week on the Better Preaching Podcast Nate Ross provided a moment that has made me think: I really don’t know preaching at all.

Nate was two and a half years into leading Northside Christian Church — the church where his father had been lead pastor. The numbers were exactly what any of us would want: twenty percent growth, a twenty-eight-million-dollar campaign successfully raised. And he was miserable.

So he did what most of us do. He pulled levers. He got his preaching calendar a full year out. He built a teaching team with names like Mike Breaux and Efrem Smith on it. Every lever worked. None of them touched the problem. “Everything looks unbelievable,” he told me, “but something is not right in your soul.”

I’ve sat in that chair. Most leaders I know have.

What finally broke it open for Nate wasn’t a better system. It was a question. A counselor asked him to set aside the business model and the branding and answer one thing: what is the Lord doing in your heart? And Nate’s honest answer — “I’d rather help leaders lead their thing than lead my thing” — came out wrapped in shame, because in ministry we’ve absorbed the idea that stepping out of the pulpit is a demotion.

Here’s the framework Nate gave us, and I think it’s worth writing on the inside of your study door. Awareness. Access. Action. Most of us live at the third step and never visit the first two. We take action, take action, take action until the wheels come off and all we’re left with is the awareness that something is badly wrong, with no capacity left to do anything about it.

Nate finds the pattern in Revelation 2. Jesus told the church in Ephesus to “remember” the height from which they’d fallen. Then repent. Then do the things you did at first. Awareness, then access, then action. We keep trying to run the sequence backward.

And underneath all of it is the hardest word in the conversation: undone. Nate describes the deep waters of Proverbs 20:5 the way a diver would: dark, cold, high pressure, nothing you’d enter casually. But he insists that’s where Jesus starts with us. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the undone. Judas left because he wouldn’t be undone. Peter kept reaching for a sword because he wouldn’t be undone. We all keep a lever within arm’s reach.

Here’s the earworm that displaced Joni Mitchell rattling around in my head: the best thing you can give your church, and your family, is the healthiest version of you. Not the most impressive version. Not the version that can keep pace with whoever preached that same text better than you did on Sunday.

But that means sitting in a powerless position long enough to let Jesus hold the power. 

Every so often a guest says something that rearranges the furniture in my head. Nate Ross did that this week.

Nate spent twenty years in local church ministry before launching Moments to Movements, a leadership development work built on a simple conviction: every leader is stuck or stalled somewhere. Doesn’t matter the size of the church. There is always something you’re wrestling with that you don’t yet know how to name.

Here’s the line that got me. Nate said we are producing a generation of preachers who are good in the pulpit but don’t know how to pastor people. Preaching is a gift, he said, but making disciples is the goal—and gifts exist to serve the goal.

That distinction matters more than we admit. Nate walked me through four areas where leaders need development. Personal performance—the preaching itself—is one of them. But there is also learning agility, relationships, and character. Four, not one.

And here’s the problem I’ve watched play out in churches and, if I’m honest, in higher education too: when someone is exceptional at number one, we give them a pass on the other three. The preaching is strong, attendance is up, the budget is healthy—so nobody asks whether he’s read a book in five years, or whether he can sit in a hospital room, or whether there are cracks in his character that Sunday morning is papering over. Excellence in the visible thing buys silence about the invisible things. That’s not stewardship. That’s a time bomb.

Nate rooted the alternative in something beautiful. He pointed out that Jesus asked 307 questions in the Gospels, and quoted Proverbs 20:5—the purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but a person of understanding draws them out. Some of Jesus’ questions sound almost silly on the surface. *Do you want to get well?* The man is obviously lame. But Jesus wasn’t gathering information. He was drawing out deep water.

That’s pastoring. And a preacher who has never learned to do it can still fill a room.

Nate also named the loneliness honestly: we prepare alone, we preach alone, and we recover alone. Then he pointed to John 16, where Jesus tells the disciples they will scatter and leave Him alone—yet He is not alone, because the Father is with Him. Jesus could sit in the loneliness of His calling without needing to escape it. Most of us can’t. So we rush to the next campaign, the next series, the next whiteboard vision.

Sit in the moment instead. Ask the question. Draw out the deep water.

The people in front of you don’t need a better performance. They need a better pastor.

One of the verses I’ve preached on repeatedly is 2 Timothy 2:2: “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.” The beauty of this verse isn’t just in what it asks us to do, it’s in the posture it demands. We must stand in the middle.

Dave Stone’s journey at Southeast Christian Church perfectly illustrates this principle. For seventeen years, he served as Bob Russell’s associate, learning the craft of preaching, the discipline of pastoral care, the practice of leadership, and the art of sharing the pulpit. Then, for thirteen years, he led as Senior Pastor, embodying everything Bob taught him while adding his own voice and gifts. Now, he’s watching Kyle Idleman live out that same role — a lineage of faithful, long-tenured leadership spanning decades.

What struck me most in our conversation was Dave’s honesty about what he learned from Bob versus what he’s learned from Kyle. “I’ve learned more from Kyle than I ever passed on to him,” Dave admitted. This is the humility that characterizes genuine mentorship. We don’t hand down our way as the final word; we create space for the next generation to stretch us, challenge us, and sometimes do it better.

Bob made space for Dave by doing something unheard of in large churches: he shared the spotlight. He gave Dave tough sermon topics, not easy ones. He let Dave preach Easter. He threw him in the deep end because he believed Dave could handle it. And Dave, in turn, did the same for Kyle. But here’s what moved me most: when I asked Dave what he’d tell his younger self, he didn’t talk about avoiding hard things or playing it safe. He talked about relying on the Holy Spirit rather than the flesh. He acknowledged that he’d been betrayed, that problems would come, but that these experiences drove him — as it should all of us — deeper into dependence on God’s Spirit, not away from ministry.

This is what standing in the middle actually means. It’s not just transferring information from one generation to the next. It’s creating a culture where we expect growth, demand honesty, embrace humility, and ultimately point people toward the Holy Spirit’s power rather than our own competence. At Great Lakes Christian College, we’re trying to build this kind of generational faithfulness. Our students stand in the middle too, between the faith their parents gave them and the faith they’ll pass on to their children. And our job is to help them learn that authentic ministry doesn’t come from mastering technique alone. It comes from learning to stand still and let the Spirit work.

That’s worth passing on.

Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with Dave Stone, and our conversation reminded me of something we desperately need to remember in this moment: artificial intelligence will never be able to do what a pastor can do.

Dave shared something profound during our time together: “AI is not the Holy Spirit.” It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but in a season when AI tools are proliferating faster than we can evaluate them, this statement cuts through all the noise. Yes, AI can help us edit our sermons. Yes, it can assist with wordsmithing and refining our language. But it cannot do the thing that makes preaching actually matter: it cannot connect a human soul with the living God.

This distinction became even clearer when Dave mentioned research showing that loneliness and companionship rank among the top uses of AI. Think about that. People are turning to artificial intelligence for what they should be finding in community. In the church. This isn’t a failure of AI; if anything, it is a misuse of AI. Dave’s warning is a clarion call for the church to lean into what we uniquely offer: genuine, Spirit-empowered presence.

At Great Lakes Christian College, we’ve built our entire institutional identity around this conviction. We know that spiritual formation cannot happen through a screen, no matter how sophisticated the technology. It happens when a student sits in a professor’s office and feels truly known. It happens when suitemates gather around someone who’s grieving and offer the kind of comfort that only the presence of another person can provide. It happens when a visiting speaker takes the time to learn students’ names and genuinely invests in their lives.

Dave spoke beautifully about something he did when he was Senior Minister of Southeast Christian Church. Dave would stand at the escalator to greet latecomers — not to shame them for showing up late, but to learn their names, to notice the visitor who feels out of place, to make the sanctuary feel smaller and more personal. He was describing something that AI could never replicate: the pastoral presence that says, “You matter. I see you. I know your name.”

The irony is that by distinguishing ourselves from AI, by leaning into what technology cannot do, we’re actually making our institutions and churches more relevant, not less. In a world drowning in information and connection-less connectivity, people are hungry for the real thing.

So yes, let’s use AI wisely. But let’s never mistake tools for transformation. Let’s never outsource spiritual formation to a machine. And let’s keep doing what only humans empowered by the Holy Spirit can do: see people, know their names, and love them into the Kingdom.