Longevity and Locality

In 2006, Dave Stone stepped to the podium at the North American Christian Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. He had just become the lead minister at Southeast Christian Church following Bob Russell’s retirement, a transition that would have rattled most preachers into playing it safe. Stone didn’t play it safe. He preached from Ephesians 4 and asked a room full of church leaders a deceptively simple question: What is the greatest benefit of serving together?

He walked through three answers — unity, maturity, and testimony — and built the case that all three are real, but the last one matters most.

What makes this sermon worth revisiting nearly twenty years later isn’t the exegesis, though the exegesis is solid. It’s the storytelling. Stone understood something every preacher needs to learn: the right story doesn’t just illustrate the point. It becomes the point.

He told about his Uncle Greg, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, who went to a camp for developmentally challenged adults. A church member named John Miller volunteered as Greg’s counselor for four days, feeding him, dressing him, even rigging up a flotation device so Greg could swim for the first time in his life. At the end of the week, they asked Greg the standard question: What was your favorite part of camp? Greg raised his arm, pointed at John, and said one word: You.

That story does more theological work than a dozen propositional statements about humble service. And Stone knew it.

He closed with another story, this one from his own childhood. In 1967, his family was hit head-on by a hydroplaning car while on a trip in Illinois. His mother suffered a skull fracture. His father had twenty-one pieces of glass surgically removed from his eyes. Blind and alone in a strange town, the first visitor who took his father’s hand was an elder from a local Church of Christ. When Stone’s father mentioned that his congregation worshipped with instrumental music (a real fault line in the Restoration Movement) the elder said five words that carried the whole sermon home: That doesn’t matter. We just want to help a brother in Christ.

Stone admitted he’d forgotten that elder’s name. Then he landed the plane: I’ve forgotten the name on the back of his jersey, but I’m pretty certain what the name was on the front.

That’s how you close a sermon. You don’t explain the metaphor. You trust it.

Stone trusted it, and the room felt it.

I made a promise on this week’s episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, and my mother raised
me to keep my promises. So here it is.

My guest was Ben Cachiaras, who has preached at Mountain Christian Church for nearly thirty
years. We covered a lot of ground including a Mother’s Day sermon featuring a live eagle that
landed on a chandelier and … well … blessed the congregation in a way nobody requested. Ben
no longer preaches with live birds. Some innovations don’t survive the third service.

But the thing I promised to share is far more useful than eagle wrangling. At Mountain, they use
something called a T Doc—a simple planning document where every element starts with the
letter T. It forces the preacher to get clear about a sermon before the rest of the team has to guess.

Here are the T’s, as Ben described them:

Title — What are you calling it? (Mountain preached through Leviticus under the title “Hot
Mess, Holy God,” which is exactly the kind of title that makes me wish I’d thought of it first.)

Time — When is this sermon or series happening?

Talker — Who’s preaching?

Text — Where is this anchored biblically? You may touch several passages, but where’s home
base?

Topic — Is there a specific topic the sermon is addressing?

Theme — In a word or short phrase, what is this about? Repentance? God’s love? Salvation?

Theological concept — A little more room to breathe here. Is this sermon a pat on the back or a
kick in the shorts? Are we afflicting the comfortable or comforting the afflicted?

Takeaway — The big one. In a single sentence, what do we hope people will think, feel, or do
when they walk out?

Why bother? Because, as Ben put it, preaching is an event—and events take a team. When small
groups study alongside the sermon, their leaders need to prepare weeks in advance. When
worship planners are choosing songs, they need to know whether this message lands soft or lands
hard. A T Doc turns the preacher’s fuzzy intentions into something the whole church can build
around.

But here’s the sneaky benefit: the T Doc is a gift to the preacher first. If you can’t fill in the
takeaway line—if you can’t say in one sentence what you’re asking people to think, feel, or
do—you don’t have a sermon yet. You have a pile of notes.

So steal it. Ben won’t mind. Build your own T Doc, hand it to your team, and watch what
happens when everybody’s pulling in the same direction.

Because better preaching makes a bigger impact.

A rubber band lying on your desk is useless. It has no power, no purpose, no strength. The only time a rubber band accomplishes anything is when it’s stretched—held in tension between two opposite poles.

That’s grace and truth.

Ron Otto and I got into this on the latest episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, and it may be my favorite stretch of conversation we’ve ever recorded. Ron, who is closing in on twenty years at Lincoln Christian Church, observed that Jesus often opens with grace and closes with truth. I pushed back gently—with the woman at the well, He led with truth: five husbands, and the man you’re with now isn’t one of them. The honest answer is that it depends on the person and the moment, and knowing which to lead with is one of the hardest judgment calls in ministry.

But here’s what you can’t do: let go of either end.

Hold the rubber band and release truth, and it snaps you—that sting is called hedonism. Hold truth and release grace, and it snaps you from the other side—that sting is called legalism. The power is only in the tension. So is the pain-free path, oddly enough. You have to hold both ends.

Ron told a story that shows what holding both looks like. He ends nearly every service by telling his congregation he loves them—not as a signoff, but because he means it. One Sunday he forgot. A young woman stopped him at the door and pointed it out. When he asked if she needed to hear it, she said, “Most Sundays you’re the only one to tell me that for a whole week.”

Let that settle in, preacher. For some of your people, you are the only voice of love they hear from Sunday to Sunday.

And here’s the ministry math Ron has learned over three decades: you can get away with preaching a lot of hard truths if your people know first that you love them. Truth without love sounds angry. Love without truth goes mushy. But truth wrapped in love—delivered by a shepherd who says “I love you” and means it—that’s the stretched rubber band. That’s where the power is.

Now go tell your church you love them. Some of them are waiting.

Because better preaching makes a bigger impact.