Longevity and Locality

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been preaching for a while now, and I still walk away from some Sundays thinking, Well, that could have gone better.

There’s no shame in that. In fact, I’d worry about the guy who walks off the platform every week thinking he knocked it clean out of the park. Overconfidence in the pulpit is a little like overconfidence behind the wheel of a tractor — sooner or later, you’re going to end up in a ditch.

I sat down recently with Patrick Lightfoot, lead pastor at Traverse Christian Church in Windsor, Colorado, and something he said stuck with me. He talks about “stage time” — the practice of actually getting up on the platform mid-week and preaching the sermon out loud before Sunday arrives. Not reading it over in your recliner. Not muttering through it in the shower. Actually standing where you stand and speak the words into an empty room.

He calls it “putting in the reps.”

I love that. Because preaching is a craft, and crafts require practice. You don’t sit in the bleachers and become a ball player. You don’t read books about farming and develop a feel for the land. You have to get your hands dirty.

Patrick also talked about watching yourself preach — playing back the recordings and sitting through the awkward “ums” and the rushed transitions and the conclusions that sort of just… trail off. He admits it’s uncomfortable. Of course it is. Nobody enjoys watching themselves on video. I watched one of my sermons once and became briefly convinced that I needed a new career. But that discomfort is where growth hides.

What strikes me most about Patrick’s approach is the discipline underneath the Spirit-dependence. He doesn’t treat those two things as opposites. He plans sermon series a year in advance and still makes room for the Holy Spirit to redirect. He rehearses thoroughly and still steps to the pulpit trusting God, not his notes.

That’s the balance, isn’t it? Preparation isn’t a lack of faith. It’s faithfulness.

Francis Chan puts it in the form of three questions: Am I worried about what God thinks? Do I genuinely love these people? Am I depending on the Holy Spirit?

Patrick has those written on a notecard and tucked in his Bible. They’re a better pre-sermon checklist than anything I could come up with, so I plan to put them in my Bible.

The congregation sitting in front of you every Sunday deserves a preacher who has done the work — and who has also gotten out of the way enough to let God do His.

Put in the reps. Then trust the One who makes them count.

BONUS CONTENT: Here are Francis Chan’s seven questions Patrick Lightfoot mentioned in his recent podcast appearance. Print them off and tuck them in your Bible and see if they don’t shape your preaching.

1. Am I worried about what people think of my message or what God thinks?—Teach with Fear.

2. Do I genuinely love these people? — Teach with Love 

3. Am I accurately presenting this passage? — Teach with Accuracy

4. Am I depending on the Holy Spirit’s power or my own cleverness? — Teach with Power

5. Have I applied this message to my own life? — Teach with Integrity 

6. Will this message draw attention to me or to God? — Teach with Humility 

7. Do the people really need this message? — Teach with Urgency

On a recent episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, my guest Mark Christian said something that’s been rattling in my head ever since: “It takes a whole lot more talent to be at a church of 125 than it does to be at a church of over 3,000.”

Mark pastors one of the largest churches in Missouri, but before that he was the pastor of a small church in central Michigan. So, he isn’t romanticizing small-church ministry from the cheap seats. He’s earned the right to say it. Then he went further. He pictured a line forming at heaven’s gates, and the VIP treatment going not to preachers with podcasts and platforms, but to the faithful pastor who served nineteen years in a farm community nobody noticed.

That image stopped me cold. It looks a lot like my dad.

When I was a junior at Great Lakes Christian College, Dad became a freshman. He sold the family farm in his forties and spent the rest of his life as a bivocational preacher in small churches across North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. He called me once, discouraged, thinking about quitting. I asked how many attended the church when he arrived. Twenty. And now? Sixty. He had tripled the church in five years, doing the counseling, the marrying, the burying. And he thought he was failing.

He wasn’t. He just didn’t have a platform to tell him otherwise.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: a platform is a terrible feedback mechanism. It rewards what photographs well. It has nothing to say about the hospital visit at 2 a.m., the marriage you prayed back from the brink, the funeral where you were the only clergy anyone in that family had ever known, or the teenager who kept showing up because you learned his name. A platform doesn’t measure faithfulness; it only measures reach.

If you’re preaching this Sunday to forty people in a town of four hundred, hear this: the percentage of your community you’re reaching would embarrass most metropolitan megachurches. You are not waiting to be called into ministry. You are already in it.

Summon the heroes. They look like you.