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Opening New Horizons through Preaching - Page 3

© Karl Evans

I know this to be true about other commercial operations. I have a friend, a farmer, who likes to step to his front door every morning when he arises. He looks out over his land, his cattle and those of his neighbors. Then he turns around and looks back inside his home, seeing the pictures of his children and grandchildren, and his wife getting breakfast ready.

He says, "Then I know what my work is about, and I am good with that."

The pastor and the congregation can model this same style for the community, and in the process build the business style for local entrepreneurs.

There is one hitch in this. A style for pastors has come into being which turns me off completely. It is commonplace now for pastors to simply find, in books or on the internet, sermons written out, then deliver them as their own. This practice is primarily laziness and self-doubt. It is the same as making a trip to MacDonald's three times each day, buying hamburgers, bringing them home, heating them up in the microwave, and serving them as if they were made at home.

If I want a MacDonald's burger, I will go to MacDonald's.

I will admit that there are times when I have been in worship and left wishing the pastor had gone to the internet to get a sermon. Sometimes it seems the preacher has neither put anything of themselves into the sermon nor anything of their fifth grade elementary school grammar teacher.

But generally, preachers are expected to put something personal into laying out the scriptures. Without the personal touch, the personal sense of what is in the Bible, the history of the world, his or her own personal experience and whatever logic is applicable, the whole thing could come from the Internet.

So back to entrepreneurship. Most entrepreneurs need and are looking for all the help they can get. When their pastor reads the Bible, then brings his or her best thinking to the material and lays it out for the entrepreneur, it should help. That is what preaching is all about, making life better.

I have often had persons sleep through the sermon. That does not bother me at all. I believe this way. Jesus came among us to make human life better. If the best thing that happens within a sermon is that some poor old fellow gets a good twenty-minute nap, that's enough. Celebrate it and go home.

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