Well, as I said in my last post, I'll be preaching this next Sunday!
In this post, I'd like to share some of my highs and lows in terms of
my preaching experiences, and how I am planning to prepare for this
coming Sunday.
A lady at church asked me if
I had ever done anything like this before. I responded that I gave
eight sermons at one church, yet the congregants seemed to only like my
last one (and I'll explain why later in this post). But then I went on
to say that I won a couple of speech contests.
Let's start with the speech contests. This was the Optimist Club Oratorical Contest (see here
to read about the Optimist Club). The first year that I was in this
was in Junior High, and I won at the local level but came in third at
the second level. The second year was when I was a freshman in high
school, and I won at the local level, then at the second level. At the
third level, however, I don't remember what place I came in. I lost,
but one couple there----whose grandson was a competitor----told me that
they thought that I would win.
To prepare for the
Optimist Club contests, I memorized my speech and recited it over and
over again every night. I still took in notecards, though. If
I were to use this approach for this coming Sunday, I might do fairly
well. I wouldn't have to worry about what I'm going to say----in terms
of coming up with the exact phraseology to express my thoughts----since
the speech would already be memorized. I could then concentrate
more on delivering my message powerfully, emphatically, and
effectively. The thing is, I don't want to memorize my entire sermon.
Years of being in school have burned me out when it comes to memorizing
information.
I could walk into the pulpit with extensive notes. But I don't want to become a slave to my notes. When
I preached in divinity school, one problem that people identified was
that my eye-contact was not good. As a result, I failed to make a
connection with my audience. So I probably won't be relying on
extensive notes.
But suppose I decide to go a more
extemporaneous route----going into the pulpit with a rough outline of
what I want to talk about, yet coming up with the details while I'm
actually in the pulpit? Sometimes this has worked for me, and sometimes
it has not. I'll start with some times when it has not. Coming up
with words to communicate my thoughts is not always easy for me. When
blogging or writing comments in online discussions, for example, I often
feel rather daunted, since I think that my words are inadequate to
convey reality or what is on my mind, or I'm afraid that people will try
to read between the lines of what I write and will interpret me to be
more insensitive than I really am (which has happened in the past). I
don't want that sort of hesitancy to hinder me when I'm up in the
pulpit. As I look back, there have been times when I have stammered
through my entire sermon, or when I have been nervous, and the result
was that my message did not go over well. After one message that I
gave, someone told me that I am very articulate----in my writing, but
not so much in my speaking! And, on an occasion when I was nervous
while speaking, people were looking at me with what appeared to be
resentment, and one lady afterwards told me that I was among friends and
so I didn't need to feel nervous! So perhaps people take it personally when you're speaking to them while being nervous.
There
were a couple of times when a more extemporaneous approach served me
well, however. One time, I was giving a sort of testimony. At first, I
was nervous, but, as people appeared to be interested in what I was
saying----as I talked about my experiences in school and so forth----my
confidence grew. It was like Bill Clinton's speech at the
Democratic National Convention this week, not in the sense that I was as
good of a speaker as Clinton, but rather in the sense that I was
initially rather stilted, but I became more relaxed, funny, and
conversational as my talk proceeded. The second time when a
more extemporaneous approach served me well was in my last sermon at a
church. I spoke from the heart about what the church and the people
there meant to me, and what I hoped for the church's future----for I was
about to move to another city and thus would not be going to that
church anymore. One person after the sermon told me that my
message was surprisingly good because he could hear me, I was not
relying as much on my notes, and I was telling stories. Another person
told me that he liked my sermon because it was from the heart and not
from a textbook.
That brings me to my another point:
it's better for me to preach from the heart. There were many times when
I communicated doctrinal or historical information, but that was not
from the heart, and thus my sermons were not as powerful. Plus, it's
hard to preach spirituality when I myself am not particularly
spiritual. And it was difficult for me to preach about the need for
people to be soul-winners when I myself was too shy to evangelize. There
are probably people who can give a powerful sermon without being
spiritual or righteous themselves----we know about scandals in various
ministries. I, however, cannot fake spirituality. In the past, I got
up to the pulpit and spoke about concepts that I did not really
understand, at least on a personal (as opposed to an intellectual)
level. This time around, even though I'm not the most spiritual person
on the planet, I think that I can communicate spiritual concepts that I
actually feel.
So what will I be doing to prepare for
this coming Sunday? I am thinking of writing my entire sermon out, but
I will not take the text of the entire sermon into the pulpit, but
rather short notes. Writing the sermon out is necessary in order for my
sermon to be neat and orderly. There are all sorts of ditches and
dead-ends that can emerge in a sermon, and I don't want that to crop up
in my delivery. So I need to prepare, on some level. At the same time,
I want to leave some room for me to be extemporaneous----where I can
speak from the heart. So it will be me being extemporaneous, within a set structure, if that makes any sense!
I may talk more about this topic as the week proceeds. We'll see!