So I'm a preacher…
which means one of my primary responsibilities is to stand up each Sunday morning and deliver a sermon
over the years I've come to realize that at least a good number of people actually appreciate a good sermon
it's just enough content over just enough time for a level of spiritual comfort/redirection/inspiration/challenge
it's also
a lot of work to preach every week,
if you think about it, it’s delivering a TED talk every Sunday
and so it's no wonder that a considerable amount of time is taken up in preparing to preach
a lot of pastors that I know have certain kinds of rituals and habits for writing their sermons… there might be research phase, writing phase, gets stuck in writing and revisions phase, panic phase and then finally “hey I think we have a thing ready” phase.
some pastors even fully write out a manuscript and practice that manuscript in an empty sanctuary prior to delivery.
that’s not how I preach.
I preach strictly extemporaneously
people have a lot of questions about extemporaneous preaching. They wonder if that still involves advance preparation. Do you memorize an outline? How do you do the whole thing?
in the strict sense of the term, I really preach extemp, which means I only know what I'm going to say about the text when it's read Sunday morning in worship.
I preach a sermon on that text, all of it basically spontaneous. It's true that sometimes I might read the lessons in advance of Sunday. Typically, I do.
It's also true that I might think about some general directions I want to take the message given what's going on in the world. Or in our local life together. But I'm always readily open to pivoting if something else presents itself even in the moment on Sunday morning. So it's not uncommon for me to have thought I was going to preach the gospel, and then I listen to the Old Testament lesson and decide to preach on it instead
The huge benefit of extemporaneous preaching has to do with the amount of time it frees up for a pastor the rest of the week. Imagine, for example, if you're preaching and write manuscripts. Let's say you take a total of eight to 10 hours to study the text. Come up with some ideas. draft a manuscript and then rehearse it. Then edit some more.
Can you compound that over many weeks? That adds up.
and probably is one of the reasons I have some capacity for other projects in ministry, because I don't do any of that.
The other big benefit is the way it has trained my brain over time, I guess, say, simply performing that way. If you ask me on the spot to have something to say about a biblical text, it's very likely—No, it's basically assured—that I'll be able to do that. Always.
this is not disconnected from the encouragement from Jesus in Scripture to always be ready to have a defense of the faith that is within you.
But it also is kind of a practice of having a nimble mind.
the weakness of extemporaneous preaching is all the things that you might be able to include if you did actually prepare. I can’t weave a bunch of exegetical commentaries or academic tools into the sermon because I didn’t have them while writing the sermon text.
On the other hand, it's often the case i'll just naturally be reading something.
Because, of course, I'm always reading.
Then, serendipitously, what I'm reading will interact with what I need to preach. I can bring a thoughtful word, from a book, or poem or song or a conversation I had during the week connects and again, back to the benefits of extemporaneous preaching.
One of the big dangers when I was writing sermons early in ministry was a too heavy reliance on written exegetical stuff.
the other big benefit, to extemporaneous preaching is that you deliver the message orally. So you're always going to be speaking more naturally in the mode that people speak, when they speak, versus the way they think when they're writing.
I mean I appreciate good writing. And I love a well crafted sermon that's read well. But a sermon really is an oral event and extemporaneous preaching taps that.
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Today I had spam in my email and text messages. It was an invitation to subscribe to “sermon AI.” Sermon AI promises to help you write your sermon.
When I say there are great benefits to not writing your sermon I'm not suggesting this. I’m not suggesting having somebody else write it. And I'm not suggesting having AI compose it. (Although that's intriguing and interesting on its own.) What I'm suggesting, and I'd like you to consider it, is that when a human like myself preaches extemporaneously, we are functionally AI or we're showing our proximity to AI.
Which is to say, when I'm presented with a text and am asked to speak for 15 to 20 minutes on it, my brain has to do exactly what AI does. I've got some prompts. Now I have to craft a whole message of a specified length about those prompts, and pull from the resources I have at hand.
I've actually run some tests and had AI write some sermons. I can honestly say that all the AI sermons I've read have been better than some of the sermons I've heard/preached in my lifetime, especially at the level of coherence and memorability.
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sometimes in a good conversation there might be moments where there is a long monologue, which is really all a sermon is.
the sermon is like a long monologue in the conversation. We might want to ask ourselves: Do we practice the sermon as a conversation in worship? And does sermon as text especially disrupt our ability to consider this question.
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Finally, back to the topic. On the reception of extemporaneous preaching. I think that maybe some people who discover a preacher is preaching extemporaneously may wonder whether or not they're hearing content governed by sufficient expertise.
Did the preacher access authoritative resources? Did they ruminate on what they were gonna say before they said it.
all I can say here is that academic conversation about the Bible is so diverse.
one could make a rather cogent argument that broad knowledge of academic reflection on a text actually weakens our ability to say true things about the text just as much as it may strengthen it, in the same way that approaching a text with a certain level of naïveté also has strengths and weaknesses.
I don't think we should elevate academic readings of the text over others.
an observation: my most profound thoughts (as much as I have any) all come when I'm talking off the cuff,
often I find it to be the case after I have a conversation that I wish I would have recorded what I said….
because I know I said it much better than I'll ever write it later.
I don't think this is gonna be true for every person because we're all different. Might be extrovert introvert related. Maybe it has to do with different kinds of neurodivergencies. I don't want to assign this for everybody.
But at least for me, I find that what I have to say in the moment is overall more helpful and sticks with listeners than what I write down and then read to them.
The things I thought were profound that I worked out in the writing of them in the absence of an audience often perform less well when delivered as spoken word.
So if you are the kind of listener who struggles with the idea that the preacher is coming up with the ideas on the spot, consider the last really good conversation you had—some time when you were sitting at a jazz concert and somebody was improvising. Was it the structured pre written parts of the song that really took you to new levels or was it the improv?
isn't it to a certain degree a mix of both?
A good jazz composition that provides space for empowerment and a place for structure, this is what I think the liturgy is
this is what I mean when I say there are benefits to not writing a sermon.
Estj
ENFP I take it ?…..