Video Transcript: Henry Reyenga Interview Bruce Ballast

Video Transcript: Henry Reyenga Interview Bruce Ballast

Henry Reyenga  

I'm glad you're here today at the craft of preaching and communication class. And with me today is Dr. Bruce ballasts, a veteran preacher, also a teacher at this class, and you're going to be looking at one of his messages and really analyzing his perspective and his craft. But I wanted to have you here and just talk a little bit about the craft of preaching. So when did you start this preaching?

Bruce Ballast  

It was February 1979? I've been at this a long time. 

Henry Reyenga  

Wow. So when you went to your first church, were you What were some of the feelings that you had?

Bruce Ballast  

It was terror, I guess. First of all, I enjoy preaching. I love to preach. But the idea of when I first enter ministry, we had to do two sermons every week. 

Henry Reyenga  

Two sermons every week?

Bruce Ballast  

Right, so morning, and evening. And so you know, I had to develop this discipline of Tuesday and Monday, I always took off Tuesday and Wednesday working on the morning sermon, Thursday, Friday, working in the evening sermon and Saturday, putting them both together. And then Sunday was just a day of exhaustion. 

Henry Reyenga  

Did you run out of things to say, Can you picture what that would be like?

Bruce Ballast  

Well, it wasn't so much running out of things to say as deciding what do I want to do next? What what what am I going to preach on? Next? figure, the Bible's full of good stuff to preach, but deciding, which do I want to do and, and do stuff that I thought I had something to say about?

Henry Reyenga  

Right, right. Just a quick question. Have you ever worried about making a major blooper now that you're going to get into preaching and the you put your, as they say, in America, you put your foot in your mouth is what they say in the USA here? How do you react when all of a sudden, you know, you didn't say something right?

Bruce Ballast  

So you're trying to keep just keep going as my as my motto, unless it's so obvious that I remember one time talking about I was in a co-pastor where there were two of us, and we had the longest term co-pastor in our denomination, except for one other couple of guys who are working in Inner City, Los Angeles. And so I was talking about that fact privilege of being in this for several years. And I said, you know, those guys still beat us in time, but maybe one of them will get shot. You know, it's just one of those words. You say it, you say. No, that wasn't the right thing. So you're just keep going here. I mean, in order to keep going right.

Henry Reyenga  

Insincerity in the end of the day, everybody knows you're human, and you just can't worry about it. One thing you can't do, and this is my experience is you can't like also shut down, right?

Bruce Ballast  

Oh, yeah,

Henry Reyenga  

Just gotta go forward. 

Bruce Ballast  

I did that happen once to where all of a sudden you, you can't remember what you just said or what you were going to say. And so that was when I was in seminary just stood there.

Henry Reyenga  

Right? One of our craft of communication speakers, Andrew Bryant. Talks about having like something in your mind, and all sudden your brain shuts down and gives a brain freeze. So I guess those are all understand that. Yeah, you just have to say, Okay, this is what I do. Now. Okay, I'm done preaching itself. Every week, you're ready to get another sermon? Okay, so how do you pick what to preach on?

Bruce Ballast  

Well, there are several things that guide that. One is, what is the what's the agenda for the church? In other words, what season are we in right now in this church that I'm a part of where we're trying to learn more about the Bible. And so we're actually we went through the Old Testament last year, now we're starting the story of Christ, and we're going to be doing the story of the church later. And so it's a Bible survey kind of thing.

Henry Reyenga  

How did the Bible survey agenda, come on to your agenda?

Bruce Ballast  

It was a study that we did of our own church and the spiritual nature of our own church and and who was we defined, you know, the various steps of spirituality? And what did people need? And they said, One, we want a deeper understanding of the big picture of the Bible. And so that became our agenda. And two, they want to learn more about prayer. So right now, I'm in an eight week series on prayer. And so the agenda of the church sometimes affects what I choose to preach on. Sometimes it's just like in the summer, it's, you don't want to work all that hard in the summer, right? So you say, I'm gonna amass a good deal of material about and I will choose something that will be just a section of the Bible or something like that. So I can get the material all set, and I don't have to be doing quite as much exegetical work as quite as much searching. So sometimes that's such an agenda holidays always set an agenda of some sort. And sometimes the agenda is just set up my own spiritual life. What am I grappling with? Where am I where's my growing edge this morning.

Henry Reyenga  

Now when it comes to the actual week. You know, it's Monday morning, take us through a week. Like how do you progress in a week that by Sunday, you have something to say?

Bruce Ballast  

Okay. As I said, I, I'm passionate about taking Monday's off after Sunday's, I'm pretty tired. But Tuesday begins the process. Again, Tuesday's a big meeting day for me in this church. And, but I try by Tuesday afternoon to start being just doing some reading around the text I'm going to use or the subject I'm going to be speaking on. And so I'll just get on the computer. And I'll just start reading various sermons that people have written on this text or on this subject, I'll get out the library stuff, the books that I have, and I'll and I'll just start reading. I'll do that again on Wednesday. And as I'm doing that, I'll be amassing notes. So I'll be you know, copying and pasting so that I just have notes to refer back to. And then Thursday morning, I get up early. And that's when I start writing.

Henry Reyenga  

So you write the entire message?

Bruce Ballast  

I type the message out, it's rough. Okay, it's rough. But I do, I do type it out, I revise it when I start going through it verbally. But anyway. And that, combined with that is prayer. I mean, each day, my prayer is that God would reveal to me what his word was, and not just the word back then. But the word now for my particular congregation and the people in my particular congregation that what I say will, indeed be God's Word to them. So that's, you know, that that Thursday, I written the sermon of Friday, I do other things. But Saturday morning, I run through that sermon, verbally, the whole thing, and then with PowerPoint, and then I do that again, Saturday night. And those two times are often many changes and how I say something how I orderliness.

Henry Reyenga  

So when the written to the actual practicing the verbal, you notice that there needs to be changes off?

Bruce Ballast  

Because I will, I mean, I'm speaking it, I'm speaking as I would preach it, and then you realize, oh, that doesn't flow, and so. Or that, you know, that was really not relevant, I can toss that section or toss that story or illustration, or whatever. And so I go through it morning, again, in the evening, Sunday morning, early, and I run through it again, before coming to preach. And, and then the joyful experience of actually presenting it is, you know, that's always a wonderfully spiritually challenging experience, especially God, you know, sometimes you can tell when God is using.

Henry Reyenga  

Did you ever, like, sense the spiritual warfare so strongly in the congregation, even as you're preaching? Like, do you ever interact at that level?

Bruce Ballast  

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, when you're preaching, when you get used to it, I guess, let's put it that way. After 33 years, I can say I'm finally used to it. But you find there's kind of two or three levels of thought going on, right? Especially if I rehearsed it well, and I've got it in my head. And I know what the next what the next PowerPoint is. And I can't stray too far from that, because we've got, you know, signing for the death here, and that person has a manuscript that was written on Thursday, right, and is not up on the other stuff. So you stick fairly closely to it. But you know, I'm fairly familiar with the material, you're thinking about that. But also, then you start, there's this other level of what's going on here. And sometimes it's going on in me, and it might be a sense of spiritual warfare in me, or, or sometimes it's just the awareness of, oh, this, you know, sometimes it's an awareness, this is not going well.

Henry Reyenga  

Okay. I understand that. Okay.

Bruce Ballast  

And, and so you realize, you just don't have people's attention. And then you step back, and, you know, I hate the one of the old sermon stories as the guy who had in his notes, you know, preach louder, weak point. Don't want to do that. But you but to be aware of this, this is not really relevant. And it's sometimes I've stopped and said, You know, I just feel like I'm not getting through right now. And this is what's on my heart. Let me just share that. And, and so, you know, flexibility comes with experience as well.

Henry Reyenga  

How do you balance the scriptural content in the relevant application, let's say just an amount of material liking content, how do you look at that?

Bruce Ballast  

There, I feel like they, if I make an error, it's more on the relevant content side error. If I make a choice, it's really an error. There are a lot of relevant content stuff in the Scripture. And to exegete that passage or to bring the word pictures and the metaphors that are in that passage out you know, that becomes a lot of the relevant applicatory material that people go home and but you know, if I just sometimes I've done that, where you've just do a teaching lesson there, man, you know, that's a teaching style of preaching where you give it to them and you trust the Holy Spirit's going to apply it. Now my own style, and I think everybody eventually develops their own style, you know, my style is to try to give people a hook, something that's going to grab them, that's going to come back to mind. And a couple of weeks ago, I preached on Christian healing. And then I did a class with a group of men who will just want to talk more about that. So early morning group of men, and, and a couple of them said what they went home with was a story I told about a guy who wasn't healed, and he died. But his, his wife, talking to the pastor and pray for him, said he wasn't cured, but he was healed, his attitude was healed. And that was so meaningful to several of these guys. So it's those kind of hooks that say, how does this relate to my life today? Um, those are the things I look for is, you know, what's going to hook and stay in and take with them out of this?

Henry Reyenga  

Have you ever been so discouraged after a message? And yeah, so how? How do you deal with that? I, once you agree, everybody that you can just picture that, you know, you do your best all week, you're in the fight, you're putting this together, you preach it in it, everybody is like this, and they're not connecting. And then the first thing you your spouse says something right, when you get home, like ha, that was a bomb. And all of a sudden, you dive in how do you sorta get out of that?

Bruce Ballast  

Ok, I'll tell you. You know, my worst sermon ever. It was Christmas season, I was not scheduled to preach in the evening. And the guy who was scheduled cancelled at like two o'clock in the afternoon, and I had a meeting from two to 3:30. I said, No problem, I'll pull it out of the barrel, right, pull it out. So I, I go to my files at home, and I don't have anything worth doing. And so I came that night. And I wandered around the theme, Emmanuel, God with us for about 20 minutes and said, basically nothing. And at least I felt so, I walked out, I go in that church, the tradition was you go to the back of the church and shake hands with people, before leaving. I didn't, I walked right up to my car, I drove home and said, I don't care if I never preach again in my life. That was, that was awful. And boy, so grieving that night, and you know, embarrassed a feeling of embarrassment, boy did I bomb, and Monday, oh, just an awful day. And then Tuesday back to work. On Wednesday, I get a telephone call from a woman in the church. And they had a group that they got together went from house to house and play cards every week. And they were going from one person's house to another and gotten her accident, very serious accident. And in fact, the three of the four in the car had to stay in the car until they could get the jaws of life there to pry the car open to get them out. And she said, you know, the only thing that helped me keep my sanity was I just kept saying, Emmanuel, God is with us. So I don't the lesson I guess is, you know, what we say or do is secondary to what God is going to do. And as and he's going to take it in the play off. 

Henry Reyenga  

So yeah, and I have experienced that to, where I thought I bombed the messages where, you know, what am I going to do with a message and God used it? It really does humble on that when we think I've even had the opposite where I thought I hit the home run. It went over in American baseball metaphor. It went over the fence. And and then, you know, there was no response. Did you had that, too?

Bruce Ballast  

Yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, and sometimes one of the dangers of preaching I think, is we think we wouldn't ever say this, but we think it's about us. And yeah, as preachers tend to be narcissistic people and human. We think it's about us. And, you know, there are times that God reminds us. It's not really.

Henry Reyenga  

Yeah, yeah, have you ever struggled with burnout in preaching, where I hear you're burned out that you're, you're the pastor and your call to preach in season and out of season? How do you deal with those kind of times?

Bruce Ballast  

Not well,

Henry Reyenga  

I know. We're just being transparent with you all here.

Bruce Ballast  

Right. Now there are times when you just say I just don't want to go back to this. And I think that's one of the reasons. many preachers within pastors and churches in the United States. You know, right now and I was meeting with people from the PC USA last week, and they're saying the average state for a pastor in a church in the PC USA is like three and a half to five years. Oh, wow. And I think part of that is his burnout and So you can go somewhere else, and you can start over and, you know, I in the church I serve, it's around seven years. I served one church for 22 years. And what happened then is it I needed a break. And the church was gracious to give me, you know, three different times, I went on sabbatical for a period of months, and just just spent reading things I wanted to read doing things I want to do. But you know, there's sometimes you don't have that on the horizon, what I do, you know, one of my main tactics is to get together with some other people and talk and pray through and, and and share with my elders that this is what I'm going through, right? Help me Help. Right?

Henry Reyenga  

Right. You know, when I think about preaching, sometimes the middle of the night comes up, do you ever have, we are in bed, or at times of quiet time, we're praying where the Lord speaks, in a way in your heart or something, and it comes through in your preaching? How does that? How do you process stuff like that?

Bruce Ballast  

That's interesting, because I, you know, I prepare meticulously for preaching, it's one of the gifts that God has given me in the calls on my life. And yet I had it, you know, with some growing frequency that I will wake up in the night or early in the morning, and all of a sudden, I realize, Oh, I'm going about this all wrong, this passage this subject. And, you know, I, I really got to take this angle on it. And I, you know, I've learned to listen to that voice of the Spirit, and yes, that becomes a very real, then input into the message, I just say, and it's kind of fun, then because you know, that God's got somebody somebody might be speaking to, you know, right. And then there are times that happens when you're preaching, right, that all of a sudden, you start saying things that you have no intention of saying, I mean, I write out a manuscript, and sometimes I'll get going, and, you know, and then you've got that two or three tier thinking going on, you're thinking, Oh, my, what's God doing right now? Because I hadn't planned to be saying what I'm saying. And yeah, those are, those are wonderful time. 

Henry Reyenga  

Yeah. One more question. And then I'll let you go. And we've, this is just great insights, wouldn't you agree? We're learning all these things. And from an experience, Pastor, preacher, I want to talk about metaphors. One of the struggles that I know, early preaching is just learning how a word picture or a metaphor operates in the craft of preaching. How do you think about metaphors? And how did those metaphors get put into your preaching?

Bruce Ballast  

There are a variety of things that I think make tough for powerful preaching. One is the preparation, doing the work, finding out what the Word of God says and listening to the spirit so that you know what his word is to this people at this time in this place. Close behind that, I think is his picture language, but you know, that shine windows on the subject. So anytime you can use picture language, there are a variety of ways you can illustrate something, metaphor is probably one of the best, but anywhere, anytime, that you can create a picture for people. Occasionally, I've done their variety styles of preaching. And in my previous church, I do a couple of times a year, I do a first person sermon. And I found those particularly challenging, because when I was writing those and you know, when you're becoming Luke, the physician, are you becoming Herod the king? Are you becoming Joseph, the human father of Jesus. I find that I had to describe things all the time. And so I had to create this picture of where I was and picture of what I was doing. It couldn't be just my thoughts. So it's like, picture.

Henry Reyenga  

the very, the very presentation itself was matter.

Bruce Ballast  

It was Yes, exactly. Right, and so anytime you can create picture language, okay, and give people especially in today's world, where we are so, so driven by picture everywhere, you know, I mean, the computer picture, the telephone now, you know, they say children are born now we'll be the first generation ever that won't know what it's like to talk to somebody and not see them. They won't have a phone, the phone will, you'll be able to see it's all picture driven of movies, television, all picture driven. And so verbally, if you practice those skills, of saying how can I make this a word picture? Will empower preaching.

Henry Reyenga  

So, one of them was just you were the pitcher, like a first person. What are some of the other metaphors or techniques, the picture techniques that we have?

Bruce Ballast  

Right? Yeah, sometimes I'll tell a story

Henry Reyenga  

like Jesus

Bruce Ballast  

Right. A parable, which is wonderful or you can and and in that you can, you can tell a real story about somebody who lived and died and experience the truth of what you're saying. Or you can do, you can use a parable, such as recently talking about the tendency of the church to become a place that is just social rather than mission, talking about a, a series of lifesaving stations on the East Coast that gradually became clubs. And, and after they became a club, there are some people who are still concerned about the life saving function. And so they wouldn't start a new one in the same process. And that's a that's a picture that people can really relate to, or to find a metaphor and poetry, poetry, or words of hymns can sometimes be or songs can be powerful pictures, people that draw them in. And, you know, if you're really good and memorize well to use a poem, you'll find that when you use alliterative language, people will all of a sudden zone in on what you are saying.

Henry Reyenga  

Let it, that would be like a poetic, to people's in, I noticed that two, were all of a sudden. I'll start with something else and people's attention. If they're looking down. They also look up. Right.

Bruce Ballast  

But anytime you can take a metaphor and say this truth is like this. Yeah, people grab on. And another key to that is, anytime you share something personal, you'll notice all of a sudden you have everybody's attention. I have to watch that, you know, I was I grew up in a time where they taught us never to say anything personal. But I find that when I share some of my own struggles, or my own challenges within a text, or get to be more real, my own family struggles, my own hurts, my own failures. Wow, you can get a room quiet real fast. Making that picture now alive. 

Henry Reyenga  

Yeah, it's interesting. You're in this class you are going to be looking at like Jonathan Edwards. And in those days, they would no way do anything personal. The whole thing was the text or something, but it had very little to do with someone's life, today. We're sort of tacking in a day where part of being an honest, authentic person is important to the preaching. We have to be careful that it is not that all testimony. In a sense, that's what you're bringing in, you're bringing testimony to the text. But you know, there's that balance.

Bruce Ballast  

Exactly, right. And if you do that too much people start tuning it out.

Henry Reyenga  

Right, exactly. Well, one last thing I'm going to mention to everybody here, if you haven't taken the revival class that Christian leaders Institute offers, is a good it's a great class. And Dr. Bruce Ballast here has written a book about that. And we feature that book in that class with lectures with the reading. My wife actually participated in doing some of the editing and I will tell you, that she loved this body of material and raved about what she learned about revival. So maybe give a little plug on the revival.

Bruce Ballast  

Give a plug on revivals. You know, I my specialty and studying route. My reason for studying revival was I want to see it in the United States. It's my country of origin but and recognizing that it's happening elsewhere in the world. And in our history has been one of spiritual revival, spiritual decline, spiritual revival, spiritual decline. And we are in a time of great spiritual decline in this country. And so looking and praying for a revival and looking for what can the church do to prepare the soil to prepare the place that was a metaphor, by the way, prepare the soil and for the blossoming, the growth of revival in this country.

Henry Reyenga  

Well, I want to thank you guys for showing up today and keep up the excellent work. Keep working on that craft of preaching of teaching of communication that Christ is glorified, Amen.