Video Transcript: Session 1 Introductions

Welcome to this class on preaching. I'm glad to be with you to present this, I'm  going to be your host for 36 weeks of reflecting on the art of preaching or turning preaching into an art. Now you'll notice the title of this class, I've titled it  preacher, preparation, and presentation, a class on making and preaching  sermons. Now, I realized that there are a variety of kinds of people who might be watching this course and taking this course for Christian leaders Institute. Some  of you may be just curious that you're saying, I wonder what wonder what  people are saying about preaching these days, or maybe I might think about  preaching sometime in the future. But it's not what you're doing right now, you  will learn some things in this class that will be very helpful to you as you try to  determine whether God has called you to enter the preaching world. Now, some  of you I know are taking it for credit, because you are going into preaching,  you've already felt a call, you may we can get engaged in preaching a little bit.  And I'm hopeful that through this class, you're going to learn some skills, you're  going to learn gain some knowledge about the art of preaching so that your  preaching is more effective. Now, of course, there are probably those of you who are engaged in preaching every week, you may be engaged in a local church,  your the pastor or a large Bible study, and you feel called every week to make a  sermon. What you learn here is going to help you do that more effectively, more  efficiently, and hopefully with greater impact. And so we're going to be on an  adventure together. Whatever your reason for signing in here and saying, This is a course I want to take, I assure you that this is going to be a rich experience for you. Now, to begin with, I do want to just do some introductions. First of all, who  am I if I'm going to be your host, if I'm going to be leading you in this journey,  you should know a little bit about me. First of all, I'm married. I married my high  school sweetheart, I have three children, I have 11 grandchildren, and they are  my pride. And my joy. You should know also that I have spent 40 years in  ordained ministry within my denomination. It's been a privilege to be preaching  for 40 years, and I still continued to do that I'm, I'm now semi retired, I guess I'm  doing some things in ministry, which will come out during the course time. But  I'm somebody who, who has had to learn how to preach well, because I've done it. And, and you should know about me that I'm passionate about the Kingdom of God. There's nothing I enjoy more than to get an email from somebody. When I  retired, officially, from my the last church I served, there was kind of a going  away party. And they had solicited information for people from the three  churches I had served during my ministry time. And I remember getting a email  from a woman who simply said, You don't remember me. And that was true,  because I didn't, she said, but I was part of the bus ministry. In my first church,  we had a bus ministry that went around to trailer parks around the church and,  and took people took kids to our Sunday school. And then often they would stay  for church. And you don't remember me. But I was given an assignment. I'm  joining a new church. And I had to write my testimony. And so I'm writing you 

because I feel called to tell you that you'll never know the difference. You're  preaching made. It led me to Christ. And that probably is the greatest reward I  could have. And there was several other people who said some similar things.  So so I'm somebody who's been in the trenches. I've been there when, you  know, you're sitting there on Saturday and going through the message and  you're saying, this really stinks. I have been there. In a time when I walked out of a service, worst sermon I ever preached, I walked out of the service. I didn't stay around to talk with anybody. I walked out of the service, I went to my car drove  home. And on the way determining, I will never preach again. I have been there  too. And I've been there moments when I just saw the movement of God in a  congregation as it came to a sense of unity around purpose because we were  gathering around the word of God. And so that's who I am. I'm passionate now I  also spent a lot of years preaching in different settings. And that's where I have  learned something about preaching as well. This is the first church I serve. It's  Calvary Church in Plainwell, Michigan, you'll notice it's a little jumbled. And that's because this is a screenshot from a Google Map program. So little tiny  churches, probably about 50 people and I came there as their pastor, and it was  a blue collar church. In other words, there weren't very many professional  people in the church, people who wanted to lead and I found as I just graduated  from seminary with a Master of Divinity degree, you know, I'm over educated for  this congregation. And I used to try to preach to them I would preach these high  ideal i ideas that I would like them to take and assimilate into their life and find a  way of living out in their life. I found that it wasn't effective preaching for that  congregation as I learned its culture, the blue collar people who went to work  every day, and they were in the paper mills existed in Plainwell at that time, and  they were people who worked under a boss. So they worked on a line. And they  did the same thing every day, or they did the directions of their boss, their  supervisor every day. That's how they lived. And then they came to church, and I expect them to make their own decisions. And they really weren't equipped for  that. And so I had to change my preaching style to become more effective for  that congregation in that way, and help grow them in their capacity to reflect on  God's word themselves, not just be fed. So it was a wonderful time. And I  learned a lot, you'll hear some stories about that along the way, about my time in Plainwell, I learned a lot about how God works. I learned a lot about myself. And if you've been involved with my class that I taught on leadership, you know that I got depressed during this time, too, because God wasn't working at the rate, I  thought he should work doing what I thought he should do. So I learned about  preaching in those types of situations and that church. The second church I  served was in Southern California and Crosspoint church in Chino, California.  Now, during my time there, I was there for 23 years. First Church, I was there for four and a half years. First Church, I preached a morning service and an  evening service two different sermons. So I wrote two sermons every week. And

then I came here where I preached half the time. So I preached once per week,  either the morning or the evening. This is not the building, I first came to when I  came there, the church was a medium sized about 400 people. And we were  going to go through a big building expansion, and the decision was made to  relocate instead. And so we relocated to this wonderful, beautiful facility. And  that's where I got to preach. And here, here is the this is off the website, that  church just so you can get an idea of the building situation on the left is the  children's ministry building. And on the right here is the worship center with  some classroom and nursery facilities around it. Now, in that church, I was  preaching to a different kind of audience. These were people who were mostly  professionals. These were people who went to work and told other people what  to do. And so I was not effective when I was telling them what to do when I was  ordering them. But when I called them to greater thought and greater Kingdom  expression, then they began to respond. So I had to learn how to preach to that  congregation. And it was also during this time that I learned some principles  about, you know, pulpit furniture, and things like that. And I'll be sharing those  kinds of wisdom pieces along the way as we go together. So that was two of the  churches, the last church I served was in Grand Haven, Michigan. And this is a  picture of our welcome area, I can't find a picture online of the, of the outside of  the building, but it's an old Piano Factory, it's about 100 year old brick building.  And you'll notice on the left side, that's the brick is still from the outside, there  were were pianos were shipped, actually, and then we created it into a welcome  area. It's three stories high on the one side and, and one story on the rest of the  facility, which we've upgraded a couple of times. But it was a very, very kind of  down to earth church. In fact, this was a place where anybody could come. And  we specialize in being people who receive people with grace. And so I preached Grace a lot, because we had people who were on their third marriages, second  and third marriages, we had people who were alcoholics recovering, and not so  recovering people who were drug addicted people who had been in prison. And  we had a variety of those people coming, we had a good mixture of kinds of  people, because we had the professional folks, the leader folks as well. But  preaching to them was a different thing, because it became far more personal,  became far more directed. And here's the inside. On the left, is me serving  communion. On the right is people coming forward for communion with the  worship band in the back and most everybody is dressed casually. And that's the kind of church it was three very, very different settings. That's how I learned to  preach. Now I also did the study of preaching, the reading and the reflecting,  going to classes, watching seminars and being part of seminars. I have tried to  hone this craft called preaching because I realized how important it was, how  important it was to be somebody who was, as we're going to see in a class just  coming up how important it is to rightly divide the Word of Truth, to study it, to  present it to God's people in a way that allows for the Holy Spirit to flow through 

the words that I say. And so I want to invite you as I share these principles as I  share some of the nitty gritty of the making of sermon some of us theory behind  it some of the practical ideas about how to create a sermon series about how to  decide what passages to preach on. Once you've decided how you develop that  into a sermon that will reach and teach the people that you are called to preach  to, we're going to look at all of that stuff. In fact, that's the next part of our  introduction, introducing the course, we're going to talk about what is preaching,  there are various kinds of sermons. In fact, the New Testament talks a great deal about preaching. But it doesn't using a variety of words. The New Testament, as  you probably know, was originally written in Greek language. And in Greek,  there are several words that in English, we translate as preaching, but there are  different words with different emphases. And so what is this thing called  preaching? And as we look at that, I'm hoping that it will help you decide, you  know, what are your kinds of sermons? And what is the menu, you know, if we  talk about feeding people on the Word of God, what, what is the menu you are  presenting to people regularly if you preach regularly, and so we're going to talk  about those different kinds of sermons, and likely, you get with one that's  comfortable. And I'm going to challenge you to maybe go outside of that, on  occasion to develop a preaching plan for your people. That will include a variety  of things on the menu. And so we're going to talk about what is this thing we call  preaching, at least in the New Testament sense? And we're going to talk about  them. How do you prepare for preaching? Now preparation, I'm going to say  then is vital. It's absolutely vital that will be in lesson three. What does it mean to prepare for preaching? Well, prayer, how you pray, as you are preparing to  preach? What other people are praying for you? And what kind of content do  they put into their prayers? What kind of energy do they put into their prayers? I  was into ministry for several years, before I realized that I'd been taught to  preach the technical parts of preaching. And I'd never been taught to pray. And I  learned a prayer is essential. If the sermons if the preaching is going to have the power that God intended it for to have, if it's going to bring change into life, that  the Holy Spirit wants to begin in people's lives. That prayer is essential to  proceeding. We're going to talk about how you study the Bible. How do you  determine whether this passage is the right one for you? Or if you're in series on a book of the Bible? How do you determine what that passage says? And then  how do you determine what that passage meant? For those people back then,  when the Bible book was written? How does that now translate into the modern  day world in which you live so that you can be effective with your people? So  we're going to talk about how you study the Bible. We're going to talk about the  technical words like exegesis and eisegesis and those sorts of things. We'll get  to that later. But we're going to talk about how do you prepare for preaching in  that regard, with prayer and study of the Bible? And we're also going to then  look at how do you construct a sermon? And we're going to take it by parts? 

How do you find an introduction that is going to hook people's attention is going  to take them in, and have them invited to and go on that journey with you. And  then we're going to look at how you develop various points in your sermons, and how you come up with a conclusion that will send people out knowing they've  heard from the Lord. All that's important stuff. What precedes this, the prayer,  and the preparation and the study, and all of those things are vitally important.  But it's when people go out with a message. What do you want to see happen?  What do you want them to know when they leave your sermon? What do you  want them to think? When they leave your sermon? What do you want them to  feel when they leave your sermon? And what do you want them to do? When  they close out your time of sermons, all of that part of the conclusion? Now  that's different in every culture, and I know some of you are in places far away  from where I am, I'm sitting in Spring Lake Michigan, taping this taping this class right now, you're far away from that, but you're going to have to determine how  the principles I present to you translate into your particular situation. But know  that what we've learned in the past was probably not always correct. The way I  learned to preach in seminary is that you told people in the introduction what  you wanted them to know. And hear, you then went to point one you finish point  one and you went back and summarize point one, you had point two and then  you when you were done with that, you went back and summarize points one  and two, and then you said point three And then you went back and summarize  points, one, two, and three. And then you concluded by telling them what they  just heard. That's the model, the template that I was given, and found out that it  doesn't always work. And in fact, I found out that a real variety in preaching can  be a rich, rich experience for your people. So we're going to look at that aspect  of preaching. And then finally, we're going to look at how do you present a  sermon? We're going to look at some of those very technical aspects, which  nobody really taught me, I realized that in seminary, I was taught to study the  Bible. And I was taught some things about turning it into a sermon, the Bible  passage into a sermon. But I was not taught about the stuff like gestures. What  when you reach to someone when you invite them to come in? When do you  when you pound your fist on the table? When do you take something with you  as an object lesson for the day? How do you do those kinds of things that will  hook your people? And then secondly, gestures? are illustrations? What kind of  illustrations are helpful? You know, Jesus told all the stories, is that a good way? What, what are some of those things that are going to cause people to say, Oh, I gotta tune in, I've got to tune in now. My experience of preaching is been rich,  it's been fulfilling, it's been life saving. I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. I believe that the preached Word of God is still the primary means by which God brings about his desire and his will, in the lives of people.  And I preached word can sometimes come from one person, or it can come  from two or three. But when it comes, the word of God, empowered by the Spirit 

of God, given through a person, with all of his personality, to a people within a  certain place and time that mighty things happen, wonderful things, of lives  being changed of hope being given where hopelessness is the experience. And  so, I want to share what I've learned with you. And I invite you along in the  journey, I guarantee you, it's going to be fun, and it's going to be a rich, rich  experience. So come on along, join me, and we're together. We're going to learn to preach effectively, so that the Kingdom may prosper and God's people may  be built up for God's great praise and glory. See you next time.