Call it a “dry spell.” Call it “writer’s block” or “preacher panic.” This clergywoman calls it “losing her preaching mojo.” Has this ever happened to you?
Dear Wise Women of the Word,
Help! I’ve lost my preaching mojo. Well, that may not be true, maybe I never found it to begin with. I am a new clergygal, serving as solo pastor at a small, smart, faithful church. They are used to good preaching. I also enjoy good preaching. so for the past year or so I have tried to learn the art of good preaching. I read all the commentaries, and of course this blog, I have lots of questions and go through all of the seminary-taught steps of crafting a sermon, but somehow it never comes together. I am too scattered. I can’t seem to make time during the week for pondering, reflecting, or thinking, not to mention, writing. I end up scribbling something down in the wee hours of Saturday night and edit, edit, edit all morning Sunday morning, and feel like crap in the pulpit. I’m starting to despise my own words and cringe at my own voice. But I love my job, I love worship, and I love my God, so I keep getting up there, feeling like crap, week after week.
So, what do you do when you’re in a writing funk? Who do you read? How do you focus? How do you find time? How do you regain confidence? How do you reclaim this writing misery as a spiritual practice? I am open to anything!
Your pal,
Pastor Sermon Freak Out
Help is on the way, dear Pastor SFO. Our matriarchs have walked that dry road, and they have some awesome advice:
Dear Pastor Sermon Freak-Out:
This is a great question! Preaching is such an important task, and it is literally never done. So this requires some getting used to. Be assured that the problem has nothing to do with your innate abilities (or lack thereof). But if preaching is truly job number one, it requires a lot of intentionality, so the place to address this is with schedule changes. Have you noticed that Sundays come around every seven days? On the average. Here are some schedule suggestions that work for me. Perhaps one of them will seem helpful to you.
1) Sketch sermon themes in large-ish chunks. This gives you a jump on the creative process. Perhaps start by looking 3 or 4 Sundays out. That way each week you won’t feel like you’re starting from scratch.
2) Get a week ahead on creating the bulletin. You’ll be doing this approximately 10 days before you have to preach the sermon. At that time, open a document for that sermon and put in it the texts, hymns, and any thoughts that were stimulated by this advance work. Often a nugget of a sermon idea will begin to form.
3) Do a few solid hours of sermon prep on the first day of your working week. Goal is to have some substantial paragraphs that comprise the overall flow/message of the sermon, along with capturing any main points/stories/textual notes.
4) Speaking of capturing material — create a system for thoughts/sentences/paragraphs that arise during the week. I generally add to the document in progress if I can get to my laptop, or create voice memos as I drive.
5) Establish a deadline to be done with the sermon, preferably one that honors your need for a good night’s sleep on Saturday.
Preaching is a crucial, difficult task. It requires our best energy and frequent attention. Energy flow is not a mystical process. It relates to biorhythms and time usage. It may take a bit of experimentation to figure out what works for you. And granted, there will be weeks that you will simply not have enough time. But keep working with your schedule to create the time you need.
Thanks for the question. I’ll be curious to hear what the other preachers have to say!
~ Ruth Everhart, blogging at Love the Work (do the work). www.rutheverhart.com
Dear Pastor SFO-
Before you do anything else, please cut yourself some slack. We all have dry spells and we all have times when we feel less confident than we’d like. Let yourself feel the grace of knowing that every preacher has been where you are right now.
I suspect that after writing in the “wee hours” and editing all Sunday morning, you are tired when you step into the pulpit on Sunday. That’s not helping you. I must confess I am a Saturday writer, however, in the last parish I served, I had to adjust my usual pattern when we began having a Saturday evening service. So while it may seem that there isn’t enough time before Saturday night, I suspect that if push came to shove, you’d find the time. Do you know what’s keeping you from starting earlier in the week? Do you need more quiet, less quiet, a different space?
There are lots of things that can help a preacher get a reboot. Different folks have different sources of inspiration. These are three of mine.
Melissa Harris Perry, Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Rachel Maddow have all helped at one time or another. They’re sharp, timely and help me focus on justice issues.
Good fiction. What have you been reading? It doesn’t have to be boring to be good. I just finished reading “Crooked” which is a faux autobiography of Richard Nixon that claims the Cold War was a result of some really fantastical events. It had nothing to do with theology but it got my brain stimulated.
Friends and colleagues who are also thinking about the texts. When there aren’t people to jabber with in person, I find that the internet provides me with a place to think my thoughts. (RGBP has been a great help in this area.)
About thirty years ago I was stuck on page four of a sermon. It was Saturday and I was going nowhere fast. I was in CPE and had not even taken a homiletics course yet. A friend passed on this word of advice from his preaching prof, “In one sentence, what’s the point of the text?” This is still the best kick start that I have for sermon writing. It helps me focus. It keeps me on topic. It helps me preach more of the gospel and less of my “stuff.”
Over the last thirty years my writing habits have changed, but please know that if you keep following the path, you will find your way.
Heidi Rodrick-Schnaath
sometimes known as RevHRod
Dear PSFO –
Take heart, we all slump at one time or the other… It sounds like maybe you need to find your own rhythm rather than relying on what the books/commentaries/professors say. Writing on a Saturday night in and of itself is not a bad thing, but it sounds like that is not working for you. So it is up to you to figure out how/when to do something different. When is your brain at its most ‘creative’. For me that often means putting off the tasks that can be done when I’m in a groggier state in the afternoon and working on creating/writing in the morning. This isn’t always easy because every task wants to use my high energy time. I have to be pretty disciplined about it and I fall off that horse a LOT.
As far as gaining confidence, just keep on keeping on, do the best you can, know that the Spirit has got your back and as my homiletics professor said, “if you’ve got a dog, walk it proud.”
kathrynzj
Dear Pastor SFO,
When I get into a sermon slump, which has happened periodically over the years, I change up my routine. It’s less about what commentaries I read and more about examining when and where I prepare. For instance, I am writing this response from a Starbucks on a Thursday morning, during a block of time set out on my calendar as “Sermon Cave.” After several months of feeling uninspired, or staying up too late Saturday night, or (for me, horrors!) re-writing the whole thing on Sunday morning, I needed to set some new parameters for myself.
Not writing well in the office? Or at home? The latter was my default, but it just is not working for me now. I’ve done most of my sermon-writing for years on Saturdays, but in this season of family life, that isn’t working well for me. This morning, I came with a nugget of an idea and was able to shape it into something I can take a look at on Saturday without being in a panic.
Start by making a date for yourself, a real three-hour block of time that allows for some minor procrastinating, but no interruptions you don’t create yourself. For this reason I recommend being outside the office and also away from home unless that is an undisturbed environment. This is an important part of our work, as you affirm. Make an appointment for it and let others know that is what you are doing.
My 2 cents worth,
Martha
http://marthaspong.com
OK, then PSFO…. some tricks. Picture the congregation. Picture one person in it. Tell that one person where the Good News is, in ONE of the readings, and then tell that person what s/he might do in response.
A colleague helped me HUGELY recently by inviting me to look at Maslow’s hierarchy of whatever and try to see just where on it the congregation is located. Do they need reassurance? meaning? challenge?
There’s tons and tons of Interesting Stuff — but what do the people in front of you HOPE TO HEAR? what question are they asking? (Buechner says somewhere that they are all afraid to ask “Is it TRUE?” but they sure want to hear the answer).
Imagine somebody maybe who doesn’t want to hear any of it. Why is it important? How would you overcome that reluctance?
You can set yourself the three-sentence challenge — or the one-sentence challenge — and do it Tuesday at the latest. That sometimes works really well.
And I heard a very great preacher say one time that we set our sights too high. When we’re writing a sermon, we have in mind making a movie: a beginning, a middle, an end (“Not necessarily in that order”), a development, “unity, coherence and emphasis,” and so forth. But nobody except the preacher (and the occasional wandering professor of homiletics) has come to a movie. The folks out there in the pews have come to a slideshow. So what you aim for, is that everybody should be given a slide to take home. Just one, out of all you have assembled. I’ve had more sleep on Saturday nights since I heard that.
Somebody — maybe Raymond Carver? — said he wrote good stories by leaving out all the things people didn’t want to read. That might also help!
Blessings on it …
Crimson Rambler
Dear friend,
I find it helps a lot to map out some time for choosing texts, whether from the lectionaries or not. I choose texts, hymns and a theme for the sermon about three months in advance, which is helpful to me and to our musicians. I’m helped by the background drumbeat it creates in my head….invariably things in the news, in parish life, in fiction, movies, and other places, end up informing my preaching. I keep notes in my phone of quotes and illustrations and Ideas I want to remember for whenever it might be useful.
Over the years, I’ve found the accountability of a preaching group to be helpful.
I meet with staff (musicians and clergy) about four times a year to look at themes, etc. That’s helped me to feel organized around preaching.
On any given week, I spend twelve to fifteen hours on a sermon. I spend from 6-9 am on Tuesday-Saturday on it, only looking at the text on Monday to remember what the texts for the week are, and studying and taking notes on Tuesday, writing on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and polishing it on Saturday. I work on sermons in the morning, because I’m a morning person and I find I have bigger chunks of uninterrupted time then.
It’s what works for me, but I’m sure you’ll receive other great ideas, too. I encourage you to experiment with what sounds like it might work for a season. It takes time for something that doesn’t come easily to become a practice.
Blessings to you as you figure out a plan,
Jennifer
www.anorientationofheart.blogspot.com
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Thank you, wonderful Matriarchs! You have shared many good strategies for all of us preachers.
If you have any tips to offer a struggling preacher, please add your tips in the comments below.
Are you facing a ministry challenge or struggling with a pastoral dilemma? Send your question to askthematriarch (at) gmail (dot) com.
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