Study Retreat...

I am basically taking two and a half days this week to get away and study for upcoming sermons. This basically means that I go to the middle of nowhere and stay in a Lake House that a family in the church has made available to me.

I bring a bunch of resources, like commentaries, some forms I use to spawn creativty and look at passages in a variety of ways. It really becomes a lot of reading, praying, begging God for an image or a story that I can work with for a sermon.

My preaching style is not three points, with a couple of sub points. That is actually how I was first taught to preach, and a few years ago I had another preaching course that encourages more creativity.

Writing a sermon for me is like writing a song or something else that is a bit artistic and requires time for creativity. I can't just sit down and read a bunch of stuff and crank out a sermon. I deal with images and stories and try to piece the Story of God together with our place in that story and offer people hope that they can play the part they are supposed to in His story.

So I will not walk away from this retreat with a pocket full of sermons, but hopefully some ideas as to where we are going. Some images or stories that will brew and spawn more ideas. Sermons are always better when they have been cooked in a crock pot and not a microwave. If all we did was preach information (transmission of cool facts and nuggets of info) life would be easy. But we preach for life transformation and it can be slow going at times to get a sermon to where it is ready to be preached.

****A note to all associate pastors that get to preach once every few months, it is a different animal when you have to preach week in and week out. You don't have 12 weeks or more to come up with great material.