by James Webb
Every now and then I’m going to find myself short of inspiration and time, and still needing a weekly blog post. In these moments of emergency, I’m going to mine my previous blog for something suitable (you remember my previous blog – the one I wrote while in Australia? I mentioned it a few weeks back). Anyway, this is one of those times. Here’s some decade old musings on purpose and happiness. I was quite the deep thinker in those days…
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I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks that preachers need to tell more stories about themselves. Not only do preachers not tell enough stories about themselves, I also think that when they do, they tell the wrong stories.
Let me make up an example. Let’s say that I’m listening to a sermon on evangelism. Let’s also say that the preacher tells a story about a time that he had a leaking pipe in his home. He kept meaning to get round to doing something about it, but he never had the time. When he finally got to it, the persistent leaking of a single drop of water had caused some big wooden boards to rot. Imagine that the preacher then suggests that sometimes evangelism is like that – a consistent, little effort that can, over time, have a huge impact.
It’s a nice image and an illustration that might be quite helpful to someone, plus it’s exactly the sort of metaphor that I enjoy. Nothing wrong with that – I would happily include such a story in one of my own sermons – but maybe the congregation also needs a different story from the preacher’s life? Perhaps a story in which the preacher himself tells of a situation where his own consistent, little effort made a huge difference. In other words, a story of how he put his preaching into practice?
I know very well the internal debate that comes from deciding whether or not to include a story that makes me look good, but sometimes my hesitation is just another refusal to get over myself. Refusing to share something that might be helpful to your congregation because it reveals something positive about you? Well, that’s just a different way of making the sermon revolve around your ego.
When I was in Cornerstone I learnt from many men and women who shared stories of how they actually went out and did the things they were talking about. Sometimes it was a story of how things went wrong, but more often it was a story of how this God stuff actually does work. As someone who finds the theoretical easier than the practical, it was informative and inspiring. Those earthy stories that backed up the theory actually changed me, for the better. That’s what a congregation needs – not just to be taught the truth, but to be inspired to live it. Stories from our lives of how we put things into practice may be the little push that encourages someone to sweep away the years of fear and act.
So preacher, tell more stories about yourself. Tell the congregation about worship that drew you closer to God, or prayers that didn’t. Don’t just share the disastrous attempts to explain your faith, talk about the times when you got it right. Share the tools you use to survive the moments when God seems distant, and shout from the rooftops the tales of how God showed up in your hour of need.
Of course, I do have the nagging fear that the reason we preachers don’t tell many of those kind of stories is because we don’t have many of those kind of stories to tell. In that case, perhaps we should step down from the pulpit for a while, until our actions have caught up with our words and we actually have a life to preach.
My post last week got me thinking about some of my own experiences in leadership. Sometimes a leader needs to be a good negotiator, a good speaker, a good manager, or a good accountant. Sometimes there are things that can only be done by a good person. Read more
My family and I were part of Cornerstone Community for about eight years. For those of you who don’t know, Cornerstone is an Australian mission and discipling movement, and it’s been going for about as long as I’ve been alive. It’s far from perfect, but it must have been doing something right. There are countless well-meaning Christian communities that have imploded within their first five years. Why has God kept Cornerstone around? What is the magic ingredient?
I wonder if one of the things that God enjoys about Cornerstone is that, fundamentally, it’s a risk-taking venture. I’m sure those who are responsible for the organisation’s accounts will agree with me, but others might not be so sure. Well, trust me. I’ve been involved in local church leadership and been a member of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, so I know what I’m talking about. There are churches that consider themselves ‘edgy’ because they’ve recently changed the time of their evening service. There has always been a touch of the Mad Scientist about Cornerstone – “Well, if Jesus really said that, what happens if we try this..?” I think God likes it. I’m not sure there’s a risk-free way to build bridges to heaven.
There’s a lot of theology you can be wrong about, and still be a Christian. Predestination, women in leadership, the Rapture, what worship really is, the role of Israel in God’s plans, what the point of the Sabbath is, whether or not Donald Trump is the Antichrist etc. I used to think that my position on some of those things was really important. Now I’m not so sure. However, I do know that there are plenty of churches where the stuff about Jesus being God and dying for our sins and all that is just a given, and that the real meat and drink is in the kind of stuff that I’ve just listed – and you’d better make sure that you believe the right things. I know of at least one church where ministers are selected based on their response to a grilling from the congregation about these kind of issues (maybe not the Donald Trump one).
The thing is, what happens if you subconsciously create a church environment where it’s a terrible crime to believe the wrong thing about these topics? What if everyone has to be on the same page about everything, or they’re persona non grata? What if what you’ve communicated over the years is not actually the gospel, but rather the message that the worst sin in the world is to get it wrong? What happens to a church like that? It won’t be a risk-taking church, because the problem with risks is that sometimes you can get it very wrong.
I remember taking a very specific risk once, and it going wrong. I crashed and burned in a humiliating way. The scars from that failure are still with me – all these years later and I still haven’t totally recovered. But I don’t regret it for a second, because I know that if God ever brings it up in conversation I can say, “Sure God, it didn’t work out brilliantly, but at least I tried.” I’m sure that God’s response will be to smile, because He is a risk-taking God and has a soft spot for risk-taking children. I remember hearing a story once about a woman who criticised D.L. Moody for the way that he evangelised. His response: “I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it”. I think that God agrees.
When I read ‘The Parable of the Talents’ another thought that I can’t get out of my head is that there are no rewards, no prizes in heaven for caution. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sometimes, as I read it, I wonder what the master’s response would have been if the servant with five talents had lost them all in his investment scheme. I like to think that he would still had more time for that servant than for the one who sat on his hands. I don’t know for sure, and such speculation doesn’t really have a place in the interpretation of parables anyway. Jesus told it to make a specific point, and a different point would have required a different parable altogether. Maybe if he’d been surrounded by reckless, careless disciples he would have told a parable about a man who suffered because of a foolish risk, but as it is he told a parable about a man who was rejected by his master because he was too cautious and not risk-taking enough. I wonder why he felt the need to tell us that one?
