the EVOLUTION of a preacher

BLOG PART 1
9 and a half months ago I became the senior (and only) pastor of Linton First Church of God in Linton, IN.  When I first started I was a rather wet behind the ears preacher, I had preached before [twice in seminary, several times at South Meridian in Anderson, twice at Auglaize Chapel in Ohio, and a fair few at Maple Grove in Anderson] but it was my first time having to preach week after week month after month.  I had never been the only person responsible for deciding what would be preached, before I always worked under someone else's plan, or at best worked in conjunction with others to decide what we should be preaching.

So, there I was with this thing looming over me, how was I going to be able to preach every Sunday [which come around with surprising regularity] and what was I going to preach on?  I started in Genesis with Abraham, a good place to start, I thought, after all Abraham was the world's first monotheist, as long as we don't count Adam, Eve, Noah, or anyone else in the first 11 chapters of Genesis [which I don't].  So, we had someone starting this new thing, so why not talk about it in the context of this church starting a new thing.  It worked good enough and that led us into Advent.  At first I thought I had advent covered through the Christ Birthday Offering Sermon Thought Starters [Each year the Christian Women Connection (formerly Women of the Church of God) take a church wide offering in order to help various ministries of the church, they have devotional booklets, posters, bookmarks, and sermon thought starters to help Pastors plan for this important time] until I read them, and to be brutally honest, this past year they kinda sucked...sorry.  So I decided to preach a series on the various characters of the Christmas story and their various journeys to Bethlehem.

Then I moved into a series on my/our new purpose slogan Real Love, Real Faith, Real People.  Then some random sermons and then Lent, which I once again decided to look at the various characters of the Easter story and their various encounters with Jesus,  Following that we spent a little over a month on the Sermon on the Mount.  Then a few random sermons, followed by a two week study of Titus. Next week I will finish my series on the Psalms, after that I am either going to preach out of one of Paul's letters, or do a series called Where You're Living At, which will look at the various rooms in a house and talk about what we need to be doing in them.

To be honest I hadn't planned on giving you a blow by blow of my sermon series, I had a completely different plan for this blog, which I will now get to.

BLOG PART 2
Sitting here today I am not the same preacher I was 9 months ago.  Back then I worried a lot about my sermons, now I tend to let go a little more.

Back then I wrote out my entire sermon, now I work off of an outline, it saves me a lot of time, plus it gives me the freedom to go where I feel I need to in the moment as opposed to feeling tied down to the words on the page.

Back then I was very concerned with how long a sermon should be, or more to the point I was very concerned that the sermons would be long enough, I didn't want people to think that I gave short sermons because I didn't research enough or know enough.  Now I don't really care how long they are, as long as I say what I feel I need to say that is fine, oddly enough according to my wife I actually preach longer now then I used to, go figure.

Then I spent a lot more time writing than actually thinking about what the text had to say and what I had to say about it, now I spend the majority of the week thinking about my sermon, letting my week interact with it, letting life around me interact with it, for this reason I feel that my sermons are more in the moment than in some illustration that I can recall from ten years ago.

9 months ago I compared myself to other preachers, both ones I knew personally as well as what we consider 'superstar' preachers, now I say the heck with it, I am who God helped make me to be, and I am where I am when I am for a reason, if its good enough for God it should be good enough for me.

Then I worried about everything, but now I am closer to my old easy going self, I still have times of concern and worry, still occasionally border on being depressed, but once I realized that it was all right to be me, I let go of some of the stuff I was holding onto and concerning myself with.  The point of fact is that I will never be Rob Bell or Mark Krenz or Dan Kihm, or my wife [who is a much better speaker than me] people I admire, sure, but what I am learning is that they will never be me either, and maybe, just maybe God has us all doing his work because God needs us all to do his work.  And if God needs us then God may just also need you...just a thought.

Peace and Love,
Pastor K

No Sleep, No Sleep, LALALALALALA

Well, folks, here I go again.  I should be working on my sermon for tomorrow, a sermon about Psalm 39 and what kind of legacy you want to leave behind.  But to be honest I have so many thoughts floating around the ether of my mind that I am finding it hard to focus.  I think this is partly due to lack of sleep this past week.  I keep getting to sleep really late and waking up fairly early in comparison.  I won't lie, this is mostly due to my own fault, instead of trying to sleep I keep doing things [watching movies and TV (Olympic coverage) or just catching up with stuff online, or playing too much Zuma and listening to music].  I need to stop this activity but for some reason I would rather watch or play instead of sleep, at least until the next day when I fight grogginess for hours on end, but then the cycle repeats.

More importantly if I am going to stay up there are things that I could be accomplishing, like working on sermons or my ordination papers [one year down and no work so far, though it has been a far busier year then I was originally anticipating] or writing more blog posts [which might not seem important, but is a creative outlet for me, which I desperately need, I used to write songs, a lot of songs, and now I don't, so I do enjoy blogging].  But I don't, instead I waste my time, and the hours pass by ever so quickly.  Oh, well, at least I'll be prepared for the lack of sleep that's coming in 3 months, give or take.

Peace and Love,
Pastor K