Where are the sermons?

I have had a few questions lately about the absence of my sermons both online and in printed form at the church. Well, what started as me being a little behind led me to reevaluate a bit. First, let me say, I love the idea of making my sermons available. I know people who read them when they miss church, read them to clarify something they heard in a sermon, I even have some readers online from far away. Second, let me say that publishing a sermon takes a little bit of work. I tend to print and post my sermons without them being perfect. However it still takes some time to take what I write and put it in publishable form. I don't mind a typo or two but sometimes what I am working from on Sunday morning is a pretty rough form of what I actually say. So, it takes me some time to look back at the notes and create a finished manuscript. Really what happened for me is that the time for this got squeezed out.

In making the decision as to whether or not to reprioritize my time to keep printing and posting, I started looking over how my time as allocated and why I don't have time for this thing I used to have time for. I made a mental list of all the things we are doing at Grace that I am heavily involved in that we were not doing when I got here three years ago. I don't offer this list as a chance to say: "look what I have done." The point isn't that I personally do all this stuff. We have a really dedicated core of lay people who do a ton of praying and planning and working to pull this all off. We also have a dedicated staff that is involved in administering these things. However, as a pastoral leader, these sorts of things take a lot of my time. Since coming to Grace, I heavily focused on programming while John focused on leadership and administration. We have come a long way in programming. While it is still in its infancy, we have developed a discipleship program to help people take their first steps into the life of Christianity: Bible 101, Prayer 101, and Methodism 101 have taken a huge number of hours to launch and nurture. Worship 101 launched last week led by Pastor John. The Why Grace intro session has been polished and expanded to be more informative and welcoming to new people. We have added local mission experiences like Kairos Cookie night to connect new people with missions. We have added an orientation event for new members to challenge them to get involved in the life of the church. The teams I work with have become systematic in their planning and visioning to create even bigger plans for the future.

Outside of discipleship, John and I have led a movement to make worship excellent here at Grace. That has involved extra planning and training of lay ministers. It has also taken a lot of weekly preparation for worship. We have added a lot of multi-media to all three services including sermons slides and video. The lyrics at 9:45 are finally on the big screen! I love all that stuff and I think it is worth it, but it all takes time to plan and to implement.

Multi-media and a desire to be excellent in all we do carries beyond worship. If you have taken any of the 101 classes of Why Grace, you have probably noticed that we use multi-media and multi-sensory learning to make these classes the best that they can be.

Over the last two years, Grace has also been involved in the Church Transformation Process with Don Nations from DNA coaching. Don has challenged us to evaluate all we do and do all we can to be in the business of making disciples. This has involved a huge investment of time both in training, evaluating and implementing.

I hope it doesn't sound like I am complaining about all I have to do. I love this stuff! It just so happens though that there is a physical limit to my time. Most of the time, as a pastor, I am aware of the boundaries I need to keep. When I work too long and too hard without family time and R&R, my ability to do my job and be a pastor is severely hampered. With a physical limit of time, when I add enough additional projects without an increase in support staff, something has to go. In this case sermons.

The reason we have been able to add so much to the church in the last three years is that lay people have stepped up to carry the weight. Our 101 classes would not even happen without lay leadership. In fact, Prayer 101 is completely led by lay people. Most of the work of our Church Transformation Process has been done by lay people and they attend as much training as John or I.

What is interesting in retrospect, is that with all the amazing expansion in programming in the last three years, the staff has remained the same size. I look at the main role of the staff of the church as a vehicle to empower the lay ministers of the church. That goes for the pastors as well though the pastors have some additional function (some call these the priestly role, but that is for another post.) Even with the huge expansion in ministry and the large number of additional people involved in ministry, the staff size has remained mostly constant. There have been some changes and some filled vacancies and we did add a very part-time sound tech at 9:45 but otherwise we are the same. The staff here has been amazing in their ability to continue to accept more and more work, but they, like me have physical limits.

It is interesting how a thing like published sermons, or a lack of, can raise the question, "Are we staffing our church in a way that will allow us to continue to grow or in a way that will cause us to shed useful ministries as others grow?" For that, I don't have and answer and I have to get back to work.

peace,

will