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ValleyChat
The official podcast of Shepherd of the Desert Church, Scottsdale, Arizona. Faith, life, and wisdom in the Valley of the Sun.
ValleyChat
Authentic Preaching, Deep Listening, True Connecting
Discover the art of crafting sermons that touch the heart and the intellect with John, a fresh voice in the pastoral world, who joins us to share his transformative journey towards connecting more deeply with his congregation. Weaving his personal narrative with practical insights, this episode uncovers the delicate balance of preaching with authenticity and theological depth. Together, we dissect the creative process behind sermonizing, from the initial spark of inspiration to the final delivery that aims to leave an ineffaceable mark on the listener's soul.
Every speaker, seasoned or novice, knows the struggle of nerves and the quest for confidence. This episode isn't just about preaching; it's a look into the crucible where public speaking skills are forged. From childhood performances to the nerve-wracking moments before stepping onto the pulpit during festive seasons, I reflect on my experiences with candid vulnerability. The conversation shifts to navigating the fine line between improvisation and meticulous scripting, and yes, we confess to sometimes borrowing a colleague's words when time is scarce. It's a chapter of growth, resilience, and the sometimes-unexpected joy found in conveying a message that resonates with every pair of ears in the pews.
Concluding our soul-enriching dialogue, we focus on the power of Christian conversations to foster spiritual growth. John and I discuss how reflecting on sermons and sharing their essence with others can solidify our faith. This episode emphasizes the transformative potential of sermons, not just in the moment of listening but in the ripples they create as their messages are carried and pondered upon in everyday life. Our hope is that this conversation serves as a beacon of encouragement, a reminder of God's unwavering mercy, and a testament to the strength found in our communal bond. Join us for this heartfelt exploration of the spoken word's ability to inspire and ignite spiritual journeys.
Hey, Sheppard Family Valley Chat podcast and John and I were thinking it would be a great conversation to talk about sermon writing and sermon listening If you're a pastor. John is new to the ministry, I am older to the ministry and we are having a blast in our Sheppard family watching and growing together as fellow preachers. I'm learning a lot from him, he's learning a lot from me. We thought we might have a conversation about that conversation so that pastors can learn and, at the same time, for those of you who are not pastors, who actually sit and listen to the messages that John and I and Pastor Alan here at Sheppard preach, we thought it might be a good idea to talk about here, to follow me on this, to talk about how we hope you listen to us as we do our professional work of preaching, if that makes sense. So, anyways, welcome to Valley Chat.
Speaker 1:This is about ministry and church and we hope you find it delightful. I'm reminded, John, of the passage in Romans where Paul writes faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, and it reminds me that in order to be a Christian, you have to be a human who hears and a Christian who, by the power of the Holy Spirit believes. You have been at the task of preaching as a called pastor for now about what? A year and a half, two years. What has been your experience over those two years of growth curve of being in this preaching profession?
Speaker 2:That's a big question. I would say that my preparation for preaching has shifted a little bit, not that it's changed, but that it's developed and certainly gotten deeper and a little bit better over the course of time. I remember when the last couple of summers we've had some seminary students from the Fort Wayne Seminary, the school that prepares pastors over in Indiana, and these two guys, their parents, come to worship here at Shea when they are wintering here in Scottsdale, otherwise they're in Minnesota, and their sons were working with us volunteering. Well, I guess they were not volunteering, but they were helping us out.
Speaker 2:They were being compensated for their efforts and they were interning.
Speaker 2:They were interning and that was a big topic of conversation. How do you guys put together a message, how do you preach to the people that are in your room and how do you go into that? And so, as I think about my preaching over the last two and a half three years probably, that I've been preaching at Shepherd, I think about how early on it was much more scripted, much more architecture in the sense of this is how I'm going to get from here to there, to here to there, and I think the reason that I thought about it that way was because I didn't know the people in the room very well, and the only way for us to hold ourselves accountable to good preaching if we don't know anyone that's going to be hearing what we say is by preparing and scripting out.
Speaker 1:So now, if I'm hearing you right, you basically just get up and wing it.
Speaker 2:Well, no, by preparing what we say really only in context of what the scripture and the text and the context about it is. Now, when I prepare, I think about who are the people that are sitting in the four sections of chairs. I have a mountain view. What are they walking through? What have they just been through? What have they been hearing in the other church services? What has been going on in the world around them? What has been happening in their homes and in their families? What's been going on in the preschool calendar?
Speaker 2:All these different details now inform the way that I speak on Sunday, and so this, just this past Sunday, as I was preparing a lesson, I had something pretty well scripted out. This is how I'm going to introduce the topic. This is what I'm going to introduce about the struggles we face with it. This is going to be the context for basing the promises of God, and then here are the examples of scripture to follow in a very practical method. Well, we spent a lot more time on these first two sections because when I got up and I looked out, I realized there's a lot of people who are visiting, a lot of people who are new to faith or new to shepherd, and I wanted to make sure we were really grounded and founded in these, these principal ideas that help us glean the most out of the practical tips, rather than putting everything into practical tips and then hopefully not tricking somebody and thinking that Christianity is just another wellness program.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's so good. You know, I, as you're talking, I think to myself, having watched you, and I can't believe it's been two and I have three years. I mean, it's just crazy how long you've been here. It just seems like yesterday you arrived and I think about this statement is an all encompassing statement about preaching. Preachers are weird. That's a true statement. It's true.
Speaker 1:Preaching is weird. You are speaking in front of an audience which is very few people do that, especially on a week out, weekend basis. Secondly, you're preaching about spiritual things which has touched your life deeply in all likelihood, and you're trying to make a meaningful spiritual emotional connection with the audience and you're doing that under the aegis of God's will. Like you are a vicar, a representative of Christ, officially in your office as a pastor speaking to a congregation, and I just summarize that as just that's weird, it's odd, it is so unique to be almost indescribable. And for me, you know, I just think that one of the most important things that I've seen you develop into is a preacher who really knows your own voice. I think that, from an experiential point of view, a young pastor gets into the pulpit in their first congregation or in their intern vicarage church and they actually have to listen to themselves.
Speaker 1:Think about this talk for 15 to 20 minutes without anybody interrupting or saying anything. That's weird, and until you get used to your own voice being the only sound heard in a room of a hundred, two, three, four hundred people, you will feel this sense of this is weird, this is not normal and and that's one of the things I've really appreciated about our shepherd structures we we actually have two campuses where I was able to, you know, essentially assign you, john, to be on the Mountain View campus and with the goal of John, I really don't care what you preach about, I don't care how you preach. Until you get to a place where you are used to your own voice being the only sound being in a room for 20 minutes, how have you, let me, let me ask you this way how have you found your voice to change, or what recognitions or realizations about your voice from two and a half years ago to today? What has changed? What have you discovered? How have you learned to hear yourself talk uninterrupted for 20 minutes?
Speaker 2:a couple of things. One, I think it started a long time ago, one when we were kids and my parents home there's four of us and something that my older sisters love to have us do was perform plays, and I think you know kids do this, especially kids. You know good numerous kids in the family. You know that you put on a costume, you make mom and dad sit on the couch, you come out in the living room, you perform some act, some song or whatever, and that I think I think that planted a seed of speaking to people somehow. I can't draw any direct conclusions, but we watch some family videos over the holidays, and so I know this happened.
Speaker 2:Secondly, in high school I was part of a class called media productions where we learned about studios, we learned about news, we learned about recording, we learned about editing, and nothing is worse for a high school self-conscious teenager, who you know was not super social and extroverted, than having to sit there and edit videos of yourself poorly reading scripts and school announcements, right, and then having those announcements play to the entire school as you're all sitting at home room watching them on the TV, right, so you get used to hearing your voice, the actual auditory practice of hearing your voice, and so I think I got over how weird my voice sounds, mm-hmm, because anybody that hears their voice recorded tends to not like hearing it. Right, that class conditioned me away from at least putting up with hearing my voice. So then the question becomes well, what does it mean to actually share my heart and my voice in a church service? Yeah, part of my vicarage internship training, the expectation was you would preach without anything in your hands and not from behind the pulpit, and so to enforce that, they put a TV where the pulpit is, and so if you did display something, it was there in the pulpit and you couldn't stand there. There's nowhere to stand. It was TV stand essentially.
Speaker 2:Secondly, on Thursdays the senior pastor, the associate pastor, would sit in the pews in an empty sanctuary and the intern would stand up on the chancel, on the, you know, in front of the altar and preach their sermon. And the first few times I had to do that I had like a five-page script that I had just tried to rote, memorize and it didn't go great, but it went okay. And now that I've been at Shepard for three years I've actually found myself kind of vacillating between you know no notes, not looking anything, not having written a whole lot down to refer to and something that's totally written out word-for-word right, christmas was a busy time. We had a midweek Advent service on Wednesday, and then we had Christmas Eve on Sunday night, and then we had Christmas morning and I so I preached three of those sermons in four or five days.
Speaker 1:I did nothing.
Speaker 2:By the way, I ate bonbons and Christmas cookies, but go ahead, john, that's not true, pastor Scott had had two Christmas Eve services, but I wrote word-for-word, yeah, the first sermon I preached that midweek Advent service and the Christmas morning service.
Speaker 1:I should also add, just as a as an addition, I asked John two weeks in advance what he was preaching on on Christmas and I completely cribbed his sermon. So I just feel the need, for the sake of integrity, to acknowledge that, john, while you preach those sermons, you, your sermon actually was preached everywhere.
Speaker 2:Okay, go ahead well, it was interesting, and I'll get to this in a second but the the Christmas Eve service, which is, like you know, one of our marquee services, were like oh, we want, we want to nail this, we want to make sure it captures the whole story of creation, we want to make sure we get salvation and redemption in there, but also baby Jesus and family time, and we want to try and cover all this stuff, and so we tend to heap a lot of pressure on ourselves for those things. And what? What do people want when they come to Christmas? They just want to celebrate Christmas.
Speaker 2:Yes, they just want to hear the glory of Jesus it doesn't need to be exactly a PhD level micro dissertation why you should be a Christian, even though I sometimes put that pressure on myself. So, anyways, having to switch back and forth between preaching and traditional setting, preaching the contemporary setting, preaching to people that I know really well, preaching to people I see eight times a year, all of these factors Influence what it means to hear your own voice. Yeah, now that Christmas Eve message, you sent me a document that basically had your whole sermon, almost word-for-word, written out. Is that typical of how you put together a sermon?
Speaker 1:Absolutely not, goodness, no, and my, my family knows. When they ask me, what are you doing, scott? Like in the afternoon on a Saturday or something like that, I'm writing my sermon and they're like, wow, what, what is happening? I generally have a very loose outline, and I've been blessed with a lot of great teachers and and a lot of time early in my ministry doing a lot of academic study in in, you know, biblical interpretation. So I've got, I've got a lot of the.
Speaker 1:What I'll say is the foundation in terms of textual Interpretation, understanding of a text. What's the thrust of a text, what's going on here in the broad context of a text? So for me, it really is just trying to find what. What is the anchor that the spirit of God is placing on me today that I want to Latch on to and then bring into the congregation? So that's how, how I get after it. I will say this, though and this is just to maybe turn the conversation our conversation, john just a little bit more toward the hearing, and so now forget the pastors for a second. Let's just talk about what we hope for with lay people.
Speaker 1:Yesterday, I got up in the pulpit and I said there's gonna be a Jekyll and Hyde experience for you. Professor Seidler is gonna talk first and I'm gonna do some you know Brainiac, nerd kind of study of the text Connecting Isaiah to Matthew's gospel, so on and so forth. And then I said, and then pastor emotional Scott Seidler is gonna show up for the next half of the service or the sermon. And, and the point is, is that I Think in my ministry, recognizing the differences in the hearers, experientially, some hearers are Are just custom made for a particular theme or topic or approach to a message.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, from a personality point of view, certain personalities listen to sermons differently. For the people in the congregation at Shepherd who are more you know, I'll say, traditional, maybe doctrinal, very high intellect, the first part of the sermon for them was like the greatest sermon ever. And then, once I hit the pastoral, experiential side, they were like, oh, this is kind of like a huggy Moment in the sermon. Why can't we get back to the, you know deep study of the text in an English accent, perhaps with a spot of tea and milk? So you know, that's one of the things that I think I've come to realize is, as I found my voice, as you're finding your voice, my voice is an academic, intellectual voice of preaching.
Speaker 1:If I have to preach there are two things that are in my outline text and context. And I can do text and context, professorial kind of analysis of the scriptures all day long. But I have to realize that I have to sometimes be a visionary and challenge people to, you know, storm hell with a squirt gun. Sometimes I have to be an emotionally deep and sensitive person who shows a great deal of psychological awareness to the pain people feel in various places and experiences of life. Sometimes I have to be a managerial personality that you know helps people have five points to a stronger family, something like that.
Speaker 1:And so my voice is particular, your voice is particular, but our audience is multifaceted, and so you know, here at Shepard I just want to say one of the conversations John Allen and I have frequently as pastors is how do we make sure that we're preaching the whole Council of God to the whole congregation of God's people? Who? I'm going to copyright that, the whole Council of God to the whole congregation of God's people, because it is not an accident that every baptized individual calls Shepard their church home.
Speaker 2:One of the most invigorating challenges and most fun I have in preparing a sermon is imagining the people that are hearing it. I know where a good number of the people sit on a Sunday morning and who's going to be there on any given Sunday, and if someone tells me that they're coming and they're new to faith or they're exploring faith or they're just a friend of somebody.
Speaker 2:I put a lot of thought into what would it be like if I said this to them. How would they hear that? And then that puts a whole lot of character and shape into what actually is shared on a Sunday morning. The other thing I want to say is when you go to seminary and you learn how to preach sermons and then you are out there in the world and you're preaching sermons, it kind of ruins preaching for you in the sense of listening, because now you are almost always a student of the person speaking and you're doing rhetorical analysis and you're looking at their sermon structure and you're wondering what their thought process was and putting together that message. Meanwhile the person sitting next to you in the pew as you're listening to someone preach may have only heard one phrase and that phrase meant the world to them, or it totally shifted their character or totally spoke into something that they needed to hear and that, I think, is the spiritual power of preaching. I love hearing sermons. I love listening to sermons.
Speaker 2:On Christmas Eve morning I attended our 9.30 morning service and I just sat in the back. I didn't do anything, I just sat. And getting to hear Pastor Alan preach an absolute banger, banger, banger of a sermon about Advent floor. What does it mean? That Christ is straddling the line between the Old Testament and the New Testament. We're straddling the line between Christ fulfilled but Christ coming back. It was amazing.
Speaker 2:And then over Christmas I got to go to my brother in Law's church and hear his New Year's Eve morning sermon about how God raises us up. But in order for us to be raised up, we need to be humbled and low before him. And again, it was like this incredible sermon, and neither of them were done in the style or the structure that I would have preached it. I would never have put that same message together. And so I think it's important for us, as preachers, to always be listening to preaching as well, because we never want to forget the experience that a hearer that you're having as you're listening to the sermon being told to you, being spoken to, being conversed with toward you, and I think of when I'm listening, so for our listening audience, so to speak, not in the pastors, but the listening audience.
Speaker 1:You know, when I'm listening to a sermon, I feel like it's the automatic payroll deductions from my paycheck. It's kind of like that as an analogy, and what I mean by it is this is that I can be listening to a sermon that, in the moment, I'm like man, this is a dog. It lacks authenticity, it doesn't grab or capture my attention. I could, frankly, care less. Where am I going to go eat breakfast? Will they have eggs Benedict? You know, I mean these are the things that are going through my mind as a listener. One of the things I've challenged myself to, though to go back to the analogy, is that it's through preaching that God makes, so to speak, automatic withdrawals from the storehouse of Heaven's riches into my soul. Automatic withdrawals are not noticed. Typically right, you don't really notice that you have money going away to your 401k, from your paycheck. You just it's automatic, it happens, but a gift for the future is being deposited in a bank account somewhere, and I'm always mindful that this sermon that I'm listening to may seem completely pointless at this moment, but God's mercies that are new every morning. I think we just talked about that God's mercies that are new every morning may pull out a thread from long ago and in that moment the spirit of the risen Lord, jesus Christ, reminds me of an insight, an apt word, a reference from Scripture that is rather obscure but, boy, at this moment, for whatever reason, I remembered it and now I can kind of talk intelligently about it.
Speaker 1:That kind of openness to what God may be doing somewhere down the road but not today as you listen to a message, I think is a real. It's a real prayer for me, because I know, as a preacher, on any given Sunday, half the congregation is probably going to be disconnected from whatever I'm saying. I just assume that I'm only going to get a 50% favorable rating from the congregation and I'm okay with that, because if over the course of several weeks, on balance, everybody feels like super connected or I was preaching just to them, then praise. Be to God, the Holy Spirit. But my prayer life as a preacher is for the love of God, please let there still be a deposit getting made, sewn deeply in the fertile soil of a Christian heart, so that at its proper time, fruit may come forth and be useful, helpful for the sake of Christian ministry witness or persevering persistence through tough times as an individual. If that can happen, man, then our preaching is golden, and that's my hope.
Speaker 2:You asked.
Speaker 2:You know what are my hopes or my goals for the people listening to my sermons, especially over in the sanctuary that I lead Mountain View Campus, shepherd of the Desert, scottsdale, arizona, lutheran Church, missouri, synod, united States of America, 21st century.
Speaker 2:And there's two things really that it comes back to for me personally. My internal goal for my preaching is I hope that when somebody hears me speaking on a Sunday morning, they feel like they're hearing a conversation, they're in a conversation with the Word of God, that the scriptures have come alive to them in a sense where they can engage with it on a personal, real, practical level. And then, secondly, my hope is that in you know, over the course of time, cumulative amount of interactions like that experiencing the sermon preached to them in a real way they know that they can go to their Heavenly Father in conversation, they can bring their daily lives to the presence of God and say this is what's happening for me, because it's an invitation we have, by being that spoken word, representative of Jesus himself to the people, that then they're brought into that relationship. That's really a two-way street and that's really the hope that I have, both for me and for the people listening.
Speaker 1:So Well, okay, thank you, john, for being you. First of all, and just as a compliment, if you've not had the opportunity to listen to John speak through the Mountain View message sermons that are in our Shepherd AZchurch website, it is a blessing and value to do that. I love the fact that my family, after listening to me preach for a real long time, they are now Mountain View attenders. So I come home every Sunday and I have to listen to my wife Renee and my kids talk about how great Mountain View worship was, how great the preaching was, and I'm like am I chopped liver? Hello, and they're like, dad, we've heard you for like ever and so we're good. But we're going to be over at Mountain View and I love that.
Speaker 1:My family has entrusted the care of their souls to John. And just continue to pray for us as preachers, that we continue to grow, for you as listeners to continue to grow. And even if you find an offset between the preacher and your own spiritual experience on a given Sunday, hang in there, push through and be open to what the Spirit of God might be doing for the sake of your future, not necessarily as a transaction in the present moment. I think that's just an important value that we can all adopt devotionally. Well, thanks a lot for joining us here. Valley Chat and this is a little bit about ministry and church. We talk about devotional stuff, we talk about leadership stuff. We want to have an opportunity to talk about all things that matter in the Christian Church and John and I, along with so many others in this coming year, are going to be having some great conversations that hopefully you find is a value for your own faith and walk, john.
Speaker 2:Anything else before we wrap up I would just say, as a little practical exercise you can do to maybe try and listen better and this is something I want to do anytime I listen to a sermon is you know, what is one thing about that message that I would want to tell to somebody else that wasn't there? What's one thing I can talk about on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday that I heard or I learned or I thought about because of that message? So, and also, you know, I appreciate the compliment. All I can say is you know, God is certainly merciful with His servants and I appreciate the encouragement and we just hope that, yeah, these conversations continue to be a resource for support and encouragement in your spiritual walk and we look forward to connecting with you next time. Thanks,