Another way of thinking about the long-term sermon in the midst of weekly preaching is to compare it to a series of family road trips. Our family has driven a number of times from western Pennsylvania to southern Alabama. Each trip had a particular, and sometimes significant, focus. If we didn’t get to Alabama, the trip would have been a failure. That was the point. The ultimate destination. But we also wanted to use the trips to give our children new experiences along the way. One journey included a stop to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Another time we visited Nashville’s Parthenon. Even if these experiences were a minor detour, they broadened our children’s horizons and became part of our family’s memories, helping us bond. We arrived at our destination a little bit later, but we were able to incorporate something important along the way.
To give a flavor of what I am talking about, I want to describe a two-year period in the parish where we decided to focus on increasing our passionate spirituality. In my parish, we came to realize that parishioners’ lack of dedication to their own personal devotional lives was the primary issue holding us back as a congregation. Everyone loved coming together for worship and outreach and fellowship and anything else that happened at the church. But when they went home, they left their spirituality behind. The number of people reading the Bible, saying daily prayers, interceding for one another, or engaging in similar Christian practices was low.
The approach I took in preaching was to talk about spiritual practices frequently and repeatedly. One week, when the readings had a biblical character asking advice from another, I talked about spiritual direction and spiritual friendship. During a different week’s reading on repentance, I talked about the practice of confession, including confession to other laypeople—which is acceptable in my tradition—and how it worked. I’m not sure that anyone went out and got a spiritual director that week, and I know that no one approached me for confession. In neither of those weeks was spiritual direction or confession the theme of the sermon. Instead, each was a slightly extended example of one way that the themes of the reading could be put into practice. Out of a fourteen-minute sermon, they were two- to three-minute asides meant to highlight ways that the spiritual life could be lived out in community on a day besides Sunday. My hope was that people would see that spiritual practices involving other people in a setting outside of the church facilities were a normal part of the Christian life. Unless those whose understanding of faith meant going to the church had heard enough examples of faith experiences happening in other places, they would never see it as applicable to them or try it for themselves. These examples might be repeated once or twice during the long-term sermon to reinforce the idea. Repetition at different times is also necessary to reach people who are away for a week, or in Florida for a season, or otherwise less regular in their attendance than a preacher would prefer.
While some examples during that time focused on spiritual intimacy with another Christian, other sermon pieces highlighted personal spiritual disciplines. Jesus’s own prayer life was mentioned frequently, along with various concrete prayer practices paralleling Jesus’s example. Different kinds of daily Bible reading methods were described, including the Daily Office, a read-the-Bible-in-a-year calendar, and The Story, which is a compilation of the Bible’s greatest hits. The overall focus of most of these sermons was not on a spiritual discipline, yet I chose a scripture reading that described a particular devotion and took a few minutes to talk about it in more detail as an aside. Since the parish as whole was looking at the topic, the parish’s Sunday morning adult group read through The Story and someone on staff led a read-the-Bible-ina-year discussion. Some weeks, just being able to connect the lectionary reading with something going on in a small group discussion was enough to put the idea into people’s heads that this was an important Christian practice.
One other initiative some parish leaders embarked on during that year was becoming what they called “spiritual trainers.” They wanted to gain enough experience of prayer disciplines that they could help others pray better. Every two weeks they met to learn and to practice. Working the prayer practices the spiritual trainers group had studied that week into the sermon was a natural way to teach and reinforce a new language. While some leaders had been introduced to a practice, most of the congregation had not. By mentioning it in a sermon, not only did everyone hear about it, but those more experienced with the prayer discipline had an opening to talk about it at coffee hour or in other contexts. Even though most people did not begin to engage a particular practice, and often no one did, a variety of important things happened.
First, most people began to see deeper spiritual practice as normal for them and normal for their church. Many long-term Christians have many things that they believe they “should” be doing, but they aren’t seen as important enough to them or their congregation to actually begin. By preaching over time about spiritual practices, everybody got the message that their relationship with God had a component that happened outside of church. Different people took that message in different ways. Some just felt slightly guiltier for ignoring it, but their attitude still changed.
Second, how people talked about spirituality at church transformed and deepened. At the end of the two years we focused on spirituality, people expected prayer to occur at meetings where it was previously absent. Parishioners became more comfortable asking each other for prayer, even at coffee hour or in informal settings. Spiritual practices and spiritual growth became normal topics of conversation for the parish leadership and were seen as an integral part of a healthy church.
Third, those who were ready to engage a deeper prayer life found the opportunities and the tools they needed, and in some cases new practices really took off. A group of people began “prayerwalking” and praying for the greater community. A healing team was founded and prayed for people after services. After the first read-the-Bible-in-a-year group finished with only two people making it through the entire year, someone else started a read-the-Bible-in-a-year Facebook group. For me this felt like a huge win because the person starting it was not someone I would have pegged as the next person to do a Bible study and because it happened after we had stopped intentionally focusing on spirituality. The change in understanding we hoped to see was manifesting itself in the congregation. People had learned a “new language.”
The ideas in this book come out of my experiences as a solo pastor who preached almost every week. Thinking about preaching as a series of long-term term sermons to teach the congregation a new language is particularly important in congregations with a solo pastor. Most of them are small- to medium-sized churches with established congregations. The pastor wears many hats and has personal relationships with most congregants. The preacher also has the advantage of preaching almost every week with the discretion to focus those sermons freely. The preacher is an integral leader in almost every aspect of the church’s life. In such a context, the practice of using long-term sermons is easily accepted by the congregation and a gift to preachers as they prepare their weekly message. Since the preacher knows the strengths and weaknesses of the parish, they are also the best person in the parish to choose the long-term sermon focus, even if the process of making that choice involves other leaders.
In a church with multiple regular preachers, these ideas are still effective. They will require more coordination and involve a discipline from all preachers to shape their weekly sermons in service of the larger goal, even if they were not involved in choosing that goal. Our congregations are not going to get where they need to go unless we are willing at every level to give up some of our autonomy to work collaboratively and to be accountable to other Christian leaders.
In their book Rebuilt, Michael White and Tom Corcoran describe the process of revitalizing their multistaff Roman Catholic church. One of their key learnings was the importance of preaching in feeding people. When they looked at themselves, however, they saw incredible inconstancies in quality and substance. With multiple services each week, and frequent guest preachers, they realized they had given up their prime opportunity to lead their congregation with no expectations or quality control.4 They moved their church to a “one church, one message” approach where everyone preaching on any given weekend was covering the same themes in their homilies, and often