Today I was reading the history of the Baptist church where I was raised, baptized and ordained to preach. No pastor in its fifty years of existence served there as long as I have served Warm Springs Church and in almost forty years, no one has served as pastor at Warm Springs Church as long as I have served. Between two churches and ninety years of existence, I am the longest tenured pastor. Out of the thirty pastors who have served between the two churches, not one lasted more than eleven years. I have plodded farther than them all…
If term limits were enacted in either congregation, I would be long gone. My dog did not live as long as I have served Warm Springs Church, Haley’s Comet may have passed twice since I started, police officers retire quicker than my years of service, roads don’t last as long as I have, cell phones, blogs and chatting on line with babes all came after I began and Starbucks Coffee was nicknamed two bucks at my start.
Recently I have dramatically altered my approach to preaching after all these years and if the truth be known, I have probably reinvented my preaching three or four times since I came to Warm Springs Church. Perhaps I am the only one who has caught on to how revolutionary those changes have been…just like I might be the only one who has noticed the monumental shifts in gel applications I have made since I first began to retro 1957. But it doesn’t matter. I have changed and can see the difference.
Preaching is a lot like cutting hair. You snip and snap and buzz and blow and snip and snip again and regardless of how artistically you clip, you still are only as good as those who look at the new doo and like it or don’t. No one asks how many snips it took to get your hair cut, how tight the razor setting, how many cross parts you had attacked by the scissors. It is either a good haircut or a bad one and that is it. A sermon is either good or bad and there it goes.
That is why so many pastors are both exhilarated by the drama of preaching and repulsed by the adrenalin drop it elicits. Spend all week looking for the perfect story, the most crucial points, the stirring inspirational comments that produce the grand “ah hah” and it all comes down fizz of whether or not Mary Jones looked at her watch as you preached. Something happens between Monday and Sunday that is dreadfully corrupting. You want to matter. Because you want to matter, you suspend Mary Jones from your ceiling as you prepare and let the pit of your stomach rotate at the turn of her smile.
It shouldn’t matter what Mary Jones thinks of your sermon…but then it shouldn’t matter what you think of Billy Bob’s new haircut. Yet try as we will to turn it all over to God and His perfect grace, we still tumble off the side of the steps and land in the muck of thumbs up or thumbs down. Give me ten pastors who preach with only an audience of One in mind and I will give you 9.8 who have already resigned. You cannot exist without thinking about what others think of you and you cannot continue without switching out your gel application every so often.
I am certain that if I add a few more years to this specific ministry, I will become a bit more comfortable with the tension within my sideways glances between the two mirrors…as I shift between the expression on Jesus’ face and that on the collective who enters into my preaching. Perhaps I will even glance over at Jesus a bit more as I go along. However I resolve this bumbling stumble toward the finish line, I will doggedly pursue a determination. Each Sunday will be an energized attempt to make good on my promise to give it my best to honor my calling. However, regardless of how much gel I use or don’t, I am still dependent on the one who cut my hair to make it right.
