On Visiting a Very Sick Friend

Today I went to see a friend in the hospital -- one of my church members. Early this morning I prayed with him and his family before he underwent "routine" bypass surgery. I told him I probably wouldn't see him after surgery because he'd be too tired to know or care that I'd been there. Instead, I'd see him in the morning. Well, I DID see him again tonight because he had a brush with death, though he appeared to be stable when I left, late into the night.

I've known my friend for over 20 years. The hard part about that, of course, is realizing how close he came to dying. When I came to our church nearly 29 years ago, I had funerals for my members. Now, I only have funerals for my friends! Every funeral involves my family. And that's hard. It's wonderfully rewarding to be able to support a family I have known for 20 or 25 years, but it's hard. It's part of the suffering of the ministry.

This week I was talking with someone in town who said a former pastor had told people that pastors shouldn't stay with a church longer than 10 years. I suppose that's fine for him. It will protect him from the kind of pain I suffer each time I bury one of my long time friends. But it will also shield him from the joy I experienced last week when I married two young people who had grown up in our church, been nurtured in our youth group, gone off to college, and returned to be married here. How cool is that!

Ten-year pastorates don't hurt as much, but they don't give as much either!

On using old sermons

I know I've talked about this before, but one of the benefits of getting older in the ministry is that you accumulate a lot of sermon notes. The danger, of course, is that you simply go back (after a "decent" amount of time has passed, of course) and re-preach those old messages! I have found that I can't generally do that.

For example, I am now preaching through the book of Revelation. It was a series I had done back in 1997 and was well-received. But as I look at those old messages, I see a lot of flaws as well as out-dated illustrations, etc. And not only is the world a different place than it was 10 years ago, I am a different person and my church is a different church. So while the Word of God is eternal, our understanding of and application of the text is constantly growing and changing.

Does it save me some time to re-trace old steps? Maybe a little some weeks. But generally, I find it just as easy to look at the old sermon and then virtually start from scratch!

On Long Sermons

One of my parishioners was visiting out-of-town relatives and attended a church service where the pastor preached a 71-minute sermon. To my mind that borders on just plain wrong!

I was concerned about the length of my own sermon for tomorrow, because with communion I didn't want to see the service go too long. My philosophy on these things is that the mind can only absorb what the seat can endure. So as I looked at my introduction tonight, I realized that while it was endlessly interesting to ME, it was actually unnecessary to the sermon. So I cut it, introduced the message with a sentence, saved five minutes, and had a much stronger sermon.

John Stott says that a sermon should last 20 minutes . . . or feel like it. As usual, he's right.