Traveling Ministry Teams 9

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38. My second year at Central (1985-86) was my first year studying for ministry, and one of the highlights was going on weekend ministry teams. Most of them seemed to be in North Carolina, but we also visited Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida. On a number of these trips, I was able to preach. It was great experience.

I don't know whose idea it was, but a lot of the trips were in a quartet, with me singing bass, Rodney Clark singing tenor, Laura (then) Strickland singing alto, and Jan (then) Fisher singing the lead. For some of the weekends, Stacey (then) Bodenhorn played the piano.

One of the most memorable trips was to Hudson Wesleyan Church in Florida, with Elmer Drury driving the van. Elmer was Keith Drury's older brother and he would die suddenly of a heart attack the next year. At that time, Elmer was doing the advancement and alumni work for the college, I believe. I don't remember much from the trip except that it was a highlight of the year.

39. In those days, I believed I needed to "pray down" each sermon. In my pre-ministerial training, the culture was that God revealed each sermon to you a little like God talking to Moses. You go up to the mountain and come back down with the sermon God had revealed to you for that week.

When I learned about the idea of planning out a series of sermons in advance, I engaged one of my earlier mentors. The immediate reaction was to think of this sort of approach to preaching as a very human one. It seemed to them to take the spiritual dimension of preaching away and change preaching into a matter of human thinking and planning.

By the way, we often would say growing up that a service was particularly visited by the Spirit if the pastor didn't get to preach because someone got blessed. Let's just say that the picture of God I grew up with was that of a very spontaneous God who showed himself most when he interrupted things. He sure didn't seem to plan ahead much, or at least he wanted to keep everyone on their toes. [1]

Back to my mentor. I responded to them, "Can't God see six months ahead to tell you what to preach earlier than the very week of the sermon?" The person thought for a second and then said, "In my experience God doesn't work that way."

I truly wanted to pray down every sermon, but let's just say that I often found myself Saturday the day before preaching without a clear sense of lightning. At the time I blamed myself for not praying harder in the week. No doubt I should have, but I don't think that was the main problem.

40. I just don't think that every believer gets "zapped" as often as every other believer. There are people who hear the Holy Spirit all the time. I envy them. Then there are people who think they get zapped all the time but really don't. They're just eating too much bacon.

But I was once encouraged when it dawned on me that Moses didn't really hear from God until he was eighty years old. I have a few benchmarks in my spiritual walk that I have mentioned. I would not be the only one to suggest that you keep track of those spiritual encounters so that you can look back at them when you enter a period of silence or perhaps have what some have called the "dark night of the soul."

When I was in England, I read the book Honest to God by John A. T. Robertson. I don't remember much of what was in the book except mainly that it went too far. But I did resonate with an experience he shared at the beginning of the book. He was talking about how, in theological college, everyone was having emotional experiences of God and he wasn't. The comment was striking to me. I wonder if one of the dangers of experientially-oriented traditions is to set up expectations that simply do not apply to everyone.

There are no doubt people who grow up in Pentecostal homes today who undergo some of my own pilgrimage. You are raised with a story that leads you to believe that you should be having these repeated and regular highly emotional encounters with God. And you pray for them, and you look at your navel in constant introspection wondering what's wrong with you.

I remember a young man when I was a boy who seemed to go to the altar at my home church in Florida every Sunday night. He never seemed to leave feeling like he had victory. Now it could have been that he simply wouldn't surrender everything to God. I do wonder, though, if he had the wrong expectations.

What would Christian experience look like for a Spock? I imagine it would be a sense of peace, not emotion of a more active sort.

41. When I am going to preach these days, I am looking for a certain peace about a topic or passage. Since I don't preach every Sunday, usually it is a matter of getting a sense of what to preach for a one time event. But I look in a number of directions.

Sometimes I look at the lectionary. [2] What are the passages that a very large number of preachers in the world are preaching about? There is nothing unspiritual about the lectionary, not at all. It guarantees that a congregation will hear from all of Scripture over time.

Sometimes I look at current events or the American calendar. There are two extremes here. First there is the church that cannot tell the difference between its patriotism and its Christianity. This is actually blasphemous but God is very patient with our ignorance. Then there is the other extreme that won't even mention Father's Day because it's not on the Christian calendar.

I reject both extremes. God can sanctify a pagan day and there's nothing unspiritual about preaching the liturgical calendar. I don't remember much from my worship class with Dr. Foutz at Central (maybe I didn't even have one?). I remember thinking that Don Boyd had gone too rigidly in the other way in seminary. Is the word of God reaching the congregation? Is God being glorified and worshiped? OK, we're good.

When we were looking to hire a worship professor at Wesley Seminary, one of my strong desires was that we not hire someone who had a rigid sense of how worship must always be done. There are many who think worship services must only be done one particular way and that all other ways are wrong. It's hard to look at the history of the whole church, especially the growing church in the southern hemisphere, and not conclude that God is far more flexible than some let on in this area.

So I now think/pray through a host of avenues like these until I have a good feeling about something, and that's what I preach. I figure God will tap me on the shoulder and redirect if I get it wrong. Could it be, though, in keeping with something I said earlier, that there are any number of different sermons that God would be happy for you could preach on a given occasion? I suspect so.

42. This might be a good place to mention a couple other trips I remember taking during my Central years. One was to the Washington DC area. It was in a Central van so we must have been singing or perhaps I was preaching. The stop lights didn't hang overhead in the capitol area and the driver of our van inadvertently ran a stop light and got stopped by the police. Not a pleasant moment.

My first visit ever to Marion, Indiana was for one of those college visit days to HQ in the spring of 1987. Headquarters was still in Marion. IWU was still Marion College. [3] We stayed in the now demolished Holiday Inn. At that point I believe Marion still had a Ponderosa and an Olive Garden by the mall. Harmon still ran in front of Noggle and the old student center was still across the street.

[1] As I've mentioned, my mother got a Bachelor of Divinity from Frankfort Pilgrim College in the 1940s. One of the courses she had to take was a preaching class. (Yes, that was completely normal in the holiness movement, for women to preach. In fact, in the 1940s, there was a higher percentage of female ministers in the Pilgrim church than there are in the Wesleyan Church today.)

One of the assignments they had to do was extemporaneous preaching. They drew a Scripture from a hat (or some such) and then had 5 minutes to come up with a sermon. I'm not sure what the value of the exercise was, but it certainly fits with the ethos of preaching I grew up with.

[2] The lectionary is a sequence of Scripture readings that, over the course of three years, goes through almost all of the Bible. One of the greatest values of the lectionary is that it takes a congregation through the whole counsel of God. I think we would find that, among those who think they pray down their sermons every week, there is a tendency to preach the same sermon over and over again from different passages. My dad used to write in the margin of his KJV the name of the preacher and date of a sermon.

[3] Indiana Wesleyan has long since earned its status as a university, but I will say we didn't entirely take the name change seriously when it first happened in 1988.