Enrichment Journal: Eleven Ways to Maximize Your Preaching Potential

All preachers have known the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Not sports events, but preaching.

Take this scenario, for example. There you are gripping the podium, white knuckled, a buzzing in your head, not able to think straight. You discover that what you had planned to say, worked hard to say, and believed you could say, is not coming through. Your mind, blessed instrument that it should be, is not processing the material for your tongue in the way you intended.

You talk, but the punch is missing. Your points are fuzzy; the story you thought was terrific is stale. For some unknown reason you cannot tell it right. You perspire.

You are thinking, If I can just get through these next few minutes, maybe I can slip out the back door before somebody catches me.

You pray for deliverance as you speak, but realize deliverance is not coming. Only the door will save you. Later you mournfully pull the sheets over your head and say as you whimper: “Please, just leave me alone for awhile.”

Does that scene remind you of anything personal? Probably so — at one time or another most of us have been there.

I have been on both the pulpit side and the pew side of that scenario. On the pew side, listening to some other poor soul struggling to get it said with great fervency; and then on the pulpit side, doing the same thing myself, praying for a quick, merciful end. When it happens to you, there is the fateful tendency to believe that it happens only to you. Other people are too smart, too articulate, too spiritual, and, too well loved by God to fail in this way. Besides, it is just proof of what you knew in your heart all along: you simply were not cut out for the ministry in the first place.

You hear the greats. They always soar. You hear the not-so greats. They seem to soar, too. You hear yourself. Where is the door?

When we are crashing on these perilous preaching shores, we react differently: Some don’t know they crash. Some don’t know, and don’t know that they don’t know. And some know and know that they know, and know that others know, too.

What can be done to minimize the chances of failing to connect with your preaching? Better yet, what can be done to maximize the possibilities for enriching people’s lives with your preaching? Read more