Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lewis A. Parks is Associate Dean for Church Leadership Development and Director of the D.Min. Program at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Mr. Parks co-authored Ducking Spears, Dancing Madly: A Biblical Model of Church Leadership with Bruce Birch and is the author of Preaching in the Small Membership Church, both published by Abingdon Press.

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Preaching in the Small Membership Church

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

I teach in a summer school for persons who were called into ministry in mid-life or later and do not have the resources, or health, or time to endure the rigors of the ninety-hour Master of Divinity program required for ordination in my denomination. Although there are exceptions (doctors, lawyers, teachers), most of these adult students have only a high school education or the GED equivalent. They answered the call while they were driving a truck, serving as a teacher's aide, selling insurance, managing a daycare facility, or managing the power tools section of a home improvement store.

They were disciples of Jesus before they answered the call to ministry, and they served as speakers and teachers in their home congregations. They studied the Bible to prepare for their service, but where and how? I love to listen to their stories. They would get up before dawn and study the Bible for an hour or two before they began the day's work. They would steal away over the lunch hour to work on Sunday's lesson. They would play CDs of James Earl Jones reading the Gospels while they drove their rig across Interstate 70 from Pennsylvania to Colorado.

And now these servants of God's Word find themselves in the most exhilarating role reversal imaginable: they are being paid to study the Bible! They are expected to sequester themselves on a regular basis so they might indulge in a search of the Scriptures. The amateur gets to turn pro! And nobody in the small membership church, neither the one who shares the preacher's blue collar hunger to grow by learning nor the professional who appreciates the privileges accrued by higher education begrudge them this basic act of seclusion behind every sermon.

Of course, some licensed pastors, like some of their ordained counterparts, are not up to the compliment. They will flit from one Urgent Task to another like a hummingbird seeking the next red blossom. They will run on empty, squeezing as many sermons as they can out of the lingering fumes of an earlier period of study. But for those preachers who are up to the call to study that sustains the call to preach, there is the weekly experience that Scripture is an effervescent source of stories, themes, images, and plots just waiting to be discovered and carried back to the community of faith.

There are several points where preaching has a heroic quality about it, and this is one of them. The preacher is aware of being signaled out by the community of faith for a dangerous mission to a distant place, like the dove Noah sends out to find dry land after the flood waters subside. Will you find any sign of hope for them this week? Will you be able to bring back to God's people some message from their Lord?

There is no guarantee that you will. Most experienced preachers will remember a miserable occasion or two of showing up empty-handed on Sunday morning after a week's worth of honest labor. You can try to cover—add hymns, meander through announcements, prolong that baptism—or you can confess it: "the Lord gave me the silent treatment this week" and allow the congregation a peek inside the peculiar prayer risks of your call. Either way the memories of such failures are saturated with shame, and the preacher will seek whatever help there may be to avoid repeats. There are tools and disciplines that increase the odds of success.

Tools

Before naming the tools of the trade, a word about the place where the preacher will use them, the study. If I am sent out weekly to search for a word from God for the people of God, I must have an environment that encourages concentration. In the floor plans of older parsonages and manses, a space was always made for the pastor's study, often smaller than a modern walk-in closet, but always there. Old pictures show a room stacked with books and magazines, cluttered with spectacles, pens, assorted knickknacks, and dominated by a ratty but comfortable chair for reading and a plain table or desk for writing. The light that fills a study is wistfully amber.

The study has been replaced by an office in many parsonages. An office is a room with a different heritage and a different mission. It is a place of commerce, a place for the exchange of information and goods. An office needs to be equipped with the things that will support that exchange, with phones, personal computers, and fax machines. Its furniture should promote attention and conversation: uniform, comfortable but not too comfortable, arranged in calculated angles. The light that fills an office is analytically white.

To adapt one of Winston Churchill's shrewd observations: we shape the rooms we occupy and then our rooms shape us. Preachers need offices because preachers are also administrators, counselors, and coworkers, but preachers never stop being preachers who need the type of space that will promote and absorb the very personal struggle of sermon seeking and sermon writing. A study is a space where Jacob can wrestle with the angel, vowing, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me" (Genesis 32:26).

The first tool the preacher as student of Scripture must take up in this study is a church translation of the Bible from its original languages of Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament). There are half a dozen or so of them available, but two have emerged as preeminent:

• New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America (NRSV) • Holy Bible: Today's New International Version, copyright 2005 by the International Bible Society (TNIV)

A church translation is to be distinguished from a paraphrase. In a paraphrase, a person or group like a Bible society offers a version of the text with more attention to clear contemporary expression than to the meaning or intent of the original Hebrew and Greek language of the Bible. A number of paraphrases are in print, such as J. B. Phillips's The New Testament in Modern English (1958); Kenneth N. Taylor's Living Bible, Paraphrased (1971); the American Bible Society's Good News: The Bible in Today's English Version (1976); and more recently, Eugene H. Peterson's Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (2002). Paraphrases are compelling. The flow of the text seems less inhibited. There is little theological shoptalk to get in the way. The contemporary jargon reaches up from the page like an old friend inviting you into the conversation. For all these reasons paraphrases are helpful when it comes to introducing a seeker to the Bible or for personal devotions or for unfolding a text in the sermon. But paraphrases are not the church's translation of the Bible and should not be used as if they were, as most writers of paraphrases are quick to point out. Paraphrases are not the primary version of the text the preacher studies in sermon preparation or reads in worship or preaches from in the pulpit.

That version will be the product of one of the church's major collective efforts as was the NRSV and the NIV, or the King James Version (KJV), their prototype written four hundred years ago. The NRSV and NIV represent the voice of a broad consensus of the church. The number of scholars engaged in the writing is large enough to ensure a faithful...