Take Paul. I mean, what an audacious statement, but at the same time what a great gut check: “Follow me as I follow Christ.” And there was also a confidence in that. I’m going to be following Christ, which means you can follow me. So I think that’s a really hard one.
Preaching: You plan your preaching menu at least a year out, don’t you?White: I do. I take an annual study break; and I do as much planning as I can, developing multiple series. Usually that’s good for the first six to seven months. And then it starts to get a little fuzzy and more audibles are called. But I certainly try to.
I look at a combination of vertical and horizontal. First of all, I develop all kinds of ideas and files on these ideas and series. So I might enter study break or use the study break to develop 15, 20, 30 different series, of which I know I can only do 8 or 10. Then I start looking at which ones are the best, and I also start looking at an appropriate menu of vertical and horizontal. And I know that we want regular decision weekends, where we’re inviting people to cross the line to faith and challenging
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them appropriately.
I also look at what are the kind of the non-negotiable leadership things that I have to address in any given year, whether it’s one stand-alone talk or a series, like money or serving or loving one another in an appropriate way. I also look at what’s happening in our world. Is there anything on the horizon? I mean, obviously when I was doing my planning last year I knew that we were going to be entering into an election like we hadn’t had in four years or eight years. So there are certain things that are like the gorilla in the room—to not talk about it would be scandalous.
So there’s all of that going on: I look at what series are the best? What’s happening in our culture? The vertical versus the
horizontal. The non-negotiable leadership issues that I need to do. And then I also ask, “Where is my church at?” A great discipline that I do is that at least once or twice a year at our midweek service we have what’s called “Dialogue Night.” (Our midweek services are just once a month, and they’re called “First Wednesdays.”) On those nights the entire event is where people can ask any question they want of me. They write their questions on cards. They’re turned in. I don’t see them on the front end. And they can ask any question they want spiritually. Those are some of the most popular services we do.
What’s interesting is that we’ll get hundreds and hundreds of these questions turned in. So we get this huge stack, and maybe we can go through 15 or 20 in the course of the night. The people who are going through the cards are trying to get them into basic topics so they can say, “Well, there are a lot of questions about this.” And they’ll ask me one question that might represent 40 cards or something. But I go back through later, and I read every single one of those. And it’s a goldmine because if I see that 300 people all asked this basic question—OK, I’m a little slow, but I think I can smell a series. I can pick up on that.
