Yet the vast majority
of congregations in the U.S. still have less than 300 people in attendance each
Sunday, and the methodologies so well suited to the suburban megachurch are
often a poor fit for such congregations. The tragedy is that too many pastors
and lay leaders look longingly at the megachurches and identify that as the
definition of “success,” no matter how unrealistic it may be for their
rural and urban churches.
At the same time,
there are some things every preacher can learn from gifted pastors like Rick
Warren, Andy Stanley, Ed Young (Jr. or Sr.) and many others. Just as Victorian
pastors would have done well to study a model like Charles Spurgeon, so today’s
pastors can gain great insights from studying the ministries and preaching of
today’s most effective communicators. Please note I said study, not mimic.
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• The marketplace
for pastoral resources is getting more and more crowded. For example, when we
started the National Conference on Preaching in 1989, there were few significant
training events for preachers. Today, pastors are inundated with invitations
to conferences, seminars, and meetings. We still think NCP is one of the two
or three most effective conferences for preachers held each year, but it can
be a challenge for pastors to cut through the onslaught of promotional materials
and find the events that will truly make an impact on their ministries.
And the congestion
isn’t limited to conferences. Although a couple of the major preaching
publications (Proclaim, Pulpit Digest) have ceased publication in recent
years, that doesn’t mean there is less competition for a pastor’s
time and attention. New periodicals have emerged, and the big action is on the
Internet. It’s hard to even count the number of web-based “sermon
services” that have hit the web, all offering to make your job easier by
providing pre-digested sermons for every Sunday. (As if God intended preaching
to be anything less than an investment of blood, sweat and tears on the part
of God’s messengers.) At Preaching, we want to give you helpful, quality
tools with which to carry out your divinely-appointed task. But if we ever suggest
that we are going to make your job easier by providing your sermons for you,
you have my permission to slap me up side of the head.
• On a related
front, plagiarism seems to be a more significant issue than it was twenty years
ago. There has always been plagiarism; the temptation to “borrow”
from a book of published sermons has always been a reality of Saturday-night
specials. But the advent of the Internet (and all those thousands of sermons
in digital form) has made plagiarism an increasing temptation and problem. Every
year, we read new reports of pastors who are fired by church leaders when it’s
discovered they have been preaching the sermons of others without attribution.
They expect you to be good; they also expect you to be you.