Preaching: Your elders are involved in helping you choose your series. Do you have any involvement of others in the actual preparation of the sermon itself?
Lucado: I don’t. I’ve got some close friends who have a research team that help them, and I have considered that. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. It probably would strengthen the sermon. We do have a teaching team though, that fills in when I’m out. We have our singles minister and our adult discipleship minister. When I’m out of town, like I was last weekend and this weekend, they alternate. So we will sit down and often times as we plan out the schedule we’ll see that during a certain sermon series they are going to be bringing a third of the messages or even a half if I’m going to be traveling. So we’ll sit down and create the series together in that case. That’s what we did for the January and February series we’re doing.
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Your most recent book is titled Cure for the Common Life. You are talking there about people finding their calling, finding the gifts God has given them. Tell me about your preaching strategies in that series.
Lucado: What really set this one apart is unique. We wanted to find a tool by which we could help people really understand their unique giftedness. As God orchestrated events we came in contact with an organization called People Management, Inc. I was really captivated by their philosophy, which is, basically, that every person is unique. Consequently, no psychological grid works, because if you try to place every personality in one particular grid then you’d need about 4 billion grids because we are all so unique. I was really captivated by that. It just made all kinds of sense to me, so we took our whole staff through the PMI approach. It was wonderful! It was so liberating for each of us to find our own strengths.
About that time we kicked off the series and started working with them in putting this into a church format. How can we help the church -- because they work with corporations -- how can we help the church find their unique giftedness? It’ll be a real short answer to a long process, but we finally resulted in a seminar that we could offer our church, called the My Story Workshop, whereby people can go in and spend half a day and evaluate their own strengths and walk out with a clearer caricature or picture of their uniqueness.
In the sermon series, I wanted to give people permission to be unique and offer a prescription on how to find their uniqueness. Giving them permission was fun. That was in the sermon series, which was called Cure for the Common Life; it took about 18 weeks actually. And then the prescription was this My Story Workshop.