Preaching: Tell me about your philosophy of preaching. Do you see yourself primarily as an expositor?
Stanley: Not really. I used to be more so. My approach is this: 1) What’s the need? What is it God’s laid upon my heart? 2) What’s the passage of scripture that meets that need? What is the key to me, as far as sermon preparation is, what’s the theme? What is the theme that I want to deal with? That theme ought to be evident all the way through the sermon, from the introduction to the conclusion. I want people to walk away with one thing. If they’ll walk away with the central truth that I want to get across, then I’m happy I think every point in that sermon should go back to that major theme.
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I think about it like a tree trunk. That is, all the limbs make up that tree. You don’t have a limb over here alone; you don’t have oaks and palm trees together. So if you have one central theme, and you hammer away at that for 50 minutes or 45 or whatever it might be, and you have a sense of direction that’s clear; a sense of progression, a sense of order, a sense of clarity. Inother words, I want to be able to walk away and know that they’ve heard one thing they just can’t escape.
Preaching: Tell me about how long you typically preach? Is 45 to 50 minutes about a normal sermon?
Stanley: Yes. About 50 minutes. Somewhere between 45 and 50 minutes.
Preaching: Tell me about your preparation process through the week, as you’re getting ready for a message. How far out do you plan, and then within that week getting ready for the message, what’s it look like for you?
Stanley: I come home on Sunday afternoon, and I start thinking about next Sunday. I do a little bit on Sunday and get my mind in that direction, so I can be thinking about it in my sleep—in my subconscious when I’m sleeping—and I can think about it when I’m not sleeping. You know when you’re a pastor, it’s all the time.
On Monday I’ll just do a little bit, just to get an idea of the direction I’m going in. Sometimes I don’t get that direction until Wednesday or Thursday, but that’s what I’m after. I call it the mystery moment for me. That’s when I’m dealing with a passage or with a theme and all of a sudden, “Bang!” I know that’s the sense of direction, and I’m onto it then. So if I’m dealing with a passage of scripture, I want to get the theme out of that passage, and go from there. Or if I have a theme, I find a passage and I really dissect that passage to see what it says, because I want to use that to prove something, but I don’t want to manipulate it to prove something that’s not true.
Then I will study a great deal of Thursday and Friday. I want to have it finished, most of it finished, at least by Friday evening, so on Saturday I can just look at it, and pray over it. But sometimes it’s Saturday. I don’t like that, and I try to make that an exception. I have discovered that if I finish far enough ahead of time it can get cold on you, and I don’t want that to happen, so I really don’t even want to finish until sometime on Friday evening or thereabouts.