Wesley Seminary New Zealand Cohort

Over the past few days I have had the fantastic privilege of journeying with our new students in New Zealand through the Pastor, Church, and World course. Although we are meeting in New Zealand the group of students pictured below represents well the diversity that exists in the Pacific Region of our world. Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji and America are represented by the students in this new Wesley Seminary cohort. In the Fall, this Pacific group will join into a cohort of North American students so that the two become one! God is opening up doors for Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University to invest in Christian leaders around the globe. To God be the glory, great things He has done and is doing!

   

A Prayer for the Class of 2012

Father,

May the life of Christ the son inspire these graduates to use their degree not to keep their hands clean but to get them dirty, not to succumb to self-service but only selfless service, that they would combine critical thinking with compassionate living as they partner with Christ in redeeming and restoring the world one person at a time, one family at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one nation at a time.

May your Spirit come upon these graduates so that the degrees they have earned would not cloister them off from the needs of the world but compel them to engage the needs of the world in the name of Jesus Christ by proclaiming good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, release for the prisoner, and to set captives free.

May You, Almighty God, gift them with the three smooth stones of faith, hope, and love that will enable these graduates to conquer Goliath-sized giants in the land such as poverty, disease, and tyranny, racism, sexism, and classism, addiction, desperation, and oppression, consumerism, narcissism, and egotism. May the degree they worked so hard to acquire propel them not toward a career through which they earn a paycheck, but toward a vocation through which they build the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

This we hope, this we pray, this we believe, this we pursue in the name of Jesus Christ, the one who used his degree, his status, not to be served but to serve by giving his life as a ransom for many. Amen!

Pastor, How Do You Rate on the Authenticity Scale?

The overuse of the word “authenticity” seems, ironically, inauthentic. The term is in desperate need of definition to preserve its value and to promote its practice. As far as I can tell, those pastors who preach and lead with power are not only anointed; they are authentic. I still haven’t quite figured out whether divine anointing fosters or follows human authenticity. What I can say, with some degree of certainty, is that the most effective pastoral leaders are authentic. Although authenticity is more easily discerned than defined, the virtue surfaces in the following ways:

·         Authentic pastors laugh at themselves but take their role seriously. Pastors who take themselves too seriously are usually surrounded by people who don’t. The opposite is also true. Christian leaders who don’t take themselves too seriously are typically followed by people who do. Of course, pastors can laugh so much at themselves that it becomes a sign of insecurity instead of security. Also, though authentic pastors may laugh at themselves from time to time, make no mistake- they are serious about faithfully fulfilling their kingdom role. They are, like the Christ they follow, dead serious about their mission but humble about their self.     

(Low)       1                      2                      3                      4                      5          (High)

 

·         Authentic pastors value people so much it hurts. There is a world of difference between a pastor who values people as pawns for self-glory and those who value people with no strings attached. Authentic pastors, no matter how many times they are disappointed and hurt by people, keep loving and taking risks on people. The inauthentic pastor, likely due to past pain, keeps people at arm’s length unless there is a chance the person can be a pawn in the pastor’s plan for power and prestige. In other words, the authenticity of pastors can be discerned by how well they love and how highly they value people who cannot help them in any conceivable way.     

(Low)       1                      2                      3                      4                      5          (High)

      

·         Authentic pastors welcome constructive criticism. Criticism stings. However, authentic pastors welcome critique, especially from the people they lovingly lead. Some congregations have had a long line of ultra-defensive, hyper-sensitive pastors which make the flock gun-shy about offering any constructive feedback at all. The authentic pastor will initiate a loop that welcomes constructive critique and safety for the lay people who offer it. This is one of the reasons why the authentic pastor gets better and not bitter over time, while the inauthentic pastor coasts bitterly and, most of the time, fruitlessly toward resignation or retirement.   

(Low)       1                      2                      3                      4                      5          (High)

·         Authentic pastors commend and empower others. One of the occupational hazards that pastors face is the need to be appreciated and affirmed. On most days this hazard is a sleeping dragon that doesn’t awake until someone else on the pastor’s team begins to shine and receives affirmation. Inauthentic pastors feel threatened and become jealous. What is more, they begin to wage a secret war designed to hold others on the team back from fulfilling their potential. Authentic pastors are so consumed by the joyful work of commending and empowering others, they don’t have time to worry about being noticed. Authentic pastors are not threatened by other gifted leaders on the team because they are too focused on valuing, commending, and empowering those leaders.  

(Low)       1                      2                      3                      4                      5          (High)

·         Authentic pastors are acutely self-aware. I have been a pastor for more than 15 years and have had the privilege of developing pastors for nearly a decade. Most of my closest friends are pastors. In my estimation, self-awareness is one of the biggest challenges pastors face. Some of us try to be what we think people want us to be. Or, perhaps we try to be the type of pastor we always hoped to be. The authentic pastor is fully aware of her strengths and weaknesses. No one needs to guide her on a walk from the la-la land of her dream world toward the real world. She is fully aware of her abilities and honest about her deficiencies. This self-awareness prevents her from portraying what she is not and pushes her to embody who she deep down knows herself to be.   

(Low)       1                      2                      3                      4                      5          (High)

So, how do you rate yourself on the authenticity scale? Rate yourself on a scale of 1-5 for each of the evidences of authenticity described above. I have yet to meet an inauthentic leader who has developed a healthy, vibrant congregation. Anointed, authentic pastors, on the other hand, tend to cultivate a congregational culture of authenticity that sends transformational ripples into the world. Could it be that the starting point for the pastor who wants to build an authentic Christian community is to first become an authentic person?

 

Lenny Luchetti     

A Sample Preacher Growth Plan

Preacher Growth Plan

·         Read Deeply and Broadly

o   Read one preaching book every two months in the following order: Telling the Truth by Beuchner, The Witness of Preaching by Long, and Preaching in the Spirit by Kinlaw

o   Subscribe to Newsweek and spend 15 minutes each day reading headline news

o   Read one of the top five NY Times Bestsellers every 6 months

·         Develop the Imagination

o   Sense and draw the biblical passage I am preaching at least once each month

o   Write an allegorical short story based upon the focus of my sermon at least once every other month

o   Read Lord of the Rings and watch the movie looking for ways the film director imaginatively engages and interprets the text

 

·         Attend Seminars, Conferences, and/or Classes

o   Attend the Preaching Essentials Workshop in the Spring

o   Attend the Gordon Conwell Preaching Conference in the Fall

o   Audit a preaching course at Wesley Seminary

·         Listen to and View Sermons

o   View or listen to two sermons per month from the following preachers: Barbara Brown Taylor, Steve Deneff, Andy Stanley, Cleophus Larue, Craig Barnes, Anna Carter Florence, Francis Chan, and Haddon Robinson.

o   Listen to one of my sermons monthly and view one of my sermons quarterly in order to analyze strengths and weaknesses of my sermon content and delivery.

 

·         Receive Feedback

o   Identify and meet with a preaching coach every three months who will view one of my sermons with me and provide immediate feedback and coaching.

o   Distribute an identical congregational survey at the beginning and the end of every year to solicit commendation and critique regarding preaching in my local church

 

·         Experiment with Creative Sermon Forms

o   Employ one creative, out of the box, sermon form per month in the coming year.

Preaching Dress and Sermon Length

When I preach in a context that is unfamiliar, I always ask two questions that reveal much about the people to whom I will preach. I inquire, what is the appropriate sermon dress and length? How long I preach and what I wear are factors that, despite their less than spiritual significance, can help or hinder the reception of the sermon. While some preachers may claim a certain sermon length or style of dress as God-ordained, these considerations are determined more by the preaching context than any other factor.

Sermon length and clothing must not only fit with the people in the preaching context, they must also match the personality of the preacher and the community that surrounds the preaching context. So, whether preaching in the local church I serve or as a guest preacher in unfamiliar territory, I aim to be in close proximity to people in the church, to people in the community around the church, and to my personality in terms of what I wear and how long I preach.

Match the Preaching Context

Wherever we preach, we want to be sensitive to the particularities of the context. Although I am quite comfortable preaching with jeans, I wouldn’t even think about doing so in a church with a large number of senior citizens. I own a few suits, but I wouldn’t dare sport mine when addressing teens or twenty-somethings. I saw a well known Christian author speak at a conference for mostly mainline pastors. He was a white young man donning dread-locks and a long skirt-like shirt. His dress did not distract me from the important and impactful message he shared, but it did become an obstacle to several of my colleagues in attendance. It was unfortunate that some allowed the preacher’s clothing to keep them from hearing his message, but I wonder if he could have done more to prevent his dress from blocking his Gospel message.

Sermon length is another contextual issue. I preached as a guest at a multi-ethnic church in Queens, NY that asked me to preach a 45-60 minute message. The suburban, mostly white congregation in the Midwest that invited me to preach wanted a 25-30 minute sermon. The preacher who stays within the bounds of contextual expectations regarding sermon length is more likely to be heard than the preacher who totally ignores these boundaries.   

Match the Preacher’s Personality

While ignoring the preaching context is disrespectful, ignoring your personality is inauthentic. As much as possible within the parameters of your context, be yourself. If you are a 23 year old preacher, my guess is the three piece suit is not your style even if it fits the context. If you are a 75 year old preacher, you may not want to wear baggie jeans and a t-shirt even if that dress aligns with the style of most of the people in the preaching context.

I tend to be a 25-30 minute preacher, perhaps because I am a product of my sitcom culture. Unless I’m invited to speak longer or shorter, this is the sermon length I hit every time. You probably have a default sermon length too, along with convictions to support your modus operandi. The point is, know yourself.  

When a local church hires me to be their pastor or someone invites me to be a guest preacher, I assume they want me to be me and not a clone of some other preacher. However, in an effort to be myself I must also be sensitive to the context. In some instances, we preachers have to find a compromise between the context and our personality. For example, you may be a jean wearing preacher in a congregational context that expects and desires a suit wearing messenger. Perhaps you can compromise by wearing a shirt and tie without a suit coat. If you prefer to preach 25 minutes and the context expects 45, perhaps you can stretch to 35. Know yourself, know your context, and preach in a manner that is sensitive to both.         

MATCH THE COMMUNITY

The community around the preaching context matters too. If you are a local church pastor you will likely want to wrestle with the question: What kind of dress would foster a sense of welcome to people in the community who do not yet attend the church? One of the churches I served was attracting people from the lower social classes within the community. Few of them owned or could afford a suit. Our pastoral staff and most lay leaders dressed in a manner that the economically challenged could adopt for themselves.

The preacher must also consider the community when it comes to sermon length. One church I served as pastor was in an area consisting mostly of Roman Catholic churches. Many of the people moving into the community were from a nominal Roman Catholic background. So, most people from the community who visited our church were used to the 10-15 minute homily of the Roman Catholic liturgy. I didn’t want to overly exhaust them with a 35-40 minute sermon so I tended to go about 25 minutes, which fit with my personality. The preacher’s sermon length and style of dress should not be a needless barrier to community people who visit the church and are processing the decision to return.

QUESTION:

How does or how should your personality, local church, and community context impact how you dress and how long you preach?

Preaching Essentials: Acknowledgments

I remember writing one of my first major papers in college. The research and writing for the paper took hours. Because getting a good grade on this particular paper was important to me, I gave it to one of my more intelligent friends to proofread. I reassured him “this is good stuff.” Well, that “friend” laughed his way through the entire paper and then asked me, “Len, are you really going to give this to your professor?” Somehow I found the grace to keep him on my friend list.

When I sent the proposal for this book along with a few chapters to Keith Drury, Wayne Schmidt, and Harry F. Wood, and inquired, “do you think there’s a need for a book like this on preaching,” they responded with enthusiastic support. They didn’t laugh at me, at least not to my face, but pushed me to “go for it.” These three wise men have served as my ministry mentors through conversations, observations, and writings, so I heeded their words. If they, like my college buddy would have laughed at my work, I might not have had the moxie to submit the proposal.   

Keith Drury is especially worthy of my thanks. He read the entire manuscript and gave me insightful feedback that, no doubt, made this book better than it would have been.

I am grateful to the team at Wesleyan Publishing House, Don Cady, Craig Bubeck, and Kevin Scott, whose excitement for the book and optimism concerning in its potential heightened my own excitement and optimism.

My colleagues at Wesley Seminary make the vocation of teaching so much fun. We eat together, think together, debate together, teach together, and pray together. Their energetic love for Christ, the Church, and students inspired me to write a book like this one. 

Amy, my wife, always believed that I would finish the book and, once I did, that it would be worth reading even when I doubted both. She is a rock indeed!

God amazes me. He used something as odd as preaching to initiate the reorienting of my life toward him. As if that wasn’t enough, he even called me to preach so that through my voice he might do for others what he did for me. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, God outdid himself by calling me to the vocation of helping other preachers “find their voice.” I thank God in advance if you discover or recover your God-given voice for preaching by reading this book.

Lenny Luchetti

What Does Wesleyan-Methodist Preaching Do?

While there are many preaching streams that feed into the river of the Christian movement, we will investigate here the unique impact of the Wesleyan-Methodist tributary. We will navigate this body of water with the help of prominent theologian Albert Outler. He locates four lenses through which John Wesley developed his theology: Scripture, Tradition, Experience, and Reason. These lenses will guide us in exploring the impact of Wesleyan-Methodist preaching.   

Scripture: Let’s start where Wesley starts- with Scripture. When I think about the biblical base for Wesleyan-Methodist preaching, I am drawn to a phrase that comes out of the Exodus Event. When God decided to pick a people to be his very own, a group through whom he would bless all the nations of the world, he chose oppressed Hebrew slaves who had been in bondage for more than 400 years. And God used a prophetic preacher named Moses to get the exodus ball rolling. Once the people are liberated, God says to them through Moses, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high” (Lev. 26:13). God did some chiropractic work by breaking bars and lifting heads, giving an undignified people the dignity that comes from right relationship with him.

In the New Testament, those Hebrews found themselves in a familiar kind of mess. This time they were in bondage, not in Egypt, but on their own Palestinian turf to the Romans. And God raised up another emancipator, a prophet-preacher like Moses, named Jesus. In his inaugural sermon, Jesus shows his preaching cards by quoting Isaiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19). Jesus had a chiropractic mission just like Moses. The preaching of Jesus, according to Jesus, was focused on breaking bars and lifting heads, giving oppressed, down-trodden people a new dignity that would come not from the political policies of Rome, and certainly not from the Jewish aristocracy, but from participation in the Kingdom of God through relationship with Christ.

Through the preaching ministry of Moses and Jesus, people whose heads hung low in disgrace, defeat, discouragement, and despair start walking with their chin up, with heads held high in hopeful belief that they could by God’s grace become something- a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a blessed nation through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed, a church that partners with God in the missio Dei. The preaching of Moses and Jesus caused these kicked-to-the-curb Jews, oppressed by mighty Egypt and Rome, to view themselves and their world through the lens of the kingdom of God, a kingdom in which the first are last and the last first, where the poor have a place, and those with regrets can start over. And that’s what Wesleyan-Methodist preaching does!

Tradition: As we move from Scripture to Tradition in our exploration of the distinct impact of Wesleyan-Methodist preaching, it makes sense to focus on the ministry of John Wesley. Wesley, like Moses and Jesus before him, was a bar breaker and head lifter. He was a member of the Anglican Church, a social club for the English elite at the time. The Church was not a welcome place for underdogs like the poor peasants losing their jobs to machines during the Industrial Revolution and washing away their troubles with alcohol.  They had no hope and no help, especially from the church. So Wesley, this well-educated Oxford don and high churchman, senses with Moses and Jesus a burning call toward his people in order to “break the bars” of their yoke and cause them to “walk with heads held high.” All of a sudden, jobless and hopeless alcoholics are being liberated and sanctified to serve the purposes of God. Black women are leading class meetings. Wilberforce is seeking the abolition of slavery. Slave-born Richard Allen is set free and sets others free through Gospel preaching. Phoebe Palmer, a woman, gets up the nerve to travel as an evangelist and proclaim good news.  All of this because a guy named John Wesley, anointed by God’s Spirit, had the compassionate courage to preach in a way that broke bars and lifted heads. And they walked with heads held high, their spine straightened by Jesus the Chiropractor, the glory and the lifter of our heads! Preaching got that ball rolling, and justice rolling with it like a river! Because that’s what Wesleyan-Methodist preaching does!

-Experience: Our personal experiences can also help us get a grip on the distinct impact of our preaching tradition. Therefore, I’m going to get a bit testimonial-it’s a Wesleyan-Methodist thing! Here is how God stirred in me this notion of preaching as a ministry of breaking bars and lifting heads. By the time I turned 16 years of age, I was pretty down and out. I found myself burdened with the bars of a yoke that kept my head hung low. My parents were battling an addiction to heroin and cocaine. Drug addiction swallowed them up. We lost our house, car, and, worst of all, our dignity. I was labeled the son of drug addicts who would never amount to much. So, I lived into this shame and inferiority. I became, at the age of 16, a high school drop-out alcoholic. The bars of my yoke were suffocating me.

Through a variety of circumstances and people, too detailed to chronicle here, God got a hold of my life when I was 18 years of age. I experienced the words of Charles Wesley’s And Can It Be, “long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night, thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell of my heart was free, I rose went forth and followed thee.” God broke the bars of my yoke and caused me to walk with my head held high primarily through the preaching of others. Though the details of your experience are surely different, God broke the bars of your yoke and he caused you to walk with your head held high. He did this to us so that he, through us, can do it for others. That’s what Wesleyan-Methodist preaching does!

Reason: Finally, we explore the impact of Wesleyan-Methodist preaching through the lens of Reason. I’m not sure any of this is real reasonable; it doesn’t make sense that God would choose to come alongside of underdogs like Egyptian-oppressed Hebrews, or Roman-oppressed Jews, or English peasants, or a down and out teenager. I’m not sure any of this is reasonable, until we realize that this is exactly how God works over and over again; it is his MO! Once we get to know God we realize “his ways are higher than our ways,” his reason beyond our reason. But we can begin to see a pattern emerging with God. He empowers a mouthpiece – a Moses, a Jesus, a Wesley, and you! And through the proclamation of good news to people starving for good news, people are raised to a whole new level of living according to God’s economy of scale. God has called the likes of us to preach in a manner that breaks the bars and lifts the heads of people by connecting them to Christ. Could there be a more reasonable reason to give our very lives to this task!

Faithfully proclaimed messages by preachers whose lives embody the good news they preach is chiropractic. It is not some American dream, political ideal, or ecclesiological well-wishing, but Jesus Christ unleashed and untamed who breaks bars and lifts heads! That’s what Wesleyan-Methodist preaching does!