When I got moved into my first parsonage (it didn't take long, I had everything I owned in an old Ford station wagon) I set out to visit every home in that town of 900 or so. After all, I was pastor of the Baptist Community Church. At first, no one was home. Then a wise lady in the church told me a story. The only people, she said, who wore neckties and knocked on doors were either tax collectors or bill collectors.
I got it.
I lost the necktie and white shirt my seminary professors thought so highly of, and amazingly most people were home when I knocked on their doors. I heard an appropriate story, and I didn't fall asleep. Over the next few years I heard lots of stories. People in that community loved to "visit".
When I preached about outreach, I didn't tell people to reach out. I spoke from my experiences with real people I was meeting, without breaching any confidences. I told stories. I only fell asleep during my sermon that one time when I had been up all night helping search for a hunter we couldn't find. He didn't reckon he was lost. We thought he was lost. But that's a different story. . .
Preachers who want to keep folks awake do the stuff they preach about, and tell stories about it (without breaching confidences or embarrassing folks). It's not, "You should reach out to your neighbor" (prescriptive) but, "I stopped by the Jones family last week and we talked about the kinds of fish he used to catch back in Iowa. Who might you stop by and visit with next week?" (Descriptive, a mini-story). Or, "Harold was telling me how he stopped at the Smiths a couple of weeks ago, and they told him some interesting stories from their childhood."
OMG! Those are such short stories! Do you suppose they would lead to short sermons?
What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.
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