Old Books Worth Reading: Fenelon's Dialogues

Now this will only interest preachers and those who care about preaching. I realize that. But there are two French books now in English translation that are worth any preacher's reading.

1. Alexandre Vinet

Alexandre Vinet's Homiletics, or A Theory of Preaching is one of the best theologies of preaching in the French tradition of situating preaching underneath the umbrella of art. Unfortunately, it is only easily found in good libraries. It has been easily one of my favorite readings in the history of homiletics.

2. Francois Fenelon

Fenelon lived in the times of excessive waste under King Louis the XIV. He never breathed a day when that particular king was not alive. The ridiculous pomp of the court infected the pulpit and caused great overemphasis on style, ornamentation of words, and eloquence-so-called. Fenelon wrote a book that seems to be aimed at all the young preachers who were swept up in amazement at well-wrought words that were really lacking wisdom. It's called simply Dialogues

If you read them let me know what you think.

Old Books Worth Reading: Winter of Our Discontent

John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent has mixed reception among Steinbeck fans. I have always loved my reading of Steinbeck. It takes a mature reader of course, and I think requiring students in grade school to read Steinbeck is a great way to ensure most of them will never read Steinbeck again. Steinbeck's East of Edenis widely regarded as one of the best novels ever written. It changed the way I preach the Old Testament and cracked wide open the riches of the Cain and Abel story for me. But again, it takes a mature reader.


The Winter of Our Discontent causes some Steinbeck readers to think that Steinbeck's last novel was his worst. Others have found his switching from first to third person unreflective (I disagree--I think it's brilliantly on purpose and so subtle first time readers think it an accident). Still others find it a preachy novel. Perhaps that's why I love it so much. I love preaching. And this book is fantastic preaching as secular novels go. I have read it four times and found the things most critique the book for to actually be among some of its greatest strengths. It is my most read Steinbeck novel, more than East of Eden, more than Wayward bus. I like it more than the short stories of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flats. Though not as powerful from a literary perspective, I relish it more than Of Mice and Men. Have you read it? What have you thought of the book?

Old Books Worth Reading: The Search for Significance

I like old books. This last week I spent an hour on a porch in a Thai restaurant carefully thumbing through my yellowed and cracking pages of an original William Cullen Bryant poem collection. It reminded me that there were some books in my collection that needs more frequent attention. So I am starting a series on old books that are worth reading (again). This book isn't so old, but for many it will seem old. Written in 1990 its past the twenty year mark. 

It's still in print for good reason. If there is anything many Christians struggle with it is a sense of worthlessness. Sin leaves its ugly mark not only in pride as we are often reminded, but also in its twin cousin shame. 

Shame is a debilitating and even deadly disease. Thousands die from it every year by their own hands. Just as difficult a reality is that millions live a walking death underneath its shadow year in and year out. They are the approval addicts and the ones stuck in the performance trap this book speaks about. 

I first found the book in the bottom of a garage sale book box. I looked at the cover (not the one pictured...the first edition) and was pulled in. Billy Graham said every Christian should read it after all. Well, some of you would put it down right then. But for me, I thought his opinion was worth a fifty cent stab in the dark. I read the book three times. 

And so, I recommend it to you. I recommend it to all Christians who ever hear their own thoughts label them worthless, stupid, or not good enough. I recommend it to all Christians who ever wonder how in the world they could be worth the death of Christ. I recommend it to all Christians who have worked hard and long attempting to gain enough approval to finely approve of themselves. And, I recommend it to me. I am going to read it for the fourth time. Feel free to tell me what you think. 

6 Unusual Ways to Save Time

Saving time is a hard thing to do, but incredibly important. Really, we don't save up time for later like money piled in the bank. But we can be more efficient with it, stop committing so much of it way in advance, and learn to use it for the things we value most. This past week I have been thinking about the unusual time savers that don't seem to get mentioned much, but save the most time. 

Here they are:

1. Take a typing course. I stumbled on this in college with a game loaded on my old macintosh computer (back in 1995 I was the only Mac guy I knew.) It was a fun game. I got hooked mostly because it allowed me to compete against myself in the form of words typed per minute in its training game. I spent a half hour every day on it, and limited myself to a half hour. By the end of the tests I was clocking 85 words per minute adjusted for errors. The average typing speed in America is 36 words per minute. I have recently decided that that little program has saved me more time in the last fifteen years than any other single time saving activity. 

Just to test that fact, I took a typing test online without any practice to see how I was clocking now. I stopped writing this post to do it. The test had lots of '-'s in it. I have never been able to train my pinky to hit that thing. So I clocked at 76 words per minute adjusted for errors. Not bad. According to the typing test, if I only type 2 hours a day (I type more like 5) I would save 5.5 hours a week. Take the test. Then set a new typing speed goal. 

2. Make a prior commitments list. I don't know where I first learned this, but it was probably when someone first pulled a "Sorry, I have a personal policy..." line on me. I don't usually use that line, but I use that principle. It's a good thing to give time to people--when you freely choose to do so and it serves a good purpose. 

It is not good  for you to keep giving time to people out of guilt, manipulation, fear of consequences, and other sorts of pressure games that waste so much of our time. So, I often have a "prior commitment." For the guilt givers of the world, they don't have the right to know what that prior commitment is, they just need to know I have a prior commitment. I have a list of those prior commitments just to remind myself of them. I rewrote it recently to add a few. 

Here's how it works:

A student with poor boundaries and a bad work ethic asks me, "Can you get together with me for lunch next week?" I say, "I am sorry, my lunch calendar is full right now with prior commitments,  I just can't make it work. Why don't you send me an email on it and we can bounce our ideas back and forth that way?" If they were to continually push  me I might reveal the policy more point blank. Then if they get offended, that's their issue. 

What should be on your list of prior commitments? It could even be as simple as "I am committed to reducing meetings with people who drain my energy and motivation." Then, "Sorry, buddy (with a smile) I have a prior commitment." Or if they are the persistent type who will simply ask for another time (most likely) "with all the other things I am already committed to this month, I just can't make it work. What is it you wanted to talk about?" 

3. A regular bed time. I know. What a fuddy duddy thing to do. You can certainly break it now and then for parties, New Year's Eve, or a great date. But incredible amounts of time are wasted by a late night show, or a book you just couldn't put down. The next day no amount of coffee can redeem your lack of brain functioning. The best hours for sleep, scientifically, are from 10pm-2am. If you slept from 2-7am (five hours) you would not be as rested as if you slept from 10-2 (four hours). So for me, I try to get as much of those four hours as possible. That means I often am up at 5 am instead of 7. If I go to bed at 10 I naturally wake up between 4:30 and 5. If I go to bed at 11 pm I naturally wake up at 6:30 to 7 am. And I feel less rested with eight hours (11-7) than I normally do with 6.5 to 7 (10-4:30). Between the hours of 4:30 and 7:00 am I have written 578 articles in one year without adding to my work day or taking away from my family. It really does save time. Once this becomes a habit it isn't a discipline, it's a joy.

4. Do the nasty job first. To do lists are great, but they can't replace the impulse to just get something out of the way. When you have a dreaded job hanging over your head it saps your energy, distracts your mind, and usually engages you in all kinds of procrastinating. Get it out of the way and a sense of accomplishment emerges coupled with a burst of energy and motivation. If you put the nasty job you don't want to do up front, you will finish the entire list faster. A friend of mine was able to earn six figures a year working half days in the banking industry doing that. He simply made the awkward calls, wrote the difficult emails, and finished the tedious paper work first thing every day. As a result, he was almost always done by noon. 

5. Procrastination. Now this seems like a complete contradiction, but it is more like the flip side of the coin. There are some things that just really should not get done right away. They are distractions and misdirections. An email comes in (ding) and the immediate impulse is to check email. A phone call comes with a number you don't recognize and you feel you should answer. Intentional procrastination can often save time. If you waited for five emails to pile up before allowing yourself to check you would save yourself a half hour a week since the average refocusing time after an email is over one minute long. The average cell phone conversation is 3 minutes and 15 seconds. The average voice mail is 18 to 22 seconds. That's three minutes of savings every time you are able to handle a message without a conversation. And frankly, you should be able to decide who you need a conversation with and who you do not after you find out who it is on the line. 

6. Push up the deadline. Okay, now I am really flip flopping, right? Procrastinate, no get it done early, no procrastinate! All of these are judgment calls and cannot be used in every situation. But this one can really save you tons of time when you have an expandable job to finish. Work fills the time you give it is the old adage. And it is most often true. Do you have something that you feel will just suck away whatever time you give it? Push up the deadline. With the clock ticking down your adrenaline will kick in gear and it will get done faster than you thought possible. So in that meeting when they say "Should we expect this  by next Monday?" Say, "No, I'll have this by tomorrow night at 5 pm." Just make sure you don't overdo it and commit yourself to something you can't possibly do. 

As a teacher I have to give feedback on assignments. For the longest time I followed the standard rule of one week for feedback. The result? It took a lot of time and it violated #4...every teacher hates grading. And, it took a week. So, I started vocalizing my own faster deadline. "I will give you comments by tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest." The first time I said it, I gulped. Amazingly though, adrenaline kicked in and I thought creatively (because I had to). I realized, hey I type faster than I handwrite (#1) and they can read it better anyway. Okay, that's it no more hard copy comments. I'll send an email with a bulleted list. That saved hours already. Next, I keep saying the same things over and over. Well, if I type it, I can save a text file and just copy and paste and edit it to personalize. Bingo, more hours saved. 

 They got great feedback because I didn't have to keep rewriting the same thoughts over and over. It freed me to give even more unique comments in less time. I didn't nitpick over all the little details that mattered less since the clock was ticking. And the students were happy to not be in performance anxiety limbo for a week. Nice. I didn't even have to organize all the papers and hand them back. I just sent an email and I was done, and so were they. The unexpected bonus was I was relieved of the meetings after class where students had to ask for a translation of my handwriting. More time saved. All because the deadline got pushed up. 

What are your unusual time savers? 

Why Did God Move the Stone?

Every holy day season I find something in the scriptural account that causes  me some questions. Last Christmas it was, "Why didn't God let Herod kill Jesus? If all he needed to do to save humanity was die, why not die young?" It led to some interesting conclusions.

This Easter, the stone is bothering me. Jesus shows up a little while after the resurrection in the middle of a room with locked doors. So according to the gospels Jesus can move through sealed and locked areas post-resurrection. Why couldn't he move through a sealed and locked stone? Wouldn't that have been more impressive? Wouldn't that have cleared the disciples of the grave robbing charge? 

Do you have any ideas why it is important to the resurrection that the stone be moved?

Writing a Sermon in a Pinch

One hour in the study for every minute in the pulpit. That's the old line that many, usually short winded, preachers use. But as any pastor who preaches knows, sometimes the week doesn't give much opportunity for sermon work. If you are preaching 25 minutes, 25 hours of sermon work isn't realistic on most weeks in general anyhow. Ideally of course, the sermon processes we were introduced to in seminary and modified to make our own over years of preaching keep us working ahead on crafting deep and rich sermons. Unfortunately, some times three funerals and a wedding fall all in the same week as a heated board meeting, a personal family crisis, or some other time eater. When this happens, we may need to write a sermon in a pinch. Here's how. 

• Go to a familiar and meaningful passage. Try to find a passage that has affected your life in significant ways and continues to do so. It can be a life verse of sorts, or a verse you just bumped into again the last week. Ideally it will be in a book of the Bible you have researched before and are familiar with without extra intensive exegetical work. 
  

• Get familiar with the passage again. Read it out loud several times. Circle a few words that strike you as interesting. Read it in a different translation. This can all be done in ten to twenty minutes of work. 
  

• Use your most comfortable sermon form. If you are a narrative preacher, now is not the time to force a point-based sermon out of your brain, or vice versa. If you typically preach with verse by verse commentary, don't change that this week. Mentally lay the sermon form like a transparency over the text. In narrative sermons something like a conflict-resolution pattern should emerge. In point based sermons a controlling thought with supporting thoughts should come to the fore. Write those elements down on a pad of paper or your computer. 

• Write a central preaching sentence. So far, your work may not have taken an hour. Certainly this kind of process allows little room for bringing you up short, surprising you in great ways, or fully forming you in the process. But, you are in a pinch. Let go of your ideals for a week. Write a sentence that you think summarizes the heart of what you see in the passage that can serve either as a refrain, or as a centralizing claim of the sermon. 

• Brainstorm sermon illustrations for each of these categories: metaphor or analogy, inspirational true story, hypothetical situation. For the first, you can fill in the blank of this sentence "In this passage God is acting like..." or "ignoring this passage would be like..." For the second category think of a true story which illustrates the problem of the text, the central principle of the sermon, or the application of the message in contemporary life. For the last, think of it like creating a parable. "A certain woman was..." or "Imagine one of us...
  

• Do what helps you get comfortable with your sermon the fastest. For some people they have to write a manuscript before their nerves calm down. Others have to preach it out loud before they can ever feel comfortable with a sermon, manuscript or not. Some need only an outline with a supporting story, quote, image, metaphor, or application beneath each major move. Only you know what that is for your sermon. 
  

Some general tips on writing sermons in a pinch:

*  Don't be afraid to pull out and dust off an old sermon you haven't delivered at this location before. Rework the sermon to be sure it is fresh. Reengage your own life with the sermon, how should it change you this week? 

*  Often you cannot use an old sermon in toto, but a sermon illustration from a different sermon can give this new sermon the wings to get off the ground. 

*  Sometimes a good quotation from a  trusted source can drive a large section of a sermon. If you find one, you can treat it as a secondary text for exposition. Walk through the quote word by word. 

*  This process shouldn't be your weekly pattern or over time the depth of your sermons will be shallow, the motivation you have in ministry will decrease, and your own personal spiritual formation will suffer. But for a week of crisis, you need some grace. 

© 2010 David B. Ward All Rights Reserved.