“I feel closest to God when I’m running.”
When a parishioner said this to me after I arrived at a new church, I didn’t hesitate. I had preached a sermon on Paul’s image of our bodies as “temples of the Holy Spirit.” I knew that this parishioner was not the only member of the church whose fitness journey was closely related to his spiritual journey.
“Would you be willing to speak about that for a few minutes during a sermon?” I asked him. Soon I had a sermon series featuring testimonies by the runner, a practitioner of mixed martial arts, and a swimmer.
Since then I have been on the lookout for people willing to share their testimony, whether as part of a sermon, the call for the offering, or a minute for mission. When a parishioner demonstrates a gift for weaving Scripture together with a story from their own experience, I know they may be ready to try their hand at preaching.
As with most things in church life, it is often easier for those of us who are pastors to do all the preaching ourselves than to equip lay leaders to do it. However, a few factors have converged to make preaching by lay leaders a powerful spiritual practice for the church at this moment:
- As notions of authority have shifted in our culture, our members have come to seek spiritual wisdom from their peers and not only from credentialed clergy.
- The prevalence of social media and the popularity of memoir have made people more comfortable with sharing their personal experiences.
- With a pastor shortage across denominations, employing “in-house” talent for worship leadership and preaching when the pastor is away is a creative alternative to relying on outside pulpit supply.
Our congregation took baby steps to identifying lay leaders with a gift for preaching. What began with the “safe” topic of fitness deepened into territory that invited greater soul-searching. In a sermon series that tied the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to Scripture, I invited members of the congregation to share stories about times they had realized their lives were unmanageable (step 1) or times they had conducted a moral inventory of themselves (step 4).
I led a class in the liturgy of confession, based on the book Standing Naked Before God (see resources below), and invited participants to write and lead a call to confession and assurance of forgiveness based on a story from their own experience. Church members were willing to do this because it was a communal effort, with everyone taking turns.
As testimony became part of our congregational culture, it created a shared expectation that all members of our congregation have important stories to tell about God at work in their lives. It also opened us to the possibility that some of them have gifts for preaching.
Eventually I challenged the elders who make up the Session of our Presbyterian church to take seriously our tradition’s conviction that they are spiritual leaders of the congregation. “Some of you may be called to preach. I am here to equip you. Who would like to give it a try?” Several of them agreed to take turns preaching once a month, employing different approaches that required more or less support from me:
- A “tag-team” sermon in which the lay leader and I each spoke
- A “how’s this draft?” sermon that took final form after I gave significant feedback
- A sermon created through the six-hour online Faith+Lead course You’ve Been Asked to Preach: Now What? (see resources)
- A sermon written with the step-by-step guidance of A Sermon Workbook (see resources)
Each of these offerings was unique, and each was received with gratitude. What were the benefits?
- The congregation got to hear from different voices, representing different genders, ages, theological views, and professional backgrounds.
- The preachers grew spiritually by immersing themselves in a passage of Scripture and listening for God speaking to them through it. As educators know, the best way to learn something is to teach it (or preach it) to others.
- I came to see sharing the pulpit not as my necessary concession to exhaustion or a burnout prevention strategy, but as a life-giving spiritual practice for the members of my congregation.
This summer our worship theme was “The Fruit of the Spirit.” Lay preachers took turns preaching on love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The accessibility of the topic made it easy for people to say yes to the invitation. And in the process of preaching on these fruits, they discovered another fruit of the Spirit in our congregation: the strengthening of spiritual community when laypeople proclaim the Word. Thanks be to God!
Suggested Resources
- Standing Naked Before God: The Art of Public Confession, by Molly Phinney Baskette, Pilgrim Press, 2015.
- A Sermon Workbook: Exercises in the Art and Craft of Preaching, by Leonora Tubbs Tisdale and Thomas Troeger, Pilgrim Press, 2013.
- You’ve Been Asked to Preach: Now What? (Faith+Lead Academy course)
