Preaching Dangerously...Continued from page 5

I love the variation of it, the sponta­neous elements of it as well as the invita­tion it is to do serious careful theological work. The congregation is really being called to become theologians and I have the privilege of trying to instigate, encour­age and challenge them, as I do myself to try to become a better theologian, in how I think and act out my faith. I love both those dimensions of preaching.

PREACHING: What about the challenges of preaching?

LABBERTON: I think it’s the limitation of my own humanity and my own gifts. I have some gifts that make me capable of com­municating some things, but I feel like I am deeply inadequate in communicating many other things. I really love to hear other people preach because I like what they bring to it?in terms of their own personality and their strength in God in difference to mine. I can admire preachers who do things that are really different than what I do in preach­ing. I don’t feel a call to imitate them, but I am aware that I wish I could say or be to my congregation more than I am in my communication. I can do what I can do and I can only do what I can do.

PREACHING: Are there some things about preaching that you know now that you wish you known when you first started as a young pastor?

LABBERTON: When I first started preaching I never preached with notes. I found it much more natural to just communicate straight to the people. Seminary bred that out of me?teaching me that it was important to develop a sermon in a different way, to develop a manuscript, to compress that into an outline, etc. I would say that during that time my preaching suffered. That was not a good season. I probably let that go on with­out really acknowledging how much I felt hampered by it.

One day, I was literally in the middle of preaching a sermon and I thought, “I am never going to do this again.” And I have never done it again. So looking back, I wish I hadn’t done that. It didn’t in anyway enhance my preaching. It didn’t do what it allegedly was going to do. It actually restrained both me and the Spirit.

PREACHING: So you preach now without any notes.

LABBERTON: Right.

PREACHING: Do you write anything?

LABBERTON: No I don’t. I just spend a lot of time thinking, observing. I may jot notes, but I frame it in my mind. My mind tends to organize things in various ways. The image is like tea steeping to me. I am trying to just soak in the text, tying to soak in the images, soak in the stories, the metaphors?the biblical ones as well as the intersections of those with the experiences of my own life, the experiences of the congregation or the experiences that I see in the world around me.

There is a point that seems to happen somewhere in that process where it starts lodging in my mind and in my heart that this is the right way into that. When I am about to go out to preach the sermon on a Sunday, I have a very clear picture of what I think the text is saying, a clear picture of what my game plan is going to be. As far as I am concerned, it is all up to God. So we will see what happens in the course of the service and the course of preaching.