Teachings

One of my primary responsibilities with our church plant is overseeing the teachings each week. Chris is great at sermons, but he is even better at going out and meeting new people. Since sermon prep takes lots of time, we decided that I would teach 3 Sundays and he would teach 1 Sunday, in this season of the church life. This frees up his evenings to meet new people and then after he and L go to bed I can work on teachings. ( I am a night owl by nature)

This has been so good for me for a number of reasons.
1. I have to stay current with Jesus. If I am going to have something to say week in and week out, I have to be spending lots of time hanging out with Jesus and reflecting on the Bible. When we led youth group or various small groups, you could always have a "fun night" planned if you just couldn't get around to a teaching for the week. But not the case for Sunday mornings

2. I have to really spend time extracting out the nugget to be learned. I am a pretty straight forward type person when it comes to teachings. I like it when sermons are easy to follow and there is a main point instead of going all over the place. It is challenging to spend time on verses and figure out what in the world is important about what you just read. Sometimes I get stuck and I have to make myself keep digging in until something clicks. It's so fun when it does click and the Holy Spirit shows you something relevant.

3. It challenges me as a person. In high school I was involved with drama and also competed with speech class. However, after that I never did much with it and so I reverted back to my introverted self. I am naturally very shy and don't prefer speaking to large groups of people. Plus I talk super fast when I get nervous. It is a huge down fall of mine. I remember a few times giving announcements at church and people saying that they had a hard time keeping up with me b/c I talked so fast. But I know that the only way I am going to grow is to have lots and lots of practice. Fortunately we have a great group in our church now, who are super encouraging and give me space to make mistakes and grow in this area. I really love the Bible and have a desire to teach others, so I am thankful for this opportunity to develop this skill.

It's amazing all the dynamics that go into teachings- studying, formulating a thesis and points, making sure you are true to the rest of the Bible and not pulling verses out of context and then delivery. We asked a few pastors how long sermon prep takes them.. the avg is usually 10-12 hours per sermon, more if you are just starting out. Hearing that made me feel much better! I also remind myself that God is bigger than my prep or delivery. If someone has an open heart, God can certainly teach them, even if I am going at lightning speeds. :-)