performance

I’ve written a number of posts on my concerns and issues with preaching, but I’ve got to admit there are a some pluses to ‘old school’ preaching…

The community has the opportunity to live an ongoing narrative through a certain person. The story always picks up where it left off, and as long as the preacher is growing, the congregation can easily follow along.

Having a primary voice speaking each week, makes the community easy to define. Listeners will often describe their church by the lead-voice, which in turn, can create a distinct culture that community members strive to live towards.

Maybe I’m insecure, but when I’m speaking in new places I often feel the need to give it all, partially because I don’t want people to think “that’s all he’s got?”. As an ongoing communicator in the community, there’s less of a need to go at things from all sides and angles, trusting that people know better or you’ll have plenty of opportunities to flesh out what’s on your heart.

If one of your primary tasks is speaking, it really gets easier and better the more you do it.

Having said all that, the above can also lead to unhealthy, narrow-minded, lemming-like communities with uni-dimensional, performance-based, preachers.

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