Trials of a recently qualified Reader, or "Isn't it annoying when the Vicar is right?"

It was my turn to preach this Sunday evening.

I have been struggling to make the sermon interesting – it had loads of good stuff in it but rather dry and academic. (Me? Never!) The Vicar likes the Sunday evening service to be creative – my sermon wasn’t. What’s more the Vicar likes to grill the preacher before the service to make sure the sermon will meet his idea of creative. So, whatever I have planned, he will tell me to do something different. I am sure that this is really not the way to treat an inexperienced preacher – he has always done it to me and to be honest I am more anxious about my time with him than I am about standing up in front of the whole congregation. It can be quite crushing to have your carefully crafted sermon hacked and slashed before you’ve even started.

So this week, since I was already feeling demoralised that my sermon was not going to be my best, he kept me for half an hour…yes, half and hour….telling me to change it.

In the end I had to break it into two parts, one near the beginning of the service and one near the end. He also told me to stay away from my notes. So it was guaranteed to be mostly Um and Er with only a bit of jumbled sermon in between.

The clock trundled inexorably towards the time of the service start, and then 5 minutes beyond because timekeeping at our church is really quite shameful…

And then I stood up for my first section. This part was mostly introduction, and then the sermon part was fairly straightforward, mostly scene setting for deeper stuff to come later. So I actually managed to stay away form my notes and do a reasonably good job only missing one or two important but not critical points.

Then I had to wait for my second slot…the anxiety of waiting for my turn twice in one evening!

Again, I did a fairly good job of staying away form my notes. But it did all start to unravel in the way that I expected. I had to go back to the lectern for a prompt, then had to shuffle my notes to find the place, then knocked the remainder of the notes on the floor. Normally I have them in a ring binder, but this time I was trying to be un-encumbered and just had the loose sheets, so they scattered to the four winds. The rest of the sermon was mostly from memory! Plus, there was a section where I referred to a whole series of 14 different verses, which I had listed for the projector team to display on the screen behind me as I came to each one, but the list was somehow wrong and none of the verses displayed corresponded to what I wanted to say. My fault, not theirs.

So all in all, it seemed like a disaster, and I have only had one harder time in the pulpit (the first time I preached at this church, when he had made me re-write the entire sermon from scratch late on Sunday afternoon)

But…..

A lot of people spoke appreciatively to me afterwards, and not just the sympathy vote. It seems that I am much easier to listen to when I ad-lib more.

So unfortunately, I have to admit, the Vicar is right, and I should spend less time carefully crafting an intricate theological sermon and more time memorising something simpler. But this is hard, as it is not my natural gifting.