I’m using a Lenten series this year written by Concordia Seminary President Dale Meyer and his homiletics students. I’ve only used a sermon series written by someone else a few times in my near-ten years of ministry, and those were for the Lenten “round-robin” services I’ve participated in from time to time. In fact, apart from those three or four years, I’ve never used a sermon written by someone else. The few I have for those services was with some serious heavy re-writing. Ok, St. John Chrysostom’s Easter Sermon is the exception; I’ve read that at one of the Easter services a few times.
I approached using this prepared series a bit apprehensively. Not so much out of pride–Dale Meyer is a better preacher than me and most others. But I was apprehensive because preaching is a very personal thing for me. My sermons are for this congregation, for this time, for this moment and are more than just monologues, but are proclaimed in relationship between my and the people, preached to me and to them together. This is why I have never posted a sermon in its entirety here. They are not for general consumption and are not words for everyone.
Having said this, I preached the second in the lenten series this evening and realized that one benefit to using a series is that already it has brought some observations and topics that I do not generally address. This evening the topic was our identity, namely, our fragmented selves we present to the world versus the identity we have in Christ through baptism. In the past, I’m sure I have touched on this as a theme, but never as a topic, never as directly as this sermon did.
For this reason, I am grateful that I am using the series, and realize that there is more to using a prepared series than avoiding work, which I thought was the case before. It has definitely given me more to consider, and may just enrich my preaching in the future.
Possibly Related posts:
I end up thoroughly rewriting the canned sermons – but being given the theme and direction (which I might not have chosen on my own) can be nice and stretch my own preaching skills a bit.
Many a congregation wishes its pastor would use a sermon or series of sermons prepared by someone else!
I’m never, ever against doing that, provided of course the sermon is appropriate and a good one and you approve its contents.