November 5, 2014

I’ve been preaching for thirty years.

Thirty years of creating new content every week for 45-50 weeks of the year. For the first fifteen years I was preaching or teaching three times a week – on Sunday morning, Sunday night and a mid-week bible study.

It all adds up to over 3,000 preaching/teaching events in thirty years. An average of two per week.

At some point I have to run out of things to say, don’t I? Actually, at hundreds of points I have run out of things to say.

If you’re the preaching/teaching pastor of a local church, you know the feeling. The Saturday night dread. The “what am I going to say this week that they haven’t all heard 100 times before?” panic.

It still happens to me. I guess I’m a slow learner.

The good news is, it doesn’t happen to me nearly as much as it used to, because over the last three decades I’ve learned a few tricks – what computer geeks would call hacks, but we’ll just call tools – that reduce the pressure and make Preacher’s Block a little less frequent.