pat loughery

I have a hard time defining what is that I do in a sermon time – beside the fact that it changes week to week, it’s an evolving process. I was thinking that it might be helpful for me to describe the goal set I have. Note that these are our goals, and we have varying success levels at reaching them.

1. Place the story under consideration for the day into its proper context the metanarrative of the story of God.
It’s our goal to see the text of the day in its larger context among the historic people of God, so we try to ground the text first in a Hebrew or Greek understanding (thank God for N. T. Wright even though he makes my head hurt).

2. Create space for people interact with the story itself in their lives.
We do this by discussing the text and its impact in our lives, and encouraging questions from anybody, anytime. We also try different forms of experiential storytelling, an experience that will grow over time as we get better. As an example, when we worked on the parable of the sower, seed and soils, we took a big bag of grass seed and walked around outside our building in the park behind, where we have concrete paths, thistles down by the river, grassy lawns, horseshoe pits full of sand, and conveniently for this parable, a nurse stump (a small tree growing out of a dead stump).

3. Allow the living Word to form and transform as it impacts people in ways unique to us as a community and to each individual person. People get to make their own application in most cases.

I think of the time as a form of guided discussion – I do have a direction in mind that I’d like us to follow, but I’m very carefully listening to the voice of God in the people’s words, and in my own head in case we need to go in a different direction together. I try to provide a framework in which to have a discussion that will be productive in reaching our goals.

How this time is unique for us:
We spend probably 45 minutes weekly in this part of our liturgy. Normally, If I were to give the “Pat’s talk part” of the sermon at once, it would probably usually be 15 minutes, maybe 20 if I’ve gotten lazy. So half, maybe 2/3 of our time is dialogue.

I haven’t done a 3-point sermon in more than a year. I stopped using Powerpoint slides before that – I think Powerpoint can be really helpful for visual learners, but it got to the point at which the discussion was not linear enough that I could flow along with slides.

We often use movie clips as illustrations, discussion starters, or just tangentially related mind-openers. Tomorrow we’ll use the scene in Finding Nemo where Dory and Marlin are being lulled by the peaceful, quiet light (after the shark scene), and then chased around by the toothy fish attached to that light. The key quote comes from Dory: “Good feelings – gone!”.

We’re starting to work with longer sections of scripture than a few verses, which makes it easier to connect with the text’s context. Tomorrow we’ll use a bit over a chapter of Genesis.

At any point in time anybody can interrupt to ask questions, which we may or may not drill down into. If we don’t drill down at that moment, we come back later, or after the benediction, or in small groups, or whatever. I don’t answer all the questions; often (usually?) if a question is directed at me it’s either answered by somebody else in the group or I ask somebody else to start the discussion in response, and then we let it flow around the room.

Here are the tricky parts of doing the Sermon//Discussion:
1. It’s tough to control/guide/direct if the group goes someplace that’s not very helpful.
2. It’s tough to control time – specifically ending at a particular time.
3. It’s tough to transition from discussion into prayer ministry for whatever God’s doing that day.
4. There are the typical issues of extroverts talking too much; introverts not talking at all – and you have to respect peoples’ boundaries if they really just don’t want to talk today.

To be revised along the way…