The shelf life of a preacheer
30/08/14 05:18
There was a time in my life when I was a huge fan of the radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor. As soon as we were able to hear public radio in the small town in North Dakota where we lived, I began to try to make time on Saturday afternoons to listen to the program. I loved the storytelling style of “The News from Lake Wobegone.” I enjoyed the musical acts. I bought cassette tapes of Keillor’s stories and listened to them over and over again, mostly as I was driving the long distances of a rural pastorate in North Dakota. I resonated with the stories of Pastor Inkfest.
Sometime after we had moved to Boise, it was announced that Keillor was retiring and that the show would be shutting down. He was going to get married again and move to one of the scandinavian countries. They had a huge farewell show. One of the things that I remember from that show was a poem by Roy Blount, Jr. that had the line, “It’s better to have been good and over than rotten and gone on too long.”
The show went off the air for a little while. Then, before long at all, Keillor started up the American Radio Company of the Air in New York. It was a lot like Prairie Home Companion - so much so that the show quickly morphed back into Prairie Home Companion. One of its features was an “Annual Farewell Performance,” in which they made fun of the fact that Keillor had retired and then returned.
And it is still going on. It’s been going on since 1974, with that little burble of a retirement and return along the way. Performers have come and gone in that time. Pianist Butch Thompson performed on the second program of A Prairie Home Companion and became the house pianist until the farewell performance. Thompson appears on the show from time to time as he pursues a varied career. He has performed in our church a couple of times and is scheduled for a concert there next April.
I will occasionally listen to A Prairie Home Companion these days. If it happens to be on when I am driving or while I am doing some work around the house I’m likely to turn on the radio and listen to part of the show. The days of being glued to the radio at that time of the day are over for me, however. Unlike other radio programs that I like, I have not subscribed to the podcast. I don’t need to hear every show. Most of the time I don’t even listen to the whole show.
There will be an audience for the show as long as it continues, in part because new listeners discover the show. There is plenty of room for nostalgia in our lives. But for me, and I suspect for some others, who have been listening for four decades, the show is a little bit worn around the edges and Keillor’s stories are a little bit repetitious. He’s predictable to me and I am rarely surprised by the endings of the stories.
Which has me wondering about my style of preaching. Although my style continues to evolve, there was a time, back in the 1980’s, when there was more than a small amount of imitation of Keillor in of my storytelling. Unlike Keillor, who has a national audience, I have a rather small crowd and I’ve changed congregations. No single congregation has had to put up with me for 40 years.
However, I did just pass my 19th anniversary in this congregation. Although the congregation has changed a lot over the years, there are some folks who were here when I arrived and who will be here next year when we pass the 20-year mark. Of course there are others who have drifted away. I often don’t know the reason why people are no longer worshiping with our congregation. Unless a person dies or moves away it is rare for me to know the reasons for their departure. Perhaps, like Keillor, I have become repetitious.
I work hard at my preaching. I often preach without notes, but such a sermon takes longer to prepare than a manuscript. When I preach from a manuscript, I can write a sermon in an hour or less. With my current style, it takes all week for a sermon to come together, starting with reading the texts months in advance, selecting hymns and other worship elements a season in advance, and then intensifying my study a week out, with group study of the texts, discussing my ideas with the church staff, and finally starting run-throughs in the empty church on Friday. Some weeks I feel ready by Sunday morning when I run though the entire sermon once or twice before unlocking the door. Some weeks, I don’t feel ready when I stand up to preach.
The funny thing for me is that how I feel about a sermon often isn’t the way the congregation feels. It is common for me to be full of criticisms of a particular sermon and to stand int he fellowship hall hearing praise for an especially good sermon when I can’t quite figure out what was good about it. Conversely there are times when I feel I’ve “nailed” a sermon just right and there is little comment or conversation about it after the worship service is finished.
Still, I think I’d like to have “been good an over than rotten and gone on too long.”
I don’t know the shelf life of a preacher. It might be more clear to me if there was a large group of eager new ministers clamoring for my job. But we have a bit of a shortage of leadership in the church today. There aren’t enough preachers to fill all of the pulpits. It isn’t exactly as if I need to step aside to make room for others.
So, like Keillor, I just keep going on. After all, he’s more than a decade older than I am. Maybe he’ll retire for good before I do.
Sometime after we had moved to Boise, it was announced that Keillor was retiring and that the show would be shutting down. He was going to get married again and move to one of the scandinavian countries. They had a huge farewell show. One of the things that I remember from that show was a poem by Roy Blount, Jr. that had the line, “It’s better to have been good and over than rotten and gone on too long.”
The show went off the air for a little while. Then, before long at all, Keillor started up the American Radio Company of the Air in New York. It was a lot like Prairie Home Companion - so much so that the show quickly morphed back into Prairie Home Companion. One of its features was an “Annual Farewell Performance,” in which they made fun of the fact that Keillor had retired and then returned.
And it is still going on. It’s been going on since 1974, with that little burble of a retirement and return along the way. Performers have come and gone in that time. Pianist Butch Thompson performed on the second program of A Prairie Home Companion and became the house pianist until the farewell performance. Thompson appears on the show from time to time as he pursues a varied career. He has performed in our church a couple of times and is scheduled for a concert there next April.
I will occasionally listen to A Prairie Home Companion these days. If it happens to be on when I am driving or while I am doing some work around the house I’m likely to turn on the radio and listen to part of the show. The days of being glued to the radio at that time of the day are over for me, however. Unlike other radio programs that I like, I have not subscribed to the podcast. I don’t need to hear every show. Most of the time I don’t even listen to the whole show.
There will be an audience for the show as long as it continues, in part because new listeners discover the show. There is plenty of room for nostalgia in our lives. But for me, and I suspect for some others, who have been listening for four decades, the show is a little bit worn around the edges and Keillor’s stories are a little bit repetitious. He’s predictable to me and I am rarely surprised by the endings of the stories.
Which has me wondering about my style of preaching. Although my style continues to evolve, there was a time, back in the 1980’s, when there was more than a small amount of imitation of Keillor in of my storytelling. Unlike Keillor, who has a national audience, I have a rather small crowd and I’ve changed congregations. No single congregation has had to put up with me for 40 years.
However, I did just pass my 19th anniversary in this congregation. Although the congregation has changed a lot over the years, there are some folks who were here when I arrived and who will be here next year when we pass the 20-year mark. Of course there are others who have drifted away. I often don’t know the reason why people are no longer worshiping with our congregation. Unless a person dies or moves away it is rare for me to know the reasons for their departure. Perhaps, like Keillor, I have become repetitious.
I work hard at my preaching. I often preach without notes, but such a sermon takes longer to prepare than a manuscript. When I preach from a manuscript, I can write a sermon in an hour or less. With my current style, it takes all week for a sermon to come together, starting with reading the texts months in advance, selecting hymns and other worship elements a season in advance, and then intensifying my study a week out, with group study of the texts, discussing my ideas with the church staff, and finally starting run-throughs in the empty church on Friday. Some weeks I feel ready by Sunday morning when I run though the entire sermon once or twice before unlocking the door. Some weeks, I don’t feel ready when I stand up to preach.
The funny thing for me is that how I feel about a sermon often isn’t the way the congregation feels. It is common for me to be full of criticisms of a particular sermon and to stand int he fellowship hall hearing praise for an especially good sermon when I can’t quite figure out what was good about it. Conversely there are times when I feel I’ve “nailed” a sermon just right and there is little comment or conversation about it after the worship service is finished.
Still, I think I’d like to have “been good an over than rotten and gone on too long.”
I don’t know the shelf life of a preacher. It might be more clear to me if there was a large group of eager new ministers clamoring for my job. But we have a bit of a shortage of leadership in the church today. There aren’t enough preachers to fill all of the pulpits. It isn’t exactly as if I need to step aside to make room for others.
So, like Keillor, I just keep going on. After all, he’s more than a decade older than I am. Maybe he’ll retire for good before I do.