Proclaimer Blog
The preacher as juggler
I've just come back from a very useful and encouraging week in India. We took a Cornhill team along and got up to all kinds of bible teaching work. It's one step removed from real pastoral ministry of course, but nevertheless it got me thinking about juggling. I took some editing work with me, and what with teaching, preaching, fellowship groups, morning devotions, family devotions, etc I think we managed to cover Matthew, Romans, Mark, Ezra, Nehemiah, Numbers and 2 Corinthians.
And even though that is somewhat unusual, the normal pattern of church ministry is that at any point the chances are you will be juggling several projects. You may have your own devotions, perhaps a Sunday morning series, another for the evenings, a midweek group series, some personal reading 121 you are doing…the list is potentially endless.
And as a preacher you've got to juggle all those balls. I'm not sure we ever really train ourselves for this. We teach people to rightly handle the word of God, but one book at a time. And when we become curates and assistants we're very often given discrete tasks and projects. But we would do well to train our younger men in the art of balancing several teaching projects at the same time. This is not the same thing as time management and project management (though perhaps those skills have some bearing). This is a spiritual discipline of being able to segregate out study and work on more than one teaching activity at a time.
Of course, in some churches, with large staffs, these issues don't arise so often. But I'm convinced that, in the cut and thrust of normal preaching ministry, it's a real skill to learn.