Preaching Teams: Shared Ministry and Message
This post is an excerpt from my e-book, Preaching Teams: Sharing the Load and Building the Kingdom Through Collaborative Proclamation. For a free download of this 40-page book that covers a philosophy and rationale for team preaching, as well as many practical tools and tips gleaned from my 20-plus years on preaching teams, please click here:
No Ivory Tower Prophets!
Most of us who love to preach have fantasized at one time or another about reaching a place in ministry where preaching is all we do. Wouldn’t it be great to be a senior pastor with dozens of staff members who could deal with all the banalities of ministry, leaving us to be “30,000-foot leaders?” We could spend our days in our studies plumbing the depths of the Scriptures, thinking deep thoughts, conceiving grand visions, and preparing sermonic masterpieces for Sunday mornings. Each week, we could descend from the mountaintop like Moses with a timely and profound word from God, and then retreat again to our sanctuary, never to be bothered with the mundane and messy details of our parishioners’ broken lives.
The problem is, God never called anyone to be an ivory tower prophet. Moses spent a lot more time in the arid wilderness with his stiff-necked people than he did on the pristine mountaintop in the fire and smoke of God’s presence. The prophets pronounced their “Thus-Sayeth-the-Lord’s” not from the safety of lofty perches but from the vulnerability of city streets crowded with rebellious hearers. Jesus left the throne room of God, emptied himself of his eternal transcendence, and permanently took on human flesh to walk paths of weariness and want with those he came to save. What makes us think we can proclaim a relevant word to a world mired in the mud of sin, while keeping our hands clean and our shoes neatly polished?
Good PReaching flows from Good Ministry
The best preaching will always flow from a life immersed in ministry. Ministry is indeed messy, but this messiness is the context of our proclamation. The life we live among our people during the week will both shape and validate the message we preach on Sunday.
Preaching as a team of servants who share ministry in a local church multiplies the impact of both ministry and message. The ministries of all shape the message of each. The preaching of the team is fleshed out authentically in the lives of team members as they live and work among the people. And the message itself is an expression not of an individual, but of an entire community.
Team preaching does relieve the stress of a lead pastor by sharing the load with others, but it does so much more. It can lead to a kind of community discipleship and shared life message that a lone preacher could rarely accomplish. The Sunday morning message becomes not merely the pastor’s sermon, but the church’s proclamation to one another and to the world.
