If I can find the time tomorrow, I want to begin a series on preaching that I’ve been mulling over for about a year now. I know a lot of blogs focus on the particular vocation of the blogger; I’ve never really tried to articulate the things I believe to be true about preaching. Obviously there’s a lot that I would want to say about it, so it’s been this sort of daunting task to me to try and give voice to my own “philosophy” of preaching. But I hope to do just that over the next few posts. This may or may not be very interesting to most of you, but I’m going to give it a shot. So stay tuned.

Until then, I wanted to share this part of an interview Rob Bell gave recently. Bell was asked specifically to identify some of the pain and difficulty he experiences in congregational ministry. I found his comments to be very insightful, not particularly because I’ve been incredibly wounded over the years by the people to whom I minister, but because I know so many of my colleagues who have. There’s a saying in the ministry: “Sheep Bites Hurt”. That’s been painfully true in the lives of so many ministers. I share this with you as a reminder that the men and women who serve in our congregations are not impervious to pain.

I would not be who I am if it wasn’t for relationships that didn’t turn out and people that really, really, really hurt me. When your work has a sort of public dimension to it, people feel free to say whatever they want. So everything from your family to your motives to your integrity to your weight, people feel free to comment on. Over time, you either become cynical and hard and bitter, or you learn to forgive and somehow for some strange reason keep your heart soft.

I hesitate to talk about it, but when you do what you do and there’s a public dimension to it you are exposed and vulnerable and out there and there are ways that people react and things that people say that are very, very painful. And you’re just kind of, if I could use the word “faithful,” you’re just trying to be true to what’s been put before you. That is a “wow, I was just kind of doing my thing.” That does produce a sort of pain.

If you’d like to read the rest of the interview, click here.