Friday, October 14, 2011
My travel plans and some initial thoughts
I will be leaving later today (Friday, October 14) for a direct flight from Detroit to Manila ... just over 19 hours! Manila is exactly 12 hours ahead of us here in the eastern timezone. I return on October 29.
I am going to teach homiletics (preaching) for Asia Baptist Theological Seminary.
Over the course of these two weeks, I plan to reflect upon teaching, preaching, travel, and my interactions with my students. My teaching is centered on ideas. People inevitably live out their core ideas. My goal is to help these pastors grow in their ability to think clearly about ideas of the Bible and to communicate them in such a way that people's own thinking is changed, rather than just adding more information or a good experience.
A question I ask myself is this: what ideas drive my attitudes, my emotions, and my actions? Are they good ideas? What would that mean? Your thoughts?
Well, back to packing and hoping I don't forget anything critical!
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I've noticed that often times even with a full grasp of the Bible, pastors' sermons will have a certain repeating theme that is unique to them, casting a distinct color over all of their material. Sometimes this is definitely a bad thing because it shows a bias and/or that they are only selecting texts they like, while other times I think it is simply their natural personalities and/or passions and convictions coming through.
ReplyDeleteI used to listen to Erwin McManus' podcast and read his books when eventually I noticed that all of his messages seemed to talk about having big faith and taking big risks. I listened to Mark Driscoll's podcast a few years back and noticed that he brought up Jesus' masculinity an awful lot.
An example that is definitely a negative one is health-and-wealth / prosperity teaching as well as the name-it-and-claim-it prayer belief system. It seems when people are in these camps, it doesn't matter what they are teaching on or talking about, these things inevitably come up.
You often see this with social justice as well. I remember growing up seeing it with hell, where hell was brought up an awful lot, and added in to whatever text we were learning about.
I think what is happening in all of these examples is that we are creating our own 'little gospels' = the thing that becomes most important to us. Hopefully in my teaching and in all our teaching, the Gospel of Jesus is at the core of all we teach on, as I believe it is what the entire OT and NT point us to.
For me as I look back over my 6 years of preaching weekly, I definitely see seasons where I emphasized certain themes more than the text does. Some of this was simply from being an immature preacher, and I know it happens still that I'm mostly unaware of. It has been helpful to create sermon series with our people's feedback to help avoid this (including yours John, thanks!) I also know it has been very helpful having a wife who tells me when all of my sermons start sounding the same!! :)
-Noah