The evolution of a preacher

Lee Stephenson: Welcome, everyone, to our Unfiltered podcast. My name is Lee Stevenson, executive director of church planting, local church planter as well.

Danny Parmelee: Danny Parmelee. I oversee church planting for Converge MidAmerica.

y, I mean, going from zero to: 2000

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, definitely changed over time and is still changing. I am still changing my kind of how I do my preaching prep, maybe even a little bit of delivery. So I think that in the beginning, as a church planter, because I was doing everything, there were the Saturday night specials where I literally was doing ministry all week, so discipleship meeting with people, and it was like, OK, I can, you know, pull this sermon together. And because I was doing my own PowerPoint slides, and everything, I could literally just show up at the last minute with all of my stuff, kind of deliver it. And for me, during that time, I was doing outline. And then memorization was the main thing. So it’s like, I could have had a few different points. But for the most part, it was extemporaneous type of preaching that fit me the most in seminary, I learned, manuscript learned, outline, learn the different ways and just found at that time that it, you know, extemporaneous was the kind of what I felt most comfortable with. So I did that for quite a while. And I know that there were some changes and shifts within there, where then I started, you know, writing a few more things down. I know that one of the biggest shifts for us is that when we did go multisite, we prerecorded services. And so because of that, and actually, let me take a step back once we started to grow more, I wanted more feedback on sermons. And so I started having other people give input before it was delivered. So a lot of sermon evaluation happens after, but we tried to put it before it was preach. I was like, Hey, don’t say that or say this, or what do you say in there? Go ahead and say something.

Lee Stephenson: So were those, like those people that you brought to the table to get feedback, were they staff, were they lay people, were they leaders in the church?

Danny Parmelee: It was all of those and intentionally. So we did use in our preaching evaluation came one of our leadership pipeline development, intentional things that we did, to the place where if I just kind of fast forward to, before I left Epikos, what we had is that we did a full sermon evaluation that happened on Thursday. And then the sermon was recorded on Friday. And then, you know, delivered live on Sunday, which is funny, because, you know, we were when we recorded it, we were preaching it to an empty room, which is now, everybody knows that. So it’s not like, I used to tell that to people like, whoa, what, really?

And I’ll tell you what though, here’s what it forced is that then, to get to that point, is I would have to manuscript almost the full sermon to be able to give it on Thursday, to deliver it. And there were it was a combination, there was usually about five to eight people in the room, that included pastoral staff, and young leaders that were residents or interns, those that were learning how to preach, learning how to do those types of things. And then we also tried to have some diversity, culturally and gender wise, which I can’t tell you how many times I had said things that a woman in the room raised her hand and was like, you cannot say that and I thought it was so funny, you know, and her name’s Lisa, actually, and she was actually one of our staff members. And I just remember a couple times that you cannot say, and I’m so thankful cuz I went back to my wife and I said, hey, what if I would have said this? No, you cannot say that type of thing. And what’s interesting is preaching got more and more difficult, the bigger the church got, so I thought it would be the reverse, like, Oh, you have more time you can focus on it and I get that some of this is flesh, but the pressure was bigger, where if I did a Saturday night special and I had 100 people, no one’s listening to podcasts at that time, you know, yeah, we might have recorded it. But that wasn’t a thing. So I was like, hey, if I just laid a dump of a sermon, no big deal. People went out to eat after church, they had a great day, they came back where now it’s like, OK, you’ve got video, you’ve got people watching online, you’ve got podcasts, everything you say, even from the community, you know, people that are looking for the gotcha moments, even other churches looking for gotcha moments, I mean, everything. So the pressure, just seemed more and more. So the prep time seemed to kind of increase. So I say all of that. I mean, that’s just kind of our own, you know, my own personal experience, is that you probably will morph over time, and I think that’s okay. Because you should be kind of, you know, asking God to kind of continue to grow you and your preaching and I’m horrible with the actual Bible verse. But Paul talking to Timothy is, like, have people see you like, grow and increase in your preaching he says somewhere. I don’t know. I’ll have to look it up when you’re talking. And then, to me, that was just an encouraging thing that people kind of like over time could see that you’re actually growing in your preaching. And so it, you know, it requires changing. So how about you?

Lee Stephenson: Well, real quick, before I talk about kind of my experience with it. So let’s say year one, how many hours do you think you were actually spending on sermon prep versus year 10? Just pure hours.

Danny Parmelee: Oh, man, that is so hard. And I think this depends on how God has wired the person to prep. But I mean, there was times where we’re talking two to three hours, you know, maybe a half hour on a Monday, another half hour on a Wednesday and the remaining, whatever, hour or two on Saturday. And for me, again, no matter what I was, the sermon wasn’t done until it was actually delivered. So it’s like, I’m still tweaking things and what in that, so in the middle, that increased over time, once I started to have some more people. And the other thing that changed for us is because our small group structure was based off of the sermon, it meant that I had to get my stuff done earlier. So even when we were single site, but we connected our small group curriculum with, you know, the sermon content that required me then to have things done on a Thursday and Friday, so that those questions could be, you know, made up and then sent out to the different small group leader so that they could do that for the next week. So I probably increased a bit more. And then man, yeah, by the time that we were, you know, multisite and stuff. And here’s the other part that changes, we had a teaching team, so you could spend more time on a sermon, because if you weren’t doing all 52 weeks, we had three main people on the preaching team, and then a couple others that would kind of just speak in from time to time. So that put me you know, at one point, I was probably down to like 50%, you know, 50 to 60% of the time preaching.

Lee Stephenson: Did you like that for you personally?

Danny Parmelee: Loved it, absolutely loved that. I mean, it just it was I know, there’s multiple ways to do it. But I just, it was glorious. It was glorious for our church, that very different preaching styles. I loved it because it allowed me to spend time on leadership and discipleship some weeks and other weeks focus on preaching. And we really did do team, I mean, we worked because again, of our small group stuff, we outlined all of our sermons together in the year because we actually had printed curriculum. So we would do that all summer and then launch the series in fall, which would then have the, you know, printed curriculum of all of that. So we would actually write, cuz we had one message. So whoever was preaching, it was all campuses. But that outline was developed by all of the pastors, even if you weren’t the one preaching it, you know, and same if you are preaching, you had help from other people to do it. But honestly, the evaluation was the biggest thing because it was a time where people really said and push back and said, Now wait a minute, I don’t think the text says that or your outline doesn’t make, you know, chronological sense or logical sense. Or, hey, that illustration really isn’t that helpful, or you need an illustration there because I don’t know really what you’re saying about and it, honestly, it’s a hard thing because it’s like your peers, but it’s what really gave the strength of really the teaching environment that we did foster at the church.

that point, once we went over: 1000

Danny Parmelee: Yeah. Did you feel the pressure more the more the church grew or not?

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, I would say so. I would definitely say so. And again, I don’t think it was a I don’t think it was an arrogance-driven, pride thing. I think it was, honestly, like the group because of just the sheer size, we have much more diverse stories of people in the seat. And it just took more time to process, OK, I know this person, what they’re dealing with, and I know this person, and what they’re dealing with, how do I communicate this in such a way that both of them take something away that’s going to be meaningful to them? That kind of processing just took longer to think through. And I know like even the research talks about that it takes pastors 180 sermons to even find your voice as a communicator, you know, so if you’re not doing a ton of preaching before you plant the church, that means it’s going to take a couple years before you actually get comfortable with yourself as a communicator, let alone everybody beginning to trust you as their pastor and so just relax and it is a muscle memory, repetition type of art that you just got to get better at the more you do it.

Danny Parmelee: One thing that I will add that you just or expound upon a little bit more that you just said is that, as people get to know you more, too, also plays a role into it. And I experienced that now because all the preaching that I do now is essentially guest preaching. And the way I realized that so much of the way that I connected at Epikos because I knew people. They knew me. They knew my dumb, dry humor. They knew this word. Now I’ll land a joke and I’m like, man, this is hilarious. And it’s like, they don’t know, should they laugh? Should they cringe? And I’m like, oh, my goodness, have to change that. Which, this is a point of actual encouragement, even if you are not a super great preacher to what you said before the relation, relational equity that you’re building into people, then what you say and because it lines up with your life will actually have an impact, even if you’re not the most eloquent speaker with the best illustrations. They get it and it’s actually having an impact. So understand that the ministry that you do Monday through Friday and Saturday will actually, you know, enhance your preaching on Sunday. So

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, well said, and I would say even now it’s changed for me because, you know, I’m full time in my Converge role and volunteer in the lead pastor role and so my time to develop sermons happens on airplanes, it happens in practice, and you have to be creative and so just to those out there that are working a job either part time or even another full-time job, you can do it. You do have to be creative. And you have to recognize that God still shows up and the Holy Spirit still works, even if you aren’t able to put as much time that you hope to. Don’t minimize your family time for the sake of the ministry as well. So as you go out and preach the word, be faithful to the text, preach Jesus and enjoy the privilege it is to be able to do that on a regular basis. Thanks for tuning in. This has been our Unfiltered podcast, till next time, keep it real.