If you’d asked me twenty years ago if I’d one day stand in front of people week after week and deliver a public ‘speech,’ I would have looked at you like you had four eyes.

You see, I was never one who desired the stage. I knew I was called to vocational ministry, but never in a million years would I think that God would be funny enough to call me behind the pulpit every week as a Senior Pastor.

Senior pastors were a different breed I thought (and was probably not far off from there), and I was not cut from that cloth. Not because I couldn’t handle administration, not because I couldn’t do hospital visits, but because I couldn’t imagine having to craft and preach a week-to-week good sermon for a congregation to listen to!

For me, the never-going-to-be-called-to-preach person, I still don’t know the best way to define a ‘good sermon.’ There are some that I’ve preached that I think I watch sail right over the outfield fence, with no response from congregants. There are others that I feel like I’ve barely bunted inside the baselines that people are still talking about weeks later. What is a ‘good’ one? Well, I’ve never been great at controlling where a baseball goes when I hit it either.

For the average congregant, the ten to thirty minutes that their pastor preaches are full of many different mindsets: boredom, exhaustion, anger, joy, conviction, challenge, and sometimes even pain.

Sermons can swell the heart, rally a nation, and even change a movement (just think of where the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century would be without sermons!).

More often than not, however, sermons are delivered in pulpits with limited reach by pastors who, like me, are often hitting home runs when we feel like we’re bunting (and vice versa).

The reality is that the Spirit is the one who takes the hours of research, prayer, practice, and writing, and turns them into a sermon that speaks to people. Some Sundays that is just one person, some it is a whole congregation. Hardly ever, is it no one.

Why am I typing this? As someone who preaches upwards of forty+ sermons a year, I just want to encourage you to be kind to your pastors. Yes, there are moments when they may need to be asked about what they preached, but there are never moments where they should be compared to other preachers (“if you were more like Pastor Mega Steve, then things would be better.”), as if them becoming like another pastor will save your church.

You see, sermons are also not the end-all on whether a church succeeds. No, no one wants to listen to someone drone on in a monotone voice, but churches don’t rise and fall on whether a sermon is a home run or not. Churches rise and fall on how well the people serve, live, and worship together.

So, let your life preach as much as your pastor’s voice does. Craft daily sermons with how you love others. Encourage as you serve those in need.

As the old saying says:

“Preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words.”