From a fellow-pastor:

1. The ‘rush from a good sermon’ is one side of the coin [about surviving in pastoral ministry]; the other side is the sense of discomfort, discouragement, anxiety, failure when your sermon lands without a splash and attracts no response or comment.and you hate yourself for wanting the applause of earth not the approval of heaven, and you rationalise that anyone who preaches week after week has to get pedestrian now and then, or that we sow and only God knows when it will reap, but you still feel depressed on Monday morning. I think we place way too much emphasis on the sermon. Historically, the sermon whether the ‘fount-of-knowledge-teacher-authority’ type or the ‘rabid prophet under the anointing model’ is not found in the NT or the early church in the way we know it. Preaching there seems to be much more conversational, dialogic, exploratory. I’d like to see us move from expecting the sermon to be the great event where God shows up, and just make it ‘here’s some stuff I’ve been learning lately’ and this might encourage others to have a go, without the great weight of solemnity and unquestionable authority, the entertainment quotient, the performance art.

2. That then raises a whole question about Sunday morning meetings. We have almost defined church as meeting on Sunday mornings – how un-NT can that be? And people today are finding it harder and harder to participate in that, it seems to me. Like the pastor’s wife… who only comes because she has to. I reckon many people my age group feel that way about church. It’s a consumer event and the consumers are getting picky. If church were truly community and fellowship and mutual edification, the Sunday morning bit would be greatly reduced in importance. What would happen if we said, this next month we’re going to increase fellowship but not meet on Sunday mornings. Jesus’ definition of church after all was whenever 2 or 3 brothers or sisters met up some place – he didn’t really want to simply re-brand the synagogue with a new updated Testament. That’s probably enough for this letter, but I think the disproportionate weight we place on Sunday morning and on the sermon is not right and leads to strenuous expectations on the pastor… We don’t want to just move to another place or take longer holidays; we need to address the causes. We need a revolution. Geoff Leslie