Machines for ministry

The other week I was stuck.  And it was soooo irritating because it was such a small thing.  

Each week, our church has the opportunity to go into our local primary school and lead an Assembly.  Short and sweet, it’s a great little opportunity.  And all the ingredients are prepped in advance: the bible passage, the subject, the link to what the children are going to be discussing in their classes.

It’s like HelloFresh, but for the gospel.

So into my inbox the week before came the helpful little reminder that it was my turn to lead on the Tuesday, and I did my checks on what I was supposed to be covering.

And I hit a wall.  Forget the fact I was teaching and leading on the Sunday, forget the plans for the Saturday and the Monday night meeting.  That little ten-minute Assembly sat in my brain 24/7, tapping me on my shoulder whatever else I was doing, occupying my attention when I had time to myself, and being a big ugly brute of a Thing all through my day off.

Have I done Assemblies before?  Of course.  Do I know the school, the children, the staff? Yep.

So what was the problem?

Well look at it this way.  I never have that brick wall with a sermon.  Why? Because I know how to start.  I grab a notepad, a pencil, a bible and either the Greek or the Hebrew, and I start to pull the passage apart.  I start to work on a  rudimentary sentence-flow diagram.

And all the time my slow language skills are making me pay attention to what I writing on the paper, other thoughts start to marshal themselves.  Tricky issues.  Translation problems.  Stuff I’ve been reading. People I’ve been talking to, and the lives they’re leading. Commentaries come next, but I know how to get the car moving.

I did it this morning: I set a timer for 90 minutes, and drove it through.  I had a cup of tea, reset the timer, and did it for the next sermon as well. I know that first language stage takes about 90 minutes, and I don’t need to reinvent a successful process.

I’ve created a machine for producing a sermon.

As someone once put it, I’ve created a machine, a process, for producing a sermon.  It’s not automatic, in the sense that I don’t need to engage.  It requires full intellectual and spiritual focus.  But I’m not sitting down on a Monday morning scratching my head wondering how to start.  I know how the process goes.

And if you think about it, you do that all the time too. Pastors know how long it will take to plan a funeral, on average.  How to publicise Christmas. Yes, we tweak things, and improve them.  But we have a basic system in place.  Being a seasoned pastor means that we recognise that, and work with the system.

I don’t start each morning wondering how the day will begin: my machine to get me to the start of my working day, which includes good coffee, a routine and structured quiet time and some journaling, is all in place and well-oiled.  It’s checked and tweaked regularly, but the basic model works smoothly enough.

So the problem I had with the Assembly was that I hadn’t built a machine to make Assemblies.  I was starting from scratch each time, and I was wasting time, energy and focus in the process.

When I got back from the school, I grabbed my planner and started thinking.  What would a machine to make Assemblies have to include?  How streamlined could I make it?

What would it look like if it were easy?

As Tim Ferris puts it, ‘What would it look like if it were easy?’

I spent maybe an hour on it, and at the end I had the rudiments of a system.  Is it flawless? No – it’s a prototype.  And I’m not sharing it, because it suits the way my mind works, and the kind of Assemblies we do.

But the lesson is clear: if there’s something in ministry that we keep having to do or to produce, it might be worth designing a process, a system, a machine to make it simpler and quicker.

So first question: What machines have you built to make your ministry life run smoothly?

And second question: What machines do you need to build, because not having one is tripping you up?  Every. Single. Time

Pile in!