Learning to Preach (and Bombing Along the Way)

How we thought about developing a bi-vocational preaching team.

I’ve preached a lot of sermons— I don’t have an exact count, but I estimate it’s over 1,000. A few of them were great. A lot were mediocre. And without a doubt, quite a few were downright terrible.

Although I’ve preached to crowds in the thousands, most of my time has been spent preaching to small groups of 15–40 students on university campuses. That’s where I’ve learned the most—often through failure.

I vividly remember one particularly atrocious sermon on Matthew 22. At the time, we were running back-to-back gatherings in the student bar on our university campus. The church was growing rapidly, and I was under a lot of (mostly self-imposed) pressure to sustain that growth.

The sermon bombed. I was under-prepared and not ready to handle the complexity of the passage. Worst of all, I knew I had to deliver the same sermon again—45 minutes later.

I walked off stage and went to hide (okay, sulk) in a nearby storage room. I put my head in my hands and begged Jesus to take me home.

Looking back, it was all part of the process. I’ve made virtually every mistake a preacher can make—and I continue to make them (just less often now). What’s changed is that I’ve become much more comfortable with failure.

Early on, the idea that I could become “someone special” through preaching was thoroughly beaten out of me. And I’m grateful. That idol needed to die, or I don’t think I could have been faithful in these quieter seasons—mostly preaching anonymously in forgotten basements on university campuses.

Preaching Takes Time

Here’s the trouble: it takes a long time to learn how to preach effectively.

Yes, some people are naturally gifted communicators—which helps—but true preaching involves far more than communication skill. The art of exegeting Scripture, understanding cultural context, cultivating prophetic discernment, knowing your community, and delivering a message with clarity and power takes many reps to do well—never mind master.

Steve Cuss, in his book Managing Leadership Anxiety, says it takes about 120 consecutive sermons (more than two years of weekly preaching) just to begin finding your voice.

The Challenge of Developing Preachers

We’re trying to plant a lot of churches. That means we need a lot of preachers. But our entire team is bi-vocational, and that limits how many reps anyone can realistically get.

This raises a critical question: How do we develop preachers in this kind of environment?

The first step is recognizing a few temptations we bring to preaching that limit our ability to develop preaching teams.

---

1. We Are Prone to Idolatry

Good preaching is a gift. It’s encouraging, memorable, and often deeply moving. But it’s far too easy to let sermons become a substitute for spiritual disciplines, covenant community, and faithful disciple-making.

We can start to treat preachers like celebrities. But no preacher belongs on a pedestal—only Jesus does.

I’ve seen too many churches build empires around a single preacher rather than the diverse body of Christ. Eventually, that mirage is exposed for what it is: an idolatrous, self-serving dream.

The church is a family on mission for Jesus. Every part has a role to play. No one person can—or should—carry the weight of nourishing the whole body.

---

2. We’ve Let Preaching Replace Disciple-Making and Evangelism

When we shifted LIFT Church to a strategy centred on personal evangelism and disciple-making, one of our leaders asked, “Who will lead people to Jesus?” I said, “You will.” She looked at me like I had three heads.

That moment revealed something: we had work to do.

Public proclamation of the Gospel matters. The gift of the evangelist matters. But a church becomes unhealthy when the bulk of the evangelism and disciple-making is done by one or two people on a stage.

It’s also concerning how many Christians choose a church based on how much they like the preaching. This is both unbiblical and deeply problematic. As long as the preaching is Biblical, I can’t find scriptural justification for picking a church based on the preacher. (The same goes for worship style, kids’ ministry, or most other metrics often used to gauge a church’s “health.”)

---

3. We Haven’t Taught the Church How to Develop Preachers

Here’s the irony: Christians spend thousands of hours listening to sermons, but most haven’t been taught how to listen to a sermon—or how to evaluate what makes a good one.

In our world of polished podcasts and online preachers, we’ve lost something important: the role of the church in developing preachers.

A healthy church must create space for young and inexperienced preachers to learn. That means the congregation must be willing to suffer through bad sermons, for their own benefit, because it forces them to engage Scripture deeply, even when the delivery is clunky, and for the benefit of the preacher, because they get the reps they need to grow in skill and discernment.

---

If we want to grow healthy churches and strong bi-vocational preaching teams, here are a few quick suggestions:

• Identify the underlying assumptions shaping your view of preaching, especially in relation to church growth.

• Clarify the purpose of preaching within the life of the community.

• Calibrate the community to understand the role they play in creating opportunities for emerging preachers.

• Adopt a long-term (decades-long) perspective when it comes to developing new leaders, rather than settling for short-term wins.

Want to Hear More?

I have much more I could say on this—how to develop preachers, how to build a bi-vocational preaching team, or even what makes a good sermon. If you’d be interested in a follow-up post, drop a comment and let me know what you want me to expand on.