Editing sermons
Being an editor doesn't have many occupational hazards. A bladder weakened by coffee over-consumption perhaps; or bruises on the upper arm from having been punched by your teenagers for pointing out yet another appalling lapse of grammar or pronunciation on their part.
Probably the most serious spiritual hazard is what the editorial mindset does for sermon listening. I find it very hard to listen to my pastor's Sunday expositions without mentally editing them as I go along: working out how ten minutes could have been saved by omitting that unnecessary illustration; or how the main point could have been so much sharper without that overly detailed excursion into the Old Testament background; or how the application could have been so much more powerful if the interesting but rather tangential point 4 hadn't been made.
If only I edited my life as frequently as I edited sermons.
All the same, in all this covert sermon editing over the years, I have noticed a few things: common strengths, failings and pitfalls. In this post (and the next) I'd like to share two with you.
The first is that a great many sermons are what an editor would call ‘a good first draft’. All the material is there, the thinking has been done, it's in reasonable shape, but it's not actually finished—which is not all that surprising, since it was, in all likelihood, still being written at 11:30 pm Saturday night.
The tell-tale signs of the ‘good first draft’ sermon are: illustrations and stories which are funny and/or effective but which only tenuously relate to the point (i.e. which the preacher has spotted or thought of early in the sermon-writing process but which don't really fit into the finished product); extraneous points or cross-references that seem to have too little to do with the main flow of the argument; too much detail on an interesting side-issue or exegetical difficulty (about which the preacher is intrigued and has read quite a lot, most of which has found its way into the sermon draft); an overly long introduction or a too-brief conclusion (the introduction often being the first thing written, and the conclusion the last at 11:25 pm Saturday).
These are the kinds of things that are quickly spotted and easily fixed by the preacher, if he makes the time to put the sermon draft aside for a while (even a few hours), and then come back to it afresh to give it a final work-over.
What is true of writing and editing articles is also true of sermons I think: if you have a finite amount of time to spend, allocating the last hour or two to a re-draft will almost always produce a better result than counting on those last two hours to finish the writing.
Granted, this is not a very profound or theological insight into the nature of preaching, but my hunch is that a lot of sermons would be a lot more listenable if they made it to the ‘second draft’.