Walking the walk, talking the talk

And it's me again! Wanted to share another thing/experience/thingummabob: I done dids me my first ever preaching assignment! What happened was that these nice people from the Jesustreff in Stuttgart invited me over to come teach one night. Tobi, whom I happen to respect and appreciate greatly, suggested I might want to use a sympathetic audience of about 130 young-ish people to try out whether I can hack it with the big boys - you know, save millions of people, change the very face of Christianity, all that. Okay, so that's not what he said at all, but I signed up in my best Dan Dare voice anyway - to boldly go where I'm not entirely sure I'd really wanted to, but anyway... I'm a bit stupid that way - challenge me to something and I'll have the hardest time turning you down (unless its something idiotic like hacking my arm off with a chainsaw), particularly if it's something of the "no guts, no glory" ilk.

(this pic courtesy of www.jesustreff.info)

So! I guess I had sort of wanted to try out this preaching thing. I mean, you know, I wanna preach for a living (sort of) in a few years time, so I might as well try and find out now whether I fit, or whether I shall simply curl up and die when faced with a pulpit and some Bible verses. I really hadn't planned on finding out quite so soon, though... I was dead nervous the closer the big day came. I'd prepared what I hoped would be a twenty minute speech on Exodus 3 and 4 and tried it out on my ever-faithful wife several days before the event. C had a lot of very useful feedback, so I went back and reworked my original script comprehensively Saturday morning (the service was Sunday evening at 6PM). I felt better after that, but still not entirely at ease with what I'd planned. Unfortunately, I couldn't quite pin-point what it was that was making me uncomfortable until Sunday morning, when it suddenly dawned upon me. I guess being accustomed to entertaining audiences, I had instinctively written the first five to ten minutes of my speech as a kind of "gag reel" - a series of puns and glib-sounding witticisms to help me overcome my own nervousness while at the same time aiming to impress the audience with my eloquence and apparent self-confidence. Now, I'm not saying that this is wrong in an entertainment context - I don't know many professional musicians/trainers/stage performers who don't have such a ritual for calming their nerves over the first five to fifteen minutes of a performance, and in a context where you're actively trying to be the centre of an audience's attention, this makes perfect sense. But, and this was something I suddenly realised, preaching isn't supposed to be about me! I believe a preacher's aim should be to glorify God, to encourage his or her audience to focus not upon the speaker, but upon the One whom I believe put me in this place so I could tell others about Him. This realisation, while very welcome and accompanied by a sense of knowing God's will, meant that a fair bit of my plans had just been scrapped, leaving me with, well, not a lot except just facing the audience and looking my own fear in the face. Not a lot, that is, besides the firm belief that somehow, God was going to come through and show me what to say and do if I did my best to be humble and please Him. So - scary stuff! More to follow soon...