sermon planning retreat

JK and I have snuck (is it snuck the past tense of sneak?) out of town for three days to work on our preaching schedule at Eastview. This is fun and hard work that I have done for the 15 years I've been at the church. First Gary York led me and some other preachers on staff and now I have taken our other preacher away for this important work. It really is crucial work for the life of the church. We spent most of last evening working on our December series (we finish Luke in November). We have this cool four week series that will be called something like, RUTH: Bethlehem love story. In the four weeks of the Christmas season we will study from the O.T. book on the themes of faith, grace, love, and hope - all Christmas stuff but from Ruth. Cool how the Bible story all ties together and how a bunch of research work, prayer and inspiration come together to make a sermon series happen. What's really cool is that we don't even know what the Spirit knows about those particular Sunday messages, but when we get there, we'll be amazed at how much better it worked out than we thought.

Today we have immersed ourselves in the book of Acts. It is rich. Even after reading through it over 15 times in the last three weeks, I keep finding cool stuff about the beginning of the church. Our working title so far is "Following the Spirit in the church's message, mission and spiritual formation". That may change, but it follows nicely on the heals of our study of Luke's gospel (Following Jesus in the kingdom of Salvation). It is amazing to see the preaching that the early church was built on...also preaching related words like witness, testify, declare, warn, plead, etc... This really gets a preacher pscyhed about preaching. We are doing what the church has been doing for 2,000 years - proclaiming this good news of resurrection.

Well, enough of that - I'm just too excited about all of this. For a preacher, spending three days with another preacher, talking about preaching and sermons to preach is like heaven. Heaven with a starbucks in the one hand and a Bible in the other.