THE BIRTH OF A SERMON (FROM CONCEPTION TO CULTIVATION)

I love the creative process that goes into just about any and all projects. I love to see how each unique piece comes together to form a finished product. In the last couple of months I have stepped into some new and exciting roles within the role that I already have here at Compass. Not only am I responsible for the main speaking and teaching at our Roanoke campus and loving on our people, I have now taken on a bigger chunk of our preaching team. For those of you that don’t know I am part of a church that is multi-site. What that means, is that we are one church, one budget, one staff, one eldership, MULTIPLE locations. Now most churches like ours have video at their other campuses while there is in person preaching at one of them. We however have a unique set-up in the fact that we have in person preaching at all of our locations. The beauty of that is the fact that we all write together. We collaborate on sermons prep and craft. Every Tuesday we get in a room and research, give input to, and birth messages that we feel God is leading us to give to our people in our area. Due to the nature of this we get see first hand what the creative process really looks like.

CASE IN POINT…TODAY!!!

We are usually anywhere from 4-6 weeks ahead in our writing. But let me give you a snapshot of what that really means…Here we GO!!!

• 6 weeks in advance everyone gets a writing assignment.

• 3 weeks out your rough draft manuscript is due…it is at this point that we as a team strip it apart and bleed red ink all over it to make it better. You cannot come with your feelings attached to it. You have to know that the team makes you and your message better.

• 2 weeks out you come back with version number two. Again we bleed, cut, and add new material. At this point it almost becomes therapeutic to cut the fat away.

• The week of the message you come with the final draft. At this point that baby is ready to be born. We have labored and toiled over it and now it is time to see that bad boy come into the world. This is where we see the payoff of all the hard work we have put into what God has instilled in us

So back to yesterday. We start a new series on Sunday called “Worldview.” We are going to be starting with Judaism and we have LABORED…I mean LABORED over this one. We started with a 32 page manuscript…cut it down to 17…cut it down to 13…and after yesterdays weed wack fest we have it down to 9 1/2 pages. For an hour and a half yesterday we cut almost three pages and 2500 words. After this whole process, lots of input, a monstrosity of cutting, and praying that what we have is what God wants his people to hear, we will preach this message with all our heart this weekend.

To hear the finished product of what God is doing in us as a team join me this weekend at Compass Roanoke at one of our two services…

9am or 10:30am at our new location in the NEW Roanoke Elementary School. If you cannot be with us go to the media section of our website and start this series with us there.

Here is to life.love.and creativity!!!