Preaching Exercise

Preaching Exercise

The first thing the professor made us do was get up from our desks and touch our toes. Every preaching class, week after week. For some of us students this was physically impossible at the beginning of the semester, but over time we managed to reach down and feel the pain and hold it briefly before rising slowly and reaching up to the ceiling. Then she’d have us do the whole movement again and again.

A strange exercise for a preaching class, I thought at the time. It was my only class in seminary—and come to think of it, my only class ever, except for Physical Education and Marching Band—that involved getting off our bottoms and using our bodies. We preaching students came to appreciate it as a fifteen-minute recess in an otherwise academic training for ministry. Our line of work involved reading books, writing papers, and sitting around and talking about reading books and writing papers. And preaching was the epitome of reading (the scriptures and commentaries on the scriptures), then writing (a sermon manuscript), and then talking about it (reading aloud the scriptures and sermon manuscript to the congregation).

No wonder sermons put people to sleep.

In the first church I served after becoming a “Minister of the Word”—as it states on my certificate of ordination lest there be any doubt as to the importance of knowledge in this profession—I spent a large portion of my time each week preparing and writing a sermon. I would skim the lectionary selections from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles; choose one or two of these passages to focus on and read them in depth and take a few notes; read what some other biblical scholars and theologians had to say about them and add to my notes; think about the passages and my notes and draft a sermon in long hand; and then sit down with the passages and my draft and my head full of thoughts—and a deadline looming—and type out a sermon, editing and revising as I typed.

Notice the key physical activity in all of this—apart from opening and closing books, pens, and typewriters—is sitting. I would sit on my backside and not use my body. Not even a few toe-touches.

Then I got fired. Or rather, the session, the ruling body of the congregation, voted on whether to renew my annual contract that I had held for only one year, and they decided, by a margin of one, not to renew my contract. As the moderator of the session and thus a member of this session, I could have voted. Assuming I voted for the motion to renew my contract, the vote would have been tied and the motion passed. But, wisely, I had excused myself from the discussion and decision and let the chips fall where they did. My tears afterward expressed relief as much as failure.

The moment of this vote until the end of my contract year left me with about a half dozen Sundays in which to preach. I distinctly recall deciding that I was not going to take the time to write any more sermons for this congregation. I read and researched the scripture passages as usual, but I didn’t take notes or write a draft or type a manuscript. No more sitting down on the job.

I started jogging. I was living in a city whose blocks were one tenth of a mile long, and I ran around a short block, three tenths of a mile each lap, ten laps for a total of three miles. Not bad for someone who hadn’t exercised regularly since high school.

Running or jogging—or slogging, as it often feels—allowed me to do something positive in the wake of having something negative done to me. It got my heart pumping, my lungs panting, my body sweating. I discovered muscles I never knew I had. I was very angry and sad and depressed after losing my first job as a pastor, and my runs released more tears, more thoughts about what went wrong, and more things I wish I’d said in my defense as well as a few remarks I wish I’d made to offend.

Running also turned me into a preacher: running gave me the time and space and energy to run through all the sermons in me that were not meant for public consumption, and left me a few words that were, I had to say, truly inspired.

Running left me a few words truly inspired that I had to say.

Running improved my breathing, which empowered my voice, which changed my tune both about the exercise of preaching—and my preaching professor was right, it is a physical exercise—and my job as a “Minister of the Word.” It’s physical labor, day in and day out, week after week.

I still read and research and write and talk about reading and researching and writing. But I don’t sit down to prepare a sermon. I go out and run.