Preacher's Block

This preaching tip was shared by Preacher’s Block co-founder, Hunter Bethea. If you’re interested in joining the most focused preachers in the world and getting these tips sent to your inbox every week, sign up here.

Walk or run or bike your neighborhood or the neighborhood surrounding your church. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been running a few miles a couple times a week in my neighborhood. I pass parents as they take their kid to school, a committee chair on her way to work, single men as they walk their dog, and a recent widower and his young son waiting for the school bus. Some attend my church, some don’t, but since I believe we’re called to pastor the community in which our church gathers, so I consider them all members of my “flock.”

I’ve found this to be a helpful practice for so many reasons, but one of the primary ones is that it helps me to contextualize my sermon to real people in my congregation. When, a couple hours after I’ve finished running, I sit down to write the sermon, I’m thinking about how Heather and Angel and Doug and Randall are going to hear the sermon. Rather than preaching to some generic made-up person in my head, I’m preaching to real people in a real place.

Plus, it makes me a lot more human. When they see me preach on Sundays, they’re not seeing someone who they think spends their whole life just reading the Bible (or whatever our parishioners think we do all week). They see me as the real guy who was sweating profusely in front of their house before going into work that morning. It’s been my experience that they start to listen a bit more intently on Sundays when they realize that your life and their life aren’t that different.