“Good heavens, the man only works an hour a week.” Those are the words I can remember from Marge Simpson in an episode of The Simpsons from over 30 years ago. At least, that’s what I think I remember Marge saying.

She was talking about her newly arrived preacher as he sermonized about how busy he’d been while adjusting to a new city. From what Marge saw, week-to-week, preachers worked an hour a week. It’s not funny because it’s true. It’s funny because people think it’s true.

When it comes to serving as a pastor, for most congregants what they see is all there is to get. Every pastor has a church member or two who is convinced that the preacher only works an hour a week. There may be even more church members who think what pastors do is not all that difficult.

There are a lot of people in the pews who secretly, and not so secretly, believe that preaching is just talking. There’s a popular meme floating around the Internet warning pastors that the person in their church who wants to teach on Revelation is the last person you should allow to teach Revelation. Why do memes exist? Because there is a measure of truth in them. Anyone can do what you do, some think.

Preaching can look easy. And good preaching should look easy.

Two Types of Swimmers

I recently watched a TEDx talk about leadership from Martin Gutmann. Gutmann is a historian and applies his research to contemporary leadership. He argues that society and corporate culture celebrates the wrong kind of leaders. We celebrate leaders who appear to strive to overcome. We honor those who face challenging circumstances and serve us great stories of how they overcame.

Gutmann speaks about two swimmers, asking us to envision one who enters into stirred waters, tries to swim but finds it difficult. He splashes against the waves and breakers, fights and struggles but eventually makes it safely back to shore. In contrast, we are invited to see the second swimmer attempt the same task. Only she spends years preparing and studying currents. She enters the water at the appropriate place and time allowing the current to carry her along as she swims, almost effortlessly.

Seeing the first swimmer, we are tempted to be awed. Seeing the second swimmer we might well say, “that looks pretty easy.”

The same is true of preaching.

Unprepared Preaching

As a preaching coach, I’ve seen my share of preachers shouting through microphones or stomping around platforms or taking all manner of flights of fancy during the sermon. I have also heard preachers offer moving stories and evocative tales which have little to nothing to do with the sermon text or the big ideas on offer.

Once, at a youth camp, a speaker told hilarious, engaging stories for about 20 minutes. Twenty minutes later no one, not even the students, could remember either the ideas he offered nor the stories he told. The students left that week believing that he was their favorite speaker, but when asked why, they told me “He was funny.”

While I encourage speakers to aim for that level of engagement, his talk and many others I encounter, and listed above, give the impression, like the first swimmer, of being good, when really they are simply the result of trivializing the task of preaching and being unprepared. And while there will always be a need for, and there is great skill in, speaking extemporaneously, there is a difference between being extemporaneous and being unprepared.

Winston Churchill said, “If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation. If you want me to speak for 30 minutes, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.” Good preaching is effective and dynamic in the kerygmatic moment. Everything up to that moment might well look and be boring.

Good Preaching

Fred Craddock said that preaching is a “life of study.” In previous generations, what has become the Pastor’s Office, used to be called “The Pastor’s Study.” That is not to say that good preaching is only, or even primarily, crawling through the back-end of commentaries and books. It is to say that good preaching is the result of lots of time, like the second swimmer, learning, growing, listening, and preparing so that the actual act appears easy to the untrained eye.

As Churchill reminds us, word craft takes time and preparation, and when done well leaves people saying, “Well, that looks easy.”

Advance Planning

How can pastors make preaching look easy? We can start by advance planning. Those of us who don’t preach using the lectionary text can too easily find ourselves abusing that freedom and preaching hot topics or from the hip. This eliminates time for study and for ideas to marinate, develop, and grow.

Plus, advance planning allows us to envision which ideas best fit into a series, which order to deploy those ideas, and how ideas build on one another. In the absence of discipline, we tell ourselves we will come up with something and sometimes that something can come late or last minute, leaving us to lean on our gifting or on gimmicks to communicate.

Manuscripts

We can also manuscript our sermons. Manuscripting is different from preaching the manuscript. Many preachers write a manuscript, enter the pulpit, and simply read what they’ve written to the congregation. Some homeliticians are gifted enough to pull this off, but if your name isn’t Barbara Brown Taylor, you probably ought not go this route.

What manuscripting does, though, is allow us to use the tools of craft, writing, story, and literature to illuminate a message, to ensure that our messages have actual content, cohere to the text, and deliver a useful word from the Lord. Seeing it on paper eliminates the anxiety of trying to “make something happen” in the moment. The Holy Spirit is just as capable of working during the writing processes as he is during the delivery process. Preparation is not a failure of faith.

The best preachers desire to be good preachers and not simply look like good preachers. The good and deep work is done out-of-sight, and, to the church, out-of-mind. Sure, there will be some congregants who think you only work an hour a week. There will be others who think they can do what you do.

They should.

A good preacher makes it look easy.

Sean Palmer is the Teaching Pastor at Ecclesia Houston, speaker and speaking coach, and author of several books including--Speaking by the Numbers: Ennegram Wisdom for Teachers, Pastors, and Communicators.