It was a beautiful image with which to begin. Rev. Tom Vais preached on Psalm 1: “They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.”
I sat among young people between the ages of 19 and 25 in the wood-paneled chapel of Presbyterian College. It was just after 9 a.m. on a Saturday and the city of Montreal was quiet. We were beginning a week-long journey. Until June 26th, these young people would be learning to preach.
They came from a range of backgrounds. Most of them were from small towns in Ontario. Two hailed from a Korean congregation in Vancouver. A few grew up in the churches they still attend, teaching Sunday school in the same classrooms where they were once students. Others joined the church later in life. It was a mishmash of ages and experiences and levels of education. Some were evaluating a call to ordained ministry. Others were considering ministry in some other form.
But all of them had one thing in common: all were here because someone in each of their congregations said ‘I see God’s gifts in you’ and urged them to go.
Throughout the week of muggy heat and afternoon thundershowers, the image of trees and water haunted me: Seeds planted by a stream, growing into trees, bearing fruit. And what is at the heart of a piece of fruit, after all, if not more seeds?
Rev. Dr. Dale Woods, the college’s director of pastoral studies and currently its acting principal, said he decided to focus the event on preaching because it’s valued in churches.
“Often I’ve found what young people were asked to do in church was not what young people really wanted to do,” he said. “We thought, why not do something important and challenging?” And in Presbyterian worship services, the sermon is both of those things.
As the daughter of a minister and now a writer with the Record, I’d penned and preached a couple of sermons over the years. I figured, since I’d spent my whole life listening to sermons, between genetics and osmosis I must have picked up some skills somewhere.
Yet I knew it wasn’t an easy thing to do. It takes a lot of courage (no matter how indulgent or supportive your congregation is) to stand up and speak thoughtfully, compellingly, gracefully, about God, life and the gospel. And it’s impossible not to put something of yourself into a sermon. Preaching makes you vulnerable.
Like every good story, sermons are journeys. And good sermons are built around challenge and tension.
Look for places in the passage that trouble you, the session leaders urged us. That’s where good sermons begin. They come from wrestling with what bothers you about a passage, what doesn’t make sense; good sermons speak to the difficulties of life; they include a journey through difficulty to hope and the good news of Jesus. And a good sermon will resonate with your own experiences of the world and of God at work.
When his group was assigned the story of the prodigal son, Mitch Hipwell immediately knew his sermon would be woven from the threads of his own life’s story. He doesn’t look his age, but at 19, he was the youngest at the event. He was also the newest churchgoer. He has been attending Knox, St. Thomas, Ont., for only a year.
“My faith journey or my spiritual journey, whatever you want to call it, it’s a small tree,” he said. “It’s been planted. But I still have a long way to go.”
Mitch’s sense of identity was thrown into turmoil in grade 10, when a painful injury followed by two knee surgeries put an end to his days of playing football. It left him hobbling around on crutches and wondering, “Well, who am I? What is this?” he said. He turned to marijuana as a “quick fix” for the physical and emotional pain, but it grew into an addiction.
He says it was music that helped him find his identity again, and it was music that pulled him into the church. He hasn’t read a lot of the Bible; hymns are what have nurtured his nascent faith.
“To be honest, I don’t really regret my past,” he told me one evening as I interviewed him in a corner of the cafeteria. “It’s part of who I am. I still have to work at kicking this habit, because there are good days and bad days. I don’t mind you saying I struggle with addiction in the article because there are a lot of people who do, whether it’s drinking 10 cups of coffee a day or chain smoking or binge drinking. At least I like to hope at least one or two people within a congregation can relate or have been there.”
With all the focus on preaching, it was easy to forget about the act of listening. Living Faith, a statement of belief of the Presbyterian Church, says that those who listen to a sermon “should pray for those who speak.” Listening to a sermon is not meant to be a passive act. It’s meant to be participatory: we are to pray for the preacher and feast on the word.
“I think preaching is one of the ways that you learn about God most easily aside from your personal devotions because we all have filters that we see God through, and a lot of that is limited by our past experiences and the wounds we’ve experienced,” Craig Macartney, 25, told me.
His faith journey has followed a winding path through evangelical, Alliance and charismatic churches to a Baptist congregation that meets near his home in Ottawa.
“I feel like preaching is connecting with people on a deeper level,” said Cody Lewis. In his tiny congregation of Knox, Morrisburg, Ont., he is the sole Sunday school teacher, the secretary of the board of managers and head of the office committee.
For him, a sermon was not a one-way message but a starting point, which can lead to meaningful discussions about a Bible passage or experiences of God’s work in the world and in individual lives.
And, as I discovered, some of the youth didn’t consider preaching to be something reserved for church pulpits. Most of them had been “preaching,” in one way or another, for years.
“People tend to think of sermons as preaching, but I think you could preach anywhere,” Brittany Saggau told me. At age 24 she was recently ordained as the youngest elder ever in her home church of Knox, Woodstock, Ont. “You can use your actions to preach the gospel. I find my church tends to be very mission-oriented, and my family is very mission-oriented. So a big value is to give back to others and to volunteer. For me, that’s a big part of preaching the gospel: actually acting it.”
It was an idea Dale Woods echoed at the front of the classroom one day: there are two sermons that are preached every Sunday, he said. One is the sermon preached by the minister in the pulpit. The other sermon is the one that is lived by the congregation when they walk out the doors of the church.
It means we’re all preachers in a way, whether we like it or not.
It’s easy to get discouraged when one looks out into the average Presbyterian church on Sunday. At the conference I heard more than one person lament the size of their congregation or Sunday school or youth group. Yet there was hope, too. And personal commitment. And stories of transformation.
I had trouble imagining Cody, who kept us laughing through our dinners of quinoa salad and kabobs, as a stone-faced military man. Yet he enlisted in the army reserves on his 16th birthday as a present to himself. He thought people would respect him if he wore the uniform, he said. And he wanted to serve his community in a heroic way.
He’s now 20. And in June 2012, he resigned from the reserves after four years of service. “There was a fork in the road,” he said. “And because of my job in the reserves I had to decide if I wanted to pursue this as a career and go over to Afghanistan, or do I want to pursue my faith. And I felt God pulling on my heart.”
It wasn’t the only story of a decision made for the sake of God, or of church members telling young people they saw gifts for ministry in them—not always gifts they saw in themselves.
Sky Choi, 25, and Sung Bae Cho, 23, are from Vancouver Korean, one of the largest PCC congregations. Until he came to the event, Sung Bae said, he didn’t know Sky very well. The two had crossed paths, of course, but Sung Bae is a worship leader for the church’s English services, while Sky is more involved with the Korean services. And with six services every Sunday, including Sunday school, it seemed like a wonder they knew each other at all.
Sky is enrolled at Regent College in Vancouver, working on a theological degree and a Presbyterian diploma through the school’s partnership with the Vancouver School of Theology.
Sung Bae spent four months last summer on the Nazko First Nation reserve, working in a job he wasn’t sure he’d be good at.
He would have preferred to do a mission trip to Mexico or South Africa, where his church supports a pastor. But, like most young people his age, he was also worried about finances and was looking for a summer job.
Vancouver Korean has been supporting the First Nation community for over a decade and runs a yearly Vacation Bible School for children on the reserve.
“Some people were really involved in it, but it wasn’t really my thing,” he told me when we sat down for an interview. “So that was my last option for missions.”
“I was struggling really hard. I think it was a Friday night, I was in the shower, and this thought came to me: If I find a job, if anything, it’s coming from God. God’s going to be giving me the job. And if I don’t find a job, it’s God also. I made the decision to go. When I got out of the shower, I texted our missions deacon.”
He later sat down for lunch with the deacon and his pastor, who was in the middle of a phone call. When he hung up, the pastor asked if Sung Bae wanted to work in Nazko First Nation for the summer. He unexpectedly had a job in the mission field—albeit the one in which he felt the least qualified. But then, God has a tendency to do that to us.
On our final morning together, we returned to the image of growing things. Rev. Tom Vais preached on the parable of the sower and the parable of the mustard seed. And he pulled some of it from the first sermon he ever preached.
“You don’t really know what God is doing when you do this,” Dale Woods had told us on our first day together. He said his first sermon was awful. Yet when he preached it, a man in the congregation asked for a copy. You never know if you will say just what someone needs to hear—if your words will become God’s words for someone.
“I don’t know of anything that suddenly appears full-grown,” Tom said. “Do you? Everything has a beginning; someone has to get it started. Why couldn’t it be you who gets it started?
“God grows His kingdom with small mustard seeds of faith. God builds His kingdom from the smallest of building blocks, person by person, throughout the centuries of human existence. … Don’t be discouraged by small beginnings.”
