Note from Pastor Jana This September, I'm going on the Compelling Preaching Pilgrimage to New York and D.C. with other pastors and I'm so excited to go! This is obviously an opportunity to go on a trip, but the most important part of this is spending time on my craft of preaching. Preaching is strange. This is a task I do every week and I do something like this: I stand in front of you all and I try to listen for what God wants to convey to us with the text and try to formulate what I hear as English. Sometimes, words flow easily and sometimes I sit and stare at a screen for a shameful duration of time. And after many, many years of doing this I'm still right in the middle of the learning curve. One of the things I have figured out is that great preaching is really about listening. It is listening to Scripture no doubt, but it is listening to the world around. It is tuning in to the stories that people tell, the conversations of your community, the things that give you a giggle, the things that break your heart, and recognizing that God shows up in gracious moments. One of the goals on this pilgrimage is that we become better at telling stories. And that involves going to new places, listening to new stories, and seeing new voices so that we can better construct our own ways of communicating the Gospel. I love that idea. Jesus was a storyteller. When Jesus wanted people to understand something about God, he often pointed to something familiar: a farmer scattering seed, a woman searching for a lost coin, a shepherd looking for one sheep, a father waiting for his child to come home. Jesus helped people see God through stories and images they could recognize. I want to keep getting better at doing that too. I don't ever want to reach a place where I think, I've figured preaching out. I want to remain curious. I want to keep reading, listening, traveling, learning, collecting stories, and noticing the world around me. I want to continue working at this craft so that the words I share on Sunday mornings can help us see Scripture—and perhaps our own lives —in a new way. So, as I leave for this pilgrimage, I go as a student. I am going to listen. To experience. To notice. To collect stories. And hopefully, to return with a few new tools for telling the greatest story we have been given to tell: the story of God's love and grace made known to us in Jesus Christ. And perhaps that is a good invitation for all of us this September: keep paying attention. There are stories of grace happening all around us. We just have to learn to notice them. Pastor Jana
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