Feedback and Growth

Timothy was young, probably timid, and left in a city where established teachers were teaching what they should not (1 Timothy 1:3, 4:12; 2 Timothy 1:7). Paul did not tell him to wait until he was older, or until he had become a finished preacher. He told him to set an example now, to devote himself to the reading, exhortation and teaching of the church, and to be diligent in these matters 'so that your progress will be evident to all' (4:15). The word for progress, prokope, means advance, forward movement; in Philippians 1:12 it is used of the gospel advancing. Paul expects Timothy not to be perfect but to be visibly improving.

That is freeing for a young or new preacher. You are not required to be good yet. You are required to get better, and to let people see it. A congregation will forgive a great deal in a preacher who is plainly learning, studying harder, speaking more clearly, listening more carefully to them. What it finds hard to forgive is a preacher who has stopped growing and thinks he has arrived. The aim of this lesson is to give you the means of growing that do not depend on having a seminary nearby.

Notice the two objects of attention in 4:16: 'Pay close attention to your life and to your teaching.' The verb, epecho, means to fix your attention on something, to watch it closely. Paul puts the preacher's life first. This is not because teaching matters less but because a preacher whose life contradicts his teaching has made his teaching unbelievable, and because the life is where the preacher himself is most likely to deceive himself. Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor (1656), still one of the best books ever written for ministers, is a long exposition of Paul's parallel charge in Acts 20:28 to keep watch over yourselves and the entire flock, and its argument is that the minister who neglects his own soul will in the end neglect his people's.

The last clause is striking: 'by so doing you will save both yourself and those who hear you.' Interpreters across traditions agree that Paul is not teaching that a preacher earns his salvation by preaching. They read it as a statement about perseverance: God keeps his people through the faithful teaching of the gospel and through their holding to it, and a preacher who abandons sound teaching or a godly life endangers both himself and his hearers. Paul says the same about himself in 1 Corinthians 9:27, that he disciplines his body 'so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.' Growth as a preacher is not a matter of polish. It is a matter of life and death.

So the rest of this lesson treats growth under two headings, which are Paul's: your teaching and your life. Sections 2 and 3 are about getting better at the craft, through honest feedback, recordings and peers. Sections 4 and 5 are about the life, through honesty in what you preach and care for the preacher who is preaching it.

Most preachers almost never hear what their preaching is actually like. At the door after the service people say 'Thank you, pastor' or 'Good word today,' and those words are kind, but they tell you nothing you can use. Many cultures make honest criticism of an elder or a pastor difficult or improper, especially in public, and many congregations have learned that pastors do not welcome it. So if you want feedback that helps, you will have to ask for it, ask the right people, ask the right questions, and show by how you receive it that it is safe to give.

Ask the right questions. 'Was the sermon good?' will always be answered yes. Ask questions that test whether the sermon did what it was meant to do. What was the main point? Which passage was it from, and what did that passage say? What was I asking you to believe or do? Was there a place where you got lost? Was there anything that seemed to come from me rather than from the text? What one thing would have made it clearer? If the listener's answer to the first question is not close to the main idea you wrote down, you have learned something important, and it is not their fault.

Ask the right people. Choose three or four listeners who are different from each other and from you: an older believer who knows the Bible well, a young person, a newer Christian, someone of a different background or education. Ask them before the sermon, not after, so that they listen with the questions in mind, and meet them during the week rather than at the door. If your culture makes direct criticism of a pastor hard, let them answer in writing, or ask a trusted elder to gather comments and pass them on, or ask indirect questions: 'What would you want a younger preacher to do differently from me?'

Receive it well, or you will not get it twice. Thank the person, write down what they said, and do not explain or defend yourself in the moment. 'Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you' (Proverbs 9:8), and 'a wise man listens to counsel' (Proverbs 12:15). Not every criticism will be fair, and not every one will be right. Some will tell you more about the listener than about the sermon. But a criticism repeated by two or three people who did not speak to each other is almost always true, and the comments that hurt most are often the ones you most needed.

Scripture's own example is Apollos. He was 'an eloquent man, well versed in the Scriptures' (Acts 18:24), he spoke 'fervent in spirit' and 'taught accurately about Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John' (18:25). That is, he was a gifted preacher with a gap in his understanding. Priscilla and Aquila, a married couple who made tents for a living, heard him preach, 'took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately' (18:26). They did it privately, and he received it. The next verses say that when he went to Achaia he was a great help to the believers there. A preacher who could be corrected by tentmakers became more useful, not less.

If you have a phone, you have a tool that most preachers in history would have given a great deal for: you can hear yourself as your hearers hear you. Record your sermon, on your own phone in your pocket or on a friend's at the front, and listen to it during the week. Almost everyone finds this uncomfortable at first. The voice sounds wrong, the habits are embarrassing, the jokes fall flat. Do it anyway. Discomfort fades after a few weeks, and what it leaves behind is the most honest feedback you will ever get.

Listen for specific things, not for a general impression. How long did the sermon take, and how long was the introduction? Could you hear the main idea, and how many times did it come? Where did you repeat yourself without meaning to? What filler words did you use, such as 'um,' 'you know,' 'amen' or 'praise God' used as a pause rather than as praise? Where did you rush and where did you drag? Did you say anything that was not true, or not in the text, or that you had not meant to say? A useful discipline is to write out, word for word, the first two minutes and the last two minutes of the recording. Seeing your own spoken sentences on paper will teach you more about oral style than any book.

Preachers have long sharpened each other in groups, and the history is worth knowing because it shows how ordinary the practice once was. In Zurich from 1525 Zwingli led a daily gathering of ministers and students called the Prophezei, the prophesying, in which a passage was read in Hebrew, Greek and Latin and then expounded and discussed before it was preached to the people. In Elizabethan England, clergy, many of them of Puritan sympathies, held meetings also called prophesyings, at which ministers in an area took turns to expound a text before their peers and were then examined and corrected. Queen Elizabeth distrusted them and ordered them suppressed, and in 1576 her Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, wrote to her refusing to do so because he believed the meetings made better preachers. The following year he was suspended from his duties for it. A peer group is not a modern technique. It is an old and costly discipline.

You can start one with two or three other preachers in your area, or online if you are far apart. Meet once a month. Each time, one person brings a sermon, either preached live to the group in a shortened form or as a recording everyone listens to beforehand. Begin with what the sermon did well, specifically. Then ask the questions from section 2: what was the main idea, was it in the text, where did we get lost, what was being asked of us. End with one thing, only one, that the preacher should work on next. Pray for each other. Keep what is said in the group inside it. 'As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another' (Proverbs 27:17), but iron that is struck too hard and too often only breaks, so let encouragement come first and criticism be specific.

Growth also comes from listening to others preach. Listen to good preachers from traditions other than your own, and from cultures other than your own, and ask the same questions of their sermons that you ask of yours. Read sermons from the past, many of which are free online: Chrysostom, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Spurgeon. Notice what they do with a text and how they move from the text to the hearer. The aim is not to copy them, which the next section warns against, but to learn what is possible.

The word plagiarism comes from the Latin plagiarius, a kidnapper, and the Roman poet Martial used it in the first century for a man who was passing off Martial's verses as his own. The image is exact: the plagiarist steals someone else's child and presents it as his. In preaching the temptation is constant, because sermons by famous preachers are everywhere online, free and well crafted, and a tired preacher on Saturday night with nothing ready can find one in minutes. Pastors in several countries have lost their pulpits when it was discovered that they had been preaching other men's sermons as their own, sometimes for years.

The question deserves care, because the church has not always treated borrowing as wrong. Augustine, in the fourth book of On Christian Teaching, says that a man who can deliver a sermon well but cannot compose one may preach what someone wiser and more eloquent has written, and he does not count this as wrongdoing, though he insists throughout the book that the preacher's life must match what he says. Around the end of the eighth century Paul the Deacon compiled a collection of sermons from the church fathers at Charlemagne's request, a homiliary, to supply readings for the church's night services, and it was soon used by parish priests as a source for their own preaching. In 1547 the Church of England issued a Book of Homilies, and a second book followed in the 1560s; clergy who were not licensed to preach their own sermons read these from the pulpit. In none of these cases was anyone deceived. Everyone knew the sermon was borrowed.

That is where the line falls. The wrong in plagiarism is not using another person's work. It is deceiving the hearers about whose work it is. Every preacher learns from commentaries, other preachers and books, and no preacher owes a footnote for every idea. But a congregation that hears its pastor preach assumes that he has studied the passage and that the words, the structure and the stories are his unless he says otherwise. When they are not, he is telling a lie with every sentence, and Jesus told his disciples to let their yes mean yes and their no mean no (Matthew 5:37). Jeremiah's condemnation of 'the prophets who steal from one another words they attribute to Me' (Jeremiah 23:30) was aimed at false prophets, not at preachers borrowing outlines, and should not be stretched further than it goes. But the instinct it names is the same: words that did not come to you should not be presented as if they did.

Some practical rules follow. When you use a significant idea, outline or phrase from someone else, say so simply: 'as one preacher has put it,' or 'I learned this from a commentary by.' It takes a few seconds and costs you nothing in your hearers' eyes. Never tell another person's story as though it happened to you; that is not only plagiarism but a false witness, as the lesson Windows Into the Text warned. If you must preach someone else's sermon, because you are sick or have had a crisis that week, tell the congregation plainly whose sermon it is, as the readers of the Book of Homilies did. And do your own study of the passage first, every time, before you read anyone else on it, so that what you preach has passed through your own mind and heart.

A new form of the question has arrived with artificial intelligence tools that will write a whole sermon in seconds. The honesty principle applies exactly as before: if you preach what a machine wrote, your hearers are owed the truth about it. But Christians who have thought about it disagree about the wider question. Some argue that these tools are one more resource, like a concordance or a commentary, and that a preacher who does his own study and then uses a tool to suggest structure or check clarity has done nothing wrong. Others argue that the wrestling with the text is itself the means by which God forms the preacher and gives him something to say, so that handing it over removes the very work 1 Timothy 4:15 calls for, and that a tool cannot know the congregation or love it. Both sides agree that the study must be the preacher's own and that the hearers must not be deceived. Beyond that, decide before God, and be ready to explain your decision to your elders and your people.

Paul tells Timothy to watch his life as closely as his teaching, and a preacher's life can fail in two directions. One is moral failure, of which the abuse of pulpit authority described in the lesson Whose Authority? is one form. The other is quieter and far more common: exhaustion. Many pastors in the world are unpaid or underpaid, work another job, preach several times a week, visit the sick, bury the dead, settle disputes, and carry the griefs of a whole community with nobody to carry theirs. Over years this produces what is now often called burnout, a state in which the pastor still functions but has nothing left inside.

The signs are worth knowing in yourself. Preparation that used to be a joy becomes a burden. Reading the Bible becomes only work, never prayer. You feel numb toward people you used to love, or irritable with them. You cannot rest even when you have time. Sleep goes. You find yourself thinking that the church would be better off without you, or that you would be better off without it. You hide your state from everyone, because a pastor is supposed to be strong. If you recognise several of these in yourself, take them seriously, as you would in someone you were caring for.

Scripture's own picture of a burnt-out prophet is Elijah under the broom tree. After his greatest victory he ran for his life, went alone into the wilderness, and 'prayed that he might die. 'I have had enough, LORD,' he said' (1 Kings 19:4). What God did first is instructive. He did not rebuke him or give him a new task. An angel touched him and said, 'Get up and eat' (19:5), and he ate and drank and slept, and the angel came a second time and said, 'Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you' (19:7). Only after that did God meet him at Horeb and speak to him. Sleep and food and time alone came before the word. A preacher who is exhausted needs those first too, and should not be ashamed of it.

The long run is sustained by ordinary things. A day of rest each week, kept as seriously as Sunday. A friend, outside the congregation if possible, to whom you can tell the truth about how you are; Proverbs 27:6 says 'The wounds of a friend are faithful.' Shared ministry, so that you are not the only one who preaches, visits and decides, because Jethro's word to Moses still stands: 'You cannot handle it alone' (Exodus 18:18). Reading the Bible for your own soul and not only for next Sunday. Time with your family, which they should not have to ask for. And, where it is available, help from a doctor or a counsellor when the darkness does not lift, which is no more a lack of faith than going to a doctor for a fever.

And hear the promise in the anchor. 'Persevere in these things,' Paul says. The word suggests staying with something over time. Preaching is not a sprint. The preachers who do the most good over a lifetime are rarely the most brilliant; they are the ones who kept studying, kept listening to correction, kept their lives clean and kept going, year after year. 'Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up' (Galatians 6:9).

Your practical step this week. Choose the next sermon or Bible study you will give, and before you give it, ask two or three people from different parts of the congregation to listen with three questions in mind: What was the main point? What passage was it from, and what did that passage say? What was I asking you to do? Record the sermon on your phone. During the week, listen to the recording and write out, word for word, the first two minutes. Then meet your listeners and write down their answers without arguing. On a fresh page in your notebook, write the one thing you will change next time. Finally, on a separate page that nobody else needs to see, write honestly how tired you are, on a scale of one to ten, and one thing you will do this month to rest.