Lay preaching? You’d be mad if you didn’t

I was to be the preacher at a rural Uniting Church out near Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley. The congregation was small and everyone sat in the two front rows. My friend Alana and I were encouraged to sit there too.

Halfway through the second hymn, the young organist abruptly stopped playing, swung her legs around on the organ stool and jumped up, simultaneously declaring, “I’m not going to play that organ anymore. There’s something in it.”

There was, too. The startled congregation stopped mid-verse and watched in astonishment as a cat darted out from behind the organ’s curtain and ran around the church.

Three or four delighted little children took off after it. Their parents chased after them. Soon, Alana and I were practically the only members of the congregation left standing in the pews.

The cat eventually found the church door and fled outside. Children and parents returned to their pews.

The organist was pacified and convinced to continue playing. The hymn singing resumed.

The trouble was: I got the giggles. The juxtaposition of solemn hymn, chaotic cat chase and solemn hymn again was too much. Alana had the giggles too.

We dared not catch each other’s eye or we would have totally broken up.

As it was, the hymnbook we shared shook violently from my bottled up laughter. I was mortified lest I snort or chortle or in some other way let people know how utterly hilarious this was.

I wish now that I had. I didn’t personally know anyone in the congregation, however, and I wasn’t able to make much of a connection between one of the most memorable services I’ve ever experienced and the message I had prepared.

If I had let on that I thought church that day was delightful and real and living, who knows where an intimate discussion with the congregation might have led?

Instead, I quelled my laughter and, when I preached, I stuck to the script I had prepared on behalf of Scripture Union.

As a deputation and as a fill-in I did my job.

For five days in early May, over 60 lay preachers and 20 lay pastors gathered for a National Lay Preachers Conference, held in conjunction with the Synod Lay Pastors In-service, at Merroo Christian Centre, Kurrajong.

I wonder what they would have made out of my situation.

Lay preachers are a specified ministry of the Uniting Church and are recognised as bringing particular gifts and graces to the community.

It is expected that one of the gifts that lay preachers bring is the integration of life, ministry and theology; so they are encouraged to speak out of their life experiences.

They would have done a better job of integrating the cat and the sermon than I did, I’m sure.

Valuable training

The conference was organised and run by the Synod’s ELM (Education for Life and Ministry) team.

ELM has oversight of lay preachers in the Synod of New South Wales and the ACT and Amelia Koh-Butler, ELM Director, is an accredited lay preacher and youth worker.

She says that, for the team, oversight is more about encouraging, supporting and providing opportunities for lay preaching than about compliance.

Presbyteries in the Uniting Church have oversight of congregational worship and technically have oversight of who may preach. Accredited lay preachers are authorised and commissioned by a presbytery for preaching in the wider church because they meet national standards.

Ms Koh-Butler said, “There is a worldwide resurgence of reliance on lay ministry but many lay preachers feel they operate in isolation. The development and encouragement of a national network is important for providing for the developing leadership in the national church.”

The conference had one of the strongest programs of any conference Ms Koh-Butler had seen in the church. She said the quality of speakers and facilitators, and the spirit of the participants, was outstanding.

There were two keynote speakers (the Rev. Dr Jana Childers, Dean of San Francisco Theological Seminary, on “The Preaching Moment” and author and lecturer Dr Val Webb on “Like Catching Water in a Net”), Bible study leader the Rev. Professor Bill Loader on “Making Sense of Paul” and ten elective leaders.

“It was a great gift to the lay pastors (who are all required to be lay preachers and who are going through a difficult transitional time since national Assembly regulations were changed) to have this time in the presence of the lay preachers.

“To be among enthusiastic and committed lay preachers has been nourishing and comforting for them. One of the concerns raised by lay pastors is that, in the future, the new specified pastors will not be required to be lay preachers. As a cohort, they recognised the value of lay preacher training and culture.”

Sense of achievement

Rob Hanks, who lives in the Hunter Valley and works for the Synod Board of Education as Director of the Youth Unit, was the conference’s mid-week after-dinner speaker.

He retold Jerry Seinfeld’s analysis of data from a national survey in the USA. People’s number one fear was public speaking. Their number two fear was death.

From this, Seinfeld deduced that at any given funeral the vast majority of people in attendance would prefer to be in the casket than to be doing the eulogy.

They obviously had not surveyed lay preachers. For whatever reason they started, everyone I talked to continued as a lay preacher because they loved it.

Gaps in the preaching roster for far-flung country churches without their own minister; an anticipated time without a minister in placement; a time when a small group turned into a church but wanted to continue with participatory leadership — these were among the reasons for starting.

But continuing was because of the satisfaction: with the ELM courses, with the skills and confidence gained, with the sense of authority from being accredited by the Uniting Church, with the sense of achievement in having grappled with a text and helped a congregation understand it.

Not only is lay preaching good for the preacher, it is also good for the minister and for the congregation who hears them.

At the front line

Dr Childers, Professor of Homiletics and Speech-Communication at San Francisco Theological Seminary, said she agreed to speak at the conference because she knew that teaching lay preachers was like being at the front line.

She said, “There is an immediacy and urgency about it that is not always there in all the teaching I do. It is a privilege to teach people who are so much in the middle. On the one hand they have experience; on the other hand they are keen to learn more and deepen their experiences as preachers.

“Preaching is not really something that can be taught in the abstract.”

Some of Dr Childers writing has taken theatre and drama as a basis for what preachers do. In the USA she is known as one of the few people who are specifically interested in sermon delivery.

At the conference she modelled drama, humour and passion with panache.

Dr Childers said that, in the USA, there were communities that needed a preacher and a pastor and the need was longstanding. They were often small rural communities or racial/ethnic communities and mostly the need was because they could not afford to pay for a full-time minister.

Professor Loader, Research Professor at Murdoch University in Western Australia, said that in the future of the Uniting Church there would be more congregations where worship and preaching and teaching would be done by the local people.

“This will be true not only in the rural areas but also in urban areas. There will also be a greater variety of forms of Christian community from house churches and small groups to larger formal gatherings.

“The people exercising leadership in all these settings will need help with gaining skills and knowledge as well as with gaining a strong sense of being connected to the wider church. “This will be true for the Uniting Church and for the church in the world. We are now in a crucial stage of building these resources.

Professor Loader said, “In the future, ministers of the word and deacons will become even more important as resource people for education and support of these developing ministries, including the new ministry of pastor. So the days of lay preachers as fill-ins should be disappearing.

“The development and proliferation of leadership teams across the Uniting Church is very good news for the future of Christianity in Australia.”

He said his impression of the conference matched what he had observed in many congregations: there were many people who appreciated an informed and critical approach to their faith and tradition.

“They are prepared to go beyond resentment or reaction to the old fundamentalisms and to move on to new understandings of enhancing spirituality which are evangelical in the best sense.”

Ministry advantage

The primary thing that excited the Rev. Lindsay Cullen, Adult Education Consultant for ELM, was lay people being involved in ministry of any kind and when the church gave them significant opportunity to be trained and equipped.

He found ELM’s lay preacher schools exciting because he saw the personal growth in people, not just perpetuation of the institution.

As someone who had recently been in a country congregation in Cowra, Mr Cullen saw all over the presbytery the contribution from the dedication and commitment of lay people.

He said, “Even if congregations can afford to pay ministers, those beyond the Blue Mountains find it very difficult to attract them. Also, there is a tight sense of community in country areas, and those who have their roots there and belong there have a great advantage in ministering to and doing mission in that community compared with those who come in for a short time.”

I asked Ms Koh-Butler what ELM would do if someone like me applied to ELM. She said while there was nothing in the Rules and Regulations that said a layperson could not preach without accreditation, I might not have to do a lot to get it.

With recognition for theological training and experience of teaching, preaching and public speaking, competency would be assessed on things like praying in public worship from a written liturgy, and extemporaneously, and leading a meal grace.

I would then probably be asked to write a reflection on the Basis of Union and a commentary on it. I would also be asked to reflect on worship in the Uniting Church as demonstrated in Uniting in Worship.

Sometimes candidates are sent a chapter from Yancy’s The Jesus I Never Knew and Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and are then asked to tell other people in their tutorial group about their own journey with Jesus. This is like a testimony, but it would be more than just “how much I like Jesus”.

Not just pulpit filler

Before researching this article, I thought about the times I had been asked to preach. It has usually been because I have fallen into one of three categories:

Although it is good to feel useful in the first two situations, it is in the third that it seems best. I can focus on the message, people still think the minister “is doing his or her job”, and I feel they genuinely want to hear me, rather than simply have the pulpit filled for that week.

After talking with ten people at the Lay Preachers Conference, I am more amazed than ever that more ministers don’t involve their congregations in this role more often.

The congregation seems to appreciate the variety, the layperson likes the opportunity, and the minister has one less thing to do that week.

Not long after I began work on this article, I learnt that my nearly-91-year-old father had died suddenly. Along with my mother and others at the (Baptist) Willandra Retirement Village, he organised speakers for their Sunday and Wednesday night services and was down on the roster himself for the following week.

He knew that the elderly and often frail congregation benefited most from short services. In his weekly letter that I received in the week previous to his death, he wrote, “We had a visit from the (“x”) organisation and the speaker took a long while to say what he had to say. It is marvellous the difference in visiting speakers.

“Some seem to be able to impart a lot of information in a very short time while others would take half a page just to say ‘good day’. Sunday’s speaker was one of the latter and went 20 minutes overtime, which is never appreciated here.”

Dad was a lay preacher and he knew the needs of his local congregation well. Every day in their paid or unpaid workplaces, lay people are concerned with whether learning is taking place and so they have much to offer in the pulpit on Sunday.

Locals know their community and have a great advantage when it comes to ministry and mission. Accreditation and experience brings exciting personal growth.

Ministers like learning from their congregations and like the acknowledgement that often their week is more than full without sermon preparation as well.

Really, these are just some of the many reasons for becoming, or utilising, a lay preacher.

When I began writing, I was thinking of reasons why one would become, or have, a lay preacher. Now, I’m struggling to think of any reasons why one wouldn’t.

Patricia Hayward is an author and religion educator