EULESS—“If you follow Jesus and the Holy Spirit lives inside you, you are the church now,” Shane Pruitt, SBTC director of missions, told a crowd of 545 youth gathered Oct. 26 at the West Campus of First Baptist Euless for the 2016 Hurst-Euless-Bedford-area Fields of Faith event held in conjunction with Fellowship of Christian Athletes and area churches.

“You have a responsibility now…. You are a part of the kingdom of God now. Live it now,” Pruitt challenged an audience used to hearing that they are the “future” of the church.

The Field at First Euless was one of 466 held nationally throughout October. In Texas, 105 Fields were held, most on Oct. 12. The Euless Field was originally scheduled for the HEB school district’s Pennington stadium, but for financial and logistical reasons, was moved to The CITY, the student center at First Euless’s Campus West, said Kent Wells, First Euless student pastor.

FCA provided food for a tailgate party and First Euless and First Baptist Church of Hurst contributed support, Wells said. Area churches brought students.

Pruitt described the evening as one of “high energy” music, interactive games, worship and testimonies by student athletes. It was Pruitt’s second Field of Faith event this year.

First Euless has participated in Fields of Faith for the past six or seven years, Wells said, adding that this year, 20-25 of the more than 40 event counselors and volunteers came from his congregation. The event was part of a comprehensive strategy to reach students in their area. Many students walk from local Trinity High School to Wednesday afternoon and evening programs at The CITY. Wells serves as chaplain for Trinity’s football team, and church members volunteer in a school-sponsored mentoring program.

Due to the broad diversity at Trinity, Wells said, “You can literally touch 72 different countries.”

Local churches have begun following up with the 14 students who made professions of faith and dozens of rededications recorded at the Euless Fields of Faith.

The ninth annual Fields of Faith event held Oct. 12 at Gordon Wood Stadium in Brownwood, Texas, attracted a less diverse but larger crowd, as more than 3,000 students attended.

“In a city, students may have to travel in traffic, come long distances. It’s easier to run a Field of Faith in a rural community,” said Ricky Cavitt, youth pastor of Brownwood’s Coggin Avenue Baptist Church.

The Brownwood Field featured the band Firetown, and Marcus Wasson, a local pastor, spoke of the tragic drowning of his grandson. Kevin Kirkland of San Angelo’s PaulAnn Baptist Church was the main speaker. By the night’s conclusion, 684 students had indicated decisions for Christ with 93 rededications.

“It was beyond our expectations,” said Tony Daniel, FCA area director for Brownwood. Daniel attends Coggin Avenue BC and is grateful for their involvement and 85 other area congregations for bringing students and providing volunteers.

Of the 207 event volunteers, some 107 came from Coggin, Daniel said.

Cavitt echoed the importance of the church’s partnership with FCA. “Our role as a church is to make disciples. Fields of Faith is a target event that helps us carry out the Great Commission. We know the gospel is going to be shared.”

“We encourage our youth to be attenders and bring their friends. We spend time praying for the event. Our whole church gets behind it.”

Follow-up began the day after the Brownwood Field as 10 area youth pastors met to divide the names of students who had professed faith and begin the process of contacting them.

“We invite them to follow-up meetings to take the next steps,” Cavitt said “It’s a process.”

“We [must] make sure those decisions are reinforced and supported. If something happens later on, they may decide it was just an event. If we don’t get them in church, we don’t have that opportunity [to disciple them],” Daniel said, explaining the importance of local church involvement.

Daniel added that statistics for his region indicate that 80 percent of the students are unchurched.

“We’ve got a generation that doesn’t know what God has done for us. I think our young people are hungry for truth and for the Lord, and if we would take seriously the Great Commission, the fields are ripe for the harvest.”

For more information, see http://www.fieldsoffaith.com.

GRAPEVINE 

It’s the nightmare that jolts a pastor wide awake at 3 a.m. 

You’re sitting on the platform. The final strains of the special music are fading. Anxiety gives way to panic as you step into the pulpit and lay your closed Bible in front of you. You speak the words you’ve always dreaded: “I don’t have a word from God today.”

What makes that dream sequence so frightening is that, for many pastors, it could so easily become a reality.

Far too many preachers suffer from what seminary professor Wayne McDill calls “the Saturday night panics.” A constant stream of emergencies compounds the pressure of too-many ministry demands. A disgruntled church member’s revolt deepens your frustration and discouragement. You’re working an outside job to make ends meet, and your family’s needs always seem to come last.

Finding time to prepare this week’s sermon is hard enough. Who has time to plan sermons for the year ahead?

“The pastor’s No. 1 stress factor is lack of time,” says Mark Tolbert, professor of preaching and pastoral ministry at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. “Some might say I don’t have enough time as it is. How could I possibly take more time to plan my preaching when I’m out of time already? It’s the old illustration that the workman doesn’t waste time when he stops to sharpen his axe. You’re going to be more effective in a lot of ways if you plan your preaching.”

Sermon preparation is like gassing up your car for tomorrow’s cross-country drive. But sermon planning is the road map that shows where you are going and how to get there.

Long-range sermon planning isn’t unrealistic, once a person knows how to plan and understands preaching as “leading your people through discipleship from the pulpit,” says Jim Shaddix, a preaching professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

“The great benefit of planning for the preacher is that it avoids getting to Saturday night or Sunday morning, not knowing what you’re going to preach and therefore dishonoring the weightiness of God speaking to his people—not to mention wasting people’s time,” Shaddix says. “The starting point is knowing what your congregation needs to hear from God in order to be moved along in Christlikeness and spiritual maturity.”

Benefits for both shepherd and flock

“Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds.” (Proverbs 27:23)

Better than any visiting preacher, a pastor knows his congregation and is able to give them the messages they need, Tolbert says. In addition to relieving Saturday night’s panic, he cites two other important benefits of long-term sermon planning:

• “It allows your mind and spirit to marinate on where you are going. If you are planning several weeks ahead, thoughts will come to you as you are driving, talking with your children, or visiting with somebody at work. That will inform a sermon, maybe not next Sunday, but two or three weeks from now.”
• “It helps your congregation by modeling for them how to approach the study of God’s Word. I don’t know of any pastor who would recommend that the best way to study your Bible is to flip it open, put your finger down on the page and start reading random verses. But that’s almost what we’re doing if we just preach isolated Scriptures. A planned series of sermons models how we approach serious Bible study—with a plan and a strategy.”

A congregation’s music leader also benefits greatly from long-range sermon planning, says Mike Harland, director of LifeWay Worship. A music leader who knows where the preacher is heading can plan for music that resonates much more deeply with the proclaimed word.

“What is happening on Sunday is not two people doing two things; it’s two people doing one thing,” Harland says. “One thing is happening in corporate worship, and it’s a discipling process.”

If two people are going to work together to disciple a congregation, it requires much more than a preacher giving the music leader a heads up about next Sunday’s text and title, Harland adds.

“I’d rather have a pastor’s heart than his text,” Harland says. “It’s about more than getting power words so I can do a concordance search of the hymnal. From a vision standpoint, what is your sense of what God is saying to you? What are the spiritual disciplines you are trying to address? What are the key ideas or theological points you will emphasize?”

That kind of partnership requires more time and a deeper relationship than a weekly staff meeting provides, Harland adds. A constant flow of open communication allows rapport and trust to be built over time. A pastor might give the music leader a copy of a book he is reading, and in return the musician can share copies of the music he is listening to.

“It takes time to get there,” Harland observes. “It requires real maturity and openness between you.” 

A strategy for sermon planning

Long-range sermon planning is easier if a pastor doesn’t start with a blank sheet of paper.

Mark Tolbert suggests a pastor sit down at least twice a year to plan specifically where he is going for the next few months and to think more generally about the year ahead. He outlines a four-part strategy: 

• Plan a book study. These sermons should be completed in no more than 12 weeks. Plan to preach on one Old Testament book for every two or three New Testament books covered. 
• Preach for six weeks on a spiritual discipline, such as prayer, evangelism, Bible study, or Christian growth.
• Schedule a doctrine study on a topic like the role of the Holy Spirit or the person of Christ. 
• Be sure to include a four-week evangelistic series. 

David Daniels, a Fort Worth pastor and contributor to PreachingToday.com, outlines three levels of planning:

• An annual “look ahead” in September. Identify immovable dates like Mother’s Day and Easter. Look at notes you’ve jotted down about possible series or topics and see whether any of the immovable dates work within a particular series.
• Gather the worship planning team at least once a quarter. Discuss how upcoming series are going to “land” visually. Decide how each one will be presented and publicized.
• Each week, debrief the previous Sunday with the worship team and look intensely at the upcoming Sunday. Depending on available time or season of the year, look several Sundays ahead and begin to nail down particular elements of worship services.

All pastors wrestle with the time crunch, and even some full-time pastors say they don’t have time to plan, Daniels notes. But the consequences of not planning are far worse than the cost of taking regular time to strategize.

“We live in a busy, chaotic world, and it never feels like there’s enough time to get everything done,” Daniels says. “But it’s a little bit like the maintenance on your car. You can take your car in for regular oil changes and have a car that hits 150,000 or 200,000 miles, or you can avoid taking the time out and it will cost you in the long run. You will end up in a bad place. 

“Taking a day or two out of my year to plan ahead gives me tremendous freedom the rest of the year because I already know where I’m going.” 

DALLAS Preachers are not the only ones who need to prepare for an upcoming sermon. Church members have an important role as well. 

“I wish they knew how critical it is that they show up for the sermon prepared to hear what their preacher has to say,” shared Jeffrey Campbell, assistant professor of preaching at Criswell College, during a podcast interview with the school’s president, Barry Creamer.

“If you’ve prayed about receiving that word, prayed for your pastor through the week while he’s prepared, and he gets up there and reads the text, shares what’s gone on in his life because of that word, and tells you about the meaning in the text, you can get something out of every sermon,” Campbell said.

Creamer admitted how easy it is to become a critic of the sermon. “I know how to sit and listen to a sermon and just detail what’s wrong with it. No sermon is perfect,” he said.

“You probably need to look at your own heart before you look at your preacher’s preaching. You need to come in, sit down, listen and count on hearing something from God.”

“Most people don’t know how emotionally draining it is to preach a sermon,” Campbell added. “You preach once or twice on Sunday and you’re wiped out. You lay your soul out there, and you want people to get it.”

A kind word following a sermon can go a long way to encourage the preacher. “Give good honest feedback,” he suggested. “If the guy fumbled, let him know in a loving way.” If the pastor has built a relationship with the member, he can handle constructive criticism, he added.

“I guarantee he wants to preach better and communicate better,” Campbell said. “They want to share the Word in a way that is creative and engaging so that people will understand it.”

The Oct. 31 interview with Campbell is available at barrycreamer.com or by subscribing to the podcast for “Coffee with Creamer.” 

Ever since they were translated into a medium that could be distributed en masse, carefully crafted messages have been going “viral”—a term used to describe information that gains popularity and circulates rapidly. At the forefront of these messages are timeless sermons, which not only impact their immediate audiences but also pay spiritual dividends for decades and even centuries.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London and known as the “Prince of Preachers,” preached to as many as 10,000 parishioners each week. His legacy has endured for more than 150 years due to the wealth of sermons preserved by faithful transcriptionists: 63 volumes constituting over 3,500 individual sermons.

During his ministry in the mid- to late-19th century, Spurgeon’s sermons were circulated weekly in the Penny Pulpit, and the demand was so great that publishers often struggled to keep up. His is the first example of a preacher going “viral,” but Spurgeon is remembered more for the quality and immensity of his sermon library, along with his vibrant ministry at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, than for any one particular sermon.

David Allen, a longtime pastor who now serves as the dean of the School of Preaching at Southwestern Seminary, is a trained homiletician who regularly teaches advanced classes to students who will go on to preach on a weekly basis for most of their lives. 

Allen points to Jonathan Edwards’ famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—often studied by high school English students—as a prime example of a particular sermon that has stood the test of time. 

“Today, his sermon is studied primarily for two reasons: its historical impact, and Edwards’ current popularity in the evangelical world,” Allen said. “Outside of this, I wonder whether Edwards’ sermon, if preached today, would still go down in history. I doubt it.

“The sermons that have lasted through history, and there aren’t many of them, have done so because in one way or another they made a significant impact in their own contex.”

It comes as no surprise that context is a significant factor when evaluating the legacy of any particular sermon. When Southern Baptists faced a crossroads in the late 20th century, a handful of sermons paved the way for a group of conservatives to reclaim the direction of the denomination.

As 45,000 messengers assembled in Dallas in 1985 for what would become a historic meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, First Baptist Church of Dallas pastor W.A. Criswell addressed the Pastors’ Conference on a Monday night with a sermon titled “Whether We Live or Die,” outlining the stakes of the controversy.

Criswell considered it the most important sermon he ever preached. As Baptist historian Jerry Sutton put it, Criswell felt his address “set forth the two directions and the implications of those directions in the Southern Baptist Convention.” 

The sermon went on to have a life of its own, impacting not just those gathered but also those who would listen to it on tape or on the radio for years to come, and it is featured as one of the classic sermons at the Criswell Sermon Library online at wacriswell.com.

Jerry Vines has garnered an international audience through his preaching ministry but will perhaps best be known for his address to the 1987 Pastors’ Conference in St. Louis where he preached “A Baptist and His Bible,” yet another sermon addressing the controversy between conservatives and moderates.

Vines outlined a historical understanding of how Southern Baptists have viewed Scriptures throughout the years, and the audience responded enthusiastically.

According to Allen, Vines’s sermon that year “may have been the most important single sermon preached at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting during the (Conservative) Resurgence.”

In his book Southern Baptist Identity: An Evangelical Denomination Faces the Future, David Dockery lists “A Baptist and His Bible” as one of the watershed sermons for the conservative movement in the late 20th century.

One of the first viral sermons on YouTube began making waves across the internet just over 10 years ago. Paul Washer, a Southwestern Seminary graduate and former missionary to Peru, was addressing more than 5,000 students at an evangelism conference in Alabama.

With the metered pace of Mister Rogers, Washer opened his sermon with a warning: “I will tell you things that make you so angry with me, and I’ll tell you things that you will deny.”

A few minutes into the sermon, he railed against those who “judge themselves by themselves” and are deceived into believing they are saved but are not. As the crowd of teenagers broke into thunderous applause, Washer quietly extended a finger to the audience and said, “I don’t know why you’re clapping. I’m talking about you.”

The sermon, variously titled “Shocking Sermon” or “Shocking Message,” has been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube. By comparison, Criswell’s “Whether We Live or Die” has just shy of 5,000 views.

Blake Stiles and his wife Connie run SBC Tapes, which they founded in 1997 to record and distribute the sermons of the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual  Pastor’s Conference. While sales are not the only indicator of a sermon’s popularity, having spent the last 20 years taping and selling Southern Baptist sermons has given Stieles insight into what sermons hold the most appeal and what audiences various preachers and sermons best connect with. According to Stieles, the appeal of a sermon has much to do with the relationship between the preacher and the listener.

“Having done this business for 25 years, we’ve seen many preaching styles,” he said. “Adrian Rogers’ style of telling stories and offering practical applications seemed to stir the hearts of the congregation best. Ed Stetzer, a very practical, statistically driven preacher, seems to reach the more intellectual person. The younger preachers like David Platt and J.D. Greear always reach the youngest generation best.”

Unsurprisingly, Stieles said, the best-selling sermon at the 2016 SBC was that of president Ronnie Floyd.

There is no one indicator that makes a sermon go viral or last the test of time; a combination of factors goes into it. Spurgeon had a massive pulpit and a means by which to keep his sermons preserved through mass transcription, while Edwards had a significant impact on the culture and historical setting in which he lived. Criswell and Vines appealed to a specific controversy, while Washer’s shocking sermon made its way onto YouTube at just the right time.

“Who are the preachers of this generation whose sermons will be remembered 50-100 years from now? I couldn’t tell you because I don’t have a clue,” Allen said. “Great preachers are not always remembered. Great preaching is not always remembered either, oftentimes because such preaching is done by someone whom the world has never known and never will know as a great preacher. But heaven will know  … and that’s all that matters.”  

AUSTIN Former Southern Baptists of Texas Convention president, George Harris, will receive the Paul Pressler Distinguished Service award during the convention’s annual meeting, Nov. 15. 

Paul Pressler, a former Texas Court of Appeals judge, demonstrated godly leadership during the Southern Baptist Convention’s Conservative Resurgence at the end of the 20th century. The Paul Pressler Distinguished Service award is presented each year to a leader in ministry who demonstrates such service in working for the Lord.

George Harris served in several ministry positions during his career, most notably as the pastor at Castle Hills First Baptist Church in San Antonio from 1975 to 2002. Harris’ pastoral career also included his 28-year appearance on “Truth For Today,” a ministry broadcast that airs over television stations nationwide. 

Harris’ pastoral presence not only influenced America, but the globe as well. He has been the keynote speaker in the European Baptist Convention and taken part in preaching engagements around the world. He founded Theological Insights for the Presentation of Scripture (T.I.P.S.), which aids bi-vocational pastors, preachers and laypersons in studying and teaching God’s Word. 

Harris’ pulpit approach comes from Nehemiah 8:8, “they read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood what was being read.” Throughout his ministry, the main focus of his sermons is making the Word of God clear. 

Harris received his bachelor’s from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, and his Doctor of Ministry from Luther Rice Seminary in Jacksonville, Fla. He influenced the lives of countless students pursuing ministry as a professor of preaching at Criswell College in Dallas and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. 

Harris has been married to his wife, Lynda, for 58 years and has four children and 10 grandchildren.