MINISTERIALLY SPEAKING

By Kendall Franklin

Thank God for growth in grace!

After nearly twenty years of ministry experience there is still something from my past that makes my stomach turn. It makes me cringe. It makes me shudder. It is my first sermon. To call it a sermon would be more than generous. It was more like a rambling analogy.

You remember your first sermon, don’t you? Come on! Don’t make me travel this painful path down memory lane alone. I am relatively certain that you didn’t hit a “homerun” with your first sermon either. I would have been happy with contact!
I chuckle about something Rick Warren said to his congregation. He had a message that had close to eighteen points in it one Sunday. The next Sunday he told his listeners: “Last week’s message had eighteen points. To make up for that, this Sunday’s sermon will be pointless.” Unfortunately, I think my first sermon was pointless too.

In my adolescent years, I sensed God’s calling to be a pastor. So, I attended a Nazarene school and began to study and attempt to learn how to preach. Pueblo First Church had a number of young men who felt called to the ministry. Pastor Jantz (then my pastor, now my father-in-law) would give us opportunities to preach on Sunday nights as we prepared for full-time professional ministry. (I wonder if that first sermon made him nervous to give me his daughter’s hand…) Our church had wonderful pastoral leadership and I had been discipled by an incredible youth minister. First Church invested heavily in young people. Evidently they had the patience to see young “wannabe” preachers like mutual funds. Some just take a while to provide any return.

I had visions of grandeur as I walked up to the pulpit for what turned out to be a 14-minute message. Application was nowhere to be found. I’m not sure relevance was either, but my heart was right. People were polite and kind. It didn’t dawn on me until years later that when they said: “We’ll pray for you…” they weren’t just saying it. After a message like that, they knew I needed it.

I know somewhere I have my first message saved in a small, brown NYI Journal For Disciples notebook. I just can’t muster the strength to read it. But on those Sundays when I preach a “clunker” I can always respond to well-intentioned parishioners, “You think that was bad – you should’ve heard my first one!” Thank God for growth in grace!

Kendall Franklin is the not-so-serious Senior Pastor at First Church of the Nazarene in Hutchinson, Kansas.