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thalia kehoe rowden – minor master class

Aug 9th, 2011
by Thalia Kehoe Rowden.
8 comments

I was a sceptic when I arrived at West Baptist Church in New Plymouth in 2008.

For many years West had embraced an all-age approach to church life, including Sunday mornings.  Yes, you read that right.  In a church of 70-odd on a Sunday, the kids were in the service the whole time.

While I applauded West’s inclusiveness and clear valuing of children, I was pretty sceptical about how a preacher could feed such a broad range of people, week-in, week-out, without missing people at either end of the maturity spectrum.

Three-and-a-half years later, I’m not just a convert, but an evangelist, for all-age preaching, all the time.  It’s not easy, but I’m a better preacher for it, and the benefits to the congregation, in both preaching and community cohesion, certainly outweigh the difficulties.

All-age services offer the kind of deep community that including everyone fosters and the regular exercise of generosity this level of inclusion requires, and both these benefits mean I get really good bang for my buck in leading this community.

All our kids know a dozen adults outside their family who obviously think the world of them.  It takes a church to raise a child, right?  They all know that church is a place for them, where they are important (they each have jobs) and so is their growth.

Our aim is to have something in each service that is ‘for’ most groups of people.  We are also very clear that there will be parts of the service that are not ‘for’ you.  There will be action songs some adults feel silly singing, there will be boring talky bits that aren’t aimed at the youngest kids, there will songs that aren’t your favourites and YouTube clips that shoot over your head.  But isn’t this true in any church?  At West explicitly remind each other that generosity to other people, in allowing them space for things we don’t enjoy but that connects them to God, is worship in itself, and to be embraced.  And we get regular practice at this, week in, week out.

But what about the poor preacher, whose congregation ranges from babies and pre-schoolers not known for their love of sermons or quiet, to people who are eager to be stretched after forty years of following Jesus?

My approach is usually to think and write content for mature Christians, but present it creatively in ways that invite younger humans and younger Christians to engage with big ideas.  On a good day, this means that both ends of the spectrum are reached by the sermon.

We all use images, stories, evocative language to illustrate the points we make.  The trick to an all-age preaching lifestyle seems to be to make that imagery three-dimensional.  Instead of just telling a story or describing an image, here are some things I’ve tried:

  • read a carefully picked, excellent kids’ book, with the pictures scanned for the screen, and weave it into the sermon as the main illustration;
  • get adults and kids to be characters in a story, or even parts of a diagram, acting it out impromptu;
  • do a demonstration with props (think of the ‘rocks in the jar’ demo you may have seen);
  • do a brief craft activity that brings it all together;
  • or just have a great picture or prop to make the image jump out: hold a fishing rod while talking about fishing.

You’ve probably done all of these at some point in your preaching to adults – it’s not rocket science, just methodical fleshing out of normal preaching practice.

This is not the dreaded slavery to trendy YouTube clips or dependence on technology that conscientious preachers rightly worry about.  It is simply making our existing imagery three-dimensional, more accessible to those with younger minds or non-auditory preferences.

All-age preaching has been great for stretching my skills.  It makes me a more thoughtful, creative preacher, because I can’t rely on purely oral sermons where the congregation works hard to keep pace.  I do some of those – not every sermon has to be for every person, in our approach – but more often, I preach sermons that have the same content as one intended for an attentive adult audience, but with the imagery made manifest in a way that broadens the accessibility.

In giving children access to our preaching, we accidentally include a lot of adults who might struggle to engage with purely spoken sermons, or who don’t have years of churchgoing to help them navigate them.

Could preaching to minors be a master class for you and your congregation?

* * *

Thalia Kehoe Rowden is an awesome parallel parker and the pastor of New Plymouth West Baptist Church, a place of shelter, faith and laughter.

thalia kehoe rowden: does anyone else want a turn?

Jan 10th, 2011
by Thalia Kehoe Rowden.
9 comments

The most controversial thing about my preaching, as far as my lovely congregation at West is concerned, isn’t that I mention chocolate or facebook in most sermons or that I’m too short for the pulpit, but how often I preach. Or don’t.

Some background: I’m the pastor at West Baptist Church in New Plymouth, a church full of warm, down-to-earth people, planted 20 years ago in the poorest part of town, to build community here and be a place of ‘shelter, faith and laughter.’ We average about 65 people on a Sunday, from a wide range of backgrounds. I’m the only paid staff member, and leadership and responsibility are well devolved, with almost every adult and teenager in the church actively contributing to our life together.

So in this church, I aim to preach about 75% of Sundays, though I usually do more like four out of five.

I’ll outline my reasons below, and then I’m keen to hear what you all think – sole and team ministers, ‘lay’ preachers, listening members of congregations. What would you do? What would you like your minister to do? What’s a wise pattern of preaching in a church like ours? What about in a church like yours?

Here’s why I think 75% is a good number for us:

  1. It’s important that the community hears other voices than mine. Other preachers bring different emphases, experiences, and styles that give our congregation a richer, more varied diet.
  2. There are currently five other people in our preaching team, none of whom preach for a living. That’s five people who would never get a chance to develop their gift for preaching if I preached every week.
  3. This may not reflect well on me, but it also lifts my game to be training and developing other preachers. My first narrative sermon after I’d led a workshop on narratives was my best in ages as I was spurred on by their enthusiasm (and knew they would be listening critically!).
  4. Having more than seven days between sermons helps my freshness and creativity, so my congregation gets better sermons than they would if I were preaching every week.
  5. I’m the sole pastor with pastoral responsibility for about 120 people in the church, and another few thousand in our suburb. I can do an awful lot more pastoral care, community building, planning, chatting, reading, writing, praying, insert-activity-here-ing in a non-preaching week.

Over the last year or so, we have been focusing at West on developing ‘7 day faith‘, where Sunday fuels Monday-Saturday living and vice versa – not revolutionary, but foundational.

How often the pastor preaches feels like a test of how serious we are about this. If we think the Sunday service is the point of church life, then it makes sense for our ‘professionals’ to be always on duty in the pulpit. If we think that Sunday is our opportunity to worship together, equip and encourage each other to build the kingdom of God in our patch of earth, 7 days a week, and that’s the point of church, then we’ll want our ‘professionals’ to have plenty of time to spend shaping our Monday-Saturday life, and we’ll be glad to have other people sharing the preaching.

There’s a balance to be found in here somewhere. What’s the magic number?

* * *

Thalia Kehoe Rowden is an awesome parallel parker and the pastor of New Plymouth West Baptist Church, a place of shelter, faith and laughter.

thalia kehoe rowden: does preaching count?

Aug 16th, 2010
by Thalia Kehoe Rowden.
5 comments

Can preaching be a spiritual discipline that helps our growth as much as our congregations’? Sure – this has been a theme of recent posts from John and George. Is it enough, or do I also have to do my own separate Bible study to be well-nourished? Now that’s a different question.

When I was exploring faith as a teenager in Palmerston North and Wellington, a daily half-hour ‘Quiet Time’ was the only model of personal devotional life I saw among my mentors and peers. Most of us weren’t very good at it, but it was the gold standard we aspired to.

A few years later, when my pastor, David Smith, preached a series on spirituality drawing on Gary Thomas’ book, Sacred Pathways, a whole new world of connecting to God opened up in front of me. (more…)

thalia kehoe rowden: all the lonely preachers – where do they all belong?

Feb 2nd, 2010
by Thalia Kehoe Rowden.
8 comments

The favourite game of Paul Windsor’s preaching students at Carey Baptist College was to casually mention in Paul’s hearing how helpful we’d found sermons.com for downloading last Sunday’s sermon.

Now, Paul is a man with a twinkle in his eye, but his expansive sense of humour doesn’t stretch to the thought of anyone preaching a downloaded sermon.  So I hasten to say clearly before continuing that I have never done so – it’s ok, Paul!

But I can understand the appeal.  Pastoring can be lonely work: most ministers in New Zealand are in ‘sole’ positions, where they’re the only trained staff.  And writing a new sermon each week alone in your study is hard work!  I reckon most sermon downloading happens not because preachers run out of time, but because they are isolated, working without colleagues.

Does preaching really have to be lonely? (more…)