Preaching During the Interim Time – Transcript

Jim Latimer: Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers: best practices and quick help from interims for interims –
wisdom from the field. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Reverend Dr. Jill Small. Jill, what best practice, would you like to share with our listeners?

Jill: Thanks for asking Jim. I’d like to talk a little bit about preaching during the interim time. Of course, the Sunday worship service is the time when any clergy person has the greatest opportunity to be seen by and heard by the largest number of people at any one time. So we want to maximize the impact that we have in that hour, all within, of course, the context of worship being about honoring God and praising the divine and how we can make that a more meaningful experience in the interim time for our congregations.

Each one of us over time develops a style, and a rhythm of doing worship. So part of the responsibility I think we have as interim clergy, is to help folks understand that I’m not going to have the same style and voice as their newly departed pastor, and the person who follows me as their next settled Minister is not going to have my rhythm or style nor the rhythm and style of their former beloved pastor either. So I think a gentle way of doing that is to acknowledge it up front, to say we all have different rhythms and styles, but then also to whatever degree is possible, try to cultivate opportunities for the congregation to experience a variety of styles and rhythms of worship.

Jim Latimer: During the interim time?

Jill: Yes. I’ve been fortunate to serve as an interim in various sizes of congregations. This is a little bit easier if you have associate clergy,
because you have an in-house pool to tap. Because all of those folks also are going to have their own their own style and and rhythm. But let’s say that you don’t have associate clergy. There are some other pools you might want to investigate. Are there retired clergy in your congregation, or in your community? You have to restrict yourself to the congregation. And this can be a little bit of a stretch, out of our own comfort zones, because handing the pulpit to another person can be a little bit intimidating.

So this is an opportunity for us to stretch as clergy as well, and quite frankly, to give ourselves a little bit of a break. Ministry is a demanding occupation. It’s not only about Sunday morning. If you can build in – I’ve done this before – every sixth week at least, every sixth week someone other than me leading worship. Now I might be there, so maybe I won’t get as big a break as not there at all, but at least every six weeks a different voice, with a different different rhythm.

So retired clergy are one area of exploration if you’re willing to supply the pulpit. Another possibility is to cultivate pulpit exchange with either other members of the clergy from your own denomination, or perhaps take the opportunity to have someone from a different faith community come and talk. So pulpit exchange is another avenue to explore. Almost all of us have association or conference clergy. They, of course, are very busy too, but if you give them notice and say, please look at your calendar, at least a couple of times, perhaps during an interim period, if you think of an interim period as being sort of 18 to 24 months on average, maybe a couple of times within that period, someone from the wider church could come and fill your pulpit.

Jim Latimer: So Jill, you’re encouraging the interim minister to actually make an explicit invitation to the judicatory person, right? Don’t wait for them to come to you. Invite them and say “I would love for you to come preach.” Because some judicatories love to preach, so make that invitation.

Jill: You know, depending on the size of your Association, the Church and Ministry folks/committee may be able to tell you those who are members in discernment. Those folks are in the process of forming their style and their rhythm and you can offer them something really wonderful by saying, “here’s an opportunity for you to help develop that muscle.”

Jim Latimer: “Member in Discernment” is a UCC (United Church of Christ) term for those who are on, who feel, a possible call to ordained ministry, and they’re in that process.

Jill: So those are ways I would try to cultivate a cadre of people you can tap to fill your pulpit occasionally, whatever is the right number of times for you, or how frequently, that is for you. So that’s one area to explore.

Another thing I’d like to mention is to preach from the lectionary or not to preach from the lectionary. During the interim time, and not only during the interim time, I preach almost exclusively from the lectionary. I have for what is becoming precariously close to 40 years now. I think I can count on one hand, the number of times I have intentionally not chosen a lectionary text. I like the discipline of preaching from the lectionary. I think one of the things that an interim period, that is a possibility, because sometimes people don’t know what the lectionary is, so there’s an opportunity to educate people. There is a three year cycle for us in the UCC anyway, and for people who use the Revised Common Lectionary, there’s a three year cycle, and to explain what that’s about. And to explain that it provides an opportunity for a congregation to get a broad exposure to all of the literature of the scriptures. I wouldn’t say we’re constrained to those, but I think it provides a real opportunity not to just preach on the things that you feel are just sort of in your wheelhouse, in the things that you like best, or more most comfortable with.

And I found in this, I think my third, I’m sorry, this is like my 12th time through the lectionary(!), that Word is always relevant. I think you know that the old story about preach with the Lectionary and the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. I think that is really good advice. I think in an interim period when there’s so much happening in the world around us, to be able to do that, and to say the voice of the still-speaking God continues to resonate through that Lectionary, I think it’s a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. So I would encourage folks to take a shot at it. But again, if it’s not your rhythm and style that’s okay, too.

Jim Latimer: Beautiful. So using the Revised Common Lectionary, as well as inviting different voices into the pulpit every six weeks or so, both of those, are under the interim theme of exposing the congregation to different voices both within scripture and other preaching voices.

Thank you, Jill, for being with us. It was fabulous. I took notes!

Jill: Thank you, Jim. I appreciate your time.

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