Back from mission, but no blogging impetus to speak of. I'm completely wrecked after a week of firstly being nervous about a kids' talk that went well and then worrying about an evangelistic talk which didn't go so well.
The kids' talk was made considerably easier by the fact that I used one of the excellent Kidswise talks by Sandy Galea and some awesome props made by my wife.
The sermon on the other hand, was agony!
The loose theme we'd been given was 'Life Matters'. I had initially wanted to do a talk about the tension between life and death in Ecclesiastes. The tension is created by death's ending of life and thus frustrating and cutting off all humanity's work and relationships. Hence, they are in vain. The talk would finish in 1 Corinthians 15 with the resurrection and its result: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.
The problem, though, is that I wanted to explore some different ways of dealing with this tension between life and death. Options such as denial, religiosity and acceptance. After a couple of weeks agonising over preparing this kind of talk, I gave in. I can't do a talk like that well enough yet. To be able to connect that philosophical stuff to real life in an engaging way in a 15 minute evangelistic talk to your average person from the street was a bridge too far.
So I decided to do an exegetical talk on John 11 (Lazarus' resurrection). But by then I only had a couple of days to prepare, and I wasn't really 'feeling' the passage as an evangelistic talk. So it wasn't so crash hot.
I'm not sure if any non-Christians were there. Very few people at church at all on that rainy day.
Still, it was good to stretch myself. Now I've got some thoughts about my limitations as a preacher to explore.