More food, and conversations on preaching.

      Yes this post refers to more food! (I'm sure I am gaining weight). This time a Chinese meal, and a really good conversation about preaching. Yesterday I met up with Pastor Yoon, who is a friend of Pastor Abraham (pastor of Korean church that meets on the premises at WPBC) and he introduced me to another Korean Pastor; Pastor Kim. Pastor Kim is ministering in Seoul at a Presbyterian church. He is completing a years course in preaching, and is attending the classes two days a week. Now when I say a day, I mean 12 hour days! I was quite interested what this course was about. Pastor Kim explained to me this course gives him a tool to apply to preaching. One of those tools was a grid with 60 sentence structures, which helps to explain the main subject of a text to the congregation, rather than the secondary subject. For example a text  may be describing the life of Paul, but Paul isn't the main subject of the, text God is.  What is important is what God is doing through Paul. What God is doing in and through Paul needs to be emphasised when preaching, so that it can be applied to the congregation. He explained that this concept was particularly hard for Korean Pastors and so he was learning a technique to help him. I was quite intrigued by this; it hadn't occurred to me that God was not the main subject of the bible passage. I can recall now my tutors saying to me we always need to think about where is God for you in this passage, and where is God's good news for us? As we talked it seemed that Korean Pastors (at least when he studied 20 years ago) did not have this kind of training.

   We both agreed there is a challenge for ministers to make sure that God speaks to us first through the text, before even thinking about sharing it with the congregation. We also shared the need for confidence in the Word as transformative to people lives through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is good to be reminded of this, and the seriousness of preaching prep. Sometimes other demands seem to take priority but our first call as ministers is to preach and teach God's word and so we need to take this seriously; I think God might be trying to remind me something there.  Also good to remember
what a privilege and responsibility it is. These are very similar conversations to ones I had with Pastor Kong and Dr Dongwan Kim. I don't think this just an issue in Korea, but one for us in the UK as well. Perhaps there is a need for more learning together.