Preaching the Big Idea: An Interview with Dave Ferguson...Continued from page 4

We have found there are a number of benefits. There was a time when I would get alone by myself and have to crank this baby out all on my own. I feel like we get a dramatically better content. I think that makes sense. There is a synergy, there is a collaboration -- if you have four people thinking on the same thing why wouldn’t you have better ideas then if you were by yourself. That is almost just common sense. We never have the problem that we don’t have enough content.

Something else happens. There are clearly times when the message is better than others, but with this process you never have a bad message. 52 weeks a year you may have some that are good or just ok but you are never going to have a bad one, because when you have that many people involved in it, it just doesn’t happen. There is never a time where everybody has a crisis going on and they just didn’t have time and they just pull something together at the last minute; it just doesn’t work that way. That is a huge benefit.

I think we end up with better illustrations because we pull from what everybody is reading. We pull from everybody’s life story. It is kind of fascinating that within our own teaching team, we have been together long enough, we can actually use other people’s stories. I can use the reference, “Tim told me the other day…” and everybody knows Tim because he is on the teaching rotation and they get a big chuckle out of the story. Those kinds of things work.

I think you get better theology. I think sometimes it can be dangerous, us just by ourselves. But when we’re holding our theology off each other, when we are doing the right kind of exegesis and the right kind of thinking, we get better theology.

I think you also get a better use of time. I discovered that when I wrote a sermon by myself it would take me about 20 to 25 hours a week. I think that is probably not atypical. What we are discovering in this type of process is it will probably take me more like 12 to 15 hours. That is a benefit for me, and for our New Thing Network we bring in church planters -- for them to be able to plug into that and say, “I can get a better message in less amount of time.” That actually empowers them to be able to do leadership development and other things that they have to do that are so challenging in those early stages of planting a church.

One more thing, for me -- maybe it’s just the way I’m wired -- I’m having a lot more fun.

Preaching: I wonder if some of the objections to this process are generational. Perhaps there are older pastors that grew up with the concept with the pastor studying privately in the office, developing the message, as opposed to a younger generation that is more open to the whole team concept.

Ferguson: It may be generational. I feel there is definitely the paradigm that people have going into preaching that it is something you do by yourself in your study with your commentaries, doing your own exegesis, that kind of stuff. It is also the paradigm you get when you come out of Bible college or seminary. I don’t know too many places that are really big proponents, who are saying: “Hey, you ought to be thinking about doing this.”