One of my favorite seminary classes was called Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching, taught by then President Neal Plantinga and Professor Scott Hoezee. I loved it because we read all kinds of wonderful books and talked about them with an eye to preaching. We also had to collect quotes and observations from our reading as a start to a file. I dreamed that as a pastor, I would be a voracious reader and my file would grow quickly.But once I was a pastor, I didn’t read as much as I thought I would. I was busy with meetings, answering e-mail, writing sermons, visiting people, and many more tasks. One of my regrets about my first years of ministry is that I didn’t better protect time to read widely. When I did read, I didn’t take the time to note those passages and themes I should save for later, so my file stayed about the same size. On my list of things-I-want-to-do-better the next time I’m a pastor is read widely and be disciplined enough to add to the file.
Perhaps you are wondering why it is important for me to read as a pastor. Neal Plantinga has taken his thinking about this topic and discussions from classes and seminars he has led and crafted them into a new book called Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists. The premise of the book is that preachers should read widely because it helps us gain wisdom, improve our use of language, interact with new ideas and people, and find the best material for sermons.
I studied English for my undergraduate education, and once I was in seminary I realized that all that reading and discussing and writing I did had taught me to do most of those things. I had entered Tennyson’s grief at the death of a friend in his poem In Memoriam A.H.H. I had grappled with stereotypes in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. I experienced Hester Prynne’s guilt and shame in The Scarlet Letter. All of those experiences make me a better pastor, preacher, and person.
Reading brings me great joy—I love getting to know new people through a novel or seeing things in a new way from a poem. Thankfully, Plantinga says to enjoy it. “Good reading generates delight, and the preacher should enjoy it without guilt. Delight is a part of God’s shalom and the preacher who enters the world of delight goes with God” (pg. x). Plantinga’s blessing and exhortation in this book really encouraged me to be more intentional about reading and the less delightful (but important) process of recording some of my discoveries.
At the same time, I have figured out some practical tips of what works for me which makes me much more motivated to do it. First, the question of what to read. My problem is usually having too many books to read at any particular time, but I often try to rotate through novels, non-fiction, and poetry. Plantinga suggests “Just one novel a year? And one biography? And one-fifth of a book of poetry by one poet? And a weekly visit to the website of Arts & Letters Daily to find out what the best journalists have been saying? Not a bad plan, I think” (pg. 42). Sounds doable, doesn’t it! Plantinga offers a “Selected Reading List” at the back of his book to get started from. Another way I like to select great books is from the Recommended Reading List for the upcoming Festival of Faith and Writing.
When I am reading, if it is a paper book I have small sticky tabs that I place at the place on a page where I find something interesting. Then, when I finish the book I go back through and if it still seems like something I want to save, I put it into the file. (I picked up that tip from an interview Plantinga did for the release of his book. Don’t ask how I had forgotten to ask him what his method is when I had the class with him.) If I am reading on the Kindle app on my tablet, I highlight parts I want to save. Then, when I am finished I go to my online Kindle account where you can see all of what you have highlighted. Anything I want to save gets copied and pasted into my files. Both of these methods have been working really well for me!
I keep my file in Evernote, which is a free software. You can create multiple notebooks with various notes in each. The best part is that I can tag each note with topics (love, grief, forgiveness, etc.). Then when I am looking for something on a theme, I check out what I’ve tagged with it. There is also a really convenient web clipper, which makes it really easy to save blog posts and online news clippings very easily. Keeping my file in Evernote has been a key to actually using this system; I started out doing it differently and it was too much work. (For the record, Evernote has no idea who I am, I just really like their software.)
I’m really looking forward to the day when I’ll be preaching regularly again and be able to use my file my often. It is a great feeling to know that I am investing time now that should pay off in the future. And now I’m off to Burma in a young adult novel I just started called Bamboo People.
