..what colour is yours?

Just unpacked the year planner to do some serious planning for next year, as you can see below. Mind you, with all those little boxes and all those multi-coloured tabs my head is hurting already!

Got me thinking though – if I had only the three primary colours to describe my sermons, which would I use?

Red: full of fire, lots of passion, but likely to burn and tending towards the angry. In his book, Playing With Fire, David Schlafer says :“Preaching is not just talking about God’s play of fire; preaching is participating in, actively entering into the divine energy of freedom, community, adventure and creativity.  Preaching is playing with fire”.

Yellow: bright and cheerful, full of life, but likely to grate on those whose lives are full of shadow. Bonhoeffer, in Worldly Preaching, talks of his best sermons as those in which in which ‘I spoke enticingly of the gospel, like someone telling children the story of a strange country.’ We have to be careful that the upbeat sermon is, indeed, enticing.

Blue: mellow, peaceful and reflective, but tending to wards the melancholy. In his stimulating book The Jazz of Preaching, Kirk Byron Jones describes how great preaching, like great blues music, can be born out of hardship: “True gospel preaching is blues preaching.  It finds ways to honour the hurt without romanticizing it”

AS preachers we are called upon to minister God’s grace in all its multicoloured forms. Peter urges us to faithfully minister the ‘rainbow grace’ of God (ποικιλης χαριτος- 1 Peter 4 v.10).  If you are honest, though, what colour do your sermons tend to be?

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Oh, and whilst you’re at it – what colour should a church business meeting be on my year planner, do you think?