Listen up preacher geeks. I’ve got a book recommendation for you.

Check out Chris Erdman’s Countdown to Sunday.

I usually read about one book on preaching a year and this is my book for 2007.

It’s really a collection of essays on preaching that are loosely related. There is some practical text to sermon stuff and there’s some provocative theological stuff like “Preaching as an Alternative to Violence” and “Preaching and War” and “Preaching at a Time of National (or Any) Election.”

The preachers who will find this book the most helpful are those who take themselves too seriously (and you know who you are). I know who you are too because I am one of you.

It is easy for a preacher to make his or her preaching into an idol. We worry too much about what people will think of us. We pay too much attention to picking just the right words believing it is our word choice that saves. We carry with us to the stage or pulpit the belief that the future of the church depends on our being “good.” We make our sermons out to be more important than the gospel itself. In doing so, we become slaves to preaching the “perfect” sermon. (Which by the way, I once did. It wasn’t much fun and no one seemed to notice.) As you well know, there is no joy in slavery.

Can I get an amen?

Erdman’s advice to preachers like us is to stop taking ourselves so seriously so that the gospel can be taken more seriously.

Here are a couple of quotes:

The best way to be a really good preacher is by not trying to be good at all. If you’re trying to be good, you must put being good out of your mind. Trying to be good has at best produced some silly caricatures of preaching. At worst, trying to be good is an alluring Siren that has caused many a preacher to crash on the rocks of ambition. You are not sent by the Lord Jesus to be good. That said, I’ve no doubt that you can be good so long as being good is not your aim.

I no longer think gestures ought to be practiced and I don’t think the sermon ought to be rehearsed. . . in advance. I’ve also preached too many sermons and listened to too many sermons that have been practiced, and frankly, they sounded practiced–there was no real room for those departures that bring life to the preaching moment. But even more than all this, I think a sermon ought not to be practiced in advance because doing so betrays what preaching is all about. Doing so keeps us preachers and our congregations stuck in the fallacy that preaching is about the preacher’s performance. It’s not. Preaching, ultimately, is about the performance, the practice, of the congregation . . .