Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

leadership

How many sermons does it take to find your sound?

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“It takes 200 sermons, before you know how to preach one.”

I’ve been wrestling with this statement, ever since I heard this from a seasoned preacher who was a couple decades older than me.

He was essentially asserting that you need to preach approximately 200 sermons…

  • Before you can discover your voice
  • To understand how to preach the way that God designed you to speak
  • In order to know what sort of preacher (and pitcher) you are

This makes sense (more on the parallel to pitching down below). After all, sermons aren’t general evergreen content that can be re-used and re-preached exactly as-is, regardless of the context. Sermons aren’t lectures that can be honed and re-taught semester after semester either. Preaching a sermon is much more than that. Preaching is the humble act of discerning and communicating God’s timely message, to a specific people, in a particular place.

Preaching is the humble act of discerning and communicating God’s timely message, to a specific people, in a particular place.
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So it makes sense that you need enough reps—approximately 200—to truly understand how to prepare and preach God’s word to God’s people in a way that is true to you.

I’ve found this to be true

In my first four years of pastoral ministry, I preached approximately 48 times a year. This was way too many reps, and I got burned out.

So for the next five years, I went down to approximately 4-8 times a year. While this was nice for the first year or two, I eventually realized that this was too infrequent for me.

For the next four years after that, I preached approximately 20-26 times a year. This was the best rhythm by far, and essentially prepared me for my current role and load at 32-35 times a year.

While I’m still honing my voice and growing as a preacher (I never want to stop developing), I’ve noticed that after 200 sermons, I’ve finally learnt how to preach one. Steve Carter, my preaching coach, has helped me uncover my voice, my sound, and my style.

It takes 200 sermons, before you know how to preach one
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So, what does preaching have to do with pitching?

As I was wrestling with my voice/sound/style, I realized that there were a ton of parallels between preaching and pitching.

Just like pitchers have different types of pitches in baseball, like the fastball, curveball, slider, changeup, splitter, knuckleball, sinker, and cutter, so do preachers! An expository sermon is a type of pitch, as is a topical sermon, or a narrative one. Some preachers have more of a teaching style, others are more inspirational, and some are very extemporaneous and exuberant—all of these are like different types of pitches in baseball.

Not only are there different types of pitches in baseball (and styles of sermons for preachers), but there are also different types of pitchers (and preachers). Starters start the game, set the tone, and will play a few to several innings. Relievers specialize in short bursts of pitching, usually only facing a few batters or pitching for an inning or two. Closers are a type of Reliever that only appears in the final inning(s) to save the game. And then there are the Specialists: Long Relievers, Setup Man, Left-Handed Specialist, Knuckleball Pitcher, Spot Starter.

In addition to all of this fun baseball trivia, do you see the parallels between the different types of pitchers and preachers? Lead Pastors and Teaching Pastors are like the Starters. Youth Pastors, Associate Pastors, and Guest Preachers are like the Relievers, Closers, or Specialists.

What’s the point?

The point of this article is to point out the fact that just like there’s not one type of ideal sermon (or pitch), there’s not one type of ideal preacher (or pitcher) either! So instead of comparing yourself with your role-models—or trying to imitate them—focus on getting your reps in. As you preach more sermons, you’ll discover what sort of pitches get you strikes, and what sort of pitcher God’s created you to be.

It’s like that how that old Hebraic tale goes, “Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?”

Just like there’s not one type of ideal sermon, there’s not one type of ideal preacher.
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Great and Meaningful Work

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“I want this to be a place where you can do great and meaningful work with the people that you love.”

That’s what I shared with my staff team at Beulah when we were celebrating our certification as a Best Christian Workplace for 2022. It was our best year ever, as our overall score marked us as flourishing. Now according to Best Christian Workplaces, there are eight keys to a flourishing workplace culture, and I was excited to see that we grew in every single area compared to the previous year:

  • Fantastic Teams
  • Life-Giving Work
  • Outstanding Talent
  • Uplifting Growth
  • Rewarding Compensation
  • Inspirational Leadership
  • Sustainable Strategy
  • Healthy Communication

And while I am the primary preacher at Beulah Alliance Church, preaching to our church family isn’t the only thing I do. As Lead Pastor, I am responsible to lead, pastor, and lead our pastors and staff team. As a result, creating a workplace culture where our 50+ staff can do great and meaningful work with the people that they love is really important to me!

I see that as equally important as my calling to preach because that’s how we’re going to live out Ephesians 4—where it’s not the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers who are doing the work of ministry, but it’s the people of God! My role—and the role of our staff team—isn’t about doing. It’s about equipping. And when we equip our church family to do the work of ministry, we will see the body of Christ built up, move toward unity in the faith, and grow into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness. Instead of being tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, we will be firm, strong, and be able to stand against the schemes of the evil one (Ephesians 4:11-16; 6:10-12).

So to create and cultivate a culture where our staff team can do great and meaningful work with the people they love, we have three leadership virtues: healthy, humble, and hungry.

I want us to be a HEALTHY team by…

  • Praying for and with one another
  • Giving each other the benefit of the doubt
  • Refusing to hold grudges
  • Growing in our spiritual, emotional, and relational health

I want us to be a HUMBLE team by…

  • Sharing credit
  • Celebrating team over self
  • Helping each other get back up when we fail
  • Despising ego

I want us to be a HUNGRY team by…

  • Being self-motivated and hungry to grow ourselves, others, and Beulah
  • Being a place where you can continue to grow
  • Together—shoulder to shoulder—being a place where we are actively moving forward

In other words, I want Beulah to be a place where you can do great and meaningful work with the people that you love. I want us to be teammates who love Jesus, are for one another, and are passionately focused on seeing God’s Kingdom come and His will be done in Greater Edmonton.

Do you want this too?

We’re always looking for fantastic people who love Jesus and the Church to join our team. And we actually have a few mission critical roles open, such as campus pastor positions for our Southwest campus and our Faro de Luz campus, and a role for an Outreach Pastor. You can learn more about those roles (and the rest of our open roles) here.

“Judge not” is not about being blind

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We live in such an interesting point in time, don’t we?

On the one hand, we’re encouraged to rate and review everything—our favourite restaurants, businesses, workouts, books, podcasts, shows, and even professors and doctors! In fact, not only are we encouraged, but we’re even incentivized to do so! But at the same time, we’re also drowning in criticism, contempt, and a wildfire of seemingly knee-jerk reactions and poorly thought-out opinions to tweets, rumours, and news articles—both real and fake.

Hmm…I wonder if there’s a connection?

When Jesus said, “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged,” was this what he was referring to? Was he warning us about the perils of five-star ratings, and industries built upon crowd sourcing reviews? Or was he perhaps talking about all of the subtle—and also overt—ways that we pass judgement onto others? Like, “I can’t believe they parked like that! How inconsiderate.” Or, “What a show off. What is he trying to prove posting that on the internet?”

It’s the latter!

When Jesus said “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged,” he’s referring to all of the ways that we judge others through our thoughts, our ensuing facial reactions, or the words that come out of our mouths. He’s talking about the tendency that we have to often criticize, condemn, find fault with, or think that we’re higher or better than others—especially when we’re “hangry” or tired.

Let’s take a look at the whole passage,

Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use. Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye? Hypocrite! First take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:1-5 CSB)

Now after reading this, it’s completely reasonable to think to yourself, “Alright so…to help me not judge, I’m just going to keep my head down and turn a blind eye to everything!”

Note that I said “reasonable to think to yourself,” and not “reasonable to do.” Going to an extreme like this is not the way to live out Jesus’ command to “Judge not.”

I love how the theologian and pastor, John Stott, explains this passage,

To sum up, the command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men (by suspending our critical powers which help to distinguish us from animals) but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God (by setting ourselves up as judges).

Oh how we often fall into this trap!

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve caught myself—mid-sentence—yelling at my kids to stop yelling at each other. When we judge others like this, we’re hypocrites. We’re near-sighted hypocrites who don’t realize that we’re pointing out the splinter in another’s eye, while we ourselves have a beam of wood in ours!

So the next time you find yourself tempted to pass judgement on another person…

…what do you think would happen if you paused and first asked yourself, “When have I been guilty of this myself?” And then went to the cross and spent time in prayer for yourself and for the other person, instead of judgement?

Friends, let’s judge not!

Keeping Short Accounts

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It’s been a little over three years since my family and I moved back to Canada for me to become the next Lead Pastor at Beulah Alliance Church.

Here are a couple of posts that I did on the succession journey:

I was recently interviewed by Sean Morgan about the transition, why humility must be the chief characteristic of the outgoing pastor, and why leaders must keep short accounts.

Here’s the episode on the Leaders in Living Rooms Podcast:

Our Focus for the Next 50 Years

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If you could focus on something for the next 50 years—and give all of your best thought, focus, resources, and energy toward that one thing—what would it be?

If, as a church, we could focus on something or some thing(s) for the next 50 years, what would make the greatest difference? And when Jesus taught us to pray, “May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” what efforts do you think he had in mind?

Recently, Timothy Keller wrote a series of four articles that are a must-read for every Christian pastor and leader on The Decline and Renewal of the American Church:

  1. The Decline of the Mainline
  2. The Decline of Evangelicalism
  3. The Path to Renewal
  4. The Strategy for Renewal

I urge you to take the time to read all four. It will probably take a good hour to read and process all of them, but it’ll be worth your time. Keller is a gift to the church.

Now when it comes to that something or those some thing(s) to focus on for the next 50 years, here are a list of eight projects that Keller is inviting us to consider. The following are his words, not mine from his fourth article:

The Projects of Renewal

This project list is not final. God will lead the leaders to his will for them. And this list which I put forward for consideration was given in the third article. For reader convenience here it is again with somewhat fuller descriptions.

  1. Church planting and renewal. We need to double the number of new church plants in the U.S. from the current 3-4,000 to 6-8,000 annually. Current models of church planting need to be changed. First, because they are both too under-resourced among poor and working-class populations and done too expensively in the more advantaged populations. Church planters, in general, will need (a) far more coaching and support, (b) far more training and education delivered to them as they minister, and (c) more institutional support for an evangelistic model that grows through conversion rather than a marketing model that grows through marketing and transfer.
  2. ‘Counter-Catechesis’ discipleship. Christian education, in general, needs to be massively redone. We must not merely explain Christian doctrine to children, youth, and adults, but use Christian doctrine to subvert the baseline cultural narratives to which believers are exposed in powerful ways every day. We should distribute this material widely to all, disrupting existing channels, flooding society, as it were, with the material as well as directly incorporating it into local churches.
  3. Post-Christian Evangelism. The Christian church in the West faces the first post-Christian, deeply secular culture in history. It has not yet developed a way to do evangelism with the secular and the “nones” that really gains traction and sees many people regularly coming to faith. This project is to develop both content and means for such evangelism. The means will entail a mobilization of lay people in evangelism, as in the early church. The content will show how to demonstrate to deeply skeptical people that Christianity is respectable, desirable, and believable (cf. Blaise Pascal’s Pensée 187).
  4. A Justice Network. We must create a network—at least one trans-denominational ministry or maybe a network of networks—that organizes Christians and churches in communities to both help various needy populations and also to work for a more just and fair social order at the local level. Only relatively large congregations can mount effective ministries to address social problems. A network will provide any church and every church in a locale multiple ways to be involved in visible-to-the-world ways and means for tackling the most acute and chronic injustices and social issues in a community or region.
  5. A Faith-work Network. We must create a network (or, again, a network of new and existing ministries) that organizes and equips Christians for ‘faithful presence’ in their vocations, [19] to help them serve the common good through integrating their faith with their work. The network will help churches disciple people for their public life so Christians neither seal their faith off from their work, nor infiltrate vocational fields for domination.
  6. The “Christian mind” project. Evangelicalism has a strongly anti-intellectual cast to it that must be overcome without losing its appeal to the majority of the population. The goals include increasing the number of Christians on faculties, forging a robust intellectual culture for orthodox Protestantism, and increasing the number of Christian public intellectuals. This will not only entail promoting believers into the existing intellectual and cultural economy of basically (a) largely progressive universities and (b) largely conservative think tanks. It will also mean creating some kind of alternate cultural economy for scholarship and intellectual work.
  7. A new leadership pipeline. We must not only renew, re-create, expand, and greatly strengthen youth ministry and campus ministries across the country, but we must link these (more tightly than in the past) with local churches and denominations, ministry/theological training centers, colleges, and seminaries—forming coherent yet highly diverse and flexible pathways for leadership development (e.g. conversion, then student leadership, then internships, then staff positions and other leadership positions). The purpose is to produce increasing numbers of well-equipped Christian leaders.
  8. Behind all these seven projects is an eighth ‘meta’ project. Call it Christian philanthropy. We cannot renew the church or be of any help to society without strong financial undergirding. That will require a change in how Christians give and steward their wealth such that it will release far more money for ministry than has been available.

Is God calling you to focus on one of these eight? If you could focus on something for the next 50 years—and give all of your best thought, focus, resources, and energy toward that one thing—what would it be?