Have You Ever Heard A Multi-Speaker Sermon You Liked?

“It was pretty clever of you to handle a tricky sermon topic by getting people to handle it for you,” he said shaking my hand after worship. He was right. This one was tricky. “What should Christians do about the opportunity gap?” A thorny installment in our “Peoples’ Choice” summer sermon series.

I enlisted the the question’s owner to tell the congregation why he had asked that question, what stake he had in the answer. Then I enlisted one of our guests from Louisiana here for the week on a mission trip to talk about how the ministries of her church are bridging the opportunity gap. Then I put on the finishing touches.

The question did not get definitively answered. The approach was more descriptive, as my co-preachers shared stories of things they’ve seen and done to reach across the opportunity gap. A lot of what they described comes down to mentoring, so I pointed that out and shared a quote from Robert Putnam: “If America’s religious communities were to become seized of the immorality of the opportunity gap, mentoring is one of the ways they could make an immediate impact.”

Clever perhaps. But I hope, also, challenging in a way that my usual solo sermons are not.