The average pastor spends hours if not days at their desk, searching their soul, Bible and Greek New Testament writing a sermon. On a Sunday, they get up and do the very physical and emotional act of preaching God’s word to people whose lives they care for, and to strangers they wish to lead to Christ. It is an exhausting, exhilarating and yet isolating experience, with very little feedback apart from the occasional, “Thanks for your sermon, Pastor [insert name]”.

Faced with this situation, a growing number of pastors are seeking to develop their skills through mentoring networks like that offered by the Centre for Biblical Preaching. The Centre and its programmes are run by Mike Raiter, a passionate local and international preacher, former missionary and former Principal of Melbourne School of Theology and former Head of Missions at Moore College in Sydney.

Mike Raiter who heads up the mentoring network.

As part of the mentoring programme, Mike meets up with small groups of preachers regularly across the year, where they present sermons and receive constructive feedback from their peers. For pastors who’ve not had their sermons critiqued since Bible college, the experience is very rewarding.

“They leap at the opportunity to have someone sit down and have a look at their preaching,” Mike says. “The majority of the guys have been out of college about 10 years, and have between five and 15 years in ministry. So they’ve been doing it long enough to be in the routine. They know what they’re doing, but also long enough to know they want to take their preaching to the next level.”

Despite the number of books on preaching and preaching conferences available to pastors, Mike believes you can’t go past the value of doing as a way of learning. It’s this philosophy which undergirds his mentoring approach.

“We normally meet for two or three hours; I give input for around 30mins on an aspect of preaching, like how to preach at funerals, or evangelistically, and the rest of the time we review sermons the guys have given recently, or a half-formed sermon they’re working on. My belief is that you learn to preach by doing it.”

36-year-old Brett Peatman is Assistant Minister at St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Somerville on the Mornington Peninsula. He’s been part of a mentoring group for the past year, and says meeting with Mike and two other pastors every six weeks has helped fine tune his skills.

“Most of the feedback I’ll get is maybe someone on a Sunday saying, ‘Oh, that bit really struck me’, but to have the opportunity to really think through the communication of it and how it works is really helpful.

“I look forward to getting there, because rather than all the nuts and bolts of ministry that you do day to day, it’s focusing on something important. It re-focuses you on one of the main tasks you have before you all the time, and gets you to think critically about it, rather than just making sure you’ve got something when you stand up on a Sunday.”

Mike says the main lessons he tries to instill in people who he mentors are the value and art of applying the Biblical text, and how to deliver their sermons.

“I’m trying to wean them off reading their text,” he says. “It’s not a read lecture, so I want them to really engage with good eye contact, be animated and engaged with people.”

When it comes to churchgoers, he says they can serve their pastors by doing two things: being grateful and and freeing them up to receive training.

“When the pastor preaches a sermon that people have found helpful, they should tell them,” he says. “One of the things I think that dampens a preacher’s passion or wears them down is just the lack of feedback; an ungrateful congregation. It’s not that people say critical things, it’s just that they say nothing. And the poor person has spent hours, and hours and hours and poured his soul into the sermon and nobody says a word.

“But also saying to the pastor, ‘What can we as a church do to help you improve your preaching?’ If they’re in Melbourne, ask, ‘Can we pay for you to be mentored by the Centre for Biblical Preaching?’ I say to pastors in other states, ‘I’ll come to you. Let’s have two-days away to just work on preaching’. Just have the church put some money aside so the pastor can do some training.”

When he’s not mentoring pastors locally, Mike is running classes at the Centre’s head office in West Melbourne, or travelling with CMS to train pastors how to preach in overseas contexts. Recently he visited Tanzania, and has a queue of requests from other parts of the world, but doesn’t have the time and money to go everywhere he’s wanted.

“It’s really growing. So much that it’s become a problem. It’s a very pleasant problem to have, but a number of invitations are coming up overseas particularly in Malaysia and Africa, but I just can’t be away much more than I already am. But the needs overseas are so enormous.”

“The challenge right now is resources. The staff bit isn’t the hard bit, it’s the funding that’s hard. There’s lots of people we could send, but at the moment, while the travel is paid for, we have three dry weeks of income while I’m overseas. So what we say to our supporters is, this is a great month to give some money to the CBP so me being away doesn’t leave us short for money.”

To find out more about the mentoring programme, visit the CBP website.

http://cbp.org.au/