Preaching Is the Easy Part

A veteran minister on ego, integrity, and what actually keeps a preacher from failing

I sat across from Terry expecting a conversation about sermon technique. What I got instead was a masterclass on the life behind the sermon — the kind of conversation that makes you set your pen down and just listen.

Terry has spent decades in ministry. He’s watched preachers rise and fall. He’s counseled young ministers, buried old saints, and navigated every season the ministry can throw at a person. When he talks about preaching, he doesn’t start with outlines or illustrations. He starts with the preacher.

And the first thing he told me hit hard.

Preaching is the easiest part of ministry.

That’s not a throwaway line. He means it. And the more I’ve sat with it, the more I believe he’s right. If you have any public speaking ability at all, you can stand behind a pulpit and move a room. You can get the slaps on the back. You can get the “That was great, brother!” compliments. And the whole thing can be completely void of anointing.

That should frighten us.

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The Ego Problem

I asked Terry if he sees a disconnect between the preacher’s calling and the way they live. His answer surprised me. He said the first thing he’d do is eliminate the word “today.”

Every generation has struggled with this. Demas was with the apostle Paul — an intern of the man who wrote most of the New Testament, a member of the Book of Acts church. And somewhere in the process, he lost sight of the value of this life of preaching. He just disappeared. Paul himself admitted the tension in Romans: when I want to do good, I end up doing evil.

Integrity doesn’t come naturally. The flesh comes naturally. Integrity is something you have to fight for, practice, and pursue every single day. And when a preacher stops fighting for it, the calling doesn’t protect them. It just makes the fall more public.

Terry has watched it happen — preachers who blaze up to the top of the star chart, so in love with the sound of their own voice and the adulation that comes with a good sermon, that they never notice the foundation cracking underneath them. And then, like a falling star, they disappear. Nobody hears from them again.

The life of the preacher and his calling are joined at the hip. They cannot be separated. If you separate them, one of them is going to die.

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Living in a Cocoon

One of the most striking things Terry said had nothing to do with sermon delivery. It was about the danger of a preacher who only knows how to preach.

He told me that many preachers today live in a cocoon. They are consumed with their own ventures, their own speaking engagements, their own platform. They step into pulpits and don’t know how to relate to the man and wife on the back pew whose marriage is falling apart. They can’t connect with the family struggling to pay their mortgage. They don’t know what to say to the teenager in the back row who’s texting through the sermon because no one in their life has given them a reason to care.

His advice to young preachers? Don’t just learn how to preach. Learn how to do other things. Get an education. Develop skills. Be bivocational or trivocational. Not because preaching doesn’t matter, but because the breadth of your life experience is what gives your preaching depth. A preacher who has only ever preached is a preacher who has very little to say.

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The Hard Questions

I asked Terry what keeps a preacher from failing. His answer was disarmingly simple: tell the truth. Then you don’t have to remember what you said.

Be accountable. Even now, at his age, he checks with his wife before accepting a speaking engagement. Not because he has to. Because accountability is a lifestyle, not a phase you pass through when you’re young and need guardrails.

And then he said something that I think every preacher needs to hear: you have to be willing to ask yourself the hard questions. When did I last teach a Bible study? When did I last preach someone to their knees? When did I last bring someone to the baptismal tank? How many people have I personally won to God in the last three months?

If you can’t answer those questions, something is off. Either you’re drowning in your own ego, you’re in the wrong place, or you’ve missed an open door.

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Priorities and Discipline

Toward the end of our conversation, Terry brought it down to two words: priorities and discipline. Anyone can set priorities. Not everyone has the discipline to keep them.

He quoted an old line: “Only by persistence did the snail reach Noah’s ark.” It wasn’t his speed. It was his persistence.

Paul told Timothy to study to show himself approved. The flip side, Terry pointed out, is also true: if you don’t study, you’re not approved. So make up your mind which one you want to be.

He told me that early in his walk with God, he made a vow: he would not go to sleep at night until he had, within his limited way, mastered three chapters of the Bible. He used what he had — a few commentaries, some concordances — and poured over them. It took three and a half years. He was fine until she hit Psalm 119 and was up until four in the morning. But he kept the vow.

That’s not technique. That’s a life.

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Find Your Own Pulpit

The last thing Terry told me might be the most important. He said: don’t rent a pulpit. Don’t sit in someone else’s church waiting for your chance to shine. Find your own pulpit — and it might be at somebody’s kitchen table, teaching a home Bible study, leading someone to the Lord.

That’s where the calling gets real. Not under the lights, not behind the big pulpit, not at the conference. At the kitchen table. In the hospital room. On the phone at midnight with someone whose world is falling apart.

Preaching is the easy part. The life behind it — that’s the work.

Commit to walk through all open doors, because one of them will lead you down the hallway you’ve been looking for.

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Go deeper.

This article is part of the Clear Preaching ecosystem, built to help preachers at every level develop both their skill and their substance. The free Clear Preaching email course covers the full preaching journey — from calling to delivery. Course 1: Clarity of Thought (found in the Clear Preaching Academy) goes deep on building sermons around one clear idea.

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