My life as a pastor in the Bahamas.

A friend recently told me that our blog clearly illustrated what Kurtis and the girls do everyday, but there was no evidence of what I do during the week...much less on Sunday. So by popular request (of 1) here it is.

The majority of my days are spent at the Kids Up! program as well. Most of my time is devoted to adminstrative stuff and sermon writing, but I do manage to sneak downstairs and help out at meal time and during field trips.

The congregation at St. Andrew's Kirk is the most diverse congregation I have ever encountered. They are not only racially and culturally diverse, but economically and politically diverse as well. It is so much fun to listen to them discuss different topics because they all bring such varied outlooks on life into the discussion. They also really listen to the sermons. My two previous churches were listening churches as well, but this group of people astound me. I had one man come up to me after church on Sunday and comment how he liked a part of my sermon but wished I had done more with it. He then proceeded to give me some ideas of how I could have developed it more and then stopped himself and said, "Yes, but that is a whole new sermon isn't it?" Pretty amazing stuff.

Sermon writing has become an interesting task each week. That is not to say that I haven't always found it interesting. What I have learned is that I tend to use more colloquialisms and slang terms in my sermons than I realized. I have also found that my cultural references don't always make sense to the congregation. For example, as I was working on my 'Good Samaritan' sermon I ran across an article that talked about the good samaritan in NYC who jumped onto the subway tracks to save a stranger from an oncoming train. I asked a couple of people if they had heard of this incident, and of course they hadn't. Which means that I had to go looking for another example that was more relevant to the congregation...not exactly the easiest thing in the world. While it has been frustrating, it has also been a wonderful learning experience. I have really begun to notice a difference in how I deliver a sermon as well as how I write them.

As I began working on this weeks sermon, I ran across a quote by Frederick Beuchner which sums up my experience in working with the Kids Up! program. These kids are hungry for attention, knowledge and acceptance. I hope you enjoy this quote as much as I did.

"We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better for worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the same point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger."

- Frederick Buechner
from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

Peace,

Keri