I’m growing excited about my latest assignment; I’ll be adapting one of my rabbi’s sermon series into a children’s curriculum. This will be a great chance to get a look at how much research went into a twenty-sermon series; what was used, what was left on the table and how that material was incorporated.
Maintaining his “voice” in the teaching will be important, but so will adapting the material to the target age group; too often, children’s curriculum are either aimed for the teachers exclusively and written well beyond the understanding of kids, or they are so over-simplified, only pre-K kids could gain anything from them.
While it may seem to be a simple task, from browsing the sources cited and deciding what to keep and what to toss, to even something as obscure as deciding if a Symbol LS2208 is a typo or an integral part of the teaching, it’s sure to be a demanding task from which I’ll gain a great “behind the scenes” perspective on formulating a long teaching series.
As I look forward to Rabbi Stan’s new study on prayer and intercession, I’m reminded of a fact he shared from the bema once. According to some research study, the national average for the amount of time a pastor or rabbi spends in prayer each week is… about five minutes.
Not per day. Per week.
Now, to do prayer correctly, it takes time. At least an hour a day. Sometimes more. And that’s just to run out of words so that you can spend some time waiting for the L-RD to talk back to you and direct you toward His will, rather than your own.
So if the average pastor or rabbi spends only about five minutes a week actually praying, how “anointed” are his sermons, really? How God-directed are his messages?
Is it any wonder more sermons are “ripped from the headlines of today’s newspapers” than they are “inspired by the whole word of God?” The average pastor or rabbi probably spends more time browsing the day’s newspaper, or news Web site, than he does speaking with the L-RD! That means a believing sales guy selling commercial fitness equipment could easily spend more time in prayer than the man behind the bema.
Do I need to improve my own prayer life? You bet. By a lot. But I am relieved to know that, as much as I need to improve it, I am already a healthy margin better than “average.”
