Talbot Davis, Author at Talbot Davis

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Thank You Jars Of Clay . . .

Talbot Davis September 4, 2013 at 1:00 am 2

. . . for getting it just right. Again.

Here's Inland, the latest single from the album of the same name:

Don't be surprised if you hear this one at church sometime in the near future.

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Top Five Tuesday — Top Five Preaching Rituals, Routines, And Habits

Talbot Davis September 3, 2013 at 1:00 am 2

Given that this is US Open time of year, last week's Charlotte Observer ran a story about the rather unusual -- OK, bizarre -- routines, habits, and superstitions that pro tennis players bring to their games.

For example, Andre Agassi went commando in his first match at the 1999 French Open . . . and when he won that particular match, then went underwear-less for the rest of the tournament, which he won.

Other players eat the same meals every day as long as they are winning while still others, like Poland's Jerzy Janowicz, refuse to shave until they are out of the tournament. That's why he was lightly bearded in the semi-finals of Wimbledon but silky smooth after losing in the first round at Flushing Meadows.

You can read the whole story here.

The article brought back some . . . comforting? alarming? . . . memories of my own idiosyncracies when I played competitive tennis. For example, I wouldn't step on the lines of the court when I changed ends during a match. I would always use the same ball on the next point if I used it to hit a good shot on the previous one. I'd wipe my grip off with a towel before every serve.

Maybe my favorite involved a tournament in Corpus Christi, Texas, which I ended up winning when I was 16. At the time, it was the biggest event I'd ever won and the best I'd ever played. And before each match that week, I had some Dunkin' Donuts. Suddenly that became the ticket! I had to have a doughnut before every match, Corpus Christi or not.

Well, that superstition ran out about as quickly as the nutritional value of my chocolate eclair.

Anyway, what, if anything, does all that have to do with today?

Quite a lot, apparently. Because I recognize that I have certain fixed and immovable habits around my preaching at Good Shepherd. I'm not going to call them superstitions because I believe God is in the whole process. But I will call them idiosyncracies because I know I'm in the process.

1. Prepare message at least four weeks out. The next sermon I need to prepare, for example, will be delivered on October 13. I figure that since I need to get one ready almost every week, I might as well be working on them well in advance. I'm pretty sure I'd have ulcers if it ever got to be Thursday night and I didn't know what I was going to preach for Sunday.

2. Familiarize myself with the coming Sunday's message every morning before I leave the house. So while during the day I'm developing & writing a sermon for next month, early, early in the morning I'm getting to know the one I'll deliver this coming Sunday. Yes, I practice. Sometimes I'll pull one out that was prepared four weeks ago and then begin to practice it on Monday and realize, "Hey! This is good! I can't wait for Sunday!" Other times it's, "Uh-oh. This needs work. And prayer."

3. Make detailed notes in microscopic writing on either Thursday or Friday. I never use those notes. They just help me to get the flow of the message firmly in my mind.

4. Pray over my preparation on Friday that God would send people of all nations and backgrounds and colors and languages to worship on Sunday. I don't know why Friday is my day for full color prayer. It just is.

5. After my Saturday run through, lay my hands over my preparation and pray for a full anointing the next day. I also pray for several preacher friends at that time, that God would use them as a magnet to draw people into the Kingdom. After praying for those friends, I pray for my own message. A long, long time ago, during one of those Saturday prayers, I very clearly heard God say, "don't ever preach without praying like this." So I haven't.

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Home Based Experience

Talbot Davis August 30, 2013 at 1:00 am 0

For the second time ever, I'm using this space to remind not to come to church on Sunday.

The church is going home. Again.

It's the ultimate in multi-site worship -- every household in our church will host its own worship experience with parents, step-parents, and grandparents assuming their rightful place as spiritual influencers over their children's lives.

We also have host homes for folks who don't have families or households in Charlotte to connect with.

Here's a sense of what's happening this coming Sunday. It's a video we prepared in May of 2012, the first time the church went home.

So pay attention to everything except the church-wide picnic on Sunday afternoon . . . we won't be doing that on this Sunday.

To download the home worship resources, go to www.gsumc.org.

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Biblical Wisdom At 9,200 Feet

Talbot Davis August 29, 2013 at 1:00 am 0

I'm spending several days this week up in Keystone, Colorado (elevation 9,200 feet), at the annual gathering of what we in Methodism called The Leading Edge: the pastors of the 100 highest attended churches in the denomination.

(Of those 100 churches, Good Shepherd's attendance of 1800 per Sunday put it somewhere in the 50s.)

Anyway, the highlight of this year's meeting is its connection of large-church pastors with the deans and presidents of the seminaries that serve the United Methodist Church.

Which meant that one of those at my table was Richard Hays, a New Testament scholar who is the Dean of the Divinity School at Duke.

I have long admired Hays' teaching which blends the best of biblical scholarship with a commitment to historically orthodox Christian teaching and a love for the local church.

And one of his comments at Wednesday's meeting -- delivered with his usual quiet authority -- gave me yet another reason for appreciation.

Our group was in conversation regarding the consequences of 19th & 20th century biblical scholarship -- how in the universities and seminaries of Western Europe and North America, professors saw their role as undermining not only biblical passages under study but the very faith of the students they were teaching.

So, in this mindset, Moses was only marginally involved in the Pentateuch, Isaiah 52-53 has nothing to do with the coming Christ, and Jesus himself actually said or did very little of what the New Testament claims that he said and did.

In academic circles, such an approach to biblical study became widely accepted throughout the 1900s; indeed, to question such commonly accepted wisdom was to beg for scholarly exile. You can read a more comprehensive history of higher criticism here.

The impact on local churches, as you might imagine, was disastrous: their seminary-trained pastors entered the pulpit trusting neither the reliability nor the authority of the biblical texts on which they preached. The result? Insipid sermons leading to malnourished congregations culminating in flatlining denominations.

Yet Hays -- who has studied and taught at some of the most prestigious schools in the world, including Yale, Duke, and Emory -- offered a sublime alternative during our table talk on Wednesday:

The truth is that rigorous scholarship leads to an appreciation of the text, not a dismantling of it.

In the world of the academy that asserition is decidedly counter-cultural: to study the history behind and the structure of biblical texts actually increases rather than diminishes the sense that God somehow breathed life into those words.

Or, as we say at Good Shepherd, that the library of Scripture is inspired, eternal, and true.

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A Good Shepherd Alternative To Toxic Charity

Talbot Davis August 28, 2013 at 1:00 am 0

By now many of you have read or at least heard of Toxic Charity, Robert Lupton's tour de force on how churches and charities actually hurt the ones they most desire to help.

You can read up on the book and the movement it is inspiring here.

Well, a pair of highly committed, high impact volunteers have taken the toxic charity thinking to heart and devised a ministry which empowers rather than enables.

Working with the Salvation Army Center of Hope, our volunteers have conducted a series of Job Skills Seminars so that the women of the Center can best present themselves during the interview process for much-needed jobs.

They followed the Skills Seminar with an actual Job Fair -- matching women-on-the-margins with hiring managers from our area.

Here's how one of our volunteers describes it:

We conducted one on one coaching and mock interviews before the actual job fair, as well as a skill practice called "TMI" ---Three Minute Introductions, where we had the women move from coach to coach and in three minutes introduce themselves and make a positive first impression. The women indicated they really liked this as it gave them the opportunity to learn different interview styles and what one person make ask versus someone else.

I think one of the most awesome points for me, was that the recruiters that came, are also passionate about the cause and in helping coach these women. So as much as it was an "interview", the recruiters helped them formulate more positive answers for the next time around. The example that (hiring manager) from (major Charlotte employer) gave was she asked one women to tell her something good about herself. She said the woman really struggled, but Latisha continue to probe until the women articulated something positive. Then she said to her next time....."that's your answer."

If you'd like to be part of the ongoing ServeTeam that enriches the lives of the women of the Salvation Army Center of hope, contact Ron Dozier, pastor of Missions & Community Impact, at rondozier@gsumc.org.

Talbot Davis

Talbot Davis

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