Most weeks, you can’t tell.
You preach a sermon you believe in. You stand at the door. People shake your hand, say “good word, pastor,” and head to lunch. By Tuesday you’re not sure if anything you said landed anywhere. Attendance is what it is. The same handful of people are still arguing about the same things. The young families you prayed in last fall haven’t come back since Easter.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, quieter than you’d like to admit, is the question.
Is this actually doing anything?
If you’ve been in ministry more than a few years, you know that question. And you know it doesn’t usually announce itself. It shows up sideways. As a Monday morning fog. As a flatness in sermon prep. As a temptation to chase whatever you saw working at someone else’s church last week.
Underneath the burnout statistics and the “I almost quit” conversations is something more basic than exhaustion. It’s the slow erosion of confidence that the work itself is producing what it’s supposed to produce.
I want to say something honest about that. And then something hopeful.
Honest first.
Preaching has always been work whose results are mostly invisible to the preacher. We have romanticized a few moments in Acts where three thousand were added in a day, and we have forgotten the much longer stretches in the prophets and the Gospels where faithful proclamation produced almost nothing a metrics dashboard would recognize. Jeremiah preached for forty years and watched his city fall anyway. Jesus preached for three years and ended up with eleven uncertain men on a mountain in Galilee.
The pattern of Scripture is not that faithful preaching produces visible change on the preacher’s timeline.
The pattern is that faithful preaching plants something the preacher rarely gets to harvest.
This doesn’t mean preaching isn’t changing things. It means the change is happening underneath what you can see, on a schedule you don’t control, in people whose interior life you have no access to. The woman who heard you preach on forgiveness in March may call her estranged brother in November and never tell you why. The teenager who looked bored through your Lent series may remember a single sentence twenty years from now in a hospital room.
Most of the fruit of your preaching will ripen out of your sight.
Some of it will ripen after you’re gone.
Now the hopeful thing.
If that’s true, the question shifts. It is no longer am I producing measurable change? That question will eat you alive, because the honest answer most weeks is I can’t tell. The question becomes am I being faithful to what I’ve been given to do this week, for these people, with this text? That is a question you can actually answer. It has a Monday morning answer and a Saturday night answer, and the answer is mostly within your control.
This is not a counsel of resignation. It’s the opposite. It is what frees you to keep going when the visible returns are low. The pastors I know who last in ministry are not the ones who saw the most numerical growth. They are the ones who made peace, somewhere along the way, with preaching into rooms whose interior weather they couldn’t read, trusting that the Spirit was doing work they weren’t being shown.
A few practical things, since this newsletter is called Preaching for Change and I don’t want to leave you only with consolation.
One. Distinguish between the change you can see and the change you’re actually called to produce. The change you can see (attendance, giving, program participation) is real, and worth paying attention to, but it is a lagging and partial indicator at best. The change you’re called to produce is closer to a congregation slowly being shaped into the likeness of Christ, and that change is mostly invisible from the pulpit. Don’t confuse the dashboard for the work.
Two. Give yourself permission to preach to the room you actually have. Not the room you wish you had. Not the room your seminary preaching professor imagined. Not the room the church growth book promised you. The actual room. The half-attentive teenager, the grieving widow in the third pew, the elder who has been mad at you since the building committee meeting. Preach to them. The gospel has something specific to say to that room, and the sermon that lands somewhere is almost always the one that took the actual room seriously.
Three. Take the long view on your own ministry. Most of what you will be remembered for, if you are remembered at all, will not be the sermon series you spent a month preparing. It will be the slow, accumulated weight of years of showing up and telling the truth about God to the same people. That is not a small thing. It may be the largest thing you ever do.
The risen Christ sent disciples into the world who were, by Matthew’s own admission, still working some things out. He did not wait for visible results before commissioning them. He did not promise them visible results once they went. He promised, instead, to be with them.
Always. To the end of the age.
That promise was sufficient for them. It is sufficient for you.
Keep preaching.
You may not see what it’s doing.
It is doing something.
Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash.
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