This summer I had the opportunity to preach two Sunday services. Because so many people visit the Cashiers area in the summer months, the church expands to offer two services on Sunday at 8:30 and 11:00. It’s rare that I ever attend two services on the same Sunday and certainly had never preached twice in the same day.
It was definitely a unique experience. While I enjoy the art of preaching, it can be very draining. Having to do it twice can leave one honestly exhausted. I’m fairly certain I took a nap each afternoon, even though I had gotten plenty of sleep the night before.
I remember feeling worried that the 8:30 crowd was getting short-changed. Yes, it was the same sermon. Yes, I had practiced my sermons before Sunday. But still, 8:30 sometimes felt like a dress rehearsal for the 11:00. In some ways, this makes sense. It’s hard to get practice in front of an audience, so the 11:00 delivery always has that advantage. In some ways, this is inevitable as extra practice never hurts. But it still bothered me. Maybe the only answer is to have the sermon better established before Sunday.
My delivery at 11:00 had one other advantage; I had some idea of how the congregation would react at certain parts. But what do you do when the reactions are different? Handling unexpected laughter I feel is fairly easy. Pause, smile, and consider repeating yourself if necessary. But what do you do when you were expecting a reaction and there is none? Do you try and force it, by admonishing the congregation? My supervisor will do this on occasion, albeit playfully. I tried it myself once and it seemed to work fairly well. Although I did learn to be flexible when using audience participation. You may not the answers you expected. You may also get many more than you expected.
Something I did learn with pulpit humor is that the punchlines were sometimes earlier than I expected. More than once people laughed at what I considered still part of the set-up, as opposed to the joke. Having not watched the sermons yet myself, this may have been an issue with my delivery. Or perhaps that’s simply part of preaching. Like many of my questions in this post, only experience can provide the answer.
I also discovered an odd personal temptation. The few times I’ve heard multiple sermons from established preachers, they changed between services. The basic message was the same but the order of the sermon might be different, details elaborated on. So my first Sunday in Cashiers I tried to do the same. Nothing too elaborate, just a few little extras. I was surprised by how much that threw off my rhythm. Changing things at the last minute impeded my flow without adding anything substantial to the sermon. I may hold this up as a goal for the future but for now, I think changing sermons at the last-minute is a bad idea for me.
For any preachers out there, what has been your experience with preaching the same sermon twice? For any non-preachers, have you ever heard the same sermon twice? How was that experience?