Squeezing the Sermon Turnip
T he other day, Brandon Cox of Saddleback Church wrote about repurposing sermons to get as much out of them as possible. The argument is that since sermons take so much effort to produce they should be used to the maximum. Having repurposed sermons on numerous occasions in the past, I get his point, however, as I considered the concept in that light I began to question the wisdom of that. My first problem with trying to squeeze everything we can out of a sermon is that the people who’ll be seeing the repurposed sermon may not be in the target audience of the original sermon. For example, suppose a pastor in a fishing village preaches a sermon, we package that sermon up and play it for Rick Warren’s usually audience at Saddleback Church. I’m guessing it wouldn’t go over well, and yet it may have been a very effective sermon in the other church. It is important that we realize that we can’t divorce the message from the audience. Another issue is that I don’t see why we should spend so ...