on extemporaneous speaking and writing sermons

One of the best things I did for my future self when I was in high school was to follow a friend’s advice to join our school’s forensics (speech and debate) team. Joining the team let me discover something I was good at, and I developed some skills that are tremendously useful to me personally and professionally, not least when teaching or presenting my research.

Lately, as I’ve been putting together some sermons for my local Community of Christ congregation and the Beyond the Walls ministry in Toronto, I’ve thought about another way that competing in forensics decades ago has shaped me. One of my particular strengths was competitive extemporaneous speaking, which involved having half an hour to write and memorize a seven-minute speech on a semi-randomly chosen topic related to domestic and foreign affairs. (I also did fairly well in impromptu speaking, which involved slightly shorter speeches with drastically shorter prep time).

These events have affected the way that I prepare sermons. This is a bit unintuitive: Both of those competitive events involved memorizing key points and then learning to expand them on the fly into a full speech. This is how I used to prepare remarks for Latter-day Saint worship services, but in Community of Christ, I’ve taken to preparing remarks word-for-word. Given that shift, you wouldn’t think that I’d be relying on the skills I developed during extemporaneous and impromptu speaking at all.

However, one thing that I’ve noticed is that within a few minutes of being assigned a scripture passage to speak on, I usually have the overall thesis of a sermon planned out in my head. (This is notably not true for a sermon I’m giving in July, and I need to do some thinking there). Of course, the specifics take days, weeks, or even months to draft, edit, and finesse, but it’s uncommon for the finished product to change drastically from the initial idea that I form off the cuff. Of course, there are downsides to that: It’s not difficult to imagine that I could miss important ideas that I could only come through by research and reading simply because I form an initial impression quickly. However, it’s also helpful to have an initial impression in the moment that I agree to give a sermon, and I have no doubt that I owe a great deal of that to three years of practice in quickly developing outlines for speeches.

• high school
• forensics
• sermons
• Beyond the Walls
• Community of Christ