Preaching or Visiting: Which is More Important?
As a pastor, as well as when I served in other ministry positions, I heard a couple of admonitions from other pastors quite frequently. One was, 'People will forgive a poorly-prepared sermon if they know you're visiting'. Another was, 'People will forgive you not visiting as long as your sermons are well-prepared'. These contradictory statements cannot both be true maxims. Pastors who were more gifted at visiting than sermon-prep and preaching tended to be the ones who made the first comment. Those whose gifts weighed more heavily on the prep-n-preaching side of the scale tended to say the second. I grew up a pastor's son, have been involved in ministry for nearly 30 years, and have lots of family members and friends who fall into one or both of those categories. From my experience, I would have to disagree with both of the above admonitions. 1. People will not automatically disregard your poorly written sermon materials, that then typically become a po