Welcome to the website of Jonathan and Holly Boyd, missionaries to Colombia, sent by Campus Baptist Church of Ames, Iowa, in partnership with ABWE. We live on the Caribbean coast in the beautiful city of Santa Marta.
I’ve never been one whos likes to get in a rut. I’m that way with many things, and preaching is no different. My coworkers and I talk about the sermon series that we want to preach, but each one determines the final product. We rotate the preaching here at Impacto Bíblico, and each one usually preaches a 4-6 week series.
When I choose a series to preach, I usually think of two main criteria. First, what does our congregation need in this moment? We try to have a balance between book series from the OT and NT, series from different genres, and topical series. The other factor that I consider is what will challenge and stretch me as a Christian missionary and as a preacher.
The last series I preached was called The Way of Wisdom. I preached one message on each of the four wisdom books: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and Job. Where did I get such a crazy idea? Well, I heard a conference session done by Dr. Pierre Constant from Toronto Baptist Seminary on preaching. He talked about how D.A. Carson had taught him to preach whole books. By preaching a whole book the congregation is exposed to its most important ideas and gains an understanding of the whole Bible. Before listening to that session I was considering preaching a series on Ecclesiastes. After pondering the idea more, I decided to give our church an orientation to the wisdom books. It would be more relevant to their needs at this point, as many of them were not familiar with any of those books (and also need wisdom for many complexities in life here).
How did the series go? Overall I enjoyed the preparation and the delivery of the four messages. I had preached on Proverbs in Chia, so I was able to stitch together two sermons into one to preach on the foundation of wisdom and the process of wisdom. The people received the message on Ecclesiastes very well. I tried to lead them to think about how futile our lives are without Christ. The message on Song of Solomon was perhaps the most relevant because I took the first fifteen minutes to talk about Heb. 13:4 and the importance of marriage. Very few people in our church are legally married. I think that two-thirds of the adults manifested their desire to get right with God in that area. The last message on Job was the hardest to prepare. Imagine preaching on 42 chapters in one message! It was perhaps the most “classroom sounding” of the four sermons, but at least people were exposed to the sovereignty and greatness of God as the main theme of the book, not our problems.
On balance, I think that the series was helpful to our people and to me. I find myself meditating more on Job or on Ecclesiastes than I did before. That definitely can’t hurt.
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Last Sunday was my worst Sunday of ministry in more than five years in Colombia. Thankfully I wasn’t preaching! I tried to lead music but made so many mistakes. On one of the songs we had the wrong words on the screen. On another I couldn’t get the entrance on the three times the chorus came in. Not to mentiont that I didn’t set the sound system up right, so our voices were quiet and our guitars couldn’t be heard well. I tried to give the announcements and got lost in what I was saying about an event for the kids… Then I taught the little kids’ class with a lesson that Holly had given me the night before, and it didn’t go too well. I ended up improvising some of the class as I taught because I didn’t understand the activities too well.
The whole week was a blur as I tried to rush to get everything done that had to be done. As you can see from my Sunday, I “finished” everything but wasn’t able to pull it together. Note to self: being behind the eight ball all week is not the way to have a good Sunday.
Now, why do I mention this? For one thing, I wanted you to have more ideas about how to pray for us. For another, I wanted to praise God and say that He uses our weakness to show us we cannot do anything apart from Him. I realized that I hadn’t specifically prayed that God would give me ability and wisdom to lead the worship service as I should have. Perhaps I felt like “I can do this,” and God wanted to quickly snuff that proud thought out. I think that when we consciously ackowledge our bankrupcy in competency is when God blesses. I’ve been reading C.J. Mahaney’s book on humility in these last weeks, and he has a number of good ideas about growing in humility. To paraphrase his words, “I’m a proud person who’s striving to grow in humility by God’s grace.”
After Sunday, God really blessed in this week. I felt more “pastoral” than ever as I was able to make several visits on people who haven’t been attending church and on one new family. It’s exciting to be an instrument in God’s hands in spite of ourselves and our weaknesses.
(Image courtesy of elinformador.com.co.)
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