The following article is part of a series of articles that seeks to offer practical advice to preachers. Each article will contain advice from seasoned preachers pertaining to all matters of pulpit ministry.

I felt called to preach back in 2008, but I would not preach vocationally until 2021. To be sure, I had opportunities to preach in the churches I was a member of in those thirteen years—as well as teach in Sunday School classes, Bible studies, and small groups—but not preaching to the full congregation with great regularity. Now that I have had the privilege to be a pastor for the last three years or so, I’ve noticed how my preaching has changed in that amount of time. Here are the top five observations I’ve noticed about how my preaching has changed for, what I believe, is the better.

1. It took me a while to find my voice.

I took every preaching opportunity I could over those thirteen years, and I have the utmost confidence that those years were instrumental in shaping “my voice.” But there has been something profoundly shaping about being in front of the same group of people week in and week out.

You could call me a natural introvert, and that has affected my preaching in noticeable ways. I’m not what you would call a shoutin’-and-stompin’ kind of preacher. I get excited, sure, but it’s rare I raise my voice. That meant it was completely against my personality to emulate some of the preaching I heard and what some audiences expected of me.

Prior to starting as pastor in my current church, I had sat under the preaching of my former church’s pastor for seven years. These last three years have helped me to see how much of “my voice” sounded like him (mashed together with some other homiletical heroes) when I first got here. I feel like I’m only now—three years in—discovering what I actually sound like. What caused the change? My second observation.

2. The church will change your preaching.

Any student of preaching knows the advice to exegete one’s audience as well as the text. A preacher has to know how his congregation thinks, the cultural stories they believe, their hopes and dreams, the things they’re concerned about and keep them up at night. Intellectually, I knew this, but I did not know how much the congregational praxis pf regular preaching would change me.

For instance, my church is made up people from a variety of different theological traditions and church backgrounds. Long-standing Southern Baptists worship alongside more recently baptized former Presbyterians. Former Nazarenes sit in front those nurtured in nondenominational circles. One raised in the church of the Amazon Rainforest worships next to another raised Assembly of God. That meant I needed to place a premium on explanation, which meant I had to rethink how to illustrate. Painting a picture with my words replaced telling a story. Further, the conclusion has changed now too. Very rarely do I end with a kind of summary story to tie everything up with a bow. The sermon conclusion is now a time of celebration of grace and sketching out what the church would look like if individuals followed the application of the text—which transitions well into the gathering’s time of response.

The gospel is didactic and kerygmatic.

H. Dodd’s thesis in The Apostolic Preaching that the New Testament strongly bifurcated preaching (kerygma) and teaching (didache) has long since been disproved. However, allow me to borrow this framework to make an observation about my own preaching.

I was taught to “give ‘em the gospel” in each sermon. And we should. But I applied that advice by transitioning to an evangelistic appeal that was roughly tacked on the end of the sermon. Unwittingly, I had bought into Dodd’s disproved thesis, thinking that preaching the gospel was always supposed to be this kerygmatic moment—persuading for belief, laying out the need to repent, calling for a response. What this did was make the majority of my sermon didactic and instructive to believers, with only the last portion intended for those who had not trusted Christ.

I still preach the gospel and repentance. I still attempt to persuade and call for a response. But now I try to find how the text naturally relates to the gospel and try to show how the gospel then informs the thrust of the text in question. Sometimes that comes across as an evangelistic appeal. Other times it takes the shape of reminding the congregation of the gospel so that our minds are primed for the text’s teaching. But the gospel is worthy of more than just being tacked onto the end of my sermon. The gospel both instructs the faithful and proclaims good news to the captive.

4. Canonical Christocentrism is sorely needed.

We cannot preach the gospel without preaching Christ, which means our preaching must present Christ to our hearers. But again, this shouldn’t be done in a way where Jesus makes surprise appearances in the sermon, popping up in places completely unexpected.

We’ve been taught to see out text in its literary and historical context, but we need to see it’s canonical context as well. There’s a metanarrative to Scripture that finds its heart in the Gospels—those spiritual biographies that present the life and teaching of Christ. It has become easier for me to stop searching for Jesus under every rock and behind every tree and instead find the way that the shape of the canon shapes my text and, therefore, relates back to the Gospels. Doing this has helped my church to see their identity as disciples of Jesus and understand the interconnectedness (and unity) of all of Scripture.

5. Doctrine is application.

Finally, my emphasis in sermon application has shifted. I still make application in the sermon and do my best to give one actionable step that everyone can do. I also point out secondary applications as we make our way through the text. But sometimes the best application is to simply tell the people, “The text teaches this truth. We can apply that truth by simply believing it.”

Aaron S. Halstead is an Elder & Lead Pastor of Teaching and Worship Ministries at Mid-Cities Church in Maplewood, Missouri.