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Many years have passed since the event took place, but it has remained indelibly imprinted in my memory. I have revisited it from time to time, for it gave me much-needed confidence and remains a milestone in my journey as a person and as a preacher. It also remains as one of my most stressful experiences.
I was a graduate student in seminary, and I was acting as an assistant fellow for one of my New Testament professors. His classes were so large that his fellow could not handle the load. A fellow was a graduate student who graded students’ test papers and passed them on to the professor for review. Depending on a student’s test scores, a fellow was liked or disliked.
The student body at the seminary could select a set number of their peers to speak in chapel during the school year. At some point in my work as an assistant fellow, several students in the class decided to campaign to have me selected for the honor, and they succeeded. I want to be clear that the reason they worked to promote my selection was not my popularity; I definitely was not popular. In addition, their reason was not my skill as a preacher, for none of them had ever heard me preach. At that point, I supply-preached occasionally, but I was by no means polished. Their reason for their campaign had to do with revenge, plain and simple. The leading perpetrators wanted to see me sweat under the stress of preaching to an audience made up of seminary professors and aspiring theologians, some of whom were already pastors of churches.
The instigators succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. From the moment I learned I had been elected until I finished preaching the sermon I had labored over for weeks, I dealt with unrelenting pressure. I do not remember how I settled on the sermon’s Scripture text, but I do remember firming up an outline as I sat in a worship service in my church. That I did so in that setting indicates how thoroughly the looming ordeal consumed my thoughts. As my pastor preached, my mind was occupied with my all-too-swiftly approaching day of reckoning. In the ensuing days, I researched, wrote, and polished.
