Baptism of the Imagination, Part 4

KC: With Will Vaus Ministries, you communicate through teaching, preaching, and writing. How is writing as a ministry unique of those three?

WV: Well, writing informs all of them for me. For a long time now, I've written out my sermons. I don't read them word for word like Jonathan Edwards did. He was one of the few people who could get away with that. I write it out in full. I didn't when I first graduated from seminary because I was so tired of that pedantic way of dealing with things, so I'd just jot out my outline and preach from my outline. But then I found when listening to tapes of myself, I was not speaking as well as I was capable, in terms of articulation and grammar. So I thought the only solution to this is to go back and write a manuscript. Then I found out through preaching over many years to a local church congregation how important stories are. When you're an evangelist, you can have your set of great stories and go around and get a lot of mileage out of one great sermon with a few great stories. But when you're a pastor, you can't; you've got to have new stories every week. And I've found, to do that well, I've got to write them out. So I take the manuscript with me to the pulpit and have it right there, but hopefully, I know it well enough that I'm not stuck to the manuscript. Writing is an essential part of teaching. Sometimes I'll deliver a paper more formally, like you would in an academic setting, but even doing a PowerPoint like I did earlier today or tonight involves some writing. It's at a completely different level, but it involves writing. Writing books for publication takes a lot of patience. It's a long process.

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C. S. Lewis on Homosexuality

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