You are three years into preaching, and you still sound like someone else: their mannerisms, their jokes, their insights.
That was me for about ten years. If you are trying to figure out how to find your preaching voice, I want to give you the one sentence that ended my search.
The training I had and the training I needed
My undergrad was in systematic theology, and I majored in patristics. I loved it. I still do. Give me the councils, the creeds, and the arguments of the first four centuries, and I am happy for a week. I could tell you what was actually at stake in the Pelagian controversy and where Gnosticism still shows up on a Sunday morning.
None of that prepared me for youth ministry.
I learned that job on the fly, and the hardest part of it was writing sermons. An eighth-grade boy has no interest in Pelagius. He is not lying awake worrying about a fourth-century monk. Taking the text seriously and saying it in a way a fourteen-year-old could carry home turned out to be a completely different skill from the one I had been trained in.
It did not get much easier for a long time.
Wearing someone else's armour
Years later, I took a new role as the youth ministry director for Alberta and the Northwest Territories with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. My predecessor in that role was my mentor. He was charismatic, funny, relaxed, completely at ease in front of a room. His altar ministry was something else. People met God when he called them forward.
I was none of those things.
So I did what seemed obvious. I decided the way to fill the role was to become him: his mannerisms, his timing, his transitions.
But the armour did not fit.
Preaching in borrowed armour is exhausting in a specific way. You are doing two jobs at once. You are handling the text and also running a continuous impersonation in the background.
The sentence that fixed it
My favourite preacher in the world is a man named Matt Tapley. He watched me go through that, and he saw what it was. He did not give me a reading list. He did not sit me down for an hour.
He said this:
All preaching is the truth of God's word through your personality.
That is the whole thing. A hermeneutics professor would probably scoff at this. You will not find it in a preaching textbook. It changed everything for me anyway.
What it actually means
There are two halves, and both of them carry weight.
The truth of God's word. You are not bringing anything new. The authority in the room on Sunday is not your insight, your delivery or your story. It is the text. That half of the sentence is a limit, and it is a mercy. It means the pressure is not on you to be interesting enough to justify the time. The word is already true whether you land the illustration or not.
Through your personality. This is the half I had been fighting. God made you the way you are on purpose. Your temperament, your sense of humour, the things that move you, the way your mind connects one idea to another, the pace you naturally speak at. That is the delivery system God chose for that congregation.
Put the halves together, and you get something freeing. The content is not yours to invent. The voice is not yours to borrow.
If the armour does not fit you either
Some practical things worth doing, if you are in that stretch right now.
- Read your manuscript out loud, alone. You will hear the borrowed sentences immediately. They are the ones that feel slightly theatrical in an empty room. Cut them or rewrite them the way you would say them.
- Name what you are actually good at. Not what you wish you were good at. If you are a careful explainer, be one. If you are a storyteller, be one. Build on the thing that is already there.
- Watch what you say in the first two minutes. That is usually where impersonation shows up worst, because it is where nerves are highest. Write your opening in your own words and know it cold.
If you are a young preacher and the armour does not fit, take it off. It was not made for you and you do not need it.
All preaching is the truth of God's word through your personality.