Starbucks and Preaching

I jokingly call it my office, but I have spent hundreds of hours in Starbucks for meetings, studying and reading. You just can't beat the deal they offer - free coffee, air conditioning, and a place to work, you just have to rent a table for about 3 dollars a session. Some locations even have free internet. I have a semi regular meeting there every Thursday from about 9 am to noon. It is open to any pastor who wants to get together for fellowship and to discuss preaching. Last Thursday I had a great time with pastors Richard and Pastor Ogie.

After discussing life and ministry issues we got into their upcoming sermons. We started with Pastor Ogie's text from Romans 11, which went well, but it got really interesting when we started discussing Pastor Richard's text. He was preparing to preach on 2 Corinthians 1:1-11 which says...

1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To the church of God in Corinth, together with all the saints throughout Achaia: 2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5 For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. 6 If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. 7 And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. 8 We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. 9 Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. 10 He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, 11 as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.

We always start out by reading the text and then answering the question, "What is the main point of this text? What is it saying?" We discovered that 2 Cor. 1:1-11 talks about how God allows us to suffer and go through hardships so that we can learn compassion and be a comfort to others as well as our suffering leading some to salvation and teaching us to depend on Jesus. Then we discussed how to outline and preach the passage.

What made this text especially interesting was that Pastor Ogie had just lost two young children in a fire. I said to him, "Pastor you can preach this passage better than both of us. You know what it is to suffer despair at a level that most will never know, and through it God is giving you compassion and the ability to comfort others beyond what most are able." It was hard to discuss the passage because my heart breaks for this dear humble brother. I thank the Lord that even after this tragedy, Pastor Ogie has been able to see God's grace in it all and continues to find joy in serving Him. He is also very eager to learn how to handle and preach God's Word better. Richard and I were able to encourage him, but I'm sure the pain of his loses will always be with him. I told him that there is a family reunion waiting for him in heaven. Please pray for Pastor Ogie and his family as they faithfully serve the Lord and also pray that my regular office hours at Starbucks will be a fruitful blessing to pastors and those they minister to.