A small Christian college in rural Indiana has launched a flight simulator of sorts for pastors wanting to hone their skills behind the pulpit.
“If you think about a pilot who’s getting trained to crawl up into the cockpit of a plane, they get into a digital flight simulator,” explained program director Dr. Timothy McConnell, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs.
He told CBN News: “We’ve created kind of a pulpit simulator, climbing into the pulpit with cameras, confidence monitors, lights, sound systems — all the things you would expect to need to have some acumen and some awareness of, to step into the pulpit in our times, and we’ve put it into a lab space.”
He has set up his PREACH Lab at Taylor University, one of the oldest Christian universities in the United States.
The program’s name is an acronym for “Preparing, Resourcing, Equipping, and Coaching for Homiletic Excellence.”
SURVEYS FIND THOUSANDS OF PASTORS COULD BENEFIT FROM THE ‘PULPIT SIMULATOR’
CBN News reports multiple surveys have found many pastors and ministry leaders feel ill-equipped to adequately and compellingly address issues from the pulpit, especially when the topics center on matters of politics and civic engagement.
In 2023, the Barna Group released data showing only one-in-five pastors felt equipped to lead their congregations on those subjects in particular.
Data published by Lifeway Research in 2021 found more than half of pastors (54%) were frequently overwhelmed by their ministries and 48% felt the demands before them — potentially including preaching — amounted to more than they could handle.
But even with these statistics, very few evangelical ministers stepped away from their pulpits.
Dr. McConnell noted many pastors are still trying to preach because it’s a duty many of them took on without any real training.
He said they could benefit immensely from a resource like the PREACH Lab.
MANY PASTORS STRUGGLE BECAUSE OF POOR PREPARATION
The Colorado-based pastor referenced President Abraham Lincoln, famously credited with saying, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I would spend the first four hours sharpening my axe.”
The 16th president was highlighting the importance of adequate preparation for the tasks at hand.
“There’s a lot of pastors out there struggling with their sermons.”
“They just feel like: Man, that just wasn’t what I wanted; it didn’t land the way I wanted. I wish I had time and space to step back and go sharpen the axe a little bit and then get back at it.”
“If you’re going to speak to thousands, you need to learn how to do that in a different way,” said Dr. McConnell.
“You don’t want to be a distraction. You don’t want to be a block to the Gospel.”
“If pastors are called to use multimedia platforms, we want them to be equipped to use them well.”
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