90: Words Matter with Austin Carty

Host: Brandon Nappi 

Guest: Austin Carty 

Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast 

berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast 

Brandon:    Welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast. I’m Brandon Nappi, and we are going to talk about words for the next few minutes. And it struck me recently in some of the online work that I do on social media, you know, showing up nearly every day of the week and offering, I hope, a word of inspiration and wisdom or just some stories that might help folks to find a connection between their lives and God. This kind of algorithmic and cultural pressure to do two things: to say something new and to say that thing that’s new in the most extreme form. It’s that the algorithm rewards extremity. The algorithm rewards saying what you believe, not in the most ordinary way, but in the loudest way, in the most extreme way.

And I notice that folks online are speaking in the greatest extremity in a way that’s absolutely distorting public conversation. And this week’s conversation is a conversation about the power of words and specifically about preaching. And I don’t think you need to be a preacher to appreciate this conversation with the Reverend Dr. Austin Carty, who’s a great lover of literature, lover of poetry, lover of language. As he allows us to peek behind the curtain in his own preaching life, he’s written a wonderful book, Some of the Words are Theirs, about the life of a preacher and about how to preach in a way that’s moving, that’s humble, that brings a kind of practical wisdom into people’s daily lives. And it seems more important than ever that we spend some time reflecting on how we use our words and what words get elevated and what words get a platform and what words and whose words get amplified. And what does the algorithm do to how we communicate and how is the algorithm colonizing our minds in shaping the words that we choose? 

And of course, the words that we choose in the Christian community don’t need to be the newest, right? This sort of obsession with the newest thing is new. And we don’t need to be the loudest and we don’t need to be the most extreme. How do we find words that speak some truth, some wisdom, that speak to the urgent suffering of the day and bring some comfort and some hope and some grounding? If you’re interested in that, then this is a conversation for you.

Our guest, the Reverend Dr. Austin Carty was a Leaders Way Fellow, so he spent a year with us in Berkeley Divinity School, our Leader’s Way program here, which begins with a week here at Yale, a beautiful community of faith, of reflection as we give our hearts and minds to thinking about and praying about innovation and the kind of innovation we need within faith communities to meet the urgent challenges of the world. And then we spend once or twice a month together incubating some kind of innovative ministry project and we come together to ponder the evolving needs of the church and of the world and the human heart. 

So Austin was a Leaders Way Fellow two years ago. He is a Baptist pastor. He joined Boulevard Baptist Church from First Baptist Church of Corbin, Kentucky in 2019. He’s the pastor there now. He holds an undergraduate degree in literature from High Point University, a Master of Divinity from Wake Forest and a Doctor of Ministry from Emory. He’s the author of The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry, which received the 2023 Christianity Today Award of Merit. It was named the Book of the Year by Preaching Magazine. Of course, he’s written Some of the Words are Theirs, a wonderful kind of part memoir, part book on the practice of preaching. And he’s married to April and together they have four children; Ada, Juliana, Whit, and Ben. I’m so grateful for this sweet conversation about life, about faith, and about the words we use to communicate the deepest truths that we hold in our hearts.

Welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.

Reverend Dr. Austin Carty, welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast. 

Austin:          Brandon, it’s such a joy to be here with you. Thank you for inviting me. 

B:         Oh, gosh, we’ve known each other for a time and have been around the block a few times. So I’m just going to call you Austin. And I’m so thankful to have you here for this conversation. There’s a book that we’re going to talk about that I’m so excited to unpack with you. But I’d love to hear about your vocation story. I mean, one of the great blessings of my life, and our listeners know by now, having listened to many episodes begin this way, is just to hear about how your path is unfolded and what led you to a life of ministry. I presume this wasn’t a fully baked idea at the age of 12 that this might have taken a little time to unfold. Can you tell us your story?

A:         Yeah, no, this was not the original plan. And the only person more surprised by it than I was was my wife who didn’t anticipate that she was marrying a minister. So this was a bait and switch when she met me. No, faith has always been pretty central to my life story. But I had no designs on entering formal ministry. In fact, I grew up in such a kind of informal Christian context, one that really looked somewhat skeptically upon more formal institutional church structures that growing up, it certainly was not a live option for me. I mean, I grew up in a corner of the church where there was not a pastor.mEverybody was called to lead in some way. It was a home church situation, and we can certainly talk more about that. But as it pertains to my sense of call to ministry. 

I had come of age and while I’m grateful for my roots and where I come from and still cherish a lot of that, I had intellectually kind of moved beyond that theology and way of seeing things. But I don’t know that just kind of internally, existentially, I had moved beyond it in the way that I otherwise thought that I had. And what I mean by that is that even though I would have certainly not in my late teens through my 20s have said, no, nobody’s called to be a pastor and to make a living that way and to formally inhabit that role. I certainly wouldn’t have still adopted that narrative. But I just did not see ministry as a live option for me. It was almost as if that had already been foreclosed in my line of sight, which is really shocking because once I finally did begin to feel the stirrings of a call, it was less of an audible voice speaking to me and calling me as it was an awareness of my truest nature and something kind of fitting me like a garment. 

I was teaching high school English is what I had thought to be … was a stopgap at the time and end up proving to be. But I was teaching a short story by Leo Tolstoy. And it was while teaching that story to that class and what ensued that I felt the first stirrings of a call to ministry. Within six months, I was enrolled at Wake Forest School of Divinity and the rest is history. But in that moment when I began to sense that call, it really was like my eyes were open to how vocation and the way that I’m wired just intersect. 

B:         Leave it to God to simultaneously blow up your life and return you back to your true self. All in one moment. Yeah. And I wonder, Austin, we have so many folks listening who are considering following a kind of call. They may be just beginning to give themselves permission to follow this prompting and think about and pray about Divinity School and think about seminarian and ordination. And as you look back, is there some encouragement? Is there some advice? Is there some affirmation of what to do and maybe some some warnings of things not to do if folks find themselves at that kind of crossroads? 

A:         That was such a pivotal time for me. And I remember that discernment moment because I really wanted to do it. But I was at a life stage where it did not make a whole lot of practical sense. April, whom I mentioned moments before, who had not thought she was marrying a minister, we had obligations, we had mortgage, life, all of that. And suddenly moving into full-time student mode seemed risky. And I remember that moment very well. And I would imagine that those who at this moment who are listening and are also sensing a desire to possibly pursue seminary, divinity school in that formal way can understand and resonate with that feeling of anxiety and risk and concern. And it’s real. I mean, it’s real. It takes a real kind of leap of faith. 

I would encourage folks not, however, to turn ears off to or discount whence that yearning and prodding comes. I know that for me, Divinity School was among the most formative and important times in my life. And I mean that certainly as it pertains to my becoming a minister and the professional life that followed. But in terms of just understanding further who I am in light of the faith I profess and my conception of the God in whom I believe and how to apply that to the concerns that I feel about the world and about human relationships And I suppose what I’m trying to say is one does not have to know that he or she or they are going into formal vocational ministry for it to be a worthy endeavor because there are many friends of mine who went through Divinity School with me who did not go on to become ministers, who I think would also say that that time was equally rich and important for them. And to pick up on my answer to the last question, while I felt the first stirrings of a call to ministry in that moment, teaching that Tolstoy class and the high school where I was teaching, it wasn’t so immediate, like, oh, then I need to go be a minister. It was, there is something about exploring my faith at a deeper, more focused level that I just feel is pulling me. I did not yet articulate that in the way I was saying I’m going to Divinity School to be a minister.

 In fact, I thought I was going to Divinity School to pursue an MDiv and a master in counseling and thought that what I was likely to do was to be a counselor. And it was only in that first semester at divinity school while doing an internship at this wonderful Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, that I began to sense, no, I’m going this route. And just pursued the MDiv. And it was only about a year later that I really began to use the language of “I’m in Divinity School to become a pastor.”

B:          Oh, wow. It’s a great reminder. You don’t have to have it all figured out. I think there’s a lot of internal monologues for folks who are pondering seminary/divinity school that I’ve got to know, I’ve got to be certain. I need to have the whole roadmap from now through the next 20 years of my life figured out. And this is a great place to do that sort of discernment, to discover where you’re being led. But having lots of questions and even plenty of doubts is in fact part of the signal that you’re on the right path if you’re leaning towards seminary or divinity school. Does that sound right? 

A:         It sounds absolutely right. And another one of the riches of it. And this is true of online cohorts, I know, too. And it’s absolutely true of residential learning. You are suddenly with a group of peers who are all animated by the same ultimate concern. It can feel strange when you’re talking about it to other folks who aren’t feeling that same deep burning and preoccupation with these questions. But even though you don’t know what you’re going there for, you can know you’re going to find a bunch of folks who are equally interested in the conversation, which is just one of the things that makes the experience so rich.

B:         Well, I mean, you name this community dimension of faith, which of course is kind of the hallmark of church, of the Christian tradition, especially nourishing and needed at a moment in time in history when we are so individualistic, and especially so individualistic as we explore faith and spirituality. So tell us a little bit about the community that you find yourself in now and in leadership among. What’s your church like? 

A:         I have a wonderful church. I am in Anderson, South Carolina. I’ve been at this church, Boulevard Baptist Church for … July will be seven years. It’s a church that has a rich history, wonderful people, a sense of being in it together. I know that sounds cliche, but that’s not always the case. There’s a sense that we are part of a bigger story than ourselves. And I have really, really loved my time here at this church. My intention is to be here for a long time.

I am, and as you are as well, Brandon, you and I’ve talked about this several times, but I am deeply influenced by Wendell Berry. The Wendell Berry Fort William model is kind of my model for ministry and what it means to be a minister. Like Eugene Peterson says, you can almost … all of Wendell Berry’s work, you substitute the word church for farm. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And one of the things that I appreciate the most about Berry, you know, Peterson talks about a long obedience in the same direction using that Nietzsche line. And Berry’s work is really helpful. I think it’s showing what’s beautiful about rooting and sticking and staying and how the things that are hard to articulate for why they’d be meaningful in the moment because they just seem so mundane. Those are the things that build a compound interest. And the things that seem like they’re going to be so exciting, the one-off spectacular events and things, they’re memorable, but they don’t bank as well. You know, those can’t really build on one another in that compound way. So I’m taken with that whole vision of ministry. So I feel like I have a good context for that here, and I’m very committed to seeing that through.

B:         Oh, gosh, I’m so grateful that you mentioned our beloved Wendell Berry. I mean, for a city boy from the Northeast, I can remember reading my first Wendell Berry poem, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I got to get down South quick. There’s something going on here. There’s something in the water that we do not have in the cities of the Northeast, as beautiful as they are.” And maybe that’s a beautiful or graceful transition to the book itself. I mean, your book on preaching, Some of the Words are Theirs, is as much a homiletics guide as it is a kind of ode to your love of literature and poetry and words themselves. So how did this book come about? You know, where in your experience was it born?

A:         I’m sometimes asked how long this book took me to write, and I use, and I don’t know who it’s original to, but the line, it only actually took six months of the writing, but it took six months and 44 years. So this book, as someone who has been trying to make it as a writer effectively for over two decades. This book really is at the very core of who I am. So yes, it’s a book on homiletics, but it’s not really a book on homiletics. The how-to on homiletics, which is there, I hope that it’s practically helpful, but it is the cipher for, you know, the real story, and it’s things that I have been working through and trying to understand about my life, my sense of call, my family, my love of literature, all of it. And it just one day felt like suddenly there it was. And the only way that this book happened was because I was fortunate enough several years ago to get to do another book, a book called The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry. And that’s not a shameless plug for that book. It’s important for answering the question, which is, I am a no-name Baptist pastor at a modestly-sized at best church in Anderson, South Carolina. So there was no reason that that Erdmans was going to do a book with me. But I did my DMin at Emory and Tom Long became a real champion for me along with Neil Planaga. And the two of them had relationships that entirely on the strength of their name and their commendation that Erdmans opened the door to look at a proposal for that book. 

So because of The Pastor’s Bookshelf and because it was received fairly well, it meant that with this book, I didn’t have to have this big formal detailed outline. I was able to basically give a paragraph. And that’s important to the answer to your question, Brandon, because unlike The Pastor’s Bookshelf, which I could have told you where it came from and what it was going to be, this book, I didn’t really know. I had this little sense of what I thought I was going to do.

B:         Well, Austin, I’d love to ask you in particular about the title. You know, I’m intrigued by this, by the title that points to a kind of commingling of words whenever we’re preaching. Some are so distinctively our own, and sometimes we’re leaning on the words of those who came before us. And I’m struck by, well, I’m struck by something I experienced when I was teaching a class a couple of years ago on spirituality, and we were reading a text that a group of monks had written about 10 years ago about prayer. And I was reading this article that these monks had written together about their prayer lives, and some members of the class said, “Don’t you have anything newer? I mean, this thing is 10 years old.” And I thought, you know, I’m a medievalist by training. Like, 10 years old is new, actually.

But this fixation on newness and having to say something new and having to say something original is itself a rather new idea, right? That our Christian ancestors would have been shocked by, right? To say something new actually would have been pejorative, right? That would have been something suspicious about saying something new. But maybe I’m answering the question before you, or at least imagining what your answer would be. Where did the title come from, and what does that commingling look like in the life of your own preaching?

A:         Well, no, you answered it well, because I’m completely in agreement with everything that you said. Well, the title itself, the line comes from the last paragraph of Norah MacLaine’s “A River Runs Through It.” And that is one of my favorite books. It’s one of my favorite movies. And I’ve always been taken by the way MacLaine lands the plane with that. The last sentence, “I’m haunted by waters.” There’s just something enchanted by that sentence. It still makes the hairs on my arms stand up. But so Some of the Words are Theirs is from that. But that title works on a lot of levels throughout the book. And to your question, I had begun to sense the very thing you’re talking about, which was this pressure.

And primarily in an age of social media and being able to get out there first and be able to say something that was scalable, that if you said it first and best, then maybe you would go viral. I came of age as a minister right when these things were beginning to come online. There wasn’t in those early years a sense that one could preach from their own church context, but be theoretically preaching to the entire world by virtue of livestream and tools that cut it and edit it, and you can send it out. And there weren’t podcasts. And while there was social media, it wasn’t what it is today, which is another way of saying that I had begun to feel this pressure that not only was I supposed to say something about literally everything happening in the world, but it wasn’t enough to just say it. It needed to be said best, first and best. So it needed to be original and it couldn’t seem like it was derivative of what somebody else already put.

And I was caught up in this game for a minute. One day I just stopped. What happened was I had put together something in response to whatever the topic du jour was. I spent time in my notes on my phone and then somebody beat me to the punch. They said what I was going to say already. And I just had this moment of – What is this? This is ludicrous. And I got to thinking, if this story that I’ve oriented my life around is true, then nothing I’m ever saying is utterly and completely original. It is in some way connected to or downstream of what has gone before me. And I thought, well, that’s true of everything in life. And that anytime that I might say something that I could even delude myself into thinking was original, it’s not because it’s been informed by all the people who have formed me in my life in good ways and bad ways, all the different things that I’ve read and seen. And this is true of everyone. That we are not just ex nihilo. We’re not speaking out of no context. We’re all situated beings. And so the book tries to put its finger on that and say that we are seldom aware in the moment, why we’re saying what we’re saying and who and what is underneath it has influenced what it is that we’re saying. And the longer we’re at it … and this is this is supposed to be an ally. It’s supposed to be true on two levels for for sermon writing. But life, the subtitle of the book is The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon. that if we are dutiful and committed and disciplined and prayerful and willing to go back and look at what has happened. And how did it come to be the way that it was and what needs a little bit of editing and what was what was influencing us and what was what was what was propelling us in the moment that we were writing it that that we have these moments of clarity where we realize where it had come from, who had inspired it and why. And that a good sermon, like a good life is always in process. And it’s not a found thing. It’s a thing that we go back and are able to work on and maybe see after a few days of leaving it aside with a little bit more clarity. Maybe what we were trying to do, what we need to take out, what we need to add on to the things that we give thanks for what role it played in the formation of the service. But we bless and say, OK, this doesn’t need to go into the final draft. And so Some of the Words are Theirs is the way that I try to capture this notion that even when we stand up and go about the preaching task, we’re never really alone. And just like in our own lives, even though we are the avatar and the representative of what’s happening, there’s lots of other voices and lives underneath what we’re doing.

B:         Well, and I love the book. I mean, as someone who’s preached my whole life, thousands of sermons likely over 25 years or so, I don’t … I don’t find myself reading books about preaching too often because they’re usually too pragmatic and too persuasive. And you’ve managed to find this beautiful middle way. It’s certainly practical, but it’s also part memoir and it’s inspiring. And so you hit all the pieces, at least that this preacher needed to read it, you know, cover to cover.

And it also has a kind of humility that’s really beautiful and knowing you a bit as I do, like your humility as a person and as a leader really comes through. And it’s a beautiful kind of counterbalance to not only this pressure to produce something new all the time. And I know that we have many preachers listening who were thanking the Lord for this permission to not be quite so new, but also this sort of trend that I’m noticing to express your truth in the most extreme form of it. Because the algorithm, if we’re communicating digitally, right, the algorithm is going to privilege something that’s completely new and extreme. 

And what I find in what some preachers are doing is they’ll say something incredibly extreme. And then when you ask them about it, or if you listen to an interview later, “Well, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean that.” And then they’re actually saying something much more moderate. So there’s this pressure to be extreme that seems to accompany this pressure to be new. Do you sense this in the work that you’re doing? And of course, you’re preaching a sermon in a church in a completely analog way. But I wonder if some of this digital momentum is anything you’re feeling. 

A:         It is. And among the many things Some of the Words are Theirs is it was also, for me, my commitment to myself to just not be pulled into the territory that all of that is. And I say that with the deepest of humility, because if one reads the book, one will find nobody is more prone and more tempted to fame and attention than I. The first 25 years of my life were just completely consumed by how can I get more attention? How can I get people to notice me? So as a recovering attention-seeking person, I’m not above it. I’m so aware of that in myself that I’m not on social media anymore. I’m a very boring pastor, and that’s by design.

And in the book, I talk about the importance of particularity and reference our friend Wendell Berry, actually, in that chapter. And I heard Wynn Collier say this one time, the thing that makes Wendell Berry’s fiction so important is that … the particularity of Port William and the people. It has to be those people. It has to be that place. And it’s that particularity then becomes universal because we can all relate to that particularity. And so when I preach, while we do have a live stream, we don’t cut things. We don’t send them out later. The live stream is purely for our homebound folks or if anybody else wants to look in. But I am preaching to this particular group. And I cite, in Some of the Words are Theirs, old sermons that I look back at because to write the book, I went and reread a decade’s worth of sermons. And those early sermons, I could really see to where I was trying to get the attention of a larger audience than my little church at the time in Corbin, Kentucky. It was just so clear by different things I was saying that I didn’t need to talk about how I was downtown at a restaurant called Travis’s Cafe when my daughter Ada said, “The 100 people in that congregation know where Travis’s Cafe is. They don’t need me to tell them that it was downtown. They don’t need me to say ‘my daughter Ada.’”

And so, yes, I’m very aware of how that is a new temptation for preachers now. And I get around that by really seeing myself as called to preach to the concerns and the on-the-ground reality of my congregation and not trying to figure out how to say something that an algorithm might pick up for the simple fact that there’s nowhere an algorithm can pick me up. But what I’ve found is the irony of it all, to go back to Wendell Berry and what Wynn Collier was saying, it is when it is so particular, it’s when it rings that true, that it really becomes something that universally is meaningful. It’s when you’re trying so hard to make it the thing that suddenly might get shared widely and gets you a bigger audience. It doesn’t have the same ring of truth, I think. So I don’t feel myself burdened any longer about the need to trick the algorithm or to game the system with the algorithm.

B:         Yeah, thank you. And the preaching that you call us to is deeply personal. It’s a kind of preaching that connects with people in the most intimate way. And I wonder if you have some encouragement around how either how to do that or in particular, how you do that and how you mine your own life and your own experience for stories. And do you have any encouragement for how to work with a story and how to know when it’s a story that’s workable or when it’s a story that maybe it’s a great life experience, maybe you learn from it, but maybe it’s not quite appropriate or it just doesn’t serve. Can you help a preacher through that discernment?

A:         Well, the first thing I’d say is that I understand sermon writing and being a preacher as an act of self-discovery. Each week we are invited into a process of self-discovery. I think this is a part of being a pastor that gets underappreciated, which is that in life we experience so many things and we take in so much information, particularly today. And it’s all so fragmented and fractious and dissonant and there’s no real coherent narrative to it in general, but certainly not in terms of how we are taking it all in and trying to make sense of it. It doesn’t cohere and life is so busy that seldom do we stop to take the time to try to come up with some sort of a way of trying to figure out what do I think and how is it connected to the things that I hold as ultimately true. And how do I make a story out of this that is orienting for my own life? How many folks stop to do that in a given day or week?

And I don’t know that I highly doubt I would if it weren’t for the fact that each week we’re called to have to try to stop and make sense of things through the cipher of the text and the Holy Spirit. And so I think it’s this built-in answer to a distinctly human dilemma, which is there’s so much coming at us and we have to process it. But when and how do we stop to do that? Well, we as preachers, we have a deadline for self-discovery every Sunday. So I think that’s one thing I would say is I would encourage folks to begin to think of putting together the sermon, not only as a vocational task, but as a process of an invitation into self-discovery.

So that’s one thing. And then as it pertains to then the stories that we are actually telling in the process of putting together a sermon and delivering it, one of the things that I say in the book that Tom Long said once that has really stuck with me was, he said, “Everybody wants to feel the cool of the air conditioner, but nobody wants to hear the HVAC rumbling right beside their ear.” And that’s been worth its weight in gold for me for a few things. One is in terms of writing the story, not to become so ponderous in all the different kind of prep, getting it all in there to show your work. You need to feel the cool, but they don’t want to hear the HVAC rumbling. 

And in the same way with the story, you know, Frank Craddock famously said, you know, somebody told him there was too much story in the sermon. He said, the story is the sermon. You know, I agree with that. It is almost always. But the story …  if it’s not clear how it is drawing out all the different resonances of the biblical text and the point you’re making, then it’s just a good story for knowledge. And then it’s the rumbling HVAC. You know, you’re cool. So why did I hear that? What was the point?

The book itself is a long answer to your question. But the shortest way of putting it, I think, is that there, in my view, if one is going to be a narrative-style preacher to have a lot of story in the sermon, the different layers of the sermon, they need to harmonize with one another. They need to be resonant with one another, but it needs to not be abundantly clear at first how these different pieces of the sermon are running on parallel tracks. That’s the way that I go about and have kind of honed my approach to putting together the sermon through the years. And obviously, each sermon looks different and there’s no hard and fast particular formula, even though I try to give just the larger strokes in the book. But if there’s going to be a story, it needs to harmonize with the point you’re making, and it needs to also harmonize with what you’re bringing in from the biblical text and the prep that we’ve done.

But then it needs to be tied together in a way that’s like, “Oh, that’s why those pieces were all there that seemed dissonant at first.” 

And there’s a dopamine hit that comes. I mean this quite literally. Neuroscientifically, when we make that association of this is standing in for that. That’s why a good joke works the way that it does. And so I think that in a well-done sermon, that’s one of the ways story is used well, is by having it in there, but not being entirely clear right away why it’s there and then the connection is made. And there’s a kind of sense of delight that comes for the person attentively listening.

B:         I mean, what you’re describing, whether it be sermon writing or literary writing that I know you’ve done some of in your life, this is hard work. There’s no way around the challenge of it and the wrestling and the unpleasantness and the discomfort. And it’s no wonder why a certain number of people are going to reach for AI to do this. So I wonder, in this moment, this really fraught moment, this brave new world, you know, often terrifying moment that we live in. Can you speak to why we might resist the temptation? Because AI can actually write a perfectly lovely sermon and no one will know, right? It’s at that point now. It’s probably going to get even better. So make the argument for us, pastor. Why not?

A:         Well, I think a lot about this. And I’m equally, let’s just say, dubious about the purported brave new world that we’re moving into. But all the things that you just said to describe the difficulties and the complications and the heaviness of trying to do it, that is true of life. And the reason that I tried to make this book both about sermon writing and about life, in fact, sermon writing as kind of analogous to and in a way to really talk about life, is that sure, one can outsource everything in a life. But if you outsource away all the things that are hard about it, the uncomfortable, difficult, demanding, it becomes a less and less human life. 

The same is true about writing the sermon. Like, yes, you can outsource it. And I’ve seen how AI can generate something quite lovely in terms of the words on the page. And here’s where I think, and I think this is true of all writing in general, but I really stand firmly on the ground of this as a pastor. And why wouldn’t I? Because it’s my life’s work and I need to believe this is true. I believe it nonetheless. You might have AI spit out something that is really beautiful in terms of the words on the page. But there is something about the delivery of it that there has to be something deeply burning in the person who wrote it for it to really be able to transmit and reach another human soul in that way.

The best writing, you can feel the writer’s soul pushing up against the words. It’s like when I referenced earlier, Norman MacLaine’s “I Am Haunted By Water.” “I am haunted by water.” That’s five words. How do you explain why when you read the book, those five words do what they do to most all of us who read it? It’s because there was something when MacLaine wrote that where he touched up against capital T-truth. 

I recently read Glimmerings by your colleagues, Miroslav Volf and Christian Weimann. There is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful back and forth. And they touch on this. And Weimann, you know, poet extraordinaire, was talking about the power of poetry and of a word to grab something that is so much bigger than us, and it can never grab all of reality out through, but it grabs and just holds finally this thing for us. It grabs this one little bit. And so when it does that well and right, it is not just lovely words. It is there’s something that is captured underneath it. And I am just deeply committed to the belief as a human being and as a preacher and writer artist that that is something that can’t be replaced. That the contact and the connection from human soul to human soul is a greater thing than just the ability to turn out something that is lovely on the page.

B:         And I think you make a really strong argument in the book about sermon preparation as an act of discovery. An act of discovery of yourself, of what you believe, of where your gifts are, of where your struggles are, and an act of discovery of, do we dare say, of God.

Right? So this sermon writing and the kind of prayer and preparation and wrestling is itself a spiritual practice. At least it is for me. And I can’t practice for you. I can’t pray for you. And it seems to me that’s among the great risks, if we’re to believe what you so persuasively write, that the act of writing here is an act of discovery.

From one thorny topic to another, I’m wondering if you could share how you as a pastor navigate the pulpit in these politically divided moments, at a moment when Christian nationalism is the loudest voice of Christianity it seems in the country right now.

And what is that like for you in … south of New Haven, Connecticut, where I’m sure there’s folks with every conceivable belief who’ve come to sit in your pews and pray with you and hear the gospel. What is that like for you?

A:         Yeah, it’s a particularly fraught moment. And that has been for some time. And I think there are lots of true responses to that question as it pertains to the way I go about it here at my church. I think one thing is true. I think there is a level of trust that has built up over the years. And to go back to how contextual I say my approach in my preaching is. I am not trying to preach a sermon that will play for either progressives or conservatives anywhere outside of not just Anderson, South Carolina– Boulevard Baptist Church. And that for me is an important place to begin, is that my audience is not outside of the congregation. My audience is my congregation. 

I try to, as best I can, preach always from a place that is pastoral and not provocative. And a distinction that I began to draw probably about five to seven years into my regular preaching was I early on … I think conflated being prophetic with being provocative. And I think those are two very different things. And I had understood at one point my call to be provocative and call it prophetic. 

B:         How would you name the distinction there? I love this. 

A:         Well, I don’t know it so much that I can name it in words, I can name it almost in a feeling. And I’m going to call upon the fruit of the spirit here for this. Here’s how I know when I am in a congregation myself, if I’m listening to somebody, if I’m at an event and there’s a preacher preaching. The way I distinguish when I’m the hearer is, I know and everybody knows what when what I’ve heard if it wasn’t what I would have exactly felt comfortable and said of myself. I know the difference of when I’ve been unsettled by something, and when somebody has just punched me in the face. There is a heat underneath it that I am not being preached to. I’m certainly not being accompanied on the journey with. I am being preached at. 

And that very quickly gets folks in a place like this and closing ears off. So I will often time in the editorial process of my sermons, look at something and then try to ask myself, particularly if it’s something that is going to be hard for folks to possibly hear. I will say, as best as I can honestly answer this for myself, did this originate from the fruit of the spirit? Is this coming from a place of love and gentleness and is there generosity of spirit even in what I’m saying being possibly something that might be unsettling?

Or is it coming from a place I’m hot about something and I’m taking it out in my sermon at. And it’s my sense that being prophetic unsettles. Whereas being provocative does what it provokes and it alienates and shuts off. 

And my goal is to be the pastor of this congregation and walk with this congregation through years and years and years and years if I’m so fortunate to get to do so. And so that means that I try to meet folks where they are with what their concerns and preoccupations are and try to do it in a gentle way that even when I say something–and we have a very purple church. So I am I wouldn’t say I’m an equal opportunity offender. I’m an equal opportunity unsettler, as it were. And so I go about it with great care because I’m somebody who cares a lot about what’s going on in the world. But I try to remember that I am a pastor and not either a provocateur or a political activist using theological language. And for me that often is a matter of which is the horse and which is the cart. 

And here’s the other litmus, as I was asked when I’ve written this. Is this helpful? Is it helpful? Like not, not, not is it going to be shareable? You know, like I said, I’ve already taken that off the table. Not, not like, is it going to score points? Is it going to, is it, is it helpful? In Gilead, you know, that wonderful novel, the end of the novel is an aged preacher, given this kind of narrative of his life to his son. And his benediction at the end is about what he’s hoping for his son. And he says, with your life, I hope and pray that you do something useful, something helpful. I think this is an important thing for us to think about as ministers.

Jonathan Haidt’s great work, you know, in The Righteous Mind, where he talks about how we are not nearly as persuaded by argument as we like to think we are. We’re so much emotional. We’ve made and you know, the data and the science are in on this. Like we’ve made our decision really quickly. And then our press secretary goes out there to figure out how to argue for the position we’ve made. Well, so now because of the soundbite culture we live in, and because everybody is so now formed to listen for signifiers that have these associations. They’re going to push you in this bucket or this bucket. I do think it’s very important that we, if we’re manuscript preachers and have worked on stuff leading up to the preaching moment, to look back through and try to figure out and make sure that there are things in there that, that everything nowadays in some ways is a signifier. So to just be mindful of what might I be saying in here that might unintentionally be turning somebody off to where there is, you know, he talks about an elephant and the rider, to where their elephant turns away, and we’ve already lost them before we’ve even got the chance to really make the point we want to make.

B:         I presume that, Austin, not every sermon is a grand slam. And in some ways, who are we to even judge, right? I mean, what the sermon does, what God does through a particular sermon. But in those moments, I’m thinking of a preacher listening who might read your book and put you on a pedestal or put their favorite preacher on a pedestal and spend all of their days trying to emulate that preacher. And when they walk away having preached something that, gosh, just didn’t feel quite right, or they even heard themselves say something that they might regret, you know, how would you encourage them to minister to themselves or to welcome the ministry of the Holy Spirit after a moment that a moment of preaching that just didn’t go according to plan?

A:         The times that have been most important and most humbling for me, I think, and I don’t wish them upon myself, but are the times where I have wrestled and wrestled and wrestled. And the more I edit and write, the worse I feel like it’s becoming, to where I’ve got something come Sunday morning that I’m almost embarrassed to get up and preach.

That is … that’s the worst place to be to where it’s like you walk out like, oh, I hope a lot of people don’t come today. You know, I have had a few of those moments in my ministry where it just wasn’t coming together. And the more I tried to make it come together, the worse I felt that it got. 

And Brandon, I won’t say every time, because that’s not true. But several of those times, I have had people come to me and talk about what a wonderful …  how it said what they needed to hear. And it just leaves me so humbled to where I’m like, obviously, I need to let my ego get out of the way here and stop thinking that this is all deriving from myself and actually practice what I preach as it were, what I write in this book, certainly.

So I think my counsel will be one that the things that we think are the good sermons are not always the ones that folks take away from and remember. And also, Sunday’s coming again the next week, that the ones where something came out wrong or you just leave feeling like I just that that was not it. And there’s another Sunday coming where you’re going to have to think about that one and all of your energy and focus is going to be placed on that sermon. And you’ll quickly forget about that moment. Or as my grandfather used to say, “This too shall pass.” 

B:         It’s amazing that God gets through. I mean, it’s the ultimate miracle that God works through this level of imperfection and inhabits these earthen vessels. I mean, thank God. I mean, this is such a humbling task. It’s a humiliating task. I’m thinking of my spiritual mentor, Thomas Keating, the wonderful Trappist monk who said, “Pray for one good humiliation every day.” And if you’re a preacher, you can be sure you got one at least every week and a big one.

A:         That is so absolutely true. You know, what I say in the book, there’s a chapter where I talk about prayer in advance of the sermon. But my process when it comes to praying right before I’m about to preach is rather than pray specifically about it, I just sit in kind of a meditative silence. Because I think of that as one of those moments where I need the Spirit to intercede with words too deep for me to utter. Because when I stop to think about what it is I purport to be doing, I’m about to not only try to speak about God, but in some sense speak for God. It’s such an absurdity that I can only sit there and ask for something that’s at a level deeper than I can access with words to somehow open me up and come through me. And I mean that quite honestly and sincerely. I’m overwhelmed and humbled by the preaching task.

B:         Reverend Dr. Austin Carty, we’re so thankful for your time and for the book. I hope readers will check it out. I wonder if you would leave us with your blessing.

A:         I would love to leave you with my blessing. I want to thank you, Brandon, again for having me. What a delight. And the benediction that I offer every week at my church, and this is apropos of something we just discussed a moment ago. And I always include both goodness and generosity here in my list of the Spirit, because that Greek word can be rendered either way. And I think those two words in English, they have such different connotations that we don’t grasp the full weight of all it’s doing. For the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. May we live by the Spirit.

B:         Amen. Thank you, my friend. Thank you, my brother. And we look forward to learning more from you in the future. And maybe there’ll be a next book we can talk about some other time. 

A:         I would love that. And I would love to talk with you about it when that moment– should it arise.

B:         Thank you for joining us today on the Leader’s Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. 

Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.