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Preaching in the Zone (part 1)

Finding that place of perfect connection

Kenton C. Anderson

This is part one of a two-part series.

I am one of those preachers who plays golf. Most of the time, my golf game is a lesson in humility—a kind of willing mortification of the flesh that reminds me that, for all my supposed spirituality, my conquest of the physical world is tenuous at best. Preachers don't have time to learn to play great golf. The time it would take to master the game would come at the expense of time spent with people or with God's Word. At least that is what I tell myself when I card yet another double bogey.

Still, there have been moments, rare though they may have been, where I felt that I could do no wrong, crushing my drives, sticking my irons, and dropping my putts. Sports psychologists call this being "in the zone." It's that place of confident performance and seeming invincibility.

I've known those moments in the pulpit. You know them too—those times when it seems we have a perfect connection to the mind and heart of each listener so that everything ...