Just a week ago, I wrapped up a continuing education program called the Iowa Preachers Project. I have started and deleted several posts trying to describe the IPP, but it’s been remarkably difficult to put into words.

Perhaps it’s best to start by giving a picture of what we did. The IPP is a preaching fellowship, lasting about nine months. The calendar began in September with a three-day gathering in Des Moines, continued through monthly zoom presentations until January when we reassembled in Memphis for another three days in person, then four more months of zoom topics, then a final three days in Charlottesville, Virginia. Each virtual month included both a presentation, about an hour long, on a topic like “How to Preach the Psalms” or “The Pinch and Promise of Law and Gospel”, and a small group discussion with a subset of the participants to check in, ask questions, and reflect on preaching. 

Meanwhile, each month also included feedback from a squad of parishioners at each fellow’s church. My five-person team was invaluable to me as each month they helped me think more deeply about the particular sermons I was preaching at Resurrection, to the particular listeners God had brought to this congregation, and it was worth every minute of conversation we shared. No other program I’ve ever attended paid any heed to the preacher’s setting as a partner in the program. I learned as much about preaching from hearing what my parishioners heard from me as I ever learned in a classroom.

The three-day gatherings were full, starting at 8:30 am and continuing until 9 pm– and that’s just the scheduled time for presentations, worship, and workshops. Presentations connected poetry and preaching or gave a glimpse into the history of gospel preaching or encouraged us to keep preaching a priority by keeping the study of God’s word at the forefront, and so much more. Worship was filled with prayer, scripture, and sermons– if my count is correct, I attended eight services and heard nineteen sermons (plus one I preached). 

Among the richest hours were the hours spent lingering at the hotel lobby or bar or patio after the day was “done,” talking about what we’d heard that day, and our kids and spouses at home, and the sermons we’d butchered the previous Sunday, and the meetings that drove us crazy, and the parishioners who drew the best out of us, and the books we’d been reading, and the concerts we’re looking forward to, and the worries that keep us up at night, and the hopes that we have for the church– God’s church, the whole body of Christ wherever it might be found. I laughed until I cried, and just plain cried, and prayed, and all that made it worth the shortage of sleep it cost to stay up until 2am and wake up again at 7 for the next day’s programming.

But it was the people in the IPP who made it extraordinary. Nineteen preaching fellows from ten denominations and fourteen states participated, in addition to half a dozen small group leaders and facilitators who added another state to the mix. I was somewhere between skeptical and apprehensive about this, to be perfectly honest. Could twenty-five people with different understandings of baptism, worship, communion, women’s ordination, LGBTQ inclusion, church structure, scriptural interpretation, and more really stick together for a year of a program like I’ve described? Apparently, yes. Like successfully navigating an asteroid field to escape the Empire, building a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa corn field, or sending the One Ring into Mordor in the care of two hobbits, it was crazy enough to work.

Then again, the Holy Spirit seems to delight in making the impossible work. Sarah and Abraham were really (really!) old, and God gave them a son to go with their promise. Esther should have died for going to see the king without permission, and God used her courage to prevent a genocide. Jesus took a little boy’s lunch and fed thousands. Paul was a persecutor of Christians, and the unseen voice of Jesus was enough to turn him into a fervent evangelist. And, at the heart of our faith: Jesus Christ died on a cross, the instrument of torture and cruel suffering. God raised him up again to new life, the most impossible of all: resurrection.

Since God can raise the dead, it shouldn’t have surprised me (but it did, I confess) that God could work a miracle like giving me a friendship with a LCMS pastor out of this thing. Since God can raise the dead, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I’d find deep commonalities with other pastors who didn’t seem a thing like me at the beginning. Since God can raise the dead, it should hardly have come as a surprise that all around the nation, in tiny country churches and comfortable suburbia and in the bustle around the nation’s capitol and in the mountains and on the beach, in growing and shrinking and stable congregations, in denominations I love, like, lament, and have never even heard of, there are faithful preachers who know and declare the most important thing: Jesus Christ is alive, and he is for us, so that in him we too may live.

I suppose the IPP at its heart was surprisingly simple: a bunch of preachers who have received the pure gospel of Jesus Christ and are determined to give it away.