Q. Carlos, give our readers a little background on who you are and where you serve in your ministry.

A. For the past sixteen years, I’ve served as pastor of the Point Pleasant Presbyterian Church in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey – a congregation of just over 500 members, in a beachfront community that’s both a bedroom community for New York City and a summer resort destination. Prior to that, I served as assistant dean and director of admissions at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary in Iowa. I studied at Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (Ph.D.). My wife, Claire Pula, is a Presbyterian minister like myself, and a hospice chaplain. Our college-senior son, Benjamin, is an aspiring singer-songwriter. Our high-school-senior daughter, Ania, is discovering her calling as an aspiring photographer and artist.

Q. How important is the task of preaching to you personally?

A. The task of preaching energizes me. Of all the activities of ministry, it’s the one that brings me the most joy. Frederick Buechner famously described Christian vocation as “the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet,” and I know that’s true for me as I enter the pulpit.

I never enter the pulpit unprepared. I’m a manuscript preacher, although I learned early on that sermonizing is different from most other kinds of writing. We preachers must write for speech – abandoning the stodgy rhetorical devices we learned, writing academic papers in college and seminary. Instead, we practice a more conversational style. Not everything that comes out of my mouth is exactly as it’s written on the page, but a good bit of it is.

Q. Do you read your sermons?

A. I’ve heard church folk complain about pastors who “read” their sermons. I never read my sermons. I speak them – and that’s a huge difference.

Q. Are your sermons well illustrated with stories, quotes and other pertinent information?

A. Another hallmark of my preaching style is the use of illustrations, augmented by the computer. For years I’ve maintained a simple Microsoft Access database that allows me to file short bits of text under both topic words and scripture references. I’m constantly adding to this homiletical compost heap of mine, dipping into it whenever I need quotations or illustrations.

In seminary, I had a preaching course from Ernie Campbell, former pastor of the Riverside Church in New York. He got us all carrying around little black books – not to record phone numbers of potential dates, but to record things we’d read, or heard in conversation, that could make their way into our sermons someday. When the course was over, I kept up Ernie’s black-book discipline – graduating, eventually, to 3-by-5 index cards, and ultimately to the database. If you want to catch any fish in this preaching game, you’ve got to keep a line in the water.

Q. Do you use the Revised Common Lectionary on a regular basis?

A. I’m a lectionary preacher. Sometimes I gripe about the odd way Revised Common Lectionary texts are “cut,” and sometimes I bemoan the long, lexico continuo stretches from the epistles, but – all in all – the lectionary frees me, more than it confines me. With so many unused sermon ideas tucked away in my database, I nearly always find something that causes sparks to fly, in interaction with the text.

The lectionary also fosters creative collaboration with colleagues. I’m coordinator of the writing team for The Immediate Word – CSS’ online, current events and lectionary resource – and the team’s weekly conference calls spark all kinds of creativity. For years, I’ve been part of a group of sixteen lectionary preachers, called “The Homiletical Feast,” who meet together for one week in Florida, every January, sometimes under the guidance of a seminary professor we invite for the occasion. We submit papers to one another on upcoming lectionary texts. Those papers are not dry, exegetical exercises, but rather sermons-in-the-making. I suppose the Lectionary Preaching Workbook volumes I’ve written are modeled after Homiletical Feast papers.

As important as the papers are to our group, what’s even more important is the chance to be together with good friends and colleagues who share this same, crazy vocation. We share meals. We go for walks on the beach. We share stories from our ministries, rejoicing with those who rejoice, and weeping with those who weep. It’s lectionary preaching that has called this particular group of pilgrims together – and every aspect of our ministry benefits.

Q. Do you read sermons written by others?

A. From time to time, I read sermons by others: Frederick Buechner, Barbara Brown Taylor, Fred Craddock, Tom Long, Will Willimon – even old Harry Emerson Fosdick (his pastoral insights into the human personality are timeless). In my own sermon preparation, I don’t so much say what these giants of the pulpit said, as try to think what they thought. Into the database those thoughts go, until an opportune time.

Preaching is about so much more than writing sermons. It’s a life.