Three Sundays Without a Net

The pastor of our church was going to be away for three consecutive Sundays. A well-needed and well-deserved break. He asked three men to fill in at the pulpit — one per week. I was week one. Two other men from the church took weeks two and three.

Each of us approached the task differently. Each of us ran into a different problem. And looking back, all three Sundays illustrate something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: the gap between asking someone to preach and equipping them to do it well.

This is that story. And it’s the story of why I believe the church needs better tools for moments exactly like these.

Week One: The Sermon Nobody Vetted

I was up first. My theme for life — the conviction that shapes everything I teach — is “others first.” Even when I don’t live it as well as I should, that’s the lens I bring to the text. Maybe it's so important to me because I fail at it so much. Anywho, when I was asked to preach, that’s where I went.

I built the sermon around Philippians 2:3–4 — Paul’s instruction to do nothing from selfish ambition but in humility count others more significant than ourselves. That was the anchor. But I also brought in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, a passage about the Lord’s Supper that I believe speaks powerfully to the same theme.

And that’s where things got interesting. Because the pastor and I read that passage very differently.

Two Ways to Read “Unworthy Manner”

The passage includes these well-known and often sobering verses:

"For this reason, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself first, and in this way let him eat the bread and drink of the cup. For the one who eats and drinks without careful regard for the body eats and drinks judgment against himself." (1 Corinthians 11:27–29)

The pastor’s view — and it’s a common one in many churches — is that “unworthy manner” refers to having unconfessed sin in your heart when you take communion. “Examine himself” means look inward, confess what needs confessing, and come to the table clean. In this reading, the Lord’s Supper is a solemn moment of personal inventory.

My reading is different. I believe the full context of 1 Corinthians 11 is about how the Corinthians were treating each other — not about their private spiritual state. Paul isn’t writing to people who forgot to confess a sin. He’s writing to a church where the wealthy were eating before the poor arrived, where some had plenty and others went hungry, where the communal meal had become a place of division instead of unity.

Paul’s conclusion drives this home:

"So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another." (1 Corinthians 11:33)

Wait for one another. The “unworthy manner” isn’t about unconfessed sin in your heart. It’s about disregard for the people next to you. “Examine himself” means examine how you’re treating the body — the community, not just the bread and wine. The “judgment” Paul describes follows from eating “without careful regard for the body” — the gathered people of God.

To me, this is a profoundly “others first” passage. The Lord’s Supper isn’t a moment of private self-examination. It’s a moment that asks: how are you treating the people at this table? Are you waiting for them? Are you considering them? Or are you consuming without regard for the community around you?

And I preached it that way. I even said directly that the last thing we should do is avoid coming to the Lord’s Supper when we need forgiveness and need to be made right. The table is not for the already-clean. It’s for the people who come because they need what it offers.

The pastor was not in the room. I assume he heard about it later.

The Alignment Lesson

Here’s the thing: neither interpretation is heretical. Both have scholarly support. Both are held by sincere, faithful Christians. The question isn’t who’s right — it’s that the disagreement never surfaced until I was already standing at the pulpit.

The pastor had no mechanism to see what I was preparing. I had no mechanism to check whether my approach aligned with his teaching direction. We were operating on trust — which is fine between friends, but it’s not a system. And when trust runs into a genuine theological difference, people get surprised.

If a platform like Appostolic had been in place — where the pastor could see the direction of a guest preacher’s preparation before Sunday morning — the disagreement would have surfaced on Wednesday, not from the pulpit. He could have said, “I see where you’re going with 1 Corinthians 11, and that’s not how we teach that passage here. Would you adjust, or would you prefer to step aside?”

And I would have stepped aside. I would have held to my conviction and honored his authority at the same time. That’s not a contradiction. That’s how shared ministry is supposed to work.

But without a system for visibility, the misalignment became a problem instead of a conversation.

Week Two: Good Heart, Scattered Prep

The man who preached on week two is one of the most genuine, good-hearted people I know. He took the task seriously. He prepared. You could tell he had spent time — real time — in the Word and in thought about what he wanted to say.

But everything was scattered.

His notes were on different slips of paper. His thoughts were good but not organized into a flow that a listener could follow. He jumped between ideas. He’d start down one path, pause, shuffle his papers, and pick up another thread. Despite the quality of his thinking, the delivery was hard to track. And he was visibly nervous, which made it worse.

I spent time in prayer with him before he went up. I could see how much it mattered to him. He wasn’t phoning it in. He was pouring himself into it. He just didn’t have a tool to help him organize what he’d studied into a coherent structure.

This is one of the most common problems in church teaching — and it has nothing to do with gifting or faithfulness. It’s about the gap between having good material and presenting it in a way that serves the listener. A pastor does this every week and has years of practice. A fill-in preacher does it once or twice a year and is essentially starting from scratch every time.

If he’d had access to a tool where he could paste his scattered notes and have them synthesized into a coherent outline — his ideas, his scriptures, his applications, but organized into a structure that flows — he would have walked to the pulpit with confidence instead of anxiety. The content was there. He just needed help with the container.

Week Three: The Google Search Sermon

I don’t want to be unkind about week three. But I think honesty serves the reader better than politeness here.

The man who preached on the third Sunday had done a Google search. It was apparent from the first few minutes that the material was not the product of personal study, prayer, or preparation. It was sourced from the internet and delivered with minimal engagement.

To be fair, not everyone who’s asked to fill a pulpit is in a position to do so. Life circumstances, spiritual readiness, time constraints — there are a hundred reasons why someone might say yes to the invitation but not be able to bring what the moment requires. And the responsibility for that falls at least partly on the person who did the asking. Not every willing man is a ready man. Pastors have a responsibility to evaluate readiness, not just willingness.

But even in this situation, a baseline tool would have made a difference. Even generating a lesson — not a sermon, but a solid, scripturally grounded, contextually appropriate lesson — would have been better than a cold Google search. The congregation would have received something prepared with theological care, adapted for their context, and built on a real engagement with the text. Not a substitute for the Spirit’s leading, but infinitely better than what a search engine returns.

Three Problems, One Gap

Three consecutive Sundays. Three different men. Three completely different problems:

Week one: a theological misalignment that no one saw coming because there was no mechanism for the pastor to review or align the guest preacher’s preparation.

Week two: good material with no structure because the fill-in preacher had no tool to help organize his study into a deliverable flow.

Week three: minimal preparation because the person filling in didn’t have the resources, the readiness, or the tools to do more than search the internet.

All three of these are solvable. Not with more gifting. Not with more willpower. Not with more time in the prayer closet — though that never hurts. They’re solvable with tools that serve the teaching process the way financial tools serve the budget process and scheduling tools serve the worship service.

The pastor who leaves for three weeks shouldn’t have to wonder whether the people filling in will teach something that contradicts his direction. The fill-in preacher who works hard shouldn’t have to show up with notes on scraps of paper and hope for the best. And the person who says yes but doesn’t know where to start shouldn’t be left with nothing but Google.

The Pulpit Shouldn’t Be a Tightrope

I think about those three Sundays a lot. Not because they were disasters — God is faithful and His Word accomplishes His purposes even through imperfect vessels. (I think I must be the chief of imperfection.) But because every one of those problems was predictable and preventable.

The church asks people to step into the pulpit with the same frequency that it asks people to sing special music, lead a prayer, or organize a potluck. But the pulpit carries a weight that none of those other tasks carry. What’s taught from the front of the room shapes what people believe about God, about Scripture, about how they should live. It deserves at least the same level of tooling and support that we give to the budget process.

That’s what I’m building. Tools that help the fill-in preacher organize his heart into a coherent message. Tools that give the pastor visibility into what will be taught from his pulpit when he’s not there. Tools that ensure the person who says yes to the invitation has something better than a blank page and a search engine.

Three Sundays. Three problems. One gap. And a deep conviction that the church deserves better.

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Appostolic gives pastors visibility into teaching preparation and gives every teacher — from the senior pastor to the fill-in preacher — tools to prepare faithfully, with structure, alignment, and theological care.