When I was entering my mid-thirties, I stepped into the role of a preacher. I’ll be direct about it—the way a neighbor might casually mention they’ve contracted a cold at a block party. It seems only fair to give you a moment to pause, because who can tell what might come of it? Perhaps I have a message intended for you.
Bad news first: I do, in a way, have something to say. It isn’t about God, nor about doctrine or scripture. My good news—my gospel, if you want to call it that—is about how preaching’s vantage point helped me become a better writer of fiction. And I don’t believe a writer must be a preacher, or tied to organized religion, to receive benefit from what preaching taught me.
My foray into the pulpit grew out of a persistent struggle in my fiction-writ ing life. When people throw around the words “failure” and “writer” in the same breath, they sometimes imply that the real misstep lies with the gatekeepers who failed to recognize genius. I can assure you the literary world did not miss what I was about. My novel wasn’t gaining momentum because its core needed work, and I kept tinkering with superficial details without embracing its substance, partly because I wasn’t sure why the story should matter. My drafts were rich in atmosphere but short on depth, reworking gritty moments into configurations that, however intense I believed them to be, remained too smooth to ignite a reader’s engagement.
I don’t think a writer needs to be a preacher, or even have any attachment to organized religion, to benefit from what preaching taught me.
Growing up, I attended a conservative evangelical church. I left during college but, as an adult, found myself drawn back into the Christian tradition—this time within denominations with different theological commitments. It didn’t take long after returning for me to realize that I was drawn to preaching myself. A few years later, I received an invitation to deliver a message at our Bozeman, Montana church on Advent Sunday.
Almost as soon as I said yes, doubt crept in about my qualifications and even my motives. Wasn’t it odd to desire to preach, to think I had anything spiritually meaningful to offer? Weren’t my MFA in writing, my position teaching college composition, and a novel without traction enough to mark me as unqualified? Indeed, and embarrassingly, might my interest in preaching be a way to ease the sting of my writing disappointments? Was I simply seeking another audience—one captive, perhaps—to replace readers who hadn’t shown up?
Somehow these misgivings did not derail the sermon I began to craft, the process of writing and rewriting that, while not exclusively akin to an essay, shared kinship with essay-writing. It carried a tight deadline and would require me to read it aloud before dozens of people—some friends, others only acquaintances, all very real to me.
Determined to avoid staking any special claim to authority, I chose to deliver that first message from the sanctuary floor rather than from the pulpit, a setup I liked because it sounded like a literary reading. If anyone argued that what I said was wrong or that I wasn’t fit to preach, I could simply point out that I was reading a spiritual essay from a plain music stand before an audience of like-minded souls.
Then, to my astonishment, I looked up from the pages I’d laid out on the stand and found not a collection of spiritually inclined listeners but a full congregation staring back at me.
*
All fledgling writers are taught to fear the audience. Who will read our work? What do those readers care about? How can we satisfy enough of those interests to feel rewarded, while nudging enough of them to keep them engaged?
The workshop framework—whether you adore it or detest it—puts a writer and their manuscript before a peer audience; if those peers approach the reading with generosity and honesty, their feedback can be a boon. Yet even a generous audience exists to assess. Hearings, trials, interviews—these are the settings from which the audience draws its power, and the word carries hints of urgency. An audience’s verdict—favorable or harsh—depends largely on the author’s ability to impress, or at least to satisfy, those who sit in judgment.
I had never truly dreaded an audience, exactly. Choosing to publish meant accepting the possibility of judgment. But the audience I carried in my mind felt tyrannical. It appeared before the story even took shape and stayed dissatisfied at every turn, perhaps because that is its job.
I wasn’t completely oblivious to this problem. Write for you, not for them! I warned myself. Perhaps that insight faltered because we seldom heed our own advice, but more likely because I knew that if I wrote a book, it couldn’t be merely for me. So I would try, Write for your ideal reader! And while this stance sometimes flickered with hope, it always faded, because I couldn’t pretend this was a private note. The moment I allowed any other imagined readers into the frame, their judgments thundered in, smothering my capacity to sense the story’s heart.
*
To risk grandiose language, peering over the edge of that music stand altered my approach to writing in a fundamental way. Not overnight, but somewhat swiftly. The people gathered before me weren’t there to be impressed. They cared far less about judging the sermon’s quality than about whether I could offer something that mattered. In that moment, my own self-importance mattered little. I recognized that people attend church for a variety of reasons—to see friends, to enjoy the music, to maintain a habit—and underneath all of that lies the hope that something essential will be found, some enduring insight encountered. The term congregation itself implies a flock, and flocks come together to confront—together—what they cannot confront alone.
I saw that I would have to commit to a story the way a preacher commits to a text, accepting its limitations before I could explore its depth.
As I continued to write new sermons, I increasingly understood how essential it was to have the sense of the congregation woven into my writing. Their shared demand for clarity helped validate my own questions and gave them direction. I needed their lived reality as people because it kept me from drifting into abstraction. I even valued the fact that I didn’t know many of them personally, because it forced humility, kept me from prescribing, and reminded me that I likely didn’t have all the answers—or even know what their questions might be.
Writing with a congregation in mind reshaped how I perceived the stakes of my novel. It didn’t erase the pressure but relocated it. The goal ceased being merely to write well or to tell a good story; the aim became to deploy language in service of something meaningful. If a congregant were asked at lunch what my sermon had been about and couldn’t articulate a clear answer, then I had failed. Not that I expected a moral to be extracted, because I’m not chasing one—rather that the measure of success would be whether the topic connected with the fabric of their life and the world as they experienced it. The test was to place a finger in the grooves the sermon left on their heart and see if they could feel it there.
Writing sermons helped me comprehend what it would take for my novel to gain traction. I saw that I would need to commit to a story with the same seriousness a preacher shows a text, acknowledging its limits before probing its depths. I also realized I would never know with certainty whether my work would be judged as art, just as a preacher cannot guarantee that their message will land as intended in a pulpit. In truth, any preacher who is certain they know precisely what their congregation must hear is misguided. Composing a sermon—whether it’s a story, an essay, or a poem—is a practice in risk and vulnerability. When I finally step away from the pulpit, I still wonder: Was that worth saying? Was that a waste of time?
Yet I’m not paralyzed by the possibility of an unfavorable verdict, because the core purpose of a weekly gathering—an assembly I belong to regardless of which side of the pulpit I stand on—is to search again for the point where our lives meet truth and fear and hope. The best a preacher can do is locate that pulse and invite the crowd to ask, Do you feel this too? And what should we do with it?
If an audience delivers judgments, a congregation offers continuity. No matter how compelling or dull a sermon may be, no matter how dazzling a metaphor or how worn-out a comparison, its usefulness tends to fade with time as life’s daily pressures intervene. Which means that, apart from the publishing particulars, another story will always be needed, another sermon planned, because a congregation understands that this gathering is an ongoing practice, not a performance. Tradition, not spectacle. Where does genuine hope live in writing? It’s in the chance to find some sense to hold onto amid this mess we’re all navigating.
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Good Guys by Mindy Misener is available from Melville House Publishing.
