Preaching full time, and not just every now and then has been a really interesting experience for me. I've had to change my preaching style. I don't like *hearing* personal anecdotes and stories in sermons. And I don't like telling them. But my folks thrive off them.

So I tell them. So I pay attention in my life and look for stories to tell. So sometimes my spouse becomes (with his permission!) a sermon illustration.

This is the pastor's first job. Not just to know the gospel, but to know your people and know how they HEAR the gospel.

My folks also like "in the original Hebrew..." (I don't usually do Greek, because I'd butcher it!). No one cared about that when I preached in seminary, because they could look it up themselves on Bibleworks. But my context is different now!

I think there's a way to bring academia into sermons that is elitist and showoff-y. But there's also the reality that many people in the pews would LOVE to go to seminary, but it's expensive. Would LOVE to read theology articles but they're behind paywall.

We make assumptions, sometimes, I think, about lay people. Not every congregation is going to have folks who care about biblical scholarship, but personally I've never been in a church where there wasn't at least one aspiring lay theologian (usually it was me lol)

I didn't go to seminary because I wanted to be a pastor at first, tbh. I went because I was lucky enough to get a full-ride scholarship and I WANTED to learn about the Bible. I have congregants who I wish could also get full-ride scholarships to seminary, because they'd LOVE it

But since those are hard to come by, I try to make what I know of academic biblical scholarship available. I don't think that's elitist. What might be elitist is assuming people in your pews don't care about scholarship.

Again, if you're up there lecturing and never listening, and assuming you have The Gospel because you have The Degree, sure that's elitist. But saying "this is what I learned in seminary" and ALSO listening to what people learned about God in their own context? not so much!

Anyway, I'm speaking here less as a pastor, and more as a former lay person who was 100% done with church until I joined a congregation where the pastor regularly preached about the summa theologica

when I went to seminary, I was bored in my intro classes because "I already learned this in church." and i'd like that to be true at more churches