I was very pleased with my small group last night. Each year we have to take one of the evening services during the summer and, last night, I felt we hit it out of the park. We spent relatively little time preparing together but all the individual contributions threaded neatly onto the central thread of running a peripatetic service (starting in the lobby and moving gradually to the front via a series of stations). This was inspired by our material – a group of fifteen psalms known as the Songs of Ascent.

Want to know more? My contribution was the sermon, which I have now posted online: Exploring the Songs of Ascent. Over the past few months, I have now had more than a handful of opportunities to speak in church and it is definitely getting easier. Preparation still took a certain amount of time (and perhaps I should note the benefits of riding on the back of a term’s study of the material with the group) and I still stuck fairly closely to the script but I felt that I delivered it quite confidently and clearly. Practise definitely brings improvements; hopefully that will continue to show when I deliver my next message in a couple of weeks time.