An awful lot of messages in the meetings for worship I attend (I won’t call them vocal ministry, for reasons I’m about to get into) start with the pronoun “I”, often combined with a statement that pegs the time. There then inevitably follows one of two things, either an announcement and/or an anecdote. “I read in the New York Times this morning . . .” A few days ago, I heard . . .” “I’ve been thinking lately . . .”

These introductory announcements and vignettes sometimes are quite charming in themselves, but they almost always lead up to a point, so they are in essence, secondary to the message. Often the route to the point is rather slow, oblique, or peppered with side-trips, but eventually we get to a point. The point is the message the speaker wants to bring to us.

I must confess that every time I hear such an opening, I cringe. Very rarely, I think, does a truly spirit-led message start with “I” and an announcement or vignette. Or at least, I usually feel that we would have been better off with just hearing the point.

When I find myself thinking along these lines, I stop myself and force myself to go deeper. In my mind, I strip away the introduction and listen to the point on its own. If it stands on its own, then maybe I have some ministry to share. Time, then, to go deeper yet and sit with the point some more to see how it feels. Is the point something valuable I have learned for myself from that moment or experience? Or do I also feel led to go public with it? If so, why? Do I get something out of it, or does it truly feel like service? Does it still point back to me, or am I seeking to answer that of God in others?

The problem with these self-centered introductions is that, first of all, they pull the speaker toward his or her self, toward ego, rather than toward service and one’s center. In the process of telling the story your mind runs through the details and these details tempt you to share them, too. You start making connections with other things, and now you’re tempted to run off on a tangent.

Meanwhile, you’re pulling the listeners up to the surface, also. Now they are imagining the scene along with you. Their minds are activated, pulling them up from the alpha brain wave meditative state that they may have descended to in their deepening process toward the beta wave region of active, conscious, everyday thought. Then the point comes like a fly landing on the surface of the lake, and like a bass surfacing to catch the fly, we break the water line and swallow. Now the point has been made, but everybody has to start deepening all over again. Two or three (or more) such messages, and one is just treading water at the surface catching flies.

Introductory personal pronouns, announcements, and anecdotes disturb the dynamics of meeting for worship and tend to waste the point on an audience lured to the surface, away from the depths—even if the point was one worth sharing in the first place. But the point, delivered as prophetic utterance, might have pulled us all deeper into the cool still water of true worship.