Since making the commitment to work extemporaneously, I have had four funerals. They were all within one week. Two on Saturday--graveside for one, community building for the other. One on Monday in a Fort Worth Funeral Home and another on Tuesday. This is unusually high volume but, they were all well-lived lives. Two of the people were over ninety, one in her eighties, and one in his seventies. All had been cared for lovingly by their family. None died suddenly. While every death brings grief, some are less difficult for the pastor. These were not difficult. It was easy to affirm the family that they had cared for their loved one and easy to affirm that the people involved had indeed fought the good fight, finished the race, and received the reward God had planned for them.
Typically, I write out every word of a funeral service--call to worship, invocation, life-marks, pastoral prayer, the message of hope, and benediction. Plus comital and prayers for the graveside service. In the services, I worked from an outline. I jotted down structure and keywords for the prayers, family member names and dates and events on the life marks and an outline for the messages of hope.
In these situations, the extemporaneous approach didn't work well. Word-choice was at issue. Frequently it felt like I was rushing things. Where I got to the part of identifying our spiritual resources the content seemed thin. I don't work from a canned message of hope. There are some things that I say frequently at funerals but, I also try to find a unique way to say them. So, I would say that I'm not satisfied with the content of the messages. I'm not particularly satisfied with the eye-contact. On the plus side, it was an intensely high number of speaking occasions to get done in a short amount of time. The extemporaneous approach did help with the demands of the week.
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