Preaching in Romanian

I’m preaching tomorrow morning. It will be the third sermon I’ve preached in Romanian.

Preparing to preach a sermon in Romanian takes a lot of extra time and effort.

Writing the sermon is the easy part. I research the passage using my commentaries, and try to find illustrations that connect to my Romanian listeners. It would be easy to stop there and rely on a Romanian to stand beside me as I preach to translate. (I’ve done that many times in the past.)

But I’ve decided that it is much more effective to preach in Romanian. So, after my sermon is written, I begin to translate it into Romanian. I do the best I can with the knowledge I have, and it’s a learning experience. I get better acquainted with the Romanian online dictionary which I use to look up new words and find conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns.

Next, I take my sermon, translated to the best of my ability, to a Romanian to help me translate the rest. Yesterday afternoon I met with my Romanian language teacher who graciously offered to help me finish translating the sermon. It also proved to be a helpful time to see if the illustrations I had chosen relate to Romanians.

After I have the sermon translated into Romanian, I need to practice it. There are always a few new big words that I need to practice so I don’t fumble through them while I’m preaching.

Preaching a sermon in Romanian is both a frustrating experience and a rewarding one.

It’s frustrating because it takes so long to translate it into Romanian. It makes me wish I were fluent and writing a sermon would come naturally. It’s frustrating because I feel like I’m bothering someone to sit down with me for a few hours and help me translate it. It’s frustrating because many of the things they correct are things that I’ve learned but have forgotten. Because I’m in such a hurry to get the sermon ready, I don’t always take the time to learn from my mistakes.

But above all the frustrations, it is definitely a rewarding experience. It is rewarding because I get to communicate the Gospel message in my listeners’ language, without needing to speak through a translator. It is rewarding because the sermon is half as long as if it were translated. It’s rewarding because it is a way that I get to demonstrate to the people in the church that I take seriously my commitment to live with and among them, by doing my best to learn and speak their language. Even after I preach (well, read) my sermon, someone may come up and say something to me that I don’t completely understand, but they know I’m trying.

So even though there are frustrations involved, I can turn those frustrations into hope for the future, when I’ll be able to speak much more clearly.

Click here to read tomorrow morning’s sermon.