In this blog post I'm going to give you 3 key steps you can take to stop using Greek in your ministry effectively. If you follow these guidelines, you're going to minimize whatever gains you made when you took Greek in seminary.
The first step you need to take is to ignore the grammar of the Greek text and focus exclusively on word studies. Doing word studies in the pulpit is much more likely to make you popular than if you spent hours laboring on the meaning of the entire passage. Things like verbal aspect and discourse structure can be safely ignored in a day when you can satisfy itchy ears with comments like "We get the English word 'dynamite' from this Greek word" or "The Greek word here is one from which we derive the term 'hilarious,' and so God loves a hilarious giver."
The second thing you can do is to not only say the Greek word from the pulpit but to spell it out as well. This will give everyone the impression that you are a Greek scholar and it has the additional benefit of distancing yourself from your audience since schlepps like them don't have access like you do to such insider information. Be careful, however, to ensure that you don't have a Greek professor in your congregation who might call you out when you both mispronounce and misinterpret the Greek word.
Here's the final thing you can do to make sure you don't spend too much time in the Greek when you're preparing a sermon. You need to stop your exegesis before it gets hard. You want your time in the text to be very fast and easy. If you want to be 100 percent safe from overdoing it, just make sure you're always looking at your phone or answering emails. Multitasking is awesome, and you can get a lot more done in your office than just Bible study. And don't use your phone merely to check websites like Bible Hub or Bible Gateway. The best way to use your phone at the office is to stay up to date with social media. You may even need to reply immediately to a comment someone left you on Facebook. That is way more important than staying focused on such irrelevant matters as Greek word order or verb tenses.
I hope you found this post helpful for minimizing the role that Greek plays in your sermon preparation. If you're looking forward to getting even less results make sure you don't come back to my website any time soon.