Every Preacher’s Nightmare (and what happened next)

You can watch the full conversation about the very public moment Yejide realized her preaching mistake.

The Rev'd Yejide Peters-Pietersen is an Episcopal priest, Associate Dean and Director of Formation at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, doctoral student, and one of the mentors here at Backstory Preaching.

She is someone I deeply respect, both as a preacher and as a colleague.

This blog comes out of a conversation I had with Yejide about the most gut-wrenching preaching moment of her life. (Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.)

To set the scene, in 2024, she was invited to preach at the Eucharist for the Episcopal General Convention—the largest gathering of Episcopalians—where we pray together and conduct the business of the denomination every three years.

This was the preparatory worship service immediately before the election of our denomination’s leader, the Presiding Bishop, for a nine-year term. 

All the bishops of the church, retired and currently serving, were seated for the worship service in the first few rows. Several thousand convention delegates and visitors were in the audience, and even more were watching online.

Yejide had prepared for weeks. She prayed over every word of the provided Scripture texts and her sermon.

And then, standing at the ambo, as she heard the gospel read aloud—realized she had prepared her sermon on the wrong text.

This is every preacher’s nightmare, and many of us, myself included, have done the same thing.

However, not with the breadth and depth of an audience like this, or when the gravity of the occasion was this intense.

"I Felt Like I Was Digging My Own Grave"

"The moment I got it wrong” Yejide said, “was this moment. It was like a nightmare."

She had paired the given Hebrew Bible text with the gospel passage she thought would be assigned.

But it wasn’t.

The gospel read aloud was not what she had expected, leaving her only seconds to decide what to do.

What she did not do was panic because she knew she didn’t need to.

Yejide stayed in her frame.

"It was the framing I've received here at Backstory Preaching that allowed me to hold my Heart of the Message and then bring it forward into this improvisational moment."

She knew her one clear message.

She knew what she believed about God.

She knew what she was inviting the congregation toward. 

And she trusted the Holy Spirit.

Because she had internalized these things she could adapt the sermon to the gospel without losing the message.

"I had to ask myself: ‘How can this gospel lesson augment the sermon I meant to preach?’ Because I still felt committed to the message."

She found that the unexpected text, which spoke to fear and anxiety, actually fit the feeling in the room in ways she hadn't anticipated. 

The Church was facing a significant transition.

The anxiety in the room was palpable.

Rather than working around the anxiety, she let the room and the gospel shape what she said.

She left the lectern and her notes behind, preaching directly and vulnerably to those assembled.

The Spirit spoke through her.

I was there with several other Backstory Preaching mentors. We were sitting together in about the fifth row where she could see us and receive our support.

We didn’t need to put on a face of politeness that communicated, “Well, that was a good effort.”

Because the sermon landed.

Yejide’s preaching was courageous, bold, honest, authentic. 

And the room was electric.

What Made the Difference

Yejide is quick to say this was not a miracle of inspiration at the moment.

Her sermon was the product of years of practice with BsP’s particular approach to sermon preparation.

"In my mind, I'm always thinking: one clear message. What am I inviting people to? What are they going to remember? I'm doing that every time I prepare a message, in a way I wasn't years ago."

She describes it as muscle memory, the kind that forms when you do something the same way, week after week, until it becomes instinct.

She preaches most Sundays, often twice a week between her parish work and her role at the seminary.

The repetition matters.

But she is also careful to say preparation is not the whole story.

"I was practiced and prepared and brought some skills, but that left the space for the Holy Spirit. We do our very best, and then God imbues it with life."

That is such an honest description of what preaching actually is: the place where preparation and surrender meet.

We bring everything we have.

We hold the framing.

And then we get out of the way.

Before The Mentorship

Yejide came into the Mentorship as someone who did not feel confident in her preaching.

In fact, she considered not being ordained because she was afraid of it.

"I would get physically ill, like I thought I was actually gonna be ill. I really didn’t feel okay."

Even after ordination, the anxiety around preparation stayed with her.

"The magical thinking, the anxiety around preparing. ‘What am I going to say!?’ I wouldn’t know. And especially as a priest, as a minister who was in a local context, you're preaching to the same people week by week. There was a listlessness that set in where I started to feel like I was boring myself."

The shift that changed everything for her was moving away from the idea that preaching is primarily about being inspired, waiting for the aha moment to arrive.

"The biggest shift for me was moving from thinking that God will have to inspire you, to realizing that God's Word is inspired and that God has a promise to people who are doing this work faithfully. God's going to meet you in these texts."

She was skeptical at first that practicing BsP’s consistent process could actually work for her.

"That idea that I could actually start with a text and by Friday have a sermon that was enlivening and hopeful? I didn't even dare believe it was true. I'll be honest, I was like, I'm happy to do this thing, but I'm not sure it's going to work for the likes of me."

She discovered how wrong she was! 

What She Sees Now

Yejide has been a Backstory Preaching mentor for several years now, working one-to-one with preachers through the Mentorship and alongside the community in The Collectives. 

She has a clear-eyed view of what brings people in and what they leave with.

"For so many of us who preach on a regular basis, the pressure to carry more and more of the load means that the space shrinks for theological imagination, for delving in and being curious."

What she sees happen in the community is that space and time expand.

"You see people come and they're anxious: I'm a half-time minister, I have another job, I'm just trying to squeeze this in. But you see that the hour they're spending there, they walk away smiling, because the hour multiplied. They got ideas. There was time and space for things to grow inside of them."

She also sees something happen at a level deeper than craft.

"Really, it's about how are you as a child of God. In the midst of everything you're doing for other people, if your own life with God is not one in which you feel in alignment with your vocation, that shows up in our preaching. How can we preach good news that we don't feel?"

And the thing she says she treasures most after years of this work is not the sermon improvements, though she sees those too.

It’s something else.

"The thing I treasure most is when a preacher is walking away feeling like, ‘I feel enlivened in my vocation again. I feel joyful about this work. I feel excited to preach these sermons.’"

Mentorship Applications Are Now Open Through Friday, June 5th!

The 2026-2027 Backstory Preaching Mentorship cohort is now open for applications.

If you are surviving every Sunday but wondering if there's more—
If you have been preaching the same way for years and feel stuck—
If you are carrying the weight of ministry through a season that feels particularly hard—

…this program was designed for you.

You bring the preparation. We'll help you build the frame.

So you can face any preaching moment with confidence and joy.

Don’t go another year without establishing this firm foundation.