Ideas Are Fun - Ask Any Preacher

When I mention to people that the average term paper I write for each seminar is between 30-50 pages, they roll their eyes and go, "Better you than me." I smile and feel sad for them. I love writing these term papers. Let me tell you why.
As a preacher you live for "the idea". All the work you do in a preparing to preach on a biblical text is ultimately to find what Haddon Robinson calls, "The Big Idea." You read, search, think, pray, and write to find a single concept around which your understanding of the text can hold together. Saturday night can be a very scary time if you still haven't found that one idea. But the opposite is true. When you find that idea, the rest of task of preparing a sermon is a wonderful experience of seeing all your hard work fall together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. After 30 years of looking every week for that one big idea, you learn how to appreciate the fact that new insights, larger understandings, ideas in whatever form they arrive are things to celebrate. Ideas are fun.
As a student working on term papers, the same thing applies. You are looking for that one big idea around which to write your paper. The only difference between a sermon and a research paper is how deep you go to get into and then through the idea. Term papers are ideas looked at in greater depth. A dissertation (usually between 200-400 pages) is merely taking a big idea and doing as much in depth thinking and understanding of it that a year's work of time and effort can produce. All I know now is that 30-50 pages rarely gives you enough time to fully research and think through an idea. As a matter of fact where I am know in the process the term papers I will be writing from this point on are one part of one idea. The last four seminars I will take for my program will allow me to do directed readings that will result in a term paper and that paper is one chapter in the dissertation. So, if the dissertation is one big idea, these term papers are designed to be one part of that big idea.
To me, the discovery of big ideas is about as fun as it gets. Putting that understanding down on paper is providing the same kind of satisfaction that you get from preaching, but the work stays with you for a much longer time.