When our daughter was tiny, she would set a grand scene with her toys and muster an audience by shouting, with a circus barker’s enthusiasm, “INTENTION! INTENTION!”

Of course, she meant “Attention, Attention.” We resisted the urge to correct her.

Every time she said it, I remembered a Sunday in a small rural Tennessee congregation I served by myself for a year during seminary. There was nothing particularly unique about that Sunday. The sermon I’d prepared for the morning wasn’t something I’d submit to any contests. As I began to preach to the congregation of roughly forty, the usual faces engaged in the usual ways—smiles of affirmation, furrowed brows of contemplation, closed eyes of napping.

But suddenly, in the middle of the message, the people suddenly gave me more attention. Those mostly elderly folk sat up straight in their seats and leaned in a little. Spouses nudged snoring spouses, waking them up and pointing at me as if to say, “He’s on a roll today.” Several people nodded which, in that button-up country church, was like a full-throated, “AMEN!”

As the people gave me more attention, my energy changed. I began to pay more attention to what I was saying and how I was saying it as they paid more attention to me, and suddenly the exchange of energy found us in a flow of attention, affirmation, engagement and intention. I raised my hands and got my body into the message and the people seemed nearly on the edge of their seats, as though they were truly attending to hear what God’s spirit would speak next through my willing voice.

And that’s when I heard a shuffling behind me.

I turned around to find a Police Officer standing right behind me. It was quickly clear that he had entered through the side entrance of that small church, from which the first door on the left was a direct entrance into the sanctuary right behind…you guessed it…the pulpit.

Still in the Spirit’s rapture, I turned to him and said, “Can I help you?” He responded, “Does someone in here drive a Red Chevy truck? You’re parked on the street and you’re partially blocking a neighbor’s driveway. We need you to move.”

I turned back to the congregation to watch as everyone stared in shock at the officer and me, sustaining their glares just long enough not to notice as Clayton, an older man who sat on the back row, slipped out the back door with his keys in hand. Like air let out of a balloon, attention fizzled.

People have thousands of places to which they can give their attention, and yet those who come to hear us preach willingly choose to give their attention to us. Some Sundays it feels like we have them in the palm of our hands, and others it takes a local constable in the wrong place at the wrong time to draw their spirits in.

However it comes, there’s immense privilege in the fact that people willingly choose to give their attention to our messages. Their “attention, attention,” is a longing for “intention, intention.” The interplay of the person sitting in the pew to the person standing in the pulpit is an exchange of our intentions for understanding, inspiration, and meaning with their intentions for relationship, community, and personal spiritual development.

After that Sunday, the church would not tell the story of the message I preached, but of what happened in the middle of it. And each time we told that story, we drew closer in laughter and shared memory. And each time we drew closer, we paid more attention to one another and the God present in each of us.

And as we paid deeper attention to the God present in each of us, we gave deeper intention, intention to the faith we proclaimed.

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Published in the August 2026 issue of For the Messengers.

Rev. Ryan Motter serves as the Senior Minister of Creekwood Christian Church, a Disciples of Christ congregation in Flower Mound, Texas. He loves a good made-from-scratch meal, evenings on his back porch, time with his daughters, and discovering new places to hike.