I love Bible translation chats 😍 Glad you’ve found one you love and that will serve your community well.

Just one comment though - it’s rare for the Greek text to be “clunky”. The NT is astonishingly good literature, and just because it’s challenging for native English speakers to read it doesn’t mean it was clunky Greek. My main trouble with highly formal translations is that they lose a fair bit of the beauty and flow and emotion of the original; by preserving word order (etc), they make it sound clunky when the original wasn’t.

And the medium is not separate from the message. Beautiful literature for a beautiful message, with different levels of sophistication, wit, nuance, and poetry by different authors.

Of course, every translation loses something; it’s the nature of the thing. Our church also uses ESV. But I think it’s important then to re-create the original text’s beauty/flow/emotion in the way you preach it, just as it’s important to re-create the emphasis and finer distinctions of meaning if you preach from a more dynamic translation.