1. Tell the Story
2. Make the Main Idea Clear
3. Apply the Main Idea

In a bit more detail, here’s my suggested “default” starter outline:

Introduction – whatever is needed to make people want to listen to you and to the passage and message.

1. Tell the story – tell the story so people can imagine it happening.  Tell it accurately, tell it engagingly, tell it with energy.
2. Main Idea – make it clear what we are supposed to learn from this story. What is the main point the author is trying to communicate?
3. Application – take some time to describe the difference this idea could make, should make, to our lives.  Be specific.

Conclusion – review the main point, encourage application, stop.

So here’s a question from Philip on this site the other day: What differences should their be when preaching narrative passages to an audience of children as opposed to an audience of adults?  Will the differences be in the manner the story is told or taught?  Or only in the truths the story teaches?

Difference in Manner?  I would say not especially.  While we might feel the need to be more exaggerated and “hyped” to keep the attention of children, I suspect they can be gripped by a well told story minus excessive clowning from us.  On the other hand, perhaps we need to utilize more energy and motion in our story telling to adults!?

Difference in Truth?  I would say not especially.  We might state the truth more simply to children, but a story has one main idea.  That is the main idea whoever the audience.  A story isn’t theologically loaded for adults, but a simple moral instruction for children.  What changes is how we present and apply that specific truth.

Difference in Application?  Yes, this would be different.  We don’t need to help children imagine trusting God’s goodness in the face of employment challenges.  But the same truth is needed in their school and home experiences.

Difference in Awareness?  Yes, this is the main thing that comes to my mind.  Children don’t have the same historical and geographical/spatial awareness that adults tend to have.  We need to beware of assuming too much knowledge with adults too (in an increasingly biblically illiterate society), but I think details in a text that may be fascinating to adults can be confusing to children.

Same passage, same truth, but differing levels of detail, and differing specifics of application.

What do you think?

Steve Mathewson explains what good stories do:

Proclaiming a well-studied story in a well-prepared way will do what good stories intend to do: sneak past the listener’s defenses to penetrate the heart.

And I suppose this is painfully obvious, so please excuse my fatigued new-Dad-again state, but what we need to do as preachers is understand the stories we preach as well as possible, shape our messages as well as possible and then present our messages (including telling the stories) as well as possible.

Let’s hear a bit more from Steve Mathewson’s great book on preaching Old Testament Narrative (p157):

“Stories move.  They have tension, movement, interaction, emotion.  We cannot tell a story while standing like a four-storey building.  We need to consider motion, body language, and emotion in voice, face and gesture.  Consider how to physically and subtly represent the movement of the story on the platform.  Don’t get stuck behind the pulpit (Spurgeon called it a “coward’s castle!”)  Always point to Goliath in the same direction, generally let time flow from left to right from their perspective, etc.  Stories move.  Good storytellers generally do too.  And the best storytellers move physically, in large gesture and with clear expressions in a way that is consistently natural!  Being natural takes work!

Next week I want to probe preaching narrative a bit more.  For the most profuse genre in the Bible, my sense is that it doesn’t get the attention it deserves in many pulpit ministries.

1. Be sure to grasp and preach the main point.  A story does not consist of details collected together to offer you numerous launch points for vaguely connected ideas and insights.  The story consists of details deliberately chosen to help make the story work, to make the main point effective.  Be sure to grapple with the main point more than you hunt for “preaching points.”

2. Be careful to honour the form as well as the content.  Why chop it up and preach it as discourse when God made it a story?  This means that the bulk of your message should involve the best retelling of the story that you can manage.  Speaking of which, two critical elements of powerful story preaching:

3. Put your energy into effective description.  Study hard so you can describe well.  Build your sensory descriptive vocabulary so you can describe effectively.  Read C.S.Lewis or another great fiction writer to get a taste of compelling description.  Turn on your imagination again, because if you can see it, they will see it.  Take enough time for your descriptions to form on the screens in the listeners’ minds.  And pour similar energy into describing the application of your message too.  Speaking of energy…

4. Present with energy through engaging dynamism.  To be blunt, people don’t listen to dull stories.  To be honest, we rarely tell dull stories in normal life.  Ask me about my littlest girl’s birth last week and I’ll be engagingly dynamic.  I need to let that version of me show when I preach a Bible story.  When you preach a Bible story, remember that if you really care so it shows, they will care too.

I think these four suggestions are the very essence of powerfully preaching a Bible story.  What would you add?

There’s plenty on this subject online already, so I’ll just offer a few thoughts on recycling content that is not our own:

1. As ministers of God’s Word, we should have higher standards than academics and journalists (and they can lose their jobs over it).  Sadly, some act as if everything is fair game for cutting, pasting and preaching as if it is personal work.

2. Oral communication doesn’t require, and cannot support, the tedious footnoting needed in academic work.  But it does need integrity.  If I’m quoting the words of someone else, I mustn’t give the sense that they are my own.  Last Sunday, for several reasons, I quoted “a great figure from church history” (and was fully prepared for people to ask who that was after the message).

3. Appropriately using a well-turned phrase or a helpful illustration as part of a message that is unequivocally yours is not the same thing as lifting a whole outline or sermon and preaching it as if it were your own.  The latter is stealing intellectual property, it is deceitful toward your listeners, and it is cheating both yourself and others due to your lack of time in prayerful biblical preparation.

4. First person illustrations from someone else should not be shared in the first person.  If it didn’t happen to you, and you give the impression that it did, you are lying.

5. Inasmuch as I’ve tried to be clear here, we need wisdom since there is so much that is unclear in this issue.  May our wisdom be thoroughly shaped by the good character of the God we represent as we preach!

Some that I preach.  Some that others preach.  The sermon is moving along well, perhaps moving at a decent pace through a text, engaging and interesting, then suddenly, the sermon seems to go into thick mud.  Suddenly the momentum is lost and the experience for preacher and listener alike changes significantly.

Why does this happen?  The message is following the standard guidelines for sermons.  The text is being explained, the relevance is being emphasized, illustrative material is helping listeners see the message clearly, etc.  But momentum drains away and progress becomes elusive and there is a struggle on for the next ten to fifteen minutes as the sermon simply seems to stand still.

I was observing this recently from the listener’s side.  It seemed that at a certain point in the journey through the message, the momentum stopped and we felt like we were spinning our wheels.  Restatement.  Repetition.  Illustration.  Repetition.  Illustration.  But no progress.

Have you experienced this phenomena?  What would you suggest to avoid it happening?  I’d suggest we look at the outline or manuscript and prayerfully evaluate it for progress and momentum, as well as for content and clarity.  While a third illustration under the same point may compound the clarity, it might also feel like an anchor keeping the sermon from arriving at its destination.

I’d also suggest prayerfully preaching through a sermon to experience it through your own ears.  Sometimes sermons look perfect on paper, but in reality simply don’t “come out well.”

One more suggestion – when it happens, take the time to evaluate why it happened and try to learn from you (or someone else’s) mistake.  The tendency is to flee the scene of what feels like a sermonic flop, but perhaps there is more to learn there than when a sermon’s momentum was faultless.

How do you make sure your message keeps moving?

I remember sitting at a big Christian convention where three speakers rotated through the morning session in soundbites. The blessing of hearing one was only frustrated by the ranting of another, it felt bitty and unprepared. But what if it were done well?

I’m not convinced. There are venues where it could work and it could work well. But I’d lean more toward it in a teaching situation than in a preaching situation.

As with some powerpoint/media intensive preachers, I get the sense that the preparation would be radically changed. Instead of time spent with God in prayer, the powerpointer sometimes seems to spend hours in mouse-clicking creativity. Actually, (in many cases they seem to end up not spending enough time with God, or in preparing the powerpoint fully, but that is another issue.)

So the collaborationist preaching pair might spend hours in scripting transitions and dialogue, hopefully without the tacky banter that seems so plastic on some TV shows, yet not have anywhere near the depth of time spent in God’s presence.

The change in preparation would mean a potential loss of profundity. There is something about a preacher spending time with God in the text praying for the people, and then coming to speak to the people. I would love to hear this done by a pair of preachers who have really pursued God, His Word, His heart for these people, etc.

I fear that profundity would disappear if the 2-person preaching were seen as a contemporary solution to a contemporary problem (like the acetate and the powerpoint were also seen as ways to fix poor preaching in recent years).

Somehow the core has to be kept in place, and done well. Then there may be benefits to supplemental approaches like this. I’m not opposed, I’m just not convinced.

As well as technological influence, there are others too.  How regularly do we hear and see another “study” indicating people have shockingly short attention spans so we should keep our messages to less than 35 seconds?  It’s amazing how these “studies” seem to selectively focus on the criteria that make the point of the person writing – not exactly solid science in many cases.

So here’s one that surely must be coming . . . two-person preaching.  If I think back to the TV I saw in the 1980’s, I tend to think of individuals – film reviews?  Barry Norman sat in a black chair and looking at the camera.  Satire?  Clive James on his own with the occasional guest.  Now everything is done in pairs.  Presenters have their sidekicks for painfully choreographed repartee in some cases, or side-splinting banter in others.  Radio shows rely on the bouncing back and forth between DJs, and if one DJ is dominant, the other acts as a foil.  So should we expect to see more 2-person preaching?

There are positives that come to mind here.  Some of the best educational experience I had involved two professors co-teaching contemporaneously.  In Cor Deo we have deliberately adopted a two-mentor teaching model, and I delight in the advantages of that approach.  It offers the benefit of added perspective in discussion environments.  It offers the possibility of variation in voice and presentation.  It offers a tangible relational approach that fits for an inherently relational faith.

But when it comes to preaching, there are also negatives.  And I’ll share my thoughts on this tomorrow.  I’d love to hear other perspectives on this . . .

3. The idea that any overt attempt at effective communication is somehow a slight on the Holy Spirit, who would much rather the preacher was completely ineffective so it could be “all of God.”  Another strange one, and again, quite inconsistent.  While it would be ridiculous to make the presentation all about the preacher’s ability to perform, leaving God out (and we’ve probably all sensed that now and then with some), surely it is equally ridiculous to try to abdicate our role as communicators.

The Holy Spirit is preeminently concerned with effective heart to heart communication (that is the ongoing ingredient in almost all His roles in Scripture, it seems).  We don’t honour the Spirit by communicating as poorly as possible.  Equally, we are inconsistent if we make any effort to be loud enough to be heard, or if we at least speak with coherent and distinct words – why bother at all?  Just mumble quietly.  No, in reality the Spirit is the One who is at work in peoples’ hearts and lives, yet for some reason He also works through us as we preach.  Preacher, lean fully on God’s strength and pray continually for the Spirit to be at work, and communicate as effectively as you can, that’s part of your role.

1. Preaching topically may be fine.  I’ve avoided the more obvious approach of addressing a subject that Proverbs addresses with multiple references, but it’s fine to do that.  And it would be fine to not be exhaustive, why not just focus more on two or three proverbs and aim for effectiveness over exhaustiveness?

2. Preaching a shorter sermon will be appreciated.  I’ve shared how a full-length sermon may be possible from a two line truth, but why not preach short?  Finish ten minutes early and your listeners may talk about the message for years!

3. Preaching a section may be effective.  You can check out Bruce Waltke and discover structure that you’ve never seen before.  Or you can go where my Hebrew prof suggested . . . preach a series of apparently random proverbs since that is how life is experienced from our perspective.

4. Remember that Proverbs is primarily observation, not promise.  Don’t turn an observation of life lived under the covenant of Deuteronomy 28-30 into a promise for all people of God in every age.

5. Preach a pugilistic match-up of contemporary wisdom with Proverbial sagacity.  That is, take a saying from our culture and watch it lose in a fight with one of God’s inspired sayings.

6. Preach Proverbs with humour and with poetry.  Help people see what life is like and what it could be like with a healthy dose of sanctified wit and biblically saturated poetic presentation.  Certainly the main idea should be proverbial, poetic, memorable, pithy, precise.

7. Preach Proverbs for living with godly wisdom, don’t preach godly wisdom to fuel the fires of self-centred success.

8. Provoke further thought, don’t bore listeners into submission as if your extensive knowledge is the focus.  Their further thought, in the fear of Lord, worked into their hearts and lives: that is the focus.

And if you don’t have it yet, get hold of a copy of Jeff Arthurs book, Preaching with Variety – his chapter on Proverbs alone is worth the price of the book.  Actually, the rest is good too . . . and I will be giving a copy away on the facebook page promotion later this month – click here to go to the promo information.

1. Repetition.  In both cases the preachers repeated the main idea (the proverb) multiple times.  It never felt forced or tedious, but it did tattoo the truths on the hearts of those listening.  Proverbs are designed to be memorable.  While we don’t have the memorability of the original language to aid us, repetition certainly helped.

2. Memorability.  We don’t have sound-play in the wording like the Hebrew, but memorability can be achieved in other ways.  In the first example Haddon Robinson achieved memorability by pursuing visualization.  That is, through vivid description, the listeners could see what he described, and having seen it on the screen of their hearts, they wouldn’t forget.  In the second example, Gene Curtis achieved memorability by a different type of sound-play.  Not the sounds of the words, but the clever use of a repeated first line of a song.  Actually, this musical marker was so effective in flagging up the need for the proverb because he ended the mini-rendition by tweaking the tune into a melancholic minor key each time – a refrain introducing the main idea each time.

3. Non-linearity.  Neither sermon imposed what felt like a foreign sermon structure on the text.  There was no overt three point with sub-point presentation involved.  Both felt relaxed and slightly circular, yet on paper could have been defined using standard outlining, of course.  There wasn’t the urgency of a narrative, or the driving progression in logic of an epistle.  The structure seemed to fit the genre.

4. Application.  Both sermons were marked by specific, tangible, relevant and vivid application.  While the one placed greater emphasis on explanation, both felt absolutely preached to the listener, to mark the listener and to bring about transformation.  I’m sure many of us could manage it, but surely it must be wrong to turn a practical, vivid, life truth, into an academic curio.  It takes great intellect to make something simple and clear, but a lesser preacher can impress and confuse the listener.  Hey, was that a contemporary antithetical distich?  Nice.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the series . . .