Audience Analysis

97 Luther Thoughts for Preachers – Part 2

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

97LutherContinuing my pondering of Luther’s less famous 97 Theses and what difference they might make to our preaching:

5. It is false to state that man’s inclination is free to choose between either of two opposites. Indeed, the inclination is not free, but captive. This is said in opposition to common opinion.

Everyone assumes they are self-moved and free to choose in any situation.  Luther argues that this is not the case.  The will is not free, but captive.  So as a preacher, I need to ponder deeply what the state of the human will actually is.  If it is free then that will result in one approach to ministry.  If it is not free, then that will result in another approach.  As humans, we make choices all the time.  We can call that liberty of choice.  But those choices are not made by a free will, but by a will held captive.

6. It is false to state that the will can by nature conform to correct precept. This is said in opposition to Scotus and Gabriel.

Luther reinforces the point by denying that human wills will obey clear and compelling application by their own nature.  So when we preach, are we indulging in an exercise to convince people to move themselves to what is right?  Luther says no.

Theses 7-9 – The will may be neutral in itself, but it is captive to a non-neutral dictator.  God’s grace is needed so that the will can do anything other than always choose evil.  When we preach, we aren’t speaking to neutral folk, but to a captive set of wills.  Lest you assume some sort of heavenly puppeteering here, let me tip you off that Luther is not saying the will is captive to God’s direct control.

Theses 10-12 – Just because we proclaim that something is good does not mean that people will strive in that direction.  It would be good to ask Luther what he thinks of moralistic preaching, for instance.  Is our role as preachers to call everyone to live in a godly way?  Seems slightly misdirected if no natural will is able or free to strive toward what we declare to be good.

Courage and Preaching Tone

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ToneHead2This series of posts has pondered the issue of preaching tone.  I’ve suggested we should understand the tone of a text and consider carefully the tone of the message.  Communication between people is rarely, if ever, purely informational.  Communication from God is never dispassionate.  He cares about people who will listen to our preaching.  So as well as considering the tone of the text, the situation of the listeners, and the tendencies of ourselves as preachers, we also need to pursue God’s heart in respect to the sermon.  What does God want to happen?  What tone would reflect his concern for the situation?

So to finish, let me highlight a danger and then two things to pray . . .

Danger: Considering the tone of a presentation is vitally important, but it does open up the dangerous possibility of inauthenticity.  If I am going to say something important to my wife, I would be foolish to not consider how the tone will come across.  But once I start thinking about tone, there is always the danger of faking something and launching into a performance.  When it comes to preaching, a performance never represents God well because God does not pretend.  God does not fake emotion.  When God speaks, God speaks with pure and authentic passion.  If we pursue “effective preaching” by looking at matters of tone, then we are in danger of inauthenticity unless we are gripped by the conviction that we must represent God not only in what we say, but by our character as we speak.  Though flawed and broken, somehow we get to speak for God.  Ambassadors.  We represent.  This kind of danger demands that we be prayerful about the privilege of preaching.

Prayer Point 1: Discernment.  Pray for God to give you discernment.  To be able to discern the intent of the biblical author and the need of your listeners.  And to be able to discern God’s heart for them, as well as God’s perspective on you.  Instead of asking God to be able to discern the state of your own heart as you approach a preaching engagement, better to ask him to do the searching and trying and weighing and to lead you into a place where you can preach in a way that represents his heart most effectively.

Prayer Point 2: Courage.  It is much safer and easier to preach dispassionately as if preaching were mere presentation of material.  Arms length.  Uninvolved.  But preaching calls on us to love people enough to be real with them.  It calls us to preach as one who represents Christ the Word of God.  Just as Christ was not universally loved by the lost and by the religious, so we might find our hearts trampled as we give ourselves away in preaching ministry.  That takes courage.  Pray for it, because the Lord knows what its like to represent the Father well and to suffer as a result.

Preaching and the Tone of the Message

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ToneHead2So assuming we agree that the tone matters, how are we to arrive at the tone of a message?  Three steps are needed here:

1. Consider the tone of the text.

As we develop sensitivity to the text and the setting of the text, we should be increasingly effective at grasping the tone of the author.  We need to go for a humble confidence rather than a brash confidence in this.  We are looking at lots of factors and weighing them up.

2. Consider the listeners to the message.

Who are you preaching to, and what is the occasion of the sermon?  Sometimes the occasion will influence the tone significantly (i.e. a funeral), sometimes it will be less significant.  It is not enough, though, to figure out the tone of the text and replicate that.  That text needs to be preached with sensitivity to these listeners.

3. Consider yourself as a preacher.

What is your natural or default tone?  Do you have a theological bias?  For instance, do you see everything as duty and expectation?  Do you see everything as gentle and joyful?  Do you turn any passage into a guilt trip?  The better you know yourself, the better you will be at selecting tone on purpose rather than defaulting into a tone that is less than helpful.

When you have evaluated all these factors, then there is still a bit more to consider.  Next time I’ll blog about the dangers and the needs as we think about preaching tone.

Preaching The Tone

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ToneHead2I’d like to point our thoughts to the issue of tone in preaching.  Not just our tone, but also the tone of the text.  Let’s start there.

Good Bible Study – Good Bible study methodology has to include awareness of context, both written and historical, as well as content, both details and flow of thought.  In fact, that is a fairly good summary of good inductive Bible study.  Looking at both context and content, we try to make sense of a passage.  If we lose any of those four elements, we won’t understand it properly.

Without historical context/setting, we will import our own culture into the meaning of the text.  Without written context we will pluck passages from the larger flow of thought in their particular book.  Without attention to flow of thought we will be explaining apparently random details and probably using them to springboard to our own systematic theology categories.  Without attention to details we will make errors in grasping the meaning.

Better Bible Study – As good as context and content are, without looking at the author’s intent we will not really grasp the meaning of a passage.  Again, there are at least two broad indicators of intent:

1. Stated intent – if the writer tells us why he is writing and what he is trying to achieve, that is great.

2. Tone of text – this is more subjective, but there will be plenty of clues in the text.  Unless we ponder the tone of the text, I would argue that we are not in a position to claim understanding or to write down the main idea of the passage.

Tone Matters – In any communication tone matters.  Every spouse knows this.  Every child knows this.  Every friend knows this.  And in written communication, tone is not always easy to spot.  How many times have people misunderstood your emails or text (do you even know?)  I can’t imagine that the Bible writers were oblivious to tone in their writing, and they probably gave attention to the tone that they intended to communicate.

Before we can preach a passage effectively, we need to understand it.  Before we can understand it, we need to pay attention to the tone.

Final Focus

/ Peter Mead / 7 Comments

mirror2In a recent discussion, my colleague made a passing remark that is well worth pondering for us preachers.

When the message ends, where are people focused?

Traditional preaching tends to leave listeners focused on themselves.  After an introduction, compelling and gripping or otherwise, then comes the body of the message, followed by an applicational conclusion.  So where are people looking as they leave?  If we are not careful, they will walk out with gaze firmly fixed on self.

1. Is there a problem with fixing the gaze on self?  After all, isn’t our goal to have people working harder to be good christians?  I hope we have a more gospel-oriented goal than that!  The turn toward self was the fruit of the fruit tasting back in Genesis 3 (take a look at the passage and trace the “nakedness” theme starting in 2:25, for example).  The turn toward self is the constant tendency of our flesh in its autonomous rebellion.  The teaching of the Bible should not be throttled down to a set of to-do items that leave us self-oriented and self-concerned.  To get to that we have to evaporate the very life from the Bible!

2. So where could or should listeners be looking?  The Bible is God-centred, and Christ-targeted.  A healthy message will surely leave people more God aware and more Christ focused.

3. But what about getting better behaved believers?  If all we have ever witnessed is pressured people striving to live up to the pressure of applications, perhaps it is time for an experiment . . . try getting some folks’ to gaze on Christ and watch the transformation that will come.  The gospel really is not about work, at least, not our work.  It is about Christ and His work for us.  And I am convinced that while short cuts to conformity are tempting, the harvest will be meager.  Try working messages to the point that the end stress is on God and not on the listener to perform.  The results may be significant in behavioural terms, and so much more.

Why Bible Reading is Down – Part 2

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments
BookYesterday we pondered two issues raised by Peter Enns’ article.  First, that people read the Bible in fragments, and second, that people read it a-historically.  Here is the third finding he lists:

3. Bible reading is down because people read it in isolation

Too true.  When did the “personal devotions” approach to Bible reading become the only legitimate approach to Bible reading?  I am very excited to embark on another season of Cor Deo next week . . . six months of studying God’s Word and pursuing God’s heart with a group of friends passionate to know God more.  I wouldn’t trade that for anything.  Perhaps you need to pray about finding someone with whom to enjoy the Bible.  Not to drown it in dull fill in the blank questions.  Not to discuss it at length until one person’s theological hobby-horses send the other to sleep.  But open-hearted delight-filled enjoyment of discovering God together.  And that is not about hunting for applications as the first order of business, but about pursuing the God who has first loved us.

Enns finishes his article by suggesting we should “read big, read real, read together.”  I agree.  Might I add that we should “read big, engage historically informed imagination and chase the personal God.”

To see Enns helpful post, click here.

I can’t help but think there may be some other important factors too.  Let me list a few and see if you would add any:

4. Bible reading is down because some preachers don’t motivate reading by their own lack of enthusiasm for enjoying Scripture (hard to be infectious if you don’t have the disease)

5. Bible reading is down because some preachers don’t expect people to actually read the Bible (and people will live down to that kind of expectation)

6. Bible reading is down because technology and instant communications is changing the way this generation engages with any books

7. Bible reading is down because preachers with an over-emphasis on application and utility has reduced the appetite for chasing God Himself (a self-focused engagement with Scripture will always diminish appetite for a revelation that works in the opposite direction)

What would you add?  And just to complete a bit of a messy post, how about a brief counterpoint too?

I wonder if Bible reading really is down?  Generally I would accept the assertion.  But among a lot of people I meet, there is a great passion for Bible reading.  These kinds of studies are always open to spin in respect to who is in the sample.  I had a conversation recently with someone asserting that the under-30’s are leaving the evangelical church in unprecedented droves. I pointed out that I don’t know any under-30’s who love Jesus who are leaving the church, and perhaps the stats may actually be pointing to nominal church-goers?  It is hard, statistically, to measure true faith.

Why Bible Reading is Down

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

BookI was interested to see an article by Peter Enns  exploring why Bible reading is down in churches today.  Biblica did some research and offered three conclusions.  Let me share their findings with my own thoughts here:

1. Bible reading is down because people read it in fragments

They point to the perennial problem of prooftexting.  The problem here goes both ways.  First, despite the proliferation of prooftexting in seemingly all types of Christian literature, as an approach it fails to live up to implicit promise.  People like to think that there are nuggets and bite-sized nibbles can satisfy the need for wisdom and instruction, but reality does not support this.  People need more than “a verse for this” and “a verse for that.”

Which leads to the second issue here.  Not only does prooftexting fall short, but it also steals the experience of seeing the bigger picture, the sweeping thoughts, the epic narratives and the heart-stirring poems of Scripture.  I often ponder the fact that the Bible men and women who I most aspire to be like are not those with a ready quiver full of pithy proof-texts, but those who know the God of the Bible because they are washed in the Bible as a whole, book by book.

2. Bible reading is down because people read it a-historically

The article points to Biblica’s approach to reordering the books in the canon.  This is interesting and I sometimes read through the Old Testament using the Jewish TNK order, or mix up the NT books into a different logical sequence.  I would push our thoughts in another direction than canon, however.  I think too many readers are reading Bible books looking for something to jump out to them today, as if the Bible were written as a relatively poor repository of ancient wisdom for future listeners to sift through and glean the lasting nuggets.

How much better the Bible becomes when we read it to find the God who revealed Himself to the original writers/readers, and who continues to reveal Himself through those books today, when understood in their own contexts.  Studying the historical setting of an epistle or a prophet can be a profound experience.  I remember reading the introduction to a weighty commentary on Isaiah – the introduction set me on fire for studying the Bible!  I would recommend reading something like Paul Maier’s “Flames of Rome” to enter into the historical context more, and then see if the epistles still feel so flat afterwards.

Tomorrow we will look at the third reason given . . .

Case Study: Isaiah 40

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grasshopperI just posted a summary of a message on Isaiah 40 on the Cor Deo site.  If you haven’t seen it, let me share a few thoughts here first.  In simplistic terms, the section preached focuses on the greatness of God and the graciousness of God.  I think there are two easy mistakes to make here.

1. To focus purely on the greatness (since that is the focus of vv12-26, the majority of the text).  I think this can lead to an impressive presentation of theology, but a weak message in terms of what is needed.  Not only by listeners today, but also in respect to the original intent of the passage in light of the first verse – to offer comfort.

2. To simple offer two paradoxical truths.  Two things about God.  He is great.  He is gracious.  Two points.  And potentially, two messages.  Simply balancing the two sets of truths is better than mistake number 1, but it is still not engaging with the text in terms of what the author was trying to achieve.

As you read the summary you won’t see all the illustrations and applications made in my preaching of it, but you will get a sense of the flow of the message.  In particular, you should see how I addressed the greatness and graciousness issue.

One further thought.  I think it is important to see the flow of a text.  I have heard this passage preached, actually, I think I have preached this passage, as a selection of theological truths to pluck and present.  It makes for a lot of positive feedback, but I don’t think this approach really honours the text God inspired Isaiah to record.

Enough for now, here’s the link to the post: Not Comforted by God’s Greatness?

Blog Review of 2013

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DogBinoculars2It has been a quieter year on the blog as I have had to scale back the writing in recent months.  Launching a new church has certainly taken time and energy, but what a privilege it is to be involved in such a project.  Meanwhile, back at the blog:

Most popular posts, in reverse order:

Preaching Doxologies and also Preaching [Insert Word] Jesus, came in just behind  The Preacher’s Clock: Procrastination?  Preparation  & Anticipation.  Writing about Bible Reading usually gets a stir.

A single post about Reading and Preaching seemed to get a big reaction for a stand alone post.  The first in the Three Common Mistakes series proved the most provocative –  Genesis.  In second place came a mini-series called Dangerous Immunization  Part 2, along with a series on the dangers of Exemplar Preaching – Exemplar Christi, Exemplar Homo-Biblicas, Exemplar Persona Illustrations and Legitimate Exemplar Preaching.

The top series of 2013 was the Preaching Myths series back in the summer:  #1 – Pew Trust  #2 – Cool Preaching  #3 – Acid and Bleach    #4 – Non-Gospel Preaching  #5 – Short Talk Required  #6 – Evaluation Verboten  #7 – Sawn-Off Concordance  #8 – Delivery Equals Circus

Some of my favourites:

I enjoyed pondering and writing the following posts and want to mention them now – Why God Still Works Through Poor Preaching and Losing our Youth by Dangerous Superficiality, which is closely tied to Static vs Dynamic Position Principle.  I wish churches would use testimonies, but not without a guide along the lines of Ten Top Testimony Tips.  I enjoyed the work that went into the Repentance Word Study in Acts.

I think my favourite series was How to Preach Less than Christian – Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4

Highest Impact Books:

I was able to review some stunning books this year.  Here are four not to miss.  Probably the best biography I’ve read is Jonathan Edwards, A Life by George Marsden.  A must read for people preaching the Gospels is Pontius Pilate by Paul Maier.  I recently wrote on a great little book on the Apostle Paul’s writings – How to Like Paul Again, by Conrad Gempf.  And for anyone involved in church work, take a look at Deep and Wide, by Andy Stanley.  (I enjoyed writing a film review on Les Mis too Click here to go there.)

Thanks for visiting the blog this year.  I hope that 2014 will be a good year for the blog, and an even better year for all our preaching!