Audience Analysis

Preaching & Application 4

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Part four of this series on application . . .

13. Be servant-hearted, not the model of perfection. It is so easy to come across as if you have already been mastered by and have already mastered the text. It isn’t about understanding. Be better at that every time you preach. But it is about whether you stand with the listeners as one who is also receiving from God’s Word, or are you just a dispenser of instruction, always? The servant-hearted part comes in when we realize our task is to serve others, not to impress them. Look to equip and enthuse, don’t look to show off so they feel obligated to you.

14. Be accountable to the text, not a red phone to heaven. Sometimes preachers come across as having a unique and Moses-like access to God. They seem to have spent the week face to face with the angel of the presence of the Lord, but it doesn’t stir the heart like Moses might have. Somehow it can instead be a bit intimidating. A bit of a spiritual superiority vibe that leaves others feeling spiritually inadequate. Don’t couch everything in terms of direct revelation if you actually prayerfully considered what to say and this felt right. That is very different than the red phone flashing on your desk and Gabriel passing on a direct message. Let your authority come from the Bible well-handled, rather than from an implied super-spirituality that may over-imply in places.

15. Be willing to describe the application. Don’t just preach truths and then leave them hanging in the air for people to grab and apply personally. They won’t. They will affirm you, but they won’t be touched themselves. Instead seek to spell out the difference this biblical truth might make in a life. They will translate that application to their own situation, but only after they see that you are offering more than just a nice spiritual thought.

16. Be specifically descriptive in applications. As you describe what it might look like to live in light of the passage, be specific. What does the truth of the Incarnation mean when I am struggling with my boss’s attitude tomorrow at work? What does it look like to trust God’s providence when everything seems to be conspiring against my marriage? What would be different if the peace of God gripped the ethos of our church with its grapevines and back-biting festivals?

Preaching & Application 3

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

No clever introduction, let the list continue . . .

9. Be mature in your application. The immature preacher will hammer out simplistic advice. The mature preacher knows that Christianity isn’t about self-help advice and tips for better living. There is a place for clear guidelines, the Bible gives us such in certain areas. But a lot of life’s issues are not effectively addressed by simplistic “try harder” exhortations. We are designed to be empowered in responsiveness, not empowered for autonomous success. How does God’s promise and God’s presence change things? How does He change us? Don’t tell me to be a better man, but show me Christ and you’ll soon see a better me.

10. Be consistent with the worship. Too often the heart-stirring devotion of sung worship leads to whiplash when the whipping from the pulpit kicks into gear. The whole package should be consistent. If it doesn’t seem right to sing hymns of good living tips – “Raise up the bar so that we might try harder to be good,” or “Amazing Effort,” or “It’s All About Me, Jesus.” If that doesn’t seem right, then maybe it is the preaching that needs to be more consistent with the worship.

11. Be sermonically fresh. When sermons are predictable they tend to lose their impact. So if you are in a rhythm of explanation followed by three points of application in the final minutes, consider whether this tried and trusted method might well have become stale and predictable. Look for different ways to demonstrate the relevance of passages to your listeners.

12. Be consistently relevant. That is to say, instead of ending with application, consider how to demonstrate relevance and application throughout the message. The opening introductory comments are an ideal place to engage listeners and demonstrate your relevance, as well as the relevance of the message and the passage. Try stating your points in contemporary and applied terms. Use transitions for exploring developing application as the message progresses. Drop in hints of relevance, even if not fully developed applications, during the telling of biblical story (avoid trite applications that mishandle the text, but even hints of contemporary awareness can make a real difference to perception).

Application & Preaching 2

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Carrying on with more thoughts on application in preaching…

5. Be aware of the specific people to whom you preach. Just because a church is in a neighbourhood, this doesn’t mean the people in the church are typical of the people in the neighbourhood.

6. Be aware of the people whom the church is trying to reach. Here’s where number 5 becomes tricky. You may be preaching to one group of people but trying to reach a quite different group of people. Application is about targetted preaching – aiming vaguely is never wise when trying to hit a target.  So do you preach to those who are present, or to those you’d like them to feel comfortable bringing?  Both is a good idea.  Neither seems ludicrous.

7. Be applicationally authentic. While it is easy to throw stones at post-modernity with all its relativizing of truth and denial of absolutes, let’s not miss the underarm throw that sits up invitingly before us as if to taunt us. This culture craves authenticity. It doesn’t get excited by authority or formalized religion or establishment stuff. But it does crave authenticity. Where else but in the community of God’s saved people can people go to find authenticity? But will they find it with us? Honesty, vulnerability, transparency, authenticity. We need to find a voice that is personally real, rather than offering application at arms length and so coming across as tipsters from a bygone era.

8. Be courageously bold. Paul told the Ephesian elders how he did not hesitate to proclaim the whole counsel of God. Do we? Do we apply the truth of God’s Word to the quirks and distinctive corporate personality of a local church? This takes boldness. You’ll get praise for critiquing the sins of others, but don’t go touching local sin if you want an easy life! At the same time our culture needs a sensitive, yet bold, propheticc voice to speak out. This is where preaching from personal proof texts doesn’t look good. But preaching through books or sections can allow a greater freedom since the agenda is coming from the text.

Application & Preaching

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Our task as preachers is not only to explain, but also to apply the Word. How can we improve as “applicational” preachers?  Let me throw some thoughts your way over the next days.

1. Be responsive to the Word. This means that as you read it, and as you study it, you respond to it. Rightly handling the Word involves work. Some of us are diligent in our exegetical processes, but light when it comes to personal response. Others are quick to respond, but weak on understanding it first.

2. Be convinced by the Word. We live in an age that is increasingly unconvinced by “well, the Bible says so!” Ok, I’ve understated it. Almost nobody is convinced there is a link between Bible and ultimate truth. So we must be increasingly convinced. This isn’t just about accurate handling of the text, with well-infomed awareness of historical, archeological and cultural backgrounds. It is also about living a life marked and shaped by the Word. It isn’t just explanation that must convince us, also lived application.

3. Be aware of the world. We don’t need to feast on sin to know how it tastes. But we can’t hide in religious ghettos and simply throw stones at the world around. Loving people means knowing people. It means finding out what makes them tick. Do we understand the shifts in thinking and communication between modern and post-modern worldviews? Do we know the difference between the modern Boomers, the hinge generation – Gen-X (who were raised modern but live in post-modern world), and the truly post-modern Millennials? Do we think through the shifts in communication, how in an electronic and virtual reality world there is a shift away from printed page communication, almost back toward an oral world, only now with overwhelming noise hitting both eye and ear?

4. Be in touch with your local context. Churches aren’t simply islands in the large ocean of contemporary culture. They sit in local contexts. Some urban, others suburban, still others very rural. These are all different. Local contexts are regional, with all the prejudices and blind spots that come within a region. People in an area tend to have similarities, perhaps in education, perhaps in outlook. Don’t go preaching urban sophisticated application in depressed rural regions.

Faint Not: The Discouraged Preacher 3

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Yesterday we looked at some of the causes of discouragement.  But what should we do about it?  Maybe one or more of these suggestions might be the prescription for your particular situation:

1. Cry Out to God.  God was never a huge fan of our independent autonomy, in fact, that notion of functioning apart from Him came with a hiss.  Yet in our upside-down world we can so easily assume that the right response is to grit our teeth and press on, not bothering God with our struggle, but somehow proving something by our faithfulness.  Uh, no.  What we prove by such independent proaction is anything but faithfulness.  Faithfulness carries an implicit sense of trusting dependence upon, and responsiveness to, God.  We are not being faithful when we leave Him out, even if everything we do is technically right.

So while our flesh may urge us to press on alone, our hearts should cry out to God.  Be real with Him.  He is not delicate. He is not easily offended.  Look at the prayers coming from Job, Jeremiah, David, et al., as they vented heavenward in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Why do we think we shouldn’t do the same?  God is not offended by our venting frustration or expressing fear.  He probably is hurt by our stony silence, however.  Cry out to God.  Be honest.  Be real.  Tell Him you need Him.  Express utter dependence.  Express utter frustration with Him if that is the case.  When you’ve poured your heart out and all your strength is gone, lying face down before Him completely spent, then perhaps He’ll pick you up and ask if you are prepared to trust Him.  To serve Him.  To be His.  Like a fire in my bones, as Jeremiah wrote, I have to preach.

2. Cry Out to Another.  Just as our flesh likes to go it alone on the vertical dimension, so we are prone to going it alone on the horizontal.  It isn’t appropriate to blab our problems to everyone.  But it also isn’t appropriate to share our problems with no-one.  Prayerfully consider who would be a wise confidante in a time of discouragement.  Be careful not to slip into gossip or slander, but be willing to be vulnerable with someone who cares, who will pray, who might offer wise counsel, who will give courage to move forward.

Tomorrow we’ll add to the list, but feel free to add your thoughts at any time.

Spaces: Thinking Through the Process

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A little while back I offered the preparation process in terms of four locations: Study, Stop and Pray (Prayer Closet), Starbucks, Stand and Deliver (Pulpit).  To finish this series on spaces I want to poke around in each of these four locations and prompt our thinking.

1. Study.  I’ve talked about this over the past few days, but essentially the issue here is both noise and access to resources.  To really concentrate on getting to grips with the exegesis means not being pulled away by other things.  It also means being able to spread out the books, while also opening up the heart.  Is it worth considering a separate desk for this?  Is it possible to make the key resources easily accessible?  Can you put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door?

2. Stop and Pray.  This one is all about noise.  The noise of people interrupting, the noise of phones beeping, the noise of tasks calling you.  You need to silence them all.  I suspect many of us can’t achieve this in our study or office.  Would it be better to walk and pray with the mobile phone left at home?  Would it be better to go to the church and pray through this phase in the place where you will preach the message?  I find this helpful as it helps to prompt my prayers toward the specific people and families that will be there.

3. Starbucks.  This one is about targeting the message.  Personally I don’t find coffee shops the most conducive to concentrated preparation.  But I see the argument in favour of them (as long as I have music in my ears instead of loud conversations from the volume-unaware that tend to sit near me in these places!)  Somehow the goal here is to be sensitive and alert to the people and the kind of people to whom the message will be preached.  This could be as simple as putting a couple of pictures up on the screen, or placing names on 3×5 cards on the desk, or being around people.  But, if I can’t help but be distracted by being around people, it is better to get the work done in a room on my own!

4. Stand and Deliver.  Different issue, but worthwhile . . . what are the issues in terms of preaching proxemics?  Is there clutter in the preaching environment?  Am I situated in the best place for this congregation?  Should I come down to their level?  Can I lose the seaworthy pulpit and be seen?  Is there clutter from their perspective?

Making Truth Understood

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So we’ve thought about making biblical truth memorable, and making it known, but what about making it understood.  Is that what preaching is?  Yes.  And no.

1. Contemporary listeners need help understanding the Bible.

There is a significant distance between today’s world and the world of the Bible.  As the preacher, you have a key role in helping to bridge that divide.  This means overcoming differences in culture, in language, in politics, in religion, in worldview, in geography, in customs, in perspectives, etc.  When you preach the Bible you need to help make sense of a very different world for the sake of those in yours.

This means we can’t just read the text and then apply it.  We have to make sense of what is going on.  This means plumbing not only the historical setting and context, but also the literary setting and context.  We have to help people make sense of not only a strangely different world, but also an unusual collection of texts.  People need to understand the canonical structure, the development of thought, the informing theology feeding into a passage, the shape of the story beyond the passage, the nature of the genre of the passage, the forms of literary design within the passage, etc.

And all this means that as preachers we have to make value judgments.  We can’t just dump all the information we know and learn into a message.  This would make it overwhelming and too long.  So we must decide what needs to be said, this time, to make sense of this passage.

2. Your listeners need more than just understanding, but not less.

Just to make matters worse, understanding is not the only goal.  It is the foundational step.  That is, without understanding, then we cannot build effective application, and we cannot expect genuine transformation.  It is no shortcut to bypass understanding and go straight to application, pressing for compliance or hoping for transformation.  Application and transformation must be built squarely on clear understanding of the text.  God is not into radically new revelation.  He has given us His Word to transform lives. He invites us to engage Him there, and as we do so, He also encounters us to change us now.  God hasn’t appointed us to simply explain the truth of His Word, nor to simply seek transformed lives by means of pointed application.  He has appointed us to put it all together – explain, apply, pursue transformation.

Making Truth Known

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I critiqued the old idea that homiletics is about making truth memorable.  I’d like to ponder a similar issue with both affirmation and critique.  Can we say that preaching is about making truth known?  Yes.  But not only.

Preaching is certainly about declaring and proclaiming truth.  We live in a world of lies and confusion.  Whether we are focusing on evangelism or building up believers, there is a massive need for the proclamation of biblical truth.  Here are some pointers:

1. We cannot assume that people have knowledge of truth.  We live in an age of increasing biblical illiteracy.  Actually, we also live in an age of increasing access to information, but increased shallowness in engaging with available information.  People are not well-read.  Thus it is not wise to assume that people have a certain level of knowledge of the Bible, or philosophy, or history, etc.  Assuming knowledge can lead people to either disengage from presentations, or to take that information and wrongly integrate it with their own perceived insight.

2. We must demonstrate the authority for our authoritative statements.  We do not live in an age where a person’s perceived authority can be assumed based on position or title.  Simply because you are the speaker does not mean much anymore.  Thus we have to demonstrate and prove authority for what is said.  Obviously we must be well-read and accurate in our handling of information.  More than that, we need to help people see for themselves that what we are saying from the Bible is what the Bible actually says.  They may or may not accept that the Bible is inspired by God, but we must show that we are not simply giving our own personal take on what it says.

3. We must recognize that truth statements alone will not suffice.  We should be declaring truth, but let’s be sure to proclaim a person.  People are trained to hold any truth statements at a distance, but we are wired to engage with other persons.  Thus we don’t just state truth, we proclaim Him.  We have to have an authentic personal relationship with the One we then seek to offer to others.  We need to speak from a life of authentic integrity, not performing, but sharing genuinely.  And we need to recognize that we are not simply addressing a brain in a body, but a person whose heart determines the value system of their life.

 

Making Truth Memorable

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

“Homiletics is all about making truth memorable.”  That’s what I was told recently.  It was explicitly focused on the issue of sermonic outlines.  While I can see some merit in the statement, I ultimately have to disagree.

I think this is an old way of thinking that is rooted in a limited understanding of both the Bible and the listener.  It assumes the Bible is a repository of truth statements muddled by different genre.  It assumes the listener is a mind-centred creature that will live well if well informed.  It assumes preaching is primarily about the orderly transfer of information.

There may be some value in memorable preaching outlines for the listener.  I suspect they are overrated.  Do people really review passages and ponder the outlines they have heard preached?  Perhaps.  A few thoughts:

1. Transferring an outline to the listeners is not the goal of preaching.  In fact, it might even distract preacher and listener from what is more important…understanding the passage, encountering God in His Word, feeling the force of its application, etc.

2. Overly crafted outlines might have some negative side effects.  For instance, the listener may equate crafting alliterated outlines with accurate interpretation of Scripture and then either copy the method, or feel inadequate to handle the Bible for themselves.  In this generation, perhaps more than before, the listener may find the preacher with clever outlines to be inauthentic and perceive him to be something of a performer.  We need to be wary of over crafting.  It would be better to understand the passage more, especially since many passages are not written as equally weighted paralleled points.

3. There are some things to make memorable.  The main idea of the message, the application of the passage, perhaps the sense of encounter with the Lord, the sense that the passage was helpful (better for them to go back to the text, instead of  relying on a simplified outline).

4. There is more to preaching than making something memorable.  The human is created as a more complex creature than a computer.  We don’t simply live from coding placed in our memory.  We are heart-driven responders and relaters.  We need to be informed, but in that informing process we ultimately need to encounter the Lord who reveals himself to us in His Word.

Tomorrow I will ponder another overly simplistic explanation of preaching, hopefully with some value for us as preachers.

Preaching and the Bible Neighbourhood 4

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

This week I have written about ways to help listeners get to know the Bible neighbourhood.  As we preach we need to point out key landmarks.  We need to help them join the dots to know how it fits together.  We might want to take them on a formal and planned tour for a few weeks.

Before we finish the series of posts, though, there’s one more than needs to be overtly stated.

4. Be sure they are getting experience for themselves.  There is simply nothing to beat personal experience of a place.  When we were first married we lived in England.  This was my wife’s first time living here.  We would have visits from friends and family, and sometimes we’d take them on official tours of places like London and Bath.  The open-top bus tours weren’t cheap, but they were a great way to get a taste of all the key sites.

One day Melanie went out with our neighbour for a tour of the city where we were living.  The neighbour wasn’t a uniformed bus based tour guide.  But did she ever know her stuff!  Simply by being in the city her whole life, she was in a position to give my wife a tour that no professional company could match.  Back doors from one little place to take a short-cut to another key location.  My wife came home tired but amazed at all she had seen.

Our neighbour was not a professional tour guide, but she had gained years of experience.  Here’s the point – we need to do whatever we can to motivate, encourage, invite and help people to be in the Bible for themselves.  Even the best tours on Sunday mornings won’t create local experts, unless they are spending time exploring and learning on their own.

Too many churches have an inconsistent culture – the effort may go in to the Bible teaching on a Sunday, but personal Bible experience is assumed during the week.  Don’t assume.  Train, equip, guide and even more importantly: expect and infect.  Expect folks to be Bible readers, and infect them with a passion for the God that they can meet there.  He is so good that Sunday just can’t be enough!