Preaching As

August 2, 2011August 2, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

I was enjoying conversation with a good friend yesterday. Together we were reflecting on the role of preaching in the life of the local church. It is such a full-orbed role, isn’t it? After all, as preacher this Sunday, you have the opportunity to preach as . . .

Teacher – The flock needs to be fed, and the preacher has the privilege of offering the food of God’s Word. This is certainly an educational role, but it is much more than education. Hearts and well as minds need to be fed. Lives need nourishing on the Word of God. As the text is expounded, there is massive opportunity for God to be presented (although some manage to preach the text without presenting God!) Teach, or they starve.

Leader – The flock needs to be led, and the preacher has the privilege of offering direction and example from God’s Word. Too easily we separate leadership from preaching. Either different people fulfill the roles, or different types of communication are used to lead than to preach. Why? The preacher has a unique opportunity to offer leadership to the congregation.

Shepherd – The flock needs to be cared for, and the preacher has the privilege of caring as the Word is presented. It is easy to think of pastoral care as a function of visitation, but how much can also be done from the pulpit? As a listener you can tell the difference between being cared for and being talked at. The preacher should care and let it show.

Defender – The flock needs to be protected, and the preacher has the privilege of defending the flock with the offering of the Word. Some don’t like this notion. They want all preaching to be sugar sweet and positive. But the reality is that there are false teachers and false teachings that are a definite threat to the flock, the preacher can defend as they preach the Word.

Evangelist – The flock needs to be growing, and the preacher has the privilege of offering the gospel as they preach the Word. Again, don’t assume that another person, another time, another role or office should take care of this. The preacher has the opportunity to clarify the gospel and call on listeners for response.

I Have Always Struggled to Concentrate

July 27, 2011July 25, 2011 / Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Maybe you are like me? I have always struggled to concentrate. I remember sitting in church as a youth and often wondering how much longer the sermon would last. The clock never ticks so slowly as it can on a Sunday.

You can count bricks in the wall, make shapes with ceiling tiles, daydream, read the introductory preface to a hymn book, the translation philosophy of the Bible committee, etc.

You can think about yesterday, or tomorrow, or a distant memory, or an unlikely dream. You can do a lot of things during the thirty plus minutes of a sermon.

It is not that I am unable to concentrate. I’ve done okay academically and have focused through films and books and games and conversations and meals. But somehow sermons are a bit of struggle at times.

I doubt that I am unique. Maybe I am just a toddler in a grown-up body, but I suspect I am not alone. Maybe you are like me? I have always struggled to concentrate. Preacher, please help me out, and those like me. Be clear, make progress, get to your point, vary the presentation, be relevant, be biblical, be engaging, be a communicator.

Visual Check-Up

July 26, 2011July 25, 2011 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

What you communicate is not merely about what you say. It is also about how you say it, both the tone and attitude of your voice, and the body language framing the whole communication event. Body language matters. It matters massively. If you don’t know that, try to contradict your words with your posture/gesture/expression and see what is heard by your experiment partner!

So for a quick five-point check-up. For best results, watch a video of yourself preaching. For next best results, ask a trusted friend or three to evaluate your body language. For benefit, think through the following prayerfully:

1. When you preach are you stilted or frozen? This happens to almost everybody when they are nervous, and some never seem to get over it. Strangely though, some are unaware of how petrified they become at the pulpit. As I tend to put it, being natural generally does not come naturally.

2. When you preach are you free and natural? This is obviously the opposite of the first question, but important to ponder some more. Are you more animated in sharing a personal anecdote or sporting memory with a group of friends than you are when you preach?

3. Is your visual presentation consistent? Some preachers tend to animate themselves in spurts. The first few minutes is all action, then by the end they seem to have contracted core hypothermia.

3b. Is your visual presentation consistent? Same question, different meaning. Do you consistently match content to visual presentation? Gesture to words (three fingers for the third in a list is always going to work better than four), expression to emotion, movement to geography, etc.?

4. Let’s be honest, are you aggravatingly repetitive? It could be a perma-grin, or a repeated gesture, or a rhythmic movement, or whatever. Any aspect of visual presentation will be aggravating once people notice it and can predict it.

5. Ok, one more honest one, are you grating in some way so listeners struggle to listen? Perhaps you come across as aggressive, or effeminate, or arrogant, or intimidating, or bombastic, or distracted, or hesitant, or whatever. Hard to pinpoint these things, but definitely worth finding out, somehow.

Summer Preaching

July 25, 2011July 25, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

In preaching terms, summer is not a season of three months, it is a season of a few weeks. It is a season when significant proportions of the congregation are missing on any given Sunday. It is a season when significant proportions of those present are mentally missing, reminiscing or anticipating. Somehow summer seems to drain focus from a congregation.

The natural response of the preacher is to resent this intrusion into the focus of the folks in the pew. Yet perhaps a church needs the summer pace change as much as families and individuals do. In some cultures a church may shut for a couple of Sundays (since everyone has fled to the coast anyway), but maybe a change is as good as a rest.

Certainly the preacher shouldn’t cajole the people into a state of focus or determined forward momentum. Save the visionary leadership for the start of the next school year. For now, use the sermons for other purposes. Some suggestions:

1. Preach more stand-alone messages, rather than series that require regular attendance. Few, if any, will manage to hear a full summer series.

2. Use the opportunity to balance the preaching schedule. Perhaps you’ve been pounding out the gospels for a while, or epistles have become the staple diet. Consider some time in the Psalms, or Proverbs, or the Prophets.

3. Don’t feel bad about being engaging and interesting. Actually, consider being that way year round. However, if you are normally a high intensity communicator, consider lowering that intensity for the next weeks.

4. If you are the weekly preacher, share your pulpit. It may be a bit late for this year, but why not invite others to preach during these weeks? It could be a pulpit swap with another church in the area. Perhaps even better, it could be a chance to mentor some of the potential preachers in your church.

What do you do differently from the pulpit during the summer weeks?

I Needed That

July 22, 2011July 15, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Following on from yesterday’s post about vicarious conviction, there is a related matter to stir up a bit. It is the appetite in the church for “I needed that” sermons. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when a sermon should sensitively but clearly touch the raw nerve of sin with deep conviction. Sometimes the Bible speaks in such a way that we feel lovingly stung by the disciplining word of God our Father. But I am not writing about that. I am writing about sermons that some church goers seem to appreciate because of the scourging they feel somehow cleansed by.

1. The flesh is drawn to religion.

We see it all over the world. Humans are religious. In the absence of divine revelation they will define religion according to predictable patterns: working to satisfy a distant deity by fulfillment of self-imposed regulations. Strangely though, even in the presence of grace-filled divine revelation, churchgoers are so prone to define their religion in similar terms: working to satisfy a distant deity by fulfilling self-imposed regulations. That’s the tendency of the flesh, isn’t it? The pre-programmed flesh continues to tend toward independence from God, even in the midst of supposedly worshipping Him.

2. The church always veers toward maturation by works.

What Paul was fighting in Galatians, and elsewhere, is still prevalent today. Who is it that bewitches us to think that having begun by faith we will then mature by means of keeping the law, working hard, beating ourselves, etc? Too many in supposedly Bible-believing churches are acting as functional members of another tradition where enduring a beating in a sermon is akin to purging the soul by means of climbing stone steps on our knees, or whatever.

3. The whipping preacher will always receive affirmation.

Here is the piece that always stuns me. If you hang around near a preacher that has just spent the sermon time whipping the congregation, some will come up and affirm the sermon! Is this a spiritual machismo that stands up after a beating and laughs it off with a “is that all you’ve got?” I suspect it is often the same kind of false understanding of salvation described above. Effectively it might be “thanks for the whipping today, I needed that, and now I feel as purged spiritually as I do physically after a hard session in the gym!”

Are you preaching the pseudo-gospel of guilt and pressure? Are you urging people via moralistic tirades to be better Christians? Do you get comments like “We needed that!” and “I like that kind of preaching!”

In the grossly inaccurate Da Vinci Code there is an albino Opus Dei monk hitman. If you saw the film you’ll remember his self-flagellation in his room. Whip in hand, back sliced open. Don’t preach for that effect. Dan Brown’s story may be compelling, but that scene is not an effect your listeners truly need you to give them when you preach!

Vicarious Conviction

July 21, 2011July 15, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

There are people in the church who seem to be addicted to a form of vicarious conviction. Actually, I should say, two forms of vicarious conviction.

The first kind is where the preacher exhibits aggressive commitment to biblical truth. You probably know people, as I do, who are very vehement and aggressive and indignant and passionate . . . in private. That is, they will express themselves in the strongest terms about the quality of the food, but only until the waiter arrives, then they speak like a hesitant mouse. Or they are bordering on vitriolic in their complaints about somebody’s behavior, until that person arrives and they go very quiet and “disaffected nice.” I wonder if this is the kind of person that gets so stirred up by watching somebody express biblical truth in the most belligerent tones possible and affirms that kind of preaching (irrespective of whether the preaching was actually biblically or situationally appropriate or not). They love to see someone else expressing publically the kind of conviction they can only muster in private conversation.

The second kind is where the preacher pins the congregation up against the wall and beats them. Strangely some people seem oddly untouched by this, as if all the conviction is really directed at everyone else. The self-justifying person is untouched by the tirade, but they are so gratified to know that everyone else is getting what they need to hear. It is sort of a vicarious conviction where the self-justifying listener is thrilled to think that others are hearing something so challenging. They love to think others are being rebuked, blind to their own shortcomings, and tone deaf to the grace that is inherent in a gospel coming from the God of the Bible (or lacking in the tirade from the front).

Token Triumphalism

July 15, 2011July 15, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I think we should beware of token gestures of triumphalism in our preaching. I suppose we could go to the example of Michael in Jude in the Assumption of Moses moment, but I’m thinking slightly lower on the scale than the direct rebuking of Satan (although I have seen it done and don’t see the value of it).

Take, for instance, the direct rebuking of atheists. This can sound especially bizarre when the pointed comments about particular individuals are made in a manner that surely would be different were the individual in the room. I think the people in our churches need to be protected from the false teaching of atheists old and new. Especially when the media seem to fawn at the sight of a new book from Richard Dawkins, et al. But helping people see the problem with the teaching of a man is different than rebuking and attacking the man himself. The same holds for the teaching of extreme liberals like the Jesus seminar or Bart Ehrmann or historically flamboyant writers like Dan Brown. Help people see the error if appropriate, but don’t go celebrating the future demise of a man with fireworks or attacking him as if he is the devil.

Then there is another bizarre twist, when the preacher decides to attack Christians who are engaging with such folks. Whether it be a John Lennox for debating the new atheists, or a Darrell Bock for writing about the Da Vinci Code, or whoever. Somehow a small-minded preacher critiquing brothers who are serving the church by engaging and critiquing such works as The God Delusion or whatever, somehow it just seems a bit pathetic. I have no aspiration to enter the mainstream debate scene or write to uncover the errors in new atheistic argumentation. But I am thankful for those that do. Different parts of the body of Christ at work for the good of us all. If I, as a preacher, decide to ridicule or reject the efforts of men like Lennox and Bock, I don’t show a superior or even a biblical form of Christianity. What I show is small-minded, uninformed and paper-thin Christianity.

We could think about other religions too. Again, it is important for our people to be informed about the uniqueness of Christ and the dangers in the cults or religions vying for their attention. Let’s do so accurately and graciously, rather than sounding off in the safety of our own company.

There’s one more category, but I won’t develop the thought. Some preachers seem very quick to mock, critique, ridicule and put down other churches and denominations. Again, there may be a place for gracious contrasting or critiquing, but cheap shots and token triumphalism somehow tends to undermine a person’s preaching, making them look small and sometimes quite silly.

Preacher, Encourage!

July 13, 2011July 13, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Everyone needs encouragement. We need it as preachers. So we shouldn’t be surprised if our listeners do too! And yet, strangely, something that everyone needs, and everyone acknowledges is needed, seems to be strangely absent in a significant amount of preaching. Let me encourage you to encourage people as you preach.

Don’t think exhortation is encouragement. There is a need for exhortation, but people need to be encouraged too. Exhorting involves persuasion and a hint of rebuke, but encouragement injects hope, confidence and life.

Don’t think guilt is encouragement. To put it simply, it is not. Guilting people into conformity is a shortcut that may yield results, but it will be short-lived and counter-productive. Allow guilt to come by the conviction of the Spirit, but don’t add guilt where guilt is not the issue – that is a form of legalism.

Don’t think that enthusiasm is encouragement. Your enthusiasm may be contagious, but people may sit impressed by your passion, yet not feel encouraged in their own. Think through how to invest rather than simply demonstrate enthusiasm in your preaching.

There are other things we may offer and think we are being encouraging. But consider both your passage and your listeners, how can this be preached in a way that will encourage them? Robinson talks about the need for ten encouraging messages for every one rebuke. It is so counterproductive when we get that ratio reversed. Be encouraged as you read the Word, and look to share that encouragement as encouragement!

The Destructive Power of the Patronising Quip

July 12, 2011 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

It is simple really, people don’t like to be patronized. So don’t. That is, if you want them to hear what else you are saying, assuming the patronizing comment is not the main idea of your message, don’t do it. It is like speaking to your spouse for ten minutes and throwing in a couple of insults along the way – what do you think they will go away thinking about?

I’m sure we all know what it is to be patronized, but let me share some patronizing comments that I’ve heard from the pulpit in recent years (just to be sure we are all alert to the range available to us if we want to undermine a sermon or two!)

Patronizing the locale – “So this is the little town of…” Maybe it is “little” from the visiting speaker’s perspective, but most locals don’t like outsiders telling them where they live is insignificant. Call it pride if you will, but don’t expect such a warm hearing.

Patronizing the church – “I come from a church of X hundred, but it’s so nice to be in an intimate gathering like this…” It’s like being a tourist. Comment positively as much as you like, but not in implied comparison with the bigger and better that you have come from.

Patronizing the knowledge – “Have you ever considered the difference the next word makes to this passage?” Unless you are claiming to have come up with something new, some of them probably have considered that. (And if you’ve got something new, you may have a different problem on your hands!) Along similar lines, “turn to X in your Bibles, you’ll need to use the table of contents to find!”

Patronizing the experience – “You may not have seen this before…” This is similar to the previous comment, it implies that you are a first time guide (which generally grates on those seasoned travellers through the Bible). Bizarrely I heard one preacher say, “If you read through John’s Gospel every week for twenty years, you would see this…” I don’t know if that is patronizing or just plain deceptive – I struggle to believe the implication that since he had done that he could now show us this wonderful insight in the text (it was a fanciful, or should I say, a theologically driven twisting of the text on that occasion!)

The strange thing about patronizing is that it tends to be in the form of passing comments, rather than overall content. This isn’t a hard and fast statement. Surely some preachers may come across as patronizing in everything they say, but I suspect that is primarily attitude. The point is, people don’t mind hearing basic messages. The way to avoid patronizing is not to wow the listener with new insight, clever exegesis or overwhelming passion. The way to avoid patronizing is to speak with love for the listener. When we are sensitive to how we come across, then we will filter out the unhelpful quips along the way.

Truth and Vision

July 11, 2011July 11, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

When we preach the truth, it should stir vision. Many preachers hope that will occur. Good preachers make sure it does.

As you preach through a text it will be offering a vision – a vision of what God is like, a vision of God’s purposes, a vision of what His people should be like in response to Him, a vision of what the world could be like. The problem is that it is too easy to preach truth from a text and feel like the job is done.

The preacher’s task is not only to understand the text (specific), in its context (general), but also to know the listeners (specific) in their context (general). This includes knowing how the message will come across. So there is the detailed part of communication – i.e. do they understand what I mean by each word and each sentence. But there is also the broader part of communication – i.e. have they been able to envision the bigger picture of what is going on here? Too often we settle for being understood at an atomistic level, but fail to make the most of the broad vision casting opportunity.

So when we preach, we should be asking ourselves, and God, what does this passage depict for us? Is it speaking of the fallen condition of humanity and God’s great redemptive work? Is it speaking of God’s character and attractiveness? Is it painting a portrait of what the body of Christ should look like? Is it suggestive of all that an individual believer, or local church, could be and do in response to Christ? Try to see the big picture on the applicational side, the listeners’ side of the divide.

Once you catch a clear glimpse of the bigger picture (again, I am speaking of the bigger picture on the listeners’ side, rather than just the passage in its context, which is vital for understanding the specifics), then look for ways to help the listener to hear and to see that scene. A visionary message, in this sense, will stir hearts and lift listeners in motivation. It will rouse tired hearts. It will move stuck believers.

Each passage is a specific painting in the greater collage of God’s great canon. Each sermon is an opportunity to stir hearts with something bigger than understanding a specific painting.