Audience Analysis

Gracious Reinforcement

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Isn’t that what God does with us?  Gracious reinforcement.  Over and over God patiently teaches us what we need to learn – not just information, but lessons of the heart, lessons of life, lessons on His character, His values, His heart.  There is a certain rhythm in life, subtle and below the surface, inaudible, but real.  It’s the rhythm of God’s dealing with us as His children.  None of us learn what we need to learn first time, every time.  For most of us, most of the time, it takes time, patience and repetition before something sinks in.

What we observe in our own spiritual walks, or in the lives of those around us, is part of what the preacher is called to participate in.  Preaching is not a one-hit job.  You don’t present a truth and then move on knowing the listeners now have that truth under their belts.  You don’t encourage a specific response to God and then look for horizons new in your preaching ministry.  The truth is that preaching also needs to tap into the rhythm of patient change, of gracious reinforcement.

Oh, there are crisis moments, but not every Sunday.  There are times when a single message will radically transform a life.  Pray for that, preach for that, but know that most fruit grows imperceptibly slowly.

The difficulties that come with this ministry are not simple.  While God works inaudibly and often below the surface, the preacher works audibly, visibly, obviously and overtly.  This opens the preacher up to the challenge of avoiding monotony and sameness while preaching to graciously reinforce the handful of big big ideas that weave their way through Scripture.  Patience required implies discouragement faced, and it does come in so many forms – natural and otherwise.

And all along the way, as we look to God to work His heart changing work in others, asking for patience and strength to press on . . . all the while He is working in us, in our hearts, and patiently, persistently, He presses on.  Praise God for His gracious reinforcement in us, and hopefully, through us too.

Don’t Skip A Step

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

A missed step jars.  Try to accompany someone singing who misses a beat.  Try a choreographed dance but miss a step.  Next time you’re figure skating in the Olympics, miss a step before going for your quad.  Ok, these examples are getting slightly less likely, but what about in preaching?  I suppose there are a lot of steps that can be skipped to the detriment of our preaching, both in preparation and in delivery.  Here’s one:

You explain a particular text.  It sets out some clear expectations of how we should be living in response to God – perhaps instruction, perhaps command.  Application is clear, so you present it.  But in doing so it is obvious that some or many listeners would have fallen short of this in their experience.  Perhaps the demands relate to morality, purity, relationship, thought-life, etc.  (It should go without saying that you recognized people might feel convicted before delivering the message.)  So since some or all listeners have already fallen short of the application of this text you reassure people of God’s love and grace.

Hold on.  Missed a step.  Too often, perhaps in this generation in particular, it is easy to preach comfortable messages and avoid the discomforting but vital step of calling for repentance.  Are people helped by being reassured of God’s grace without also being urged to repent?  If God is a relationally jealous God, and we have been adulterous and unfaithful to Him, then is it enough to have feelings placated by assurances of His goodness?  Surely a jealous lover’s goodness is little comfort to an unfaithful spouse unresponsive to the necessary conviction for sin?

It may be harder to preach, but giving people opportunity to repent, reminder to respond, must be a necessary step in some sermons.

Application Is Not Always Pragmatic – 2

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Yesterday I suggested that preaching with applicational goals is entirely appropriate.  Furthermore, if done appropriately and sensitively (not to mention specifically), application that is very pragmatic certainly has a place in our preaching.  But we have to see the rest of the list too:

2 – Belief (the head) – It is important to recognize that behaviour is driven by belief.  If we only ever seek to fix behaviour, we will be frustrated because of the influence of underlying belief.  If a message calls for thinking a certain way about God, about life, about salvation, about conflict, about ministry, about whatever . . . then don’t feel bad about applying accordingly.  Sometimes a message transforms lives without a call to action, but with a call to respond in belief, in changing perspective, in thinking well about something.

1 – Affection (the heart) – If behaviour and conduct is driven by belief and thought processes, then it is important to recognize what drives our thinking and belief . . . the affections of the heart.  It is the heart that supplies values which function like software in the mind.  It is the hardening of the heart that stood at the root of the wrong thinking and bad behaviour of “the Gentiles” Paul wrote of in Ephesians 4.  And it is a new heart that is so transformative in the new covenant.  How easily we try to live new covenant Christianity as if we still have hearts of stone!  Applicational preaching needs to reach deep into the hearts of listeners and not settle for pragmatics or information transfer alone.

I know it is the work of God’s Spirit to change hearts.  But isn’t it only the Spirit who can truly influence thinking and action too?  Apart from me you can do nothing, Jesus said . . . so we must lean fully on the Lord as we preach His Word, but part of our task is to emphasize the relevance of the preaching text; the relevance to our conduct, to our beliefs, to our affections.

Application Is Not Always Pragmatic

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There is plenty of teaching around about the need for application in preaching.  If all we do is lecture on biblical truth, but don’t earth it in the lives of the listeners, then can we really claim to be truly preaching?  Having said that, application doesn’t have to be always pragmatic.  It really depends on the text, the listeners and the occasion, but essentially there are three targets for application:

3. Conduct (the hands) – this is the pragmatic application level.  This is where we give tangible and measurable suggestions to respond to the teaching of the text.  Some are quick to decry this, but remember that Jesus emphasised “doing” what he taught, and James makes a similar strong emphasis with his mirror illustration.  Where this often falls short is that it is either left too vague (so listeners agree, but have no plan to follow through), or there is simply so much of it, week after week, that many listeners simply feel burdened by endless “to-do” lists piling up in their Bibles.

But pragmatics is not all there is to say about application.  Tomorrow we’ll finish the list.

Feel the Force: Poetry

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When we preach poetry, do our listeners really feel the force of it?  Poetry is found in the Psalms and wisdom literature, of course, but also in the historical books and the prophets too.  All too easily we can preach to the head, but not move the listeners with the force of the text.

A couple of thoughts on this:

1. Word images may not carry instant force, so we should build it. For example, when the Psalms speak of the heavens, the stars, the sun and moon, etc., there is a big difference between most listeners today and the original hearers of the text.  They lived under the stars.  Once the sun went down the rhythm of life changed and stargazing was as normal as TV gazing is for some today.  So a brief reference to how amazing it is to look at the stars and feel so small (as in Psalm 8 ) will simply not move contemporary listeners like the original reference would have done.  Today we have to build an awareness of our smallness (thankfully we have NASA and the Hubble telescope to help generate a sense of smallness!)

2. The structure of a poem, the shift in content, may not be apparent to our listeners, so we should clarify and demonstrate it. If the poem was read carefully straight through, the discerning reader would probably pick up on the transition that occurs.  The problem with preaching though is that the extra words may obscure the transitions instead of clarifying them.  There is a major transition at the mid-point of Psalm 73.  Yet if the preacher is droning in their voice, or simply moving methodically through a series of points, that dramatic transition may easily be missed.

3. Emotive language can so easily be made informational. As I’ve probably written elsewhere on this site, it is so easy to dissect a frog to learn how it jumps, but in doing so we stop it doing so.  A dissected poem is not enough for effective preaching.

People listening need to feel the force of poetry so that it can mark their lives deeply, as God intends.

Fierce Attention and Affection

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I was just reading a synopsis of an intriguing book.  The book is about the importance of conversations, both at work and at home.  Nothing to do with preaching though?  Well, perhaps more than might be obvious.  I was struck by the author’s second principle – “Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real.”  She writes that it is too easy to try to please so much that the truth gets hidden away in exchange for a trinket of approval.  In the next section she writes of the need for fierce affection for the other person.  I won’t pursue that in terms of conversations, but what about our preaching?

How easily we slip into routine prayer, routine preparation, routine textual study, routine sermon forms, etc.  How different would it be if we gave a more fierce attention to the text, and pursued a more fierce affection for our listeners?  What does the text really say?  What do the listeners really struggle with?  And although it feels even less comfortable in this context, what if we fiercely prayed about the next sermon?

Ok, so the word “fierce” may seem out of place here.  I tend to agree.  But I like the thrust of it, the sense of not going through the motions, but stepping out from behind the mask of normalcy to genuinely pursue the meaning of the text, the lives of the listeners, the heart of God.  Whatever we call it, let’s go for it!

Facebook in Sermon Preparation

/ Peter Mead / 6 Comments

James Wood made the following comment on the post Extent of Application:

I think he brings up a good point. I’ve tried to combat this by forming the sermon through conversation with the community. The beauty is, technology can aid this! I will post questions from the text to my facebook page as I’m studying. The responses help me to direct my study and hone my examples to reflect the needs of the community.

I have not tried this, but am intrigued.  While not a huge fan of facebook, it may be an easy way to access “feed-forward” input in the preparation of a sermon.  The point of “feed-forward” input is to be able to hone a message in advance of it being preached by gaining input from an individual or group during the preparation process.  (Obviously it is kind of like feedback, but in anticipation.)

Has anyone else tried using Facebook or Twitter or even good old fashioned email for input prior to preaching?  There is something about face to face interaction, but let’s be honest and recognize that something is better than nothing and unless we have a system in place, we are often choosing nothing over something in these matters.  At the same time, perhaps people feel less pressure in an electronic social setting and are therefore more willing to engage honestly?

Any thoughts or experience on this, please share!

Extent of Application

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I was just reading a synopsis of a book on the effect of technology on faith.  For example:

Reading and writing are individual activities.  The technology of writing favors individualism over community, leading us to spiritual disciplines of “quiet time” and “journaling” and a gospel that is primarily oriented to the individual.  Printing erodes the communal nature of faith. (p56-7 – Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps)

That’s an interesting observation.  I think many of us tend to promote an individual spirituality – quiet times, reading, journaling, private prayer, etc.  When we do mention corporate applications they are often either related to witnessing or church/ministry involvement.  Both of these corporate or interpersonal activities are typically felt in terms of duty rather than delight (the same could be said of the private disciplines – it all depends on how we perceive and present them).

When we think of the applications of our preaching, the contemporary relevance of the Word of God, do we think through all that it might mean to us by way of invitation as well as burden, in terms of the heart, the head and the hands, as well as corporately and not just individually?  The Bible speaks to us all in far more intricate and engaging ways than many of our sermons do.

Worth pondering, at least for me . . .

Truth and Testimony

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

It concerns me when truth and testimony seem to be separate.  For instance:

There are some Christians that are very strong on the truth issues relating to Jesus – who He is and what He’s done.  They are passionately committed to the truth and will not compromise on it.

There are some Christians who have a strong peronal relationship with Jesus.  Their testimony is sweet and intimate and personal.  They have a deep sense of the love of God and communion with Him.

My concern is that I see too many Christians who have one, but not the other.  Strong on truth and standing for what is biblical orthodoxy.  Or strong on testimony and shaky on biblical orthodoxy.  Surely the Bible is inviting us and urging us to fully grasp both?

As a preacher, do you tend to pronounce truth, but never really offer the invitation for the more personal and intimate walk with the Lord (assuming that will be there)?  Or do you tend to make Christianity so winsome, but without the infrastructure of truth in place?

Let’s be sure that we are not imbalanced ourselves, but hold firmly to both of these aspects of the gospel . . . and then be sure to present both.

Never the Same

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I am speaking at a conference that I speak at regularly.  Tonight I am preaching a message that I have preached before, but it will be unique.  Same conference, but different people.  The same program, calling for the same title, same content, same focus, same goal.  But it will be different.

This group of people are a different group than last time.  I have only been around this group for three or four days, but I can sense a real difference, and so do others working at the conference.  So as I prepare for tonight’s message I am struck by how I have to put last time out of my mind and not fall into the trap of trying to recreate anything.  Tonight has to be tonight, and it needs to be God’s work.

Somehow this setting is just reinforcing in me a truth that sometimes isn’t at the forefront of my thinking.  Every preaching situation is unique.  Even if the message content is the same, the purpose is the same, the program around it is the same, the preacher is the same (although I’ve changed in six months since last time) . . . but a different set of listeners makes for a different and unique message. 

If this is true, then we have to ask ourselves a couple of very simple questions – how alert are we to who we preach to?  How dependent are we on God for each preaching occasion?

Simple stuff really, but important.  I need to go and continue to prepare.