Delivery

The Personality of the Preacher 4

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Last few in the list:

8. The Power Preacher – This person likes to be in charge, they naturally lead groups they find themselves in, and they always look for ways to influence others.  Preaching can be a bit of a no-brainer role for them in some settings.  Now there are massive connections between preaching and leading.  But there are also massive connections between our content and a non-worldly servant leadership model of the inverted pyramid.  This preacher will be able to communicate vision and may have people naturally respond to them.

But it is important to have people respond to the Bible, rather than just to the preacher.  Perhaps every personality type would do well to check their motives for preaching, but perhaps this type should do so quicker and more thoroughly than some others.

9. The Performer Preacher – Typically people-oriented, very extrovert and fun-loving.  Naturally enthusiastic and potentially highly engaging.  They like to be the center of attention in social situations.  This person will bring energy into the preaching moment.  They will bring enthusiasm and joy.  They will bring more emotion than some personality types could dream of expressing.  Some visitors will feel enthused, some regulars will excuse and enjoy.

However, this personality type needs to know that their personality will aggravate some others.  The energy will grate.  The emotion will be considered a false front.  The hype will be seen as a poor attempt to hide a lack of content.  This personality type can be perfect for some situations.  In every situation there needs to be care for content to come in the package of energetic delivery, otherwise the naysayers will be proven right.

10.  The Inspirer Preacher – Another natural communicator, with a natural ability to engagingly explain and apply biblical truth with intensity.  This person will be seen as a good preacher by others, whether or not the content is as profound as they give the impression that it is.  However, sometimes the intensity may seem to come with the public speaking, rather than from the power of the content.  This personality type needs to channel the same energy into their study as they naturally produce in their delivery.  They probably need to understand that some personality types will struggle to maintain the level of inspired intensity while listening to them!

11. The Visionary Preacher – Intellectually quick, they see a preferred future in most situations, and are able to communicate that sensitively and powerfully.  They may have energy for creative planning, but lack energy for maintaining the important routines in personal life and church life.  People in churches without clear vision and direction can feel starved of leadership.  This type of preacher can be a real blessing to such a church.

However, not every visionary statement can be followed through on by all listening.  This personality needs to be sure to affirm and to support and to encourage the present activities and routines, where appropriate, rather than only seeing the better future and continually presenting that.  People appreciate direction and vision, but they don’t do well being constantly critiqued and evaluated negatively.

I have deliberately avoided 16 types, for obvious reasons.  There could be many more than the 11 I’ve listed.  What would you add?  Perhaps more importantly, what are some of the features of your personality and how do they influence your preaching?

Pointers for Preaching Epistles Effectively – Pt.5

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Let’s finish the list, but by no means finish the pursuit of effective epistle proclamation!

21. Select the take home goal – Is your goal for people to remember the outline?  Why?  Better to aim at them taking home the main idea with a heart already responsive to it, rather than a commentary outline of a passage.  Let’s not flatter ourselves – people don’t need hooks to hang thoughts on, they need a thought to hang on to.  Better, they need to leave with a changed heart.  If they are changed by an encounter with God in His Word, then looking at the text should bring a sense of the structure back to mind.  However, remembering the outline on its own has very limited value (unless they’re taking a Bible school exam that week).

22. Pre-preach the message – Don’t rely on written preparation.  Most things make sense on paper.  It is important to preach through a message before preaching a message.  Better to discover that it simply doesn’t flow, or a particular transition is actually a roadblock, when you can still fix it.  Pre-preach in a prayerful way – i.e. why not talk out loud to the Lord about the message before and after actually trying it out?

23. Don’t just preach single passages – I am not saying that the only way to plan your preaching is to preach through a book sequentially, but that should probably be the default approach.  Series should not become tedious, but cumulative.  Let each message build on what has gone before, while standing in its own right.  One way to inject variety is to vary the length of passage.  You can cover more ground sometimes, zero in other times, and why not begin and/or end with an effective expository overview of the whole?

24. Converse with the commentaries and other conversation partners – Notice I didn’t put this in at the start.  I believe we should converse with others during the process, but not become beholden to one other voice.  Doesn’t matter if your favourite preacher preached it that way, or a commentator explained it that way, or your friend sees it that way . . . you are the one who has to preach it.  But all of those do matter.  Your goal is not stunning originality.  You want to be faithful to what the text is actually saying, and faithful to your unique opportunity, audience, ability, etc.  So converse with, but don’t ride on any of these partners.

25. Present the passage with engaging clarity and relevance – Here’s the catch-all as we hit number 25.  I’ve hammered the need to be truly biblical, rather than just biblically linked or biblically launched.  But you also need to preach with a relevance to the listeners, and with a clarity that can be easily followed, and all of that with the engaging energy, enthusiasm, warmth, concern, love and delight that is fitting for someone soaked in a passage from God’s Word.  This engaging preaching certainly includes the content, but also the delivery – your expression, your gesture, your movement, your body language, your eye contact . . . it should all be about a heart brimming over with God’s Word to connect with God’s people.  Your heart has encountered His heart, so you want to engage their hearts for the sake of transformed lives and a pleased Lord.

What might you add to the list?

Preaching to the Heart

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Just for a change, I’d like to offer a list of posts relating to this subject.  I think it is so important that we preach to the heart and not just fill the mind or press the will.  So here are some past posts on the subject:

Profound preaching involves profound preparation, profound application, profound presentation, all working toward profound transformation.

10 Biggest Big Ideas of the Bible made much of the central role of the heart, both God’s and ours.  Here are the links – God, Creation, Sin, Grace, Faith, Redemption, Community, Spreading Goodness, Hope, Christ.

Our View of the Bible is critical in respect to the heart.  This post on the clarity of Scripture pointed to the issue of the heart.  We don’t need to add force, we need to feel the force of what is there.

Preaching to the heart goes beyond guilt – four-part series – one, two, three, four.

How often do we hear the terminology of the Bible being overqualified.  Here’s a post from a while back on confusing the heart and the head.

Preaching from the heart?  Here’s a post.  Depends on your motive.  What about when the preacher is passionless?  What if there were a thermal imaging camera?  When should the message touch the preacher’s heart?  One thing I’ve said more than once is that we shouldn’t de-affect the text.

Preaching to touch the heart?  Images matter, especially biblical ones.  And so does vivid description.  How will you touch the heart?  Beware of manipulation though, or troublingly distant preaching, and one more.  Mentoring is critical to truly marking hearts.

Some historical thoughts on preaching and the heart?  How about Wilberforce.  Or Jonathan Edwards.  Even Chrysostom.  And Thielicke on Spurgeon, and more of that gold.

A series on the preacher’s heart.  Part one, two and three.

And an article on heart-centred hermeneutics.  (And a recipe to finish.)

Why Being Natural Feels Unnatural

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I hope you’ll forgive another oldie from the archives – this is from 2007:

While this may not be true in every culture, many have little time for “pulpiteering” these days.  The appearance of performance is significantly off-putting to those who place high value on genuine, vulnerable, honest and natural speaking styles.  People do not appreciate the sales patter of a car dealer or the obvious reading of a script in a phone conversation.  And in many churches the ranting, prancing or different enunciation of earlier generations is long gone.  But the key to being both natural and effective is not simply to relax.

As a general rule, the bigger the congregation, the bigger the gesture.  This can feel unnatural.  Yet the goal is not for you to feel natural, but for the listeners and observers to feel that it is natural.  Consequently a “natural” small gesture might look ridiculous to those in the pews.  It may feel natural to point to the left in reference to the past and gesture to the right when speaking of Christ’s return, but this is not effective as it looks awkward to the congregation.  After a while, the gesturing from right to left for time or logical progression starts to feel natural to the speaker, but only after thought and repetition.

As a general rule, a group of people require more repetition and restatement for concepts to formulate in their consciousness.  This can feel unnatural.  In a conversation with a friend it may be enough to say something once, but in a group you must allow several sentences for an initial thought to register, and then several minutes of careful work for the thought to form into something they can see in their minds.  This feels unnatural to you as the speaker, but that’s not the point.  The point is to come across as natural and to be effective in your speaking.

I am not advocating performance.  I am saying that effective preaching takes hard work, thought and much prayer.  Just relaxing doesn’t cut it.  Perhaps the real test of naturalness is the one that comes when the service is over.  As a listener approaches for a conversation, do they get the sense that you are a different person out of the pulpit?  Hopefully not.  Hopefully the switch back into conversational mode will not reveal that you are somehow acting when preaching, and a different person when not preaching.  Effective God-honoring preaching calls for real integrity in the pulpit, in conversation, in private . . . and we should learn our own appropriate communication approaches in each setting.

Word Studies 4 – Using the Fruit

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This week we have been pondering the importance of word studies.  It is vital that we take the words of Scripture seriously, and thereby make our preaching as accurate and effective as possible.  So let’s say we’ve identified key words in a passage, pivotal terms on which the passage turns, and we’ve studied them to get a good sense of what the author meant by choosing those particular terms.  How do we use the fruit of the study in our preaching?  Here are some suggestions:

1. Default to smooth integration.  The majority of word study work that you do in your study need not show in your preaching.  By show, I mean overt reference to it.  The default should be that the study you’ve done is hidden, but the explanation you give is accurate.  Sometimes I would even go for smooth integration when I think the translation isn’t the best.  So I will read it as is, and then subtly state a preferred translation.  No fuss, no critique, just staying on track for effective explanation.  I think this is a good default.

2. Underline word studies sparingly and strategically.  There are advantages to sometimes letting some of the word study show overtly.  Perhaps you go to a couple of familiar or enlightening uses of the term, to give a taste of the process and help people see why you explain it as you do.  If this is done too much it will lose its impact.  Choose to show the word study more overtly in strategic moments – perhaps when the term is critical to the passage as a whole, or at least to a major point in the passage.

3. Avoid original language flaunting.  I know it is tempting to let your Hebrew or Greek hang out.  And if you haven’t studied it, it may be even more tempting to show you’ve read heavy commentaries.  I also know that some people will shake your hand and thank you for the wonderful insight into the original language.  What neither of us know is how many in your congregation are sitting there feeling linguistically inadequate, assuming that you can find things in the Word they never could, and therefore feeling less motivated to read the Bible between now and when you preach again.  Typically there is no need to refer to the actual term, just say “in the original” or “the word Paul uses here . . . ”

Tomorrow I’ll finish the list with three more suggestions on using the fruit of Word Studies.

 

The Four Places of Preaching – 4

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Preaching begins in the study, then after the time with God in His Word, we stop and pray.  Having spent that time getting His heartbeat for these particular people, then we head to Starbucks (or wherever you like to work with people in your sights), in order to prepare a message that will effectively communicate to these people.  Then there’s one more place to add to the sequence, it’s the place where we . . .

Place 4 – Stand and Deliver (The Pulpit)

All eyes on you, nowhere to hide, now its time to deliver the message.  I know that it sounds spiritual to downplay delivery.  It sounds profoundly humble to pray that people won’t see you.  But they will.  Its part of God’s design, He likes to use the weak things to achieve His goals.  He has this pattern of incarnational ministry down through the years.  So to downplay delivery might well be to sabotage the situation.

God does use the weak, but He also delights in good communication.  Its part of who He is.  We have a communicating God.  A God who delights to reveal Himself in His Word, and who sends His Spirit to work in the communication of human to human, as well as heart to heart connection between Him and us.  It may be a hideous thing to perform that which is not real, but it is profoundly Christian to communicate as effectively as we can in reliance upon Him.

The goal?  To prayerfully deliver a biblical, clear, engaging and relevant message so as to offer Christ to the lost, to build up His church and to please our Lord.

If we fail to give prayerful consideration to the moment of delivery then we may be biblical, clear and relevant in content, but we will drop the ball on clarity in delivery.  And you can probably say goodbye to the goal of being engaging.  To present God’s Word in a dull or unenthused manner is to say something about God and His Word that does not bear saying.

So prayerfully consider how your delivery reinforces or undermines your ministry.  Consider the interpersonal connectivity of eye contact, of expression, of gesture, of posture.  Consider the representation of God’s character by demeanor, expression, energy and warmth.

Four places.  Study, prayer closet, Starbucks and pulpit.  Private, more private, public, more public.  Its quite a journey, and for many it is a weekly journey.  It can feel like an adventure.  It can be tiring.  It may feel like a  lonely path.  But we never travel alone.  He is with us, to the end of the age.

Ultimate Impact

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Is it just me, or was there an ultimate weapon used in cartoons that isn’t used quite so much in real life?  Whether it was a cat chasing a mouse, or a bird fleet of foot, sooner or not much later the arch nemesis would bring them into collision with a great heavy anvil.  Ouch.

I suppose in real life the anvil has its disadvantages as a weapon.  It is probably fairly heavy.  Somewhat cumbersome.  And it is probably fairly avoidable.  What it gains in gravitas it loses in penetrative impact.  To put it another way, I’d rather fight a foe with an anvil than an enemy with a blade.

Which brings me to preaching.  Some sermons feel like the preacher is trying to reproduce the cartoon impact of an anvil.  A massive amount of weighty content delivered as quickly as possible.  Much better to sharpen that sermon and preach a single point, rather than trying to deliver the whole container load of exegetical insights.  The blade may feel lighter to carry, but it will have a great impact in listeners’ lives.

I need to ponder this afresh before tomorrow.  It is so tempting to try to give ’em everything right between the eyes.  In my cartoon-like prayers they will all be stunned and transformed.  In reality they will both see it coming and feel annoyingly pushed by it, but without the message penetrating.  How can I sharpen my main idea.  What can I cut out to make the message do its work in a streamlined way?

The Word of God is sharper than any double-edge anvil.  Obviously.  May our preaching of His Word have the massive weight of the text behind it, but the sharpness of a deft blade in terms of its focus.

Reflections on Great Bible Teaching – Part 1

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Last week I was at a conference, enjoying it both as a participant and as a presenter.  I was particularly struck by the main Bible teaching.  I have been pondering what made it so effective and will offer my reflections in three posts.  I know the speaker is not a limelight seeker, so I won’t name him, but I trust these reflections will be provocative for us.

Observation 1 – Masterful Handling of the Text

In four messages we were taken through the entire book of Daniel.  Not the easiest book to preach, nor the least controversial.  How was the text handled so effectively in the course of four one-hour presentations?

A. The speaker was sensitive to both the literary and historical context of the book.  He knew his Babylonian and subsequent world empire history and demonstrated a keen awareness of the various disciplines needed for pulling together the complexity of Daniel.

B. He was deeply aware of the literary structure of the book.  Layer upon layer of structure was masterfully woven together as the book was presented, leaving the listeners struck by the artistry of the writer.

C. He showed a remarkable ability to summarise the content of multiple chapters without losing the essence or the core intent of the passages.  The teaching had integrity, even when a chapter was surveyed only briefly.

D. The speaker was as bold as a lion, yet as winsome as a lamb.  In a mixed crowd of people from multiple denominations and disciplines, it would be tempting to try to please everyone with a sort of neutered presentation.  Not here.  There was a stunning level of courage in this presentation.  He knew that many would disagree on various levels, yet he was unashamed in his presentation of the book. I think this kind of courage required both a genuine winsomeness and an authoritative mastery of the book’s contents.

I was challenged by the obvious passion for the Word that showed in this series of talks.  But there was more to it than that, tomorrow I’ll look at the issue of targeted applications…

Saturday Short Thought: Applicational Yet Unengaging?

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I’ve been thinking about preaching that connects with the congregation.  Part of the issue is the complex consisting of application and relevance.  But this is not the whole issue by any means.  So here is a question: is it possible to be totally applicational in a message, and yet completely unengaging?

I believe it is possible.  If there is no personal warmth between preacher and listener, and if there is no vertical warmth between the preacher and God, then a highly applicational message could easily become an instructional rant based on a text.

This isn’t something any of us should strive for.  Problem is that if we think being relevant and applicational is the whole deal, then we can overlook the fact that communication is best offered in the context of interpersonal warmth.  As preachers our listeners need us to have that reality in both dimensions!

A good friend of mine has a stock of great sayings, one of which goes, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  So true in preaching.  A chilling of the temperature in our personal walk with God will show in our communication with others.  Even the most winsome of texts can become an opportunity to hammer on the duty theme again, for example.

Let’s leave it there, that almost qualifies as a short thought!

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Insightful Incidentals – part 2

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Yesterday I suggested that some preaching points pursued from minor details in a text can be well off-target.  But does this mean we are constrained to a rigid main point only approach?  Generally this wouldn’t hurt most preachers, but let’s say for argument’s sake that you are very conscientious on preaching the main idea in a text . . . are there some guidelines for commenting on the less central details?

1. Make sure you’ve understood how the detail relates to the whole before you say anything else about it.  

Biblical narrative tends to be sparse in nature.  Papyrus was expensive and the writer’s were sober.  They didn’t waste words.  So if a detail is present, assume the detail is important to the specific goal of the passage.  Rather than rushing into an easy preaching point, be sure to make sense of the detail in the whole passage, and the whole passage in light of the detail.  Once you know how it is working here, then maybe it bears some passing interest in its own right.

2. Make sure any comment you make concerning the detail is rooted in its context.

Plucking a phrase or sentence out of context to say something it doesn’t say . . . well that is the arena of the cults.  Let’s not subtly prepare our people for the cults by modelling cult-like Bible handling in the pulpit (or they might go for it on their doorstep!)  A text is saying something.  You can’t legitimately say anything from a passage, be sure to say the passage’s something.  Context will always be the key to correctly interpreting the meaning of a detail.  If it doesn’t mean what you want to say, be patient until the passage does say that.  Perhaps even select a preaching passage accordingly, but be committed to saying what the text is actually saying.  Never force.

3. Make certain any passing applicational point is rooted biblically.

There may be a place for a passing application point, but be sure the application is genuinely biblical.  Many a moralistic point has been made that is more preacher’s culture or personal preference than biblical teaching.  Many are committed to the idea of comparing scripture with scripture during the interpretation phase of biblical study.  I think more would do well to compare scripture with scripture in anticipation of making their applications.  I think Haddon Robinson said a few times that there is more heresy per square inch in the field of application than in any other aspect of preaching.

More could be said on all this, what would you add, or clarify?