Delivery

Don’t Shoot the Wheel-Nut

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Today in the news there is a story of a man who got frustrated trying to loosen the wheel-nut on his car and decided to try blasting it from close range with a shotgun. The ricochet of buckshot and debris peppered him from ankle to abdomen.

While not wanting to make light of his severe injuries, I would like to draw an analogy for our thinking as preachers. Use as much force as necessary to achieve each goal in a sermon, but don’t exert excessive force that will backfire on you. Here are some examples of backfiring preaching techniques:

* Overstating the introduction. Don’t promise to solve all the problems of the world in your introduction if your message only addresses some of the problems. If the goal is modest, then strive to create a thirst for the message, but a thirst that will be quenched. It is easy to take onboard the importance of surfacing a need and then over-promise. It will backfire.

* Overbearing illustrations. Perhaps you come across a moving story, or have a powerful experience that fits with your message. Be careful it is not too powerful or you might overwhelm the message. Illustrations and stories should drive the idea forward, not overtake it. Even if it happened to you, even if it is all true, even if it agrees with the text . . . if it is too strong it may backfire.

* Over-the-top word choice. Sometimes shocking a congregation can be effective, but you must plan carefully. Just because Tony Campolo once swore at a congregation does not mean we should all try it. For effect or shock value or even for a laugh, it is tempting to go too far. Don’t. It will backfire.

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Being Natural Often Feels Unnatural

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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.

Plan to Pause

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A pause is a simple concept.  Stop for a moment.  A non-preacher might assume it would be easy to stop talking, especially since most people would rather not talk in front of people anyway.  But no, pauses are hard to do.  Almost a constant piece of constructive feedback to beginning preachers is “a few pauses would help.”  I still find it difficult to pause enough after almost 15 years of preaching.

A pause is a very powerful weapon in the preacher’s arsenal.  After a pause, studies suggest that listeners are alert, attention is high and they listen well.  This increased focus will only last for a few sentences before fading to a more relaxed state again.  This means that after a pause we only have perhaps three or four sentences to establish what we’ll be saying next.

Be sure to pause between the chunks of a sermon.  Give listeners that opportunity to be fully with you as you set off on the next chunk.  Then be sure to start the chunk clearly.  Think through those first sentences and be sure that everyone will be onboard before the relaxation of attention.  If we really think through the power of purposeful pause, we’ll be motivated to pour over our outlines or manuscripts and carefully select key moments to stop.  Plan to pause.

Remember Your First . . . Sermon?

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Yesterday I had the privilege of evaluating fifteen sermons at the end of a preaching course.  For five days the students had been working through an introductory course in preaching at Tilsley College, many of them never having preached before.  I’ve heard negative comments from preaching instructors before about having to listen to student sermons.  I have to be honest, I enjoy it.

Nerves sometimes show, some mistakes may be made, but ministry happens.  Even though in every case there are helpful suggestions made by the listeners to improve in the future, at the same time there are positive affirmations and encouragements also shared.  I may sit there with my evaluation sheet and be making notes, but still there are moments of real encouragement, real conviction, and real ministry in my life.

There is something about the in-class preaching experience that I wish could be experienced in the church too.  A sense of excitement, of openness, of camaraderie.  A lot of that has to do with the attitude of the listeners.  Perhaps we need to consider training our listeners how to listen to sermons.  At the same time perhaps we need to make sure we have not lost that sense of dependency on God, that awareness of someone evaluating what we do, that sense of relief at the end, maybe even a momentary inner cry of “I did it!” which quickly gives way to “thank you Lord, we did it!”

If you are married, it is healthy to think back to that first date, first kiss, first sensation of being in love.  If you are a preacher, think back to that first in-class message.  Not as romantic, but it may stir some helpful feelings though!

Prayer, Preaching, Professionalism?

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Is there any stage of the preaching process that we should not be bathing in prayer? When people are first exposed to training in homiletics there is often an initial concern. Is this “process” reducing a highly spiritual ministry to a series of stages, techniques and professionalism? That would depend on the instructor, but I’d hope the answer would be no.

We should be praying at every stage. We should prayerfully select the passage and make sure it is a true literary unit. We should prayerfully study the passage and determine author’s purpose and idea. We should prayerfully consider our congregation and determine appropriate sermon purpose, idea, strategy and details. We should even pray about delivery, and of course we should be praying for the people as well as ourselves throughout the process.

Prayer does not result in a bypass around the work. Praying as we select the passage does not mean we will receive direct revelatory guidance about what to preach. Praying during passage study and sermon preparation does not excuse us from the long hours of wrestling with the text or the often grueling work of crafting the preaching idea, and so on. So we don’t pray begging for a hard work bypass. If we do receive an objective direct revelation then we should obey, but prayer is not primarily about that. Prayer is a lot about dependence, about humility, about asking for wisdom as we do our part of His work.

Let us be preachers who do not shy away from the work involved in our ministry, but let us also be preachers who never fail to pray at every stage in the process.

Craving Authenticity

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Our culture has shifted and is shifting.  Certainly in the west there is now a deep mistrust of inauthentic communication.  For example the slick sales pitch of a car salesperson twenty or thirty years ago has largely morphed into a seemingly more authentic approach today.  In reality much of sales communication is learned pseudo-authenticity.  Nevertheless it reflects how things have changed.  People don’t appreciate spin, slick patter or unnatural performance.  This is also true in the church.  People do not respond well to, or respect, the pulpiteering style of previous generations.  Pulpit-pounding ear bashing does not stir as some suggest it did in the past.  So what are we to do?

Work on delivery so that the real you can come through.  Working on eye contact, body language, gesturing, inflection of voice and so on should be done not in order to perform, but to effectively be yourself.  Obviously we all have aspects of communciation style that could be improved, so we should do that.  However, our goal is not to learn a pulpit style or persona.  Our goal is to allow the real person to communicate really effectively.

Be in your message.  People want not only authentic style of delivery, but also authenticity in content.  That means we cannot hide ourselves.  We should wisely place ourselves with appropriate vulnerability into our messages.  As Haddon Robinson says, “don’t be the hero or the jerk” – it is not nice to listen to someone showing off, nor do we want to listen to someone without credibility.  So look for ways to show yourself, but carefully so you don’t overwhelm or undermine the message.

Piper’s Ten Tips from Edwards

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The final chapter of The Supremacy of God in Preaching by John Piper contains ten lessons from the preaching and writing of Jonathan Edwards. I’d like to list all, but highlight a handful for us this morning.

So here’s a list of half of the ten. Preachers should Saturate with Scripture their messages, and employ analogies and images, driving the teaching home with use of threat and warning. They should plead for a response and be intense. It is easy to see where Piper received his greatest preaching influence. Now the other half:

Stir up holy affections – Edwards was right in recognizing that the theological tradition he was such a big part of can easily fall into a mind and will centered anthropology. He was not an advocate for unthinking fervor, for the preacher must also enlighten the mind. However, if all the preacher does is educate the brain and pressure the will, he is missing the driving seat of a person, namely the affections. This is a lesson we would all do well to ponder biblically. Hence we should probe the workings of the heart.

Yield to the Holy Spirit in prayer – the preaching event is such a divine working that we are foolish to lean on our own “professionalism” as communicators. Who among us would say that their ministry has enough or too much prayer in it? For our preaching to reflect the Christlikeness that it should, we must be broken and tender-hearted – a fruit, in part, of much prayer.

Preaching Lessons from TJ Hooker – Part 2

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I certainly don’t want to push this illustrative analogy, but just one more post from the world of 1980’s television drama.  The title is wrong.  These two posts are really preaching theory “illustrations” rather than “lessons.”  Obviously I can’t use the term “illustrations” because it would mislead on a preaching website, but I’m also not saying we learn our preaching from Aaron Spelling TV productions.  The fact is that as times change, so does the presentation style used by the media.  They are driven to be as effective as possible, so they tend to evolve their approach.  Some aspects are negative (more and more shocking content to stir results in numbed viewers), but others are simply neutral (such as the phenomena noted in the last post and this one).

So just one more “lesson.”   A quarter of a century ago, the episode I was watching followed a clear plot line.  A situation thrown into tension by a problem, with the tension then increasing until the moment of resolution, followed by several minutes of denouement – tying together loose ends and returning the viewers to a state of relaxed contentment.  Those last few minutes were intriguing to me.  The program almost landed twice, but still dragged on.  After the satisfying capture of the felons, there were two more scenes.  One in which the arresting officer made a tricky play on words in reference to the length of jail term one would receive.  Then another showing the officers joking together as they headed out of the door. Corny?  Yes.  Necessary?  No.

Compare that with equivalent police or military dramas today.  Often the show ends just before you expect it to end, not three minutes after it should have ended.  Often the show ends with some tension remaining, a thought-provoking scene, or a cliff-hanger.  These two approaches illustrate a preaching lesson that homiletics writers also affirm:

When you come to the end of your message, don’t add three minutes of nothing and a corny freeze frame moment that leaves listeners comfortably returned to a state of relaxed levity.  Instead carefully craft your conclusion to both resolve the message, yet also to leave an unresolved state of heart and mind, a slight disequilibrium that gives some momentum into the application or further consideration of the message.  Oh, and try to do all that and finish a couple of sentences earlier than they expect.

Biblical Preaching Must Be Biblical

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Of course biblical preaching has to be biblical.  However, just because preaching is biblical it does not mean it is the best it can be.  John Piper notes that just because the Bible is believed to be inerrant, it does not guarantee that preaching will therefore flourish.  He notes three ways in which evangelicals undercut the power and authority of biblical preaching:

1.”Subjectivist epistemologies that belittle propositional revelation.”  In a day when truth is considered relative and subjective, we preach the Word because God has given revelation to us by means of objective proposition.  Preach the idea of the text, and you preach the Word of God.

2. “Linguistic theories that cultivate an exegetical atmosphere of ambiguity.”  Sometimes diligent study using all tools available can lead us to a point of textual confusion and paralysis.  We have to evaluate whether that is a genuinely difficult passage and admit that, or find a way past exegetical paralysis to effective preaching.

3. “Cultural relativism that enables people to dispense flippantly with uncomfortable biblical teaching.”  So easy to try to please the people by avoiding the tough stuff.  We must preach the whole counsel to help the people and ultimately please our audience of One.  (Quotes taken from Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, 40.)

It would be good to take stock of this list and check our own ministries to make sure we are not undercutting the power and authority of biblical preaching.  (We should also make sure we don’t use some of this terminology that would render us incomprehensible to most listeners!)

Application’s Oft-Missing Ingredient . . . ?

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Recently Steve Mathewson wrote a helpful post on the PreachingToday blog concerning application.  He warned of the danger of too many “life application points” in preaching.  How easy it is to overwhelm our listeners with to-do lists.  I agree that this is a huge danger for us. 

In some church circles people have become very fond of what they perceive to be highly relevant preaching.  This often takes the form of “7 Keys to a Happy Marriage” or “5 Smooth Stones for Spiritual Battle.”  Because people seem to respond to this kind of “list” preaching, it is a temptation to incorporate that into a more expositional model of preaching.  So at the end of an expository sermon, the preacher will give a list of life application points.  These are specific strategies to be implemented in daily life.

It is easy to overwhelm list-driven people with more lists to add to their backlog of lists.  So what should we do?  First, we should be sure to apply the main idea of the text/sermon rather than lists of secondary suggestions.  Second, we should concentrate on helping people visualize how this could look in normal life.  Perhaps we share two or three examples, but not as a list.  Rather, this is a selection of possible scenarios out of which at least one will help listeners to see what the idea would look like in action in their life.  Sometimes several scenarios will be unnecessary.  Third, we must look for ways to include an encouraging tone in our application.  This does not just mean an enthusiastic team talk that fires up our people.  It means stirring an inner sense of motivation and a feeling of competence in our listeners.  We easily overwhelm, but instead we should strive to give appropriate encouragement (the oft-missing ingredient).

If you didn’t see Steve’s post, it is well worth a read: http://blog.preachingtoday.com/2007/10/the_challenge_of_application.html