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50 Summer Preaching Tweaks: 16-20

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Summer50bA little pick and mix selection of fifty tweaks that you might want to ponder as we head into another school year of preaching ministry:

16. Smile.  If you know you do this, move on (but only if you actually know, not just if you think you do).  There are a surprising number of preachers that never seem to smile.  Implication?  Either there is no good news (we are called to preach good news), or no love for listeners (we are called to love listeners), or no delight in God (no comment necessary).

17. Use your preaching space effectively.  You may have a vast platform area, or a small cluttered space, but are you using it to maximum communication value?  I remember preaching Pilate with Jesus (one side of the pulpit) and the Jewish leaders (on the other side of the pulpit).  The use of space helped the message to be visualized, simply by my deliberate movement.

18. Step outside your preaching mode to communicate effectively.  Periodically drop the preaching mode and just be real.  Actually, you are still preaching, and deliberately so, but it offers another ethos.  If your normal preaching mode is too preachy, just drop it permanently and preach real!

19. Increase the vulnerability value.  Speaking of being real, how vulnerable do you get in your preaching?  Some think it is wrong to let any of you show in your preaching.  That’s fine.  You can continue to preach from another room via radio mic.  But for those who recognize that preaching involves communicating God’s truth through your personality and life (i.e. an incarnational view of preaching), then evaluate how vulnerable.  Where can you be appropriately, but helpfully, vulnerable?

20. Preach first-person at least once.  It is so different, you have to give it a go.  Pick a passage, study like crazy, write a message from the perspective of one character in the story or associated with the passage.  Decide if the listeners have gone back there, or if the character has travelled through time to today.  It is more work, but the impact is typically worth the effort (costumes and fake voices are not worth the effort!)

The Gospel in Concrete 2

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments

ConcreteWall1The epistles don’t assume full awareness of God and the gospel and proceed quickly into practical applications.  Instead God has given us many case studies of the apostles applying the gospel in concrete situations, and they don’t just dive into instruction, or assume that believers all have the basics in place.  Furthermore:

3.  The apostles never assume that God is a given.  This is a big problem in the church today.  Too many people assume that anyone talking about “god” is talking about God.  And I don’t just mean those outside the church.  Some of us do sniff out that there are different conceptions of “god” floating around, both in religious talk and in cultural use.  But even within the church, it is thoroughly naive to assume that anyone referring to “God” is necessarily speaking with a full biblical awareness of the one true God revealed in the Bible.  The epistle writers don’t just use a generic label and press on into practicalities.  They always clarify and specify.  Often we’ll find reference to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or references such as “the God of all grace.”  Let’s be real about the fact that even within the church, the God described by some people sounds like a different God than we see revealing Himself in the Bible.

4. The apostles never offered a paper-thin gospel.  “God is the in-charge super-being who will judge you, so be sure you sort your relationship with him by praying this prayer.”  Not something we find in the New Testament.  The gospel they offer consistently communicates such realities as the intra-trinitarian relationships, the wonder of “in Christ” participation in that fellowship by the Spirit, inside-to-out transformation of a life by change of desires, the self-giving love of God as spotlighted by Christ’s atoning death on the cross, the divine countering of the Lie that still permeates this world through cosmic antagonism to the Truth, etc.

More could certainly be added (feel free to comment, of course).  Let’s be looking at the epistles and recognizing the wonder of having these case studies in applied gospel theology for us to learn from and use as we seek to address the down-to-earth complexities of specific local situations.

The Gospel in Concrete

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ConcreteWall1In the New Testament, the gospel is never given “in a vacuum.”  That is to say, we don’t find generic presentations of the gospel as a set of statements.  Instead we find the gospel being applied to concrete situations: real people, real churches, real issues.

God didn’t give us a standard version and then leave the application to us.  Instead we were given a set of case studies where we can observe the apostles engaging real life situations with the gospel.  We see the church being split by a form of gnosticism in 1John, a different form creeping in in Colossae, the young believers under pressure from the antagonists around them in Thessalonica, the self-confident yet worldly church at Corinth, the divided churches of Rome, the threat of false-Law-teachers in Galatia, the discouraged by pressure believers addressed in Hebrews, etc.

As we ponder the “case studies” given to us in the New Testament epistles, here are some thoughts:

1. The apostles don’t respond to down-to-earth issues with mere down-to-earth instruction.  You won’t find an epistle that just says, “here is how to act like Christians, pull yourselves together and just try hard, do the right thing and the feelings will follow…”  Instead we find the apostles responding to sometimes very human issues with an application of theological reality.  They certainly do get specific and practical, but always on the back of, or in association with, doctrinal instruction that needed to be grasped or reaffirmed.  To put this in terms of relevance to today, just pressuring people to act appropriately is never appropriate.  They need to be gripped by the reality of who God is and what He has done/is doing.  They need to see themselves and the gospel clearly.

2. The apostles never assume the believers all know the basics.  I could imagine some of us today writing a contemporary epistle along these lines: “Okay, so we all know who God is and what the gospel is, of course, so let’s get to the nitty gritty . . . ”  The apostles didn’t do that.  Even after spending months or years teaching in a church, they still chose to reinforce and re-communicate the truths of the faith.  Why?  Perhaps because they knew people didn’t easily grasp the wonderful realities of the gospel.

More thoughts tomorrow…

Two Ways to Feed 3

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Food BadJust one more post for this week.  I’ve been (over)working the analogy of preaching as culinary work on behalf of others, suggesting that there are better and worse ways to “cook the meal” of a sermon.  Just one more thought:

There are those cooks who bring out the best in ingredients, and there are those that try to use ingredients to do what the cook wants.

Perhaps you’ve tasted cooking that really makes the most of what is in it.  Each vegetable prepared to flourish in its own way, the sauce offering the subtle richness and blend of each ingredient, and so on.  It takes a good cook to “honour” the ingredients in this way.  And then there is the bland cooking that tries to force every ingredient into the same mould.  Meat is meat, so turn it into parched tree bark.  If vegetables are boiled long enough, even the colour can join the flavour in the evaporated exit.  And perhaps a really bad cook will have the ingredients for one meal, but try to make another meal anyway, just because they want to.

So it is with preaching.  We are working with the absolute finest material – the inspired record of divine revelation.  There is a wonderful variety of genres, sub-genres, plots, themes, grand sweeps and tiny details.  Each writer’s personality subtly coming through, along with the Author’s thumbprint throughout.

Some preachers seek to honour the “ingredients” they are working with.  They observe and analyse and consider the text carefully and prayerfully.  They seek to reflect the text and they make it their goal to say the text’s something, not just their own anything.  They seek to say what the text says and do what the text does.  And in the process they both nourish and delight their congregations.

Others treat the Bible as a bland set of staple ingredients.  Mix freely, swirl it all together, bake for an inadequate time, and slop it up.  Essentially the goal is not to say the text’s something, or even the Bible’s something (although that will be the claim).  Rather, the goal is to say the chef’s something.  I wanted to make a chicken curry.  Didn’t have the right ingredients, but I made one anyway.

What a privilege to help people not only enjoy the richness of the Bible, but to introduce them to the wonderful God who gave it, and himself, to us.

Ground-Zero Preaching (Easter in the Pulpit) 3

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

ChildShockedCrucifixion images tend to be sanitized.  The reality was so much more shocking than we tend to realise.  The frequency of reference, combined with serene artistic representations, has led many believers to have a altogether unrealistic mental image of the crucifixion.

If you are preaching in the next couple of days, before the celebration of Sunday, how should you handle the passion of our Lord?  It is tempting for some to try to be as graphic as they can.  The motivation may be good, but the net result can be lacking.  Turning peoples’ stomachs is not the goal of Easter preaching.  By all means be as biblical and historically accurate as you can be, but always keeping in mind that your listeners are a mixed bunch.

Some of them may fill their minds with horrific images from movie and video games.  But there will be others present who find the slightest hint of blood  brings about faintness and nausea.  The goal is to preach Christ and Him crucified, not to preach so that all people recall is the horror of crucifixion itself.  So beware of excessive medical detail, or overwhelming graphic description, or repulsive projected images.

It is important to remember that people will be drawn by the work of the Spirit, not by the effectiveness of our storytelling and vivid description.

We need to find the right balance this Easter.  Tell it well and help people to know the historicity and reality of Calvary.  But be careful to rely fully on the Spirit to stir the heart, as opposed to simply stirring the stomach by excessive and unhelpful shock and awe tactics.

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.

Interactive Bible Observation Preaching 2

/ Peter Mead / 7 Comments

Yesterday I shared some reflections on the advantages of the approach I took to preaching through Ruth last month.  The evening meeting allowed a different approach to the morning meeting, so I had folks marking up the passage on a handout, and then interacting together about observations along the way.

Here are some of the disadvantages, limitations or challenges in this approach.

1. It takes longer.  If the church is very strict on end time, then you have to begin it earlier in the meeting.  What might take 30 minutes to preach, can take 45-50 minutes with this approach.  Having said that, people should feel fully engaged if it is done well.  It may also take longer in preparation. That is, even though the homiletical crafting may be less, the exegetical awareness needs to be maximal.

2. It requires a certain relational comfort level.  Maybe requires is too strong a word.  I appreciated knowing the people and feeling a sense of mutual trust.  Having said that, I have seen someone do the same thing with a group of people he’d never met before and it worked very well.  But he had to win trust very quickly.  Too big of a group and it would lose the relational connection potential.

3. It requires care in interaction management.  When people participate, you have to handle what is said graciously.  Even when they are wrong.  This is where knowing the congregation really helps.  A comment shouldn’t be crushed, or too overtly corrected, etc.  I see this as common courtesy, but I am used to it in more “classroom” environments.  Some preachers seem unable to handle interaction without offending people.  I was talking with someone recently and we mentioned a speaker who might be invited to something.  The comment was telling: “yes we could invite him, but don’t let him have any Q&A time!”

4. It requires lots of preacher thinking.  When people participate, there is less control for the preacher.  You don’t know where they will go.  Your questions will influence that, but you really have to know your stuff, and know your plan.  How will you create and sustain tension with this approach?  When will you preach, and when will you interact?  How can the conclusion have impact?

5. You may have to overcome other messages and ideas.  Perhaps it wouldn’t work so well in a very familiar New Testament passage.  Or perhaps it is just what is needed.  But you would need to help people see the text itself, rather than their preconceived ideas and favourite points from other preachers.

Overall, none of these issues disqualify the approach and I will used it again, modifying continually.  Print the text, let them mark it up and lead as you all enjoy the adventure together.

Interactive Bible Observation Preaching

/ Peter Mead / 6 Comments

Last month I decided to try something a little different in our church.  I used the Sunday evening service (we have two services on a Sunday), for a study through the book of Ruth.  Each person attending was given a handout with the plain text of the passage for the evening with headings removed, but plenty of margin space allowed.  At various points I had them marking the text and then interacted with them as we observed the passage together.  I still preached, but it wasn’t a tightly controlled sermon.  I determined when there would be interaction, and overall I think it worked well.

Upon reflection, here are some of the advantages of this approach (not saying it should replace normal preaching, but I think it has a place).

1. It shows people that they can read and think about the passage, they don’t need to be spoon fed.  It is easy to get into the habit of only getting Bible input from “experts” – either at church, or for some, on MP3 downloads during the week.  But this approach subtly reminds people that they can look at and think about the text themselves.

2. It shows some people that they don’t automatically know everything.  This is in contrast to number 1, I suppose.  Some people are over confident in their view on everything.  This approach allows them to discover that they missed something and should look closer.  “I never saw that before” isn’t such a scary phrase from the preacher’s perspective, when they are actually observing the text with other people and it is plainly before them (rather than a homiletical invention).

3. It gives people experience of observing, then interpreting, then applying.  Some never really observe, some skip straight to application, etc.  This is a good group exposure to inductive Bible study.

4. It slows the pace of experiencing the text.  In this instance, it was Ruth, a narrative.  Good preaching can also slow the pace of experiencing the text, but this approach certainly did.  People felt the tension and it built nicely, both during the message and over the weeks.

5. The preaching element is proven.  That is, if done well, the preaching element should not get the “I wouldn’t have seen that in the text” kind of response.  They are seeing it, the preacher is just building and reinforcing what has already come through.  I found the more traditional preaching element in this series felt very gritty and real: it was the explanation and reinforcement of the main theme in each passage, tied into the bigger picture of the book.

There are other advantages, so feel free to add by comment…

Holiday Post 3: Carefully Communicate Compelling Characters

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Another January 2008 post for you, another day of holiday for me with my family (this is pre-loaded, in case you are wondering). . .

As preachers we always run the risk of preaching in black and white. We read a biblical text, compile the facts and preach them. Biblical writers wrote in a time where detail concerning characters in the narrative was sparse to say the least. We don’t read physical descriptions very often, other details are usually lacking and a character’s character is often only hinted at. Yet today we preach in a world where character detail and description are much more prominent (in advertising images, commercials, dramas, movies, etc.)

Warning! – The danger here is that we preach from the biblical lack of detail in a manner that resembles an abstract or colorless lecture. We can easily preach messages that people don’t relate to, can’t connect with and probably won’t be touched by.

Possibility! – The text often does give us more than we may at first notice. So with a little extra work and care, perhaps we can preach narrative texts in a more compelling and gripping way.

Definitely! – First we must be sure to make the most of whatever the text does give us. Don’t skim over a physical description, or the meaning of a name, or dialogue from their lips, or any other statement regarding the person.

Carefully! – Typically the text will not give enough information to build a full profile of a character. But carefully proceed to build more of a profile if you can. Consider all pertinent biblical, historical and cultural information. In areas where there is no possible certainty, perhaps suggest possibility without being definite. “Perhaps he felt . . . or was . . . or wanted . . .”

Remember that your goal is to preach the idea of the text with relevance to your listeners. Don’t get sidetracked into endless character profiling like an obsessive detective in a crime drama. Of course, facts are critically important. However, remember that lectures can be boring, but characters in dramas are compelling.

Holiday Post 2: Preaching Inside the Fence

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Pulling up some posts from January 2008 since I am on holiday with my family this week . . .

Previously I suggested the image of preparing and preaching within a low fence (click here to see part 1). I’d like to suggest a reason for doing so that may not be immediately obvious. Very simply, you will enjoy the preaching process more. Let me give an example:

Almost four years ago the church I was involved in was working it’s way through Luke. I had Easter Sunday morning. It was tempting to read Luke, but essentially preach Paul. You know how it is, so simple to revert to the terminology, ideas and focus of a passage like 1st Corinthians 15. I resisted the temptation and erected a low fence. I studied within Luke’s writings. I saturated my preparation with Luke and worked to prepare a deliberately Lukan message. I didn’t want to just preach the resurrection, I wanted to preach Luke’s account of the empty tomb and risen Christ. I tried to grasp the significance and focus of the carefully written account in his gospel. I tried to use Luke’s terminology and present his concept of salvation. I wanted to preach in Luke’s language rather than Paul’s or John’s.

The message went well as far as I could tell. One discerning listener commented on the deliberate Luke language. Probably everyone else missed it. That didn’t matter. The big idea was as good as I could get from the text, the relevance was as deliberate and concrete as possible, the big things were what mattered. But for me, as the preacher, the attention to fine detail like choice of terminology made the study both exacting and rewarding. I felt like I’d tasted something of Luke’s great gospel in a way that I could so easily have bypassed.

I got a taste for preaching with a fence that day, and I’ve continued to do so whenever possible. I’d encourage you to try it if you haven’t already. Take the opportunity to push yourself deeper in whatever book you are preaching. It’s easy to revert to default thoughts from elsewhere, but you’ll enjoy it more if you don’t!