Homiletics

What Are the Best Echoes?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Echoes of heaven.  When believers listen to a preacher, they don’t want to hear the echoing sound of plagiarized preaching.  However, echoes of heaven are a different matter.  It’s that sense that the preacher hasn’t just written a message packed with information and illustration, but has been before the throne of God above.  That sense that this message is an accurate explanation of the passage, but not a cold academic explanation of the passage.  That sense that the preacher knows the Book, and also the Author of the Book.  They want to also hear relevant application of the passage, but not a relevance born out of the worldliness of the preacher’s own life, but the incisive relevance of a “prophet” who speaks forth into this world, yet somehow is anchored in that world.

You can’t fake it.  I suppose we could try.  But faked heavenly echoes will surely clang just like when people drop famous names to try to impress us in conversation.  Genuine echoes of the glories of heaven’s throne room, of angel voices singing, of intimacy with God; these genuine echoes will not clang.  They will usually be faint, even subtle, but resonating with reality if, in fact, they are real.

For the best of echoes we must genuinely spend time in the presence of a God who invites us to boldly come.

Are There Good Echoes?

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Yesterday I echoed the terminology used in Fred Lybrand’s book as we considered whether it is possible to steal your own sermon.  If it is, then there would be a hollow echo in our preaching.  Today I want to ask whether there might be a good echo in our preaching?  I think there is.

It is the good echo of a genuinely influenced life.  It’s not the stealing of a sermon, but the marking of a life that makes for a good echo of others.  Consider those who have taught you, mentored you, influenced you and marked you.  Surely in your preaching their influence will resonate for all to hear.

People do not have to recognize it in order to hear it. You don’t have to speak like them, sound like them, gesture like them.  Mimicry may be flattery for them, but it probably falls into the category of “hollow echo” for you!

Unless you point it out, others may not know how your enthusiasm for the Bible was caught from that Bible survey teacher, or how your passion for accuracy has resonated from the call of that other prof at seminary, or how your theology was forever shaped by encounters with another who remains a good friend, or how your longing to know God was inspired by the genuine example of one close to retirement as you had just begun.  (I could go on describing those who I hope echo in my ministry; Bruce, John, Ron, David respectively.)

Perhaps it would be worthwhile thinking prayerfully through those who have left an impression on you through the years.  What was it about them that made a difference to you?  Perhaps you will have reason to rejoice and express gratitude for good echoes still resonating from your life and ministry.  Perhaps you will have reason to pray and ask God to make more clear in you what you heard so genuinely from them.  (Perhaps their vulnerability was so powerful, yet it is somehow limited in your ministry.  Their precision in wording so effective, yet of a level rarely reached in your preaching.)  What might be found lacking as you look back to others and listen for the echoes in your own ministry?

I think there can be good echoes in our preaching.  The difference is that these echoes don’t bounce around an empty space and come out as feeble hollow echoes.  Somehow these good echoes come from the very fiber of our being, from a life marked rather than a good thing mimicked.

Plagiarism and Echoes

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

At some point I will write a review of Preaching on Your Feet by Fred Lybrand.  I need to finish it first.  Today I’d just like to raise an interesting thought.  Is there a connection between plagiarism and the way most preachers preach?  To put it another way, is it possible to steal your own sermon?

Stealing sermons isn’t good.  Maybe you’ve tried it.  Maybe you’ve heard it.  (Maybe you do it every week – and sing private praise songs about the internet!)  No matter how good the original, no matter how well-crafted the wording, no matter how inspiring the passion, or amusing the anecdotes, somehow a stolen sermon can only be, as Phillips Brooks described it, a “feeble echo” of the original power.  It seems to bounce around in the second preacher’s head and come out as an echo.  It doesn’t resonate from every fiber of his being, it pings out with all the added noise and cavernous emptiness of  a poor recording from a low quality cassette player.

Lybrand raises the possibility that preachers of integrity (ie. not verbatim sermon stealers) might still preach with the same kind of echo.  It’s easy to preach on Sunday morning, referring to notes that prompt your thinking back to your preparation on Thursday.  It’s easy to be preaching trying to recall exactly how you had it before.  It’s not as hollow an echo as a sermon that has bounced through cyberspace (or even through history!) and landed in your memory.  But there is still a hollow-ness.  Still an echo.  Somehow we can fall into preaching the sermon of another preacher – that is, the sermon of you three or four days ago (and God has changed you since then).

I won’t offer Lybrand’s solution today.  I’ll just leave this as a point to ponder as we wrestle with how to really preach, how to really connect with real people at a real moment in time.

Make Two Key Times Count

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I just saw a chart showing that there are two key times in any presentation.  I’ll describe the chart for you.  On the vertical axis, from 0 to 100%, is the scale of attention and retention.  On the horizontal axis, it reads “beginning … middle … end.”  The chart consists of a U-shaped curve.  Attention/retention are highest at the beginning and the end, but dip significantly in the middle.

This poses some concern for me as a preacher.  If this is true, then we need to consider whether we’ve packed the best meat in the middle of the sermon.  Surely we wouldn’t want to give a “meat sandwich” of a sermon if our listeners miss significant amounts of good meat, but take in all the white bread at the start and finish?  Perhaps we need to give more attention to the bread of the sandwich.  Too many sermons are fine steak in the middle of dry cheap white sliced bread.  We need to give more time to preparing our intros and conclusions (so the bread is a higher quality homebaked wholemeal something or other).

Ok, enough of the sandwich analogy, I’m starting to get distracted by my own hunger.  When we preach, let’s think carefully about how to maximize the value of our introduction – not just grabbing attention and building rapport, but also raising need for what is to follow and moving powerfully into the message in order to protect against an excessive dip in attention and focus.

Let’s think carefully about how to make the most of our conclusion – not just fizzling to a faded flop of a finish, but finishing strong, driving home the main idea, encouraging application of it and stopping with purpose.

If attention and retention are highest at the beginning and end of a message, let’s make these two key times count.

(If you want to see the chart and the suggestions given in that post, just click here.)

Prayer Beyond the Pressing

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It should go without saying that a preacher should be a pray-er.  It doesn’t.  We are living in a day when much noise has drowned much prayer, not only for the typical churchgoer, but sadly for the typical church preacher.  If the preacher is employed by the church, the job description has grown exponentially in terms of what is expected (being dedicated to the Word and to prayer seems a long way off for many).  If the preacher is employed in “normal” work and preaches in spare time, it goes without saying that life is also very busy.

While I don’t want to paint a picture that is unfair in gross generalizations, it does seem that many are falling short in their prayer life.  Some may have lost prayer life altogether.  Many are possibly reduced to prayer for the pressing.  Do you find yourself squeezed into that pattern?  Prayer for next Sunday.  Prayer for current crises in the congregation.  Prayer for pressing matters of ministry and “church vision.”  The next project, the next event, the next weekend.

Perhaps it would be helpful to take a walk with God today.  Take time away from the desk, from the PC, from the phone, leave your mobile/cell, your PDA, or any other contemporary contraption (I’m tempted to say pager – just in case anyone still has one!)  Take some time and space, then pray.  Ask God to lift your eyes and your heart beyond the pressing concerns.  Certainly cast those cares on Him, but look beyond Sunday, beyond the current project.  Try to look longer term and pray accordingly.  Get a sense of where you are going.  That could mean praying in terms of five or ten years.  It could mean praying in terms of eternity.  Both are healthy.  This kind of prayer, combined with the dreaming of faith, lifts us from the pressing to have a heart stirred by this God who holds the future, this God who keeps His promises over the very long haul, this God who can wrap up history and move us into an eternity we don’t deserve despite the forces of hell being arrayed against Him.

Prayer beyond the pressing is important.  It’s important in our ministry.  It’s important in our personal walk with Christ.  It’s important.  Don’t let the pressing press away the delight of a longer-term gaze.  (Not that this is the most important thing, but I’m sure your preaching this Sunday will only be strengthened by a heart lifted to heaven, a bigger picture view of life and ministry, and a fresh reliance on our great God!)

Bible Study Is Not a Hop

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

I don’t want to oversimplify Bible study, but in most basic terms it involves two steps. The first step is to understand what the author meant by what he wrote back then.  The second step is to then consider the enduring application of that text for us today.  Back then . . . today.  Two steps.  One.  Two.

Bible study is not a hop.  We cannot simply try to understand what the text means for us today.  But this happens all the time.  Last night I was enjoying a Bible study in Isaiah 28-35.  We noticed how easily writers will try to explain the content of the passage in terms of “us.”  The problem with this “melded” approach to understanding a passage is that it flattens and simplifies everything.

You might say that actually simplified is good when it comes to complex books like Isaiah.  Indeed, but not when simplified comes at the cost of understanding what Isaiah was actually writing, and at the cost of enjoying the multi-layered, complex, intricate and beautiful plan of God.  When we look at the way God works out His promises we should be stirred to cry out, “Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”  There is a richness to the way God works through history.  That richness can be lost so quickly – in the time it takes to change two steps into a hop.

Wherever we are in the Bible, let’s be sure to wrestle with what the author meant back then, followed by the possible applications for us either by enduring theological truth or by extension (interpretation before application).  One … two.  Not a hop.

Listen to Jonathan Edwards

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I just listened to Max McLean’s performance of Jonathan Edwards’ sermon – “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is considered the most famous sermon ever preached in US history. The sermon is available as a free download here. Actually it has been edited down to about 20 minutes of actual sermon (rather than 43), with extra comments before and after – think radio show. Nonetheless, it’s free and worth hearing.

It is worth hearing both as a listener to be ministered to, and as a preacher to notice a few things. First and foremost, listen as a listener. Get a sense of why people trembled and cried out for mercy. Listen, not for rhetorical power (although I’ll come to that), but for the strong truth of the gospel itself – that’s where “power” is. Listen to stir your appreciation for God’s favor. Listen to stir a passion for the lost, to light afresh a flame for evangelism.

And you can listen as a preacher too. Even this shortened version allows us to hear a classic example of the power of a controlling idea. You will appreciate powerful and vivid sensory imagery conveyed in well-chosen words. Surely, this will stir prayer for your own preaching and those that will hear it.

What’s Missing in Preaching These Days?

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

It’s an important question.  As I talk to people about preaching, and read about preaching, and sometimes hear preaching too (although there are exceptions to what I will write in this post), there is a general sense that something is missing in contemporary preaching.  I suppose it probably varies by culture, perhaps by denomination, certainly by individual preacher, but generally speaking, something seems to be missing.

The more I ponder this issue, the more I realize it is not a technical detail (although “technically” there may be many common failings).  To use the analogy of a car (since mine is about to receive it’s annual “government test”) – it’s not a matter of a bolt here or a seal there.  It’s more on the level of whether the engine is there or not.  What I am saying is this – the weakness of much contemporary preaching is a core weakness, not a minor detail.

Perhaps it is that many preachers simply don’t know their Bible well enough.  After all, in an age of constant e-communications and busy lifestyles, it seems to be increasingly difficult to find preachers who really dwell in the sacred text, rather than just visiting it during preparation.  Perhaps it is that many preachers don’t know their God well enough?  I ask it as a question, because I know that is a potentially inflammatory thought.  But then again, that’s the beauty of blogging – I can prod to prompt pondering, even if you think I am wrong in what I write.  As somebody wrote somewhere (sounds like a Hebrews quotation) – where have all the divines gone? Perhaps the communication of many preachers is too stilted, too inauthentic for this generation?  That may seem like a leap into a different aspect of preaching, but I see real connections between the communication aspect of preaching and the previous matters of being a biblical preacher, being God’s preacher.  Somehow I don’t think the prophets would have seemed inauthentic.

I’m just thinking out loud.  What I’m thinking is that if there is a general weakness in preaching these days, it is less a matter of effective transitions or pithy wording of key statements in a message, and more a matter of the underlying connection with the Lord, deep knowledge of His Word, and authentic heart-to-heart connection between preacher and listeners.  What do you think?  Am I way off track?  Am I missing something?  Or, generally speaking, is something missing?

Who Needs the Day Off?

/ Peter Mead / 9 Comments

Just a thought to throw into the mix of life as a preacher.  I just had a fairly busy weekend – preaching three times in two churches.  That means not only preaching, but being mentally distracted in the lead up to the different meetings.  As any preacher knows, it can be a draining experience.  This is why many pastors take Monday as their day-off.  I understand that.

However, it’s worth asking the question, who needs the day off?  As hard as my weekend was, my wife’s was harder.  She had to handle preparing four children for church, being aware of them at church, dealing with bedtimes without me home, etc.  Busy time for me is busy time for her.

Maybe you have Monday off?  Perhaps that is the perfect opportunity to look for ways to bless, serve and encourage others who work hard when you work hard.  For many preachers, Monday can’t be a day off because preaching isn’t your primary source of income.  Perhaps there are other ways to show appreciation to a spouse who lost part of their weekend because you were serving others during your weekend?  For me, this morning will not be the usual relaxing admin catch-up that I almost enjoy on Mondays (brain dead work), it will be handling homeschool and lunch so my wife can enjoy a morning to herself.  She deserves that after the weekend I just put her through!