Saturday “Short” Thought: And the Winner Is . . . ?

December 24, 2011 / Peter Mead / 10 Comments

There is a discrepancy that I need to share with you. This week, in a slightly relaxed pre-Christmas mode, I ran a couple of polls on the Facebook page and the LinkedIn group associated with this blog. I asked, what do you wish you had more of in order to help improve your preaching. Here are the results in reverse order . . .

In last place – further training in biblical studies (5%)

In fourth – more encouragement from listeners (10%)

In third – further training in preaching (19%)

In second – more fellowship with other preachers (24%)

And the winner – more time for preparation (43%)

Now I have done enough classes in quantitative analysis and statistics to know that this survey is bordering on meaningless, but in the spirit of bad statistics, let me make a couple of comments before I point out a big discrepancy for pondering over this festive season.

Comment on the winner – people responded to the survey by clicking on their most desperate felt need. I suspected that time would be the greatest felt need because many of us wish we had more of it every single week! This doesn’t mean that only ten percent of preachers need more encouragement from listeners. I suspect that number would be higher if people could have voted for two or three options.

Another comment on the runner-up – it is interesting that quite a few folks expressed the desire for more fellowship with other preachers. I suspect that the ministry of preaching is unnecessarily lonely in many churches. Perhaps it is worth starting some sort of preacher’s gathering in your area, or better, in your church. I have been so encouraged by the first two gatherings of a dozen preachers and interested parties in our church.

DISCREPANCY! I posted another poll in a larger group of Christians asking “What is the greatest weakness in the preaching you hear?” The options available were lack of Bible, poor handling of the Bible, lack of clarity, lack of relevance, and poor presentation. Issues of clarity and presentation came last, lack of Bible came third, lack of relevance second, but the runaway winner was poor handling of the Bible with 45%. Combine that with lack of Bible for a total of 65% and two things jump out at me.

1. I’m breaking too many quantitative analysis rules to list.

2. Runaway greatest need in one poll (Bible handling), and distant last in perceived need among preachers (further training in Biblical studies) – could it be that preachers are generally over-confident in their ability to handle the text accurately and effectively? I know some of the preachers who responded to the poll and don’t think this to be true of them, but in general, this strikes me as true: many preachers need more training in effective Bible handling. I wonder if it would be worth picking up that book that might help over the next couple of weeks as we sit at home enjoying Christmas festivities? That might be the best feast of them all!

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Have a wonderful Christmas!

What Would Help? People

December 23, 2011December 20, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week I am pondering how we might pursue improvement in our preaching ministries. We’ve thought about training and time. Today let’s talk about other people. (If you want to see the poll on LinkedIn, click here. There is also a poll on the Facebook page here.)

Preachers need preachers for mutual encouragement – As I wrote recently, preaching can be a lonely experience. Preparation tends to be done alone. After preaching preachers would often rather be alone. But is a ministry of preaching a commitment to lots of solitude? Yes and no. It would be wrong to lose sight of the need of the body of Christ for everyone in it, including those who preach. Having fellowship with those who understand and care makes a big difference.

I would encourage every preacher to be involved in, or to organize, a gathering of preachers for mutual encouragement and resourcing. Not a venue for egos, or for pyramid climbing, or for conflict. But a venue for genuine heart to heart fellowship and support. Is there one in your community? There is value in sharing with other preachers outside your church. I have been involved in a ministry that seeks to launch preachers clubs around the world – where these have worked, the ministry has been greatly blessed. Gatherings of preachers meeting every month or two and working on a passage of Scripture as well as praying for each other – valuable, to say the least. Having a local preachers’ group is great. Even better, is there one in your church? Surely we should all be looking to build up others and mentor others, so why not develop a preacher’s gathering within your church?

Preachers need people for encouragement as well as feedback – Listeners tend to fall into three categories. One is the listener who never communicates with the preacher other than being polite. Another is the listener who only communicates critique (either directly or through asides). The final category is the listener who genuinely looks to encourage the preacher. People in this last category are worth their weight in gold. Finding people who will pray for the preaching ministry, and encourage the preacher, and advocate for the preacher, etc., is not easy. Yet when people in this category offer feedback, it is so much more palatable.

I don’t want to slip off into discussing issues of feedback. I want to recognize the need for encouragement, just as all people, in all ministries, need some encouragement. Doing ministry does draw down on our resources. We look to God for empowerment, but He chooses to give us strength, in part, through the proper functioning of the body of Christ. I don’t know how to let your listeners know that you need this, perhaps you should accidentally send a link to this post (or maybe an appropriate moment of vulnerability in a message might help).

For what it’s worth, I’ll offer the results of the poll in the short post tomorrow.

What Would Help? Time

December 22, 2011December 20, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

This week I am pondering how we might pursue improvement in our preaching ministries. Last time I thought about training. Today let’s talk time. (If you want to see the poll on LinkedIn, click here. There is also a poll on the Facebook page here.)

We probably all wish we had more time. Truth is, we can only free up the time we have and use it better. Some things cannot be avoided – demands on our time from a certain amount of pastoral crisis (although boundaries are important here to protect us from too much), and family responsibilities (boundaries are needed to protect this time).

I had an email from a friend the other day pondering the signs of superficiality. Included in his list were such issues as prayerlessness, failure to get into the Word, failure to read solid meat materials, great time wasting, a passion for secondary issue pursuits and the latest fad. We also need to take stock of the age in which we live – an age characterized by instant and constant communication, but not an age characterized by people of great spiritual depth.

Diligently managing our time is not simply about getting time to prepare sermons – a very pragmatic goal. It is about having the space to soak in a deep relationship with God, so that out of that depth, we might offer to others the blessing of profound preaching and ministry. I wonder if the next couple of weeks are a good time for us to prayerfully take stock of the time challenges in our ministry. Perhaps some changes need to be made. Perhaps some boundaries need to be installed. Perhaps our hunger for the things that really matter needs to be cultivated afresh.

What have you found to be helpful in terms of managing your time as a preacher?

What Would Help? Training

December 21, 2011December 20, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week I am having a relaxed look at things that might help us continue to improve as preachers. If you want to see the poll on LinkedIn, click here. There is also a poll on the Facebook page here. Here are a few thoughts on training:

The concept of training – As a younger man (just about), I am always impressed when I meet older men who are hungry to keep learning. I’ve been humbled by the attitude of some in classes I have taught – I think being eager to learn from someone who is much younger is a sign of real maturity. I want to be like that. I want to take advantage of opportunities to learn more and keep growing. Wasn’t it one of the teaching gurus that stated the day you stop learning, you stop teaching? Some are so eager to influence others, yet stubbornly unwilling to acknowledge their need of being influenced. I suppose it would do us all good to prayerfully consider what our attitude to learning says about us.

Training in Preaching – The poll option states, “Further training in preaching,” but the reality is that any training in preaching is a rare privilege, even in formal training institutions. At the same time, by widening the scope of the definition, we must acknowledge that all preachers have received the training that comes from hearing others and from repeated practice themselves. Both observation and practice have an impact on our preaching. Nonetheless, why wouldn’t we be hungry for training from those that might have something to offer us? I’ve been involved in teaching preaching in Bible college, seminary, conference, cross-cultural training seminar, church-based workshop, non-traditional mentored environments, etc. All have their benefits. What has been the most helpful training you’ve received? What opportunities might you take advantage of in 2012? (Remember, it is possible to get training courses on DVD, online, in book form too.)

Training in Biblical Studies – Such a significant part of effective preaching is effective Bible handling. There’s no room for complacency here, but the opposite in this case is not dutiful diligent discipline (although it can be that if you prefer). No, the opposite of complacency in this area is the blessing of deeper interaction with God in His Word. I would ask serious questions if there weren’t a real genuine hunger for more of that in my life. So let’s look for ways to learn more (formal training), for people to learn from (knowledgeable mentors) and for resources to help us grow in that area (a book on interpreting the literary forms, a refresher on biblical Greek or Hebrew, a book on hermeneutics – I’m really enjoying An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation at the moment).

In the mad and busy schedule of ministry I understand how training gets squeezed out. But when the desire to learn and grow diminishes, something good has been throttled out of our hearts.

What Would Help?

December 20, 2011December 20, 2011 / Peter Mead / 10 Comments

People often quip, at least in my country, about having roast preacher for lunch on a Sunday. In our house we are training our children to listen well with a good attitude on Sundays, so we tend to have a quiz together as we digest the sermon over lunch.

Some Sunday lunch quizzes are more difficult than others for us as parents: sometimes the children struggled to listen and remember what was said, sometimes we parents struggled to listen and remember what was said, sometimes we have to navigate around sermons or preachers that didn’t really do so well, and sometimes we have to answer questions when our children start asking about the preacher’s content or demeanour.

Instead of fostering a critical spirit toward preachers, we want to encourage our children to be good listeners with hearts open to what they can learn. As preachers, we need to be continual learners too, looking for how we can be ever better stewards of the ministry God gives to us.

So here’s a question for us as preachers: what would help us to improve? Actually, I’m not asking about the generic class of “preachers” – but specifically, what would help you to improve, what would help me to improve?

I started a poll over on LinkedIn to get a few responses, and have added it to the facebook page too. If you are on LinkedIn, click here to go to the poll and add your thoughts (you’d be most welcome to join the group too). If you are on Facebook, click here to go to the page and you’d be welcome to “like” the page too.

Since I only had five spaces for possible answers, here are the five options that came to mind:

– Further training in preaching

– Further training in biblical studies

– More time for preparation

– More fellowship with other preachers

– More encouragement from listeners

In the next days I will share some thoughts on these needs, and for what it’s worth, I will collate the results at the end of the week. Please do confuse matters by adding other suggestions too, either here or on either networking site.

Christopher Hitchens Was Right

December 19, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Normally I have my post hosted on the Cor Deo site every other Monday. This time around I posted it a couple of days early because of the death of Christopher Hitchens. I am going to link to it from here, as usual, because I feel it addresses an issue to which preachers have to be so alert. That is, how does our message come across to those who aren’t already agreeing and affirming everything we say?

I am not talking about accommodating our message to non-Christians who want a more palatable and cheery message. I am talking about not communicating an unnecessarily foolish shell of the gospel. The gospel isn’t foolishness because it is illogical, silly and arbitrary. It is foolish because it is so richly full of God’s self-giving love, a notion so alien to the selfish views of people and their expectations of the divine. Christopher Hitchens railed against a god that most Christians don’t even believe in, but somehow his straw-man version of god struck a chord with many in the world. We need to make sure we don’t feed the fallacy, but instead proclaim the powerful truth. Here’s the post.

Saturday Short Thought – The Power of the Word

December 17, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week I have been thinking about the power of words. Actually, even the power of few words. I’ve been blogging about Proverbs – those powerful little dynamos of biblical wisdom. I’ve been preparing to preach at two carol services where message length has to be kept tighter. I’ve also been thinking too about the death of a man whose life was known for the absence of small talk, Christopher Hitchens. I’ve blogged about his death and a strong lesson that I feel we need to learn as Christians, and especially as preachers, over on the Cor Deo site – please click here to go there.

So on one extreme there are those that seek to wax eloquent to show their own so-called wisdom. At the other extreme we have Biblical wisdom, such as that in Proverbs. Then in the middle are preachers trying to share a word in season, especially in this season when so many make their annual pilgrimage to a place of worship. And in the midst of it all, I can’t help but wonder at the Word of God who became flesh and pitched his tent among us. Even before he learned to speak words on Mary and Joseph’s laps, he was the Word incarnate – so small, so tiny, yet the most powerful message the world has ever known.

Allow me to repeat the words of Richard Sibbes that I shared here a few weeks ago:

“We cannot too often meditate of these things. It is the life and soul of a Christian. It is the marrow of the gospel. It is the wonder of wonders. We need not wonder at anything after this.” (Sibbes, Works 5:485)

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Next Week –

Survey Results: Missing Ingredients in Effective Preaching

Preaching Proverbs 5: Random Thoughts

December 16, 2011December 9, 2011 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

To finish off this series of posts on preaching Proverbs, here is a randomly organized collection of brief thoughts. See what I did there?

1. Preaching topically may be fine. I’ve avoided the more obvious approach of addressing a subject that Proverbs addresses with multiple references, but it’s fine to do that. And it would be fine to not be exhaustive, why not just focus more on two or three proverbs and aim for effectiveness over exhaustiveness?

2. Preaching a shorter sermon will be appreciated. I’ve shared how a full-length sermon may be possible from a two line truth, but why not preach short? Finish ten minutes early and your listeners may talk about the message for years!

3. Preaching a section may be effective. You can check out Bruce Waltke and discover structure that you’ve never seen before. Or you can go where my Hebrew prof suggested . . . preach a series of apparently random proverbs since that is how life is experienced from our perspective.

4. Remember that Proverbs is primarily observation, not promise. Don’t turn an observation of life lived under the covenant of Deuteronomy 28-30 into a promise for all people of God in every age.

5. Preach a pugilistic match-up of contemporary wisdom with Proverbial sagacity. That is, take a saying from our culture and watch it lose in a fight with one of God’s inspired sayings.

6. Preach Proverbs with humour and with poetry. Help people see what life is like and what it could be like with a healthy dose of sanctified wit and biblically saturated poetic presentation. Certainly the main idea should be proverbial, poetic, memorable, pithy, precise.

7. Preach Proverbs for living with godly wisdom, don’t preach godly wisdom to fuel the fires of self-centred success.

8. Provoke further thought, don’t bore listeners into submission as if your extensive knowledge is the focus. Their further thought, in the fear of Lord, worked into their hearts and lives: that is the focus.

And if you don’t have it yet, get hold of a copy of Jeff Arthurs book, Preaching with Variety – his chapter on Proverbs alone is worth the price of the book. Actually, the rest is good too . . . and I will be giving a copy away on the facebook page promotion later this month – click here to go to the promo information.

Preaching Proverbs 4: Sayings and Sermons

December 15, 2011December 9, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday I described two masterpieces of the art of preaching Proverbs (click here to see post). Both the explanatory emphasis of the first and the applicational emphasis of the second affirmed the possibility of a full-length single saying sermon from the Proverbs. What were some of the key features of these sermons?

1. Repetition. In both cases the preachers repeated the main idea (the proverb) multiple times. It never felt forced or tedious, but it did tattoo the truths on the hearts of those listening. Proverbs are designed to be memorable. While we don’t have the memorability of the original language to aid us, repetition certainly helped.

2. Memorability. We don’t have sound-play in the wording like the Hebrew, but memorability can be achieved in other ways. In the first example Haddon Robinson achieved memorability by pursuing visualization. That is, through vivid description, the listeners could see what he described, and having seen it on the screen of their hearts, they wouldn’t forget. In the second example, Gene Curtis achieved memorability by a different type of sound-play. Not the sounds of the words, but the clever use of a repeated first line of a song. Actually, this musical marker was so effective in flagging up the need for the proverb because he ended the mini-rendition by tweaking the tune into a melancholic minor key each time – a refrain introducing the main idea each time.

3. Non-linearity. Neither sermon imposed what felt like a foreign sermon structure on the text. There was no overt three point with sub-point presentation involved. Both felt relaxed and slightly circular, yet on paper could have been defined using standard outlining, of course. There wasn’t the urgency of a narrative, or the driving progression in logic of an epistle. The structure seemed to fit the genre.

4. Application. Both sermons were marked by specific, tangible, relevant and vivid application. While the one placed greater emphasis on explanation, both felt absolutely preached to the listener, to mark the listener and to bring about transformation. I’m sure many of us could manage it, but surely it must be wrong to turn a practical, vivid, life truth, into an academic curio. It takes great intellect to make something simple and clear, but a lesser preacher can impress and confuse the listener. Hey, was that a contemporary antithetical distich? Nice.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the series . . .

Preaching Proverbs 3: Full-Length Single Saying Sermons

December 14, 2011December 9, 2011 / Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Jon provoked this series of posts by asking if it is possible to preach longer than five minutes on a proverb (particularly the two-line kind), without preaching topically through a whole subject. I believe it is. Not just in theory, but based on my experience as a listener. Two, perhaps three messages stand out to me, that have been on a single two-line saying, and have warranted the full sermon length they were given. So, two ways to pursue fully orbed Proverb preaching:

The Every Angle Jewel Explanation Approach. The message I have in mind is one I head a few years back from Dr Haddon Robinson. Seemed like a simple saying, until he started probing it. Like a connoisseur of fine jewels, Robinson took up that little saying and methodically turned it in every direction, probing each facet to gradually determine the richness of the meaning of the proverb. Technically he used carefully developed paragraphs of thought. Experientially it was like sitting at the feet of a wise sage giving a guided tour of a fascinating thought. In the process of explanation I learned about metallurgy, about Hebrew culture, about the language used, and most importantly, about myself as the light reflecting from that jewel shone into corners of my life. There was no bony structure sticking out, or jerky transition into time for an application. It was relaxed, it was measured, it was well-crafted, it was a message that marked me.

The Every Direction Intersection Application Approach. Ok, so my label is almost as long as a proverb, but I’m not Solomon. The message I have in mind is one I heard in seminary chapel over a decade ago. Dr Gene Curtis preached a masterpiece of a sermon that still influences my ministry today. A typical two liner. A full length sermon. A lot of marked listeners. How did he do it? He explained the proverb, which didn’t take long, but then he applied it. Then he applied it again. Then he applied it again. Multiple situational applications, all driving home the same point, the main point of the proverb. In this particular case he also used the first line of a children’s Sunday school song to reinforce the point and offer a musical memory marker along the way. If you can imagine a busy intersection in the centre of a large city, a roundabout/rotary with multiple roads leading off it, that was his sermon. He left the world of the Hebrew sage and entered the office of the pastor, the conversation of the spouse, the lap of the parent, the phone call of the friend, etc. Each time showing the relevance of the proverb, each time reinforcing the same point, each time returning to the text and then heading off on a different exit point. I would love to have preached a sermon so effective.

I was impressed recently with a sermon by Andy Stanley on a single proverb, which was excellent, but despite the impressive feats, perhaps it didn’t quite attain to the two I’ve described. (Or perhaps it had the strengths of both!)