How to . . . ?

Saturday Short Thought: Dangerous Preaching x4

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I recently heard Gavin McGrath speaking and he was asked what he thinks constitutes dangerous preaching.  I really liked his list of four off the top, as it were:

1. False teaching – of course.

But in good church circles, the other three would be –

2. The mocking or patronizing of non-Christians –  So easily done, so unhelpful to all.

3. Legalism and feeding religiosity – If you perform better then you will be a better Christian.  This leads to either pride or despair, but neither are helpful.

4. Formulaically simple preaching – Just follow this abc and you will have better life.  Problem is that the Bible doesn’t teach that, nor is it effective.

What would you add now that you’ve had time to think about it?

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.

The Four Places of Preaching – 3

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So the preaching process starts in the study, then the preacher needs to stop and pray (in an even less distracted place), but then comes the third location.

Place 3 – Starbucks.  Huh?

Let me clarify before I start into this that I personally don’t tend to pick Starbucks (or pray in a closet, for that matter), but the principle applies.  I have a good friend, and a preacher I highly respect, who does literally go to a coffee shop for this phase of his preparation.

He takes five 3×5 cards and puts names on the cards – the names of individuals in the church, a cross section, essentially.  With his five listeners spread out on the table, and surrounded by real life and culture, he is then able to prepare the message.  He can ask himself as he goes, “would this communicate to Jim?”  or “How would Kerry take that?”

The goal in this place?  To prepare a message that will effectively communicate the prayed-through main idea of the passage to the particular listeners as an act of love for them and for the Lord.

The best biblical content will be wasted if it isn’t targeted appropriately.  Our task is not to make the Bible relevant.  It is.  Our task is to emphasize that relevance.  And by definition, something can only be relevant to specific people.  Relevant to this age.  Relevant to this culture.  Relevant to this community.  Relevant to this church.  Relevant to these individuals.

So John Stott was on target when he urged preachers to be at home not only in the world of the Bible, but also the world of the listener.  Haddon Robinson took the two worlds notion and expanded it to distinguish contemporary culture from the specific culture of the local church.  So we can misfire with  traditional presentations in a changing culture, as we can with postmodern engagements in a church that hasn’t gone there.

Whether we sit in Starbucks, or ponder the church’s phone list.  Wherever we spend time with church members and people from the community we seek to mark.  Somehow we need to make sure our messages are more than great biblical content.  They have to be on target, and to be on target, we must know the hearts we aim to reach.

The Four Places of Preaching – 2

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

After spending significant time in the study, without company, yet not alone, the preacher needs to move to the second location.  What comes out of the study is a deep awareness of the passage, its meaning, its intent, its contours and details, all summed up in a single sentence summary, and all held as a treasure in the heart because of the work of God during the time in the study.  Now to the next place:

Place 2 – Stop and Pray (The Prayer Closet)

In his very helpful book, Deep Preaching, J. Kent Edwards urges the preacher to take God’s Big Idea into the closet and allow the Spirit to work there for the sake of deeper preaching.  So true.

This place doesn’t need to be a closet (it’s hard to find one humans can fit in in some cultures!)  It does need to be a place without study resources and Bible software and shelves of books, not to mention phones and email and satellite whatevers.  It might be an extended walk in the woods, or a chair in the lounge, or even, one of my favourites, the empty church where the message will be preached.

What is the goal here?  The goal is to spend focused time in fellowship with God concerning the preacher, God, the passage and the listeners, in order to be able to then prepare a targeted message for them from that passage.

Where is the focus?  God was certainly involved in the study, at least, He should have been.  But it is important to recognize that the preacher is not primarily a purveyor of ancient wisdom.  The preacher is, or should be, in fellowship with the Living God.  So the step isn’t from commentary to outline, but from study to focused prayer.

1.  Preaching should involve enthusiasm for the text and what you have discovered, but it should be driven by who, rather than what.  Prayer closet time allows that personal connection and responsiveness to the God who reveals Himself in the Word to develop and drive the preaching.

2. Preaching should involve awareness of the meaning and impact of the text, but it should be sealed on the heart and experience of the preacher, not just held at arms length as new discovery.  Time in prayer allows God’s Word to be driven deep into our hearts.

3. Preaching should involve a message carefully crafted to communicate effectively to a specific audience, but for that to be an act of real love, then God’s heart for the people needs to be our heart for the people.  Bringing the people before God, alongside the passage, is thus critical to forming and delivering a message as an overflow of God’s love for them.

More could be written, but let’s leave it there.  Study.  Then stop and pray.  Then?  Some people will be very excited by the next location!

The Four Places of Preaching

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There is a journey from text to message.  A journey consists of a sequence of locations, so I’d like to lay out the four places of preaching.  Perhaps this will be helpful to someone.

Place 1 – The Study

The first place the preacher needs to go is the study.  Just the preacher, the Bible, perhaps a desk, whatever study resources may be available, and a prayerful pursuit of the meaning of the text.

What is the goal in this place?  To be able to accurately state the main idea of the passage in a single sentence summary as a result of prayerful historical, grammatical, literary study of the passage in its context, with a heart laid bare before God.

Who is involved?  This place is where the preacher is in prayerful pursuit of the meaning of the passage.  So there is a historical focus, a sense in which the preacher is seeking to go back then to the time when the human author wrote the passage.  There is a deep concern with making sense of the text as it was intended, as inspired, with the historical and written context, the inspired choice of genre, the content of the passage in terms of its details and its structure or flow, and the intent of the writer.

So the preacher is studying, exegeting, interpreting.  Yet in that quiet place of wrestling with the text, the text is also wrestling with the preacher.  This is not some sort of abstract and entirely objective study.  The preacher is there.  When the Bible speaks, God speaks, and when God speaks, lives change.  So the preacher has the privilege of being marked by the text as the Spirit of God first applies the passage to the life of the preacher.

The study is a place of deep fellowship between the preacher and God.

Why, then, the study?  Should this not be the library, after all, studying involves resources?  No, this should be a study, because a library is a place of people pursuing information for a variety of purposes.  The preacher’s study is a place where the preacher meets with God as the biblical text is studied both exegetically and profoundly devotionally.

Should this not be the office, after all, ministry is a complex business these days?  No, this should be a study (whatever the room actually is), because an office is a place of action and interaction, of incoming emails and phone calls, a place where multiple plates are kept spinning.  No great and profound preaching can come out of an office.  (If your study is too much of an office, then study elsewhere – borrow a room and leave your phone behind, study in your car in the woods, but go somewhere where you can be with the Lord in a “study”.)

Tomorrow, place 2 . . .

Ultimate Impact

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

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 2

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In this series of posts I am reflecting on Bible teaching I had the privilege of sitting under last week.  It was some of the most stirring and powerful ministry I have heard in a long time.  I won’t name the speaker, for I suspect he wouldn’t appreciate that, but I hope my reflections on this ministry might be a stir to us.  Yesterday I wrote about his masterful handling of the text … something that reveals hours, even years, of hard work.

Today I am struck by another labour intensive feature of the messages:

Brilliant and On-Target Application.

A. The speaker was sensitive to the specifics of a very mixed crowd.  I heard him speak from Daniel almost twenty years ago.  It was powerful then because it was targeted to a the group of young people of which I was a member.  This time the messages were different.  Part of that was the difference in audience.  This was a mixed group with a variety of ministry roles from across the continent.  Yet the messages were so pertinent to people living as a small minority in difficult anti-Christian cultures.

B. The speaker honoured the intelligence levels of those present.  This was a gathering of people that included a significant number of the highly educated.  The messages were not elitist at all, but the speaker was sensitive to the intelligence levels in the room.  Nobody would have felt patronised, nor would anyone have felt untouched by the ministry.

C. He obviously invested significant time in preparation.  The level of relevance and applicational targeting in these messages would not come from a quick scan of old notes.  The speaker evidenced a real love for the listeners by the level of specificity he managed to achieve in his thoughtful applications to the audience.

Tomorrow I’ll add one more post, on the issue of the speaker’s credibility.

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…

Jesus, How Should I Preach?

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Yesterday I had the joy of leading a morning seminar that overviewed the preaching preparation process.  I guided the participants through the 8-stage path that I advocate on this site and find so useful in my own ministry.  But I think there is another way to look at the process – in effect a view from a greater height, a helicopter view of the preaching process.  Dare I say that this might even reflect Jesus’ approach?

I would love to get the in-depth Jesus preaching seminar.  Surely it would involve issues of speaking with authority unlike the scribes, and how to select compelling images, effective storytelling, memorable motifs, etc.  But I want to suggest a slightly higher level, helicopter (or should I say more heavenly) view of the preaching process.

The gospels don’t give us the answer to how should we preach.  But as well as His example, there is also the consistent pattern of Jesus’ theology.  How should we pray?  He answered with a variation on the theme of what is the greatest commandment?  Since the pattern was so common in his teaching, allow me to speculate on an overview of the preaching preparation process from Jesus’ perspective.  Jesus, how should we preach?

1. Love God.  The first phase of the process is to be loving God by sitting at Christ’s feet.  Stop being manic and busy for God, but instead sit at His feet and allow Him to minister to you.  Don’t search the Scriptures and miss the person that is there, but seek the Lord in His Word and you will find Him.  Treat the Bible as if God is a good communicator and so diligently study and wrestle with the text, allowing it to do a work in you before you even think about offering it to others.  Love God in response to His self-revelation in His Word.

2. Love your neighbour (congregant, listener, audience, etc.).  That is, pray for the people who you will speak to.  Really spend time with God concerning them.  Then as you start planning your message, plan it prayerfully with a deep concern for them to understand, to stay engaged, to be able to follow, to feel the import and impact of the message of the text.  And as you preach it, preach with the winsomeness and grace of God permeating your demeanour, because God is passionately excited about incarnating His grace and truth!

I could be wrong, but I wonder if Jesus might give an answer along those lines.